the goose

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.

I really like the Bizcamp concept. I have met some great people through it and the grass roots feel makes the advice proffered that much more believable.  On the other hand, I think the presentations can be even better.  Specifically, and selfishly, I’d like to see less …

• talk about funding / support ‘grants’:  Most businesses are not suitable for funding.  Biznik send me an email recently claiming than less that 1/1oth of a percent of their surveyed businesses had venture funding.  The funding industry loves these type of events but it can be overdone.  While funding is great for some it is a worrying distraction for most at a time when really it should be all about sales.
• ‘professionals’ pimping pro services: I’m all for selling but I’d actually rather get my accountancy advice from another entrepreneur (eugh – I hate that word) than someone who makes their way in the world be selling hours.

and more …

• The nuts and bolts of business: Rather than a panel discussion on how to raise money – lets have a panel discussison of entrepeneurs on the nuts and bolts of business (sales, accountancy solutions, dealings with the reveneu etc).  Already successful business people how have managed to crack some of the boring every day business or making a buck.
• Guerilla tactics: Personally  – I’m not so interested in what I should do to build a successful business.  I’m more interested in what I can do. I want to hear case studies and examples of how people managed to get the most out of the system or pull off a sales coup by using a little inginuity.  There should be a type of parliamentary privilege applied so that people don’t need to watch their P’s and Q’s too much.
• Debates: Debates are great for pulling out little gems of advice.  How about funding vs bootstrapping or building a business vs building a lifestyle.

Of course – I can’t be there for this years event but if I can’t spout supposed advice from a stage I can at least do it from here.

Pop down to your local Spar.  Look at the wine on offer.  The majority of it is betwee €8 and €12.  There might be one or two for €5 and a couple for €16, but the majority lies somewhere in the middle range.  Have you ever wondered how wine which has come from so far and near, from France to South Africa to Australia, should all settle down to this narrow band?  I have.  I blows my mind that even though the South African Pinotage had to be shipped from another hemisphere it still costs roughly the same as the French Cab Sav.  Is it a massive co-incidence?  

No.  The reason is – the customer gets to chose what price to pay.  Its true for wines and it is true for web-apps and websites.  The value of one wine over another is purely subjective and it is up to whoever has the moula in their pocket at the time to decide how much of it is worth handing over.  As merchants, we don’t really have any control over that.  All we have control over is the amount of value we chose to offer.  So when it comes to pricing, here are the things I always try to implement.

1. 9 buck starting price: Offer a few bucks for something basic.  For consumers this should be around the €9 /month range.  It is a table wine for every day consumption.  For business’s that should be more like €25 a month.  No matter what the product, these are the psychological pressure points for consumers / business consumers.  The latest example of this style of pricing I have come across was for EasyTweets.
2. Up-sell by adding value: Above the basic plan, offer more value in return for a higher spend.  You can’t control how much your customers think your service is worth but you can control  how much value you can add at each price point.  On level up from the basic plan will be the €19 a month for consumers and €49 for ‘business consumers’.   
3. Look for ways to build in some kind of obsolescence:  Blinksale, BackMeUp and Basecamp all use this model.  After you start using more than x number of invoices/megabytes/projects a month you need to upgrade to the next price point.
4. Always have a plan you don’t think anyone would buy:  Because you don’t know how much value your customer will place on your service, always have a top plan or price you don’t really expect anyone to buy.   In any restaurant, the most popular bottle of wine will be the second least expensive.  This is because guys don’t want their dates to think they are cheap – so they don’t want to buy the cheapest bottle on offer.  At the same time, they normally are cheap, so they buy the next one up.  In a similar way, some people don’t want to appear flash – and will feel it more ‘reasonable’ to buy your middle plan as long as there is something above it.  Of course there will be others out there (about 5%) who have to have the best plan available.  Don’t forget to come up with a way to take their money and deliver a suitable level of value. 

On the Piehole project we added a top plan for almost €2,000 a year  - not really expecting anyone to buy it.  When we did add the plan however – two things happened.  

1. Sales of our middle plan went up.
2. Two people actually bloody bought the top one.

We are delighted that we were able to deliver enough value that someone would consider giving us that much of their hard earned cash.  As it turns out – they both made their money back in the space of a couple of weeks.  

I’ve been spending too much time fricking around with twitter.  I’m almost hooked and almost ready to jack it all in.   I digress.  I checked out a list of the most popular twitter users and CNN in particular.  You can check out a graph of the rise in the number of users.  I was a little suprised to see that these graphs (all the ones I checked anyway) were a straight line.  I thought there might be a exponential rise in twitter friends.

I was thinking along the lines of the MLM pitches I’ve sat through.  In brief, the pitch is, “you get five customers, they each get five and so on” until you have thousands in your ‘downline’ all paying a commission.  Of course, out of your first five, probably none will go on to find other customers and you end up trying to sign up a hell of a lot more in search of the guy/gal who will take it to the next level.  Hence the straight line.

Irish-Story.com was one of the first sprint events we ran. We set off on what proved to be a rather ambitious project – to record and sell mp3’s of traditional Irish Stories online. As we had a voiceover actor on our team we knew that we would be able to produce something good. We certainly didn’t understand how long it would take to put the stories together. Several months later we finally had a set of four high quality stories – almost in time for Paddy’s day.

Our original strategy was to optimise the site for web traffic and climb the google rankings. This hadn’t provided any sales at the time but as Patricks Day came around we steadily started to see our traffic rise.

A few days before the big day itself we changed the template from a wordpress style blog with about 8 pages of content to a straight ’sales letter’ style single page. There was a mess up during this process and the analytics code was dropped from the site for a day or so as you can see from the dip in traffic. It did pick up however and pretty quickly upon changing the copy we had a sale – $9 worth. Not great but at least this project had finally achieved some sales. Alas, although traffic climbed, and eventually ebbed after Paddy’s day, that was the only sale we had. We did have a 14 people sign up for the newsletter and these might provide a sale down the line.

I just got asked what did and did not work when building up www.piehole.ie. Here is what came to mind in my reply.

Hey Derek

Thanks for getting in touch. What did and did not work is my favorite topic. I could go on for ages. I was actually thinking this morning that it would be great to share stories with people to see if we could all figure out what works. The highlights for me would be.

WHAT DIDN”T WORK

* Sucking up: We had a major agency all signed up on our site so we decided to throw them a party, inviting them along to a wine evening. It was a good night but most of them didnt turn up -and as it happens they decided to leave us the next week anyway.

* Business Cards: We gave out business cards for free to a few members we thought were movers and shakers. The cards were 50 quid a shot and we didn’t really measure any positive feedback other than some appreciation.

* Wimpy telesales: we hired an actor to do some telesales work for us but we knew in our heart of hearts she didn’t really have the gumption for sales. We hired her anyway but it didn’t really pan out on the sales front. She did help with keeping our members happy though and she is a great gal to have on board.

* Bad grant applications: I was slopping filling out a grant application and forgot a form. The application got bounced back to me and now we have to wait another few months for the money.

* Competition: Maybe our market is too small but we tried a few competitions for both advertising agencies and actors. We got no measureable feedback on these. We ran one competition to get people to subscribe to our podcast but they all just unsubscribed afterwards.

WHAT WORKED

* Tracking: Setting up a spreadsheet tracking our marketing activities against our metrics (sign ups, hits, payments) has really helped to identify which activities reap rewards.

* Telesales: With the right girl or guy behind the phone this is a great way to ‘drive’ sales rather than waiting for organic growth. We are at about a 1 in 10 hit rate right now.

* Upgraded plans: For a long time we just had a basic 145 / year plan. We added 399 and 1899 plans – and fuck me – someone bought them. A lot. Just having a higher price plan available makes a big difference.

* Blogging: The blog has really helped increase our traffic. We launched a .ca site a few weeks ago and only recently started adding blogs to it. Doing that alone has pushed us to page 2 in carada for some keywords.

THE JURY IS OUT ON

Affliates: We have just started signing up a few affliates and we have to see how they will get on. We manage it using a simple coupon system. The affiliates get €20 per sign up.

Printed books: We have a printed copy of our free ebook and we are distributing this to sound studios. We’ll wait and see if this helps.

Airmiles for producers We have set up a special affiliate program for people who hire VO’s. If they recommend us and someone signs up with send them for a facial or some other little treat.

It seems that anyone can get on. In fact. I did.

A couple of weeks ago I was on “The Internet Without Fear” – a local radio show dedicated to website businesses. You can have a listen for yourself over at 3r’s website. I was being interviewed over two weeks about a Sprint event I had held. Its a pity I didn’t have the actual sales figures to hand for the second interview!

In the “current economic situation”, everyone is hungry for business. Recent dinner parties have been filled with talk of friends and relations getting let go from various positions. Johnny Cash sang about A field of Diamonds and a colleague Peter Lawless is fond of describing the story behind the song. The original story of the field of diamonds was about a guy who traveled the world seeking riches when all along his house was build on a ‘field of diamonds’ – but he never bothered to look down and notice them. All very shmaltzy but there is a lesson there. If you are looking for work, you could do worse than to sit down and look at your own contact lists and think hard about who might be able to introduce some business for you. Here is a list of suggestions, some of them whacky, some of them not to get the creative juices flowing. You probably already know the enough people to keep you in clover through the coming storm. Just think how you could help them.

Sit down & look at your filofax/database
Who recruits staff for your business?
From your Christmas card list
Who is your child’s orthodontist?
From your school or college?
From your gym or spa
Who sells you sporting goods?
Who do you have lunch with?
Who is your best friend?
Bride & groom at the last wedding you attended
Who’s your vet? From your old job
From your church
From your club
Through your spouse family or children
From your old neighbourhood
From your civic activities
From your chamber of commerce
From your trade association
Who enjoys the same hobbies or sports?
Who is on your bowling or soccer team?
Who belongs to your local PTA?
Who is your children’s scout leader?
Who lives across the road?
Who is your dentist? Who cuts your hair?
Who sells you furniture or curtains?
Who moved house for you?
Where did you buy your spouse jewelry?
Who do you order flowers from?
Who books your travel plans?
Who sold you your car?
Who cuts your hair? Who waxes your legs?
Who teaches you yoga?
Who supplies stationery to your office?
Who advises you on marketing?
Builders or carpenters you’ve used
Who installed your alarm?
Who designed your extension?
Do you know a business advisor?
Who would you use for PR in your business?
Who organises events?
Who supplies your franking machine?
Who supplies office furniture?
Who sold a house to/for you?
Know any caterers?
Who is in your mobile phone?

Its a little disappointing to see how small my ‘twitter mosaic’ is. Not nearly enough to print off an put on a T-shirt but if I wanted to – I’d use Sxoop’s Twitter Mosiac tool. I wonder how long this took to put together? Go on – buy one.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

I had a hectic weekend. I spent it at The Think and Get Rich Bootcamp in Dublin. It was about €160 to attend and for that we got 11 world class speakers on topics ranging from writing a book to selling on eBay. There were two sessions in the morning and two in the afternoon. This seminar is pretty much a polar opposite of the upcoming Dublin Bizcamp. Each speaker would give about an hour of ‘education’ on something to do with creating an online income followed by about half an hour or a sales pitch. That was fine by me. The speakers really were excellent (for the most part) and even the sales pitch gave you some ideas.

The sales pitches were so good that even I had to hold on to my chair to avoid signing up to one of the many courses available. The upsold courses varied in price between €1,500 to €3,000. Most of them promised the opportunity to make tens of thousands of euros a month in online income. That does sound a little too good to be true which is what made a lot of people hold back from purchasing. Personally, I am finding it hard to keep on top of what I have, rather than looking for something new to get involved with. If I had seen someone offering training on setting up an affiliate plan I might have gone for it but as it turns out there wasn’t one on offer.

Anyway, if you would like to sell during a talk (which I don’t do myself), this would be the way to do it based on what I saw at the weekend.

• Establish how stinking rich you have become via whatever medium it is you chose (property, internet marketing etc)
• Establish that it wasn’t always that way referencing any working class background or dire financial story you have available to you.
• Explain your ‘lightbulb’ moment that made you realise that you didn’t need to suffer in poverty.
• Describe your meteoric rise (including picture of fancy cars and houses)
• Demonstrate the great deals that are out there to be had (using case studies)
• Make your offer, outlining at least 5 components demonstrating that each is worth at least the price that you will eventually offer your product at.
• Total up the total cost of each component which should come out at anywhere between 5 and 20 times your eventual offer price
• Discount that by 55%
• Then offer a special limited offer to anyone who signs up on the day for the first x attendees. x in this case would be somewhere between 12 and 40.
• Demonstrate that this is the only time you will be able to avail of this price.

Is this high pressure selling? Well – you could say so. On the other hand – it might just be the most effective method of driving sales. I’ve kept in touch with someone who has signed up for the events and they will be reporting back at the monthly Goose Forum. Lets see how much value is delivered.