Participation…

On Sunday, I had coffee with a friend of mine, productivity enthusiast Jared Goralnick. Jared has been pretty busy recently promoting his new product, AwayFind, so I was pleased he had some time to chat.

I like meeting up with Jared because he is quite motivating, and I learn a lot from him. I consider myself knowledgeable about business, but I’m very much a newbee to the tech world. It’s great when I get time to pick Jared’s brain, since I love to learn (as a researcher, I must!).

Because I lack much of the experience you find in the rest of the tech community, I often stand on the sideline… I don’t attend all the events I could, I don’t comment as much as I should, and I have stayed somewhat anonymous as a blogger.

Jared encouraged me to put myself out into the community, and he’s right. The only way I’m going to learn and become successful in tech (or the world at large, for that matter) is to contribute. By blogging more, improving my technical skills, attending events, and participating in the discussions, I will build upon the skills I lack… and display my unique talents and perspective.

On Jared’s advice, I registered my own domain… WarWrites.com. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to migrate my blog to this new domain, set up Feedburner and Google Analytics accounts, and make other improvements. I want to make this blog a place others come that displays my unique love of finding creativity in the often mundane world of business.

I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m excited. Thanks for the push, Jared.

Making Money Through Advertising: Harder Than It Seems…

I seem to be reading a lot of articles recently on why internet services must be free. Everyone from Seth Godin to Fred Wilson makes the argument that free is the internet strategy de jour.

However, when most people think of providing a free service, most people like to fall back on one simple revenue model… sell advertising. However, building a sustainable business around internet advertising is harder than it seems.

According to some reasonable assumptions on page views and RPM (revenue-per-thousand page views), you need to find a pretty big audience before you’ve built yourself a health business. Let’s say you have a well-targeted website with an active base of users. If this is true, than a RPM of $10 is high, but reasonable. In order to build a US$25 million business, you will need over 208M page views per month. To put it in perspective, you need to be close to becoming one of comscore’s top 100 most visited sites… That’s a lot of people viewing a lot of content.

Key lesson – don’t get lazy and fall back on advertising. Get creative… if you’re smart enough to create a product that people find valuable, then your certainly smart enough to turn that value into cash.

P.S. – Lightspeed Venture Partners wrote an good article with some useful assumptions for building an ad-supported online business.

Think Creatively to Generate Revenue, and “…connections go for a premium”.

I love creativity… I have a great deal of respect for people that think about something in a new and unique way. And for this reason, I’m excited about entrepreneurship. If you have a good idea that effectively solves a problem, you will be rewarded… handsomely.

Business creativity doesn’t lie solely in product design and development. It should also be evident in your business model. I’ll be writing about this topic soon, but I don’t think people should design a great product, and then get lazy by figuring that they must monetize it through advertising.

To effectively monetize a product, you must dig deep to identify the true value, and put a price tag on it.

And, that’s just what Scripped is doing. According to a post at the Silicon Alley Insider, Scripped will provide their web-based script-writing software for free, and charge for add on services, such as “script consultations” and “brokering meetings with producers and the like”.

Now, I don’t know much about the movie business, but it seems like these guys thought hard about what a screenwriter would pay the most for… experience and expertise. Can they deliver on that promise? We’ll have to see…

Naming Your Company: Some Practical Guidelines

I read a blog post today on naming your startup from venture capitalist Mark Peter Davis.  Mark gave some very usingful and practical advice:

1. Be phonetic,
2. Use few syllables, and
3. Make sure the url is available.

I might add another rule to this list…

4.  Make sure people will remember your name.

There are many ways to do this, but I think the name should somehow relate to the product or service you provide.  Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule, but if you only have limited exposure to perspective customers, you want to make sure the name sticks.

NIN gets (even more) creative…

Yesterday, I saw on Digg that Nine Inch Nails had released a digital album called “Ghosts I-IV” for $5. So, I bought it.

However, I don’t think anyone realized how popular this album was going to be…

When I got home to download the tracks, the site had crashed from too many users. So, I had to wait until the morning to download the music (which took 45 minutes… ugh). Short story… the album is still not on my iPod.

As I was waiting for the album to download, I got a chance to look around the Nine Inch Nails web site, and I was impressed. Trent Reznor released this album with a Creative Commons license and encouraged people to remix the music. And, he created an area on the site for users to post the remixes.

This is a great strategy… not only any I spending more time on the NIN web site to hear these remixes, but I’m more engaged with the product (I hate to equate anything Trent creates to “product”, and I apologize profusely).

If I love a product and stay engaged with it, you can be pretty sure I’ll continue to spend money… not because I am forced to, but because I WANT to. Every company should hope they can find customers that enjoy giving them money.

P.S. – Here’s a great New York Times article on NIN’s innovative business model for “Ghost I-IV”.

"Cool" Just Isn’t Enough…

I recently read the following quote from a Washington Post blog about the Digital Music Forum in New York City:

“A member of the audience then posed an pointed question: Isn’t simply being cool the secret to success? Consider Apple, for example. Napster became popular because it was considered “cool.” Now iMeem is benefiting from its cool factor.”

My answer to this questions is no… in the digital world, you should focus on utility, and cool should be the outcome. What makes technology “cool” is getting cool people to use it. And, if the service has no utility, then cool won’t help you for very long.

Now, mind you, “cool people” in the technology world that use products like Apple/Napster/iMeem aren’t the same “cool people” that spend hundreds of dollars on vintage Nikes. Even though they aren’t the same, they do share a similar quality… they are leaders in their respective groups.

So, to make you product “cool”, you need to find what motives the leaders and develop products they want to use.