And so matters proceeded for the next six months in a fairly ordered way.

Pages were conceived, modified, argued over, designed and optimized for the different sections - all the time using that very useful communication tool: the forum. See my earlier Blog post abut forums here.

Courses were created, authors were spanned in, courses were written and DTP’d, pages were programmed and things slowly began to take shape. The operative word was  S-L-O-W-L-Y.

As a result, I had to urge and push everyone to work more and cajole my team to give me more priority at the expense of their other clients. That’s all very well, but it costs money. And money was running out fast. The Fundisi train was eating up finances at an express-train rate, but progress was that of a local goods-train-shuttle.  I had my revised target date set at the beginning of April, and that date was disappearing into distant history together with the last cash resources. The team offered to help out financially either by foregoing part of their fees in exchange for a percentage interest, or by converting their fees into a short-term deferred loan. I didn’t like either of those scenarios.

I needed a partner with cash, and a new cash flow projection.

Fortunately, I found someone who had as much faith in Fundisi as I, and she jumped at the chance of getting in on the ground floor. We had to convert the business from being a sole-proprietor-based operation into a legally separate entity called a Close Corporation*. My wife, my new partner and myself each became members with a 33% share of the business. The business then began paying me a salary as managing member (Just enough to keep me alive, ahem…). A new bank account had to be opened and the Close Corporation had to be registered with the requisite bureaucracy.

And still the site stubbornly refused to be born. The programmer had to go onto a full-time basis, and my new target date was set for the end of June. That date came and went, and while the site was indeed taking shape,  there were still far too many items outstanding on her (the programmer’s) to-do list. By now I was chewing nails, pencils, computer mice, and personnel. I even went as far as asking the programmer if I should hire another programmer to assist and was met with a call-my-bluff challenge of: “If you are not happy with my work, I’ll gladly step down. Otherwise I’m working as fast as I can”.

I had to calm down, take many deep breaths, cry on my wife’s shoulder, take stock of where we were, reign myself in, be patient and be very nice. Talk about being stretched out over a barrel!

Finally, we got the Course Shopping Cart to work properly and then we got the Payment Gateway to talk to Zen-Cart and to talk to the Bank and at last, the end was in site.

Or so I thought…

Then I discovered the horrible truth about URLs generated by Content Management Systems. You know, the url with the “?” in it like:

http://www.fundisi.com/index.php?main_page=howitallworks&rhs_page=howitallworks_rhs

and how they were not really so Search engine friendly.  Oops.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s exciting episode…

* I wrote about Close Corporations in this earlier blog entry.