Do Young Entrepreneurs Still Want To Change The World?

When I decided to become an entrepreneur, a streak that always lay dormant in me, one of the criteria I had when Ilooking at a business is, is it changing the world in some small way? That's always been my goal is to create something that is better than what has existed in the past. Most notably, my first real, true start up, not including my previous failed businesses, is Surface Medical Spas, which, from the beginning, was designed to change the way cosmetic medicine is practiced and delivered. The current medical system is totally antiquated and inefficient, and Surface brings efficiency to the marketplace based upon technology, not individual physicians' skills.

My current start up, Nimble, is designed to replace advertising and marketing for local small businesses. It is designed to bring hyper-competition into the marketplace and allow any business to manage its own inventory in real time by selling its unused inventory at a discount directly to the public or some other small business; that is a cool deal.

It surprises me personally when I meet entrepreneurs whose only goal in life is to make money by what I see as less than purely ethical or idealistic reasons.

I recently ran across an entrepreneur at a gathering who was truly excited about his new business. He had come out of UVSC Entrepreneurial Program and one of his assignments had been to start a new business. The business he had started was an online ppc business, and he was very proud that he was making about $1,000 a month doing it. His business consisted of purchasing a domain, running up the rankings using SEO, providing a bunch of ppc text links at a dead end, and, from my opinion, tricking browsing consumers into clicking one of these ad-links. That was his business model.

Businesses like this irritate me to some degree because they add nothing. They just skim a little bit of money by unsuspecting businesses and people (I routinely categorize realtors in this category as well).

My own feeling is that if you are going to run a business and expect people to pay you money that you should be actually adding value. Just providing dead links so that somebody is tricked into clicking on them, adds zero value and to be honest I think is at least cloudy on the ethical front. I know many business owners that will do anything for a buck. Potentially, if I had one of these sites, I might think about that as well. I do have sites that run adwords and I do make a little bit of money off of them, at least enough to pay my bills, to keep the sites up and going. But to provide no content, I think is just scummy.

Where are the young radicals out to change the world and stick it to the man? 

Figh Club is this coming Tuesday

Fight Club is on for this Tuesday, June 27th at around 6:30.

If you're a senior decision maker in your organization, you're invited. (Salespeople and students are by personal invitation from a Fight Club member only. Sorry.) It'll be at the Fiddlers Elbow again.

Fight Club is a network of entrepreneurs, senior business owners and decison makers who occasionally get together and have dinner while we meet new friends. If you'd like to attend you can email me, Ryan Money, Ryan Coombs, or whoever else you might know in Fight Club. Ryan's going to be blogging about this as well. We keep the group small and informal. No sales, no pitches, no BS. (You have to save that 'till Wednesday.)

Is clicking an add without intent click fraud?

Comment from Does anyone else tip bloggers?

A tip? Keeping the PPC model alive and working? If you're clicking on an ad merely to reward the blogger, you're committing a mild form of click fraud and compromising the performance-based PPC ad system.

It’s reasonable to take the step of browsing the ads on a blog you would like to support, but you should click only when an ad genuinely entices you. Otherwise, you're doing all parties a disservice. At least that's this purist’s view.

That's John Lewis Needhams opinion. Of course, he does work for Google and since he's my brother-in-law he usually adopts the contrarian point of view. (Here's a picture of the do-gooder.)

I would argue this. PPC is someone elses business model and is simply advertising. Viewing advertising is not a promise to pay or anything else. If you're paying for PPC advertising (as I do) you know that your conversion rate is low. Advertisers are hoping that their landing page is targeted enough to get people to stay and hopefully buy. Using the web or clicking on a link instills no moral obligation to purchase anything. Google/Yahoo is pitching advertisers on a model that charges them only when a viewer takes an action (clicks on a link). Google/Yahoo or other PPC providers have no moral athority to determine 'why' someone is clicking on an ad if it's not a concerted effort to make money.

Clicking on a blogs link as a 'thank you' or 'tip' to the blogger isn't fraud. It's not even close. As an advertiser I want my business in front of potential buyers. If content based advertising works, any advertisement or ppc link that's provided should be of some interest to whoever's reading the blog.

Perhaps terrorists will be able to target the US PPC model?

Utah Bloggers offers you free pizza & t-shirt.

I thought the first Utah Bloggers whatchamacallit went well. Ryan (whom I know well) and Phil Burns (whom I do not) performed admirably with a first throw of the dice. I spoke with Ryan after the event and he claimed he'd have been happy with a turn out of 50. There were obviously were many more.

Here's my post-partum critique of the event and the attendees from the back row.

1. While a panel is fine as background noise while you chow down on the pizza, the general info being disseminated is not the optimal use of the event for those of us familiar with blogs and blogging. I think I'd prefer informal groups where I could find out about the bloggers.
   
2. Bloggers hide behind their blogs. Sheesh. It's like the 'geek' dinner. You'd think that speaking in person was a hazardous activity. I could care less about what type of software is used, I'd like to actually know who I'm reading.
   
3. Interest is high. It was equally obvious that bloggers are looking for a venue like this.

An excellent start. Makes me happy that Ryan Money is coming on as a principal in Fight Club.

My Secret Chef - How to show your inexperience in a service industry.

People don't want to look stupid. So they act stupidly in an attempt to avoid being embarrassed personally.

Nimbleit.com has a business (My Secret Chef) that is run by a young Weber State business graduate (Adam). My Secret Chef has been on the site for a while and this last week made it's first sale.

Now I had met with Adam and offered to put him on the site gratis since hes a young guy with a semi-struggling business. Since his business had been put on the site without the usual payment, his banking info had not gone through the usual process and since he'd not yet sold anything his direct deposit hadn't been initiated. So, when he made his first sale he recieved an instant email notification that the sale had been made and wanted to know how he would be paid. (I had explained it previously but it had been a while.)

(By way of explaination: Nimble directly deposits all sales for the previous 7 days into the listed businesses checking account every Friday.) 

So what did Adam do? He charged the customer full price and told her he'd refund the sale to her card if and when he got paid.

Did he behave in his own best interest? I'd say no. In his desire not to loose a single dollar of potential income, he blamed everything on a third party... us. Then he sent us a nasty all-caps email demanding immediate email although he'd been told that the deposit would go through on Friday (which it did.) So he was in a position of having charged the customer and receiving payment twice.

Had we done anything wrong? No. Had we not done anything we were supposed to do? No. Did anything not work the way it was supposed to work? No.

What should he have done? Even if he'd never been paid, he should have told the customer, "You paid for this in good faith and I'm going to honor this."  Then he could contact us if he didn't recieve payment the way it was promised.

Adam showed his inexperience with customer service and business relationships by overreacting. He damaged his relationship with his customer, his relationship with us, and our relationship with the customer. He's made himself conspicuous as a potential problem and used up all his good will with me personally. Fight Club.

The moral: Business is about the value of personal relationships. That's what I consider capital and I value a business relationship over $20 worth of cheese. 

Utah bloggers shindig

 For whoever reads this blog that doesn't already know:

Utah Bloggers Conference is coming soon.

• June 13, 2006 (6:30 pm - 9:00 pm)
• Miller Business Innovation Center
• Free admission, food, and prizes
• Hosted by my peeps: Ryan Money, Phil Burns, & others

Does anyone else tip bloggers?

Blogging's a commitment that takes a good deal of time and effort. When I like a blog or blogger I'll proactively look to find a ppc link to click on. Does anyone else do this?

Pedal to the metal or Slow to go? Save 35% on your gas bill.

If you want a big gain in fuel mileage, though, you need to seriously lay off the pedals when driving around town. Accelerating more slowly away from green lights and stopping more gradually for red lights cut fuel consumption in Edmunds.com's tests by 35.4 percent for the Land Rover and 27.1 percent for the Mustang.

Some dirty SOB stole my iPod.

Joshua Stimle got robbed and blogged it. Some dirty, low-down selfish SOB smashed the driver side window of my landrover and pinched my iPod with all my beloved podcasts on it. Truly, I hate that. I would gladly replace the iPod and the $500 landrover window replacement if I could have caught that filthy thief in the act. I'd have beat him worse than Billy Barty whupped Ryan Coombs.

Early stage VC Article: What’s everyone else’s obstacle to imitation?

What are Your Barriers to Entry? Post worth reading.

Insurance Companies: How to charge more than no coverage at all.

 Insurance companies are not your friend. In fact, they don't have friends.

As health insurance costs skyrocket and more people turn to high-deductible policies, a key question is emerging: When you're paying out of your own pocket, what rate do you pay?

Is it a discount negotiated by insurers, or the provider's gross charges, which could be several times higher than the negotiated rate?

Case in point: Lisa Stamm of Kendall, who had a simple earache and got slapped with a $375 bill for about 10 minutes with a nurse practitioner. If she had no insurance, she could have paid $125. If she had a no-deductible policy, her insurer might have paid about $140, and she would have paid nothing.

But Stamm showed the receptionist at ER Urgent Care Center on SW 137th Ave. her Cigna insurance card, and that sparked the problems.

''This really made me mad,'' Stamm says. ``I called the insurance commissioner's office. I called my insurance. You'd think something could be done.''

But no. ER Urgent Care insists she cough up the full $375. ''We as consumers have to make our choices,'' said Trudy Herdocia, the firm's vice president of operations. ``And live by them.''

Complete List of Blogs & Bloggers in Utah.

A list of Utah's business bloggers. Courtesy of Ryan Money.

Click to read more ...

Option percentages for startup employees?

Guy Kasasaki has posted: 9 questions to ask your startup from an employees perspective.

I think this is a topic that gets short shrift in the blogisphere. I'd like to find a smattering of breakdowns of employee compensation if anyone knows of some.

Start up or go home.

With the economy starting to tick and employment on the rise, what are the effects on startups? Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, says it's a:

bad time to start a company:

1. Everybody else is starting a company. It's crazy. Every single person who leaves a tech company isn't going to Microsoft or Google or Apple or whatever, they're going to a startup. Trying to operate in this environment is crazy. I'm getting late-onset ADD from trying to keep track of them all, and it's impossible to get attention for your product amidst all the buzz (er, noise).
2. Your competition just got funded too. You've got $5 million in the bank, and they do too. Their VCs want them to succeed every bit as much as your VCs want you to succeed. This gets you into a horse race, which no one wants: it's exhausting and expensive.
3. Talent is scarce again. Hell, I want to find someone to write a little bit of PHP for Wench.com and I can't find anyone (Hey if you are a PHP webapp builder and have some spare cycles, email me at caterina-at-gmail). Everyone's gainfully employed, and fielding several offers.
4. You can't operate in obscurity anymore. We started our company in 2002 when nothing was getting funded anywhere and everyone was still licking their wounds from the big bubble bang. Nobody cared about us except us. We were in Vancouver fer crissakes. But we were able to focus on finding and connecting with the people who mattered most: the customers, the users, the community. You get more done when no one's looking over your shoulder.
5. Web 2.0 isn't all that. Hello?. I don't think there's a rising tide lifting all boats here. I don't think Web 2.0 is the magic bullet some people seem to think it is either. It ain't the features, it's that AND the business. Tagging was a great feature, no doubt. But Flickr was at break even -- about to tip into the black -- when we were acquired.
6. There's too much going on. Every night there's a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it's Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It's a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who's talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain't the Chief Party Officer.

David over at 37 Signals counters with: It's a great time to start a company.

1. You don't need VC diesel to get your motor running. Working nights or putting money aside to run full-time for three months is enough to get off the ground if you have a great idea and enough passion to make it matter.
2. You can actually charge money for valuable services. People have never been more willing to part with their credit cards to pay for services that improve their business or their life. You don't need to spend aeons and cumbaja meetings pondering HOW TO MONITIZE?! when all you need is a service worth paying for.
3. You don't need mainstream tech to make a dent. No wonder you have a hard time finding people if you're only looking at the mainstream tech circles. You're competing for talent with all the risk-averse insurance companies of the world. We picked Ruby early and used Rails to get access to the cream of the crop. People bustling with passion to develop using tools they love.
4. You don't need to live in San Francisco to make it big. Or rather, if you want to make it big, don't live in San Francisco. You'll get sucked in to the myths (you need VC!) and drowned by the parties. Most of the worlds talent does not live in that tiny spot of land. I developed the Basecamp, Backpack, Tada List, and Writeboard from Copenhagen, Denmark. And we have one of the greatest developers I've ever met in Provo, Utah. While the rest of the company is in Chicago and New York. The Rails core team includes people from Germany, Canada, Austria, and all over the US.
5. You don't need a swarm of worker bees to take off. Of course its hard to find 10 or 20 great people by tomorrow, but you don't have to. We're entering a golden age of small teams capable of doing big things. Just get a band of three together and you're good to go for v1. Using modern tools and simply doing less software means that having more people is likely to slow you down rather than speed you up.

 Who's more in the know? For myself, I'll go with: We're not getting any younger. The only time to start a business is immediately.

Note to VC: “Wake up.”

Via: Lone Ronin on the oddness of venture capital.

Of course, this number is meaningless. No one can really forecast this kind of return on an investment. No one can really say, "Yeah, given our business model and the way we're structuring this deal, I totally see a 10x multiple in two years."

 

I mean, one more time, seriously? Anyone who stands in a meeting and says, "You'll get back ten times what you put into this thing," is absolutely, completely, without exception, lying through their teeth or overly naive about business in general.