Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 19 Sep 2006 10:59:00 GMT
Microsoft recently announced that they will be releasing a web site to compete with the extremely popular YouTube. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to call their site Soapbox. It’s taken me a few days to process this development and I’ve made a decision about it.
I must change the name of Soapbox. I resisted this for a few days, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to bite the bullet and change the name. It hurts, but I think it’s the best option I have.
I’ve been reading the excellent marketing classic entitled Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. It has driven home the idea that the name you choose for your product is quite important. The really successful products have a brand name that has become associated with the generic product. When those brand names are discussed, people immediately make that association. Clorox = bleach. Bayer = aspirin. Ebay = auction site. Kleenex = tissue.
I need to choose a name for Soapbox that has the potential for that association to be made someday. So that when people hear the name, they immediately think ‘review site’. Microsoft has successfully soiled the name Soapbox. It will forever be associated with ‘video site’.
Hopefully, I’ll be announcing the new name soon.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 19 Sep 2006 10:35:00 GMT
A number of the pages in Soapbox contain a list of reviews. Until now, these lists contained each review in its entirety. This was clearly sub-optimal, especially as more and more detailed reviews have been written. I released an update to address this issue which allows users to see many more reviews at a time while lowering the amount of scrolling they need to do. I think it’s a significant improvement and it will facilitate some other enhancements that are on the way.
You can get a feel for some of the changes by looking here.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:42:00 GMT
I recently learned a few lessons about planning and achieving long term objectives.
I used to do very little planning. I’d spend all of the available time I had on a daily basis working away at both short term and long term objectives. I’d just work and work and keep on working and have no end in sight each day. As you might imagine, this lack of planning approach didn’t work. I worked my tail off and never felt like I had achieved much.
Then my wife Kelly helped me to understand that it would be much better if I broke my day down into time slots. Each time slot was an amount of time I desired to spend on each goal every day. A basic time boxing approach. So there were time slots for Bible study, for consulting, for trading and learning about the stock market, for creating businesses, etc. If I didn’t get too much done during a time slot, that was ok. I did my best that day using the time I had available. I didn’t need to keep beating myself up about not accomplishing enough. I was spending the time I had intended to spend, I was living consciously, and I was living my life with a long and steady marathon pace that worked.
There have been weeks though when things didn’t seem to work out very well. Last week was one of them. I think I’ve just now realized why. You see, last week was a busy Soapbox week. I released a new feature that bloggers started talking about. (CenterNetworks, TDavid, Schulzone, TheStuffedDog, and my friend Rafe) There seemed to be so much that had to get done. So I bulled through and did those things. I was really enjoying it and it was stuff that was fun to do. I had started sprinting to accelerate the “creating businesses” goal because that’s what needed to be done that week. This sprint was at the expense of the other goals. That extra time I spent sprinting had to come from somewhere. I knew at the time what I was doing but I justified it by saying things like “it’s ok… I’ll catch up later…” Or, “sometimes these things take precedence…” Whatever. It boils down to not sticking to the plan.
I was able to make a ton of progress in one area of my life. But the other areas were neglected. So I got to the end of the week and felt like I couldn’t keep up with things. I felt like life was so hectic and overwhelming. I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing the things I had set out to accomplish. Some of the balls being juggled were hitting the floor. All of these feelings were completely justified because I HADN’T accomplished the things I had wanted to. I HADN’T made some progress toward each of the objectives. Some of the objectives were completely abandoned on a given day. Zero progress on that objective.
This “sprint on one goal at the expense of others” is not a good idea for me. It worked much better when I took a disciplined, long term approach and completely time boxed each of my activities for the day. Then I always got to the end of the week feeling like I was juggling all of the balls successfully. I was taking a step each day toward each of the goals. No balls were ever hitting the floor. No feeling of being overwhelmed. No feeling of a hectic life. I had taken the finite amount of time I had, broken it up into sections, and worked for each of the sections. I did the best I could with the time I had been given.
My friend Joe said it well – ‘Long lasting self-discipline is better than doing things in spurts that ultimately don’t stick.’ Joe was talking in the context of losing some weight. I think it’s a generally applicable principle of goal achievement.
Another realization I had was that there are things on my daily list that MUST get done and there are things that are nice to haves that I really enjoy working on. I realize now that I need to completely finish the must-haves before even thinking about the nice-to-haves. If I do them in the other order, the time slots for the nice-to-haves often get extended leaving less time for the must-haves. I think it’s a much better approach to finish the must-haves first and then know that anything else I accomplish that day is gravy. It’s almost like I need to work on the must-haves to deserve the opportunity to work on the things I’m really looking forward to doing. I’m working toward that reward which makes the must-haves more enjoyable.
I’m no longer going to justify the sprint. The marathon approach seems to work better.
Posted in Personal Development | no comments
Posted by Duff OMelia
Fri, 08 Sep 2006 20:35:00 GMT
I wanted to mention that I recently took part in the Q&A session that Seth Godin offered to people buying 11 copies of his book. I won’t go into any details, but suffice it to say that it was incredible. He is a marketing super genius and he had a huge impact on the entrepreneurs on the phone call. I greatly enjoyed it.
I’ll also say that there are gonna be lots of changes at Soapbox over the next few weeks. He had ideas that I don’t think I ever would have thought of. And even if I had thought of them, I don’t think I would have had the guts to proceed with them because they’re so different than what I was thinking. I’m really excited about the feedback he provided.
Posted in Other Stuff | no comments
Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:51:00 GMT
To support the latest feature of Soapbox I needed to upgrade to an improved web hosting plan at OCS Solutions, primarily for memory reasons.
A pleasant side effect is that many of the pages are now loading in 1/3 to 1/2 the time they previously did. After I add some caching this week, there should be another significant performance improvement.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:21:00 GMT
I’m pleased to announce the release of a new feature of Soapbox which you bloggers out there have been asking for – Blog Syndication.
Why would you want to syndicate the reviews from your blog onto Soapbox?
- More people will see your reviews.
- More people will learn about your blog.
- Each syndicated review in Soapbox contains a link to your original blog entry.
- Your reviews will matter more because they’ll have more reach.
- When people are buying a product, they typically search review sites, not blogs.
- Your blog’s rankings in search engines are improved as more sites refer to your blog.
- It is SO easy to mark a blog post as a Soapbox review.
If you’d like to know more about it, here are more details.
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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.
Posted in Entrepreneurship | no comments
Posted by Duff OMelia
Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:46:00 GMT
As many of you know, I’m diligently trying to make Soapbox so remarkable that customers feel that they need to tell their friends about the site. Seth Godin’s Books have taught me that passionate customers can do a much better job of marketing than I can. I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin.
I am quite confident that Seth would have a number of ideas about how to make Soapbox more Purple. I’m quite sure that he would have ideas about which sneezers I should be trying to reach to turn Soapbox into an Idea Virus.
So I started thinking about how I might provide Seth Godin some value. I started thinking things like, “Is there anything I might do for him such that he might be willing to talk to me for a few minutes about Soapbox? I wonder if he’d be interested in some kind of equity stake or some kind of revenue/profit sharing in exchange for some verbal collaboration?”
THEN, I read his blog post this morning. WOW. He is offering the chance to participate in a call-in Q&A session for people willing to buy 11 of his books. I find this to be an incredible offer. A remarkable offer. In fact, the only reason I’m writing this blog post is because I’m so surprised by the offer. I think that Seth Godin is passionate about what he does and he enjoys helping folks. It seems to me that the businesses and individuals who are most willing to serve those around them are often the ones who prosper.
So, I’ve emailed Seth in the hopes that there might still be room in the Q&A Session. We’ll see!
Posted in Other Stuff | no comments
Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:31:00 GMT
The geeks out there using
Soapbox will be excited to get their hands on some
XML feeds. You can subscribe to the following:
- The reviews in your network
- The recent reviews
- The reviews of an individual person.
If you don’t know what syndication feeds are, you can learn about them here.
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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?
Posted in Entrepreneurship | no comments
