Cockiness vs. Confidence

Do others think you are cocky or confident? Is there a difference? Most importantly, is being cocky necessarily a bad thing?

These things have been floating around in my head lately (yea, I know, what a waste of brain power). Ironically, I would not describe any of the young entrepreneurs I know as cocky, but I would describe all of them as very confident. Cocky tends to have a negative connotation - the people I would describe as cocky are the people that are all talk and no substance, they talk about how much better they are than everyone else and give no one any respect. That can't be good for an entrepreneur...right?

But then I make my sports analogy (this is where my sports analogies might fail) and it seems to me like great athletes - Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Barry Bonds - are not just confident, they are cocky...probably overly cocky. They seem to never even acknowledge their competition as legitimate and, in their prime, there was no chance that they would ever be beaten. It seemed like their cockiness helped crush the competition.

For a little help, I leaned on dictionary.com for some definitions.

cock‧y - arrogant; pertly self-assertive; conceited; Overly self-assertive or self-confident.

confident - belief in oneself and one's powers or abilities; self-confidence; self-reliance; assurance

First off, there's nothing worse than not understanding a word in a definition. Wtf is "pertly"? Apparently it means "boldly forward in speech or behavior; impertinent; saucy". Ah, pertly, of course. Can't wait to drop that one on my friends.

So the definition of cockiness has "overly self-confident" in it, which is certainly a good thing, but it also includes "arrogant" which means "making claims or pretensions to superior importance or rights; overbearingly assuming; insolently proud".

Now that describes someone who's cocky in my mind...and being arrogant is certainly not good. So I suppose I conclude that being cocky is not good and being confident is. Anyone have any thoughts...or do you feel stupider (yes, stupider is a word) for having read this and wish you could have that five minutes of your life back?

Startup Success 2006

I found this video on Guy Kawasaki's blog and it is absolutely priceless.



One thing that really stuck out in my mind - at one point Guy opens the forum up for questions from the audience and someone asks how each entrepreneur is going about marketing their product. The panel, which was comprised of five entrepreneurs including the founders of LinkedIn and photobucket, gave what I thought was an extremely promising answer for YE's like myself. Each entrepreneur said that their company has grown through some combination of SEO, PR (through the media, blogging, and social networks), and viral marketing.

Do you know what that list doesn't include? PPC advertising, television commercials, magazine advertisements, or ANY paid advertising. It seems like most new startups learned from the dot com Super Bowl commercials and learned more effective techniques.

It also seems to me that you don't need hardly any money at all to grow your business. That means that as a YE, you and I and everyone else can market our companies effectively with a telephone, a computer, an email account, some word processing software, and some business cards. You don't need to spend a ton of money to promote your business.

Which would you rather have - a full page ad in a magazine or a full page story about your business? For obvious reasons everyone would rather have the full page story. The funny thing is, the story costs $0 and the ad costs thousands. It may take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but you and I can grow our businesses WITHOUT a lot of money.

Want a free link to your site?

I'm looking for testimonials for iPrioritize. All it takes is a few minutes to write two or three sentences and email it to me at adam.mcfarland@iprioritize.com. In return, I will put a link to your site below your testimonial. Check out what's up there now for examples of what I'm looking for.

If you ever want me to do the same for you just let me know and I'd be happy to help. Thanks guys :)

Writers block or something like that

Right now I'm sitting in a coffee house with a few of my buddies (where we go to get out of the house and still get work done). My main objective of this outing was to post to my blog, although I can't figure out what to write about for the life of me.

I keep a list (using iPrioritize of course) of potential blog topics. The list is probably 100 topics long, yet each time I've tried to start writing I get completely stuck. So, here I am, worn out after a long day of work with so much on my mind that I can't say anything at all.

Here are some random thoughts that probably could be whole posts if I could get my shit together and actually write something decent:

• Selling something is really, really hard. Every time someone actually signs up and pays for an iPrioritize business account, I do a little dance around my "office".


• Has anyone else noticed how big of a pain in the ass it is to actually get people to pay when they say they will? I've had a few large groups of people sign up for iPrioritize and I invoice them separately after setting up the accounts. It's funny, we shoot emails back and forth every five minutes, but as soon as I send the email invoice which is just a link to PayPal to pay, they magically take several days/weeks to pay when they promised payment by the end of the day. I really don't comprehend. When I give someone my word I pay ASAP. Apparently I'm in the minority


• Customer service is a bitch. Check that, doing customer service well is a bitch. I spent about 8 months of my time as an engineer working on product and process improvements to reduce customer complaints for our company. I can foresee having to implement some of that stuff (on a smaller scale) with iPrioritize down the road. If I don't, I could end up spending all day answering questions and inquiries. From my experience thusfar, about 25% of the people contacting me have legitimate inquiries, the rest are answered in the FAQs. I need to do eventually improve the complaint/inquiry process to reduce the number of contacts while still answering the user's question.


• This earl grey tea I'm drinking tastes like sewage.


• Marketing is more fun, more frustrating, and more rewarding than programming. When you are programming there is less unknown. Your goal is your end product and you need to do a series of steps to get there. Sometimes those steps don't work as well as you had hoped, or take longer than planned, but you always end up with tangible and the desired output - your completed site. Marketing on the other hand, is more fun (because it taps into my creativity more and also results in some human contact), more frustrating (because sometimes a bunch of time and money yields nothing), and more rewarding (because you actually MAKE MONEY).


• I hope I'm never in the public spotlight to the point where the media questions my every move. I'll be honest, 99% of what I watch is either on ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPN News so I relate everything back to sports in my mind. This whole Parcells and TO thing is crazy. Dude has an injured hamstring...in the pre season...leave him alone. When "the player" feels better, he'll practice. If you stick a microphone in front of ANYONE every single freaking day after work, they're going to give you something quotable. Imagine walking out of the office every day and having a slew of reporters at your car asking about your f*ck up earlier during your presentation. To top it off, they've already got a quote from your boss saying that you need to step up your game or they might put someone else on the project. I'd probably go on a profanity laced tirade and start throwing shit. I think athletes and coaches deserve more credit for putting up with our wacked out media on a daily basis.


• You wanna know something that I enjoy? Watching our basketball team kick the living shit out of other countries. Blah blah blah, the rest of the world is catching up to us. Maybe Argentina and Spain are, but there's nothing like barely squeezing out a 103-58 win over Senegal at 6:30 in the morning to start the day off right.


• Every girl in this place looks kind of hot from a distance, only to disappoint up close. Nice from afar, but far from nice. Oh well, I'm sure we look really cool - four guys sitting at a table with their heads buried in lappers...


• Does anyone else think that new Maria Sharapova commercial is freaking amazing? I know it's on like 5 times an hour, but I always stop what I'm doing and turn my head to watch.

That's all. I'm running low on battery and quite frankly getting sick of listening to the crappy jazz music here so I'm going home.

I'm going bald...someone come up with a solution!

My father is bald and my grandfather's head looks like a bowling ball, so from an early age I figured my fate was sealed. That's why I wasn't too surprised when my hairline started receding at 18, or when the top of my head started thinning at 20.

I figured that maybe if I grew my hair out it wouldn't look as bad. So last year I grew it out for about 7 months and it looked absolutely horrible. I seriously looked like a 40 year old balding guy. So, faced with the choice of a lifetime of rogaine and hair thickening shampoo or keeping my hair really, really short, I chose the latter. I buzz my hair with a #2 every week (Friday for those of you who are really interested) and no one can really tell. As it gets worse, I'll start buzzing it with a #1. Once the hair is all the way out, I'll just shave it bald. That's waaaaay easier than fighting a losing battle.

Why am I telling you this? Because a few weeks ago I got an email from a friend over at Respond2 telling me that they picked up Bosley Hair Restoration as a client and that they were doing a blog entitled Battle Against the Bald, where they chronicle someone going through a hair restoration procedure.

Since then the whole thing has been on my mind. The blog gives an interesting look at the whole balding process. I now know much more about balding and my immanent fate than I did a few weeks back, although I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

The Bosley thing looks OK to me, but I don't think I'd bother...too much of a process for me when I can just shave it off. But it amazes me that modern science can't figure out an cheap and effective way to permanently grow hair (on your head) or permanently remove hair (from the rest of your body, but primarily the face).

If one of you crazy young entrepreneurs can figure those things out I'll be your first customer :)

Entrepreneurial balance

I've noticed something lately - when I am on a regular sleeping, eating, and exercising schedule I am a LOT more productive with my work. That may seem ridiculously obvious to people, but it's not always easy to follow.

This past weekend I was out until 3 AM on both Friday and Saturday nights and I slept like crap. I got up at a decent hour but I was sluggish and didn't get much done. Last night I went to bed early, recharged my batteries, and today I'm a thousand times more focused. I'll easily get twice as much work done today as I would have in the same amount of time yesterday.

Again, duh. Tell me something I don't know. Maybe that's an obvious example, but what about when you only sleep 6 hours a night because you "need" 14 hours to get your work done? My point is that if you slept 8 instead of 6, you'd get that same 14 hours of work done in less than 12 hours. Toss in a balanced diet and some exercise, and you're not only improving your work productivity, you're living a balanced and healthy life that'll allow you to be an entrepreneur for many more years.

How much could you accomplish in three weeks?

Do you ever wonder what you could accomplish if you eliminated all distractions and pushed yourself to the max? You couldn't do it for long or you'd go crazy, but how about three weeks? What if you slept, ate, exercised a few days a week, and spent 100% of the rest of your time on your business. No TV, no social outings, no boning around online reading blogs :)

The last few months of my life as an engineer I shared a large cubicle with an older engineer named Paul. When I put in my two weeks, Paul and I started talking about business. Turns out Paul spent the majority of his professional career running a business and he and I had several long talks about anything and everything related to entrepreneurship.

When I *complained* about having to move from CT to Albany, say goodbye to all of my friends, sure up my health insurance, and try to wrap up all of my work...all while still trying to grow my business, he looked me in the eye and told me that I could do it. That when he first decided to become a business owner he bought a house, married, went on a honeymoon, quit his job, and started his business - ALL IN THREE WEEKS!

That's a lifetime for most people. Most people couldn't handle all of those things at once. But it is possible. Sometimes I think we sell ourselves short by saying that we're "doing enough" and not pushing ourselves into greatness. You can do more. I can do more. How much could you do in three weeks if your back was against the wall? Could you do what Paul did?

"Please fire me" blog

It's been about seven months since I left my job to become an entrepreneur full time. But it was several months before that when I decided that I was going to leave. That left me with about two months of working a job where quite frankly I didn't give a shit.

I came in late, spent hours a day socializing with co-workers, took two hour lunches, and then mysteriously slipped out the door while everyone else was still working. In between my slacking off, I did just enough work not to get fired. I asked one of my co-workers how long he thought I could keep it up before I actually got fired. His answer: you could probably go through your entire career doing what you're doing and not get fired.

I thought about it, and realized he was right. I was doing my work, I wasn't holding up any people or projects by not getting stuff done...I just wasn't exactly trying my hardest. I realized that every company is FILLED with people like that, people who actually do very little and still manage to keep their job.

So then I came up with the idea: PleaseFireMe.com - a blog where I go into work every day TRYING to get fired and chronicle it online! I ultimately didn't do it because there were penalties for me if I got fired (namely I had to repay my signing bonus and relocation package, which I certainly was not willing to do), but how awesome would it be to start that blog? What if you were going to quit anyway and there was absolutely no consequence to being fired?

One caveat - you have to try to get fired through work related happenings. You can't just walk in with an uzi or yell a racial slur...that would be too easy. You have to get fired by your laziness and your complete and utter lack of desire to accomplish anything.

To start, you need to have a goal for yourself at work. If you don't have a goal, you may find yourself becoming bored and actually doing work. In my last weeks I was reading an e-Book and when anybody did anything to disrupt me, I was PISSED. My objective was to read the e-Book and you better not bother me with "meaningless" work. That's the mentality that you need to have. It might be fantasy football, or firing emails to sports talk radio shows all day long, sending IM's to your friends, working on your MySpace profile, or even working on your own business, but you need to have an objective.

Once you've got an objective it's all cake from there. Take on as few tasks as possible, and when you do take something on, be sure not to actually do it. When someone asks you for it, tell them that you are waiting on someone else for XYZ before you can get to that, or better yet tell them that you are slammed with work and maybe they should look for someone else with a little more free time to work on the project.

Another line that I used a few times that seemed to work well - I don't think we should start that project until (insert future date) because (insert BS reason about how it will actually save resources to wait). When all else fails, throw in meaningless cliched phrases like "we really need to see if we can synergize our efforts first" that people don't really understand but don't want to admit to not understanding.

All the while you should be blogging about what you are doing and saying and how people are reacting - preferably WHILE you are at work, maybe even while you're in a meeting if you can slip your laptop in there. The blog would captivate the world - I know I'd be hanging on every word!

The scary thing - it might take YEARS for you to get fired. If you've already got a good reputation at your office, people will likely think of all the good things you initially did when you started and look past your recent shortcomings. My guess is that it'll take some new manager to come in and point out to everyone that you actually don't do jack. Then the shit will hit the fan...and the blog will be a success...and be published as a book...and you will be famous...

Right here, right now, I am begging all of you out there with jobs - when you decide to leave, please try to get fired and blog about it - if for no other reason than to satisfy my sick desire to prove how inefficient and hypocritical corporate America is. Any takers?

The Sport of Business

I read blog maverick religiously. I might not always agree with all of Mark Cuban's opinions, but his desire to constantly innovate and improve, to never settle for the status quo, is a trait that I admire and hopefully embody. I save my favorite posts in a Word document and read them when I need some motivation. Without a doubt, my favorite is The Sport of Business from March of 2005.

Real competition comes from the sport of business.

In sports, you know who your opponents are. You know when you are going to play a game. You know pretty much how long the game will last. It'’s mentally and physically exhausting if you are at the top of the game, but it still pails at the effort required to be successful in business.

The sport of business isn't divided into games. It'’s not defined by practices. It doesn't have set rules that everyone plays by.

The sport of business is the ultimate competition. It'’s 7x24x365xforever.

I love the sport of business. I love the competition. I love the fire of it. It'’s the feeling of the clock winding down, the ball is in your hands, and if you hit the shot you win...all day, every day.

When I sit back and think about why I get a rush out of business, why I love being an entrepreneur so much, it is because of the challenge. Because of the sport. I was one of those kids who never really felt challenged in school. Even through a tough engineering program at RPI, it really wasn't that HARD to get good grades. You study, you work hard, you get good grades. When I graduated and went into industry, it felt "too easy" and being an engineer gave me no gratification.

I am extremely blessed to have been given the opportunities to succeed that some people don't. I am extremely fortunate to have had the right people and mentors in my life to guide me and make things easier. That's why I felt like I needed to CHALLENGE myself. To make the most of the abilities I have as opposed to "wasting" them in a 9-5 that I don't believe in. To truly maximize my impact on the world.

Starting a business puts you at the bottom of the barrell. You have no money. You have no customers. It's HARD to succeed under those constraints. You own the dream and if it dies in your head it is over. No one else will pick up the slack. Some might call that pressure, I call it a challenge, and I love it.

Whenever I wonder if I have enough to succeed, I read the rest of Mark's post about "the edge":

The edge is getting so jazzed about what you do, you just spent 24 hours straight working on a project and you thought it was a couple hours.

The edge is knowing that you have to be the smartest guy in the room when you have your meeting and you are going to put in the effort to learn whatever you need to learn to get there.

The edge is knowing is knowing that when the 4 girlfriends you have had in the last couple years asked you which was more important, them or your business, you gave the right answer.

The edge is knowing that you can fail and learn from it, and just get back up and in the game.

The edge is knowing that people think your crazy, and they are right, but you don'’t care what they think.

The edge is knowing how to blow off steam a couple times a week, just so you can refocus on business

The edge is knowing that you are getting to your goals and treating people right along the way because as good as you can be, you are so focused that you need regular people around you to balance you and help you.

The edge is being able to call out someone on a business issue because you know you have done your homework.

The edge is recognizing when you are wrong, and working harder to make sure it doesn'’t happen again.

The edge is being able to drill down and identify issues and problems and solve them before anyone knows they are there.

The edge is knowing that while everyone else is talking about nonsense like the will to win, and how they know they can be successful, you are preparing yourself to compete so that you will be successful.

That'’s what makes business such an amazing sport. Everyone plays it. Everyone talks about how good they are or will be at it. Just a small percentage are.

Every single day someone has an idea. Every day someone talks about some business they want to start. Every day someone is out there starting a business whose entire goal is to beat the hell out of yours. How cool is that.

Every day some stranger from any where in the world that you have never met is trying to come up with a way to put you out of business. To take everything you have worked your ass off for, and take it all away. If you are in a growing industry, there could be hundreds or thousands of strangers trying to figure out ways to put you out of business. How cool is that.

The ultimate competition. Would you like to play a game called Eat Your Lunch. We are going to face off. My ability to execute on an idea vs yours. My ability to subvert your business vs your ability to keep it going. My ability to create ways to remove any reason for your business to exist vs your ability to do the same to me. My ability to know what you are going to do, before you do it. Who gets there first? Best of all, this game doesn'’t have a time limit. It'’s forever. It never ends. It'’s the ultimate competition.

It'’s the sport of business. It'’s not for everyone, but I love it.

Me too Mark, me too.

Your business card can be so much more

What's on your business card? I'd guess that you've got your name, title, company, address, email, fax, phone number, and website. That's fine, but a business card can be so much more. A unique and original card can be an extremely powerful marketing tool.

As a young entrepreneur trying to conserve cash, I set out to do as much as possible with my business card for iPrioritize. Here's what I came up with:

Front:



So what, big deal? That's not any different than anyone else's card. Well, flip it over:



That's right. I managed to cram a screenshot onto my card (for the record it looks even better in person than it does on a monitor)! In addition to the screenshot, I put the most important selling points of iPrioritize. Now, when I'm trying to explain iPrioritize to people, I just whip out a card and talk to the screenshot! It completely changes the dynamic of what a business card can do for me.

Here's how to improve your card:

Tip #1 - Incorporate your mission statement and/or slogan. Don't just tell people who your company is, tell them what your company actually does.

Tip #2 - Use color. Seriously, it doesn't cost that much.

Tip #3 - Print on both sides. You can double the amount of information and again, it really doesn't cost that much. Use one side for your contact info and the other as a promo card.

Theoretical question for you YE's

Something that's been floating around in my head for the past few days:

Lets say in theory that it costs you the same amount of money to acquire a customer regardless of their domestic location, but you can only afford to spend the money to acquire 100 customers. Is it better to have 100 customers in the same relative location (say NYC) or to have 100 customers equally distributed throughout the country (two in each state say)?

All other things are constant too - all customers are in your target market and your product is "virtual" so delivery costs and customer service will costs aren't affected by location.

Any thoughts? I can make what I think is a persuasive argument either way (and an argument that it really doesn't matter) so I'm curious to see what you guys think.

Fund your startup yourself

So you've got a great idea for a business. Maybe you've even taken the time to put together a business plan and a prototype of your product. Conventional wisdom would tell you to start the long and arduous process of searching for funding. I'm here to tell you that conventional wisdom sucks.

Venture capital is hard to come by...at least for now

Think you're going to pitch your business to a venture capitalist or an angel investor and they're instantly going to throw you a million dollars? Think again. Venture capitalists and angel investors that I've met have painted a different picture - they are so bombarded with ideas that they don't read most of the plans that cross their desk and they rarely invest in companies that don't have some sort of proven track record.

Oh, and even if you're hell bent on getting backing from a venture capitalist, it can take years and in the end you've lost control of your business. If they've invested in you, things are going to be run their way, regardless of what you think. Think long and hard if that's what you really want.

Find a way to get started on your own...NOW

In the June issue of Entrepreneur Magazine, 69% of their "Hot 100 Companies" were financed by savings and personal funds. That doesn't include loans from friends and family, or bank loans, or credit cards. In short - most up-and-coming companies found a way to do it on their own.

Give me an example Adam

Two companies both have killer product ideas and just completed their business plan and a prototype. Company A begins beefing up their biz plan and approaching venture capitalists. Company B self-funds their first production run, throws up a website, and begins selling. Meanwhile Company A is still looking for an investor. Company B has sold a few products and despite their struggles, are starting to get noticed....and Company A is still looking for venture capital.

By the time Company A has found money and started moving forward, Company B has been around for a few years. No doubt it has been hard, but they are a battle tested business and ironically, a company that an investor would love to invest in. They have learned to bootstrap because to conserve cash and in doing so have become profitable. Their operating expenses are low and their margins are high.

Which company would you rather be?

So what are you getting at?

Just f*cking do something. Start something. You don't need all the answers and it doesn't have to be perfect. Every day you spend chasing cash is a day someone else spends chasing your customers.

Terms of service for brick and mortar stores?

One thing I love about running an online business is that you can get people to agree to your privacy policy and terms of service when they sign up (that is, assuming you state that fact). How cool is that? You know that no one reads those things and you can pretty much eliminate all liability that you have for anything and everything people could try to hold against you.

Want to sue me for accidentally losing your data? Can't, you agreed not to in the terms of service. Mad because I closed your account and didn't give you a reason? Tough, you agreed to let me do that when you signed up. Now, just because it says so in the terms of service doesn't mean that doing so is a good business move, but it's nice to know that if the proverbial shit hits the fan you can point to your terms of service and cover yourself.

That got me to thinking - wouldn't it be awesome if a brick and mortar store had terms of service? Maybe you would hear a message playing over the loudspeaker when you walk in to Best Buy, or have a poster on the door or at the register:

By walking into this store, you are agreeing to the following terms of service.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Best Buy, its officers, employees, parent companies, subsidiaries, contractors, vendors or affiliates, from any claim or demand, including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your visit to Best Buy, the violation of this User Agreement by you, or the infringement by you or any other person you walked in with, of any intellectual property or other right of any person or entity.

We may kick you out of the store, suspend you temporarily or permanently should you violate any portion of this User Agreement. Best Buy reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. The failure of Best Buy to enforce any provision of this document does not constitute a waiver of such provision.

I wonder what people would think of that. I'm pretty sure that there would be an uproar. So why don't consumers care about all of the terms they agree to when they register online? We've become so used to ignoring those things that businesses stuff anything and everything possible into them to limit their liability. Great for businesses, bad for consumers.

blueorganizer - maybe the best Firefox extension yet

Following my post last week about 13 Great Firefox Extensions, I received an email from Alex Iskold, the CEO and founder of adaptiveblue, a company that makes the blueorganizer Firefox extension. Alex had read my article and thought I might be interested in his extension. Not knowing what to expect, I clicked through to the adaptiveblue site and watched the tutorial for blueorganizer and I was absolutely floored at how cool it is.

According to their site, with blueorganizer:

your browser becomes smarter. It helps you personalize your web experience based on what you already like. It harnesses your information to help you discover relevant new information and save time.

Sounds great, but what exactly does that mean? A picture really does say a thousand words in this case so watching the video demo will really help, but I'll do my best to try to explain. blueorganizer is like digg, del.icio.us, stumbledupon, and every other social bookmarking site rolled into one and advanced about five years (I realize that's a pretty bold statement).

Whenever you visit a site with something you would bookmark (say a book, movie, or video game), blueorganizer lets you bookmark the product in its appropriate category. Even cooler, blueorganizer automatically detects products on a page you visit. For example, if you stumble upon (no pun intended) a book on Amazon that you want to save, all that you have to do is click the "bluemark this page" button at the top of the page and bluemark takes care of the rest. It adds a photo of the book, title, author, and relevant tags to the book section of your blueorganizer. Now fast-forward a month to when you want to find that book again - all you need to do is look under your book collection to find your book. No more looking through bookmarks of URL's. You actually look through the products you like, not the sites.

In addition, there are a plethora of features (more than I can mention) that make this extension one of the coolest tools ever. My favorite feature is the ability to publish your bookmarks to RSS so that friends and family can subscribe to them. There are also cool features that allow you to rent movies from NetFlix or compare prices on your product from a bunch of different sites.

I also took some time to read Alex's article entitled "Smart Browser, Where Art Thou?" in which he outlines the reasoning behind creating such an extension:

Bookmarks are flat, the world is not
Let's start by looking at the way we currently remember things on the web. When we find something interesting we create a bookmark. If we are web 2.0 savvy we tag it and send it to del.icio.us. Sounds good, right? Not really. Say we find an interesting book on Amazon, a wine to buy for a friend's birthday, or a restaurant that we'd like to visit next Valentines day. The moment we bookmark the site, the rich concept like a book, a wine or a restaurant instantly disappears. Instead what we have left is the link: a piece of text that will not be meaningful a week from now. Why not? Because we do not think in terms of links. We think in terms of concepts like books, wines and restaurants.

After reading that, I'm even MORE convinced that blueorganizer is absolutely ingenious. Very, very innovative stuff.