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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty debuted in the United States on December 25, 2013. This review focuses on the how the film is an essay on the transition from analog to digital – made for and by the children of the 70’s (otherwise known as Generation X), the “analog vs. digital” and “disrespect for the past” themes, “the purpose of life”, and symbolism in the film. Most of this is from memory and is my own opinions. I have not read any other reviews on this movie, but have seen the movie and trailers.

* Spoiler Alert * This article contains information about the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, please consider watching it first. * Photos credit 20th Century Fox *

Generation X

In #Mitty, the movie, the actors and the director are all Generation X. Stiller was born in 1965 and is currently 48 years old. To give you perspective on the person writing this article, I was born in 1980 which makes me part of Generation X, Y, and the Millennial Generation, however I’m most likely Generation Jones. While I was able to pick up on a lot of the references and music used in the film, there are still things that I didn’t ‘get’ like the name on the t-shirt Mitty’s mom kept for him.

The movie is full of references to Generation X. Mitty’s sister is auditioning to be Rizzo in Grease, a movie that came out in 1978. She gets him a Stretch Armstrong (debuted in 1976) doll for his birthday. Mitty has a Jansport hiking bag (popular in the 80’s). At the end of the movie Mitty is wearing a hoodie sweatshirt, a leather strap necklace with a copper hex nut, and friendship bracelets. There are also several scenes referencing “Major Tom“, which is a fictional character created by David Bowie in the late 60’s.

You can always tell about how old you are based on what music appears in commercials and it’s becoming apparent that the markets have begun marketing less to the Baby Boomers and more to their children, Generation X. No where is that more apparent than in this movie, which is filled with product placements tucked in and tied to the story line from eHarmony to Papa Johns to LIFE.com, but with nods to Conan O’Brien, TBS, Cinnabon, Dell, CareerBuilder.com, KFC, Instagram, the iPhone, and American Airlines.

Generation X was the last generation to graduate high school and enter the workforce before cell phones and Internet access became ubiquitous. Ben Stiller’s directorial debut, Reality Bites, which came out in 1994, was the same year Netscape started. The World Wide Web had just begun and yet it was already clear that things were changing. It appears that Ben Stiller, despite the success he’s had since then, still longs for a time when things were more simple, more analog – and is betting his audience does too.

Analog vs. Digital

When Walter Mitty goes to give Rich the longboard at Cheryl’s home, there are at least three 70s-era cars on the street, which is very unusual for a movie set in 2013. In that same scene, on a wall, drawn in chalk is the words, “Here Comes the Sun,” which is an allusion to a Beatles Song of the same name from the album Abbey Road, which came out in 1969. On the cab ride back to his mom’s house, Walter Mitty wants to turn the cab’s digital video off to which the cab driver says ominously, “It stays on.”

Walter Mitty has an analog clock in his apartment (not pictured, but you can hear it ticking in the background) and he wears an analog wristwatch with a leather strap. Although the watch is never specifically referenced in the film, it plays a small part in the short story by James Thurber. For a sense of how Thurber thought about watches, in The Gentleman in 916, he writes, “Even the sound of a wrist-watch prevents me from sleeping, because it sounds like two men trying to take a wheel off a locomotive.”

While Walter Mitty does have a computer, it’s an older model, Dell laptop, which echoes his cell phone, an older flip-style phone. In contrast, Cheryl’s character uses a modern smartphone with Internet access. She still uses terms like “buffering” when searching the Internet (something she probably doesn’t have to do and isn’t a term used much any more). On the flip side, the photographer, Sean O’Connell does not have a phone at all – nor does any place Sean is currently located (ie. a shipping boat).

While on the shipping boat, a deck hand takes a picture with his smartphone for Instagram, and asks to be Facebook friends. This foreshadows Mitty’s meeting with Sean O’Connel in Afghanistan who doesn’t take a picture at all, instead choosing to remember the moment as “me”/himself without the camera. This lost desire to be ‘in the moment’ shares a sentiment with those who identified with Charlene deGuzman and Miles Crawford’s I Forgot My Phone video which went viral in August of 2013.

Disrespect for the Past

Walter Mitty works with analog film, something Kodak stopped making in June of 2013. Mitty’s co-worker, Hernando (which means “bold voyager”) has a man-crush on the photographer, O’Connell for still using film, which acknowledges he is well aware that although he is surrounded by film negatives, digital pictures have largely replaced analog film. Mitty states that he has never lost a negative despite “over a million” negatives passing through his care over the last 16 years he worked at TIME magazine.

“Negative Asset Manager” is Mitty’s job title, but it’s also a metaphor for the deprecation of ‘everything that’s come before’. In the final scene of the movie, Mitty tells his former boss that the magazine has been built by many people over a long time, which the new boss is now treating as a negative asset on the balance sheet that needs debited or written off. The message is that businesses are created and ran by people, not balance sheets, and should be treated with more respect, even when things change.

When Mitty’s boss, Ted Hendricks asks Mitty where the picture was, Mitty says it’s in a “silver bath” to which Ted does not even try to understand. He later asks someone else to look it up only to conclude that it “doesn’t exist.” Of course it exists, but simply Googling “silver bath” will only give you shiny pictures of bathroom accessories. You have to know that it was a part of photo processing, which is something older generations, even Generation X, understood – even if only in context.

The most visual disrespect for the past occurs as Mitty is entering LIFE magazine for the last time and movers are literally dropping art onto the floor as they violently remove it from the walls. All of the desks are empty and covered in drop cloths like dead bodies, a symbol for the lost jobs and the lost magazine. After working at the magazine for over 16 years, during his 17th year, the job ended – a ‘death” which could be a metaphor for the death of his father, which happened when Mitty was 17.

The Purpose of Life

In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty movie, LIFE Magazine’s motto is, “To see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, to draw closer, to see and be amazed.” This motto is written on the wall of the lobby and is repeated in the wallet O’Connell gives Mitty and in the background of the movie as Mitty leaves for Greenland. However, on the wallet, O’Connell added one more sentence, “That is the purpose of life.”

Off the coast of Greenland when Mitty jumps into the ocean, the captain of boat yells, “Don’t fear the porpoise,” which sounds like, “Don’t fear the purpose.” In this movie, Walter Mitty is 42 years old. In real life, Ben Still was 47 at the time of shooting the film. While younger than Brad Pitt, he still may have fears about the purpose of his life, just like Walter Mitty. Just like us. Just like me. He doesn’t want to be the old man bringing the news on a telegram.

Film Symbolism

The most blatant symbolism used in the movie was with allusions to 35 mm film reels and negatives. From the lights in Mitty’s apartment hallway to the windows on the outside of his apartment building, to the dots on the glass in LIFE magazine lobby, to the fuselage of the Greenland airplane at night, the film perforations, also known as perfs or sprocket holes and rectangular acetone film frames themselves were apparent throughout the beginning of the film.

The word “Life” was used throughout the movie, not just as the name of the magazine, but also in conversations Mitty had with Cheryl and his mother. It’s also referenced on the bottom of the longboard Mitty traded for in Iceland. In large print it says, “LIFIO”, which is Icelandic for “can survive”. Similarly, Cheryl comments to Mitty “last in, first out”, which is commonly shortened as “LIFO” in business process management. Find any more? Leave a note in the comments.

December 28, 2013
What is Autotask?
Some people call it a “hosted business automation solution”, a “complete business management solution”, a “complete business management platform”, or a “hosted business management software to streamline and optimize business processes” – but all of that sounds like a bunch of words strung together that don’t really mean anything. So what exactly is Autotask?

When I worked for a local IT firm we used Autotask for tracking IT tickets and projects, but it can do much more than that. It can store inventory, track time clock information, and integrate with Outlook and Quickbooks. It can also integrate with quoting software like Quotewerks and remote monitoring software like N-Able.

If you run a business (especially an IT business), whether by yourself or under a company, one day you might need an automated management software to help run the daily tasks of billing, scheduling and managing tasks. That’s what Autotask does well. It takes care of tracking the little things so your business can focus on bigger things.

What is Autotask?

Autotask is an IT Business Management Software that helps value-added resellers (VARs), management service providers (MSPs) and IT Service providers to sell, implement, deliver and bill for their services. It’s similar to Parallels Business Automation Standard, which is the industry’s leading, billing and hosting automation solution.

How does Autotask Work?

You can streamline and automate your workflows, increase your productivity and optimize the value of Autotask. From lead generation, to winning new business and setting up contracts, to managing projects, supporting your clients and simplifying the invoicing process, Autotask delivers proven techniques and customizable best practices to help you work smarter and more profitably.

You can create and format custom reports, leverage other Autotask System Reports, and add simple charting into your reports. And these are just some of the processes and tasks they do for you without requiring you to analyze each data you enter. Because everything is kept in one database, it gives you the power to mine your data to answer virtually any other question about your business.
- What’s due
- What’s billable
- What needs to be scheduled
- Which employees are under-utilized
- How long specific tasks are taking
- Which clients are most profitable
Why use Autotask?

When you keep business management and maintenance overhead costs low, you directly increase revenue on top of acquiring new businesses because of great over-all customer experience. When you keep your clients happy or your business running smoothly and efficiently, everything else follows.

With this automation standard you take care of three essential components for your customers: business, operations and management. When you address these three components, you have one very satisfied customer. Every business can profit from Autotask – from freelancers, small businesses, mid-sized businesses, non-profit organizations, public administrations to large enterprises.

Alternatives to Autotask

In addition to Parallels Business Automation Standard, there are other complete business management solutions such as Tradepoint Enterprise Business Management Software with Integrated CRM, ShareComplete Business Management Software, BusinessMan (which is based on FileMaker Pro), WORKetc’s business management software, ForgeWorks, Arquila, and Insight Business Management Software. If you’re looking for a field service management alternative to Autotask for mobile field service technicians, consider GoServicePro.
December 13, 2013
The White Album Problem

In Men in Black (1997), Kay is showing Jay some new alien technology and says, “This is gonna replace CD’s soon; guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again.”

At the time of this writing I’m 33 years old, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the progression in music from vinyl records, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes to CDs, MP3s, and Streaming audio. But in the computer world, the change is even more dramatic. I grew up with hard-drive-less PCs that ran off of 5 and 1/4th inch floppies to 5 MB hard drives to 3 and 1/2 inch floppies to ATA to SATA to Flash hard drives.

I started writing on a DOS-based PC using PFS Write and when Windows 3.1 came out I had to convert my book to Windows by using PFS to “print to file”. This allowed me to open the unformatted files and save them in Microsoft Write. When Windows 95 came out I converted the book again to Microsoft Works, which came with the computer. After Windows 98 came out and I got Microsoft Word, I again had to convert the book to Word.

Then came the web.

It was one thing to have to worry about the files stored locally on your hard drive. With the introduction of web applications, we now had to manage digital archives in the sky. My first encounters with web storage was with email, which I accessed via Telnet to Pine. Soon after I started using Eudora as an email client followed by Juno, which was my first personal email address. I didn’t use AOL mail, but that along with Prodigy and Compuserve were popular webmail clients at the time. My first experience with webmail was Hotmail, followed by Yahoo! Mail, and finally Gmail. It’s important to note that with the exception of Gmail, ALL OF MY EMAIL IS GONE. Because I didn’t backup or convert my old email from Pine, Eudora, or Juno and because of Hotmail and Yahoo’s aggressive email deletion policies at the time, all of my past email has been lost. The only archives I have from that time exist in paper letters I saved, audio tape recordings, printed photographs, and VHS tapes.

I was still writing paper letters to my girlfriends, my mother, and my grandmothers up until 1999. Even though I had a Juno and Hotmail account at the time, the other parties didn’t. I can remember making lists of people’s email addresses in high school because so few people had them – and those who did have them were usually shared with their parent’s as part of their family’s ISP account. I can remember getting in trouble with one of my girlfriend’s dads for a joke I sent her via email in high school. One AOL product I did end up using a lot was AOL Instant Messenger. It’s how I kept in touch with friends sitting next to me and across state lines after high school. It’s also how I met my wife, but that’s another story. Like my old email, no conversations were ever recorded, kept, or archived. I don’t have them. They are gone. This loss of digital history is part of the reason people still want to know what happened to collegeclub.com. It had all of their emails, pictures, and chats stored there went it went offline. Imagine if Facebook went offline tomorrow – how would you feel?

Sometimes, digital archive management can even be a problem within a single site. Take Youtube for example. It started out as a site that had it’s own login. People didn’t really realize how they would eventually use it or what exactly it was for at first. They setup accounts, posted weird stuff, sometimes forgot about it, and then came back and setup another account later. Eventually Google bought Youtube and started forcing users to login with their Google Account, which they also had multiple logins for. So now people had multiple Youtube accounts and multiple Google accounts and now Google was forcing you to reconcile the two. Videos uploaded to Youtube could not be transferred between accounts. If you wanted to delete the account, but keep the videos, you had to manually download them and re-upload them again. Then came Google+ and Google wanted you to stop caring so much about your channel name and start using your real name, which caused even more confusion. Despite Facebook’s massive growth and change over the years, their product has remained relatively consistent compared with Google’s products.

Digital Preservation is a huge problem going forward. As more and more data is created, it first has to get stored, but it then has to be read over time. That either means preserving the devices and programs that can access the data or constantly converting the data over time. That essentially is the White Album problem. In MIB, it is alluded that Kay first bought the White Album on a vinyl record, then bought it on an 8-track, followed by a cassette tape and finally a CD (in 1997 MP3s were not popular enough to mention on a movie). If Kay had not bought the White Album on the latest format, he would have to maintain the older system that was capable of playing the music in the format he originally bought it on. If I were to have saved my old email, I and the service providers would have to have maintained the computers and servers capable of displaying that email information or I would have to had downloaded and converted the data into a suitable format. Does it matter? Maybe not for me, but as a society we have to wonder what is going to get saved and what is going to get lost?

There is a lot of talk about the “reverse 15 minutes” rule where instead of everyone being popular for 15 minutes, everyone gets to be anonymous for 15 minutes. I don’t know. A LOT of the stuff I’ve created has been deleted and though it may exist somewhere, if you can’t find it on Google or your own hard drive, by all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist. This applies too to those VHS tapes you had converted to DVD in the early 2000’s. If you’re not converting them to Youtube or some other form of digital media you risk losing (yet again) the information you previously sought to keep. In regards to social media, yes, the data is there, but the more data you add, the harder it is to find things. Have you ever tried to look up one of your old tweets? The server only shows you the last 50 tweets or so at a time and loading more old tweets takes a long time, however if you know what you’re looking for, one search can bring back tweets from 2009. Facebook’s Timeline feature made it easier to go back in time, but unless you’re going all the way to the bottom or scrolling slowly, you can’t easily see everything and Timelines aren’t searchable (Update: Facebook Now Allows Users to Search Timelines). While the problems with a lack of a “delete” button on the Internet is not the topic of this post, I’d argue that it’s less of an issue than it might seem. While the government will always have access to whatever information they want, individual companies will go out of business, files will get deleted or not converted, or databases will not be indexed or searchable making the data irrelevant over time.

What You Can Do to Preserve and Convert Your Data Over Time

If you’re looking for a place to store your digital files, consider Dropbox for general file storage online. 100 GB is currently $9.99 a month, which probably isn’t enough for all of your files, but for pictures there is Flickr, which can store up to 1 TB of images per year online. Google Drive is another option and one that can convert your Word, Excel, and Power Point files into an editable document. This is one way to keep files ‘always converted’ as long as Google Drive still exists (Google has been known to shut down services often so beware). The bigger Google gets the less likely I am to invest my data with their systems. While I still use them for email (via Google Apps), I use Dropbox for image and document storage and sharing. I also have a second backup hard drive in my computer, an external hard drive, and a network hard drive connected to my home PC. I still have the first digital picture I ever took of myself in high school, but to do that I had to copy that file from a floppy disk to a computer I had in the late 90’s and to every computer I’ve had since. Just one misstep along the way would have meant that file would have been lost. And is there any value to keeping it? Maybe, maybe not.

When I used to do computer repair, the #1 most heard request when fixing a computer was, “save my pictures”. These people were saving their digital images on their computers and no where else. This is still the case for the most part. The difference is that most people’s pictures are now on their phones and when they drop them in the toilet, their pictures go down the drain. This again is where Dropbox comes in handy as it can automatically upload pictures from your phone to Dropbox. However, there is an obvious and real cost to all of this data storage. Whether you continually buy new hard drives or you continue to pay month after month to Dropbox to store your data there, you are assigning value to the preservation of that data. And storage of the data does not equate with retrieval of the data. If enough time passed and you were no longer able to open a JPEG image with any available software, that data would have become useless. As each new software and hardware platform comes along, we will always have the White Album Problem and those who do not keep up risk losing access to their data, forever.

The Snapchat Generation, the Forgotten Generation

The EU recently blocked a bill titled the Right to Be Forgotten, which would have granted users the right to ask service providers to delete the personal information. But Snapchat users aren’t waiting for a law, they’re simply not storing anything online. While it’s technically possible to retrieve the data, for most purposes this means that for a generation of social media users, no data will be stored online. So what will their history be? How will they remember these times? Maybe there are still places online where they will store their pictures and maybe they’ll occasionally use email to communicate, but when your primary mode of communication is text, Snapchat, Skype, or some other form of ephemeral communication, what legacy are you leaving? Maybe they don’t care, but should we?

Update from Vint Cerf 2/13/2015

The following are excerpts from Google’s Vint Cerf warns of ‘digital Dark Age’:

I worry a great deal about that,” Mr Cerf told me. “You and I are experiencing things like this. Old formats of documents that we’ve created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed.

“And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is.”

‘Digital vellum’
Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud.

If his idea works, the memories we hold so dear could be accessible for generations to come.

“The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future.”

November 30, 2013
The Trading Turtle Experiment

Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt are not names you will immediately recognize. But if you are interested in becoming a successful Forex trader, it is worth reading up on them as it might change your life.

In the early 1980’s, the two commodity traders had turned $5000 into $100million. Of course, they were ecstatic and often discussed the reason for their success. Eckhart believed that it required a special ‘gift’ or trading instinct that had resulted in the profitable trades. Richard, on the other hand, firmly insisted that had nothing to do with an inherent nature but that he had taught himself how to trade by using specific moves that resulted in the right choices of when to enter or exit the market and at what price to make the move. He concluded that anyone could be taught to trade.

He decided to run an experiment. He placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal and thousands applied to learn trading at his feet. He chose a group of people of 14 applicants each with different backgrounds, ages and financial knowhow and over a period of 14 days he taught them all about Forex. He called them the ‘Trading Turtles’ after recalling turtle farms he had visited in Singapore and deciding that he could grow traders as quickly and efficiently as farm-grown turtles.

Among the most important concepts he taught them was how to implement a trend-following strategy. The idea is that the “trend is your friend”, so you should buy futures breaking out to the upside of trading ranges and sell short downside breakouts. In practice, this means, for example, buying new four-week highs as an entry signal.

At the end of the two weeks, he opened an account for each member of the group and deposited $250,000 in each account. As a group, the Turtles personally trained by Dennis earned more than $175 million in only five years. Richard Dennis had proved beyond a doubt that beginners can learn to trade successfully.

The idea that anyone can be taught to trade Forex continues today. There are many online tutorials available today, that provide the trader with information that will guide him into successful trading. There aren’t many millionaires out there that are willing to foot the original deposit, but with the proper instruction, making money in Forex is still possible.

November 26, 2013

Ben Stiller’s Walter Mitty Longboards

UPDATE: Bustin Boards has confirmed that it’s a Bustin Boards Boombox longboard and after seeing the movie, it should be noted that there is only one longboarding scene in Iceland. The other New York scene mentioned in this article is ‘covered’ by CGI which makes it look like Walter Mitty is longboarding on asphalt. All pictures copyright of their individual owners.

Ben Stiller as Walter Mitty Longboarding in Greenland

Ben Stiller stars in and directs The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, where he is seen carrying and riding a longboard skateboard in several parts of the movie. At one point he’s longboarding down a hill in Greenland, while in another scene he’s longboarding down a street in New York City. The 2013 movie, which is based loosely on the original James Thurber short story and the 1947 Danny Kaye film, was filmed in Bronx, New York City, Greenland, and Iceland.

While the movie doesn’t come out in America until December 25, 2013, after watching the trailer I wondered what longboard Ben Stiller was using in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty movie. A reddit thread on longboarding in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty offered up the following clues. According to justchilln, “a Freebord was actually used in a dream sequence in which Mitty is snowboarding down the street of NY. Source- My buddy was the freeboarder.” You can see Ben Stiller filming part of this sequence in New York in this video below.

On June 14, 2012 Silverfish Longboarding posted the above video on Facebook where Jame Ka-stello pointed out, “It’s a Gravity Ed Economy, and Ben can actually skate, modestly as it may be – lets not get too fired up, the wires are there because they use that rig for a lot of stunts. Plus it would suck for ben stiller to catch a stop rock and faceplant I suppose.” And Aj Powell said, “At least he’s riding Paris Trucks“. However, Willy Staley noticed that, “the trucks are on backwards.”

According to user, thewatches, on Reddit, “I saw this movie in a pre-screening in nyc, and it’s fantastic, but they use 3 different longboards in the movie (it’s supposed to be just one board). They change it situationally, some downhill board like a landyachtz or something and two different Bustin boards.” While I couldn’t find a picture of a Land Yachtz longboard skateboard used by Ben Stiller in the Walter Mitty film, the pictures below are most likely a Gravity Ed longboard and a Bustin Maestro Pro longboard.


In this image, Ben Stiller is likely riding a Gravity Ed longboard with Freeboard attachments to keep his feet in place. Some have criticized the film for Walter Mitty not wearing a helmet, but in this image he is being hung by wires to keep him up.	Originally featured on The Daily Mail on May 7, 2012, Ben Stiller is shown carrying an. “extremely large skateboard over his shoulder”, which is likely a Bustin Boards Maestro Pro Longboard.

M Longboard Industry in France

While I’m not sure how this fits into the story, I did find that on Nov 10, 2013, M Longboard Industry wrote on their Facebook page (translated from French), “What a pleasure when a huge company producing Hollywood knocks on the door of a small workshop shape French … On the occasion of the release of the film “The Life of Walter Mitty” January 1, 2014, 20th Century Fox has decided to win 3, Z-Shape M-longboard-industry autographed by Ben Stiller in person!” and “Ben Stiller on the set of “The Dream Life of Walter Mitty”, on the occasion of the French release January 1, 2014, M-3 longboard longboards industry, the effigy of the film autographed by the actor to be won at the national level through UGC! Soon find all photos of the production of these boards Z-Shape.” The associated picture was that of Ben Stiller holding the sign post, which is a different longboard skateboard than the other two longboards shown.

Ben Stiller Other Longboard

What are the 3 Longboard Skateboards used by Ben Stiller in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty?

I have emailed customer service at Gravity Skateboards, Bustin Boards, Land Yachtz, and M Longboard Industry, but have yet to get a response about if any of their longboard skateboards were used in the Walter Mitty movie. However, both the movie and Bustin Boards are located in New York City so there’s a high probability that the movie used a local company. Gravity Skateboards are out of California, Land Yaachtz are out of Vancouver, BC, and M Longboard Industry is out of France.

Gravity Ed Longboard – used in street scenes in New York city – buy on Amazon.
Bustin Maestro Pro Longboard – used in the downhill scenes in Greenland – buy on Amazon
Either the Land Yachtz Longboard Time Machine or the M Longboard Industry X Board as used in other parts of the film – buy on Amazon.

If you have information about what longboard skateboard was used by Ben Stiller in the 2013 Secret Life of Walter Mitty Film, please let me know in the comments below or on Twitter.

Matt at M Longboard Industry Matt points to this Rad Train article as evidence that Ben Stiller used Dregs Skateboards. I can’t find any hard evidence of that, nor can I find the original Concrete Wave Magazine article that supports it, but I will admit that the Dregs Blade Crest longboard does look a lot like the one used in the film. Josh Dickey, managing editor at The Wrap, said on Twitter that the downhill scene in Greenland features a LandYachts Wolf Shark longboard.

WALTER MITTY trailer unmoved me until I saw he's LONGBOARD DOWNHILLING on a LandYachts Wolf Shark (my bombing deck)! pic.twitter.com/3QNWoEdN1i

— Josh Dickey (@NotoriousJLD) July 31, 2013

If you’ve seen the movie and know what skateboard Rich is using in the park or think you have a different explanation for the longboard used, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!

November 24, 2013

The History of Fair Haven Christian Church

In June of 1953, Fair Haven Christian Church had its first church service. It was held in Charlie Brackman’s living room. There were 64 people there so the kids had to sit on the stairs. Five families attended, including the Allen’s, the Coy’s, the Brackman’s, the Hook’s, and the Burgett’s. Orville Coy donated the land for the original church, a piece of land high on the corner of State Road 135 and 300 South. Orville and Dorothy Coy were also some of the key organizers. The first preacher ever hired was Art Guy. Noble Turner built an apartment over his garage for him. Art’s first child was born there. He had two children overall.

The church building was finished in September of 1954. It was all donated labor. Some workers didn’t even go to the church. The whole congregation helped. The ladies cooked and prayed much. The men came after working their day jobs and brought their sons, too. One of the boys, Richard Agnew, was among them. His parents owned and ran a greenhouse, and so he knew landscaping. He thought of the idea to put the church at an angle facing northeast. Then one day, when the men were working on the ceiling, someone dropped a nail and it hit Richard in the eye, blinding him. It was the thing they hated the most.

Controversy

Fair Haven was founded after disagreements with Trafalgar Christian Church resulted in a breakup. They disagreed with what Trafalgar Christian was teaching. Trafalgar Christian was being run by The Disciples of Christ, an organization which told Trafalgar Christian what to give to missions and what to teach. Trafalgar Christian didn’t even want kids around because they thought the kids would mess up the carpet. Fair Haven wanted to teach what they wanted to teach and not have an organization like The Disciples of Christ ruling over them. Fair Haven separated from Trafalgar Christian Church with strong opposition.

Fair Haven relocated to a new location in 1998 along 300 South where they currently reside.

The Blue Lounge

Everyday is happy day in the Blue Lounge.

The Blue Lounge was the high school Sunday school room in the basement of the old church. At the height of it’s glory it had two couches, a stereo, a fridge, and a Nintendo Entertainment System. It was named after the blue paint, which was chosen by Jeff Wise, the youth minister at that time, who was an avid University of Kentucky fan. It was rumored that Kentucky Christian College had a similar room, but no room like that was ever found.

Controversy

The room was often used as a hiding place during normal Sunday morning church and it’s growing collection of electronics, wine corks, and “big metal” caused a growing divide between high schoolers and church leadership. Eventually a lock was placed on the door and the wine corks were removed (because they smelled like wine). The giant chunks of metal were taken to the recycling center and the electronics were outdated over time.

November 10, 2013
Seektivity – My First Failed Startup
This is a story about Seektivity, the idea I had for an activity and event locator app that I worked on, but never completed. While I did a lot of fun things growing up, I wouldn’t say I had a lot of fun. I grew up in an environment of scarcity. There was never money to play games or buy snacks. While I got to participate in bike rides, Boy Scouts, church activities, and the occasional trip to an amusement park, I didn’t go to as many movies, arcades, and social events as I would have liked to growing up. #firstworldproblems

The summer before I entered 3rd grade my parents moved to Indiana and by 5th grade I was walking with a neighborhood friend back from the store when we came up with the idea for an activity park for kids. It would have the “normal” stuff like arcade games and go-karts, but also weird and dangerous stuff like hot air balloons, hang gliding, bicycles that fly, recumbent bicycles, and a zip line. It would also have spa-like attractions such as a lounge, a pool, and an indoor eating area.

In August of 2012 I had an idea for an app that would “facilitate play”. The idea was born out of a desire for anyone to improve where they live (wherever they live) by communicating and facilitating activities in their community. I proposed an app called Seektivity or Outure or something else as a new business for me to run. I began looking for feedback and criticism of this idea (and whether or not they wanted to be a part of it). Initially nobody gave me any feedback at all and no one wanted to help. I began defining what the app would do:
- It will allow people to create paths/routes for others to follow based on GPS tracking (gamification and/or nature trail creation from public streets and paths)
- Incorporate geocaching element if wanted (again with the gamification element to outdoor activities)
- Allow others to find and post activities to do (based on a Foursquare-like interface where users can add activities, set them to reoccur or occur once)
- Facilitate the creation of activities/games (allow users to turn their life into a game, their town into a game, but basically just make their lives better/funner)
- Allow users to upload/add what equipment they have (this allows users to find activities that match their equipment ie. pickup hockey games)
- Monetized by selling equipment/things to upgrade/do activities (affiliate links or ads) or by selling app
- Predict and announce upcoming activities based on likes/equipment/past history (push notifications / emails)
I didn’t know how to program and so I decided to create a minimally viable product (MVP) using an architecture I was already familiar with to begin building the app: WordPress. Although it would eventually be a mobile app also, I decided to first build it as a website (or web app). The thinking went that worst-case scenario the mobile app would simply be a ‘wrapper’ that displays the website’s content. This is similar to how Facebook’s app initially worked.

I was able to cobble together pre-existing parts in WordPress to create an MVP that did most of the things I was looking for the app to do. I experimented with several different plugins and custom post types, but settled on GEO my WP, which “Adds location to any post types, pages or members (using Buddypress) and creates an advance proximity search.” It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but logged in users of the site could add locations and anyone could search for locations.

The primary benefit the application was supposed to provide over similar apps like Foursquare was the ability to add activities and events to a physical location. WordPress would allow users to add a location via a post and tag it using WordPress tags, but those who followed behind wouldn’t be able to add tags or events to that location without having editor permissions or by using the comments functionality of WordPress. This was enough to have users start to use and test it.

I loaded up the database with several places and activities so that there would be something to search for, but it didn’t survive the first interaction with a user. She typed in “tennis”, which wasn’t in the database anywhere so she saw little value in the application. Welcome to the chicken and egg problem. One way to get around this would be to attach this application onto Foursquare’s database and use it for locations, and then adding events and activities on top of that.

In January of 2013 I contacted a local iPhone app developer and said:

I am looking for a developer to code an app that is like Foursquare for activities and events rather than just places. It will need to store user account information on a web server and be able to use GPS mapping tech to locate the user in space. They should be able to browse activities and events around them or do custom searches without logging in. With an account they can add activities or events. Places should exist as close to once as possible in the database so an address lookup feature would be necessary. Each event should also have privacy settings and be able to invite and get checked into. Users should also be able to comment or add meta tags to an activity or event. Activities can occur based on a set of criteria I’ve come up with. I have tables and diagrams and wireframes on how all this works, I just need a developer to help code it up.

He said it would take at least 2 months at $10,000 a month to get to a MVP. I decided to wait, but that first user, Joy, thought the idea was good enough to urge me to keep working on it so I thought I’d take 2 months and learn Ruby on Rails, which I started to do in March. I was working through Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial, but I couldn’t even get through the first chapter. Even at the most beginning levels, it was still over my head.

Reflections on a Failed App

Joy thought it would be a good idea for me to document my thoughts on the development of Seektivity at this moment so that when people are writing a book about my future success they will be able to give a correct account of how the company and app got started. Even though this probably will not happen, I thought it would be a good exercise in figuring out what went wrong. Before that I’ll start by describing a little bit about our backgrounds, how we met, and what we have been up to lately.

Joy grew up around presidents, astronauts, and famous writers. Her father ran a large Christian organization in Colorado and is well connected. She helped friends make millions of dollars with one of her ideas and one of her friends ended up marrying a millionaire. She married an Air Force pilot and after having four kids, started her own interior design company. After dating a NFL player from Wisconsin, she ended up marrying a dentist in Indiana and that is how she met me.

I grew up around computers, the Internet, and farmers. My father worked for General Motors in Indiana and was well liked at his job. I helped friends start businesses and helped small business owners survive and thrive. One of these businesses was called Neighborhood Geeks, where I worked part time as a computer technician. After moving to Indiana, Joy called Neighborhood Geeks to help setup her children’s computers for school and that is how we met.

I worked for Joy off and on for several years at her home, until eventually also taking over the website management and marketing functions for her husband’s dental practice. Years later I would also take over the IT work at the office and then assist with a staff transition period when Dr. Reese was between managers. It was during this period of time working in the dentist office for 9 months when I first shared the idea of Seektivity with Joy.

Before I worked full time at the dental office I was a business analyst at a regional bank. During the day I would daydream about starting new business ventures all while running a side business of IT and web consulting at night. One of these ideas was a search engine called Seektivity. The idea didn’t get very far – just a search engine that used Google search to deliver Google Ads via search results, but I liked the name enough to hold onto the domain.

The summer I started working at the dental office as interim manager I would go on long walks through Tipton to exercise and think. It was during one of these walks that I decided that I should start an e-Commerce business – one that sold stuff to “facilitate play”. I thought I’d use my Outure™ brand to make an outdoor adventure company, but after doing some customer interviews found that there was more of a need for finding and sharing things to do, which brought me back to Seektivity.

Joy initially thought the idea was good and encouraged me to build it. I worked on the specifics and even created a web version as a prototype, but when faced with programming obstacles beyond my reach I dropped the project to focus on areas where my web design and IT skills could be better used: eCommerce. I began to work on building the original Outure idea and went looking for a partner. Joy was excited to help, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Seektivity.

Immediately after New Years 2013, while vacationing with her family in Hawaii, Joy finally had time to clear her head and it was through this clarity that Seektivity came back to mind. At the same time, back in Indiana, I was explaining the idea to a group of friends when one of them turned to him and said, “You know, I still think that’s a really good idea and even if you can’t build it yourself, you should try and pitch it to someone.”

When Joy came back she asked me to meet. I came to tell her that I couldn’t work with her anymore and that I was moving on. She understood, but wanted to share how she had come to think about Seektivity while on the beach in Hawaii. She said that a group of people wanted to go fishing, but had no way of finding someone to fish with. It was something that Seektivity would have fixed and this is how her interest was renewed.

Her interest in the project inspired me to ask her again if she’d like to be a part of making something great. She said she wanted to change the world and that she believed that the business had the capability of connecting people and creating experiences that simply would not occur without the app. She believed it would help bring people together and to be more active. It is in this way that Seektivity was born.

I AM thinking ALL THE TIME about possibilities with Seektivity…as I travel, ideas and options for the app become so evident!!! It is an Erich “DUH” moment — why it has taken us this long to capitalize on it is mind boggling!! -Joy

There’s nothing like doing something to realize what you need to do next. This happened to me when I was first developing Seektivity. When I actually could use the thing, my perspective changed a lot on what the product actually was. Design sure does matter a lot. Obviously Apple is a cliche example, but I’m thinking “Eventbrite” vs. “Foursquare”. Both allow user-generated content, but one is ‘cool’ and one is not. The difference? Design.

I considered making Seektivity using Foursquare’s API but even in the briefest of research I glimpsed that the idea violates their API terms. In other words, you can use their data like a data set and run analysis’ on it and make your own ‘pivot tables’ out of it or you can publish to it, but you can’t use it as a address database for a whole other service like I’m wanting to. I’m not sure I’d want to spend all that effort doing that either since one click would disconnect my whole app.

By February of 2013 somebody else made a Seektivity app called Shoutt. It wasn’t exactly the same but pretty neat and it actually worked. I signed up. I think my idea has more sticking power in the midwest where I live. My use cases are more practical I think than theirs. It’s all about the use cases. But use cases don’t matter if your app doesn’t work. As of this writing their app is still up and running. Meanwhile I’m writing this blog post.

Epilogue

By September of 2013 Joy and I had started an ecommerce company called SkinnyCoconutOil.com with her son. I was onboard as an SEO and IT advisor. My bio reflects what I was trying to accomplish at Seektivity:

I’d like to help people meet more people and do more things. I hear so many people say they don’t know what there is to do and don’t know who to do them with. I’m not talking about boyfriend/girflriend matchmaking – I’m talking about the question of how to make new friends and how to find new things to do. In a world with an overwhelming amount of information, people are more isolated than ever. I want to help fix that.

This problem is not from a lack of information, but from a lack of organization of that information. If Shoutt is not successful, someone else will be. In December of 2012 Foursquare added the ability to add events to a location. This problem is real and software like Foursquare, Shoutt, or Meetup can help bring people together and make the world a better, funner place. It’s all about #community.
November 9, 2013
A Tale of Two Cities: From Milligan College to Muncie, Indiana

I’ve recently wrote about my first two years at Kentucky Christian College and my one semester at Milligan College so I thought it would be appropriate to share how I spent the year 2001, the year everything changed.

Life at Milligan was better than at KCC, but it wasn’t as different as living in Muncie, Indiana. It wasn’t just the location that changed. The world was changing all around me. There was a new President in the White House. People were just getting cell phones for the first time. And then there was September 11th.

My best friend got married. I moved into an apartment for the first time. I began dating someone who would eventually become my wife and my roommate did the same. We both worked at Old National Bank. It was our first professional job outside of maintenance or factory work. We all went to Ball State, but it didn’t start out that way.

The Big Move

I was home from Milligan on Christmas break and I was working at Franklin Power, a factory where Derek’s dad helped me get a temporary job. Derek was living up in Muncie with Jason. During Christmas break Jason and his girlfriend, who had just graduated high school early, announce to their parents that they are getting married in the Spring. That meant Derek would have to find another place to live. When I heard that I decided not to go back to Milligan, but to move to Muncie with Derek instead.

There was just one problem: all of my stuff was still down at college in Tennessee. I had to drive 8 hours down to college to pick up my stuff, tell the college I wasn’t coming back (they didn’t care), and apologize to my friend, Ben, for not gifting him his own room. You see, he had been my roommate and had he not switched roommates, he would have had a room all to himself. I helped him decorate his new room before I left, but as soon as his roommate got there, he promptly tore it all down.

I moved to Muncie with $400 I had saved from working at Franklin Power, but I didn’t have another job lined up. Derek and Jason both worked at Chili’s in the kitchen and although Jason got me an interview with the manager, I decided I didn’t want to work there and so I didn’t have that opportunity when I moved there. I worked for a couple of weeks as a vacuum cleaner salesman before landing a job moving furniture for a furniture retail outlet called Stout’s Furniture.

The Big Changes

I applied to get into Ball State, but it was too late to get into the Spring semester so for two months I worked 7 days a week moving furniture for $5.25 an hour. It was here that I got my Chauffeur’s License and began driving a 30-foot straight truck 10 hours one-way down to Tupelo, Mississippi to pick up furniture from the manufacturer. Instead of paying me overtime, he would give me $150 in cash for each trip despite getting 2 hours of rest (includes packing) before heading back.

Eventually mowing season started and I used my experience mowing at camps for both summers to convince a local landscape company to hire me full-time. I was now making $6.50 an hour. I got a second job at Old National in July, but continued to mow until school started in August. Old National paid $7.47 an hour. After school started I started selling books on Half.com until November when I got a second job as a maid at a local hotel making $5.25 an hour.

I met Suzanne, my wife, on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) the same week I started at Old National and on Thanksgiving I cleaned rooms and made beds at the hotel in the morning before driving out to Tipton to have dinner with her family for the first time (in the house I own now). I also worked Christmas day and New Years day. I didn’t know how to quit the hotel until Old National told us they were closing the Muncie facility, but offered me a job at over $10 an hour if I would work instead in Indianapolis, which I did.

The Muncie, Indianapolis, Greencastle, and Franklin Connection

I asked Suzanne (MusicGirl158) to marry me in September and by August of the next year we were married. We’d take trips down to Tennessee to see her grandparents over the weekend. She went to Depauw University and would drive from Greencastle every day two hours one-way to come visit me in Muncie. When I chose to move to Indianapolis I chose to move back in with my parents until a few months before I got married when I moved to Greencastle, where I lived alone for the first time in my life.

Ben did not return to Milligan after his second semester there and so I helped him get a job at Old National with me. Eventually Derek moved from Muncie to Franklin and also got a job with me. Derek, Ben, and I all worked at Old National in Indianapolis at the same time until Ben got the tip of his finger cut off in a mowing accident and decided to go back to school at Johnson Bible College. I eventually left Old National after I was passed up for the managers position and every other lateral move I had applied to at the organization.

While Ben was working mornings mowing I was working mornings repairing computers and while the businesses were the hardest to deal with, there were a few homeowners that were equally as hard. I once had a woman scream in my face, “Every other person in the world can print wirelessly!” when I was having trouble setting up her wireless printer. It turned out to be a problem with the Subnet Mask address, which I didn’t understand at the time, but had to figure out that day. She later called to say she didn’t have an icon on her desktop. At least she paid.

It’s All About the Community

It’s not all about the money, and it’s not about where you live, it’s about who you know and who you choose to spend your time with. I had a core group of friends from Fair Haven that I ended up going to college with at KCC, Milligan, Ball State, and IUPUI. I went to KCC and Ball State with Derek and Jason and I went to Milligan and IUPUI with Ben. I worked with Jason, Derek, and Ben at Old National. Together we spanned 6 colleges in 3 states over a period of 8 years.

Jason and Derek graduated from Ball State in Muncie after first attending KCC. I graduated from IUPUI in Indianapolis after first attending KCC, Milligan, and Ball State. Ben graduated from Johnson Bible College after first attending the University of Indianapolis, IUPUI, and Milligan. Jason, Derek, Ben, and I are all now married with children. We are all active in our communities and our churches. We owe a lot to our early mentors and our contemporaries who showed us a path forward and when the world was literally changing around us, we stood strong.

November 8, 2013
From the Garden to the City: The Epic Entrepreneur’s Story

Every entrepreneur has their own version of the classic “entrepreneur’s journey”. They usually share this story at the beginning of an interview or podcast. I’ve never been interviewed or been on a podcast so I decided to write my own. I’m choosing myself. 🙂

Family Background

From the time I was born my family moved about every four years. Two of those houses were in Missouri and two were in Indiana. When I lived in Missouri I was young, but I remember I had this white, Lamborghini Hot Wheels car. I remember telling my dad I wanted to start a Lamborghini car dealership when I was older so that I could sell Lamborghini’s to kids like me for a $1. I remember my whole family laughing at me.

My mom volunteered at church events as a clown. She would come up to me and say, “I’m your mom,” and I’d say, “No you’re not!” and run away in fear. She sold Tupperware on the side. I remember her having Tupperware parties, but mostly I remember how much Tupperware we owned. I still use some of it today in my own house. This was my first view into entrepreneurship, which I sort of later followed when I was in Amway for a year.

My dad worked at GM during the night and during the day would volunteer at the church doing maintenance work. He would change out light bulbs in the ceiling of the sanctuary using a giant ladder. I remember watching him and wondering if he was going to fall. I’m scared of heights. We did a lot of land sculpting at every church we ever attended. For some reason, my dad just liked moving dirt around. He liked how dirt shaped water’s direction.

My First Businesses

One day after moving to Indiana I was walking through a shopping center with my older brother and we went into a Hooks Drugstore. He bought some baseball cards with his allowance and I was hooked. I collected baseball cards, bought Beckett Magazine price guides, and traded with friends. I never made any money, but this was my first experience with buying, collecting, and curating something with the intent of future earnings. I had a trader in my neighborhood in Southport that shared with me his dream of opening up his own baseball card store. This inspired me. I wanted to open up my own baseball card store. One day he setup a professional-looking stand in his garage and operated a neighborhood store for a day. I really looked up to that guy and always wondered how he turned out. I don’t remember his name though.

I also had small stints in buying candy and gum from the grocery store to sell at school. There was a time when “sour balls” just came out, which weren’t available from vending machines at school. I’d go to the grocery store, buy a bag, and sell them at school for 10 cents a piece. I actually didn’t sell any though. It was a complete failure. By the time I got into the game, I was already too late, the market was already saturated with other sellers. You see, it wasn’t my idea. I stole it from someone else – someone who had greater access to capital (their mom) and more prone to risk (willing to ask for the sale). Not only did my competitors have these things, they had prior experience selling Big Red and other types of gum. This is the same guy who later shot me in the back with his BB gun and gave me a bad haircut.

His name was Joey. We were both in 5th grade and one day Joey and I were walking home from that same strip mall in Southport. We started to come up with a plan for a new type of business. We both liked going to the local Putt-Putt and playing arcade games so we thought it’d be cool to start a small theme park or game center where you could do things like ride go-carts or fly small aircraft in addition to your standard arcade. We drew out pictures and made grand plans. We were doing it for kids like us who didn’t have a place like that. We were our own customers. We were scratching our own itch. It was “selling Lamborghini’s for a dollar” all over again. It never happened.

Business Education

Middle school was pretty much the dark ages of my entrepreneurial journey, but in high school I really ramped up. I started an antique business with a friend, started taking business classes at school, began editing websites on the side, started a band, and subscribed to INC and Entrepreneur magazines. When we had Career Day at school I told a speaker I wanted to “own my own island”. I was rude and full of hot air. I didn’t understand at that time how much value I would have to provide the world in order for me to one day afford my own island. I didn’t learn that until much later.

I kept studying business in the various colleges I attended. Each one taught me a little something different. At Kentucky Christian College I learned about how much I don’t like accounting. At Milligan I learned that first impressions make a lasting impression. At Ball State I learned about art. And at IUPUI I learned about computer science. I took 3 classes on Microsoft Office, 2 speech classes, and 1 marketing class. I took 2 years of Accounting in high school and 2 years of Accounting in college. I joined every business club I could find and failed 3 out of 4 of my math classes.

I don’t feel that I learned that much from college, but there were a handful of professors that made an impact on me. Dr. Charlie Starr, a literature professor at KCC, taught me about symbolism in movies, and although I can’t remember all of their names, the most impactful teachers were my literature teachers. Those were the ones I seemed to connect with the most in high school and college. The other most impactful professor was Andy Harris at IUPUI. He taught me about computer science and STAIR, which is an iterative method of problem solving, similar to customer development.

Business Development

I made the mistake of thinking that a college education was the key to any sort of financial windfall. In fact it had the opposite effect. I became debt-ridden and after I graduated I was no better off in the job market than the day before I graduated. I even asked my employer at the time, Old National, for a raise, but they said no. It wasn’t until I went back to school at a technical school for a specific skill set that I was able to get a higher paying job. However I later learned that the thing that actually helped get me that job was what I was doing on the side: web design. They wanted someone who could do IT work and help out with their website.

In my last year of IUPUI, Jason and I worked together to build a computer repair company called Neighborhood Geeks. After I graduated college, instead of going to classes in the morning I started going on IT service calls. I had no formal education as an computer technician, but I knew a lot about how Windows XP worked and had a good idea of how to troubleshoot problems. Google, like now, was our friend. After two years of not getting ahead in my day job at Old National, I started get CompTIA and Microsoft Certified. I still couldn’t find a better job so one day, I just quit.

A coworker asked me what my boss, Corey, said when I quit. He said, “You filled out the wrong form.” I couldn’t help but laugh. Old National didn’t use to have a formal “2 Weeks Notice” form so years earlier Corey had me make one up for our department. I used the form I had made, but by the time I quit, Old National’s HR department had come up with their own form. I had worked there full time for 6 years. It literally took me an hour 1-way to get to work everyday. I drove through rain storms and snow storms. I made stupid mistakes that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I essentially grew up there, but it was time to move on.

Career Development

2 days later I got a job at a call center helping teachers learn how to use web-based software to make tests and quizzes for their students. It was brutal, but even in that environment, I added value. There was a particular problem that no one knew how to fix and people would often call in about it and we’d have to say we didn’t know. One day I decided to dig into the problem and I discovered what was causing it and how to work around it. I was one of the few people who didn’t get laid off during the slowdown, but that’s when I got the opportunity to work at IBM’s call center, so I left after working there 2 months.

I worked at IBM 3 days before I got the job doing IT full-time. The first job I ever had was washing dishes for $4.25 an hour. I started Old National in Muncie at $7.47 an hour and ended in Indianapolis at over $12 an hour. The call center in Lebanon paid $10 an hour and IBM paid $11 an hour. My new job as an IT professional paid $20 an hour, which was quite a big jump for me at the time, but I stayed at that same rate for 5 years. Despite moving on to a business analyst position at another bank for 3 years and working as an interim manager at a dental office for 9 months, I stayed at that same rate until I went back to being an IT professional for a new rate of $25 an hour.

But I was tired of “trading dollars for hours” like Robert Kiyosaki talks about in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Even for the year in which I ran my own consulting business doing IT and web services I was still trading my time for money. I longed to move beyond the employee or self-employed roles (or the technician role in The E-Myth Revisited) and into the business owner or entrepreneur role, respectively. I needed a product or service I could sell systematically that took my time out of the value equation so that I wasn’t the one holding myself back from earning the income I wanted to fulfil my vision for the future.

Vision and Mindset

I’ve spent a lot of time learning about how to start a business. I’ve read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. I know you need to start with a mantra, make meaning, and have milestones. I read Jim Collin’s Good to Great. I know that you first have to get “the right people on the bus.” Eric Ries’ Lean Startup says to start with the product and ask people if they want it. There are many ways to start a business, but I know some of the worst include choosing a business name, buying business cards, incorporating, and designing a logo. None of those things bring in new customers or revenue. That’s how I developed the theme of #SellFirst, and it’s a tag I own on Twitter.

“Sell First” is a mindset that says, “before I invest more time, energy, and money into this new business, I am first going to ask someone if they want to buy it.” I believe that sales is essentially “asking someone to buy something.” In high school Jason and I called this “spontaneous asking”. We found that when we asked for something, we were much more likely to get it than we did not ask for it. This seems obvious after the fact, but there is much fear in asking, which may be part of the fear people have of selling. I certainly still have that fear, but it’s something I’m learning to get over as I view it as more important than marketing. Marketing Supports Sales.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and motivational speaking lately and several reoccurring themes have emerged. The first one is the need for a vision of what you’re future will look like. This sets your mind in the direction it needs to go. The second is the need for mentors and education that gives you the information you’ll need to get to where you’re going. The third thing is hard work and the ability to temporarily discomfort yourself now for a better future later. Extraordinary effort now is greater than the same amount of effort spread out over time. The fourth thing is your product. When given the choice between working on anything else and your product, always choose to improve the product.

Product Development

I live in Tipton. I’ve lived there for most of the last 10 years. It’s a small town with little to nothing going on. I have to drive at least a half hour in any direction to see anything other than cornfields and pickup trucks. But it’s from this location that I’ve worked professionally for 10 years, developed and ran side and full-time businesses, and raised a family (I now have 5 kids). It’s out of this desolated place that I’ve come to shape my ideas of place and community. It’s how I came up with the ideas for Seektivity and Outure. I believed that it didn’t matter as much where you were, but who you were hanging out with and what you did with the situation. Even Tipton could be a cool place with the right people, the right knowledge, or the right stuff.

I had a vision of a mobile app that allowed you to post and activities and things to do around you. If you discovered a tennis court you could add it to the app and tag it with “tennis” and the next person who came there might add “badminton”. In the same way, someone might find a baseball diamond and first tag it with “baseball” while someone else might tag it with “Wiffle ball” or “softball”. If Foursquare is for tagging places to go, Seektivity would be for tagging what there is to do at those places. There may be a hundred different fun things to do in Tipton, but without an informational tool like Seektivity, I would never know about them. In this way, people can transform their communities into more active and happier places to live.

In late 2012 and early 2013 I started getting interested in physical products and ecommerce. That’s when I got the idea to create products to help Seektivity users get more out of their communities. Outure was developed out of a need to facilitate “activity in your own backyard.” I felt that outdoor adventure companies often glorified exotic places like mountaintops and sunny beaches while most of America lives in mostly flat, mostly dry areas of the country. That doesn’t mean there isn’t fun things they could be doing if they just had the right information, similarly interested people, and the right equipment. By providing the people with the gear to have fun in their own backyards, my mantra in both products is to “facilitate play”.

The Reality

The reality is I’m not as great as I thought I was. I never finished making Seektivity. I got a minimally viable product (MVP) and stopped working on it in February of 2013. That same month I stopped being an entrepreneur and went back to work for a company that made me extremely uncomfortable for 7 months. In August of 2013 I switched jobs and began working on Outure and everyday I take a little step forward by posting a picture to Instagram or commenting on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter. I hired a VA in November to help write reviews of urban activity equipment sold on Amazon as an affiliate, but hope to one day open my own e-commerce store. That’s my vision and this is my reality.

November 7, 2013