I attended my first meeting of the Atlanta Web Entreprenuer’s Meetup group. This is a fairly new group and this is only the 2nd meeting (I believe). It’s organized by Mike Schinkel and tonight’s meeting had a fairly diverse group of people – some geeks, some non-geeks, and a mix of people passionate about being entrepreneurs.
We had a great presentation by Robert Swarthout – the founder of PaperbackSwap. Robert’s built a pretty interesting business and he’s all of 24. You gotta love young, passionate Internet entrepreneurs. (I’m finally old enough to stay that).
Here’s some highlight from Robert’s presentation, titled “How to manage expotential website growth”:
- 1M books available in his database
- 31K books in the mail at anytime
- 875K page views a day (they double in 2 months)
- 1,400+ concurrent users avg (2pm EST – 11pm EST), others are not logged in
- 11,000+ unique users login per day
- 7-8K book postings per day (brand new book into systems)
- SwapaCD.com sister site (last august)
- 90% woman, 40 and over is their primary audience
The setup is LAMP based. They started almost 2 1/2 years ago using Rackspace to EDeltacom (yeah, an Atlanta based company!).
As far as stack info for the application:
- Fedora 5
- Apache 2.2.3 + mod_deflate
- MySQL 5.0.18
- PHP 5.2
- Shorewall Firewall
- webmin for admin
What a wonderful software-as-a-service business model. This is a great Internet business success story – and one right here in Georgia. Great job Robert!
technorati tags: entrepreneur, atlanta, georgia, meetup, bookswap
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