Alex Pooley's Blog

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It’s been over a year since I left full time work and I’ve had the privilege of seeing business from many perspectives. I am beginning to form the conclusion that business is all about turning unpredictable circumstances in to predictable ones.

Let’s say that you sell puppies in a shopping center. You know that you will average x number of people walking in the store each day, of which you can predict y% will purchase. Though you will experience cycles, you know that some breeds will outsell others. You also have a known margin on your puppies, and you also have
predictable monthly revenue, costs, and hence profits.

The biggest hurdle facing anyone starting a business is to discover these “knowns”. You don’t know what you haven’t seen, and you will never see what you never try. And don’t assume! Measure! Test! You know what they say right.. “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me”

The biggest personal challenge is to get your feet wet. Once you’re in though, don’t hesitate or you will eventually freeze to death. Make sure that before you hop in, you set a soft budget of money and time. Spend as little money and time as possible but kick as hard as possible in every direction you can. Build channels and test.

My first mistake was to not budget my time. My second mistake was to not budget any money. You need money, and you need time. Without money, it takes too much time. Without time, you won’t make any money! ;)

My definition of business: predictable channels from your customers to a sale.

Good luck!

Here’s a slick recipe to build a niche site that delivers what people want in your niche, with little effort. I’d bet that you could find a stack of ebooks charging $27, $57, maybe even $77 for this advice.

Goal: To create an info product with little use of your time.

Setup: Do a little research to work out what niche you’re interested in targeting. You want something narrow enough that you can fill a specific need, and broad enough that there’s enough potential sales volume. Something like “beagle training” is a good idea, something like “training beagles to run through tunnel obstacles” is not.

Method:

1. Create an “above the fold” page that asks the reader to tell you specifically what information they are seeking. The goal is to acquire information from people that visit your site. Promise that in return for submitting the form, you will send them an answer and copy of your info product when you’re done.
2. Create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to the site. Let it run for at most a week, and aim to acquire around 30 questions.
3. Run off to a site like guru.com, or Elance and find an expert in your niche.
4. Record a question answer session with the expert. The questions include, and are based on, the questions that people submitted from your question page. The recording is now something that you can sell, or offer as a bonus to a complementary offer.
5. Run off to a dictation site (E.g. idictate) and get your audio interview transcribed. Now you have more fodder to sell.
6. Start to sell your goods by building a “1 page sales letter”. Use it to replace your “ask a question” page.

This is stupidly easy, but I thought it was pretty elegant. You can mold the interviews like play dough to create articles for article submission directories, marketing fodder, etc.

I heard about this method from a webinar by Jim Edwards and John Carlton. I don’t know if it really works, but if you’re in to info products you would be hard pressed to develop a more efficient process.

I’m flicking through Alexa right now and I came across Kiko’s Alexa traffic graph (included below). When I first saw the graph I noticed a sudden reversal in trend. The graph started going up very nicely, but then suddenly turned. I’ve highlighted the initial positive trend with the red support line. You can see the reversal occurring around the point where the traffic graph (in blue) crosses the red support line. I’ve shown the cross over area with the transparent pink box.

This cross over point appears to occur in April 2006. I did a quick search to see if I could find what happened during this date and I found something very interesting. Google’s Calendar service opened in April 2006! It’s then interesting to note that after about four months Kiko was for sale on eBay, which is why you see the spike. Kiko eventually sold on eBay to Tucows for $250,000. Tucows spoke with Mike Arrington from TechCrunch some time later and said they were going to white label the product and offer it to their retailer partners.

Further to this story, I found a post by Richard White who worked on the Kiko team who describes the reasons for the sale. Apparantly Kiko was sold because the team was burned out. More reasons are given throughout the post such as “adding too many features”, “30Boxes stole the calendar startup limelight”, and “no social networking component”. From my analysis I think that RIchard is incorrect. I think it’s an interesting example of how we look for reasons within our own experiences. From my own development experiences I know that I can spiral in to a mindset where I have to add “just one more feature” before I’m happy. The fact is that the market would be happy with a particular feature set, and that’s the feature set you have to provide, regardless of time constraints, internal conflicts, etc. Let me know if you know how to derive that feature set ;)

So what conclusions can be drawn from this? Stay out of Google’s path? Probably not a bad idea. From looking at the graph, Kiko were already in trouble with Google’s arrival, regardless of their internal issues. 30Boxes haven’t gone very far since they launched in February 2006, perhaps stunted by Google. But then look at services like Yedda the social answers site. Yedda are looking strong at a time when Google’s Answers service has just folded. I don’t want to pick on Richard, but it’s probably a good lesson for all of us (if you agree with my analysis of course), that an entrepreneur should always be mindful that they are there to please the market.

As an aside, I have a juicy analytical post on social networking effects coming up, so stay tuned!

• onstartups
• news.com.com
• worcester.typepad.com