Startups

Mar 02 2012

Why DID We Launch New Frugality?

If you’re new here, great to see you. We’d love to have you join us starting March 6 for our series of Webinars on Marketing and Business. Learn more about FORWARD:MARCH here.

If you haven’t seen Dave’s side project called New Frugality, that’s okay. We – Dave and Indigo21‘s Heather Acton – spent the month of February in beta mode – which is the way people say “soft launch” or “private open” these days.

But we’d certainly like you to come visit – it’s not a “work in progress” anymore.

Why DID We Launch New Frugality?

It might seem counter-intuitive for Dave from Area 224 to work on something so…well, “consumer-y” – but here are a couple reasons.

1. Frugality is More than “Being Cheap”

Everyone can learn a thing or two about how to best spend resources – and, I’ll be honest, I’ve learned more over the past few weeks researching articles and reading up on things people do to be frugal than I would have expected. (A month ago, there’s no way the thought of ditching shampoo would have crossed my mind.)

2. Frugality Can Help You in Business

Yes, Area 224 prides itself in sharing Marketing knowledge – but we have to get better at the whole allocation of resources thing. Who doesn’t?

Plus, if anyone claims to have all the answers, they’re wrong – and I picked up some great tips from Heather in this post on the low-cost small business.

3. And, Let’s Be Honest…New Markets

Frankly, while I’ve spent some time in consumer marketing, I can always learn more about how consumers think. What’s on the minds of shoppers? Who is looking for what, and when?

The insights from this site have already shown us what sorts of things the visitors want to know about, and what things they’re not that interested in. Expect to see more of what you actually like to read.

So, yeah, this is a self-serving blog post inviting you to visit another blog. Here’s a link to New Frugality. Thanks!

Apr 01 2011

BREAKING: Canada Launches Initial Public Offering

Also, Canada.ca to become Global Web Portal.

In a move surely to baffle global financial markets, Canada has filed with the New York Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange and the Hang Seng Index for an Initial Public Offering.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who will become CEO of Canada, LLC and Executive Vice President of its web offering, Canada.ca, could not be reached for comment.

Area 224 will of course be following this breaking tech story, and will interview any Canadian Social Media Gurus for their comments. Stay tuned.

Mar 23 2011

Sweet. Fancy. Moses.

Thanks, holler.com
Loves me some Interwebs. Want an example?

We’re not gonna mince words: we’re launching 12 Minute Marketing, and we’d love you to be a part of it.

And we’ve watched some other launches do really cool things with the “single purpose web page,” and the “viral marketing form” and other airquotes things that are so cool.

For instance, Holler.com is pretty simple/cool with what they’re doing: http://holler.com.

So cool, we thought this:

“Where can we get one?”

Ask, and a company called launchrock delivers. Though they didn’t (as far as we can tell) work on the Holler launch, they are working with the team at Zaarly (which raised cash from Ashton and Demi, and they haven’t even launched yet).

Here’s a screenshot:

Screener from zaarly.com — Thanks, zaarly.com

This DIY single-purpose viral-sharing signup thing is so awesome, we were able to set ours up in a span of 30 minutes.

Want to see it in action?

Go here: http://12MinuteTraffic.com.

Are we pumped? Beyond.

Is it cool? Yes.

Did we get a chance to mention Ashton and Demi in our post? Yes.

Does the Headline of “Sweet. Fancy. Moses.” really have anything to do with this? Yes. In fact, we’ll say it again:

Sweet. Fancy. Moses.

Mar 18 2011

Always Be

Photo Credit: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid
The line from “Glengarry Glen Ross” is “Always Be Closing.”

It’s an awesome movie. Alec Baldwin’s performance is amazing. Watch this clip, pulled from YouTube, if you haven’t seen it a million times before. (NSFW – that means “Not Suitable For Work.”)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI

A wonderful spend of 7 minutes. Baldwin’s character spells out a couple acronyms in his NSFW diatribe, including AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, part of the sales funnel that we think is dead) and the most famous, or infamous, ABC. Always. Be. Closing.

ABC should be replaced, though. As this very 80s clip from a very non-PC workplace will show you…this stuff doesn’t work anymore. Some alternative suggestions:

ABR. “Always Be Recruiting.”

Tech Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist Mark Suster pulled out a can of awesome yesterday in his TechCrunch advice to startups. And that was his point: if you as an A-List Tech Exec are not out searching for more like-minded people at all times, your business will stagnate, you’ll be relegated to the B-List, and you’ll recruit C-List players.

We have seen this time and again – and not just in technology and startups, but in all types of businesses.

The “Turf Warriors” are, IMHO, the worst – their mission is to protect their own empire, and you can see it in the type of people they hire. You may have worked for one before, you may be working for one now. Most of the time, the people they hire are lacking gravitas, or might not have top-notch skills.

Don’t go there with your own business, your own department. If you’re not hiring somebody who is, to borrow Suster’s term, “punching above their weight class,” you need to take another look at your own hiring practices.

Always. Be. Recruiting.

ABL: “Always Be Launching.”

I have been accused of having ADHD – not because I’m all over the map, but because I seem to be working on the next thing all the time.

I don’t have ADHD – I’ve been checked out for that – but I do have an addiction (of sorts) to product launches.

This is borne out of two things. One is necessity – I need to make a living, and having something new to offer clients and prospects helps me do that. Two is constant improvement – I want to see people in my circle (clients, friends, associates, whomever) make more meaningful connections that improve their business.

As a result, I am always launching.

Your next question is “what about failure?”

The beauty of having multiple product lines, service lines, things to offer clients and prospects, is this: some of them will not work. Not all of them are for everyone. But being in constant launch mode leads to more (gasp) innovation – because this thing may not be what they need, but the next thing very well may be.

Always. Be. Launching.

ABY: “Always Be Yourself.”

I have seen some awesome things happen to online friends of late – things that could never happen to me. There’s Erika Napoletano, Redhead Writing, who will be penning for Entrepreneur Magazine. There’s Paige Worthy, whose “Hire Me” page led to a gig with YouSwoop.

These particular things could never happen to me – because, well, I’m not the kind of person who writes in Erika’s style, and my story and Paige’s story are pretty different.

But other things could happen to me. And to you.

You have a voice – read this awesome post from Danny Brown – and your mission is to find that voice. You could be like the woman who digs gaming so much that you do your own web show. (Not the famous one, but a different one. One that’s more, well, you.) You could be the guy whose food truck rocks, or the gal whose jewelry rocks or the rock band that actually does rock.

But you can’t get there if your aspiration is to be somebody else.

We just went through this exercise as part of our launch (natch) of 12 Minute Marketing. We revisited our own mission statement – which keeps evolving, but it’s pretty true to the “voice” that we’ve developed over the past six months of daily blogging, and over the past 4 years of being in business.

To provide training and consulting in new media, digital media and social media that helps business owners and managers to better connect with people and sell more stuff.

Which, I think, is pretty much what we are good at doing over here at HQ.

Always. Be. Yourself.

Mar 09 2011

Startup Hospice And When Your Company Needs It

The Logo...
You brought it to life, you watched it grow. You thought it was gonna be a world-beater. But it won’t…

So now what?

We lived this – or, more accurately, Dave from Area 224 lived this – back in the middle part of the past decade, running a Web 2.0 for college admissions portal called U Sphere. We had barked up every conceivable tree, had partnerships and relationships and signed Letters of Agreement. We had students using the portal, we had customers paying us – but we knew it wasn’t going to be the Next Big Thing.

IF you’re at that point, where you just know it ain’t gonna make it, here’s some advice.

1. Gut Trumps Everything.

Smokey The Bear Says: “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.”

Dave Says: “Only You Can Shut It Down.”

On the surface, our case was pretty simple: we started a business, built a product, got customers, and were looking for the right dance partners. We found them! We pursued these chaps, courted each other, and had the agreement in principle that said we’d run their US Operations in exchange for a piece of a larger pie.

Presented at face value, it sounds pretty awesome, right? I mean, we had brokered our little startup into becoming the crown jewel of a multi-million-dollar, multi-national enterprise.

Dave’s Gut: This is a bad idea.

A dangerous combination of arrogance, hubris, positioning, valuation and international intrigue (clandestine meetings, weird stuff at customs, etc.) doomed this deal from the start. So, when it fizzled, it wasn’t a bad thing – even if it meant the company’s wounds couldn’t be healed.

2. Get the Right Advice.

One awesome thing about building a startup is this: meeting people who are wicked smart and for whom ALMOST every idea turns to gold.

Meeting one of these folks and then getting the chance to sorta kinda consider them a mentor was phenomenal. Getting the chance to call them up and spend 10 minutes walking through what was going on was priceless.

AND the one question they asked that stuck with us?

“What’s your gut telling you?”

Another thing about advice: don’t ask someone too close to you, as they’ll tell you what you want to hear. Don’t ask someone for whom emotion trumps logic: they’ll tell you to keep going, even when you know you really shouldn’t. You want the kind of mentor who will say things like “do you really wanna do this?” And it’s ideal to find someone who has been on both sides of the equation – the ones who know when it makes sense to retool and when it’s better to cut losses and move on.

There’s also the flipside here…

3. Get the WRONG Advice.

True Story: We have a Bizarro Mentor. Every one of this person’s ideas has been an abysmal failure; and every time we say “hey, we should launch something that does a, b and c” we wait for their advice. “You should totally quit your job and do that!” We translate that through the Bizarro Filter and discover that it is a piss-poor idea.

Make sure that person has a glass half-empty philosophy. And that it’s someone who is free to advise you on just about everything to do with a startup but has never worked for one before.

Find out who your Bizarro Mentor is – you have one, you just haven’t identified them yet. Find them, ask them.

4. Start Working on Something Else NOW.

Here’s hubris again: it WILL work, believe in your dreams, don’t give up, you’re gonna make millions.

At the second reality starts to set in, you need a Plan B. And Plan C and Plan D won’t hurt either.

If that Plan B is finding a real job, great. (We tried that back in the day.) Plan C, though, made more sense – leveraging our know-how of this social networking universe (since ours WAS a social network, after all) led us to launch Area 224.

5. Don’t Assign Blame, Even to Yourself.

After ripping the band-aid off, seeing the old business in the rearview has been liberating. Yeah, I was ultimately responsible for the demise of the business – and, while I learned from it, I don’t blame myself one bit.

Pointing fingers all around the universe doesn’t do anyone any good either. Woulda, shoulda, coulda won’t help.

It’s okay if the end is near. Really. You did this once – you were able to get it past the launch phase and turn it into something. This makes you marketable.