| Subject: Basic Info |
| From: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 5/6/08, 14:14 |
| To: "Robert Brown" <rbrownbarachel@hotmail.com> |
The Lancaster Group
Essentially, The Lancaster Group is to be an LLC which will provide clients with a range of information technology, copywriting, and design services in general while focusing on website production, enhancement, and maintenance in particular.
Qualifications
Our senior software developer Andrew Stein recently spent eight months serving as an on-site consultant in support of Hearst's soon-to-be-released Digital Paper content delivery device, designing and implementing a service-oriented data processing system by way of .NET 3.5 technologies, including C#, LINQ, WCF, WPF, ASP.NET MVC Framework, ADO Entity Framework, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. Previously, he served as a software engineer for the Austin-based online advertising firm Datran Media, where he participated in performance and quality testing, bug fixing, new feature design implementation, optimization and general development of several large (250k + lines) enterprise class database driven Java web applications, targeting in-house Windows and Debian Linux systems, deploying against Tomcat or Glassfish, MySQL (4.x & 5.x) or SQL Server 2005, among other things. He is proficient in Java, .net, SQL, Markup, and two dozen other languages and variants thereof.
Our senior copywriter Barrett Brown has worked for several advertising and marketing agencies including Sullivan Perkins and Avacata, as well as on a direct basis for his own clients, which have included everything from large media outlets like America Online and Fox Business Channel to small real estate, tech, energy, and retail firms. His other freelance work has appeared in dozens of publications including National Lampoon, The Onion A.V. Club, and McSweeney's, as well as plenty of lesser-known trade and industry pubs, city and regional magazines, alternative weeklies, and public policy journals. His first book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, was released in March of 2007 to praise from Rolling Stone, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, Air America Radio, The Huffington Post, and Skeptic, among other sources.
The Lancaster Group also offers the services of several computer graphics designers with experience in corporate website development, among other things.
Marketing
The Lancaster Group intends to drum up much of its initial business in the same manner in which its principals have already done so as individual freelance consultants by responding to job ads on craigslist and other such mediums and offering potential clients competitively-priced services undertaken by our principals, both of whom have considerable expertise in their respective fields. In order to this more effectively, we will actually be placing our own dummy posts on these sites while posing as a firm which itself is seeking these sorts of services. Based on the responses we get, we'll be able to discern what any potential competitors might be offering and how they go about offering it. Using the information gleaned from this, we'll be able to better undercut any potential competitors in the future.
Finances
Because the Lancaster Group does not require any additional equipment or operating space other than that which it already possesses, fixed costs will be essentially non-existent.