First, if you’ve found your way from FromLittleThings.co to FLTBTG.com, congratulations! It’s been a week or so since CrazyDomains messed up its relationship with its upstream supplier of .co domains and our FromLittleThings.co domain went off the air, along with the other .co domains managed by CrazyDomains.

Not expired, just messed-up by Crazy Domains.

It’s been a week or so of frustration and feeling powerless, with no real help from CrazyDomains, and no resolution in sight, so we’ve been forced to move everything to FLTBTG.com and used social media and word-of-mouth to let everyone know.

The email addresses we’ve used until now are also a casualty, so if you need to reach Zach or I, just use our first name at the new agency.com.au or this contact form for now.

Second, I wanted to let you know that we’ll be publishing fewer new stories on From Little Things for the next weeks/months because we can now see the end of the ‘runway’ in terms of current financial backing for From Little Things, we’ve left it a bit late to begin finding revenue, and we want to make sure we can keep ourselves going for longer while we find a way to pay for ourselves.

Our plan for starting From Little Things was simple:

1. Create a great-quality publication that would help our industry grow; and
2. Once we’d established the value of the publication, get revenue from running a series of FLT-branded events and selling some sponsorships, both at the events and on the blog.

Our goal was to satisfy the Australian tech startup industry’s need for useful, educational advice, and I believe we’re making good progress towards achieving that goal. But we underestimated how long it would take us to develop the event series and find the sponsors needed to pay our way.

We don’t expect to make a fortune from From Little Things (the days of making a fortune from media businesses are probably gone!) but we think aiming to build a ‘ramen profitable’ business is important for our motivation, and for us to be credible in the local lean startup community.

What was to be our first FLT event, with US star pitch coach Tyler Crowley, has instead pivoted into a Pollenizer event for lack of FLT sponsors, which is a bummer, but we’re moving on. We probably need to pivot away from the event series idea and drop the sponsorship proposal, judging by the lack of interest. We still have a proposal for sponsorship of the blog, available on request, and we’re open to other ideas.

Do you want From Little Things to continue in 2013? Is it nice-to-have or important to you? How do you think we should be making it pay? Please let us know, and if it’s just nice-to-have, please help us understand what we need to change to make it essential in your working week.

For the time-being Zach’s going to be squeezing in the occasional interview and article between freelancing on projects for The New Agency and Pollenizer. I’ll edit Zach’s occasional stories, and we’ll both keep spreading the word, testing the level of interest, and trying to secure sponsorship support from the technology companies, online media companies, telcos and consulting firms we hope can see a place for their brand to be associated with us.

From Little Things isn’t going away, it’s just a bit harder to find and a bit less frequent with the good stuff. We hope to be back, with the volume up to 11, very soon!

• alan

UPDATE: CrazyDomains fixed the configuration issue and we’re back up at fromlittlethings.co again, but we’ll be moving to a new registrar ASAP. Thanks for your support while we were down. The revenue challenge still remains for us to work on!  – alan