(part II)<p>At that time, Cint AB (privately owned panel admin service. International scope, HQ in Stockholm, SE. www.cint.com), launched Cint Direct Sample (Today, Cint Link). CDS was an API providing programmatic access to their +5mio vetted(!) respondents in 42 countries. They would take care of re-imbursement and administration of all the respondents, quality-control of the panels in use (mainly making sure that no "professional" respondents were allowed to answer). My end of the of deal was to supply a survey tool and the customers of course.<p>/* Sidenote: Google has since my "launch", opened the doors to <a href="http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home</a>. I consider this an affirmation of market viability for Openpanels or similar. */<p>Enter Openpanels.net. An unholy Frankenstein using WordPress as a CMS (Hacker gag reflex #1), and a heavily customized (also imposing the venerable "spaghetti-architecture" upon the code) fork of Limesurvey. I was the glorious Taskmaster, endlessly hiring and firing freelancers until I found someone that actually worked out. For you Hackers, this will seem crazy, but it cost me nearly USD10,000 and 9(!) months to get it running at the current state. But it worked. Just barely. But it worked (still does, technically speaking). And then I ran out of money.<p>The project was self-funded (read: under-funded) because my bloated sense of self-entitlement didn't allow me selling myself or my project to anybody else. So, when I ran out of money, I literally didn't know how to pay my upcoming rent.<p>(cont.)