Another timely post from Problogger entitled "5 Brilliant Things You Can Do with an Inactive Blog." As I said in the previous post, I was up to my neck in blogs... I guess if you're a successful blog on blogs, you must be good at blogging...
I've got a dilemma. Hoping for some advice from the community.
I have the opposite issues of what this Problogger post is talking about. I have so many topics I want to blog about that I end up starting myriad blogs. Here's what they are:
I recently went on a 2.5 week, 14 city road trip out to the east coast (Adam, I almost looked you up but I ran out of time as I had a game to catch in Boston!). I went to see my Milwaukee Brewers play at Fenway Park in Boston and Yankee Stadium in NYC, and along the way visited a whole bunch of places. One thing I enjoy doing is working from different places, in essence showing that one can escape the artificial lights of the cubical world in exchange for more inspirational locales.
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| Statue of Liberty is in the distance above the left person's head |
The first venture I created that actually brought in revenue was a website called NOTtheBookstore.com. I started it in 2007. Last week, I made the decision to stop working on it and focus on other ventures.
I learned a lot from it:
Outsourcing tasks that don't make sense for me to do
I learned to use elance.com, and hired someone offshore to do data entry work that would've taken me hours. That experience taught me how to manage someone offshore, and helped me to think which tasks I should be focusing on and what tasks I should outsource. (Thanks to the book 4-hour Workweek
Working with a site you didn't program is hard
I hired someone to program an upgrade to the website for the first time, adding the ability to pull data from Amazon to calculate just how much you'd save over the campus bookstore. But there were all these tweaks I wanted to do, and looking through all that code was daunting. I'm actually pretty proud of myself that I was able to make the tweaks I needed to, because I'm someone who's never heard of object oriented whatchamacallit before. It's because of this experience that I starting learning Wordpress and I'm going to start any new website I create with Wordpress so I have control over features.
Marketing and promotion
I've never needed to market or promote anything before in my life. I started with Facebook ads (back then, they were DIRT cheap) and on a whim contacted the Xavier Marketing Club. That started off a great 2 year relationship, in which I still keep in touch with 1-2 of them. I also realized that a college campus might be a great sales and promotion channel that companies aren't leveraging. You have a bunch of people, similar age, interests, all tightly packed in a small area. Really encourages word of mouth and viralness!
Continous improvement
After a couple of semesters of relative success, I stopped marketing at Xavier to focus on the bigger University of Cincinnati. Part of this was an experiment to see if it was self sustaining. It wasn't, as sales dropped a good amount. I learned that you need to constantly be in touch and looking to improve your business. Also, a good company with a low barrier to entry needs to reinvent itself all the time. I think NOTtheBookStore needed to be reinvented to add more and more value to the site.
Scale up
I tried to scale the success at XU to the University of Cincinnati, which had 5X the number of students. I went through the same process, worked with their marketing club, promoted with fliers and advertising in the school newspaper. But UC just never took off. I have a couple of theories: 1. A larger campus means a longer build up part of the curve before it tips. 2. On a larger campus, there's a lot more choices and a lot more noise, so your message gets diluted. Or maybe it just needed more time. I don't think I cracked the nut on this one, if anyone has thoughts I'd love to hear them!
All in all, a great experience. It gave me a glimpse of what things could be like. And it made me a real entrepreneur.
If anyone has more insights or advice as to more I can take away from this experience, please comment!
P.S. Here's a copy of the email I sent out to my student list:
As I'm getting my umbrella entity set up, I'm trying to figure out what my company will stand for, what principles will guide it, and what we're trying to do. One thing I knew I didn't want was to do the dot.bomb business model, but I couldn't put my finger on what the anti-dot.bomb business model was. I think bootstrapping is as close as it gets. I ran across Chris Garrett's posting on Escape Velocity called Bootstrapping Rules that hit it right on the head. I like how Chris mentioned how this mentality changes your operating strategy. I definitely plan on incorporating these principles in my fledgling company!
Well, after many years of adopting a "don't ask don't tell" type policy for my Corporatepreneurial ventures, I think I'm ready to talk about myself. It's only fitting that Adam let the secret out on his blog, as I've used him and others as role models to get myself to the point I am now.
My name is Dale Ting. I live in Cincinnati, OH and recently left a Fortune 50 company.... Of course, that company would be Procter and Gamble, makers of Tide, Downy, Bounce, Crest, Swiffer, Pringles, etc. etc. etc. (As an aside, P&G owns Gillette, which was Adam's former company's archnemisis. My idea for the product to end this "more blades" war would be to invent an infinity bladed razor. Basically, you have a just a field of billions of tiny razors. Then what would they do, infinity plus one?)
You'd be hard pressed to find a consumer products company bigger than P&G. I spent 10 years at P&G after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a Chemical Engineering degree. So I'm another engineer turned entrepreneur. I've just now stopped referring to P&G as "we" - it's a hard habit to break after 10 years there. I've also just recently gotten more comfortable with calling myself an entrepreneur.
I'm also an ABC - American Born Chinese. This dynamic played out in the fears that I had to get over to make this move. I've mentioned my dad many times before in this blog, and one of the cultural things I had to get over was the strong desire to please your parents. My dad wasn't quite Tiger Mom (thank goodness) but the cultural values were there. I'm happy to report, my dad recently sent me an article that said people who were doing what fulfills them were happier and lived longer. He also has been helping me with one of the new ventures I've started up. So things have turned out great on that front as well.
I was originally going to go into entrepreneurship cold turkey... No income, only a bunch of ideas that needed vetting out. But I was lucky that an opportunity came along with a company called oneCARE, a much smaller company (actually 1000X smaller) who among other things licenses P&G brands and comes up with the smaller products off that brand (i.e. anything Bounce that's not dryer sheets, anything Tide that's not detergent). It was a perfect fit as they were located in Cincinnati and could use my experience with P&G. They also were great in providing me the flexibility to work part time so I could work on my entrepreneurial ventures. I hope to reward them for this opportunity by launching a bunch of products!
I'm hoping this post shows you the real human being behind this blog, and removes some barriers for me in networking with everyone out there.
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