Living the Startup Life

Twitter me this, twitter me that… what is twitter really good for? Its a question that everyone is asking, no one truly knows the answer to, but people all over are still using it. Are they really?

Rachel makes a good argument for the uselessness of Twitter. If you truly look at what twitter is, it’s a tool to help people stalk you. They literally took a cool feature from Facebook (the status bar), and just built an entire community around it. Now I know they added those cool little text message notification to tell you what your friends are doing, but really… I don’t need to be updated that you’re “tying your left shoe” or that “you’re coming back from your trip to NY.” Twitter is a tool that pretty much all bloggers are using to try and push their posts (at least in my opinion).

With that said, I use Twitter. Why do I use it? Because I need to stay up to date with everything going on in the Web 2.0 community as the CMO of Future Delivery. Have a met any friends through Twitter? NO. Do I actively visit the site everyday? NO.

I do have one question though. Why is it that some people have 50,000+ people following them?!?! That completely boggles my mind because I want to be them, hahaha. But seriously, I do. Can you imagine the power that these people have? Every single thing that they post can potentially be text messaged to 50,000+ people. This is insane for viral marketing!

So, my quest is to find out how to get more people to follow me on FB. If you have a strategy, contact me and we’re work on it together to figure it out.

I was at the Web 2.0 Conference last week and someone from Angel Soft approached me to do a 1-minute pitch. Most likely you don’t know what Future Delivery is, so if you understand after my pitch then I did a good job. Here it is:

I know I can do better, so please feel free to critique me and give me feedback. I am always looking to improve and would greatly appreciate your advice

I went to the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco last week with Ryan Geist.  It was a very eye-opening experience for me because I got to see with my own eyes how many web 2.0 companies are actually out there!  There is a ridiculous amount of companies who are literally doing the same things.  Ryan and I counted about 15 companies that are doing enterprise wikis and company communities.  I had this idea for a Gen-Y generated TechCrunch and had one of my team members start recruiting authors to build the blog; however, I went to the event and what do you think I saw?  Trade Vibes.  After taking a deep breath and looking at all of the companies at the event, I now understand the level of competition in the Web 2.0 industry and just how difficult it is to make it big and stand out above the crowd.

I listened to a few of the keynote and was actually impressed by Max Levchin, the Founder of Slide.  Even though he wasn’t the greatest orator, I found his interview very enlightening.  He is 32 (he actually looks about 26 to me) and has experienced previous failures.  Even though I am against useless application like Fun Wall or Super Poke Facebook, I must say that he has done a great job giving the masses what they want.  The first key principle that I learned is to market for the masses. If you get enough people using your site, you’ll eventually find a way to make money.

The second key principle that I learned came from Lyle Fong, the Founder and CEO of Lithium.  I learned that you must tailor your community to that 1% of hardcore users. If you can get that 1% to constantly be contributing and bring quality and value to your site, then the casual users will eventually feel the “helpfulness” of the site and want to participate in the community.

I’ll give the overall conference a B-.  There were some quality workshops and a few quality keynotes, but I really didn’t see anything super exceptional.  The conference floor had a lot of people trying to sell you and make you use your product; there wasn’t much business development going on.  The South Park Crawl (which was the after-conference parties that companies hosted) was actually very fun.  The Yahoo and IBM parties took the cake.

I will be going to Startup Camp in two weeks.  If you’re in the area (OC or LA) and would like to come, I would love to carpool with you!

I think the most frustrating thing that I have encountered with entrepreneurship are the technical hassles. And when I mean “technical hassles” I don’t mean anything extreme liking C++ or Java. I mean the simple things like setting up your blog, adding the stuff on the bottom like “digg this” or “stumble it”, and of course, changing main domain names.

For those of you who don’t know, you can have a main domain, add-on domains, and parked domains. So our original main domain for Future Delivery was www.fdnetwork.org. This was because Yu-kai Chou originally started a professional networking site called the FD Network. So we had thefdworld.com as an add-on domain on our host.

Anyways, I don’t want to get into the details about what add-on domain or parked domain names are. My point of this blog post is to warn you about completely nuking your website. When you “nuke” your website, it means that you are completely erasing EVERYTHING. We did this because we wanted to change our main domain name for SEO purposes. So before you nuke your website, make sure you have done these things:

1. Ask your host to back up your database
   • They won’t just do it automatically. You need to literally tell them to back up your database before you ask them to erase everything because once it’s gone, there’s no turning back.
2. Make sure it’s about midnight if you’re on Pacific Time
   • Many things can go wrong, and if you’re doing in during the middle of the day, chances are your website will be down while people are surfing the web. If you do it very late at night, then you have all night to try and get your website back up to spec
3. Back up all of your blog text and posts
   • It’s a very sad site to see all of your the blog posts that you have written in the past year go up in smoke. Make sure to back them up on your computer so that you can easily transition and post them back onto your site.
4. Write down all of the places that link back to your site and where your site is feeding into
   • One of the most important things about SEO is to have relevant sites link back to you. Once you nuke your site, your links are completely changed and you lose all SEO that you have developed. Make sure to write down every place that your site is linked from and linking to so that you can contact those places and see if they will re-link to you. Its always good to give it at least a try.

Our team member just fell to the floor in angony (in a joking manner) because the site is just not up and running like it was. We literally have to start everything over because we decided to nuke the site. So were learned a very valuable lesson: Do not nuke your site unless you truly have to. We could have figured out other ways to change our url and improve our SEO, but we were gung ho and wanted to charge! So, we paid the consequences. All experience is priceless though so I’m glad we went through it.

So my girlfriend and I were driving to get some late night Boba Loca over in Garden Grove when I saw the billboard for I Hate Sarah Marshall. I saw this about 6 times the last time I was driving around in Westwood, so I finally decided to check it out. I asked Kim to look up Sarah Marshall on her iPhone and we found out it was a blog of some sort.

I’ve recently dived into the blogging community and I thought, “Wow, blogs have gotten so powerful that jealous boyfriends are now using it to ruin the reputation of their ex-girlfriends.” It was literally a blog about how much this guy Peter Bretter hates Sarah Marshall for breaking up with him. I joked around that I’m going to get the url ihatekimear.com just in case

And then it hit me. I had the I-think-I’ve-seen-this-guy-before feeling and it was because I had seen Sarah and the guy on top of the horse in a movie preview before. Kim and I had gone to see Semi Pro last weekend and The Sarah Marshall movie was on one of the previews.

WOW! If this is not a great way of using blogs for viral marketing, then I don’t know what is. These billboards were posted absolutely every where I looked, which drove me to the site. The site itself is very cleverly made and is made to seem like it is actually the blog of Peter. There is even a little youtube snippet of him hating on Sarah. There is a picture of Sarah on the top right that says “Click here only if you’re over 18.” Of course everyone is going to click there! It’s like putting a red button in front of people that reads “Don’t click.” We will click; it’s human nature.

So this is the power of viral marketing. If you use blogs effectively, you are able to reach your target market directly and have them spread the word for you. The only things that I can add to their strategy is to incorporate comments, trackbacks, and all that other good stuff on their posts. If you can get a conversation going on the site, it will attract even more attention.

Chubs the cat is the cat that my family and I adopted.

Chubs was a street cat.  She would prowl our neighborhood streets, going from door to door and house to house just to scrape up any food that she could find.  One day, she winds up on our driveway with a sweet little “meow.”  My brother and I find her very cute that we go inside and get her some milk.  Our dad has always raised us to dislike cats, so we kept our distance and bid farewell to our visitor.

For the next few weeks, she kept coming to our driveway at 6pm at night for some milk.  She got bolder and bolder as the weeks went by and she would try to jump through our front door to get into our house.  Every time she managed to get in, we would grab her and literally chuck her back outside (Flinstone’s styles).  Don’t worry, she is a cat after all and she always landed on her feet.

I go out to my backyard a couple weeks later, and who do you think I see?  There is Chubs sitting there on top of our porch, sitting like a queen.  She sees me and makes a break for the door again.  Of course, I had to chase her inside and throw her back outside.  It made me wonder, this cat keeps coming over and over everyday and we throw her out every time.  Does she really think that she can make it inside our house?

A couple weeks later, I’m cleaning out some things in my garage and I hear a “meow.”  There is Chubs the cat sleeping on top of a cushion in the garage.  So this is where she has been sleeping!  In a matter of a month, she went from the driveway, to the backyard, to the garage.  You can’t help but be completely endeared at this point.  So I pick her up, and give her a tour of the house.

We went from cat haters to adopting a cat.  Since then, we have bought her a collar, feed her everyday, she’s slept on my chest, we give her massages, chase away dogs that are chasing her, and even go out to walks with her around the neighborhood.  Yes that’s right, Chubs the cat walks with us around the neighborhood.

So what can we learn from Chubs the cat?  Persistence pays off!  And not just any type of persistence.  It takes a sincere and good hearted persistence to get and accomplish the impossible.

So what does this have to do with entrepreneurship?  EVERYTHING!!! You and your ideas will be knocked down left and write, you will fail constantly and constantly, and people around you will disappoint you; however, amidst all of the struggles, you need to persevere and be persistent.  And don’t continue if you’re going to do it with a bad attitude.  Don’t tell everyone about how annoying it is to fail.  Chubs the cat never once bit us, never once clawed at us when we were throwing her out, and she never once missed her 6pm milk.  She came back with a good heart.  That’s what you need to do.  Stay persistent with your entrepreneurial path and always keep a positive attitude.  If you stay persistent with a positive attitude, then you will one day have your own seat in a house of you own:

So I was invited by my good friend Ryan Geist to go to the TechCrunch event this past Thursday evening.  Am I glad I went!!!  The place was packed with smart, young, and beautiful people.  Stepping into the event was like crossing into a different world.

I’m so used to being the youngest in the room and having to fully explain what a virtual world is, what an avatar is, and even having to explain what “web 2.0″ means! Whenever I meet up with friends or talk to people in the “normal” world, everyone is astonished that I have my own company at the age of 22.  The most common question that I get asked is, “How do you even start your own company?”

Not true at the TechCrunch event.  Pretty much everyone there was my age and has their own startup company.  It felt really good being among a crowd of people that understand exactly what I’m going through: working 100 hour weeks, living off of my savings, and dealing with so much uncertainty.  So with that said, I highly encourage you to attend the next TechCrunch event.

So what about the companies?  There were honestly a bunch of companies that I felt had no chance making it big and only a few that stood out in my mind.  The ones that I do like are meebo and docstoc.  But they have enough coverage going on for them right now.  I want to direct your attention to a couple that will fully launch this summer: Razume and nkdGuru.

Razume is a social network focused around resumes.  It is a great place to get your resume edited by the community and meet people who are developing themselves professionally and personally.

nkdGuru is a social network focused on mentorship and helping students learn more about a company, industry, or career before they fully commit themselves to it.

A common trend that I’m seeing is that the millennial generation is looking to more and more take ownership of their careers and not do what “the man” tells them.  If companies do not learn how to adapt themselves to the millennial generation, then they’ll just end up with a bunch of old X Gens working for them and new startup companies that take advantage of the open source community will vanquish them.

So I am very very excited!  About a week and a half ago, I was contacted by a Brandweek representative to chat about being a young CMO and what my opinions are about marketing and PR.  I’m good friends with Ryan from Brazen Careerist and today I get an email from him congratulating me about being on the latest article!  I didn’t even know that the article had been written, so I google my name and there it was: Marketers of the Next Generation.
After reading the article I realized something that seems to be a recurring theme when you continually try to push your image and company into the public eye - authors will alter what you say and alter your message to create a more buzz-worthy and interesting article. Luckily, I remembered to tell him not to mention what companies have signed on with Future Delivery or else I’m sure he would have added those names in the article.

So what did I learn from this experience?  You have to be very careful with what you say to authors and writers.  It is there job to write an interesting and appealing article so that people will read it.  If they have to alter some things, then so be it.

So I recently got hooked on this new TV show called Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  Now, it’s not the best show in the world, but it had a pretty cool storyline and entertaining characters.  Anyways, I’ve gotten used to watching TV shows on demand online because of my hectic schedule and I just don’t know when TV shows are on anymore.

So I go onto Fox On Demand and I can’t find the show on their list.  They have like a bazillion other shows on the list except for the one I’m looking for.  So I google it and find out that they have pulled it from being seen free online! They are now selling it on iTunes for like $17 and plan to release it on DVD!  I am so sick and tired of all these corporate people trying to suck every penny out of us.  Don’t they understand that our generation is all about free content, sharing, and open source.

So in order to fight the man, I say lets not watch the show on TV anymore and lets not pay them so that we can view it on iTunes or on DVD.  I want free content.  Plus, I can watch some free and better stuff on youtube anyways.

I just read a blog post by Ian about using the title of your blog post strategically.  He makes some very good points and I have to agree that making your blog post seem more enticing or controversial can compel people to want to read your post.  I actually also had a conversation with my business partner Yu-kai Chou about whether or not all PR is good PR.  We were talking about this because some of my most controversial blog posts that have shown up on Brazen Careerist have gotten the most comments.

For example, Flirting with the Interviewer was a blog I wrote to test out my theory of all PR being good PR.  It definitely raised some controversial issues and started a great conversation.  Not only was my blog a test, but it did have some very relevant tips and strategies that applied to interviewing.  Now, I could have entitled my blog post something like, “Principles of flirting apply to interviewing,” but that might not have generated the same buzz.

So since I started this blog to document my marketing experiences, I would like to tell you that buzz-worthy, controversial blog post titles and blog posts do increase traffic to your site.  I hope that once people go to our site, people will realize that we do have some very great content and that this is a place where you can learn how to further your career.  I’ll definitely keep you all updated about how or if we sustain the traffic we generate.