There was a strong attendance at this months ‘mastermind’ forum. The room at the Quality Inn was just about big enough and there were a few new faces. We seem to be getting into our stride now and there was a good mix of attendees. We started off with an overview of show4training from Helen Tonetti. Helen explained the state of play for what is, by any standards, an ambitious project showing good signs of progress. Deciding to dump what might be considered to be a more traditional business in favour of seeking fortune online shows that there is good appetite to build new types of business online which don’t rely on huge helpings of capital to get started.

New to the group was Ana from Event Elephant who had some great contributions in the evaluation section of the forum. Des from WithU also made his first appearance.

What stood out at this event was a review of our first ’sprint’ event. A sprint is a small project of about 40 hours of work undertaken between meetings. In this case, Simona, Priscilla, Niall and myself kicked off by trying to come up with an intellectual property product to be sold online. Niall works as a voice-over actor and the plan was to find out of coypwrite material online, record it and sell the result online. It was inspired by an idea an old friend of mine had seen work successfully for printers off-line. We worked up a project plan …

The idea was to create a product that could generate an income long after we had finished spending our fourty hours on it. We had an initial meeting to decide on what material we would record. We were mostly working from titles found at http://www.gutenberg.org/. An initial plan was to chose of the popular self-help books like ‘The Prince’. We soon figured out that a book on world domination written by an italian might not go down all that well in an Irish accent. Instead, Simona did some research on popular search terms that would suit an Irish accent, such as ‘leprechaun’ and ‘banshee’. There was good traffic for these keywords so we chagned tack and selected a few old irish fairy tales.

Recording the stories themselves proved to be the most time consuming part of the exercise. We had a final project meeting on the night before the mastermind to try and pull everything together into a sellable product. The result was www.irish-story.com. How much money will we make? That is hard to say until some traffic has built up. We did at least get something up and running with not a lot of effort. Its just a question of how long it will take to recoup that effort.

So what shortcuts did we take? Well I guess you’d have to be there find out. Most of the project went according to plan apart from the fact that we had to abandon plans to sell the book on iTunes as only audible.com is allowed to supply books to the Apple company.