Erich Stauffer

Category: Entrepreneurship

  • Bulldozers: 5 Serial Entrepreneurs That Only Know How to Push Things Forward, Make Meaning, and Change the World

    Bulldozers, a term coined by Jason A. Cobb in January 2011, refers to employees who do one thing and one thing only: push things forward – and if their company doesn’t let them, they leave, but continue pushing forward.  Employers need to learn to recognize bulldozers and fuel them, not throw stumps in their way (stumps don’t stop bulldozers anyway, they just make them leave faster).

    Let’s take a look at five bulldozers – employees who pushed forward, right on out of their former company:

    1. Ian Rogers – left Yahoo! to form his own business when Yahoo! failed to heed his advice.
    2. Joshua Schachter – left Yahoo! after they failed to upgrade (and eventually killed) Delicious.
    3. Lars Rasmussen – left Google for Facebook after Google killed Wave he helped develop.
    4. Jyri Engeström – left Google to “make meaning” after Google dropped support for Jaiku.
    5. Dennis Crowley – left Google to form Foursquare after Google killed Dogdeball for Latitude.

    Ian Rogers, the former General Manager of Yahoo! Music, left to form Topspin Media, a company that makes marketing software for music artists to maximize their fanbase and brand exposure.

    Rogers bucked the industry trend to ‘shove bad products down consumers’ throats’ like in October 2007 when he addressed a number of music executives. He explained that consumers aren’t willing to adopt inferior products (namely subscription music services) saying, “I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.”

    This fits the model we’ve seen with serial entrepreneurs, which seems to also apply to bulldozers: they want to change the world for good and won’t put up with the bad ‘cause ‘life’s too short’.

    Joshua Schachter, created Delicious (a social bookmarking site), GeoURL, Tasty Labs and was co-creator of Memepool. Schachter released the first version of Delicious (then called del.icio.us) in September 2003. The service actually coined the term ‘social bookmarking’ and featured tagging, a system he developed for organizing links. On March 29, 2005, Schachter announced he would work full-time on Delicious. On December 9, 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious for an undisclosed sum, but according to Business 2.0, was close to $30 million – with Schachter’s share being worth approximately $15 million. Prior to working full-time on Delicious, Schachter was an analyst in Morgan Stanley’s Equity Trading Lab. He created GeoURL in 2002 and ran it until 2004.

    Schachter left Yahoo! in 2008 after Yahoo! refused to move forward on Delicious development and began working for Google from January 2009 to June 2010. In November 2010, Schachter acquired startup funding from Union Square Ventures for Tasty Labs. Yahoo! announced plans on December 16, 2010 to shut down Delicious, but as of January 26, 2011 is in talks with Kevin Rose of Digg about Digg possibly taking over Delicious.  Rose asked Schachter if he would be interested in working on it, but Schachter was too busy with Tasty Labs.

    At Tasty Labs, Schachter is joined by co-founders Nick Nguyen and Paul Rademacher. Rademacher is a former Google and Dreamworks engineer who will be heading up engineering for Tasty Labs. Nguyen previously worked with Schachter at Delicious and just recently left Mozilla to serve as VP of product for Tasty Labs, which plans to put “the useful back into social software,” according to their website. Since then, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreesen (a serial entrepreneur) and Ben Horowitz’s venture capital firm, has also invested. Schachter says about Tasty Labs, “I’ll grow it organically,” said, noting that the company is called “Labs,” and not a specific product. “This could end up being multiple applications.”

    Of course it will. That’s what you do.  You’re a serial entrepreneur and a bulldozer.  No one is going to stop you from making things useful.

    Lars Rasmussen, co-creator of Google Maps and Google Wave, announced on October 29, 2010 that he had left Google, and was moving to San Francisco to work for Facebook.

    In 2003, Lars and his brother, Jens, with Australians Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, co-founded Where 2 Technologies, a mapping-related start-up in Sydney, Australia. This company was bought by Google in October 2004, to create the popular, free, browser-based software, Google Maps. The four of them were subsequently employed by Google in the engineering team at the company’s Australian office in Sydney.

    In October 2010 Rasmussen was hired by Facebook to create a “Modern Messaging System” after Google killed Wave just under a year after publishing it.  Facebook’s new messaging system, which combines wall posts, email, and SMS (text) messages, was codenamed “Titan”, and rolled out on November 15, 2010.  As of January 26, 2011, Facebook Messaging is still invitation only.

    Rasmussen said about his move to Facebook, “Obviously they’ve already changed the world and yet there seems to be so much more to be done there. And I think that it’s the right place for me to be.” Once again we see this desire to “change the world” as a key characteristic of serial entrepreneurs and bulldozers.

    Jyri Engeström, co-created Jaiku, a Twitter-like service, which was sold to Google in 2007 when it was the leading European microblogging service. After the acquisition, Engeström continued to maintain Jaiku but Google focused his efforts on creating systems that power Google Buzz and related products. The original Jaiku code base was ported to Google App Engine and released as Jaiku Engine, a free open source microblogging platform, but in January of 2009 Google announced it was no longer going to support the platform, although the site would live on.

    A sociologist by training, he has also developed the term social objects – a label for “things that people socialize around,” including text, images, videos, and other shareable Web content.

    Prior to Jaiku, Engeström worked as Senior Product Manager of Internet Handhelds at Nokia. At Google he was responsible for mobile applications including Mobile Calendar and the Gmail Mobile client, while also spearheading Google’s efforts in social media, starting up Google Buzz, Google Profiles, and Google Latitude. He left Google in October 2009 to become an angel investor and start his own new company, Pingpin, but is also active in the following companies: Appsfire, Betrabrand, Mobclix, Superfeedr, Xiha, Sofanatics, and Thinglink (his wife’s business).

    Engeström wrote on Twitter in October of 2009 that the reason he left Google was in order to “make meaning” out of another project, which is another characteristic sign of a bulldozer.

    Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Dodgeball and FourSquare, both location-based social networking services. Dodgeball was sold to Google in 2005, which discontinued it in 2009 in favor of Google Latitude (partly thanks to fellow bulldozer, Jyri Engeström). Crowley co-founded Dodgeball with fellow student Alex Rainert in 2003 while attending New York University. Both were hired by Google in Dodgeball’s acquisition in 2005 and both left in April 2007, Crowley and Rainert left Google, with Crowley describing their experience there as “incredibly frustrating”.

    In January 2009 Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering at Google, announced that the company would “discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available.” Dodgeball was shut down in February 2009 and succeeded by Google Latitude.

    After leaving Google, Crowley, with the help of Naveen Selvadurai, created a service similar to Dodgeball and Google Latitude, which became known as Foursquare.  While Dodgeball was available in limited cities (Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis–St. Paul and Denver), Foursquare is available everywhere. Crowley later hired Rainert as Chief Product Officer (head of products) in 2010.

    Rainert, a co-founder of Dodgeball, is also quite the bulldozer and is quoted as saying, “We’ve found that people with judgment trump rockstars. You need people who can make decisions. You hire smart people because they want to make an impact, but everyone can’t weigh in on everything because then you’ll never get anything done.  Our employees have had to learn not to take things personally; things just need to keep going.” That’s another perfect example of a bulldozer: “make an impact” and “keep going [forward]”.

  • 20 Serial Entrepreneurs: An Analysis

    Serial entrepreneurs want to change the world and “make meaning” but successful ones also make money, and lots of it.

    Here is a list of 20 serial entrepreneurs and the companies they helped create:

    1. Andy Bechtolsheim: Sun Microsystems, Granite Systems, Arista Networks
    2. Biz Stone: Twitter, Xanga, Blogger
    3. David Duffield: PeopleSoft, Workday
    4. Dennis Crowley: Dodgeball, Foursquare
    5. Elon Musk: PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors
    6. Evan Williams: Blogger, Twitter
    7. Jack Dorsey: Twitter, Square
    8. Jason Calacanis: Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs Inc., Mahalo, Launch, OAF/TWI
    9. Jim Clark: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, MyCFO, Neoteris
    10. Kevin Rose: Digg, Pownce
    11. Marc Andreessen: Netscape, Opsware, Ning
    12. Mark Cuban: MicroSolutions, Broadcast.com, 2929 Entertainment, HDNet, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres
    13. Mark Pincus: Tribe.net, SupportSoft, Zynga
    14. Max Levchin: PayPal, Slide, WePay
    15. Nick Grouf: Firefly, PeoplePC, SpotRunner
    16. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis: Kazaa, Skype, Joost, Atomico, Rdio
    17. Scott Jones: Boston Technology, ChaCha
    18. Sean Parker: Plaxo, Napster, Facebook, Causes, Founders Fund
    19. Steve Jobs: Apple, NeXT, Pixar
    20. Wayne Huizenga: Blockbuster, Waste Management, Auto Nation

    Birds of a feather flock together

    Of the companies listed, you may have noticed some repeated names. When we sort the list by the companies with at least two serial entrepreneurs from our list, we get three companies:

    1. Twitter: Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey
    2. PayPal: Elon Musk, Max Levchin
    3. Blogger: Biz Stone, Evan Williams

    Similar Industries

    And of the companies listed, another trend emerges, which is the similarities in industries.  The companies can be narrowed down into a surprisingly small number of groups, which could be categorized as ‘Technology’ and ‘Other’, but broken we see a large amount of Web 2.0 and Entertainment companies as well as Transportation:

    1. Software: Twitter, Blogger, Xanga, PeopleSoft, Workday, Dodgeball, Foursquare, Netscape, Ning, Plaxo, Napster, Facebook, Digg, Paypal, Slide, WePay
    2. Hardware: Sun Microsystems, Arista Networks, Granite Systems, PeoplePC, Apple, NeXT
    3. Entertainment: Pixar, 2929 Entertainment, HDNet, Blockbuster, Zynga, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres
    4. Transportation: SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Auto Nation

    This follows a pattern in economics called ‘barriers to entry’ of which software has the lowest barriers in terms of cost and transportation, the highest.  Hardware and entertainment, it seems, falls in the middle, which is what you would expect.  So in the future, we can probably expect more serial entrepreneurs in the software arena, probably culminating up through app makers, which has the lowest barrier of entry and the highest audience: a combination ripe for the next round of serial entrepreneurs.

  • How to Identify a Micro-Niche

    How to find a profitable niche to start blogging about on your new mini-site

    In a previous post I wrote about how to monetize your blog, but I didn’t mention how to find a niche market to promote. There are many ‘rules’ about this, but while I may point out some, not all are going to apply. One rule you can keep in mind though is that 7 out of 8 attempts may fail. If you’re willing to seek against those kinds of odds, keep reading.

    When choosing a new micro-niche, there are three things to keep in mind:

    1. Competition for the keyword – when you do a Google search for your keywords, how many root, top-level domains show up in the top ten search results? It’s very hard to break into the pack when competing directly with a home page of an aged domain, but if the search results show deep page listings instead you’ve got a shot.

    2. The product – First of all, is there a product to promote? Goods are easier to sell, but some service industries like lawyers and business consultants can make more – much more. Second, what are the commissions on the product? You have to be comfortable with the commission level, which varies greatly between products, to Make sure it is worth your while.

    3. Traffic (Visitors) – Even if you have low competition and a great product, if no one is looking for it then you’re dead in the water. You want to have enough traffic to sustain your business and make it profitable, but to not be in competition with the bigger niche market. The sweet spot seems to be around 20,000 daily searches for a given set of keywords. You can find this info out using Google’s External Keyword Tool or Market Samurai.

    You want some competition. This is a sign that the micro-niche is profitable. You just don’t want TOO much competition.

    How to Start

    Knowing how to do the research is one thing, but what if you can’t think of anything to start with? What if you can’t think of any ideas to search for? Some advice I heard once was to browse a magazine aisle and look at the ads in the back. If vendors can afford to advertise there they must be making money and so you can too. Be careful not to chase a niche just because you like it. Do the research and be willing to say ‘no’ to yourself if it doesn’t pan out.

  • The Monetization Connection

    How to make money from a blog or mini-site

    Previously I wrote about blogging for profit, but didn’t go into detail about how to monetize the content. In other words, how do you make money from a blog?

    There are three primary ways to make money from a blog:

    1. Ads – this is the easiest, but lowest-paying form of revenue. However, it can be a good way to get started and prove viability. Popular ad networks include Google Adsense and Chitka. Ads like these are pay-per-click or PPC which means you get paid regardless of if the advertiser makes a sale.

    2. Affiliations – Affiliate ads are potentially more profitable, but require a well defined niche or else it is too hard to attract visitors that will actually buy the products you are promoting. Affiliate ads are pay-per-purchase or PPP, which means you only get paid when the merchant advertiser makes a sale.

    3. Direct selling – This is when you are directly selling something on your site that you are responsible for fulfilling. This has more potential for profit than affiliate advertising since you can make higher margins, but its more risky and you have to do fulfillment yourself. Examples of this can be anything from ebooks to beef jerky.

    4. (Bonus) Transform – the pinnacle of a website is when it can be converted into a book or television show. This means you have hit the big time, but its because your site has the two major ingredients listed below.

    What do all four of those revenue sources have in common?

    1. Original Content – some estimates say to post up to eight times a day. If you are just starting out, shoot for once a week, then move it up to once a day per blog.

    2. Visitors – Don’t stop writing content until you have at least 200 visitors a day (track with Google Analytics). If you already have 50 or more posts, but are lacking in traffic, start promoting your sites.

    Promotion

    The easiest way to promote your site, like with SEO, is to start with your site. Make sure you are linking to previous posts with appropriate keywords (I call this ‘threading the needle’, but its also known as ‘siloing’) and displaying navigation correctly. Visitors should be able to find more content they want to browse easily, but remember the goal is to monetize by either promoting other people’s goods and services or by selling something yourself so don’t get too carried away in internal self-promotion.

    Once you have fixed any issues on your site and made internal linking a habit, begin bookmarking your posts on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, and Delicious. After that is done, look to join a relevant forum to join and comment often. Soon you will be able to add a signature that will show up on all of your forum posts with backlinks to your site.

    If you do all of these things and you are still not successful, try a different micro-niche.

  • Blogtrepreneurs Blogging for Profit

    The Internet is a great unsettled land not unlike the discovery of a new world – and entrepreneurs everywhere are taking notice

    Entrepreneurs who blog for profit are sometimes called Blogtrepreneurs. Whether they come from a business background, an Internet marketing background, web design background, or are still in high school, anyone who can identity a niche (read: need) can turn content creation into revenue creation. In fact, that is exactly what I do everyday whether I’m actively working on a blog (or mini-site) or not. That is because blogging for profit is like a fly wheel. It takes a lot of energy to get it going (finding a niche, an appropriate domain, adding content, and promoting), but once the fly wheel is going it takes little effort to keep it going and you are free to start a new fly wheel, or blog.

    Niches

    Niches are segments of a market and are generally well covered. Micro-niches are segments of a niche and are generally covered less. This is where blogtrepreneurs can add value to the market by helping people find answers to what they are seeking in a nook of a market segment. For example, digital cameras are a market. SLR cameras are a niche of digital cameras and NIKON SLR cameras are a micro-niche of SLR cameras. A site about NIKON SLR cameras could sell it promote or educate about the cameras themselves and about all of their accessories. I have a blog about family photography that talks about different digital cameras and techniques for taking family pictures, for example. Identifying a micro-niche is not easy, but there are many sites out there that can help you identity how to find a niche.

    Domains

    Once you have a niche picked out, its time to secure a domain. There are still good domains to be had, but everyday there are less and less as more people gobble up the remaining ones. In the same way there is only so much land, there are only so many words and combinations of words, which is what adds to domains value over time. When choosing a domain you should include your primary keywords if at all possible. If you don’t know what your primary keywords are for your niche, stop and find out. There are plenty of sites with advice on how to choose the right keywords, which you should use  in your domain. Domains can be registered at registers like GoDaddy.com, but also at hosts like HostGator, 1and1, and BlueHost. I can recommend any of these.

    Content

    Once you have your domain registered with hosting, you’ll want to start adding content. One of the easiest ways to do this is to setup WordPress on your server. BlueHost makes it easy with SimpleScripts, but you can install it manually almost as easy at 1and1 and others. Once WordPress is installed, you can start adding posts, but where will you get the content? Think of writing content like writing a research paper. You can’t copy works, but you can quote and reference. Ultimately you wafted to add commentary and value to the material without plagiarising. You won’t get an F, but Google may not rank your site if it contains duplicate content so write your own. For my nook covers site I pieced together facts around the web to create something whole and new and its paid off.

    Promotion

    Now that you’ve created your content its time to promote your site. Promotion starts from within and that means finding a WordPress theme that is SEO ready it making it so. I’m not going to go into SEO here, but there are lots of sites that explain all about search engine optimization. The next step is creating backlinks, which are links back to your site from other, preferably relevant, sites. Think of backlinks as votes that Google uses to decide who it should rank first for a given set of keywords. Find relevant sites to create backlinks on by commenting or by adding to a forum discussion for example.  I was able to greatly increase my ereader accessories traffic by adding a link to it in a forum about ereaders.

    So do you think you have what it takes to be a blogtrepreneur? Don’t wait. The longer you do the more you delay getting paid and risk losing out on the perfect domain. Want more? Check out my other blog on how to make money online.

  • Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles

    Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles wrote, “Entrepreneurship, it is commonly believed, is enourmously risky. And indeed, in such highly visible areas of innovation as high tech – micro-computers, for instance, or biogenetics – the casualy rate is high and the chances of success or even of survival seem to be quite low. But why should this be so? The entrepreneur, by definition, shifts resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. Of course, there is a risk the entrepreneur may not succeed. But if even moderately successful, the returns should be more than adequate to offset whatever risk there might be. One should thus expect entrepreneurship to be considerably less risky than optimization. Indeed, nothing could be as risky as optimizing resources in areas where the proper and profitable course is innovation, that is, where the opportunities for innovation already exist. Theoretically, entrepreneurship should be the least risky rather than the most risky course.” This is the passage that inspired An Entrepreneurial Mind.

  • Innovation Comes from Customers

    Innovation comes from customers…or so Harvard thinks.

    Aha moments rarely come without some sort of problem you are trying to solve and there is no greater ‘problem creators’ than your customers. Twitter is a perfect example of this. They will think of things you never thought of and use your products in ways you’ve never imagined. Learn to harness this phenomenon and you’re on your way to having a more innovative company.

    For example, imagine you have a customer who wants software that allows appointments to be setup online. “No one has it” he says, but he wants it. So an innovator would make it, have it made, or find it, and then package it and sell it to other sites. That’s how innovation from the customer makes your company more innovative.

    But you have to execute.

    It’s easy to create a plan, the hard part is executing it. One trap a lot of companies (people) fall into is creating the structure around innovation or a new project in the hopes that once the structure is in place the new product will almost make itself. “After [that] it’s just ‘plug and chug’,” they say. Executors know that you have to do the plug and chug part too even if that means hiring out or outsourcing to do so. The plug and chug-level work should be a matter of following procedures in a well-defined structure. The creators, designers, and innovators at a company usually like to create the structure, but have trouble filling it in. Either learn to get around this psychological gap or find someone else to finish/maintain the job for you.

  • Geek Hand and The Settler’s League

    Hate the Game, Not the Player

    I set out to create a new “Home” brand of technology consulting so that I could offer Indianapolis computer repair in homes without damaging the brand I was establishing with business customers.  I came up with “Professional Technology Consulting at Home,” but the domain was taken so I started looking around and trying different keywords.  I found that “codageek.com – The last geek you’ll ever need,” was available, but I kept looking.  I eventually stumbled upon “geekhand.com” after looking up synonyms for ‘friendly’ (handy).

    I liked “Geek Hand” enough to consider grabbing it, but I wanted to do a little bit of research on the name and domain first.  I found that it had been used prior by another person for personal use and had since been abandoned.  I liked that there were already a lot of backlinks to it from other sites, but because much of the links were from sites about gaming, I wondered if it was the right fit for my in-home computer repair business product I was developing for Indianapolis business consulting firm, Watershawl, Inc., where I was CEO.  It seemed like it might be better off as a part of my blog network at Cost Publishing Media Group as a board game micro-site.

    I went ahead and picked up the domain, setup WordPress, the theme, the plugins, and the SEO.  I created a logo for it which consisted of a 0 and 1 which has both game and binary code meanings.  I used this logo as a background on Twitter and as it’s icon.  By the way, I don’t hardly purchase domains unless the username is also available on Twitter.  In this case, both were available and I took that as a sign before purchasing the domain.  While all of this setup is going on I’m thinking about content and products to sell or promote.  I did a quick search on Amazon and determine that board games, video games, and card games would be my primary products with the “news” of the site being centered around the geek culture of movies, television, and conventions like Comic-Con.

    To promote the site automatically I did two things: I setup a Tumblr account to pull in WordPress posts automatically push tweets out to Twitter and a Facebook page to push out to Twitter anything I post there.  So I only really have to post in WordPress, then copy the link to the post to Facebook to post on what is now the ‘Settler’s League’ page there in order to have coverage to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter all at once.  Sometimes I’ll bounce those around on my Facebook wall and on other Twitter accounts I manage for different brands.

    The next step was to add content and put the promotional procedure into place, which I did.  I had a minor problem with links overflowing in the footer, but a quick CSS tweak fixed that.  I have a WordPress theme that I use as a base for most of my Cost Pub sites.  I also make custom WordPress themes and do web design and SEO for the Indianapolis area using Watershawl’s Growmotion marketing where we Growmote web sites–first we build them then we promote them; don’t just promote your business, grow your business with Growmotion.

    Update: I have since converted Geek Hand into more of it’s original role of personal computer repair, but with a slant towards mobile phones – a play on the ‘hand’ in the title.  Here’s the link to the new Geek Hand Facebook page in case you’re interested and a link to Settler’s League’s home page.

  • The First Day of the Rest of My Life

    While the title of this post sounds a little dramatic, today I did turn in a resignation letter to my day-time job.  The job was well paying and secure.  I had friends and freedom there, but it wasn’t what I was passionate about and the moment I thought I could get away to do what I was passionate away, I did.  It wasn’t an easy decision though.

    A week ago I asked God how I should be spending my time to create revenue.  I decided to fast for 7 nights, skipping supper each night to pray instead.  By the end of the week, my wife and I both came to the same conclusion.  It was time to leave.  After that, our ideas of how things should go slightly differ.  She wants me to spend some time looking for another job and I want to take care of my current customers and build my own business, but I have a feeling I’ll do a little bit of both.  I’ve already informed a couple of old jobs I had that I would be willing to work for them again when needed.

    My wife is pregnant with our fourth child.  We don’t yet know what the sex is or how many there might be or whether or not we’ll have insurance.  My hope is that the path God led us down includes provisions for all of that and as long as I continue to pray and follow that path.  I have goals and plans to focus on the Indianapolis web design business, Growmotion, and Cost Publishing, my blog network, while doing contract work for an Indianapolis computer repair firm and Watershawl [a web design and SEO company I ran from 2007 to 2012].

    I don’t know what the future holds, but I have just under four weeks left at my current job to start finding out.  I have to figure out how I’m going to structure my day working at home, how much time I’m going to spend with my family playing, teaching, and eating, and how much time I’m going to spend resting and reading.  There are a lot of unknowns, but one thing is for sure, today is the first day of the rest of my life, but then again, every day is.