Day 25: Funding and (More) Follow-Up

A primarily service-based business like ours doesn’t need too much in the way of funding… but there are times we need to buy this or that for the business. Sure, we’ve got a bank account and checks, but who buys anything in physical stores anymore? So we decided to apply for a credit card. Our main requirements were that it have no annual fee and that it have the ability to generate single-use credit card numbers for online purchases. We did some research. We applied (and applied… and applied some more…) And now we get to wait.

The one credit card company that offered an immediate response kept rejecting our application. I couldn’t understand why it could immediately reject our application… but it couldn’t tell us why for 7-10 days, and then only through the U.S. Mail. Some kind of privacy issues? One credit card’s site was rendered useless because they do their weekly maintenance tonight. Another major site was designed such that if they offer business cards, I sure couldn’t tell. So we ended up at the same company that’s been sending us 0% APR ads for weeks now. Not by choice, mind you. It looks like a nice account, though, and we’ll find out in 3-4 weeks if we were approved. Can’t these folks add a little more automation into their system?

I also followed up on a few more things from SXSW. We’ve been discussing some possible business opportunities related to Wi-Fi, so I reserved several library books related to that. While I was at the library’s site, I went ahead and reserved a couple of books about selling on eBay. I think that would be a good topic for one of the classes we plan on teaching. I also checked to see if the library had Maximum Accessibility. They didn’t, but I decided it would be worth ordering. John Slatin was a panelist in one of my SXSW sessions, and based on that session, I think his book should really be worth it.

Finally, I’m thinking about making my word mixer design from yesterday into a cryptogram-style puzzle. I had to research the genre of course, and found two sites that I thought had very good user interfaces. Is there a downside to game designing? Sure, the coding phase is about the same as for any other application… but you just can’t beat the research and testing phases!