Posted by Duff OMelia
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:03:00 GMT
I met a dad in the pediatric intensive care unit whose child had been in the neonatal area of the hospital for 3 months. I asked him how things went with work and how he and his wife were able to spend so much time at the hospital. He replied that he’s a business owner and that his work wasn’t too affected by the long hospital stay.
Creating assets that provide value to people is important. Producing more than we consume is important. Figuring out how to live in a way such that your income is not solely based on the time you spend working is important.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT
You’re creating a website that you’d like to release to the general public. One of the questions that needs answering is, which features do you need to make it to that first release?
I’ve been enjoying creating sites that I personally use like Spreedly and No Kahuna. When I’m an actual user of the site I’m making, it makes the decision about what to implement a bit easier.
The goal is to get to market and have the site being used by real customers as quickly as possible. For No Kahuna, that happened in 2 days. Spreedly took many weeks of effort before a real customer started using it. To release to a real customer, we’re only trying to make something that’s slightly better than what’s out there. We’re only trying to provide some value to the customer, not all of the value we’re ever going to provide. Does the site in its current state improve the lives of our customers?
When you’re your own customer, this becomes fun because you’re only working on the features that you’re quite sure would improve your life. If you’re at all unsure whether a feature provides value, defer it. Only do the stuff you’re confident about. This is fine because you’ll be released soon, and then customers will start giving you real feedback which is much more valuable than your guesses about what’s important.
Once you’re released, then you need to be judicious about which features to implement and be willing to say no to many requests from customers. In Getting Real, the 37 Signals guys said this:
And one more thing: it’s not just about the sheer number of requests (we don’t recommend adding something just because X# of people requested it), it’s about customers planting a seed in your mind. If they keep reminding you of something, it forces you to think about it. Maybe it is a good idea. Maybe it isn’t. But at least it’s important enough to consider if so many people keep asking for it.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:34:00 GMT
My friend Alex and I spent 2 full days last week creating No Kahuna. It was an intense and quite enjoyable 48 hour burst of design and development. We can’t wait to see what the world thinks of it.
Of course, we used Spreedly to handle our subscriptions and payments. Without Spreedly or something like it, going live with a subscription-based web site would be pretty difficult if not impossible.
I hope you can give it a try.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:31:00 GMT
I found this excellent talk by Guy Kawasaki to be quite motivational:
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:52:00 GMT
I’ve spent the last few months working on Spreedly with 3 friends. It’s been a wonderful experience working together to create a business.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:05:00 GMT
For the past year and a half or so, I decided to spend less time consulting and more time creating businesses. For a long time I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I wasn’t really spending any time doing it. It took me a few years actually to make the realization that if you want something to happen, you need to spend some time working toward the goal in a disciplined way.
So I had decided to spend about 30 hours consulting per week rather than the typical 40. I would spend the other 10 hours creating businesses. Now that I’ve been doing this for awhile, I’ve come to some conclusions.
It’s amazing what can be accomplished in about 10 hours per week. I’ve been quite surprised about it. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I have a project that I think will take about a month to complete if I were working on it full time. At the normal 40 hours per week that would work out to be about 160 hours for this project. If I only worked on it for 10 hours per week, I would have thought that it would take me 16 weeks to complete the project.
It turns that it’s been taking me much less time than I anticipated. I would have thought that because I was working 1/4 of the time, I would only accomplish 1/4 of the work. Instead, it seems as though I’m accomplishing much more than 1/4 of the work in that time. How is that possible? Why is it that I feel so productive for those 10 hours?
I think it’s because there’s a whole bunch of time during the week that I’m not working the project. By the time I’m ready to do some actual work on it, I’ve spent a ton of time mulling over things and making determinations about what the next steps should be. These determinations are often not even conscious thoughts. But by the time I’m ready to pick up that project again, I feel like I’m ready to code like the wind.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Sat, 06 Jan 2007 13:34:00 GMT
In Seth Godin’s blog post about strategy, he says:
It takes real guts to abandon a strategy, especially if you’ve gotten super good at the tactics. That’s precisely the reason that switching strategies is often such a good idea. Because your competition is afraid to.
I agree with him. Abandoning a strategy is often a good idea.
His post brought to mind a few questions I’ve thought about in the past along similar lines. When do you quit? How do you know if your current strategy really should be abandoned, or if you’re just quitting before your strategy had enough time to succeed?
We’re often given seemingly conflicting advice in life:
- “Never ever ever quit.”
- “Embrace change and be willing to change strategies because the path that you’re on might not be feasible.”
- “It’s not possible to fail if you don’t give up.”
I’m not really sure how to generically know if it’s time to change strategies. I am, however, capable of coming to a conclusion for a specific business instance. Soapadoo.
Is the whole strategy of Soapadoo flawed? Should I stop spending time on it and instead devote time to another business? Soapadoo clearly isn’t viral yet and it hasn’t become the dominant reviews website on the internet. It’s generated revenue but it’s not yet profitable. Should it be scrapped?
My answer is no. Certainly not. Here are some reasons why:
- Soapadoo hasn’t been around very long.
- Most businesses take time to develop and succeed. Sam Walton said that Wal-Mart, like most overnight successes, was 10 years in the making.
- It often takes time for a business to adapt and change to the marketplace. This refinement can often cause a business to become remarkable/viral. Ward Cunningham has spoken about “waiting for insight”. Insight often takes time.
- I haven’t found another website yet that’s completely focused on reviews and keeping things simple without bloat.
- I haven’t found another website yet that allowed bloggers and other reviewers to aggregate a subset of their posts onto a review site that’s highly Googleable.
- I haven’t found another review site yet where reviewers could benefit financially.
- I haven’t found another website that effectively combined the idea of a social network with reviews.
- As a consumer of the site, I find it personally useful to read reviews written by friends and others I respect. I’ve also found it useful to be able to email a link to a Soapadoo review to those looking for recommendations.
- This business has a really low capital burn rate.
- If Soapadoo isn’t profitable a year from now, I’ll certainly consider spending less time on it in favor spending time on more profitable ventures.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:02:00 GMT
I’ve often had days when I wonder if I’m making any progress at all toward some long-term goals. It seems pretty easy to think this way given that the goals are long-term and we often only consider the hear and the now. These
questions of progress can do some good. They can also hurt.
The downside of these thoughts is that it’s easy to draw the conclusion that no progress is in fact being made. If no progress is being made, what is the point of doing all of this work anyway? Will I ever see a payoff for my labors? It doesn’t seem like it. Maybe I should just quit. Perhaps that long term goal made no sense. Maybe it just wasn’t for me. It would probably be better if I invested my time in other pursuits. These negative thoughts are not helpful.
The upside of questions of progress is that they can cause introspection to occur which can lead to significant breakthroughs. Perhaps it feels like no progress is being made because the path needs a slight adjustment. Perhaps I can work smarter on this goal and bring about its achievement sooner than I thought possible. Perhaps I need to set some shorter term goals to give myself more feedback about the progress. Or perhaps it really is time to assess the worthiness of the goal and whether I’ve learned anything that causes me to question its value.
Most goals that really matter are the long term variety. Achievement of these goals matters because it often takes time and energy to do great things. It takes time and energy to change yourself enough such that the achievement of some goals is even possible. Simply put, achieving long term goals is hard. It’s much easier to quit. It’s much easier to not even establish long term objectives in the first place. As is often the case, the difficult path leads to the more rewarding outcome.
Here are two examples I’ve been thinking about recently:
- I have spent about 3 years learning to trade the stock market. I’ve often wondered why it’s taking so long to become an excellent trader. I’ve often wondered whether I’ll ever get it. I’ve often felt like I wasn’t making any progress. The reality, though, is that a ton of progress has been made, even though it often doesn’t feel that way. I didn’t know anything about the stock market a few years ago. If I really look back in time, it’s easy to see the progress. If I consider where I’ve come from, if I consider where I started, the progress becomes evident. So will I ever get it? I’m quite confident that I will because I’ve had an incredible mentor. This ensures that the things I’m doing every day to get closer to that goal do in fact work. Hundreds of other people have taken the same steps and become excellent traders. It takes time. It takes patience. And it takes a ton of perserverance. This is one of those goals I never plan on giving up on. I plan on pursuing it for the rest of my life.
- Another long term goal has led to questions of progress – Soapadoo. I would like Soapadoo to be a very successful business that provides a ton of value to people. I want it to be so remarkable and useful that folks can’t help but tell others about it. Soapadoo certainly hasn’t achieved these goals yet. If the site were truly remarkable, the traffic to it would have exploded. At this point, there’s been a steady rise in traffic each month, but it’s certainly not viral by any means. Are these Soapadoo goals achievable? I believe so, but I don’t know for certain. Does that mean I should give up? No! Hear’s why – I haven’t even been trying for very long. A few months is just not a long time when it comes to creating a business. It takes time to refine a business to be what customers are looking for. It takes time to market a web site. It’s easy to start a business and then wonder a few weeks later why it hasn’t been an incredible success. If you listen to successful entrepreneurs, it often takes months or even years for an entrepreneurial venture to gain some traction. Overnight successes are rare.
So, for me, I need to keep plugging away every day. I need to ensure that the things I’m working on every day take me a step closer toward these long term objectives. I need to be disciplined and determined.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:56:00 GMT
It seems that every life story I’ve read about successful entrepreneurs includes them being told over and over again that they’re idea couldn’t possibly work. Here are some of the forms of “No” that are often heard:
- “I doubt anyone would want that”.
- “Other companies are already doing that.”
- “That would be too difficult. It couldn’t work.”
- “That would cost too much money.”
- “What if you fail at that?”
- “That would take too long to implement.”
- “If you did that, one of the big companies out there would implement that and you wouldn’t be able to compete.”
Humans generally resist change. Entrepreneurs generally embrace change and bring it about.
The act of creating a business isn’t supposed to be easy. If everyone you talk to about your idea thinks it’s great, perhaps it’s not such a great idea. Perhaps it’s too easy to implement. Perhaps it’s not a big enough change from the status quo.
Perhaps we should be excited to hear from the skeptics. Hearing from the skeptics might mean that you’re onto something.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:24:00 GMT
I debated for awhile about when one should start monetizing a website. When should one attempt to have the website generate revenue? I originally thought I should have tens of thousands of reviews and that the site should be hoppin’ in order to start monetizing. I’m not really sure what led me to this line of reasoning. Right now, it just doesn’t seem logical. Why not become cash flow positive on the business earlier? I can’t see any downsides of monetizing early, especially if the method of monetizing your site provides value to the users of the site.
Therefore, I added some Google Ad Sense and I connected to the Amazon Associates program. I didn’t really know too much about them before starting on the task. All in all, it’s taken me about 8 hours to learn about the 2 programs and incorporate them into Soapbox.
What’s interesting is that before today, the site had zero chance of generating revenue. Now it suddenly has potential to generate revenue every day. I wonder how it will go.
I think Soapbox is a perfect site for Google Ad Sense and a perfect site for the Amazon program. Both programs provide value to the user of the site. I’ve been amazed how relevant AND useful the Google ads are. I think they’re a good fit for the site and they’re not just ‘noise’ like they are on many sites. In some ways, Soapbox could become a broker that sits between potential customers learning about products and the providers of those products who are purchasing the ads. It’s the same way with Amazon. If I’m reading a review that a friend wrote for a book, it’s pretty nice to have the Amazon link there to make it easier for me to buy it.
Why not monetize early?
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