Bring on the inspiration

by jbreazeale on September 9, 2009

goldfish jumping out of the waterI think the universe is trying to tell me something.

I recently completed a research project that provided sparked some creative business ideas. (Direction!)

I had dinner with friends on Sunday and in addition to a tummy full of s’mores, came away with plans to meet with a small group to hash out our stuckness and inertia around our fledgling businesses. (Action!)

And then I came across these posts (Inspiration!):

Why Creative Entrepreneurs Don’t Need to Worry About Free

from Charlie at Productive Flourishing

Although Charlie started with a discussion of the recent “Free” controversy/debate in the blogosphere, he really hooked me with the theme of “people-centered capitalism.” What a powerful force of change and of good this can be and I think we’re just getting starting.

Wouldn’t you rather support the business of a person you know instead of a nameless corporation?

Wouldn’t you rather buy something that’s unique and meaningful to you instead of something that satisfies the lowest common denominator?

And as a small business, aren’t you the one with the advantage?

You are the sales / marketing / R&D / customer service department – if you need to make a change, you can. You are the one who creates your business – make it something you and your customers love.

Do Interesting Things

from Leo Babuta (@zen_habits) at Zen Habits

How could I resist this:

The way we work is changing, the way we live has already changed. Entire industries are crumbling, and more are growing on their ruins. People are empowered to express themselves, to create, to become a part of a global conversation and transformation, in a way that has never existed before.

What will you do with that?

Do something.

Do something interesting.

Be a part of the conversation, and say something remarkable. Create something unique, new, beautiful. Build upon the works of others and transform it into your own…

What follows is a laundry list of ways you can take action including such small steps as “focus on less but do it better” and larger ones like “make the lives of others better.”

And if something as simple (I won’t say easy) as showing up in your life and being yourself (even if that includes “be[ing] a dork, but do[ing] it boldly”) can make a difference, then I can at least do that much.

What will you do?

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Denver New Tech Meetup: The Farm Report

by jbreazeale on August 19, 2009

muuuuuuuucaI know some people still consider Denver a cow-town, but after last night’s Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup, maybe we’re more of a cow and bunny town…

If you haven’t made it to one of these Meetups yet, here’s what it’s all about:

The 1st Tuesday each month at 6PM, five people get five minutes each to demo something. Five companies each have five minutes to demonstrate their new technology, followed by five minutes for Q&A from the audience. The event is designed to provide a time and place for technologists and entrepreneurs to showcase the new technology developing in Boulder/Denver tech community (geeks, investors, entrepreneurs, hackers, etc). The event is also designed to create networking opportunities for anyone interested in new technology.

Fun, right? And since I happened to have free babysitting services last night (thank you for in-laws visiting from out of town!), I hopped in the car and made the quick trip downtown to the Tivoli.

(Note to self: Check parking maps *before* heading out. Especially when you’re headed to a college campus and school is in session.)

CowPotato Logo

CowPotato: Using Android to whack cows with spuds

After welcoming remarks from Robert Reich (OneRiot) and Brad Bernthal (Silicon Flatirons), Jeremy Slade kicked off the presentations with a demo of his Android-based game: CowPotato (yes, you shoot cows with a potato gun.)  I would have been more interested to hear about developing for Android versus for the iPhone, but that’s probably more of a Boulder Open Coffee Club topic. Crowd consensus: meh (although for some reason mooing cows does consistently cause crowd giggling.)

vPo.st Logo

vPo.st: Mobile to Social

After the cows, we moved on to…bunnies? David Rudder used these awesome electronic rabbits to demo his mobile to social networking platform, vPo.st.  With vPo.st, you can use your mobile phone to call in a message, that would then get transcribed (via Twilio) and posted to your social network (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace).  In this example, a call to vPo.st sent a message to Twitter that prompted the electro-bunnies to start lighting up and twitching their ears. Cool.  (Check out the Violet RFID Mirror package on ThinkGeek or buy the stand-alone bunnies directly from Violet.)

Boulder Digital WorksBoulder Digital Works: Transdisciplinary learning

David Slayden took us briefly out of the cow and bunny farm with an overview of the new Boulder Digital Works “60Weeks” program starting this fall. Generally, it’s a non-degree university-based program combining the schools of journalism and mass communication with engineering for a yummy art+technology blend of goodness. Anyone want to loan give me $25K to check it out?

BUNNYHEADLocalBunny: Smart and automatic responses for your business on Twitter

And then, just in case you were starting to miss them, we were back to the bunnies. This time LocalBunny wrapped it up with an overview of their keyword-based Twitter auto-responder for businesses. Think TextMarks, but with Twitter instead of SMS. It’s an interesting concept and I think it will be great for businesses… once they can get *users* effectively using keywords. Not a huge hurdle, but something to think about.

If this sounded like fun…

Join me (and 300+ others) at the next Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup on September 1st in Boulder. Tweet “presenters” to @bdnt to get up to date presenter information (thanks to LocalBunny).

Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Logo

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More thoughts on Startup Weekend Boulder 3

by jbreazeale on June 12, 2009

Another great write-up:

Friday night 40 to 50 people gathered to discuss a problem. Sunday night two of these problems were solved and four more were well on their way to being solved. Why? Startup Weekend Boulder 3.LilBiker, Jun 2009

You should read the whole article. And don’t forget to take a look at Jason’s Flickr set “Startup Weekend Boulder 2009“.

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hippie and hardcore

by jbreazeale on March 5, 2009

A yellow rubber duck.

Image via Wikipedia

I attended this fun and wacky business call with Havi (the hippie one) and Naomi (the hardcore, swearing one) yesterday and thought I’d jot down some of the bits that caught my attention…

Success doesn’t mean you’re done

Havi and Naomi have built successful1 businesses, but that doesn’t mean they’ve done everything perfectly or that they’ve done all that could be done to make their business successful. In fact, they both started the call by listing a variety of pretty important and basic business stuff they should be doing.  Like:

  • Having a friendly and helpful contact page. Make it easy for people to get in touch.2
  • Having a organized shopping cart. What if someone wants to buy all of your products at once – can they? Can they even see all of your products in one place?
  • Managing the sales funnel. Provide (non-pushy) opportunities for people to buy more or similar products from you. You know, “If you like ABC, you might also like DEF…”

Remember, spend time on the big issues but don’t forget to regularly go back and revisit some of these basics for your business and your website. Get some fresh eyes looking at these issues and you’ll probably be surprised at what you find.

Be kind and helpful

You might be surprised about how many people are just waiting to help you and your business — don’t piss them off. The blogger you just sent an obnoxious email to may have been in the middle of writing a glowing article about your product  — are they still going to post it after receiving your message? Hmm…  On the flip side, what are you doing to help other businesses? Are you writing those glowing reviews or recommending products to your friends or other businesses? We’re all in it together, people. Step it up!

Don’t forget being kind and helpful to yourself, either. If you “hate” sales, go out there and read some books about it and you just might learn that you don’t hate sales – maybe you just hate the high pressure, guilt driven, shadily manipulative sales that you’ve experienced in the past. Same goes for “marketing,” just check out one of Havi’s articles on that topic – she’s way funnier than me! Everyone has parts of their business that are tougher for them than others, so be patient with yourself when addressing these, but *do* address them.

Also, give yourself permission to spend time doing the things you need to do, regardless of what others may say. Feel free to refer to your staff of consultants (real or imaginary, paid or unpaid, doesn’t really matter.) For example, “My marketing consultants advised me to spend at least 30 minutes a day monitoring and participating on Twitter and Facebook to build my business.”3 Ok, this was actually one of my favorites and I’ve can’t wait to find out what my “consultants” suggest that I do next…

Think about the opportunity chain versus the opportunity cost

Example: Someone’s browsing around on your website, she’s a new (or relatively new) customer and she wants to buy your product, but {insert tragic technical/personal/act of God event here} happens and she can’t complete the sale. Will she come back and buy later? Maybe, but she’s going to have to make a significant effort to do so. What can you do to make it easier or more desireable for her to come back? Do you have a way for her to “hang out” with your business? A blog or newsletter or some way that you can contact her  (in a non-spammy way) in the future? The lost sale cost you $50, but the lost opportunity of connecting with your customer was priceless.

Other random thoughts and quick tips

Don’t homogenize. Be your wonderfully unique *you* – the world’s a big place, you’ll find your audience. Besides, who wants to work with a “life coach” when you could work with a “habits educator (+ duck!).”

Answer the (obvious?) questions people are asking. For example, if you’re an acupunturist and the top Google questions about acupuncture are “Do I have to get naked?” and “Does it hurt?”, then maybe you should be answering those questions.

Make it simple. Keep it simple. Everytime you add a new choice for your customers, you decrease their likelihood of choosing anything.4

Sell the relationship, not the product. Example: You’re promoting a workshop at your local community college. Instead of pointing people to a static page about the class, direct them to an article (or send them an article) with the opportunity to “subscribe to more like this.” You can start a relationship and expand your audience.  I may not be interested in class XYZ, but I might be willing to receive your newsletter and when you offer class VWX in the spring, I might be the first one to sign up.

Notes

1. I don’t know details, but they seem to be supporting themselves by running businesses that help others and are fun and interesting to run. Pretty good definition of success, I think.

2. A specific example was Amazon.com not having a phone number on their website to contact their customer support. And, while I agree with the premise that you should have an easy way for people to contact you, you should also emphasize contact in the way that’s most effective for you. I would hate to have people calling me directly – I hardly answer the phone anyway, so you’d probably just go to voicemail – but I can answer emails all day long, so having a big “contact me” phone number might not be the best option.

3. A statistic from Naomi — the ratio of “marketing” to “doing” your business should be 4 to 1. So, just refer to all of those hours on Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. as *important business marketing* efforts. Ok?

4. Check out the Getting Real book from 37signals for lots more on this idea.

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Plowing through the roadblocks

by jbreazeale on January 23, 2009

roadblockI was watching the season premiere of Burn Notice last night and for the first time, saw a car actually plow through a roadblock (instead of the traditional “Oh no, there’s a roadblock! Let’s act like we’re playing chicken, but we’re actually going to skid to a stop before actually hitting the cars that are blocking the way.) Ok, they didn’t actually go through the middle of the two cars, but there was a reasonably valid option to go around the roadblock (while taking out some sort of prop-like structure) and they did.

So what, right? Well, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately thinking about building a new business — I’ve given a respectable try to “working for the man” and I’d really rather build something more lasting, more authentic, more interesting, useful, and fun. I’m just not quite sure what that is and it seems the more time I spend thinking about it, the more roadblocks I encounter (create?)  So this time, instead of stopping at the roadblock, I’m just going to go through or around them, even if it means sustaining a few bumps and bruises along the way.

Anyway, with that (long) introduction out of the way, here’s what I really wanted to share with you — some of my free-writing around the roadblocks I’m facing. (Note: I copied these excerpts from my journal and, in the spirit of free-writing, they probably ramble a bit and may be a little repetitive but the purpose is to capture my thought process not to be perfectly written or error-free.)

January 22 – One of the roadblocks I keep putting in front of myself is that someone’s already doing what I thought of doing. How crazy is that? As I walk down the street at lunch time I can see two hot dog cart vendors — like *that* hasn’t been done before! Of course it has, but there they are on their respective corners, each with a little crowd gathering. The pretty blond vendor has a few more men at her cart; the older male vendor has a few families, but there’s plenty of business at each. And on the larger scale look at Dell and HP, Boeing and Airbus. None of those founders went in saying, “Oh well, someone already makes [computers/airplanes/software/etc...], so I guess I won’t do that.” We wouldn’t have any businesses if that happened. So I just need to get over the “unique” thing — at least as it applies to the business idea because whatever I decide to do will be unique because I am unique (just like everyone else). No one in the world has the exact same package of skills, experience, personality, etc. that I do, but because we are all universally more alike than we are different there *will* be people who recognize in me and my words and my works, themselves. Those are my customers, my clients, my friends, my “target audience”.

Another roadblock I create is around being “not good enough” or having a “lack of skills/experience”. Well, there will always be people out there who are smarter than I am, who have more experience, who are more savvy, who are friendlier, who are better at sales / finance /accounting / etc., so what? There are also plenty who are at the opposite end of the scale. I mean, seriously, I have three degrees from some top schools, strong recommendations from colleagues and mentors, and I’m always trying to learn something new and improve my skills — I think I’m fine. Maybe I won’t be a neurosurgeon or a rocket scientist, but otherwise I should be okay, I can learn what I need when I need to and my experience will come from trying.

Also, why would I ever acquiesce to someone else’s definition of knowledge/experience (or my perception of such)? Am I not qualified to perform XYZ task just because John Doe is already doing XYZ task and he has a website, pages of accolades, lists of speaking engagements and white papers and seminars and books – all that means is that he person was willing to take the time to put something together, create valuable and meaningful content, and take the risk of sharing it with the world. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn from those who’ve gone before me and those who are making progress now, but it does mean that I am capable of doing the same thing. I am capable and qualified to express my opinions and share them with the world and I should do so, because no one else can…

Photo credit te.esce. Available under a Creative Commons license.

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