shanedevane.com
Welcome to my personal homepage, a domain I've had since 10/6/2000! When I first started this site, it was to promote my freelance web design portfolio. Back then, I was living with my parents in Dublin, Ireland, and trying to make a name for myself as a web developer.
One of my earliest memories was printing out A4 'Web Designer' flyers and walking around a town called Bray, handing them to any business that would accept them.
I succeeded in getting 2 clients that way, but I would not recommend it.
Freelance Ireland - circa 1998!
I started my first company at 18 years old in Ireland. Back then, if you wanted a .ie domain name, you needed to register a business name, and the only way to do that was to start a company! So lucky me, at 18 I had to walk into a solicitor's office for the first time so they could act as notary for me to create a single director limited company (a new thing at the time), and thus my startup adventures began.
Freelance Ireland started to address my own problems: 1) I needed to have some sort of good portfolio showpiece website that I could use in my web design portfolio so I could win clients, and 2) I needed to find freelance work, so what better than operating the site that people used to find freelancers! Unfortunately, the freelance web design business wasn't for me as the income was sporadic and the work was always 'lightweight', and I wanted to learn (and get paid) for systems database development and have a more stable source of income. Freelance Ireland ran for 10+ years and eventually turned into a LinkedIn Group.
Irish Coffee Club - circa 2001
This was a voyage into building a product. Fresh from reading 'The 4-Hour Workweek', I figured I could build a site, integrate WorldPay, roast the coffee, and use An Post to deliver with a 24-hour turnaround time! The good news is it worked! The bad news is that the business needed real setup capital for buying coffee roasters and was a very low-margin business. It needed bulk purchasing of green coffee, sourcing good suppliers, buying a second-hand coffee roaster, fumigation challenges, and not to mention the health and safety requirements for food processing... so I exited this startup quickly. Still, it showed me what could be done and gave me confidence that I could build, market, and operate a 'business' end-to-end if needed.
GoingOut.ie - circa 2003
This was my second foray into a large content site, designed to be similar in size and effort as Freelance Ireland. The goal was to create a competitor to LovinDublin and to learn some of the lessons I had with Freelance Ireland, i.e., the content of Freelance Ireland was user-based, which meant at times there was little to no content - whereas a content website wouldn't have these issues, and after building up an audience, I could potentially create services/products based around that.
The strategy was to keep the site in slow growth mode for 1-2 years, build it up, let SEO take over, and grow the audience slowly (while I worked day jobs), and I could keep costs super low. The plan worked, but the content didn't. GoingOut focused on events, and unfortunately, events go stale very quickly! This meant constant updates and curation. This was also my first time experimenting with 'pipelines' and ETL systems to crawl online content and then format the content for the event search engine. All in all, it was a great technical project to work on and gave me another showpiece for my portfolio. As a business, it really required low-cost curation and employees, which I didn't have and couldn't afford. So GoingOut was closed.
It was around this time I started to realize that the Irish market was just not large enough for a 'slow growth' tactic...
linkchecks.com - circa 2017
Enter LinkChecks! A bit of an impulse purchase of a product. I decided I wanted to build a tool that I could use and then perhaps monetize - learning from my past experience, I focused on a simple tool and a simple concept - check if the links on your website are working! Basic, simple, easy. A user enters a URL, it would kick off a background crawler, crawl a website and all the links, store metadata such as meta tags, image amounts, broken images, SEO tips, etc., and then email a report to the user complete with old-school .xls file! Super, everything someone could need to check if their website had good or bad SEO. I offered it for free initially and started to build up a steady user base, nothing too special, maybe 20-30 users each month (given that competition in this space via ahrefs and Moz and of course, Google Search Console!).
This project was great, again, as far as technical projects go. It unfortunately broke often (as web crawling often does), took too long (10+ hours if there was a backlog), and required constant code updates. At the time, my goals for this were to explore and build in .NET and I wanted to learn more web crawling. In hindsight, this 'version' was a pure MVP and after initial validation should have been rebuilt in Apache Nutch (very fashionable at the time). LinkChecks also suffered from the explosion of React.js Apps and jQuery frameworks which didn't take kindly to crawling!