Recently Dove did a study that showed men think they are better looking than they actually are, but a similar study was done in 2010 and before that in 2009. I probably think I’m better looking than I actually am, but what I’m more concerned with recently is that I may think I’m better than I actually am.
For the last year and a half I’ve had this inflated notion that I’m ‘more than just an IT and web guy’. “I’m a high-level thinker!” I’d say to myself. “I think at a systems level. I can synergize data. I can run a big company. It’s easy for me to make money. I can do anything.” The problem was that while I was busy thinking about better ways to run a company or businesses I could start, I wasn’t really doing anything. I was really just running my mouth.
Work is Hard
The moment I was forced to do some of the things I was claiming I was ‘so good at’ I found the tasks extremely hard to do. Solving big problems is not easy. Setting up an ecommerce site is not easy. Going to work everyday is not easy. I had to get over my dream of doing nothing and realize that I’d always be doing something – and so I had to get better at whatever it was I was doing.
What I was doing was IT work, web design, and online marketing/SEO. But because I had spent all of my free time thinking of new business ventures, reading about startups, or hanging out with friends, I wasn’t spending any amount of time becoming a better IT guy, learning more about web design techniques, or discovering new SEO and online marketing strategies.
To be fair, I was learning new things about marketing. I recently learned about things like market sophistication, multivariate testing, and content marketing. I was able to apply this new knowledge to clients who needed to use market segmentation to create separate marketing campaigns for different target markets. It also came in handy while writing the marketing strategy for a business plan for one of my customers.
But there is a lot more I could be doing. I wrote a post on Google Authorship Markup Validation in 2011, but I’ve yet to get it working on my site. My voicemail message still says my old company name and my Gravatar still reflects the old logo. I’m still trying to figure out video and I’ve yet to start an ecommerce store (one of my goals in 2013). However I did start an Amazon Web Store (Amazon’s eCommerce platform) yesterday to try it out. I was looking for something that would let me easily add products and I’ve found that finding suppliers is one of the hardest parts of setting up an ecommerce site. So far I’m not thrilled with it. Why? Because it’s hard.
Seeking Out Easy
James Altucher recently wrote, Why Do Anything? In it he writes about how he likes, “to submerge myself completely in water and just float for as long as I can hold my breath.” I used to do this. It was my favorite thing to do when I was on the swim team in high school. As soon as school got out I would race down to the locker room, get changed, and submerge myself in the diving well. I didn’t weigh very much then so I’d sink down about 10 feet until I reached an equilibrium and I’d just hover there, weightless and silent. Nothing could hurt me and all was right with the world – all but my lack of oxygen. I try to recreate this feeling when I’m in the shower, but it’s not the same. That’s the only thing I miss about high school.
In August of 2012, a little over a year after I first quit my job, I wrote a short post called Always Working. It was the first time I realized that I had a feeling where “I just have to work until [x]” happens. Later I had a dream about a hill behind my house. It was a place I had gone many times before and I knew it very well. There were trails, a playground, a parking lot, and a place to buy candy – all at the top of the hill. The only thing was the hill doesn’t exist in real life. It never did.
It was clear my perception of work needed to change.
Recently a friend texted me with the stark realization that he still has 30 more years of work ahead of him. I don’t know. It’s all about your mindset (what people used to call your attitude). To me, work is part of life – and you’re always going to be working – even when you’re not technically working. It’s great if you can do something you love, but it’s better to be better at what you’re doing. Be the best that you can be and things will get better. If you’re a farmer, be the best farmer. If you’re an accountant, be the best accountant. If you’re a writer, be the best writer. If you’re not the best, practice “deliberate practice” in order to get better. This is what great people do. If you want to be great, you have to try to be great – not just think you are great. No one becomes great by doing nothing. There is no hill in your backyard. You cannot float forever. You have to come up for air.
Slowly I Turned…Step By Step…Inch By Inch
Seth Godin recently wrote an article for Fast Company about how to build a company slowly and one line stuck out to me and it’s one that I’ll end with:
Sometimes the best way to be great at something is simply to become better and better at that thing, rather than hoping one or three bold and brilliant choices will reap a windfall.
Why Did Instagram Succeed When the Color App Failed?
We hope you’ve enjoyed sharing your stories via real-time video. Regretfully, the [Color] app will no longer be available after 12/31/2012.
That was the message posted on Color.com [Update 7/15/2003: The site is no longer up.], the domain Color Labs paid $350,000 to acquire in 2011 almost a year after Instagram was founded. A year later their photo sharing app would be on the way out while Instagram was getting bought for a billion dollars. What went wrong? Why did Instagram succeed when Color failed?
Color vs. Instagram
Color Labs was a start-up based in Palo Alto, California whose main product was a social application for photos called Color. It allowed people to take and view photos matched to a location. Color grouped photos based on a user’s friends so that they are more likely to see those pictures that are most relevant. Like Color, Instagram is an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and optionally tie them to a location. Unlike Color, users can apply digital filters to photos and share them on a variety of social networking services. It confines photos to a square shape, similar to Polaroid images, which along with the filters gave photos a retro look and feel.
A Difference in Startup Methodologies
Color Labs started after co-founders Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham received $41 million in funding between 2010 and 2011 from Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank before the app had a single user. Conversely, Instagram was started by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010 with $500,000 and teams of just a few people. As Instagram introduced successful products and attracted users, they slowly raised more money and hired engineers. Meanwhile, Color Labs spent $350,000 to buy the domain color.com (and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com), rents an office in downtown Palo Alto, California, where it employs 38 people to work in, according to the New York Times, “a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp.”
Instagram’s $500,000 seed funding round came on March 5, 2010 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while Systrom was still working on Burbn. By February 2, 2011, it was announced that Instagram raised $7 million in Series A funding from a variety of investors, including Benchmark Capital, Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca (through Capital fund), and Adam D’Angelo. The deal valued Instagram at around $25 million and later that month, Facebook made an offer to purchase Instagram and its 13 employees for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. By May of 2012, the number of photos has exceeded one billion. Google offered to buy Color for $200 million in July of 2011, but Color Labs turned down the deal. They were later acquired by Apple (mostly for their patents and talent) in October 2012 for an undisclosed sum.
A Difference in Responses to the App
On March 24, 2011, Color Labs launched its first application “Color for Facebook” in Apple’s App Store and within a week released an update allowing users to see photos from events “Nearby”, a “Feed” of relevant photos, and a “History” of groups that users can participate in. In June 2011, less than three months after the company officially launched, Peter Pham left Color. When it first launched, the application had around 1 million downloads, but as of September 2011, the service had a little under 100,000 active users. The app was poorly recieved, attracting few users and many who did not understand what it was supposed to do. One reviewer in the Apple App Store wrote, “It would be pointless even if I managed to understand how it works.” Users were confused with the application’s user interface and purpose. Its initial rating in the App Store was 2 out of 5 stars.
For Instagram, the response was much different. It rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million registered users as of January 2013. Support was originally available for only the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, but on April 3, 2012, support was added for Android phones. Instagram for Android was released[18] and it was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day. An app rating under 3.5 stars makes users considerably more reluctant to download the app. With an app rating of 2 out of 5 stars, the Color app was doomed. Once entered into the cycle of bad reviews it was nearly impossible to break out as there were wasn’t enough new downloads or positive press to bring the average back up and over the 3.5 stars mark. Meanwhile, as of this writing, Instagram has 4.5 stars ouf of 4 on the Apple App Store with over 62,000 reviews.
A Difference in Purpose
Color was first meant to help you find and share pictures related to your location, but Instagram was solving a different problem. They were making mobile camera photos look better. The Color app only worked if other people were using it (a chicken and egg problem), while Instagram solved a problem people had right away. This could have been because Kevin Systrom had already developed a check-in app called Burbn. Josh Williams of competitor check-in app, Gowalla, said, “Early user feedback, coupled with a desire to avoid the check-in battle…led them to drop everything to focus on one simple feature: photos. They made the act of taking and sharing photos (many of which just happened to be location-tagged) fast, simple, and fun.”
In Summary
Color was a company in search of a product. They didn’t have much more than a mountain of cash when they started, but it was spent on things like numerous employees, fancy offices, and marketing rather than product development, user feedback, and customer interviews. Color may become a PR lesson for the future as they may become legends for squandering one of the biggest and most covered product launches in app history. On the flip side, Instagram already had a product they were trying out, were listening to their users, and created a new company based on the results. They continued to listen to their users and made their product even better. They didn’t hire a bunch of people or spend a lot of time talking about their company. Their product solved a problem, people liked it, and they used it. Each company had a runaway effect, albeit in different directions. Once those directions were set in motion, it was hard to change them.
In closing, I’d like to quote from Color’s about page, which says a lot about how the company thought. If you have a different opinion about why Color app failed and Instagram succeeded, please let me and other readers know in the comments.
At Color, we believe in the opportunity that the new mobile era presents and are excited about developing products that transform the way people share the stories of their lives. We work collaboratively, iterate often, and enjoy problem solving. Color is a company of entrepreneurs and innovators, highly skilled in their respective specialties, constantly striving to learn and grow. We’ve cultivated a very relaxed and informal culture and enjoy our extra curricular activities, which include but are not limited to: ping pong tournaments, ball pit acrobatics and impromptu poker nights.
A few years ago, I discovered a positive correlation between having places in my life where people know me and my happiness. I call those places “stations”. I noticed that the more stations I have in life, the happier I am.
What is a station?
A station is going into your local coffee shop and having the barista know your name. It’s going to a restaurant and having the waiter know your name. It’s having friends that you can stop at by their house or running into someone you know at the grocery store or going to church and having people recognize you and want to shake your hand. In order for those things to happen, you have to have positive interactions over time (which is one of the definitions of friendship).
A few years ago I started intentionally trying to build up my community. When i would go to a place that I knew I was going to probably visit a lot in the future, I would say, “Hi, my name’s Erich. What’s your name?” It seems simple enough, but you do it and then you try to remember it and say it eventually they they learn your name too. And the next time you’re there, you can start to ask deeper questions like, “How are you doing? How was your weekend?”, and then as time goes on you can get deeper and go as deep as you want to go. You get to the point where you can say, “Hey, that’s rough. If you want to talk about it, maybe we can go talk about it somewhere else,” and then you take that relationship from that place and you move it some other place.
So maybe you start off by talking to someone at church but then after talking to them at church, one day you say, “Hey, maybe sometime we should go get coffee together,” and then you go get the coffee together. And then you can even start to combine these things when you have someone that you know that you’re bringing to a place where you know someone else, you can introduce to people and say, “Hey, this is my friend. I’d like you to meet this person.” Being a connector helps other people be happy as well. Because it’s not just your happiness, it’s their happiness too. It’s “community happiness”.
You are knowing them, they are knowing you. It’s reciprocal.
If you’re old enough to remember this show, Cheers, you know that when Norm walks into the bar, everyone yells, “Norm!” There’s been a couple of times in my life that that’s happened in real life. And it is an awesome feeling. You walk into a room and everybody goes, “Erich! Yeah!” They’re genuinely excited to see you. Everyone in the room is flipping out. It’s only happened like twice in my life, but I remember it vividly. And if you’ve ever gotten married, you know you’re walking down the line or you’ve gone to a wedding and there’s this receding line. and you’re walking out and everybody’s shaking your hand. After intentionally building up the community for years, one time I was just walking out of church (I needed to go to the bathroom or something) and I’m like, ‘just let me sneak out here’ and then left after right, people kept sticking out their hand and saying, “Hey, Erich,” “Hey, Erich,” “Hey, Erich”. It was like a freaking receiving line.
I was like, ‘Wow, I did it. I created community. This is amazing. I’m so happy right now.’
There’s lots of ways to become happy or have moments of happiness or be fulfilled in life. But community is one of them. It’s beyond happiness too. It’s about your life. Like literally. Like you’ll live longer if you have better relationships with people. If you have people that care whether or not you’re alive or dead. And they genuinely like recognize you. care about whether you exist you walk into a place and you’re just nobody and you go home and you’re alone and you never interact with anyone something happens on the physiological level and you just don’t live as long as someone who’s an active part of the community where people actually care that you are there or not.
When i was young, my dad told me one time, “If you want to have friends, be a friend.” And so I’ve tried to be friends with people. And because of that, I have friends as an adult. I even make new friends. It takes effort. It takes being the one to reach out and ask. And I have asked people and they don’t always do stuff, but they have told me, “I appreciate you asking because not everybody asks.” And if you want to go into the world of dating, there are girls that just don’t even get asked out. In sales, people don’t get the sale because they’re not asking for the sale.
Asking is such a huge thing.
I know it’s not really what we’re talking about but it’s a human thing. Even God says to ask Him for things.
Humans want to help other people. They want to be with each other. We are community-oriented people.
If you take a bee out of the out of its hive and just leave it alone, it’s going to die. The bees need the other bees to survive. Humans are the same way. Humans need other humans to survive. If you leave the population, you won’t die on day one, but like eventually you will. Everybody needs each other. So it’s not just the physiological, it’s also the emotional.
In summary, I have found that the more of them you have, the happier you are. And the way to cultivate stations is to reach out to people and build up your community over time.
Third Place
Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, made the term “The third place,” popular in his book, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, but the “third place” is actually a phrase coined by contemporary sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Oldenburg postulated in 1990 that the third place is, “a public place where people gather for the social satisfaction that they can’t get from the first two domains of the home and the workplace.” Oldenburg argued that the availability of such gathering places in America was lacking. Schultz turned America’s ‘lack of place’ into a business opportunity encouraging loitering and turning Starbucks into that third place. In this post I will argue that their is a direct relationship between the number of third places and happiness (in life and work).
Social Structure
In Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell recounts the story of a town whose inhabitants rarely got sick. After a doctor named Wolf began looking into why, he “slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself.” The town’s social structure had multiple generations living under one roof, the townspeople talked to one another on the street, they cooked together in each other’s backyards, they went to the same church, and had “twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people”. In short, the towns people were a community and they had places they could go to congregate and interact. It’s these ‘third’ places that I call Community Stations.
Community Stations
If you went to a public school your teacher may have setup your classroom into stations. If you were in first grade there may have been a station for reading books, a station for building blocks or puzzles, and another station to watch an aquarium or greenhouse. These were all places you could go, sub-sections within the larger classroom to hang out with people like you doing things like you. When you grew up you may have been assigned a “work” station at your job and bought a “play” station for your home. In the 1800’s whole towns were built up around “train” stations and now every corner has a “gas” station for our cars. Third places like Starbucks are a “coffee” station – and like the stations set up around the classroom, is one where like-minded people gather to talk and share what’s going on in their work and their community.
Personal Community
Your community is more than the 2 square miles around your home. It’s made up of the various types of community stations, the most important ones being your home, your work, the stores you visit, and your friend’s homes. Each station in your personal community is like a node on a network and like Facebook, the more friends you have, the better the experience. This network value is called the Network Effect. But unless you live in a college dorm or in a close-knit community like Roseto, you have to travel greater distances to these different stations. But the more stations you have, the greater the chance you will be able to interact with these stations and the greater the value of the community. This is why density matters and it’s why more communities are choosing to infill instead of building sprawl.
Walkable Neighborhoods
Alex Steffen talks about infill in communities being used to build denser communities, but there are already places like that: cities. I recently wrote about how people under 30 are moving into the cities and driving less, what Nathan Norris calls The Great Migration of the 21st Century. More and more people want to live in walkable neighborhoods, places where shopping, fun, and friends are all within walking distance. There is even a website dedicated to judging the walkability of a neighborhood. But you don’t have to live in a city to have a walkable neighborhood. Suburburban “sub-divisions” like these in the Indianapolis area can be specifically built to be walkable.
Business Networking
In my post about working in Indianapolis, I wrote about how on Thursdays I would start out at the local BNI meeting, then go to Subway where the local Sandwich artist would remember me and ask me about my business. After breakfast I’d head to Starbucks where I’d normally run into someone I know and begin working. At night I’d attend a meetup or go to a friends house before heading home. After going full-time on my own business one of the first things I noticed was how lonely I was working from home (like right now?). I wrote:
When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that.
Work Communities
My ex-wife used to work at a hospital with a man named Melvin whose job was to keep rooms stocked each day. He had worked at the hospital for many years and had developed a routine that involved starting out in the stock room and making rounds around the hospital, stopping to talk to various people in each location. These were his stations within the hospital and without them he would not have been as happy at his job. He needed the community that the stations provided him. As an IT and web consultant, my clients were scattered around the city of Indianapolis and it created many places I could go throughout the day. My clients became part of my community and added to my work enjoyment. It didn’t feel like work – it felt more like visiting a friend.
Seeking Stations
I lived in small, rural town where there wasn’t a whole lot to do. There was no coffee shop and none of my friends live around there. There was a bowling alley, a movie theater, and several gas stations. My kids liked walking to the gas station to get candy and occasionally I’d walk to watch a movie, but the only place for me to go to ‘work’ is McDonald’s or a local diner. One is depressing and the other won’t leave you alone. There is no place to ‘hang out’. It’s a walkable neighborhood, but where would I be walking to? I decided that there must be something to do there, it’s just that I didn’t have the information as to what that is. That’s when I got the idea for Seektivity – an app that lets you share activities and events going on around you – kind of like a Foursquare for activities instead of places. A lot of my friends thought it was a good idea. Shoutt has since come out with something similar, but it adds a ‘borrowing/lending’ feature. I shoutted in that town, but there was been no one listening (give me a shout out on Twitter).
I take a drink of my coffee and get a text from a customer. The room seems brighter now. I feel like I’m a part of a community – and for a second I am happy.
Jack Dorsey, a CEO I admire, is the co-founder and CEO of Square (a service I highly recommend for solopreneurs and small businesses), spoke to a student audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business through the View From The Top series. Dorsey shares his story about how he came up with the ideas for Twitter (which he created and co-founded) and Square, which gives advice to the entrepreneurs and business students in the auditorium and thanks to Youtube, all of us.
There is a moment in the beginning of this 44 minute video (around the 3:30 mark) where Dorsey begins to talk about about how he starts and thinks about a project. It’s not that he just begins with the end in mind, but that he specifically begins with an image or picture in his mind – and then creates images of all of the steps in between. He falls in love with the end product, but maybe more importantly, he ensures that he will enjoy the journey in between.
If I could explore the world, if I could craft something and really learn how to build and how to build a vision of what I wanted to see in the world – I could do amazing things…always.
The most important thing for me to do is to see a picture of where I want to go – see a picture of what I want to do in the world – and then figure out how to work backwards from that.
William Gibson said, ‘The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.’ This is exactly how we run our companies as well…An idea that can change the course of the company can happen anywhere in the company. The future is already in all of your heads and your work, everything you have to do in your life is to distribute it.
Realizing that picture and making sure that I am distributing my idea, distributing my picture…is the most important thing – it’s to have that strong vision – to have that strong sense of what you want to do in the world – to be selfish to build something for yourself and be able to convince others to do the same. -Jack Dorsey
While I didn’t think of it as an e-commerce company at the time, I was buying books in real life and selling them on Half.com – something I’ve wanted to get back into for the last year. This is a story of my first e-commerce company, Blu Bukx.
The Beginning of Blu Bukx Company
Like a lot of companies, this one started as a result of what my friend, Jason, was doing. He had visited a local library with his new wife and discovered they were selling off their old books by the bag. He looked up how much he could sell them online and quickly discovered he could turn a profit. He already had an eye for this type of thing as he was already actively selling antiques on eBay for his dad, a retired antique dealer. For those following along, this is the same dad that allowed Jason and I to have a booth in a closet in his antique store (hence the name Closet Collectibles Company).
Not one to let this newly found arbitrage go unexploited, I soon found myself visiting every library in town, buying up as many books as I could find and posting them to Half.com. I found that children’s books and non-fiction books sold the best and although I was selling at least one book a day, the books were piling up in my bedroom. I was still in college at the time and during this process had just recently met the woman who would later become my wife and had recently just started working at a bank doing items processing. I would go to class in the morning, come home in the afternoon, package up books to ship, then take them to the post office on the way to work.
It was a big process to enter in the ISBN codes for every book purchased into Half.com. My future wife would stay up late at night in her dorm room to help me out. I remember one time she entered in hundreds of books on the site and I did something to delete all of her work. I think she cried. As part of the process you would have to price your book. Half.com would let you see what other people were selling it at and you could price it accordingly. One book stuck out. It was a book about the mafia’s role in the oil business and someone had it posted for $150. My soon to be wife thought it would be a “great deal” at $120 off. It sold. She told people about that book sale for years. She was so happy.
When the libraries ran out of books to sell I had to find another source to keep up my inventory. That’s when I discovered the clearance section at the local Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Half Price Books stores. I could buy a book there that nobody locally wanted to buy for say $3 and sell it online for $15. This was in 2001 when a lot of local booksellers hadn’t really caught on to the whole Internet thing. It wasn’t that there weren’t any websites selling books online: at the time, Amazon.com was still the biggest (and I even experimented with selling some of my books through them as a reseller), but there was also efollet.com and textbooks.com, which is part of one of the funnest nights of my life.
One of the Funnest Nights of My Life
The fall semester was about to begin and as was the tradition, Jason and I would walk around campus figuring out where all of our classes were before the first day of school. The campus was mostly empty at this point, but all of the building doors were open. One of the buildings we went into had a large dumpster in the hallway where professors had been dumping old papers and whatever else they didn’t want. As book resellers there was one thing Jason and I both noticed right away: a trunk-load of textbooks. They were the kind of books that textbook publishers would send professors to get them to buy their books, but if the teacher didn’t want to use them, they were of no value to them.
We loaded all of the books into Jason’s car and drove them back to his house. After getting them all inside his office we began systematically looking them up on efollet.com and the total value quickly got into the hundreds of dollars. Needless to say we were getting giddy, but the real fun started when we “got serious” and started to cross-reference the different textbook buying sites on a per-ISBN basis to create the highest payout possible. Now that was fun. We ended up splitting the money which I no doubt put into food, rent, my computer payment, or more books.
One of the Changiest Years of My Life
2001 was the year I moved to Muncie, Indiana, changed colleges, worked four different jobs, dated two different girls, got engaged to one of them, bought my first cell phone, my first apartment, started my first ecommerce business, and watched our country go through September 11th. I was mowing that morning as there was a period of time when I would mow in the mornings, go to school in the middle of the day, and then go to work at the bank in the evening. The first thing I heard when I got back into the truck and turned on the radio was, “It’s an act of war!” My first thought was, “What was?” As I listened to the radio my first inclination was to call Jason and ask him what was going on. He filled me in and said he was recording the news in case I missed any of it. My next call was to my soon-to-be wife. I told her I loved her then called my parents and did the same. It was a weird year and one with a lot of changes, but things didn’t stop changing. They keep changing every year.
The End of Blu Bukx Company
Eventually local book sellers did catch on to the whole “Internet thing” and started competing against me directly. The market inefficiencies were gone and it became increasingly harder and harder for me to turn a profit as my margins continued to shrink. I tried to sell the business and it’s inventory to my mom, but she didn’t want to do the work involved. I had got laid off from my bank job in Muncie and got transferred to the same job in Indianapolis. I was engaged, but was now living back at home with my parents. I ended up picking out some books to keep for any future kids I might have, giving away some to friends and family members, and taking the rest to Half Price Books to sell. I still have two of the book shelves (I made one), but the others got sold to a guy at the bank I worked with. My kids do read some of the books I kept from Blu Bukx company, but mostly they just sit there.
Although I walk by these books every day I almost forgot that I even had this company. Looking back I can see how much time it took (for both me and my wife) and how much it influenced a small part of my life. The one thing I find odd is that because of the way Yahoo! stores it’s mail and because of me switching computers over time I have no digital record of this company ever existing. I can’t find anything in any of my emails, on my hard drive, or on the Internet (via Google search). If I didn’t write this post, no one would have ever known it ever existed. And that would have been okay. I just wanted to write this for my own sake as it touched on a lot of different parts of my life that helped shape where I am today. Maybe I’ll start up another e-commerce company again – and maybe my wife will help me input product descriptions and pack up orders – and maybe we’ll be happy.
“Some people have the uncanny ability to make more in a week than most will earn over a lifetime. What’s better, they do it all the time. Amish Shah is one of those people.” Below is a screenshot of his presentation secrets, which I have outlined below. Click the image to watch the full video from Mindvalley Insights.
Presentation Secrets
You are not the hero, the audience is.
It’s not about just you. It should be a shared belief.
Tell Stories because it conveys meaning.
Facts don’t sell. Emotions do.
Stand out.
Be human and stay connected.
Talk to the audience personally.
You are the mentor.
Help the audience get “unstuck”.
Come from a place of humility and be selfless.
Combine two things: Facts and Stories.
Stories provide an experience.
Facts provide information.
First create the desire in the audience and then fill it.
Formula
Intro and unfulfilled desire – Relatable Hero
Presents dramatic actions held together by confrontation. Obstacle for the character – Roadblocks
Resolution – Transformation
Audience needs to change internally and follow you.
This is similar to the advice Mimi Henderlong of Threadless gives about “telling a story about someone who works at your company and make your customer the hero.” In the following video Amish explains the basics behind his record-breaking launches, his tried and tested theory on how to humanize your work, and how to overcome the single biggest hurdle that all affiliate marketers face – credibility.
Video is both one of the most powerful and underused tools in marketing, training, and communication.
I think it would be wrong of any new endeavor in 2013 to not include video as an integral part of their marketing strategy. This is how I am going to include it this year:
Work to create an “interview”-style of videos in a series where I talk about things that interest me published on Youtube and this blog
Work to create videos where I go to events or to work for different clients as a way to showcase what I do in the field in my daily work
Develop video for common IT helpdesk solutions such as how to add apps to your phone, how to setup voicemail, or search the Internet
Just Get Started
The best thing you can do is to just do something. You’re not going to get good at it until you try and fail. It’s okay to fail, it’s how you learn.
The video on the right is a perfect example of this. I have a stain on my [T-!]shirt, I didn’t shave, the lighting is horrible, there is no script, and the camera is wobbly. But what you don’t know is that I specifically bought paint and painted that part of my house AND bought a special light to make videos, but I only made them this one time. And the only reason I made this one was because I told someone that I would (she was supposed to make one too, but she did not). The fact is that I did something – and now I can do the next one better.
Video as a Conversion Tool
I ran across this article on video and it reminded me of how important video is in conversions. It encouraged and reminded me to keep developing video for my products, my services, and my clients.
Video is a very strong conversion tool and one that is increasingly being used by companies to help customers learn more about their products or about the community you’re trying to establish around your products and company. Letting people know the ‘rules’ of your ‘tribe‘ and how to act in it will help your customers feel like they are part of something when they do business with you. It’s an intrinsic way to make each customer feel special. Video is one way to let people in on that culture.
I’m not the best at making videos (SEE above), but it’s something I’m learning more of how to do this year. I’ve done some work for other clients (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) but for a professional, there are others I can recommend.
I used a Canon 60D camera on a tripod. I did not use any special lighting. I also used an Audio-Technia ATR 3350 lavaliere microphone with a mono-to-stereo adapter from Radio Shack. I also used an iPad 2 as a teleprompter, using the Proprompter HDi Pro2 from Bodelin Technologies. I decided to invest in this gear, since I have a number of instructional videos I plan to shoot in the future. I edited the video in iMovie and then uploaded it to Vimeo, which I like much better than YouTube. It has many more options, including the ability to use a minimalist video player and custom thumbnail image.
I have boiled Michael’s list down to a ‘bare bones’ and ‘all-out’ version:
Editing: iMovie on a Mac ($999) or Adobe Premiere Elements on a PC ($999) – both prices include hardware and software
Publishing: Vimeo or Youtube – Why not both?
You don’t have to buy all of this at once and can combine your resources with friends or clients who may have iPhones or iPads. Vimeo and Youtube are both free.
Making Video a Habit
If you make this a part of your marketing habits and start treating it as a must-do versus a maybe-should-do then you can start to do the things it requires to help make our business ventures a success. In this way, video can become part of your new Marketing Ecosystem. That’s my goal. What’s yours? And how can I help?
You may have heard of “marketing platforms“, but I’d like to introduce what I’d like to call “marketing ecosystems”.
What is a Marketing Ecosystem?
While a marketing platform contains a ‘home base’ such as a web site and its corresponding marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Books – a Marketing Ecosystem takes a slightly broader view and encompasses:
The Marketing Platform
The People Doing the Marketing
The Processes of the Platform & the People
The Technology used by the People
A/B Testing, Events, Analytics, SEO, Twofers
A Marketing Ecosystem is a Customer Acquisition System that funnels traffic and buyers from the Marketing Platform into a trusted Onboarding System that has feedback loops to the Marketing Platform.
The outputs are blog posts, videos, social shares, books, events, products, and services. The inputs are traffic, phone calls, email, email sign-ups, new clients, and revenue. I’ve written before about how books are the new business cards, but now books can be your advertising too.
Licensing & Commercialization of Intellectual Property (Twofers)
In marketing terms, this is referred to as “repurposing content“. Content is the energy that keeps this Marketing Ecosystem running. Content creates traffic. Traffic leads to revenue.
The most effort should be spent on making the best content possible. Marketers will say “make it share-worthy” or “remarkable“, but let’s get back to basics. It needs to be quality. Quality attracts quantity. This is the core of Content Marketing.
An Example of Content Flow Through the Marketing Ecosystem
A trusted, knowledgeable person is mined for their insight. This insight is edited into a series of blog posts, a book, and several videos. In each of these marketing channels, backlinks are placed to buy a product or service and sign up for an email list. The same content is then sent to this email list with more links to buy products or services, but everything should be tested.
Test Everything (Beta Title for this Section Until Further Tests Completed)
Test Everything is a Marketing Ecosystem tenet. In SEO, conversions, and sales, the single most important element is the TITLE of the page, post, book, or sales brochure. In books, the cover is the second most important element. But how do you test? Using Facebook, Twitter, and Google Ads, test titles and covers until a significant improvement in sales is discovered.
Don’t Forget About the People or the Products and Services
Remember that this Marketing Ecosystem is made up of people talking to people who have problems that the products or services solve. People are messy, emotional, and rarely rational. They make decisions based on copy, design, urgency, FAQs, or personal referrals. And keep in mind that the people who answer the phone or emails also have emotions – so they need properly trained, but all of this cannot happen without quality products and/or services.
The marketing ecosystem can be perfect, but it will implode if the product or service is awful. A Marketing Ecosystem Engineer must ascertain whether or not a product or service is worth supporting or whether the product or service first needs further developed.
On Building a Customer Acquisition System using a Marketing Ecosystem
Once a marketing ecosystem is fully understood and the product or service has been fully vetted, a Customer Acquisition System can be built. This system would provide the editing and implementation of the web and social design, content creation, distribution, events, referral connections, email marketing, onboarding training, and do A/B testing and analytics. This system could be offered as a service.
An Example of a Customer Acquisition System at Work
A dentist is interviewed for his dental knowledge. This is turned into a series of blog posts and videos. Each of these have the opportunity to directly sell or add to an email list. The blog posts are turned into a book, which is sold on Amazon. This book also has links back to his products and services + the ability to sign up for his email list. The dentist can now claim that he is a published author. Each title and cover is A/B split tested to ensure the highest ranking and payout – and ultimately increased conversions.
How I Have Applied This System in the Past
I have attempted to create and use a system like this by taking some of my most popular blog posts on Erich Stauffer figurines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) into an ebook on Amazon. However, I did not test the cover and feel that its design has hampered it’s sales. My Youtube channel is called “TheBlogReader” because it was meant to record me reading my blog posts as a form of repurposing content. I only did that a couple of times though, however I still recommend it to my clients, but they hardly ever want to do it. Maybe they are expecting me to do it for them. Video is one of the things I am going to be working on more this year.
How to Create a Customer Acquisition System
I’d like to say I have this all figured out, but I’m still learning and trying new things. I’m going to apply some of these principles to a new project I’m working on – one that I can’t share yet – but if you run a business in the Indianapolis area and want to talk about it, please let me know.
Lenovo Edge E420 and E430 laptops with Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 1000 (Intel(R) WiFi Link 1000 BGN) and Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 2230 cards are experiencing BSODs when connecting to a wireless network. These wireless network cards are included in Lenovo Edge types 1141 and 3254; and models 57U, BUU, and ALU.
The computers operate just fine when the wireless card is disabled and the computer is only connected to the Internet via an Ethernet cable. It’s only when the WiFi is being used that Windows 7 will crash and dump the results, pointing at the netwsw00.sys or NETwNe64.sys file, depending on the wireless driver. Computers shut down every 5 minutes.
Windows Updates
This began occurring after the Windows Updates installed on April 16th on eight different Lenovo 420’s with a Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 1000 (Intel(R) WiFi Link 1000 BGN) card, and four different Lenovo 430’s with a Intel(R) Centrino(R) Wireless-N 2230 card.
There was a “bad Windows Update” released that day called “KB2823324“, but it has been removed and the replacement for it, “KB2840149” has been installed. Despite this, all of the laptops continue to bluescreen for as long as they are on a wireless network.
Driver Updates
All eleven laptops are running Windows 7 and are 64-bit. They all have the factory-installed image provided by Lenovo with some of the Lenovo programs uninstalled. Drivers have been fully updated using both Intel’s Driver Update Utility and Lenovo’s ThinkVantage System Update. Despite all of this, all of the laptops continue to blue screen.
Lenovo Edge Laptop
Intel Wireless Card
Latest Lenovo Driver
Latest Intel Driver
E420 / 1141 (57U, BUU)
Intel(R) WiFi Link 1000 BGN (Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000)
Intel forum posts (1,2,3, 4) suggest enabling FIPS, turning off ARM (Adaptive Radio Management), turning off the option “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”, turning off wireless-N, or only allow WPA connections. A lot of these are old posts and for other Intel wireless cards, but I know that turning off the n-radio did not work for me and enabling FIPS was not an option for security reasons.
Lenovo forum posts (1, 2, 3) suggest using “legacy mode” instead of “UEFI” in the BIOS; updating the bluetooth drivers, turning off bluetooth, or turning off “bluetooth collaboration”. The mention of “bluetooth” made me think of this “Solved BSOD” solution from Seven Forums that involves updating the bluetooth drivers only after ensuring that the bluetooth radio is turned on. The following is a table of the latest Intel bluetooth drivers.
Bluetooth Drivers
Lenovo Edge Laptop
Intel Bluetooth
Latest Lenovo Driver
Latest Intel Driver
E420 / 1141 (57U, BUU)
Intel(R) WiFi Link 1000 BGN (Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000)
IT administrators might want to review Intel’s Intel PROSet/Wireless Software and Drivers for IT Administrators or the Intel PROSet/Wireless Software IT Administrator Links, both of which contain Wireless+Bluetooth combined driver packages that are meant for network distribution. As an IT administrator, I find these problems really frustrating, especially when it’s happening to a large amount of users at once. When a solution is found, it will be posted here to help others.
Like a lot of 
A Marketing Ecosystem is a Customer Acquisition System that funnels traffic and buyers from the Marketing Platform into a trusted Onboarding System that has feedback loops to the Marketing Platform.