Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur Video

Updating this post on my book review of Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur by Stuart Skorman, here's a GREAT video book reading and Q&A session with Skorman himself. If you've read the book, the video is a great supplement and helps to answer some of the un-answered questions from the book. If you haven't read the book, he reads excerpts from the best parts and imparts the most important lessons.

Enjoy!

The pressure to succeed now

As I sit here in my living room on a Saturday morning and reflect back on the week that was and the week that's to come, the only thing that keeps entering my mind is pressure. I went through the usual second-day-jitters when I launched SportsLizard, but I weathered the storm and maintain that my plan will work, but I feel an added amount of pressure than just that.

I feel pressure from my partners to not let them down - to truly meet and exceed the lofty goals I set out for SportsLizard.

I feel pressure from myself to remain focused and stay committed to the simple plan I have devised to change this industry.

I feel the pressure of the clock - I want to make everything happen NOW.

I feel the pressure to validate myself - the fact remains that I left my career and moved away from a place I enjoyed living to move back into my parents basement and make very little money. I essentially gave up my social life and sacrificed many of my hobbies, all to try to achieve the kinds of amazing things I never could have in a 9-5.

I look at where I would be if this failed - I could always return to doing more client work, but who would want to work with someone who can't even make their own site a success? I honestly couldn't look someone in the eye with the confidence I do now if I knew that ultimately all of the sites I've started have fallen short of their expectations.

I'm not sure what I would do if SportsLizard fails, but I really don't feel like thinking about it. Because in the end of the day, I KNOW that it won't fail this time, and that mindset and confidence that I have this time will make all the difference. Just thinking about failing and what I would do puts me in the mindset of failure and I want no part of that.

I think this type of pressure would force some people to crumble or walk away. Or maybe most people wouldn't feel this pressure because they don't expect from themselves what I expect from myself, I don't know. But all I know is that the only way I can respond to this pressure is to execute my plan to perfection.

I've worked out the technical kinks with SL for the most part, and today I begin the worlds simplest marketing plan (I'll delve more into that some other time). Some day I'm going to look back at this blog and re-read this emotional roller coaster I've been on and just laugh. For today though, I just need to focus on working my ass off until the Final Four games start....then I'll work at about half-speed while I watch the games :)

Some days I just suck

If you can't tell, my confidence has been at an all time high the past month or so. I really feel like all of my work the past few years has put me in place to do something special with SportsLizard. One could say that my confidence has turned into cockiness (which can be both a good thing and a bad thing).

But it always seems that whenever you're feeling untouchable, something happens to make you feel like you suck. Yesterday was one of those days where I kept catching error after error, bug after bug - all things I should have never missed and yet somehow managed to miss all of them. I should have known better. Anytime you complete a 3 month project in 3 weeks, SOMETHING is going to go wrong. It just so happened that I found all of those somethings at the same time yesterday.

Openads messing with load times
I was boasting about the powerful (and free) Openads ad software last week. I still think it's great, but don't think you should plan on installing it and deploying it in a few days. I am pretty familiar with online advertising, and I'm pretty familiar with PHP/MySQL driven applications, but I still had to read every sentence in the manual to make sure I was doing it correctly. If I had to install it again, it would be cake, but it was frustrating the first time around.

Anyway, last night I had a complaint that pages weren't loading. I opened up Firefox, and all was well. But in IE, it took a LONG time for a page to load (I'm talking 45 seconds of showing just the header). At first I was sure it was my thumbnail script - I'm auto-generating thumbnails from pictures of items scattered across the web (people don't upload a photo, rather provide me with an image URL). The problem was I KNEW that I had tested the site in IE and not had that problem.

After an hour of going insane and wondering if our new server was to blame, I flipped on Firebug and realized that my ad software was the one slowing the load times. Turns out calling two ads at the same time with javascript invocation code (Openads talk) is slooooowwwww. So I changed a few settings around and all was good. I just should have tested the site more thoroughly after installing Openads.

Stupid Mistake
While playing around in IE, I also noticed a really, really, really stupid mistake that was making the ads appear above the items instead of next to them in IE (see an example of the item page to see what I'm referring to). Again, I didn't test the site thoroughly enough after installing the ad software.

SE Spiders Screwing With My Data
Then I noticed that the 'Popular Searches' on the home page were the exact same as when I launched. How could that be? There had been some 1,000 searches already. Was EVERYONE just clicking those links? Well no, not everyone - every bot. Every time a search engine spider crawled those links it was counted as a search, keeping it popular. And at that moment I realized that this data from the old SL was absolute crap because half of the searches were from search spiders crawling links to search results. So much for being "the smartest thing I ever did with SL the first time around". Oh, and the same problem pertained to keeping track of what items people are clicking to buy - search spiders follow the "buy" link and it gets tallied as a purchase.

I solved this two ways - first, I used the rel="nofollow" tag on my links to prevent search spiders (the good ones anyway) from crawling those links. I've already conceded that individual items won't bring search traffic because they are only up for a week or two, so I really don't need the search results to be crawled. Second, I added a field to my database to record the HTTP User Agent, which will tell me if it's a browser or a bot on the page. Google AdSense has a nasty habit of crawling every page that shows AdSense on it...which is fine, but I don't want that to be counted as a search so I'll filter those User Agent's out.

If this data is really going to be used in a price guide, I've got to keep it accurate. These are good first steps, and I'll probably add IP tracking to the mix too to try to prevent human spamming....something I'm sure will happen (if you want your item that you're selling to have a higher value, you could inflate the search demand for it by searching a lot for said item).

My Trunk is a Lake
And to top it off, I was making a late run to FedEx with George and we went to put some boxes into my trunk and there was a few inches of smelly rain water awaiting us. It's leaked before - I've fixed it before - but obviously not good enough. I'm going to take care of that later today.

Days like yesterday can definitely shake your confidence, but they are also great learning experiences. Yesterday slapped me in the face and showed me how much more work I really have to do to make my site great. In the end, it just motivated me more :)

Feedburner - I love you guys, but...

One of the things I'm most excited about with the new SportsLizard is that it's going to be MUCH easier for me to produce content. I used to create a page for every story I wrote, and then manually update the RSS feed, send out the newsletter, and update all of the archives. It was such a pain in the ass that I wrote far fewer articles than I should have or wanted to because I didn't feel like spending an hour publishing it.

Contrast that with the new Wordpress-run Lizard's Rant Collectibles Blog that I have set up. All I need to do is write a post and everything else is taken care of...even the newsletter that's delivered through Feedburner. Most email services charge for distribution, but not Feedburner - they let you customize EVERYTHING about the message (there's only a tiny message about Feedburner at the bottom, which most paid providers put up there anyway) and you can have an UNLIMITED list (most services limit your list size and number of messages).

So with a huge smile on my face I contacted Feedburner and asked them to import my existing subscriber list (a pretty small list of 400 subscribers). They wrote back right away, but could only import 100 emails because that's their "rule". I understand having a cap, but considering I could build a list of infinity subscribers with you, why is the import limit only 100? I love everything about Feedburner, but this is something that doesn't make much sense to me.

Now my first 100 subscribers are subscribed, and I'll have to email the other 300 asking them to subscribe again. We'll be holding a give-away for newsletter subscribers in the next month, so I'll tie that into the email, but take a wild guess as to how many of those 300 will re-subscribe? I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'll get 75 at best....I'll probably lose 225 great email subscribers to my newsletter because of a pointless rule...eh. Not really a huge deal, but something completely arbitrary that makes my launch a bit more difficult.

You could argue that the only subscriber that I care about is the one willing to click a link and re-subscribe, but I don't buy it. My hotmail account receives about 20 newsletter from everything from The GAP to CompUSA, and while I glance at these messages and sometimes even visit their site and order something, I probably wouldn't bother to re-subscribe if they took me off the list.

Book Review - Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur

I interrupt this regularly scheduled blog post, for yet another entrepreneur book review. One of the great fringe benefits of blogging about your entrepreneurial experiences is that you get contacted by a lot of other entrepreneurs. Sometimes I'm even lucky enough to be sent a free book written by an entrepreneur in exchange for my feedback on the book (I like getting stuff for free that I'd probably pay for anyway).

Such was the case with Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: Why I Can't Stop Starting Over by Stuart Skorman. Skorman is best known to us young entrepreneurs as the founder of the immensely successful movie site Reel.com. In sticking with my cut-to-the-chase book review format, here are the pros and cons of the book:

Pros

• A very easy and entertaining read. It felt like I was sitting in a room hearing Skorman tell his life story. I like to read books that really challenge my mind, the problem with that being the most of the books I read for personal and business are "difficult" reads that you can only process five or ten pages at a time. I regularly found myself reading 20-30 pages at a time without wearing my brain out, a testament to the laid back writing style.
• That's not to say that I didn't learn a lot from the book. Skorman tells his stories and weaves the lessons that he wants to impart into the stories. This works better than the other way around - listing off the lessons and telling the stories that led to you learning them - because you get to experience Skorman's growth as an entrepreneur from his twenties into his fifties as he experienced it.
• By far, BY FAR, the best part of the book was that Skorman "failed" in his most recent venture? Why is that so great? Because we all like to think that we do our failing early on, and that once we succeed we will continue to succeed. Skorman cashed out $17 million from Reel.com. He could have retired - he had all the money in the world. But the serial entrepreneur inside of him couldn't retire, and he lost around $15 million of that in Elephant Pharmacy, a pharmacy the blends western and eastern medicine. I don't know how I would react if I had that kind of money, but I think there's at least a *chance* that I would risk it all again for something I believe in. It led me to the realization that there's a good chance that we are entrepreneurs for the sake of being entrepreneurs, and not for the sake of getting rich - we crave the experience more than the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
  

Cons

• For most books I can rattle off the cons, but I only have one in this case. I was waiting to find out exactly HOW Elephant Pharmacy (a business that still exists today) was able to suck so much of Skorman's money, and then BAM, all of a sudden it just says "Just before I completed this book I signed a legal document that restricts me from writing about events at Elephant after October 31, 2003." Come on...it's like having the movie theater lose power with fifteen minutes left in The Sixth Sense only to leave you hanging (which, incidentally DID happen to me, and we had to come back the next day and watch the whole freaking movie over again just to get to one of the most shocking endings of all time). But I digress - I understand that Skorman probably didn't have a choice, but it leaves the reader hanging. The whole book is very transparent and then the ending is concealed.

Overall, a GREAT read for any entrepreneur. This book is going on my short list of books I recommend to first-time entrepreneurs because of the up and down experience it puts you through. That up and down experience correlates to any entrepreneurial endeavor that you or I will experience, and because of that we can all learn from reading Mr. Skorman's fantastic story.

SportsLizard is up and running, but...

The new-look SportsLizard has officially launched, 10 days before my April 1 due date. When I initially took this project on, I thought an April 1 launch would be pushing it, so I'm very satisfied with where I am at. Here's a page that describes some of the new and interesting features. All of that said, it's not really all the way launched lol.

In addition to just launching the new site, I had to move the site to Pure Adapt's server. And since I was eliminating like half of the old SL, I had all sorts of fun things like writing over a hundred 301 redirects (and I know I didn't get everything). It felt like I was trying to accomplish 50 things all at once. So I got to a point today where I just needed the site to be propagated to the new server to be able to move ahead. So I changed the DNS and crossed my fingers.

I've yet to fully test everything, but I think 95+% of the site works fine. I'm going to go through each and every page and function in a few minutes. I have two big things remaining: installing an advertising-management platform (planning on going with OpenAds) and templating the old articles to match the new site (I know, if I had programmed the site better/smarter I wouldn't have this problem - I'll go back to 2004 and yell at myself).

I hope to get that crap done by the end of the weekend, and then I can move on to contacting advertisers, soliciting more sellers, and driving more traffic to the site. I'm trying to be careful not to burn myself out getting to the launch point - in the past I've worked insanely hard just to launch something, only to realize that the launch is like 1% of the job. Although I'm working 12-15 hrs/day right now, I'm not mentally looking at the launch as THE accomplishment, just putting things in place so I can do the stuff that will grow the site and make us some cash money.

Defining the future of collectibles with more data

Collecting and analyzing data is worthless if you can't draw conclusions that directly help you improve your business. In my last post I showed some interesting search data that will definitely impact the way that the new SportsLizard functions. I dug deeper and found out two more things that will help define the way I grow SL:

How to market...
Since I haven't done any marketing in like a year, the majority of the traffic is search traffic. The majority of that search traffic comes from customs related searches (I dominate search results for anything Custom McFarlane related), people searching for a specific announcer (the announcer ratings work great because most sports announcers don't have a ton of web sites about them), and "long tail" searches for something collectibles related that I wrote an article about.

People don't find SportsLizard by searching for the items because items are listed and unlisted frequently (similar to eBay). That leads to indexing problems - Google spiders the site and sees an item and the next time they come back it's gone. I've essentially conceded that no one is going to find items through search, and that the sources of search traffic will continue to be the collectibles articles, customs, and announcers. It's easier to get an article about Topps Baseball Cards to rank high than it is to get a specific set of cards to rank high.

And while I expect this search engine traffic to contribute heavily, I realize that for SL to succeed it's going to have to draw traffic from elsewhere. I'm going to have to get collectors on the site through other techniques - I haven't sat down and planned it all out at this point, but I think it will primarily forum marketing at this point (sponsoring forums so that I can interact with collectors where they "hang" out).

How to flip the industry upside down...
I also studied what collectibles terms are being searched in the industry (using an internal tool that automates the SEO-Book KW Research tool....which Pure Adapt plans on making available sometime soon). My intent was to use it to help brainstorm ideas for topics to write about on the site, the idea being that if something is searched a lot and I have an article about that very topic, I'll rank high and get a lot of traffic...a technique I've used countless times in the past.

But I found something I didn't expect: a TON of searches for a free price guide. For anyone not familiar with collectibles pricing, it's pretty much been dominated by magazines like Tuff Stuff and Beckett for all of time. They each have online pricing, but Beckett charges for theirs and Tuff Stuff just makes free .PDF's available. And the data used in these magazines and online is out of date and taken from a small sample of card shops. Everyone knows that price guides are extraordinarily inaccurate and out of date. That's why you only get $20 for your card that books at $120.

After some thought, I figured out how SportsLizard is going to launch a free, online price guide that pulls from live market data. The price guide will be based off of:

• SUPPLY - The current item listings on SL (we're going to launch with between 3k and 5k collectibles, and hopefully be over 10k in the first month). eBay has over 800k for reference.
  
• DEMAND - search data from Yahoo
• DEMAND - search data on SL (over time...so a hot collectible that's being searched frequently will get a boost)
  
• DEMAND - purchases made through SL (again, over time)

We can measure supply vs. demand for a collectible. That's just a little better than a price that's just the outdated opinion of a few card shop owners :)

And the best part is - the community feeds the price guide. The more items listed, the more accurate it is. The more people searching and buying through the site, the more accurate it is. It serves the greater good of the hobby to participate in SportsLizard's price guide.

I hope to launch the price guide by May 1...it's basically contingent on us building up enough data to start with. Man, this just keeps getting more and more exciting. I'm waaaay ahead of schedule and should be able to launch the site by weeks end.

The smartest thing I ever did with SL the first time around

Back when I was designing SportsLizard for the first time I was still in engineering school and I was overly obsessed with collecting and analyzing data (hence the industrial engineering major). Most of the quirky things I decided to track (like the intricate demographics of my users) were a waste of my time that should have been spent doing pretty much anything else.

But I did start tracking what people were searching for, and when I pulled the cobwebs off of my database the other day I was shocked to find over 24,000 searches. All of a sudden, I realized that I had an enormous sample of extremely valuable data - if I could see what my visitors have been searching for the past few years I could tailor the new site around it. Do people search for their favorite team? For their favorite collectible type (autographs, cards, etc)? Or for their favorite players? Or a specific collectible (1986 Michael Jordan Fleer)? Or all of the above?

Take a look at the top 20 (by % of searches):

reggie bush - 2.4%
vince young -2.32%
brady quinn - 1.82%
bo jackson - 1.58%
barry sanders - 1.46%
dan marino - 1.39%
pat tillman - 1.19%
san diego chargers - 1%
junior seau - 0.87%
tom brady - 0.84%
drew brees - 0.79%
lebron james - 0.77%
peyton manning - 0.77%
jerry rice - 0.76%
michael vick - 0.72%
mcfarlane - 0.71%
walter payton - 0.68%
derrick thomas - 0.66%
john elway - 0.66%
ladainian tomlinson - 0.66%

It doesn't take a statistician to figure out that the visitors to SportsLizard have been searching by player. Only two of the top 20 (San Diego Chargers and McFarlane) are not players. It's also obvious that there's a football bias, and a bias towards the players that are listed in the customs directory (which isn't a surprise because each player links to a search of their name).

Interesting huh? The new SL won't overemphasize teams and collectible type like most sites do, and will be sure to emphasize specific players like most sites don't. More cool data to come in my next post...

Writing for the web

No, this isn't a post about writing articles for the web, like this one I wrote a while back. I'm talking about writing for a website. If you look back at the first version of SportsLizard you'd see an incredible amount of text explaining everything. Hell, this "current" version from about a year and a half ago still has confusing pages like this one about selling a collectible (note all the asterisks and special scenarios).

Here's the deal when it comes to writing on your site: PEOPLE DON'T READ, THEY ACT. I'm obviously not talking about a blog, I'm referring to an e-commerce site, a search engine, web software, etc. Look at Google, the most influential site of our time. It's a freaking web form with a search button that anyone who's known HTML for a week could program. It's great because it's simple and functional. I'm guessing that their conversion rate of getting someone to search (the goal of that page) is probably well over 90%.

I have a new goal as I'm developing this new SportsLizard - write as little as possible. That forces me to make the site intuitive to use. Web usability is a fascinating topic - what makes people click away from your site and why? There have been several good studies on the topic, and the book Call to Action is a great read, but in most cases there are no answers except trial and error because every site/market/visitor is uniquely different.

That said, there's one universal truth that always seems to pop up - throwing too much at your visitors is a bad thing. Whether it's too much text or a navigation menu of 50 choices, the user is less likely to follow the path you want them to take (to make a sale or sign up for a subscription or whatever the goal of your site is) and more likely to either click away or follow a confusing and frustrating non-linear path through your site looking for something that should be simple to find.

Screenshot of the new SL design

I've received great feedback from my team so I figured I'd post it here for everyone to see. This is the redesign of the Customs home page. The rest of the site will be on the same template.

Starting on the new SportsLizard

I spent the end of last week wrapping up some of my more time consuming client work to free myself up for working on SportsLizard. Going forward, I'll be spending ~40% of my time servicing our existing client base and the remainder re-launching SportsLizard. I see this as an opportunity to validate myself (if I'm such an "expert" in SEO/web marketing, then I should be able to grow my site if I put the effort into it) and also bring our company a step closer to making the majority of our revenue from our own sites and only take on the clients we want.

That said, there's some guilt on my part because I know for the next 1-2 months my revenue contribution to the company will be less than it has been. I know that if I fail, I can just pick up more clients and we'll be fine - but anyone who knows me knows I want to innovate for myself and not a client...so I'm looking at this as a HUGE opportunity to prove myself. If I fail, it could be a few years before I can jump off client work like this and delve into a project, because we have a lot of expenses coming by the end of the year (most notably we are in the market for a warehouse for Detailed Image).

So what's my brilliant idea to re-launch SportsLizard? I want to unite all of the small and mid-size collectibles businesses that currently sell on their own site to syndicate their items on SportsLizard for free. By building this unique data source of hundreds of thousands of items, I will provide VALUE to collectors - something I don't do now. Add in the customs section, the news section, the announcer ratings, and the news reader that are already in place, and I think I have the recipe for a massive collectors site.

I honestly don't think I could have done this a few years back. But now SportsLizard is large enough that I get contacted by 4-6 advertisers a month so I know I can support the site with advertising. Right now I have several on a "waiting list" for this new launch. I couldn't have had that a few years back. It takes pressure off knowing that we'll increase our revenue immediately without me doing any marketing/promotion.

I also now know a lot more people in the industry that sell online. I just finished sending out emails to 8 mid-size collectibles sites and I've received 2 "yes" emails in the first 10 minutes!

I also want to point something out that I learned with experience this time around: don't build your site/product/service based upon what YOU think will work. I've only begun templating the new site, and purposefully chose to contact other site owners before developing the database. Why? Because they give you insight that will save you time. For example, both of the replies I've gotten thus far mentioned that they currently syndicate using Froogle. So it would behoove me to accept Froogle feeds and make their lives easier....now wouldn't it? That's something I hadn't thought of, but can easily do now that I know about it.

I've honestly never been this excited in my life about a project because I feel it's the culmination of all of my skills and interests into something that can really make a difference in a hobby that's falling behind the times.

Next up - designing the database and search function. Once that's done I get to migrate the site over to Pure Adapt's server, contact more dealers, contact my advertisers, and begin marketing the sh*t out of the new site. Man I can't wait...

SportsLizard's making a comeback!

Anyone who's actively been reading this blog has known that for the past year SportsLizard has essentially taken a back seat to iPrioritize and my SEO work, which eventually led into Pure Adapt. I haven't spent a second marketing it in about a year, and I do no maintenance other than answer emails from people (about 10-15 collecting questions/month) and post two articles a month in the news section.

Funny thing is, traffic has continued to grow and the site (particularly the customs section and the news) have really, really taken off. Right now we make a few hundred bucks a month off of affiliate sales and AdSense, but for the traffic it gets SportsLizard does a poor job of A) translating in to money and B) giving visitors a reason to return.

The original idea
In 2003 my invention was a success and I was looking to start a business. My partner and I got crushed in a few business plan competitions and decided to go our separate ways. I had taken a few classes on web business in school, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Where else could I actually afford to start a business anyway?

I loved sports collectibles, something I'd been active in since I was a little kid, and I saw the old-school hobby falling behind the times. Other than eBay, there was no other great source for finding collectibles online, so I sought out to build a "better eBay" to truly pair buyers and sellers of collectibles. I wanted to become to collectibles what Amazon was to books. So I spent the next year going to bed 2 hours late every night so that I had 2 hours to read business books and write a business plan.

The launch
The site I launched with in summer of 2004 (seen here on the WayBack Machine) looks archaic, but actually had quite a bit of unique functionality and features that buyers and sellers couldn't find anywhere else. Even better - I programmed the whole thing myself, my first real website. In the first day I noticed that people cared about my site a whole lot less than I thought they would but it was OK because I actually had a pretty good marketing campaign. I was keeping it simple - I went where collectors were. I was active on forums, I paid for advertising in collectibles magazines, and I racked up a heavy PPC bill. It worked - for a month or two, but when I couldn't sustain the costs I began to see new users level off. Thus began the dark ages of SportsLizard.

The struggle
The problem with competing with eBay is that it's nearly impossible to grow the number of buyers and sellers concurrently. It's the chicken and egg thing - you can't have sellers if there are no buyers, but no one's going to buy if there are no items. And since SportsLizard only made money from sellers fees, I focused too much on getting sellers....a hard sell for a site that got barely any traffic.

What did I do when that failed? I decided to grow the site and add anything of any value that I could to it. I added the news section and the customs section, and about 15 other subsections (most of which flopped) over the next few years. I also became obsessed with SEO - a good career move, but not something that translated into revenue at the time. This is when the wheels started to come off - my simple plan was now a messy one with no direction and my marketing was all over the place.

I gave up
I wasn't planning on taking a job after college. I was going to live at home, work part time, and grow SL. But several companies came calling, and I couldn't resist the large salary and signing bonus. I decided that if I couldn't attract sellers to the site, I'd join a bunch of affiliate programs to get my inventory and focus on attracting buyers, which led to the current ability to search eBay and Amazon and other sites. The problem with this strategy is that 99% of the time the best item is still on eBay, so the buyer gets no value from SL, and the seller never even knows the buyer came from SL. Oh, and I make about 12 cents for a sale :). Anyone with half a brain can see that SL doesn't provide value to it's users (again, other than the customs and news sections).

False hope
But what about the Microsoft Award? I'm going to be honest - it means a lot to me that I was recognized by Microsoft, and it's kind of cool that I have a letter from Bill Gates hanging on my wall, but it didn't do a heck of a lot in the collecting community for me. What it did do was give me the confidence to quit my job and leave my career. After a few months, I saw the strategy I had in place wasn't working, and I moved on to iPrioritize and SEO work.

The opportunity is STILL THERE
The thing that always bugged me was that the opportunity is still there. Collectibles are dominated by a few large companies that absolutely RIP OFF consumers and do it with a smile on their face. Most of them hate me because I've exposed them in SL's news section with the help of other collectors (this one prompted an uproar from everyone mentioned in the article). I've always said I'd love to dedicate my career to taking down each and every one of them and exposing them for the frauds they are. I'm astounded by some of the things that collectors put up with - either because they've never considered the alternatives or they've never had an alternative.

It's amazing, but the opportunity four years later is even larger in my opinion than it was back then. eBay is still the only place to go to find your collectible. Everywhere else your product search is a waste of time and you're better off just going to eBay. I'm a firm believer that eBay is great for some things, but that most consumers would rather make a purchase from an actual business. They'd rather just put their credit card numbers in and not have to worry about leaving positive feedback or tracking their package or PayPal's quirks.

I'm baaaaack and this time I mean business
A few weeks ago I finally had my epiphany - I came up with the way to accomplish the goals of SL and meet this gaping need in the industry. I am four years more knowledgeable. I have helped successfully grow several sites, my programming and SEO/marketing skills are leaps and bounds better, I know infinitely more about business than I did back then, and I now have a team of successful entrepreneurs around me to supplement my weaknesses. With the blessings of my three amazing partners, I have decided to severely cut back on my client work and make it my sole mission to accomplish the original goals of SportsLizard.

This time I'm not starting from scratch. I have contacts in the industry, SL ranks high in the SE's and gets a ton of traffic, and I have advertisers lined up to sponsor the new site. I have the resources and wherewithal to truly accomplish my initial vision. I'll get into the details in another post, but my partners all believe 100% in the plan that I presented to them.

For the next several months, the primary focus of this blog will be the revival of SportsLizard. I'm going to do my best to share all the intricate details of this massive overhaul to my first business. It's kind of like getting back together with your high school sweetheart - you always knew you loved her but you were distracted by other opportunities for a while. Well not anymore - SportsLizard is going to accomplish it's original mission and I'm going to chronicle it here for everyone to read.

My tentative launch date for the new site is April 1. Starting next week I should be able to devote the majority of my time to this project. I'll keep you posted...this is going to be FUN.

Wohoo, we're profitable!

It feels like it's been six months, but Pure Adapt only officially acquired Detailed Image on February 1. So when the four of us sat down Monday morning to review our numbers for the first month, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew that Detailed Image improved 33% in sales since last February, and I knew that our consulting work was bringing in a steady flow of revenue, but I also knew that we had spent a lot.

Amazingly, after all expenses (server, inventory for DI, salary and benefits for four people, lawyer fees, money paid out to contractors, taxes, insurance, etc) we were STILL profitable by a few thousand dollars. George does all the accounting (the rest of us hate it, thankfully he loves it) so I turned to him and asked him again after looking at it myself - this actually includes all of our salaries? Yep. We managed to cover all of our expenses, pay ourselves, and still come out with money left in the bank. I honestly thought it would be a good long while before that happened...and it makes me excited for our future - very, very excited :)

Should your job define you?

When I was an engineer I always used to cringe at the first question everyone asked me when they met me: "So what do you do?" It was like my entire existence was defined by what I do from 9-5. I knew people at our company that had impressive jobs but were horrible human beings. I also knew people who worked in the factory that were some of the most kind and interesting people I've ever met. It used to drive me nuts. It's as if a humans worth is somehow defined by societies impression of their career choice.

Even I - someone who works a lot of hours and loves what he does - hopes that people don't define me by my business acumen. I think it's a petty reduction of my passions and interests, and largely ignores my relationships with friends and family, and my core beliefs and values...the sum of which define me. I would hope that anyone who truly wanted to know me would look beyond my passion for business to see the entire person.

Is it like this everywhere? Is there a "career competition" going on where it's participants are so short sighted that they define the human lives of those around them by what they do to put food on the table? Could this unhealthy career obsession be why Europeans are so much happier than Americans? I know one thing for sure: from now on, whenever I meet someone new, the LAST thing I'm going to ask about is what they do for a living.

Why no one gives a sh*t about your new business

I know that's a bold statement, but let me explain. Here's what most first time entrepreneurs think when they launch their new business:

"My new business is going to take the world by storm. As soon as people see it they are going to tell everyone and I'm going to be rich. I'm going to tell a few friends and they'll tell 10 friends and then they'll each tell 10 friends and it will explode. Everyone is going to want to be a part of it. It's going to be great...yay!"

Anyone who has started a business knows what happens next: you send an email to 30 friends and family. About 10 of them actually go to your site and only a handful reply. They all know about your site, but might not tell someone about it for months, if ever. You're left wondering why no one gives a shit about your new business. The reality of it is that everyone is immersed in their own life and their own problems, and very few will really take the time out to help you grow your company.

In marketing, it is very, very, very hard to grab someone's attention. It's infinitely harder to get them to take action (sign up for your service, buy a product, etc). Of the people who actually do check out your site and like it, many will bookmark it and move on...maybe they'll come back in six months, maybe never.

In much the same way, an investor or advertiser doesn't care that you have a great idea. They care that you have a solid business plan, a working demo, and financial backing to even consider you. More likely than not they want to see hard data that proves that they should invest their money into you.

It's a cold realization when it happens, but it teaches an invaluable lesson in preparation and dedication. I experienced this with SportsLizard and iPrioritize, and I recently saw a few first time business owner clients go through it. I tried to cater their expectations, but in the end they had to see it for themselves to believe it.

My father (not a businessman) experienced it first hand with iPrioritize. He loved the idea, and bought into it as much as I've ever seen him buy into anything. He brought business cards to work and handed them out to family and friends. Most people said "that's nice, I'm glad for Adam." When my Dad asked them a week later if they had signed up for an account, he would grill them as to the reasons why not and tell them why they should use it. I would have to calm him down and explain to him that most people aren't going to take the time to sign up, even if they like me and like the idea.

Think about how many cool tech ideas you hear about. Now think about how many of those you actually use. It's not a shot at the company - maybe you don't have a use for it, maybe you can't afford it, or maybe you don't feel like taking the time to figure out something new. It's nothing personal against the company, but to them you go down in their metrics as a visitor to their site that didn't take action...a failure.

The worst part about this is that you're often left in a state of shock and no marketing plan to move forward with. Marketing takes hard work, sacrifice, and persistence, as much as anything I've experienced in life. Most marketing plans I see fail either because they give up too soon or they didn't plan to have to work at it and they don't have a long term strategy.

Don't be that entrepreneur. Prepare to spend months, even years marketing your product or service for people to notice. Expect it to be hard and yield less than you initially expected. If the world turns you into the next YouTube or MySpace than be grateful, but if not be ready to work. When you do finally get customers, embrace them...especially the good ones. Oh, and when the hard work does finally pay off, celebrate because you persevered and you deserve it.