We had another work session, staying late at the office, just to catch the fireworks in front of the Intercontinental.

It wasn't quite what we had hoped for, but for Eric the big win was meeting the co-founders of Node Rabbit

Node Rabbit streamlines web app deployment. It should save teams like us a lot of time when it's time to get the get their apps deployed. Eric has written us a bunch of scripts that build up the server image, and install the apps we need with just a single command line, but the "last mile" has been to do the deployment from the command line on a local machine.

The office space on the Mass Challenge floor down at Fan Pier is working out great. There is lots of activity, great energy, and being plopped down in the middle of 110 like-minded entrepreneurs is really refreshing after working at the kitchen table for so long. Our brief stint in the CustomMade offices was awesome, but Fan Pier really can't be beat during the summer. There are concerts, fireworks, and of course that amazing 360 degree view of Boston, the harbor and the airport.

Even though, I’m always out and about at various startup events, there is something to be said about coming into an office and seeing familiar faces on a daily basis. Not that I’m at that stage yet - with so many entrepreneurs floating around I haven’t managed to put names to faces yet. There are activities going on all the time and everyone is making a concentrated effort to get to know each other. Between the Foozball, ping pong and pool tables, the happy hours, the networking events and workshops arranged by the MassChallenge team, the daily lunch outings, and just people stopping by our cube (or rolling by on a scooter if you’re StudyAbroad101) to check out our shoes, I’m meeting a lot of interesting people who all have the same kind of passion that I do and it’s a lot of fun. Somewhere in there, Eric, Jeff and I do manage to get a lot of work done, of course!

After dinner one night, we tried to sneak into the Bare Naked Ladies concert that was playing at the Bank of America Pavilion. We didn't quite make it, but I think that dark spot in the patch of light behind me is Ed Robertson . He doesn't blog too much, so I'm not expecting any good back links.



We did hold out for our (and EVERY other entrepreneur’s) favorite BNL song, of course, .. wait for it ... "If I had a million dollars!"

We've got a pretty solid financial plan and use of proceeds slide, so if you by chance have a million dollars, sing along with us:

If I had a million dollars, if I had a million dollars
I'd buy you some traffic - millions of unique visitors with a really high conversion rate too

If I had a million dollars, if I had a million dollars
I’d buy you a line of shoes and some great website features too

If I had a million dollars, if I had a million dollars
I’d buy you an operations director and a rockstar marketing guru…

If I had a million dollars
If I had a million dollars
If I had a million dollars
If I had a million dollars
I’d be... launched and on my way to a series A.

Dear Google,

HELP! Open Runway isn't in your index, and we can't figure out why you don’t love us.

We changed our company name from Sole Envie to Open Runway several months ago.

We're pretty happy with the name and think it's much, much better than Sole Envie. Maybe the googlebot doesn't think so? Just tell us the truth. We won’t be offended.

When we were at Sole Envie, just about anything we blogged would show up within a day or so. Now ... nothing. As we mentioned we're pretty happy with the name, so we'd like to keep it. We've got the trademark and everything. Our logo is pretty spiffy, too, so we are definitely keeping the name.

While we are pre-launch, we do have a coming soon page as well as blog. We think we need to blog more (doesn't everyone?), but even with what we've got, we've managed to get some good backlinks to the site. My CEO Monika Desai just wrote an awesome post ... on another site (http://venturefizz.com/blog/where-are-all-women ) ... but it does link back to openrunway.com.

We do see that your crawler has been hitting our site daily on a regular basis for several weeks now.

We've got all the right stuff from a crawler standpoint:

• Sitemap.xml
• Robots.txt
• A blog feed
• Fabulous Shoes

We’re thinking we might be to blame for the problem. When we initially did the site move we didn't bring over a lot of the original content, and made an amateurish attempt to use 301 redirects. Maybe the googlebot didn't like the 404? We’re truly sorry Google. It won’t happen again.

Now that we are getting ready to launch our closed beta, we want to make sure we are in the Google index so that women all over the world can find us and start designing and ordering their own dream shoes.

Google, give us some love. Help us be found!

Lost and lonely in Cyberspace,

We're still not feeling the love from Google and Eric is in a heap of trouble.

Our needs right now are simple. When someone searches for Open Runway in Google, we want our company to show up at the top. We're not yet asking for top search results for "shoes" or "design your own shoes" or "most awesome shoes", just a simple result for "Open Runway".

I've had Eric cranking away and has made some progress.

Is your robots.txt pulling a HAL?

Instead of, eh hem, an improperly configured robots.txt that might have been telling the Googlebot, "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."? He finally added the robots.txt, and configured it with: User-agent:* AND Allow:/ . The googlebot is now hitting it. 

Betta check your Meta

There are some noindex Meta tags that you can put into your HTML that will tell the robots to not index a certain page or follow links from it. For example: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"><meta name="robots" content="noindex"> . As near as I can tell, we are cool there:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

<meta name="keywords" content="crowdsourcing, personalization, customization, fashion, high heels">

<meta name="description" content="Open Runway is a Fashion 2.0, social commerce platform that offers co-created and crowdsourced fashion for women. Our first products will be shoes. Join the Fashionocracy.">

<meta name="author" content="Open Runway, inc.">

<meta name="copyright" content="Open Runway, inc. Copyright (c) 2010">

New Kid on the Block

Addmittedly Open Runway is new, not launched yet even, but we are starting to produce some content on our blog. The only thing I can think of is that Google doesn't like Eric's hair. I heard the 80's were back, but perhaps I took this too literally when I sent him to the stylist.

Good hair aside, we have submitted Open Runway to the "Add your URL to Google" , and I do see the site getting crawled.Horaay! but ... no Open Runway pages are in the index yet.

Breaking News! Man bites dog

I will admit the update frequency on our blog has been a bit low. With Eric and myself heads down moving the site toward launch we've been a bit neglectful of producing new and interesting content. I did just crank out a post for Mass Challenge, but the content generation is really sparse.

We made the decision that until the website & configurator are done and the final confirmation samples for all sizes have been received from the factory, we weren't going to stress too much about search placement, but not even getting "Open Runway"!?! That's just crazy.

So Eric will keep looking into it.

I wrote a guest blog piece over at Mass Challenge, "Where are all the Women?" .

Open Runway has been selected to be a finalist in the Mass Challenge. Read more about it over at the Open Runway blog.

Sole Envie will be one of 8 mass customization industry thought leaders participating in the panel,  How Mass Customization Can Create Value & Profit at Babson College on October 8, 2009. The panel, hosted by jewelry mass customizer, Paragon Lake, and emceed by Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe columnist, will explore the impact of using technology to enhance customer experiences, the economic benefits behind mass customization, how buying practices might change consumer habits, technology practices in the future and many impromptu topics.

The other panelists include Matt Lauzon, Founder & President of Paragon Lake, Wendy Cebula, President of Vistaprint, Shaon Kan, President & CEO of Tikatok, Andrew Callen, General Manager of Corporate Casuals, Micah Rosenbloom, General Manager of Brontes Technologies, Sarah MciLroy, Founder & CEO of FashionPlaytes, and Sung Park, President of Umagination Labs.

This free panel will take place on October 8, 2009 from 6pm to 8:30pm at the Olin Auditorium at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. To register, visit: http://masscustomizationpanel.eventbrite.com/.

We are excited to announce that Sole Envie is one of 15 start-ups selected to be part of the inaugural class of the New York City based First Growth Venture Network (http://www.firstgrowthvn.com) mentoring program for high potential, seed and early stage start-up tech entrepreneurs.

The First Growth program (1) connects class members with venture capitalists, angel investors, successful entrepreneurs and advisors, all of whom have spent years in and around technology start-ups; (2) connects each start-up with a First Growth Advisor Team consisting of a VC, an angel investor or executive and a successful entrepreneur who will serve as mentors to the team; (3) provides regular opportunities for substantive information and networking with the broader First Growth community; and (4) provides a peer group of other high potential tech leadership teams in the First Growth program

The other start-ups selected to participate in the First Growth Venture Network include: 20X200, AdHatchery, Capsearch.com, ChallengePost, CB Information Systems, Give Real, GoodCrush, Legolas, MeeGenius!, OrderGroove, Producteev, StyleHop, Zeevex and Zodah.

First Growth Venture Network is comprised of leading venture-related players including venture capital firms - Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, Charles River Ventures, First Round Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Capital, Valhalla Partners, and Venrock; angel investors - Grape ArborVC and AngelVineVC; the Tech Group at law firm Lowenstein Sandler and the tech investment banking firm GCA Savvian.

We are thrilled to be a part of this amazing program and look forward to working with the First Growth entrepreneurs and advisors.

To learn more about the First Growth Venture Network, visit the following links:

http://www.firstgrowthvn.com/news/sept09/

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/06/16/start-spreading-the-news-first-growth-wants-to-nurture-vc-in-nyc/

Sole Envie was mentioned in this past Sunday's Boston Globe. The article, "The custom touch - Bay State start-ups are taking another run at tailor-made apparel" covered some of the cutting edge mass customization fashion companies in the Boston area and Sole Envie was proud to be among them.