the goose

I was pretty late to the twitter scene but I was convinced that it was going to be huge.  About 5 months ago I put together @agtweet as an exercise in getting my head around it all.  I had this marketing plan and I thought I’d review how things went.

First up it might be worth mentioning that it appears as though twitter take up in Ireland is slowing.  For the last three months I’ve been tracking new accounts and there seems to be a downward trend although the first months data could be skewed because I was busy finding all the new people. Read the rest of this entry »

@dcurtis made an excellent point this week on twitter.

People think Google is a software company. It’s not. It’s a services company. Advertisers are the customers; you are the product.

It got me thinking about how its easy it is to misconceive and how those misconceptions can be disastrous when it comes to nurturing your cash-flow.  Pricing is one thing that I’ve misconceived for years.

Supermarkets, shops, airlines and pretty much every consumer business sets the price for its products.  It might be easy to assume that they are in control of the price.  In reality  – they are not – we are. Read the rest of this entry »

There is nothing that drives me up the wall more than chasing money for which honest time has already been spent. I love it when I can get paid up front. The only trick is, especially in Ireland, people love to put payment on the long finger. So what is the secret to getting paid up front, in full?  I don’t fickin know, but here are three rules of thumb:

1. The customer has be able to see exactly what they are going to get before they buy.  Think about it.  You only pay for things up front when you are certain that the product is going to deliver what it promises.  A Sacha Barron Cohen film guarantees to gross you out.  A grocery store cookie guarantees to give you a sugar rush.  This is the biggest reason why you just can’t get away with charging up front for consultancy work.  It is hard to predict an accurate outcome.
2. Guarantee:  If the cookies don’t give you a sugar rush or moreover are out of date – you can get them exchanged or refunded.  I’m not sure if the same is true for a Sacha Baron Cohen film, but you get the idea.  There must be some kind of guarantee.  In effect this is why customers don’t pay up front.  Not paying before delivery is their own inbuilt form of guarantee.  If the service is that out of whack with whatever they expected, they can just withhold payment. Read the rest of this entry »

What does your average voiceover artiste and a leprechaun have in common?

Answer: they both know how to avoid getting found.

If you catch a Leprechaun, he has to give you his pot of gold. As a result, Leprechauns are secretive little fellows.  One was however once caught by a young farmer. The farmer couldn’t believe his luck. Demanding his pot of gold, the Leprechaun reluctantly pointed to a tree in a forest under which the gold could be found. The farmer tied a red ribbon around the tree and headed off to get a shovel so that he could dig up his new found wealth. Read the rest of this entry »

Index style websites are the proven model for generating solid cash-flows online.  Daft, MyHome, RevaHealth, Maybefriends.com and Google have all proven the model.  Collect together a searchable collection of homes/people/clinic or chics and you can make money from it.  Estate agents, dentists and horny teenagers have doling out to get included in these services for years.

It makes sense. These sites help you get paid/laid.  Well worth a few bucks.

But what next?  I’ve spent the evening playing around with the excellent Spotify.  For me, this excellent little app really marks the true demise of the traditional music industry as it was known.  I’ve been enjoying all the music I can eat for FREE. It makes sense.  The cost of producing and marketing music is dwarfed by the potential for sales.  The music industry used to have a free ride – recording once and reproducing the material under copyright n times.  What has happened is that market forces have caught up.  Bands now make money from live events and merchandise.  They are back to selling time – albeit very very well paid for time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve only taken 8 weeks worth of Spanish lessons while in my life.  At that is was mostly because the teacher was hot and my pubescent mind hadn’t figured out that hot 30something spanish teachers are never gonna fall in love with a pimply teenagers.  It’s kind of ironic that Benos Entonces offered a bunch of expats a free ride on their series of
Spanish learning videos in return for a review.  I say ironic because they have cunningly figured out that the horny teenager in us all never really goes away and using sex to distract you from the fact you are learning a language is a winning strategy.

The series comes in a variety of formats but I went through the lessons on my ipod.  This was pretty easy to do – I just dragged them into my itunes and low and behold 30 odd innuendo filled episodes were ready to roll.  I had in my mind that I’d zip through them over a spare weekend but as it turns out they are fairly hard work.  Thankfully, the protagonists, an English bloke and his hot Argentine professor manage to keep your interest with a selection of vaguely titillating topics while still covering the basics.  You could in fact be excused for thinking it was a primer on how to deploy pigeon-Spanish chat up lines to the fine art of getting you leg over.

Each video consists of a ‘magic white board’ which offer a kind of subtitling system on steroids.  The teach, Jimena, speaks only in Spanish and her words are displayed on screen with English subtitles underneath.  I really don’t have much Spanish at all and from the get go it was tricky to keep up.

Between the ‘magic whiteboard’ and the questions asked in English by the English bloke I managed to figure most of it out.  Having said that, it takes a while to get used to reading the Spanish and listening at the same time.  It’s bloody tricky to read the Spanish and English and still pay attention to what is going on at the same time.

I guess this is how the Argentines speak in the wild so it is probably no harm to just push yourself and try to keep up with the lessons.  By the time you get to lesson 9 or so you can pretty much get everything that is being said.  The magic whiteboard also colour codes the text so that you can easily see which are verbs, nounes etc.  Again, you don’t really get the hang of this at the start but eventually it becomes kind of handy.

I would certainly recommend the series to anyone seeking to improve their aural understanding of Spanish while covering basic concepts.  It is a lot less boring than a text book, probably more fun than your own interactions with a Spanish tutor and at the very least you’ll brush up on your pickup techniques.

Adrian Mole might have have been on to something.  Measurement seems to be all the rage.  So why all the focus?

It comes down to this.  Growing our cashflow is basically a monotenous task.  We try out various things in an attempt to find new ways of growing our income.  New sales strategies, blogging, calling, networking are all thrown into the mix.  It is fun.  Finding out what works is fun.  The trick is – once you have found out what works, these tasks become boring.  The initial rush of blood with the first sales fade.  It is down to plain old repetition.

Repetitive tasks bore the bejesus out of me.  I prefer to call them habits.  Habits form the progress.  Successful bloggers post regularly.  Social-pop stars tweet regularly.  Fit people train regularly.  Smart people do the crossword etc.

The truth be told that most of the activities or habits we have that grow Piehole are not really web related.  With all that in mind I’ve put together this simple tool for tracking non-webby activities online.  You can see it in action at www.piehole.ie/event_stuffer/event_stuffer.html.  It is basically a form that lets us pump our own events into Google Analytics so we can track over time what we have been up to and what is working.

So why bother?

• I find it kind of motivating to see a spike in revenue that co-encides with a load of outbound customer service calls.
• We can design custom analytics reports showing correlation between marketing activity and site performance.
• Ideally, when it comes to selling Piehole, it will be a great sales tool to actually have a demonstration of what works in black and white.
• Over time we can really see which habits work and which are worth dumping.

So for now it is back to the grunt work (I mean habit forming).

It has been just over a month since we arrived in Buenos Aires.  While steak, wine and weather had a definite impact on our decision to move – the cost of living, in general, is what swung it.  Simply put our goal is to earn more than we spend without selling our time.

We have developed a modest cashflow mainly via our Piehole website but pumping it up to the level required to support the two of us in Dublin was daunting.  Instead we reduced the cost of our lifestyle by shipping out.  Our biggest worry was that life down here really wouldn’t be as cheap as expected and we’d end up crawling back to Dublin looking for jobs somewhere.  Now the numbers are in and I’m pretty happy with the story so far.

The figures are counted in Euro.  So what exactly has all this bought us?

Accomodation: Well it includes accommodation in a pretty upmarket part of the city (think Portabello with more restaurants). We have a 2 bed place, newly refurbished with high ceilings etc.  It is hard to equate it to Dublin but I’d estimate something similar would come in around the €1,600 a month mark.  The only other difference would be that the place is furnished to a much higher standard than I’ve seen in the Dublin rental market and includes all bills.

Eating out: We’ve had a total of 46 meals out over that time including brekkies, lunches and dinners.  Your typical brekky will cost about €4 for two people including coffee, fresh orange juice and croissants (or medialuna as they call them here).  Lunch normally comes in around €12 for two for a pretty standard Jamon + Queso (ham and cheese sandwich with drinks etc).  The dinners are where it gets pretty good value for money.  €20 will buy you all the cow you can eat along with some decent wine and a desert or two per couple.  There are of course places you can spend more but the most we have managed to spend (and we try, believe me) is €30 for a meal for two.  I had heard that the food was bland here but I really have no complaints.  Finding a decent salad is a little difficult but carnivores are in some kind of meat filled heaven.

Wine: There of course really decent wine deals to be had.  Something better than your standard Spar bought €12 bottle of Concaha y Torro will come in about €4.  The most expensive bottle I’ve seen in an upscale wine shop here goes for €40.

Clothes: We haven’t bought a hell of a lot of stuff here but the quality seems excellent.  Priscilla found some very funky dress jewelry and there are a tonne quality clothes shops.  The quality of design in BA is excellent and this shines through in the clothes selection available.

Groceries: We only really did one big shop which bought about 18 meals.  If you want to – you can eat very cheaply but fruit and veg is still a little pricey.

Spanish + Travel: Included in our budget is a private Spanish tutor three times a week as well as internal flights to the other side of the country.  The flights cost about what you might be happy to pay for in Europe, mile for mile, but there of course cheaper ways to get around.

All of that might not mean a lot.  In summary though – I’m more than happy with progress so far.  As a rule of thumb I’d say its about a third as expensive to live down here as in Dublin.  I do feel as though we have managed to free our time and the sensation is fantastic.  Of course, the question now becomes – what next …

I’ve been a little nervous about getting out and about in the Buenos Aires business community, especially with my still very naescent command of the langauge. I’m glad I headed over to Areatres last night however to hear Frank Almeida talk about how he turned a hobby into a business that now supplies McDonalds, Carrefour and dozens of other Argentine big name brands.

Sugar and Spice started off 7 years ago as a preserve export business but while jam started to go out of fashion, a sideline cookie business started to pick up. Frank’s background in corporate sales obviously forms the backbone of their success. Having initially supplied a few local providers, when McDonalds approached them they actually had to turn the international behmoth away for lack of production capacity. Interestingly McD’s took an interest in the Chicago born entrepenuer and invited him in to explain his plans for future growth. “They literally saved me from making the biggest mistake of my life” Frank told us as he explained how the management in McDonalds helped to edit the designs for what was to become an 800sq m. production facility in the heart of Bunos Aires.

In the early days it was all about building client lists and calling them weekly to see if he could supply product to grocery stores, supermarkets and local newsagents. As time went buy and demand picked up he had to classify the clients by size as it became too much of a strain to call every single customer. The top clients got a weekly call, while bi-weekly and monthly clients got less attention. Nowadays the clients tend to call him but there is still a lot of face to face meetings to keep the ‘old fashioned’ customers happy. “When I stopped calling around to a few stores, I noticed a dip in sales”.  He took on a sales rep to help keep in touch with customers while he turned more of his attention to keeping things running smoothly back at base.

I was fascinated by the the idea of the cookie business because the third party stores provide such an excellent sales channel. When I first saw Levi Roots receive funding on Dragons Den I began to realise what a wonderful business supplying food to supermarkets could be. The value of each purchase is small but it repeats and creates a beautiful cashflow.  Convincing our clients to upgrade or sign up can feel like a hard won battle, person by person, but in this sector, once you are on the shelves, the product literally sells themselves.

If only there was a way to put a website on a supermarket shelve and have people come along pick up copies. Of course there are drawbacks. Getting paid is getting a little trickier than it was as with all businesses that invoice rather than accept payment upfront. He had no regrets though and when asked if he would sell his product online he made it quiet clear he was happy to let his customers deal with the end customers. A short lived cookie home delivery catalogue soon got the boot when he found himself trapsing the streets of Buenos Aires trying to find the house he was due to deliver 2 packets of cookies too.

Branding seems to be the other key to success. While early on, the supermarkets looked for their own branding, now the Sugar and Spice name has established itself. Supporting a number of local charities that Frank himself is involved with no doubt helps to re-enforce this brand. This brand found its beach head market in the local expat community.  Sponsoring local meetups helped to establish demand and Sugar & Spice still sponsor the sweet table at local events to this day.  For the moment there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of competition for his ‘premium’ cookie. Consumers seem happy to pay up to three times as much for his slickly packaged product as for the cheaper competition.

What I took most away from the talk was undoubtedly how ‘work a day’ they’re success had been. It was obvious that a lot there had been a wide range of marketing activities used over the years, not all of them successful, but in reality it was all about gradually building up the business day by day rather than coming up with some kind of master plan for world domination.

There is still plenty of room for expansion in Buenos Aires but Frank hopes to expand his line abroad in the coming years.