Next Tuesday, the 20th of July 2010, there is going to be a global meetup for Jason Calacanis’ This Week In Startups podcast.  I started watching the series after Jason interviewed DHH.  Jason appears to push a lot of people buttons, but I have to say, I’ve been really enjoying the podcasts.  The guy is genuinely entertaining and there are few good insights to be had as to what to do and what not to do when building an online business.

The one previous Global Meetup went down fairly well.  It seems like a good opportunity for people to pitch their business, regardless of where they are, right to the heart of silicon valley.  This month’s event has an international focus and when I saw that no-one was organising the London leg of the show, I thought I’d lend a hand.  We have a great sponsor TheFlyingBurrito.co.uk on board, and so far there are about 20 people interested in coming along.  I have about 10 people interested in pitching on the night. The format will be as follows:

5.30:  Brief introduction and thanks to our sponsor The Flying Burrito.

5.40: Pitch #1 + scoring

5.55: Pitch #2 + scoring

6.10: Pitch #3 + scoring

6.25: Pitch #4 + scoring

6.40: Pitch #5 + scoring

6.55:  Announce our winner

7.00:  Link up with live podcast + streaming of the show on u-tube

8.00:  Wrap up + drinks next door.

The scoring will consist of asking the audience to rate the presenters pitch, and concept idea. We’ll (roughly) average the results and mark each person accordingly.   The person with the highest score will go forward on to present during the show.

If you would like to come along – register here.  Drop me an email if you’d like to present.  There is a £5 attendance fee payable on the night.

Why am I doing this?  Well, to be honest, I’ll be heading state-side in a couple of weeks, and I thought it’d help raise my profile a little, so when I get there, I might get to hit the ground running in terms of meeting some interesting folk.  Lets see if it works.

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.

My favorite book, The Four Hour Work Week, extols the virtues of outsourcing – but it wasn’t until this weekend that I had met someone who had seemed to master it. On Wednesday we will have an introduction to outsourcing work to lower cost economies. This simply means using the internet to find people who can at a lower cost than is often possible here in Ireland. It is sometimes described as geoarbitrage. I personally have been outsourcing various tasks throughout the years and have made my fair share of mistakes. There will be a panel of people there ready to share their experience and we will cover

• What tasks can be oursourced?
• Which websites to use?
• A walk-through of outsourcing a job
• How to specify a job correctly
• What sort of savings can be made?
• What are the common mistakes?

Enough food makes you happy.
Enough booze makes you merry.
Enough time lets you relax.
Enough sunshine makes you brown.
Enough exercise makes you energetic.
Enough friends keep you company.
Enough travel makes an open mind.

Why don’t business plans shoot for enough money? Fresh from the excellent bizcamp.ie I was struck by how many people there were stuck on investment as a model for building their business. Along with investment comes almost inevitable gesticulation when it comes to market size and potential revenue generated.

Is it not cool to generate enough money so you can have enough of all of the above?

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.

The second fully fledged automated income session convened last night. The format was less school-room like this time around and there was more opportunity to learn from people in the room. In particular, Simona Rusnakova from 3R Sales and Marketing presented on how to write an ebook. While I had bought the odd ebook online – it wasn’t something I knew a whole lot about but it set more than a few cogs whirling away in my head. In particular – it is something we will kick off in relation to the piehole project over the next six months.

You can check out Simon’s slides below.

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I was lucky enough to see Keith Cunningham speaking in Dublin a few weeks ago. Keith is an American multi-millionaire entrepreneur who lists amongst his past businesses everything from dry-cleaning to cable television outfits. He went from being worth over a 100 million to bankruptcy in the 90’s and claims to be the inspiration for Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad”. He is the type of Texan that really could fill a ten gallon hat but is more mellow than maniacle. His current mission in life, together with his pretty young wife Sandy, is to educate would be entrepreneurs on the path to riches.

As a wanna-be rich entrepreneur myself – I was glued to every word. Although he may not be MBA professor material – he undoubtedly has a firm grip on the mind of an startupper. About half way though his presentation – he began to debunk some of the mantra’s professed by the Rich Dad crew. Keith started off his training career with Kiyosaki but its obvious there was a parting of ways at some stage. In southern tones, he started to dismantle the concept of “passive income”. In his own words he described the concept as ‘monumentally stoopid’.

I have to admit – my heart skipped a little when I heard him say this at first. I’ve been harping on about creating automated passive incomes for more than a year now and to hear someone with that kind of track record come out against the concept had me wondering. Of course- it was maybe more of a headline grabbing technique than it may first appear. Keith talks about leveraging your effort rather than creating a passive income stream. There is always work associated with money flowing into your bank account. At the very least there are accounts that need to be signed off. Of course – at the beginning there is far more than that to be done. Creating a passive income requires a massive effort. Like trying to manually push a fairground carousel into action – you need every ounce of energy to begin with. Even when the edifice is slowly making circles, you still need to keep an eye on it – pushing the odd horse as it floats by to keep the momentum up.