Category Archives: Business At The Speed Of Thought

Finding the money, dreaming big and spending small

How To Create A Website Using Brains Instead of Money

: Image via CrunchBase

By Gretchen Glasscock

A while back, in By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09, web guru, Guy Kawasaki, details how he built a website on the cheap. That is, for Guy Kawasaki $12,107.09 is cheap. And it is cheap for a top ranking, major website. But if you’re not in Guy Kawasaki’s league yet…. and most of us aren’t …. you can build an attractive website that captures eyeballs, brings in revenue and turns a profit for $100 to $250.00. I know. I’ve done it. Many times.

Let’s look at how, working off Kawasaki’s list ( in italics). Actually Kawasaki only had four expense items, and you can pare those down dramatically.

As Kawasaki says, “Here’s a quick overview by the numbers:”

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).
0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

Times have changed since people on the web spent weeks or months laboring over business plans. The web is fast, fast, fast and you have a built in, real world focus group. Start from where you are with what you have. Put it out and see if people like it. Or, as they say in advertising, see if the dogs will eat the dog food. If they do, then keep leveraging up. You can and should leverage up for the life of the site to keep it fresh, interesting, constantly evolving and compelling.

As for money, I agree with Mark Cuban who said: “Rule #1: Sweat Equity is the best start up capital. There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs, your own pocket and your customer’s pockets. You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders, As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t. The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.”

Kawasaki has plenty of brains and, if you follow his moves, you will be using and improving yours. On to Kawasaki’s next point :

3. “7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

I couldn’t agree more. WordPress has revolutionized ordinary people’s ability to rapidly deploy an attractive, sophisticated website which can then be updated in plain text. According to Wikipedia, “WordPress is a free, open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application, powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today.” Being open source, it has thousands of man hours of coding and is constantly being refreshed and updated. It is powerful and elegant, plus it offers many plug ins and widgets, automated pieces of software which work in the background doing essential tasks it used to take programmers many hours to do. These tasks include search engine optimization, providing Google with a sitemap and a constant stream of updates and a thousand more functions, all of which work together to make your site a success.

As for design, WordPress has a huge array of free themes you can select. There are also some premium themes for which you pay a small price. A lot of professionals prefer the Thesis theme, at $87, because it is simple, elegant and endlessly customizable without having to code. Thesis is, right off the bat, an expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework. Thesis is known for the quality of its design and search engine optimization, SEO, which is critical because it is SEO traffic which drives the success of a website. There are also many free or inexpensive”skins” or looks available that overlay the Thesis framework. But to keep it simple, and for your own look, go to Istockphoto.com, put in your keywords to search for suitable photos then pay a buck or so each for a half dozen photos to go in your rotator or media box and you’re ready to go. Add your Twitter.com widget on the sidebar to drive more traffic.

At BlueHost.com, you can get great web hosting, features and service, 24/7 for $6.95 a month, payable a year in advance and only slightly more by the month. Among the many features they offer, to make life really simple for a webmaster, is the ability to install a WordPress platform to your site with one click.

· $4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

These guys at at Electric Pulp are top notch talent who’ve developed a well deserved reputation and consequently are well known. You pay top dollar for well known. I am a believer in remote teams and, trust me, a lot of remote techs aren’t well known and their prices are correspondingly much lower. Last week-end, I had an issue with a website and, through eLance.com, I located a Canadian demon coder who worked through the night and all the next day to fix it. I paid him $150 including a $60 bonus. I also brought on a certified IT Security Expert from Ireland who handled all the IT security for a global firm. He did a review of my site security for $125. You don’t have to be expensive to be good. You just have to know what you’re doing.

· $4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something. Here’s a breakdown of what I got for this amount of money.

I agree with some of Kawasaki’s thoughts on this. With lawyers you can pay now or pay later. And, if you get very successful and are negotiating an investment or liquidity event, you definitely want top notch lawyers “not only for her expertise but to show opposing counsel that you’re not clueless.” Agreed. But, if you’re bootstrapping, you can defer this expense until you are bringing in those bucks. Yes, your lawyers may cost more then, but you will be making more, so, in my judgment, it evens out. If money is an issue, which it usually is, I’d go with later.

· $399. I paid LogoWorks $399 to design the logo. Of course, this was before HP bought the company. Not sure what it would charge now.

It still charges $399. In fact, you can get a package for $299. But there’s a larger array of choices all the way up to $2999. I paid $299 for my latest logo from LogoWorks. But there are other choices. When I started out on the Web in 1996, I used a royalty free Matisse painting of people joining hands around the world as my logo. As I got established and began to see revenue, I paid $2, 000 for a custom logo. But now, I’ve learned, you can find a logo designer on eLance.com for $125 for a static logo and $150 for an animated logo. Either LogoWorks, another logo specialty shop which you can Google, or one you find on eLance.com is suitable. However, what I particularly like and I think you will like about LogoWorks is that you go down a decision funnel selecting the look and feel you want and have a lot of control over the process and the look and feel of the final product.

· $1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy. I registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc, etc). I had no idea that one had to buy so many domains to truly “surround” the one you use.

A domain name should cost about $10. I don’t want to quibble but I like to wait until a site is a proven success and bringing in revenue before spending a thousand dollars “surrounding it.”

Kawasaki goes on to say:

“· $0. I spent $0 on marketing to launch Truemors.

· 24. However, I did spend 24 years of schmoozing and “paying it forward” to get to the point where I could spend $0 to launch a company. Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

I do understand he’s Guy Kawasaki. And, as he points out, it takes a lot of experience to get to the point where you could spend $0 to launch a company. But it will never be sooner than today, so you might as well start. If you’re known a bit around the web or in your specific field and you put up a good site, you will find your niche and get traffic also.

In concluding, Guy says, in part:

4. I learned four lessons launching Truemors:

1. There’s really no such thing as bad PR.

2. $12,000 goes a very long way these days.

3. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.

4. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

I agree. You can do it for much, much less, a couple of hundred bucks perhaps. And definitely, “Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

5 Reasons WordPress Makes it Super Simple to Have a Headache-Free Site (communicatevalue.com)
10 Killer Ways for Startups To Use WordPress (wpjedi.com)
Book review: Head First WordPress (forthelose.org)

25 best-paying jobs for women

: Image via Wikipedia

25 best-paying jobs for women – CNN.com.

On Mother’s Day, along with apple pie, baseball and the American flag is motherhood , and, of course, the women who are mothers. Most of them work. But they are still not earning what the boys are.

“When you look at Forbes magazine’s most recent list of highest-paid CEO’s (chief executives of the 500 biggest companies in the United States), you won’t see a woman until No. 48: Irene B Rosenfeld, CEO of Kraft Foods.

In a country where women make up 47 percent of the workforce, women make up just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEO’s. In addition, women who worked full time earned an average of just 80 percent of what men earned in the same positions in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

In probing deeper into this unfortunate dynamic for women, one might want to take a look at the BLS stats highlighting 25 jobs where women earn $1000 a week or more but still a fraction of their male counterparts:

Chief executives
Women – Median weekly earnings: $1,603
Men – Median weekly earnings: $1,999
Women’s earnings as percent of men’s in same occupation: 80.2%

Lawyers
Women – Median weekly earnings: $1,509
Men – Median weekly earnings: $1,875
Women’s earnings as percent of men’s in same occupation: 80.5%

Computer software engineers
Women – Median weekly earnings: $1,351
Men – Median weekly earnings: $1,555
Women’s earnings as percent of men’s in same occupation: 86.9%

For a compete list, go to 25 best-paying jobs for women – CNN.com. And, if you have any suggestions on how to improve these stats, email us.

On Equal Pay Day, IWPR Study Finds Women Earn Less Than Men – Whether They Do the Same Job or Different Jobs (eon.businesswire.com)

The Entrepreneurship Track

Entrepreneurship can definitely become a way of life. I should know. I’ve been a life long entrepreneur, just as my father was before me.

I don’t know if it’s an addiction, the challenge, knowing you can bear the pain of the long climb, the exhilaration of success when, against long odds, you know you’ve created something that didn’t exist before. Maybe it’s a hidden gene, waiting to be discovered. Maybe it’s just that after entrepreneurship, nothing else seems so satisfying. But whatever it is, and the x factor is, author Rajesh Setty gets it, to my mind, just right in The Dance of Entrepreneurship:

“There are broadly three phases of entrepreneurship

1. The Beginning

2. The Journey

3. The New Beginning ( Yes, It’s Not the Destination )

rubber_meets_the_road

Now, the quick outline of the elements in each phase:

1. The Beginning

The five elements for the beginning phase are:

1. Purpose: Knowing why you are in this will help you keep going when the going gets tough

2. Passion: Doing what you love will make it feel like you are not working

3. People: Building together with the right people will make it look easy

4. Problem: Solving a real problem will help as people will pay to solve a real problem.

5. Plan: Having a plan even when you know that it’s going to change along the way

2. The Journey

The five elements of the journey

1. Patience: Everything takes longer and costs more. Patience is a MUST

2. Persistence: Sticking to the course of action even in the face of difficulty

3. Perseverance: Sticking to your beliefs even in the face of no successful outcome

4. Pain: Ability to handle the “pains” of entrepreneurship along the way

5. Politics: Knowing how to navigate in the sea of politics. You may not want to play politics but surely you should know how to survive and thrive in the politics that already exists

Last phase is what I call the “New Beginning.” I purposely did not call it the destination because rarely I see entrepreneurship “ends” with something – it’s usually a stepping stone to begin something new.

3. The New Beginning

So, here are the five elements of the new beginning

1. Pride: The satisfaction that comes with taking a concept to a completion

2. Profits: If executed well, there is money to be made. There are also profits in terms of personal growth and fulfillment.

3. Power: Since nine out of ten companies go out of business, if you are part of the one that succeeds, you automatically have more power.

4. Possibilities: New possibilities open up as you have more credibility

5. Philanthropy: You can make a bigger difference to the world as you have “extra” capacity

For those of you who are starting on this wonderful journey, wish you the very best.

How To Twitter Your Cool TwtBizCard

: Image via CrunchBase

@twtbizcard – Say goodbye to business cards as you know it. Send your Twitter Business Card by adding #twtbizcard to a @reply.

TwtBizCard Says

Say goodbye to business cards as you know it! Send a Twitter Business Card!

Web

TwtBizCard – Your twitter business card

( Offering some other very cool free twtapps as well: twtvite- event manager , twtjobs , twtTRIP , twtpoll ,etc,)

When your recipient goes to a link on Twtbizcard, this is what your Twitter pal sees, some of it derived in real time from your Twitter profile – you put in the phone #, address, email, and can edit anytime, also archive bizcards sent and received:

HOW TO: Exchange Business Cards With Twitter @Replies (mashable.com)
TwtJobs – a simple career manager twitter app (twi5.com)
twtapps.com: simple and useful Twitter applications (netwala.blogspot.com)
TwtBizCard – your twitter business card (twi5.com)
CalendarTweet – an events calendar for twitter (twi5.com)

Web 3.0, Breaking Out Of Our Silos, Getting Smarter

If you happen to be an entrepreneur on the web, like me, whether you’re
building your own blogs and websites or building them for others, you need to keep your eye on the web’s future. That’s where we’ll be competing for eyeballs, relevance and revenue.

Some distilled insight is offered by Richard MacManus in Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web. He analyzes and sets out to distill “a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent “Web 3.0″ concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web.”

It might be a tall order to understand all of that in one gulp, but let’s look for a second at Web 3.0, then gently peek over the horizon to see a tiny preview of what lies ahead. ( Some of it might be a little techie, but for most of us it will work behind the scenes, and we will have simple tools which help us take advantage of the Net’s increasingly intelligent structural and linking dynamics.)

“Web 3.0: What Comes After 2.0 (!)

Last year Greg Boutin loosely defined web 3.0 as “the Web of Openness. A web that breaks the old siloes, links everyone everything everywhere, and makes the whole thing potentially smarter.”

There is a lot of debate about what Web 3.0 is and the term itself is open to derision. In my view Web 3.0 is an unoriginal name for the next evolution of the Web. What’s important to note though, is that there is a difference in the products we’re seeing in 2009 compared to the ones we saw at the height of ‘Web 2.0‘ (2005-08). If Web 2.0 was about user generated content and social applications such as YouTube and Wikipedia, then Web 3.0 is about open and more structured data – which essentially makes the Web more ‘intelligent’.

The smarter the data, the more things we can do with it. The current trends we’re seeing today – filtering content, real-time data, personalization – are evidence that ‘Web 3.0′ is upon us, if not well defined yet. We actually saw a great example of Web 3.0 this week, with Google’s release of Search Options and Rich Snippets. Those features added real-time search, structured data, and more to Google’s core search.”

: Image via Wikipedia

Macmanus goes on to discus “linked data” which is interesting, if pretty techie. There is a fascinating, if mind blowing, graphic of a Linking Open Data (LOD) project. He also notes that Google will be a big player in all of this.

: Image via Wikipedia

The bottom line is that, ultimately, we will have a more intelligent web and entreneurs would do well, to position themselves for the future by keeping an eye on linkages. To dive into the complexity of it all, go to Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web – ReadWriteWeb.

Google’s Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web (radar.oreilly.com)
Linked Data is not owl:sameAs Semantic Web (semantic-web.at)

How To Gain Insulation From Competition: Foster A Tribe

: Image by Alex Osterwalder via Flickr

Not sure what the hardest thing is in business is because so much of it is challenging. But one of the hardest things to achieve has to be “insulation from competition”. Even if you are great at doing whatever you do, someone can always come along and replicate it. Seth Godin, marketing guru, makes the point in Seth’s Blog: Thinking about business models

that building a “tribe”, insulates you from competition. I can think of some examples of this. Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. After all it’s only ice cream. Volkswagon, when it brought out the Beetle. After all it was only a car. Apple when it introduced everything from the Mac to the Iphone. After all, there were competing products, but for those who fell in love with the meticulous design, ease of use and the sheer enjoyment of using the product, there was only Apple. Here’s how Seth makes that point when thinking about business models”

“A business model is the architecture of a business or project. It has four elements:

What compelling reason exists for people to give you money? (or votes or donations)
How do you acquire what you’re selling for less than it costs to sell it?
What structural insulation do you have from relentless commoditization and a price war?
How will strangers find out about the business and decide to become customers?

The internet 1.0 was a fascinating place because business models were in flux. Suddenly, it was possible to have costless transactions, which meant that doing something at a huge scale was very cheap. That means that #2 was really cheap, so #1 didn’t have to be very big at all.

Some people got way out of hand and decided that costs were so low, they didn’t have to worry about revenue at all. There are still some internet hotshot companies that are operating under this scenario, which means that it’s fair to say that they don’t actually have a business model.

The idea of connecting people, of building tribes, of the natural monopoly provided by online communities means that the internet is the best friend of people focusing on the third element, insulation from competition. Once you build a network, it’s extremely difficult for someone else to disrupt it.

As the internet has spread into all aspects of our culture, it is affecting business models offline as well. Your t-shirt shop or consulting firm or political campaign has a different business model than it did ten years ago, largely because viral marketing and the growth of cash-free marketing means that you can spread an idea farther and faster than ever before. It also makes it far cheaper for a competitor to enter the market (#3) putting existing players under significant pressure from newcomers.

This business model revolution is just getting started. It’s’ not too late to invent a better one.”

Social Media Changes Forever The Web Business Model

: Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

Remember when the Net roared on the scene and created new business models not even imaginable before? “Opportunities where Amazon is 34x bigger than Barnes & Noble, where NetFlix destroyed Blockbuster, and where Skype is worth $2.6B while telecom companies drop like flies?”

Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software reflects on what’s happening on the net today where, as he sees it…. and it sounds pretty reasonable to me…the same pattern is emerging, just in a different guise.

In, Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want toJason talks about how social media has already changed the rules of the game. Here’s his take:

“The days of “have a website and advertise” are over. It’s too expensive to be noticed on an Internet that’s already full.

Social media is the only way LinksFor.Us could get traction. If Darren Rowse or Brian Clark talks about it, it’s visible. If it hits the front page of Digg, it’s visible. Once it’s visible, once you have things like incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you have a shot at using traditional SEO techniques for staying visible. But social media is the only way to overcome static friction (short of spending crazy money).

Social media is already changing the rules of the marketplace, just like the web did a decade ago. It’s still early of course and no one — not even the experts — knows where all this is going. But it’s clear that times are changing again, and those that don’t jump in will go the way of print media.

Want examples?

In a test run by BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customer reviews to their website increased sales and decreased returns of their products. Skeptics said sales of low-rated products would crater. What actually happened is that sales of low-rated products increased. When shoppers were questioned, they explained that when they read why someone else maligned the product, often they disagreed or didn’t care about that particular problem. If the price was right, it was worth buying anyway.
Fog Creek software makes millions of dollars from FogBugz, a bug-tracking system. There’s hundreds of bug-tracking systems — free, cheap, expensive, open-source, commercial — yet Fog Creek is highly visible and successful with no advertising. How? Because the founder, Joel Spolsky, has built an incredibly popular blog about writing software. He was before his time; before RSS he wrote essays and notified you by email when a new one was posted. It’s widely agreed that without the blog-before-it-was-called-a-blog, Fog Creek would likely have remained an unknown consulting company with a few struggling products.
Nike allowed people to build and order custom shoes on their website. Skeptics said deep customization is too expensive, design-sharing is too complicated, and people need to try shoes on. Wrong! Once the site took off, Nike created physical stores where you could do the same thing. Joaquin Hidalgo, Nike VP of Global Brand Marketing says those stores now “represent 25% of our revenue.”
Speaking of shoes, Zappos also sells shoes on the Internet. CEO Tony Hsieh is so convinced that their legendary Twitter presence results in sales, he even wrote a popular beginner’s guide to Twitter. He insists that Twitter and other forms of open communication are required for excellent customer service; employees are trained in Twitter. Zappos raked in $1B last year even with the recession; they’re doing something right.
Oddly-named marketing site Marketing.fm gets double the traffic of marketing.com. One has a blog with useful content and one doesn’t. Guess which is which.
Zeus Jones describes 16 more terrific examples. (Thanks to David S. Finch for digging it up.)”

Conclusion: better jump in now while you still can and keep leveraging up with social media. Or, as Jason puts it, “Will there be another new thing someday? Sure.

But today and for the foreseeable future, this is the world. You have to jump in even if you don’t yet understand it.”

What Sort of Business Plan Do You Need ?

Business plan guru, Tim Berry, will be reading and evaluating 75 or so business plans in a single month so he should know something about how to create them and how to judget them.

As Berry says: “This is business plan season for me. I just finished reading half a dozen plans for Notre Dame’s annual business plan competition (we (Palo Alto Software) give a prize to the best one), and another half dozen plans for the Rice business plan competition (I’m a judge, and we have a best business plan prize for that one too). I still have to read five plans for the University of Oregon’s New Venture Competition next weekend (I’m a judge), and I’m supposed to produce a first-cut on 43 plans for the Willamette Angel Conference (I’m one of the angel investors) by the end of the workday today.:

Here’s his take on what sort of business plan you need:

Why You Should Start Your Own Page On Facebook

: Image via CrunchBase

Dan Schawbel makes an interesting point and one I think might be helpful to all of us about the value of starting your own page on Facebook. Schawbel in HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook notes that with over 200 million active users, Facebook has become a personal, product and corporate branding hub. He presents a very thorough guide to building your personal brand on Facebook, but the most interesting point he makes, I think, is How To Start Your Own Page.

“Facebook pages are for brands, ranging from Coca Cola to Barack Obama and even you. These pages resemble your Facebook profiles, so only use one if you have a large number of Facebook friends. By having a Facebook page, your brand can go viral, holding a spot on other people’s profiles. The other main advantage is that your page will rank high for your name in Google () () and you can use it for your professional career, while keeping your personal profile private.”

The reason I think this is a really good idea is because I recently read a study showing the most likely prospect for getting new business is from someone you are already doing business with. The next most likely place is from someone who’s heard good things about you from someone you are doing business with. In other words, credibility — being good at what you do—, attention to clients and colleagues and word of mouth or at the core of building your brand, your reputation and your business. Remember that when you are deciding where to invest your time. Facebook is a more intimate platform where you can get some of those qualities across.

Since I’ve just come upon this truth myself I haven’t built my Facebook Page yet, but it is now on my priority to do list. It will be a bit tricky because my Facebook friends come from many different personal camps or tribes, and my page will blend webbiz, social media and entrepreneurship. The idea will be to gather a small community with interesting thoughts on these subjects. An interesting challenge. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, if you’ve built a Facebook page or are planning to, please share your thoughts and experience.

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Mentoring, Tools & Strategy To Succeed

Category Archives: Business At The Speed Of Thought

How To Create A Website Using Brains Instead of Money

25 best-paying jobs for women

The Entrepreneurship Track

1. The Beginning

2. The Journey

3. The New Beginning

How To Gain Insulation From Competition: Foster A Tribe

What Sort of Business Plan Do You Need ?

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“Web 3.0: What Comes After 2.0 (!)

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