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Starting My Own Business – Quick Update

January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Quick update on Diamonds or Dogs.

I added the “Diamonds” side of the site over the weekend, set up the landing page and moved a few blog posts over. I also added more posts and a few new female reviewers.

A few points:

  • I’m actually not an engineer, I learned most of this just by doing. The things I didn’t know I hired people to do.
  • Hiring people is easy these days. You can find qualified folks all over places like eLance or just by asking your network. My graphic designer was a girl I dated a few years ago and my developer is someone I’ve never met who I hired through a website. Total costs for both of them so far are around $700.
  • Total costs for the rest of the site are less than $100. That includes domain registration ($50), hosting ($10 a month), WordPress CMS (Free), Outbrain recommendations (Free), various Google tools (Free), Share This plug in to allow people to “like” posts and share them (Free), Feedburner plug in to allow people to subscribe to a feed of new items (free) and pizza for my first feedback session where my friends told me what they thought of the site ($30).
  • No complicated business issues so far. The only relationship I had to form was an affiliate one with Amazon. They’ll take care of actual ordering and fulfillment and then pass along a share of the profits. Sometime in the future I might work directly with drop shippers but that’s too complicated right now.
  • I’ve gotten amazing support through my network of friends and family. I’m about to publish my dad’s profile and first review plus one of my close friend just got his mom to sign up as a new reviewer.

Next!

My next goals are to start marketing the site.

  • AdWords campaign
  • Facebook campaign, which I’m hoping you, my readers, will help me with
  • eMail campaign
  • YouTube video. Yes, I have a good idea for a YouTube video about gift giving.

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Best of all, this has been a ton of fun and I’ve learned a lot.

Special thanks to my wonderful wife who keeps testing things, making sure what I write makes sense and giving my great ideas for how to improve the site.

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

Starting A Business

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

lemonade stand posterWhen I was a freshman in college I came back home for the summer and my dad and I started a business selling chia pets. We made them in our garage and shipped them to stores around California. Actually, they weren’t Chia pets (because that’s someone else’s trademark) so we called them Green Heads, but they were essentially Chia Pets. We bought pantyhose from Target, filled them with saw dust from a lumber mill close by and grass seeds from Home Depot and then sold them to gift shops. It was fun and it made us a few hundred bucks. I also learned a lot about retail and manufacturing.

My senior year in college I started a comic book shop with a couple of friends. Actually, to give credit where credit is due, my friends did most of the work since they weren’t actually in college but I helped with everything from manual labor to business relations. It was pretty rough but doable with a minimum of resources and a lot of hard work. The store did well and you can still find Alternate Realities in the Lincoln Mall in Rhode Island (thank you Sue and Howie so very much for the wonderful experience). Again, it was a learning experience for me and I came out of it with a healthy respect for the power of accounting and inventory management. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Family, Friends, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan, Step 3 - Communicate Tagged With: , , , ,

The Plan For 2012

January 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

2012 !Earlier I wrote about my plan for 2011 and how that went, this post will be devoted to 2012.

Each of the items below is something I want to do or accomplish this year.  I’ve gone ahead and created a project for each one of these (nothing fancy, I just use tasks in Microsoft Outlook to track these).  Each project has various items under it that represent to do’s or tasks.  Accomplishing these tasks may lead to more tasks.  For example, when I figure out what I want to build from scratch I’ll have more to do’s around buying materials and making blue prints.

Each of these projects has measurements attached where possible.  These measurements are used to indicate success or failure.  for example, the blogging goal has a measurement of 1000 users per day to indicate success.  I then take this measurement and figure out what I need to do in order to achieve it.  Some goals, like children, have no measurements attached but in such a case I usually make a note to myself about why is it that I’m tracking this goal.  For example “I want to be a good parent”.  This will help me figure out what I need to do.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my grand plan for 2012! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Family, Goals, Losing Weight, Making More Money, Starting Out, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Did I Do On My 2011 Goals?

January 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Happy new yearBack in January I posted these goals as the things I wanted to accomplish in 2011.  Looking through them now, I’ve accomplished a lot.  Yes, some of these goals failed and some only partially succeeded, but I aimed really high in 2011.  I also learned a lot about setting goals and creating plans; information which I am going to apply to 2012 goals. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Finance, Goals, Health, Jobs, Life Lesson, Perfectionism, Relationships, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

How Can I Change The World? Or At Least My Country

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Darwin - Very gradual change we can believe inSo, if I think both the OWS and the Tea Party movements suck, how exactly would I go about changing the world?  It’s an interesting questions because one of my goals in life is to leave this world in a better condition than I found it.  Whether or not I have kids, I want my impact on this world (and on my country) to be positive.  I don’t need to be the next Abraham Lincoln or Tim Bernars Lee, but I would like to have a net positive impact.  This is especially important to me these days when the world seems to be in a bit of trouble all around.  We have environmental issues, economic collapse, political instability, leaders who seem clueless and politicians who seem completely out of touch.  In the face of all this, it’s easy to feel powerless and just give up.  However, there are still plenty of ways in which one person can have an impact and I’m going to use this post to list a few. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Decision Making, Goals, Honesty, Responsibility, Step 1 - Priorities, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Screw Reminders and To Do Lists

July 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

To-Do ListI am one of those obsessive people who has to write down everything they need to do.  If I don’t write it down, I obsess about it.  I think about it over and over, visualizing all the bad things that will happen if I don’t get this done on time.  I stress myself out imagining the ramifications of what will happen if I forget to this task and then I obsess about whether or not I will forget it.  This is true for everything.  From the most important task (get an officiant for my wedding) to the least (walk the dog).  Luckily for me, I found a solution to this problem a long time ago.  The solution was actually in a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done which I highly recommend for anyone wrestling with organizational issues.  It was a simple solution and basically called for me to write things down.

I know, I know, sounds stupid simple, but it really works.  Before you start obsessing over a task, just write it down.  That way you have a reminder which you can deal with later.  In the meantime, you’re free to go about whatever other work you needed to do without devoting extra brain cycles to other stuff.  It’s an excellent tip and one that has stayed with me for years.  Unfortunately, it’s also that drives me crazy sometimes. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Goals, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Step 2 - Make A Plan, Stress Tagged With: , , , , ,

Retired At 31, A Lesson In Purposeful Living

April 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Old Fisherman - Cape Cod“I’m retired!”  That’s what my friend Ray said to me on his 31st birthday.

To better understand this comment, let me describe Ray to you.  Ray’s family came from a poor farming community in Asia.  They had no money when they came to the US, a poor understanding of English and no real education.  His father worked as a school janitor for many years, slowly saving up money until he could buy a home.  Then he bought another home, and another, and another…  In his 50′s, Ray’s father retired on income from his school pension and from the dozen or so properties he owned and rented out.  He spends most of his days travelling or enjoying life with his extended family.

All of this was done through a lot of hard work and determination with no “luck” involved.  Ray’s dad worked long hours and saved up all his money for this goal.  The family rarely traveled, never “indulged” in luxuries and the kids were expected to pay their own way through college.  However, it was also a very happy family.  Aunts and uncles would stop by all the time, large family dinners were the norm and both parents were very involved with their kids and their community.

I still remember going over to Ray’s house on the evening after Thanksgiving.  Before she passed away, his mother would always save leftovers for us.  We would all show up around midnight and feast on leftover turkey, stuffing, corn and pies!  It was a warm and happy house, even if they didn’t have the latest big screen TV.  I think Ray saw all this and, being the competitive guy he is, decided he would do the same, only faster. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Goals, Step 1 - Priorities, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Magic Of Numbers; AKA, How To Get More Messages From Your Online Dating Profile!

April 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

How I slept last night.Over at my fitness blog, 60 in 3, I talk about some recent graphs of my weight, age and workout performance.  I basically charted some of these numbers against one another and tried to figure out what they told me.  And if you read the posts you can see that they told me quite a bit!

For me, this is pretty awesome!  I love numbers and data.  The optimization junkie inside me wants to start playing with them right away.  I want to see what happens to one number when you increase the other.  I want to know if two numbers are related.  I even want to see if I can predict one number based on the behavior of others.  There’s a whole field of science around this statistical analysis and I find it all fascinating.

In fact, one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite books (Friday) has the hero being given some random data about gold prices, beard lengths, skirt lengths and then being told to make sense of it.  At first, our heroine thinks this is nonsense, a crazy assignment meant to annoy her.  However, she slowly begins to see connections until she gets to the point where she can predict the price of gold simply by looking at a picture and examining beard and skirt lengths.

Sounds a bit crazy, doesn’t it?  Maybe not so much. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Optimization, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

You Miss 100% Of The Shots You Don’t Take

January 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

She said yes 2011 is off to an AWESOME start! I wrote about a couple of experiments a few weeks ago, one involving weight and the other involving money. Well, both experiments are going very well.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Losing Weight, Making More Money, Starting Out, Step 2 - Make A Plan, Step 4 - The First Step Tagged With: , , , , ,

My Big Plans For 2011

January 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Goal SettingA few months ago, I posted up my list of things to do.  This week I took some time to really evaluate these projects and see which ones I want to tackle this year.  By doing so, I’m basically coming up with a list of goals that I’d like to accomplish in the next 12 months.  This will let me have something concrete to work towards.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Goals, Step 1 - Priorities, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , ,
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