the goose

There is a fatal flaw in Google analytics for anyone running an online business today.  The flaw is it only allows you to measure the amount of traffic on your site, perhaps your income, and your ad spend.  This is no big suprise, Google makes their money from your ad spend.  However, Adwords is likely to be only part or none of your marketing spend.  We actually don’t use it at all.

What Analytics does show however is that there is a lot of power in visualising your statistics.  As many bloggers will tell you, the coloured graphs help to keep the motivation up on those long cold lonely nights when you think no-one really cares.

Much the same goes for building your online cash-flow.  Sometimes it is hard to see the wood for the trees and having up to date accurate info helps to keep going through the dark times.

That is why I’ve mocked up what I think are the key metrics I’d like to see in my own dream analytics account.

At the top I’ve put outbound and inbound emails and calls.  I’ve got a hunch that these two metrics most closely predict our income in any given month.  In fact I know that getting on the phone is the single most effective thing I can do to drum up income.  On the other hand, it is an aversive task.  Clearly being able to see how calling impacts on revenue helps to get stuck in and start chatting to people. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been plugging away at the old Español for a couple of months now.  It is not so hard as languages go but there is still a certain amount of pointing going on while ordering dinner in a restaurant.  One of the big differences between English and Spanish are reflexive verbs.  For example, the Spanish don’t say “I like icecream”, they say “Icecream likes me”.

Me gusta helado.

Not everything is reflexive.  Only certain verbs and you just have to learn which are and which are not.   There is a list of reflexive verbs but I think one is missing.

To be worth

I’ve been playing around with different pricing points for AgTweet this week and the problem is that although we’re used to reading the price of stuff on labels, pricing is reflexive and so is value.  Its impossible for anything to be worth €10.  It can only be worth €10 to somebody. There is a broad range of people who use agtweet from students to IT geeks and the trick will be in coming up with price points for each.  In setting a price all I am hoping to do is guess the price that will be good value to enough people to make the service fly.  Its a bit of a cath-22 situation.  Price too high and too few sign up.  Price to low and you end up sponsoring the whole thing.  Decisions, decisions.

Getting whatever you want really isn’t that hard.  You just gotta stay focused while everyone else has gets bored and moves onto to something else.  Its true for property development, software development and getting good at pretty much anything.  Malcom Gladwell reckons that all it takes to become truly world class at something is to spend 10,000 hours practicing it.  Of course bugger all people can hold their attention on something for 10,000 hours.  Even swimwear models lose their appear after 10 minutes or so.

Recently I’ve been a little more distracted than normal – so in an effort to become a little more focused I started a new project.  You got it.  Don’t worry though – this one was a quickie.  I set up http://twitter.com/dailyfocus.  Its a twitter bot that simply asks “how much revenue did you add today?” at about 16:30 Irish time every day.

Its just a little reminder for myself that really all I gotta do is stay focused on day to day revenue and the rest will follow.  You can follow it too and join me and 4 other Eastern Eurpean girls looking for love.  Of course, its kind of like admitting you aren’t focused.  Then again, unless your a concert pianist, you probably are.

I saw this table in David McWilliams’, The Pope’s Children, a few years ago.  It made me sick.  There nestled in the middle of the ‘potential to generate their own income’ column was me, an IT worker.  It looks slightly dated now though.

So what has changed?

Restricted capital: Builders need capital to work with but web businesses typically don’t need a lot of financial capital to get started.

Focus on costs: It is a great time to buy that house in Dalkey but not a great time to be building one.  There is a downward pressure on prices.  Software innovation is often about pushing costs down – a popular proposition right now.

With that in mind I’m proposing a change to the table that will take place in the coming years.  Lets hope it catches on.

While listening to the Global Business BBC podcast a couple of weeks ago, I heard the author of What They Teach You in Harvard Business School.  He said something that struck a cord with me.

“Comparison is the death of happiness”

I think he’s right and I put together this poll to demonstrate why.

I saw this tweet from @kevin_noonan this morning and it hit a nerve.

So how would this apply to building ‘lifestyle design’ (if anyone has a better description for this, I’m wide open to suggestions).

The Rules of the Game: In my case, this is that I want to have hundreds of people paying me tens of euro a month until I earn more than I spend without selling my time.  Other games you can play include, earn 4x the national minimum wage and invest 20% of income for 15 years until financially free or find a job you love and do it until you die. The good news is that there are new games you can play all the time – or even come up with your own.

Set the Stakes: To me this means, what am I willing to spend in terms of capital. I don’t necessarily mean financial capital.  This could mean the amount of time I’m willing to invest or the amount of effort I’m happy to spend.

Quitting time: How do you know its working?  For me this is all about measuring progress.  Setting a clear, well set goal and breaking it down to weekly or monthly objectives.

Carry on.

You can recognise a successful business because it has

• at least a €500,000 turnover
• 3 or more employees (with preferably 1 managing the other two and so on)
• an operating margin somewhere between 50% and 10%
• a Christmas party
• HR contracts
• titles
• Hours of work

I admire these businesses.  They provide employment, structure and meaning to people and help the world go around.  The only problem is, I don’t want to run one.

I’m more interested in spending less than I earn while not selling any time.  With that in mind I’m dumping term building a business in favour of developing cash-flows.  As for a title, I tend to stick with programmer but privately I try to think along the lines of an investor.

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 »

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 »

There are several things that are hard to get used to in Argentina. First up is the fact that you can forget about finding somewhere to eat before 9 in the evening. Secondly it still kind of knocks my socks off when said meal out doesn’t require a mortgage extension. Finally – it is the language.

We’ve been batting away at it with a private tutor, podcasts, online training videos, books and video tutorials for a while and LangaugeBob was something I was keen to give a whirl. It is a great idea and I was kind of surprised to see that the company behind it is actually in Galway. Not that people in Galway don’t have great ideas of course.

LanguageBob is a plugin for your browser that splices Spanish/French/German etc words into the webpages you read.  The idea is that it helps you to build your vocabulary while browsing the web.  You can mostly figure out what the words are by context and in this way you can build up the range of words you know.

Great idea although you are out of luck if you want to use the Plugin on a Mac.

Damn.  Rather than mosey on and do something more profitable I then took it upon myself to right this outragous descrimination against FireFox using Mac users and rolled my own Spanglish script for firefox.  To install the script drag the Spanglish link to the top of your browser and hit it.  You should see a little sea of yellow words pop up where a Spanish word has been interpolated into your browser.  Fun.

This got me thinking. Stephen Downey recently pointed me towards the excellent Software by Ron blog.  Ron proffers a four step process to finding a profitable niche.

1. Market
2. Marketing
3. Aesthetic Third
4. Functionality a Distant Fourth

I’m not so sure how far behind the others functionality comes.  I was able to knock together something not a million miles away from their product in a few hours.  A polished execution can create some barrier to this kind of competition.  He does however emphasise a point that makes a lot of sense to me.  First you gotta find the market – then design your marketing around them.  Typically I spent about 8 hours putting together this Spanglish button but I hadn’t really thought about how you would market something like this.  Then I realised what LanguageBob are doing right.  They are already in a thriving marketplace – namely the FireFox plugin directory from where people can find their product and use it.  Of course is a marketplace is too crowded then this doesn’t help you much.

So who would you sell this product to?  Well – people like me is a good start – newly minted English speakers in foreign countries.  Expat forums might be a good start.  Perhaps directly to Schools?  After that perhaps teaming up with other language product providers?  All in all it is a toughie and perhaps demonstrates to myself how even though the cost of creating products like these (and mine) – the marketing costs seem to be pretty much the same as ever.