Archive for the 'entrepreneurship' Category
November 8, 2008
I never thought I’d be that excited about a printer, but here I am writing about one. The main reason it’s so exciting to write about this one is because I got it free! That’s like getting $350 (including ink) of stuff you can really use!
I bet you are wondering why I got it free. Well it’s because I (@aruni) and Barbara Jones are both on twitter. Barbara runs a company called One2One Network - The Women’s Word of Mouth Marketing Network and she discovered me on twitter and began following me a while back.
OK, it’s not just because I’m on twitter, but part of getting lucky is being somewhere where people are looking for people like you. So she probably thought since I write reasonably well in English and my blog is read by many entrepreneurially minded women, men, moms, and dads, that my experience with the printer might provide an interesting perspective.
When she first asked me if I’d like an Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer, I tweeted back something like “heck yeah!” I then told my husband and he being the one that manages our home IT set-up as well as being our resident rocket scientist, was immediately skeptical. First he grumbled “Well, what’s wrong with our current HP Photosmart 3210 All-in-One” that we’ve had for a few years. The only response I could meekly muster was that the scanning feature didn’t work well. He then asked if it was network ready (not just wireless…it had to be able to be plugged into with an Ethernet connection). He also said it had to be Mac compatible. Of course Barbara cheerfully tweeted it met all of those requirements. She was probably wondering why I was looking a gift horse in the mouth or at minimum what kind of man I was married to.
When it arrived and he opened the box, he took one look at the design and features and cracked a half smile (a rare occurrence when it comes to technical items - unless it’s a new Mac, Blackberry, or other Apple product) and said “You did good.” I nodded knowingly thinking to myself ‘don’t I always!‘ 
He set it up and the last few weeks we’ve been using it for a variety of things from printing work related stuff, to kid’s birthday cards, maps, to scanning documents. I have to say I’m impressed and here are the top 5 reasons why:
- My husband was impressed making it easier to get it installed and tested!
- It has a document feeder just like a copier. This is such a *HUGE* feature for scanning or copying multiple pages. I no longer have to put one page down, open the lid, put another page down, etc. I just set the pages I want to scan or copy on the top and press a few buttons. It also scans to .pdf which I love!
- It’s Mac compatible (see also item #1 above)
- It’s WiFi and Ethernet ready (see also item #1 above) [Interesting side note: the Wi-Fi Alliance is headquartered at the Austin Technology Incubator, which is where I work during the day]
- The design is very cool, modern, and sleek and fits perfectly on top of my little file cabinet. It has a touch screen front interface for one touch copy and scanning.
The only issue I’ve had with it is printing pages with heavy color and that’s probably because we use newspaper cheap paper. A few months ago (for some cheap wad/had a coupon unknown reason) I bought a case of Office Depot premium multipurpose paper and it’s pretty thin. I think I just began printing on it using the HP and now with the deep colors in the Epson, the pages sometimes come out feeling wet. I changed the setting to draft but then it kind of dulls the color. I guess I’ll have to suffer through some wet pages until I finish this case of cheap paper!
So, although inertia (and the economy) might have prevented me from replacing our HP printer, I can honestly say that the ability to scan multiple pages easily would have swung me over to the Epson Artisan 800 All-in-One printer side of the camp quite some time ago.
So thank you Epson, Barbara, and oh yeah twitter!
November 2, 2008
The title of this post was inspired by a fortune cookie fortune. For those of you who are new readers, I did some posts a while back using fortunes from fortune cookies as blog titles. I thought this one was particularly appropriate given how challenging entrepreneurship can be and given the state of our economy. But here’s the interesting part, the fortune cookie actually read: “Love is like war; easy to begin but hard to stop.”
I felt myself nodding knowingly inside when I read it. How true it is in relation to both Love and Business. How relatively easy it can be to start a business or fall in love. We tell ourselves, it’s just an idea/romantic feeling…let’s see where it goes. One thing after another happens and if you don’t chicken out (or the playing field of potential significant others or stable jobs doesn’t pull you away), you find yourself:
| Business |
Love |
| |
|
| Exploring ideas |
Dating |
| Incorporating your business |
Being in a committed relationship |
| Raising funds |
Getting engaged |
| Hiring people |
Getting married |
| Raising more funds |
Buying a house |
| Releasing new products |
Having kids |
| Hiring more people |
Hiring domestic help or losing your mind |
| Taking longer to break even |
Taking longer to adjust to life with kids |
| Laying off people |
Hiring a marriage counselor |
| Feeling an air of desperation |
Experiencing a mid-life crisis |
| Closing up shop or going bankrupt |
Getting a divorce |
| Becoming profitable and self sustaining |
Living happily ever after! |
No one goes into business or marriage believing that one day it might ‘stop’ or end. Yet, 80 to 90% of the time businesses (e.g., technology start-ups, restaurants, retail shops, side businesses) fail or barely break even, and last I heard 50 to 60% of marriages end in divorce and that rate has been increasing over the years. So much so that venture capitalists are actually funding sites like Divorce360.com and Agreed Divorces.com. They should also fund a site called ShutDownYourBusiness.com!
Stopping a business or a marriage is not easy. You get up every day and say to yourself: “Something will happen to make the business work. I’ll get funding. I’ll get that next customer. I can’t stop now!“ You coast in your marriage thinking “I’ll keep myself busy and things will get better or make more sense. We’ll make it work for the sake of the kids.“ Many times it does get better (after the sleep deprivation wears off) but sometimes you end up like Archie Bunker and Edith Bunker or other such couples who can’t stand each other but stay together because they don’t know what else to do. Or you end up a bitter, washed up individual who finds yourself going through the motions because you have defined yourself as an entrepreneur yet you could never build a sustaining business. You then end up feeling that life is unfair and you never got your well deserved lucky break.
I know this post might sound depressing, but these are the odds you are playing with when you start a business or marriage. Many entrepreneurs will fold up (and have already started to) their businesses due to tough economic times (no funding, no customers, etc.). They will use the bad economy as a welcome excuse for not making it. It is, after all, a justifiable/less ego-destroying way to explain to people why your business didn’t make it.
And by all means, take the opportunity to wrap things up if you can (for your and your family’s sanity) because it is going to be tougher than normal for a while. However, at the same time, the opportunities (volunteer help, cheaper resources, less competition) for being creative will be abundant.
The next few years are going to be interesting. Companies/marriages may fall apart because the changing economy ends up being the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or they might outlast the downturn and be stronger on the other side. Many successful entrepreneurs have emerged from down economies and their success is surely a prerequisite for the economy turning around and thriving!
I, for one, am glad to be living in this day and age. In no other time in history (or probably not in any other country) could I have done what I’ve done, tried what I’ve tried, say what I say, write what I write, do what I do, or dream what I dream without being squashed.
What do you think? Is Business and Love like (the US war in Iraq)? Easy to begin but hard to stop?
October 27, 2008
Raising money is a hard thing to do and often harder when you are raising money for a non-profit. The payback isn’t measured in dollars, in quantifiable ROI (return on investment), or in perks and huge salaries. It’s measured in change. It’s measured in the effect your cause has made on your community…on the world. I have yet to read such an inspiring article/post on the matter of raising funds in a non-profit as the one written by Sasha Dichter, who works at the Acumen Fund, on Seth Godin’s blog called In Defense of Raising Money: a Manifesto for NonProfit CEOs. Whether you are in a non-profit or a company trying to be profitable, it is a MUST read! You can feel his passion in his post.
Here are a few excerpts, but please go read his entire post…it is truly inspiring.
“How good is your idea? How important is your cause? Important enough that you’ve given up another life to lead this life. You’ve given up another job, another steady paycheck, another bigger paycheck to do this all day long, every day, for years if not for decades, to make a change in the world and to right a wrong.”
“Breast cancer has an unbelievable level of awareness in the United States, definitely ahead of all other cancers. Yet breast cancer is actually the 5th leading cause of cancer death in the United States, behind lung, stomach, liver and colon cancer.(2) So why does it get the most attention and the most funding?”
“So why are you so scared to ask people for money? …
How about this instead: “You are incredibly good at making money. I’m incredibly good at making change. The change I want to make in the world, unfortunately, does not itself generate much money. But man oh man does it make change. It’s a hugely important change. And what I know about making this change is as good and as important as what you know about making money. So let’s divide and conquer – you keep on making money, I’ll keep on making change. And if you can lend some of your smarts to the change I’m trying to make, well that’s even better. But most of the time, we both keep on doing what we’re best at, and if we keep on working together the world will be a better place.”
If only we could all feel as passionate about our lives and ideas with this same level of intensity every day, but most of us can’t (maybe even Sasha doesn’t feel this way every day) so we read posts like these and get inspired by someone else’s passion. What a true gift of charity when people share their wisdom and passion…expecting nothing in return…except for maybe a little change.
October 22, 2008
And now for a long overdue post on search engine optimization. The business reason for waiting this long was that I wanted a quarter to pass after I officially ended my search campaign (i.e., June 30, 2008) with the firm I had been using before analyzing the results. The personal reason is that well, um, given my various activities, I didn’t have the time to do it until now.
To get more background on my SEO experiences, check out my posts: What They Don’t Tell You About SEO Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Although I signed up for an annual contract, about 4 months in it became apparent to me that it wasn’t working for a variety of reasons. I think it was obvious to them also because 6 ½ months into it, we were very far away from achieving their guaranteed results of making more than we spent monthly on search services by the end of the contract. Something miraculous would have to occur. Was it anyone’s fault? Yes and no.
There were things I should have researched and understood better before engaging a SEO firm. I made the decision hoping it could be part of a ‘silver bullet‘ solution to raise our trial and conversion numbers and as we all know, the silver bullet doesn’t usually hit where you want it to. I also think that the firm could have advised me better upfront on things like website conversion, dropped the ball a couple of times, and could have proactively paid more attention to the direction things were going. When I last checked their site, it looks like they have changed their focus more to SEM (search engine marketing) than just SEO.
Although it does hurt to have spent the money (especially considering the economy today), several of my peers have spent tens of thousands more dollars than I did with similar results. So I feel a little less dumb when I look at my company’s P&L statement. In fact I know several web company CEOs in town who have suspended their SEO/SEM campaigns to focus on other ways to bring more qualified/convertible traffic to their sites after not seeing expected results.
Overall, I learned a lot and when the time is right, I may consider re-engaging with SEO again. I have no hard feelings against any of the people I worked with at the firm. They are all nice people, and since I don’t want to focus on feeling let down, I have chosen to think about it as educating myself and helping someone somewhere feed their kid or pay their rent. Such is life!
The biggest lesson I learned was: SEO is not a good choice when you are creating a market! It’s hard to predict what people will search for when looking for your product in a market that is not well defined. It’s hard to even know how many or if they are looking for your product! I’ve mentioned before the example of a baby blanket. When you are looking for a ‘baby blanket’ or a ‘red soccer ball‘ you know what you are looking for. When you are looking for a way to get your baby to sleep better at night or understand his feeding patterns, you may not even know you are looking for a web and mobile based tool to help you track his activities. So even if you land on the Babble Soft site, you don’t have a frame of reference to compare it to.
So I chose to end the contract rather than spending thousands of more dollars for another 5 ½ months with all signs pointing to the fact we weren’t going to achieve the hoped for results. I could have continued but I didn’t want to have to deal with a situation where none of us wanted to be in thereby making all of our lives more stressful. I’ll never know if I did the right thing but given the economy, I’m sure glad I’m not having that big cash outflow each month when I’m not seeing the equivalent or greater cash inflow. Maybe I let them out easy, but I think the money is better spent paying our mortgage instead! Here are the highlights:
Facts for SEO Analysis on Babble Soft:
- Search engine traffic went from 14% just before the beginning of the campaign in December 2007 to 36% in September 2008 with a peak of 58% in July after ending the campaign.
- Referring site traffic went from 42% to 46% with a peak of 51% in August 2008 due to a fabulous article on BabyCenter called The basics of baby schedules: Why, when, and how to start a routine. This article resulted in a record amount of trial signups and still sends qualified traffic to the site and I didn’t spend any money for that lucrative mention!
- Direct traffic went from 43% in December 2007 to 17% in September 2008 which is good because the number of people who know to directly type www.babblesoft.com or another URL link on our site is few in the world.
- Trial sign-ups went up 200% from November 2007 to June 2008. They increased 500% from November 2007 to September 2008 because of the BabyCenter mention. However, since we just launched the web and mobile applications in 2007, the base amount wasn’t that high to begin with.
- Conversions went up some as well but that again was because the base to grow from wasn’t that high. They didn’t go up near the amount we all hoped for to cover our SEO costs. That’s why percentages are great to quote but they don’t mean you are breaking even yet.
Key Learnings from my SEO experience:
- SEO is not a great place to spend your money when you are creating/making a market. There are just too many unknowns.
- Focus on getting mentions in places where your target audience visits (e.g., BabyCenter). This is hard to do without PR help but sometimes you can get lucky. People have spent tens of thousands of dollars on public relations firms as well and still not achieved the ‘perfect’ story placements. Since I don’t have a big marketing budget, I am taking things into my own PR hands and hoping I’ll get a big mention from the free Help A Reporter Out (HARO) PR leads I now get.
- If you have the budget, experiment with keywords using Search Engine Marketing (e.g., Google Adwords) until you see what keywords work to get qualified traffic to your site, and then revisit SEO. However, if you are creating a market this could prove to be an expensive endeavor because you might have to do A LOT of guessing!
- Spend a significant amount of time making the appropriate conversion changes on your site. In other words, make sure your site gets people to sign up and part with their money! Make sure your SEO firm not only understands the importance of conversion but can also identify the changes and make them up front. There are people who know how to make your website flow and your text copy sing a siren song. You need to find someone who gets your market and if you are creating a market, you might be the expert and have to wing it yourself.
I think that the SEO/SEM firms are going to face hard times with the changing economy as many businesses will. If you have the time and money to do it right and you’re selling something like ‘red soccer shoes’ or ‘Halloween costumes’ then SEO might make sense for you. If not, it’s probably best to turn over another low-cost marketing rock while you create and define your new market.
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October 15, 2008
Teach her how to fish, she eats for a lifetime. This year’s Blog Action Day theme is about poverty. When I last checked the site over 10,000 bloggers had signed up to participate reaching over 11 million readers worldwide. Last year’s theme was on the environment and I wrote Rock. Paper. Scissors. How Do We All Win? on the topic of the environment and cutting down on paper usage.
How does one break the cycle of poverty? As an entrepreneur, I’m a strong supporter of those who try to make a difference by creating products and solutions that help their local, national, or global community. All ideas are not created equal, but the people behind them are the ones who can cultivate them into something life changing or learn from their failures, pick themselves up and help others on their paths to create something great.
Whether entrepreneurial drive is innate or learned one may never know, but we do know that it can be cultivated and nurtured by the right people, resources, and support. It can also be squashed and abused by people who feel threatened by the passion behind the ideas.
I have heard several of my favorite bloggers mentioned Kiva.org in the past and I thought it was a really neat concept. So for this year’s Blog Action Day, I’ve decided to donate $100 to a Kiva project. However, it looks like I’ll have to wait because all of their projects are currently funded!
Kiva is a site that enables people to give/lend money to entrepreneurs in third world countries who are trying to make a difference in their poverty stricken communities. You can contribute money towards a small loan for an entrepreneur to help him/her get started or purchase some supplies. It’s called micro-lending.
Giving someone the means to try something entrepreneurial to build up their self esteem and add value to their community, is priceless. Giving them the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship first hand from the school of hard knocks is contributing to their life education.
So take a look around you and be grateful for what you have despite the challenging economic times ahead for all of us. If you are reading this blog post, chances are that you are not sitting in a hut somewhere without electricity wondering where your next meal might come from.
Encouraging ideas, creativity, and entrepreneurship is the way we will see ourselves through this downturn. Investing in good people with the entrepreneurial spirit is a fabulous thing to do. Check out Kiva.org and when an entrepreneur and her project surface that you find interesting, consider lending her a few bucks to help her make a difference!
October 13, 2008
Business is tough and it’s only going to get tougher the next several months and probably years with the economic meltdown happening as I type. Things have been good (actually great) in the United States and it seems that many people (Democrats and Republicans alike - each in their own different ways) started to expect things to be taken care of for them and began to forget that although luck plays a part in finding financial success, that working hard, getting an education, paying attention, making good decisions, not buying what you want but don’t need, not eating unhealthy foods, etc. play a much bigger role.
Members of both political parties took it for granted that the government would take care of them. Not just those on welfare! Some just thought the good times would roll on forever and signed up to risky home loans and bought things on their credit cards they couldn’t afford.
Some decided because they were told (i.e., marketed to) they should own a home as part of living the “American dream,” they should buy a home not worrying about whether times would change and if they could afford it over the long term. And it’s not just high school drop outs who made these decisions, it’s also college educated people, because the American culture of ‘borrow, borrow, borrow and don’t worry about tomorrow‘ has prevailed.
So who dropped the ball? The American consumer? The government? The banks? Parents? Educational Institutions? In my opinion, everyone did. The ball has been repeatedly dropped and instead of being ‘kicked off the team‘ like they would be on any professional sports team or any successful business, they were allowed to continue to drop the ball. And now because the ball was dropped too often, here we are in the US facing one of the worst economic challenges in our history.
My guess is that in the years to come those who repeatedly apologize for dropping the ball, for making mistakes, or not following through (e.g. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve who I couldn’t believe said something like ‘I don’t know, I haven’t had a good track record when it comes to make decisions about the country’s financial position‘ when asked about the $700 billion bailout package. — Yes, I saw him say that on live TV!) will hopefully be weeded out. We can only hope they get weeded out without receiving big financial packages rewarding them for their incompetence.
The US system is broken in many ways but in many ways works better than anywhere in the world! It rewards incompetence but it also rewards talent. It rewards people who work hard but it also rewards people who happen to be at the right place at the right time without the right skills and then doesn’t get rid of them when they don’t perform.
So pay attention. Don’t let that ball drop. If it happens to drop, pick it up quickly and pass it to the next person on your team (and hope he or she doesn’t drop it too often) because our country and our world needs everyone’s help!
October 2, 2008
Woo Hoo! I submitted a panel idea for the 2009 SXSW Interactive extravaganza a couple of months ago and I was just informed that it was selected! It will be called Building A Web Business After Hours. Although I have several panelists lined up, we have been asked not to finalize the panel yet — probably to make it oh so hugely compelling for all of you to attend!
One of the cool things about being selected is that I get a free Gold Badge pass to attend SXSW interactive and so do the panelists! I probably won’t have much time to party late into the evening unless my husband doesn’t mind watching the kids for 5 days/nights in a row.
Thank you to all of you who voted for the panel idea during the open voting period. It wouldn’t have been selected without your support!
September 27, 2008
I co-write articles for university alumni magazines with my fabulous writing partner Pam Losefsky. You can also see more of our write-ups on the article page of this blog. The last article that we did for the Self Starter series for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, is on Kirby Allison (gif). Kirby is a recent graduate and the founder of The Hanger Project. He built the business nights and weekends in school and even after graduating while he held a day job!
Sadly, interviewing these interesting entrepreneurs and writing about them with Pam was one of the things I had to remove from my very full plate of things to do. Both Pam and I took on other commitments ranging from my day job and her additional writing work, that we decided we couldn’t continue to do it and do it well. We’ve been doing articles for The Alcalde for over 3 years now and we really enjoyed working with each other and the editor, Avrel Seale. Life is full of hard decisions and this was one of them. Who knows, we might write for them again when it works for all of our schedules…
I’ll do full posts on past articles we’ve written that I haven’t done one for yet…so keep an eye out for those. An image of Kirby’s article is below and an interesting highlight from his article follows.
“Last fall a confluence of opportunities - a complimentary product review in the Wall Street Journal and a major order from a luxury men’s store in Guatemala - propelled the popularity of Allison’s hangers. He found himself scrambling to air-freight new inventory to meet the Christmas demand. His little side project had become The Hanger Project, a recognized leader in premium hangers.”
September 21, 2008
Photo by Sandy Blanchard
Yes, the title of this post is another fortune from a fortune cookie I got a few weeks back at PF Changs, and I’ve found it true in many respects in my life and career. [As an aside, I started this post while listening to Chiquitita by ABBA and after a glass of red wine! I'm usually not able to write or think while music is on because I'm easily distracted so take that into consideration as you read.]
The title of this post is also in a well known Christian Bible verse in the book of Luke Chapter 11 verse 9 (”And I say to you, ask and it shall be given to you: seek, and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you.“). I believe when you set your intention on something, if it’s with pure intentions, and if it’s meant to be something will happen. It may not be what you envision but something happens. I guess it’s sort of a cross between the belief that many people hold like Edward Mills, who writes about the Law of Attraction, and taking destiny in your hands. You seek but you also pay attention to what people are saying and doing.
I’ve had people tell me I’m lucky to a) start a company before, b) to get the education I’ve gotten, c) to find the amazing childcare for our kids, for d) having the friends I have, d) to have the things we do, e) etc., etc., etc. What most people haven’t seen is the hard, dark times in between that I’ve been through. I’d venture to say that most people who the world perceives as doing something beyond “normal” have struggled through many things.
I’ve always felt there is a healthy portion of luck involved but also a good portion of seeking, asking questions, and listening involved. Finding good childcare (gosh we are so lucky with the people we had take care of our kids part time and full time when they were little and where they go to school and pres-school now — knock on wood!) didn’t just happen because I sat on my couch all day. Finding good jobs or opportunities didn’t happen because I was watching TV or drowning my sorrows (which is tempting!). Plus, I think I like to see the good in people and expect great things from them so when I do get disappointed, it is pretty deep.
So just over a month ago, I finally let the realization that I could not continue with Babble Soft with a day job and no funding, and I needed to do something different hit me. There are many options out there including a) moving on to something else, b) finding a business partner, c) finding a large baby-related company to take the risk early on and buy us. Given the economy and the hard realization that we are in fact creating a market with Babble Soft, option c) is unlikely. And I’m not ready to just give up. So now I’m seeking a business partner (so I’m not just a lone pumpkin by a tree). Hopefully, the right person will happen across my path…maybe she or he already has!
I’m wrapping up this post listening to 70s music…for some reason I enjoy listening to 70s music. I also enjoy 80s music but there is just a deepness to 70s music that resonates with me sometimes. The song currently on is Piano Man written by Billy Joel. I was fortunate enough to hear Billy Joel in Concert when I lived in Dallas several years ago and I remember thinking to myself “What a feeling it must be to hear hundreds, nay thousands, of people singing along word for word to a song you’ve written.” It must be so energizing yet so surreal at the same time. I wonder if I’ll ever experience that kind of feeling…
September 16, 2008
A friend of mine, Robb Lanum, recently sent me a link to an article on The Onion called Day Job Officially Becomes Job. For those of you who haven’t heard of The Onion, it’s a hilarious publication that makes fun of everything and everyone. Most of the articles I’ve read from them make me laugh or say repeatedly “eww, that’s gross!“ Take for instance a recent, funny article called Woman Always Really Excited To Be In Whatever Relationship Status She’s Currently In.
Robb did an impromptu guest post on my blog a while back about the writer’s strike. He blogs at The Robblog and has been trying for years (probably over a decade) to make it big in the California screen writing scene. He’s made progress and slowly but surely moves his writing career forward or at least makes it more visible by blogging about his experiences.
Robb sent me the link to the article on The Onion because he himself took a day job over four years ago, and he knows the plusses and minuses of having a day job and trying to build your business, your brand, your writing career, etc. He knew I could relate. I’ve been at my day job for not yet 3 ½ months (seems longer) and so far overall it has been a good decision for a variety of reasons, one of which being my husband struck it out on his own to consult and someone had to have the stable job with benefits in the family.
But this day job article by the Onion is not funny. It was written back in February 2004 and begins with “Another human dream was crushed by the uncompromising forces of reality Monday, when the restaurant day job of 29-year-old former aspiring cartoonist Mark Seversen officially became his actual job.“
It then goes on to say “When I was younger, my attitude was ‘Never give in,’” Seversen said. “Nowadays, my attitude is ‘Get real, dumbass.’ If I have any advice for all the young aspiring painters, novelists, and rock musicians out there, it’s probably that they should quit following their dreams before they rack up a lot of credit-card debt. The sooner you accept your real job, the sooner you can start to build up seniority and get on board with the pension plan.”
I expected to be laughing at the end of the article, but found myself frowning instead. Then I thought, “Phew, I’m sure glad being an entrepreneur trying to build a web business after hours is not like trying to be a writer, painter, rock musician, or actor on the side! And working for The University of Texas at Austin isn’t like working in a restaurant.”
Or is it?
September 9, 2008
I’m sure many of you have noticed that I haven’t been blogging as much recently. It’s not due to lack of desire, but due to lack of time and mental energy. I have a full list of topic ideas I want to blog about, but by the end of the day after interesting and bureaucratically taxing events, kids, dinner, husband, baths, teeth brushing, catching up on Babble Soft stuff and personal emails, I feel pretty dazed.
I have blog posts floating around in my head with rarely enough thoughtful time to get them down in a post. Fortunately, I have had some timely guest posters who have filled in some of the gaps.
I can’t say I’ll be able to get to a blogging pace (in the near future) that can keep up with my blogging ideas given my current schedule and life situation, but so far I’ve done a better job at posting than Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning and formerly Netscape, who hasn’t consistently blogged since May 2008! But he’s running a heavily venture backed company so I’m guessing he has just a few more people breathing down his neck than I do.
I’m glad I’m not in his shoes right now in this economy, with the news constantly talking about the questionable results of social networks from a business model perspective, and with some of the widget partner issues his company is facing. But Marc’s a tried and true entrepreneur so I’m sure he and his team will figure something out. If not, he is a millionaire and married to a millionaire so chances are they won’t be out on the streets any time soon.
Yep, it’s all relative and I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve been given and the opportunities yet to come. Thank you to all of you loyal readers for sticking around!
UPDATE: On an interesting note, Seth Godin, the famous author and blogger on marketing tips & ideas, did a post on September 10 called How often should you publish? and in it he says: “Key assertion: you don’t publish it unless it’s good. You don’t write more blog posts than you can support, don’t ship more variations of that software than your engineers can make marvelous.” So I guess my haphazard blogging is OK because it fits what I can support!
August 29, 2008
The Summer 2008 Olympics are now over. The national conventions for the Democrats and Republicans are happening. Democrats just wrapped up theirs and Barack Obama is the official candidate. The Republicans are up soon and John McCain just announced his VP, Sarah Palin. School has started for all kids across the country. Summer vacations are over. And life goes on.
Like many I watched the Olympics when I found the time in the evening and was fortunate enough to see some of the men and women’s gymnastics, swimming, track and field, and volleyball. I saw the US women’s beach volleyball team win. I saw the women’s gymnastics team win and saw Nastia Lukin win gold. I saw Michael Phelps win several of his gold medals for swimming. One weekend I even caught the Chinese synchronized swimming team. Wow, that was impressive! My husband stayed up later and saw the women’s and men’s volleyball teams as well as the men’s basketball team.
I actually think I was able to watch more of the events during this Olympics than any other Olympics in my life. I’m not sure why that is given that my life is so much busier than it used to be. It’s probably because my husband was watching it and it was a nice (often nerve wracking) way to end the day and see several of the events “live.”
What struck me was how hard all of these athletes have been preparing for the vast majority of their lives for this one shot at gold, fame, and potential sponsorship opportunities from big name brands/companies. All their preparation comes down to a single point in time to succeed or fail. The pressure and mental stress must be extreme, and yet they get up every day to prepare for that one moment in time.
Every individual who competes tries hard, practices hard, prepares hard and only 1 receives the gold medal. The same is true for entrepreneurs but fortunately there aren’t hundreds of little kids competing to win in one particular business (e.g., selling widget X). There may be several competitors in a space but it’s doubtful that the leaders of your competitors started practicing to compete to sell “widget X” when they were 10 or even 5 years old!
However, there seem to be many more factors way out of the control of the entrepreneur that determine their company’s success or failure (e.g., the economy, people issues, product issues, market timing, etc.). An athlete has much more control on whether they get up and practice every day with the major big unknown being a devastating injury. They are rarely blindsided by a last minute entry who ends up being a well-funded Superman/Superwoman athlete!
Building a successful business is extremely hard, costs money, and is time consuming, but after watching the Olympics, my guess is that preparing and then winning a gold medal is harder, requires more discipline, and is more time consuming but with more defined parameters. Even more so if you happen to be a Chinese Olympic team member who are often taken from their parents at a very young age.
People expect athletes to take years or even a decade to train to even make it to the Olympic games, but many expect entrepreneurs to make it big in just a few years and in the process they often burn themselves and others out. I’m guessing that fewer entrepreneurs earn ‘gold medals’ than individuals and teams do every four years in the summer Olympics.
August 17, 2008
I co-write articles for university alumni magazines with my fabulous writing partner Pam Losefsky. You can also see more of our write-ups on the article page of this blog.
Our most recent article for The University of Texas at Austin’s alumni magazine, The Alcalde, is on Bart Knaggs (gif). Bart is the founder of Capital Sports and Entertainment which brings us the annual, highly popular Austin City Limits Festival. Here is an interesting quote from his interview:
“There are ways you want to manage opportunities, but mitigating risk, I think takes you down the wrong path.” Instead of thinking that you might lose so you’d better prepare for the crash, Knaggs says you must believe you’re going to take off, so you’ll only prepare to fly. “You have to commit 100 percent to powering the engines and getting up to speed. You have to rally your people, you just have to know you’re going to fly.”
Bart has two kids. After getting his undergraduate degree, he became a competitive cyclist - “a form of self-employment in which the sacrifice is monumental and the payoff only accrues to an elite few.”
One more article in the Self-Starter series will be coming out soon, so sign up for free email updates and you won’t miss it!
August 14, 2008
Earlier this year, I had such a great time at SXSW Interactive 2008, that I submitted a panel idea for SXSW Interactive 2009 called Building A Web Business After Hours and more people than I thought are interested in seeing it happen!
Panel Description: Many businesses are built after-hours or during odd hours of the day and night. Join us for a panel discussion by entrepreneurs who built (or are building) their Web/E-commerce/Other business while holding a day job, multiple jobs, or who are currently balancing two+ career options.
For those of you who don’t know, I am attempting to build a web business (Babble Soft) after hours and lets just say it has it’s ups and downs but mostly it’s really hard and challenging with a big upside bejng that in my day job I get to be around other entrepreneurs.
How many of you (or people you know) are building sites and businesses in their spare time (on the side)? What kind of businesses are they? Many great businesses start with tinkering on the side…
I’ve started to assemble a great group of panelists including:
- One of the co-founders of BlogHer, the top female blogging site in the world that has partnerships and customer relationships with some of the top recognized brands in the world! Elisa Camahort Page, a co-founder, awesomely mentioned my panel in her Time to vote for SXSW panels post. Check out Elisa’s post to see the other great panels she’s recommending.
- Thom Singer is the director of business development for Austin based vcfo. Additionally he is the author of four books about the power of business relationships and is a professional speaker. With the support of his employer, he successfully manages his job and his own business, speaking to companies around the country on how to network. He blogs at Some Assembly Required.
- Karen Bantuveris, Austin founder & CEO of VolunteerSpot, knows firsthand what ‘juggle’ means. She’s built VolunteerSpot from the ground up while running a successful management development and executive coaching business, and being active in her daughter’s school PTO Board and Scout troop. She even manages to sleep, occasionally.�
- Jeremy Bencken, co-founder of ApartmentRatings.com, Tenant Market, and PR for Pirates. Jeremy and his wife, Katie, founded ApartmentRatings.com in 2000 out of their one bedroom apartment in Mountain View. They bootstrapped the site while attending business school at UT-Austin and then during full-time jobs for 4 years before selling the company to Internet Brands in 2007. Along the way they grew traffic to over 12M unique visitors per year (without an ad budget), built a base of advertisers, fought off frivolous lawsuits, and got their site featured on NPR Marketplace, and in stories in the NY Times and AP.
Please, please, please go vote for the panel by clicking on this link: Building A Web Business After Hours. I believe 30% of the weight on whether a panel is chosen is from people like you voting. The only downside is that you have to create a log in, but the upside is that you will be in the SXSW system and see all the other cool panels going on and vote for many more!
Thanks and I look forward to seeing some of you at SXSW next year. 
August 12, 2008
While out on vacation for almost 11 days, I had to check emails. I can’t fathom not checking emails at all and coming home to thousands of emails. I think I would have cried…not that I don’t already feel like crying over the mental draining-ness (not a word I know) of keeping up with day to day emails. Currently, I actively check 3 different email accounts.
I know that tons of busy business people get overwhelmed by email and some have even stopped responding altogether to email, but I haven’t reached that point yet. Companies like NutShell Mail (I met the founders at SXSW here in Austin earlier this year) attempt to solve it by having all of your emails going to one place. Right now when I’m home two of my email addresses download into one Outlook and the third to another set up of Outlook on a different desktop at my day job. When I’m on the road, I have to log in to 3 different webmail accounts. Fortunately, I’m not on the road that often.
What I found interesting is that I ended up probably deleting about 40% of the email I received (which included newsletters, news updates, blog feeds, friend updates, etc.) while I was gone. I’m still deleting some even though I’m fairly caught up because if I tried to read them, I wouldn’t get to anything else! It’s making me wonder if I should even be getting those emails and instead rely on the ‘if it’s really big news, I’ll hear about it from someone’ belief.
The risk of doing this is looking stupid if something big has happened (especially in your market) and you unknowingly wear a blank stare when someone exclaims ‘Did you hear about xyz?!”
I guess one always has to take calculated risks in life. In my current life situation, I have to take the risk that I might not be in-the-know in exchange for paying attention to the rest of my life.
How do the rest of you cope with email overload…or do you?
