Venture Kid

Top 10 Tips for How to be a Social Media Douchebag

Author’s Note: I am aware that this post may seem a little out of character in comparison to previous posts that I have written on VentureKid.com. I recently got bored and annoyed with some (only some) of what I’ve observed in the so-called social media realm on the internet. This post is how I express that benign frustration. No one (who I know) should take this post personally. Everyone else should feel free to be offended, but hopefully more amused. Admittedly I do not claim to have never followed any of these “tips.” Oh the irony… Enjoy.

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Hi, my name is Johnny Full-of-Shit. I’m 27,  and a graduate of Appleseed online virtual college and I am a Social Media ROCKSTAR (that’s right show me the follow-love @JohnRocksMajorSox on Twitter). I secretly live in my mother’s basement but make frequent references to my real life where I abscond to far away places to get drunk and prentend to sleep with good looking women all thanks to my monthly six-figure pay check from Scammer’s Inc.

Question: Are you a lazy, naive visitor whose come across my website in your desperate search to make lots of money without even lifting a cheek to fart? Well, then you’re in for a treat because this blog post is going to reveal the secret, awesome POWER of Multi-Level Affiliate Scheming Social Media Media Guru-ness. In other words, I will teach you how to be a ROCKSTAR, just like ME. Listen up:

10 ) Be immodest. Promote yourself and the “secrets” to online marketing that you know but will never quite reveal (until people buy your e-book), and do it 24/7.

9 ) Author shitty e-books (like, “How to sign up for a Twitter account and send your first tweet”), just as long as people leave their email address and pay you $13.54. Gotta love the green :: sunglasses… on :: 

8 ) Read the book “Never Eat Alone” and the “4-Hour Work Week.” Then call yourself an entrepreneur in your Twitter 1 line bio, but spice it up up with adjectives like “guru” and “extraordinaire” and, my favorite, “Rockstar.” boo yah bitches.

7 ) Be a thought-leader and create the impression that you are elite, the butter of the cream of the crop, by creating and promoting your own personal-brand-ish-nish. Trust me, people are dumb, they won’t know you were actually drunk in that photo or that you weren’t wearing pants! Thanks Photoshop.

6 ) Spam your friends on Facebook whenever you write one of your super-awesome, thought-leader-ing blog posts. Pressure them to re-post and comment it. Do the same on Twitter. Viral like a virus, oh yeah!–Cheers Malcolm Gladwell.

5 ) Diligently point out spammer comments on Techcrunch. Pointing out blatant comment astroturfing will also score you some major net-props. Damn straight.

4 ) Waste your time reading repetative blogs posts about entrepreneurs launching un-inspired startups who are only slightly more motivated than you. “What pioneers they are! What risk takers–launching a web-based business in this economy, GOLLY!”

3 ) Tweet like a douche bag. That’s right, tweet all day, everyday. Better yet, do the smart thing and set up robots to converse with people for you. You’ve got to get in the conversation, dammit!!

2 ) Make shitty top 5 or top 10 lists (remember it ’s great link bait on Digg and other social uh stuff).

1 ) Finally, be COMPLETELY un-original, but then claim it was you who wrote it or originally thought of it. Remember, recycling is good for the environment baby.

That’s all I got for now kids. Oh BTW, add me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Deliciousness, and everything else. And just so you know, I won’t accept your “add to network” request on LinkedIn since we haven’t done business together, but I’m still flattered so try it anyway.

K thx bye.

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Not sure how to network? It helps if you know how to dance.

A friend recently asked me for some tips on how to get the most out of an upcoming networking event. I thought I could give her the best, most complete answer if I took the time to formulate my thoughts into a article.

The thought of “networking” can be a scary thought if you haven’t done it before or only have a vague idea of what it means. It might conjure up thoughts of your first middle school dance where there were all these people around, but no one thought you were cool enough to dance with. Of course, networking at conference or a local event has nothing to do with the awkwardness of adolescence right? Well, there are some similarities so lets walk through it.

Step #1: Know what to you want

If believe you will get the most out of the “dance” by sitting on the sidelines and being a wallflower then that’s fine, do it, see what happens. But remember the point of a networking event is to meet people just like the point of a dance is to dance. So if you don’t dance why bother leaving home?

Let’s assume what you want is to generate leads for new job opportunities. Now get more specific than that: what sort of job are you looking for? Does geographic location outweigh the importance or whatever type of job it is? What type of job do you NOT want? What are some examples?

Defining what you want is the first step to networking success.

Step #2: Know how you’re going to get what you want

After you know what you want, you have to understand the tactics you must undertake in order to attain it. For example, one of the most important first steps you can take is to find out if there is a list of the names of individuals who will be at the event. By doing some research in advance on who will be in attendance you target 2-3 individuals who you presume have the resources to give you what you want or who can introduce you to someone who can.

Without such a list at your disposal your ship isn’t sunk, but you will have to keep focused on what you concluded from step one. To do so, prepare 2 or 3 introductory questions in advance that will help you strike up conversation with different attendees at the event. The questions should be specific enough that anyone answering them will be sure to give you the pertinent information you need to determine if the conversation is worth your time to continue having. If not, be polite, look for an exit, and then move along to the next person.

There are other fish in the sea and realize you don’t have to slow-dance with everyone.

If you meet someone who can help you, make it clear that you are interested in learning more and that they have the power to help you. Sometimes, it can be as simple as making sure to get that point across. Otherwise be prepared to show how you can help them in return, what is the benefit to them helping you? Specifically what do you have to offer?

Step #3: Act to get what you want

After you know what you want and how you intend to get it, the last step is to actually do it. Be prepared for rejection and be prepared to reject.

As you seek to “bust a move,” remember the importance of being polite, and the supreme importance of listening to other people. If you are perceptive you will be able to quickly determine what it is the other person wants. At that moment you should be thinking in your head of someone or something you know that could help that person. If you have an answer, exchange contact information and then seek to make a positive exit to the conversation. The assumption is this example is that although you could help them, that individual is unable to help you (at least, at the moment, and that should be part of the long term motivation for you to help them).

Recognize that not everyone you meet can help you and vise versa. Meeting new people is great for the fun of it, but stay focused on your goal as well.

Last Number

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Matt, I’ve got a problem with some of this advice–much of it completely self-interested. I don’t want to be like that.”

The truth is it is and it isn’t. It is in the sense that you are actively looking out for yourself and your best interests. It isn’t in the sense that you will (presumably) add value where you can and then continue along in your search for someone else where your interests are mutually aligned.

Going back to the dance example, if you’re in a crowd or people there’s bound to be a diversity of personality and physical attributes. Some you will find attractive enough to dance a number or two with, others not so much.

In life we will temporarily plug ourselves into any number of potential relationships with others. The chance for a successful outcome to those interactions is dependent on whether or not there is some sort of mutually aligned interest for both parties.

Tags: networking

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The Top 3 Most Scalable Sales Methods for Startups

How are you going to sell your web-based product or service? It’s a question that all internet entrepreneurs must ask if they are serious about turning their idea into a growing, robust business.

My current start-up, Bluesky Local, which offers a web-based, automated small business marketing service for restaurants and stores, is in the midst of making this important decision.

There are numerous sales methods that could possibly be employed. However in making this decision, it is important to consider how scalable each option is. For the purposes of this blog post, there are two definitions of scalability: labor efficient scalability and cost efficient scalability. First the former, then the latter. Labor efficient scalability requires the least amount of additional physical labor capital for every additional sales lead generated.

Here is a listing of possible sales methods for generating leads among the local business owner community in order of how scalable they are based on labor efficiency (1 is the most scalable).
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: local lead generation, online sales, sales, sales methods, sales strategy, scalability, scalable, startups

3 Comments | Posted in » sales, startups

Fire, Fire, Fire

There’s a phrase I’ve been repeating to myself lately: “Pull the trigger, Pull the trigger.” It may seem an odd thing to be repeating this phrase to oneself, but let me explain (no, I’m not looking to buy or discharge a firearm in the literal sense).

This phrase was derived from the phrase “Ready, Fire, Aim.” If you’re an entrepreneur (especially an internet-based captain of industry) you should already be familiar with this saying. In theory it means, get your product to market ASAP and refine from there. In practice it may mean, for example, “Build the damn website, launch that sucker, market that sh*t, and then go back and start tweaking and do it quick!” Excuse the language.

Recently I’ve had trouble moving from step one (”Build the damn website”) to step two (”launch that sucker”). For instance, though the Scrimple coupon website has been live for a little while now, I have recently spent too much time planning on what would happen rather than taking immediate and individual steps to launch each change as we made it. At the time I was engrossed in the thinking that, well, we’ll get all our “ducks in a row” and then launch the latest changes at once. This turned out to be taking way too long and I found myself losing motivation to continue building and programming behind the scenes.

I realized this the other day while day dreaming in Managing and Leading in Organizations at the Johnson School. Then I began to get quietly very excited, I felt a rush of adrenaline when thinking about, “What if I just launched the damn local business directory listings on the site? Granted, it would be far from complete or perfect, but the fact that I would be making that single step in the development process public would push me to work harder to rapidly improve it.”

That is what I am doing right now, the database is unpacking the business listings file up as I type this. Forget waiting until it’s a little more perfect, forget all that. I’m pulling the trigger this time. We have readied and aimed enough, now it’s all about rapid fire web development and agile marketing action:

Fire, Fire, Fire.

I’m finally understanding the importance of this and I hope you will as well in your own projects and business endeavors.

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The Laser and the Spinning Top

Kevin McGovern once said, focus is the laser to success. I believe that today and I have internalized that through hard work and many mistakes in the last few years. I realize now that in order for a start-up business to be successful a team must be relentlessly focused on doing one thing very well at any given time. Distractions must be labeled and turned down. I cannot say the same is true for larger corporate firms (after all, there is much more talent and capital available in that circumstance).

The Scrimple team was always most effective when labor and resources were focused on tackling one big task at a time. For instance, this past summer when we shifted our business from doing printable coupons online to a local discount card model. We did this in a matter of about one month. We signed over all our clients, built and launched a new website, placed orders with suppliers, and signed a contract with a local distribution partner for $2,000 immediately turning a profit.

In the past, my mistakes as the company’s leader lie in the fact that I acted less like a laser and more like a spinning top. To be a “spinning top” means to work sporadically and to re-appropriate one’s energy too often toward different projects or tasks that are not interdependent. Thus, less is accomplished than otherwise would be. For example, at the start of last summer we had a particular vision for our company and a specific path that we were headed down in order to realize it. It involved making our coupon website more scalable and viral. However we began to drift a little as we investigated other ideas, such as our coupons on a credit card concept and also with two supplementary website develop jobs for local businesses. We also spent time trying to raise capital, which was not necessary either.

Looking back on it now, those two side jobs actually provided unnecessary income for the company compared to where that effort could have been allocated. Also, we should not have been looking too intensely into the credit card idea and instead realized that we did not have the bandwidth at that moment to fully implement it. Rather we should have been focused on scaling the website by building on top of what we already had.

Success requires many mistakes, however repeating the same mistake must be avoided. Now that I have made this mistake I will strive to never again repeat it. Learn from my mistake; understand the difference been the laser and the spinning top.

Tags: entrepreneurship, focus, spinning top

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Design Issues

We’ve had some difficulties resolving cross browser display issues recently. For instance, display in Internet Explorer has been inconsistent with other, more modern browsers (Firefox, etc.). A decent percentage of our audience still uses IE6, which merits our time being devoted to this task.

One very annoying problem that I managed fix today was the IE6 float bug. For example, in IE6 when you float something to the left it will float it to the left however it will add extra margin to the left so that the div appears to  be indented by about 55px. The link in the first sentence of this paragraph provides a relatively simple work around. My hope is that browsers are moving toward a more widely agreed upon set of interpretion/display rules of the W3C spec for CSS. IE7 and FF3 seem to be a positive step forward in terms of a roughly equivalent display.

List of items to fix on the site:

1) Fix positioning of navigation menu at top of page

2) Graphical hyperlinks are not clickable in IE6 (I know…)

3) Display of divs on business page

4) Display/ orientation of divs on directory page

5) other stuff that I’ll put here later…

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Perfect Timing for a Company Offering Practical Career Advice

Today I had a chance to check out the recently launched FoundYourCareer.com. FoundYourCareer offers advice for individuals looking for a more practical approach to landing their next job. I was skeptical at first if the price of the service could possibly match the value offered after sign-up. However, I am impressed having now tried the service. I would recommend it to other current students or individuals seeking to get a leg up on how to interview and develop their interpersonal skills, among other key factors that will contribute to landing a new job.

I will give a few examples of how FoundYourCareer offers value to job seekers.

1. It has a great video clip to go with each Lesson (this was one of the first things I noticed). In each video, a member of the Found Your Career team discusses in a personal and personable way the topic of the lesson. They tend to give examples of how the knowledge applies from experience, which makes the information much easier to understand and remember.
2. The written part of the lessons, similar to the videos offer practical knowledge that can actively employed and adsorbed, whether you’re networking with people at various companies or you’re going on interviews.
3. There are over 35 lessons total and over an hour of video footage to supplement.
4. Many of the posts are written with numbers and bullet points, which make them extremely user-friendly to read through and review.

The only possible negative I could find was a lacking design. However, this could be viewed a positive as well since a minimalist design simply serves to put more of the focus on the content/product which is high quality in this case.

Overall FoundYourCareer has entered the market at the right time considering of the abismal state of the economy. There are a lot of job seekers out there and the numbers are only growing. Products like FoundYourCareer offer benevolent value in the form of career-seeking knowledge.

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Practicing Entrepreneurship

How do you become a successful entrepreneur or a better entrepreneur? You learn to practice it, and then you keep practicing it as much as possible. Entrepreneurship and skill in business are no different from learning any other trade or skill. If you want to be a great musician and you have some baseline level of innate talent and a willingness to learn, you must practice your instrument in order to get better. If you want to be a better computer science programmer you must practice the skill in order to get better. If you want to get sharpen your public speaking skills, you will not improve your ability to do so by thinking about it. You must practice it. You must get up in front of an audience as often as possible and speak.

Entrepreneurship is the same way: the more you practice the better you will get. There’s no secret formula. Depending on the type of business you are looking to create you must develop a set of general skills and knowledge. If you are starting a web-based business, you should probably learn a little bit about programming and design. If you are starting a financial services firm that manages the assets of large, private investors, you will need to refine your communication, sales, and analytical skills.

There is a wrong way to practice entrepreneurship, and that is to not practice it. By this I mean to not act, to become too mired in your own thoughts and apprehension and circular planning that you forget the fact that to accomplish anything in business you need to do two simple things: build & sell. If your business product idea is a widget, you’ve got to build it and then sell it. If you need funding to do so, you will have to raise it. If you need the help of others you will have to thoroughly communicate your ideas to potential team members and convince them to help you get stuff done, and to get the product built.

It is simple in practice but difficult to do in reality. To practice entrepreneurship you need to constantly build and sell. If you become mired in planning and forget the importance of building and selling then you unlikely to succeed. The more you practice the better you will get and the more likely you are to succeed.

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Two Farmers Speculating on Opportunity

It is unfortunate that my experiences as an entrepreneur thus far have served to make me more cynical. The upside is that my vision has become clearer and more “realistic.” Many of the most successful business individuals I know are characterized as realists rather than idealists. However idealism has some value as a positive, motivating force. There is an metaphor that accurately explains this dichotomy:

Two farmers meet in a field right as the planting season is upon them. One of them is an Idealist, the other a Realist. The Idealist remarks to the Realist, “This field is ripe. We can grow our crops in this field. We can sell them at the marketplace. We can use the money to hire farmhands and buy more land. Soon we will be like managers. Soon after that we will be the managers of managers and eventually our farm will be so large and well managed that we can retire and the business can run itself.”

The Realist is thinks for a moment and looks around at the barren brown soil. He turns to the Idealist and responds, “Yes, there is opportunity here. But in order to get to the point you describe we must first acquire the seeds and plant the crops with our own hands. We must nourish the crops as the grow and keep the insects away until they are ripe. When the time is ripe we must develop a method of transportation to get the crops to the marketplace so that we may sell them. We will have no reputation to begin with so we will have to learn ropes, we will have to find the buyers. When the season is over we must figure out our expenses to last through the Winter when inventory may be low or non-existent. In a few years perhaps we can hire some fieldhands, but they must be trained. We will have to train them. In a few more years perhaps we can earn enough to buy a new plot of land, but that may prove more difficult than expected. Yes, the opportunity that you speak of is quite out of reach from where we stand today. However, if we commit ourselves to the chores and the mundane work required of us and if we are willing learn, we can get to that place that you speak of. It may take a decade or two, but it may be possible.”

Tags: entrepreneurship, idealism, realism

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Chrometa – Time Tracking for Enterprises

Chrometa LLC

I recently spoke over the phone with Brett Owens. Brett is the CEO and co-founder of Chrometa LLC (formerly Time Tracking Buddy). Brett and his team originally positioned Chrometa as a consumer facing utility that would help users track where they spent most of their time while on their computers. However, the Chrometa team realized that it would be better to reorient the company’s product as an enterprise software application. The perception of value by business customers, for instance law firms who have become increasingly concerned with tracking billable hours, was much greater than for individual consumers.

The value for large enterprise firms is that it provides a screenshot time of what an employee is working on at different time intervals. By making the work that an employee does or does not do public to Managers and Executives, the company is able to view in the aggregate and at the micro-level how time is being spent and therefore hold employees accountable.

The choice to become a B2B company has thus far proved to be a fruitful one, as Chrometa recently finished a pilot test with a healthcare company. The company is looking to roll out version 1 of its software in the near future.

Best of luck to you Brett. In today’s attention deficit world the computer offers an endless slew of distractions; your software has the potential to help companies keep employees motivated, focused, and productive.

I will predict that time and task tracking software like this will increasingly go mainstream. The recession should accelerate its adoption. By knowing which employees are slacking and which are on task employers will be better equipped to reward and punish the behavior.

While such solutions make perfect sense for employers there may be some pushback from privacy advocates. Such software may give the negative, omnipresent feeling that one is being watched all the time at work.  Employer interests, however, are likely to prevail since all employees are employed at will and in general make concessions whereever and whenever they use company resources. Finally as work systems become increasingly mobile and the divide between work and liesure time is blurred, this shift will only increase the need by employers for this type of service.

Tags: Brett Owens, Chrometa, Enterprise Software, Time Tracking Software

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