“You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All teh Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liza Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

I’ve been running on and off for a couple of years now. I’ve been prone to injury so I have probably spent more time off than on which makes everyone I know ask me why I continue. I run because it’s an enourmous release.

Running for me is a cure-all. When I’m feeling stressed or angry I find that running makes those feelings of frustration disappear. I can have had the worst day/week/month but an hour around the track with nothing but me and the clothes on my back puts everything into perspective.

Running gives me time to put problems into perspective, to realise that everything is surmountable. It also reminds me of how resilient my body is and that while it’s often easy to quit the greatest rewards come when you push past the pain point.

Running is a time for self reflection disconnected from everything else. There is no one nearby to talk to me or interupt me; there is no Twitter or email or phonecalls; there is nothing.

This afternoon I put out a tweet looking for a talented Myspace layout designer as part of my work with Melbourne artist management company Forum5. I got a few sarcastic responses back from some of my followers saying that I was stuck in 2002. While Myspace is definitely not the youngest or freshest music company on the block (and actually started in 2003) it’s still relevant for artists today.

Myspace is still the one place every artist needs to be and it could take a while to replace that. It’s the number one directory of all artists, big or small, where you are pretty much guaranteed to find a page featuring their music and some personal details.

When people are searching for artists they’ll often type in the artist name followed by the word “myspace”. I do the same thing when I’m looking for a wikipedia article about a given topic. It’s because I am looking for specific information that I know that particular site will have. In the case of the wiki search it is likely to have dates, facts and (hopefully) little opinion. When I’m looking for an artists I want to be able to stream their music, see a couple of photos, find out where they’re from and see how many people are following them.

iTunes doesn’t offer an alternative to this because you need to be within their app to search for music rather than from a web interface. Furthermore iTunes is a closed system for artists requiring you to pay money to third parties to have your music listed there. iTunes also lacks a lot of the more detailed information about the artist such as their last played show or photos from their upcoming video clip.

Myspace has no barriers: anyone can search from their browser without a third party application and anyone can create a music account and list their music there. It’s also really customisable with html, CSS and javascript so it can be more personalised than many other services.

Former Myspace users might think that Myspace is dead or irrelevant because they’ve moved over to Facebook or Twitter. The reality is that Myspace is no longer a social utility, it’s not “a place for friends” but it’s still a great music discovery engine.

I’m not arguing that it’s the best platform, there are definitely a lot of holes in it. There are better places to use to sell your music and your merchandise, to promote your shows and even to build your fan base – and these can all be seamlessly integrated into a Myspace profile. However Myspace is still the number one directory that every musician needs to be in so they can be easily found by prospective fans or casual listeners.

My advice to music talent is to create a great looking Myspace (you need to be there!) but also to look a little further afield. Setup a Facebook page and a Last.fm account and embed these widgets on your Myspace page. Create a slick looking site on The Sixty One and use this as your band site with your own custom url. Setup a Twitter account and update it daily with stuff like what you’re listening to, photos or snippets of new tracks. And then synch it to your Myspace/Facebook/Last.fm and The Sixty One profiles so you can update once and push to many.

What do you think? Am I completely off the mark or is this self-evident?

Ned

P.S. I did find a couple of guys who do great Myspace layout work over at Synapse.

Mick Liubinskas from Pollenizer delivered a Focus Workshop in Melbourne last Tuesday night with the topic “Focus or Fail: How or Why Startups Get Focused”.

It was a great night that I got a lot out of despite recently reducing my entrepreneurial workload. I could definitely see areas I could have improved in previous projects and developed more than a few ideas on generating focus on my Next Big Thing™.

A couple of bite-sized takeaways I can pass on for those who didn’t get a chance to go:

1. Everytime you need to use the word “and” in your one line description of your product you’re losing focus.

For Orgnition we built a better way to manage your community organisation. What was this? It was an organisation management system which included a CRM and a CMS and email management and… we were not focused enough. Focus on one thing, do that right. For Pollenizer they were initially about helping people build better online and mobile businesses. That was too much and so now they are only focused online.

2. Customers move slowly. Very slowly.

Don’t expect your customers to jump on your product on day one, it’s rarely going to happen. They need to find out about you, hear about you from their friends and then go back and check out your site again and then maybe eventually sign up.

For Orgnition we realised back in January that another 6 months might get the business over the line but we weren’t prepared to make the commitment. Within the first month after we closed it down we started to get all sorts of enquiries, particularly from people we had spoken to 6 months previously, wanting to give us money. Unfortunately for all involved it was too late.

3. Target the customers or market with the most pain.

Ignore the rest of your customers, just make your product work for those people who really, really need it. These people will forget the cost of switching to you or the price you’re going to charge them for the product. Find these people and build your product around them, everyone else will come on board later as you build out your value proposition.

4. Define your market segments, be prepared to burn them.

This was a great point in the workshop. Create a detailed list of market segments that you can attack, make them as small as possible and then focus on getting them to use your product with all of your energy. However if your product doesn’t stick in that segment burn it, forget about that segment and move onto the next one.

By creating a lot of small segments (perhaps with only a dozen companies in each segment) you can move onto the next one and still have plenty of potential targets available to you. If you go through a lot of segments without gaining any traction it might be time to review your product and start the process again.

All in all it was a great session and I look forward to applying some of the concepts. If you’re in Sydney Mick runs these workshops every now and then and you should definitely get along. Hopefully he’ll be back in Melbourne for another in the not too distant future as well – I’ll certainly be going again. You can follow Mick on Twitter at @liubinskas.

Ned

Update: Here is a copy of the presentation slides from the night.

My mate Ross recently returned from SXSW where he saw a newspaper called Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing. It was a collection of articles by people like Clay Shirky and Warren Ellis but it was also the inspiration for a new project we’re now working on.

“And now it’s in print” is a 16 page full colour newspaper aiming to promote amazing online content to a wider audience. It’s a way of sharing the online culture in physical print. We’re planning on focusing primarily on content coming out of Melbourne but will also be including things we’ve found from around Australia and the world.

We’ve given ourselves a month to get it ready for print and will then distribute around 500 to 1000 copies. This is not a for profit venture, it’s a small part in a series which you can find in our biographies under “awesome shit”.

We’re prepared to run just about any kind of content you can imagine: long form, short form, photographs, tweets, illustrations and even transcripts of podcasts. But there are some limitations:

• The work must have originally appeared online, and it must still be online at press time. Why? Because each piece will be accompanied by information that should help people find it online as it originally appeared.
• We can’t afford to pay for contributions. This is a project we’re doing because we want to promote people beyond their current audiences. We’re not getting paid, so we hope if you’re involved you’ll be cool with not getting paid either.
• You can’t submit your own content, someone else has to nominate you. Who do you know who produces amazing stuff online? Tell us about it and we’ll get in touch with them and see if they want to be a part of this.

So what is this post? I guess it’s a few things. It’s a call for submissions. It’s certainly a call for suggestions of people we should know about. And it’s a public announcement that this is a thing. I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Email me at ned@mynameisned.com or feel free to drop comments on this blog.

Ned

There was an amazing vibe going on in the room as 6 times got their ideas together to report their progress to some outsiders like myself and Tom from Adioso. All of the teams have made great progress since they started around 16 hours earlier, working on very little sleep trying to get their concepts out and in the hands of real users.

I’ve been cynical of these “start a business in a weekend” programs in the past because it’s just not that easy. To produce something of real value takes a lot longer than 48 hours. A startup is more like a marathon than a sprint.

However what these kinds of programs do demonstrate to their participants is that it’s possible to release any idea in a short amount of time and that actually doing that is incredibly valuable for the individual. You learn how to create a successful venture through launching something, anything. It may not be successful immediately but taking that first step of getting something out there is instantly accelerates your knowledge of what a startup is and what it involves. It also makes you a part of a surprisingly small group of people who are doers, not talkers.

As an example I am studying entrepreneurship at RMIT. Everyone enrolled in the course wanted to be an entrepreneur; to create their own businesses, be their own boss and change the world. However in my three years doing entrepreneurship at RMIT I think I could count on one hand the number of students who have actually launched a business – and these are people who want to do this for a living.

This startup camp is also particularly important because it’s introducing a wide range of highly intelligent, talented and engaged students to the prospect of entrepreneurship as a valid career choice.

Anyway, enough ranting. Here are the 6 startups from the weekend, though not all of the websites are live at the moment. Check them out and let me know what you think.

• Ansr.it – a site for humourous questions and answers
• BloodThank.com – bringing blood donation to the social web, putting the Thanks into blood banking
• Classnotes.com.au – a marketplace for tertiary students to buy and sell study notes.
• Dreamsharediscover.com – a community networking site for users to share their dreams and live out their aspirations.
• Gwisher.com – a gift recommendation engine
• Nightmapr.com – find local hotspots and plan your night out.

For me the best early-stage pitch that I saw was for Class Notes. Firstly I was surprised that no one had really done this in Australia well, especially as the market is fairly competitive in the US and the UK. As Tom said to me later “it really doesn’t reflect well on the state of entrepreneurship in Australia’s students that this idea hasn’t been nailed yet.”

What I really liked about this idea was that they can generate revenue relatively quickly – a good indicator that they can generate real value for people by solving an existing problem. They’ve also been able to launch a version of the site in less than a day. I’ll be really keen to see how these guys progress with the project – now that they’ve got most of the functionality the real work begins to make it a successful business.

You can follow the rest of the weekend via the hashtag #scm10 on twitter and find out more about the Agents of Change student entrepreneurship programs at their website.

Ned

If you haven’t heard of them before Shoes of Prey is a small aussie startup who make custom designed shoes for women. You go to their site, design your shoe exactly how you want it (including colour, style and materials) and they custom make your one-of-a-kind shoe.

Last week they paid for a review on the popular youtube channel of JuicyStar07. But JuicyStar07 isn’t just any ordinary Youtube channel, she has over 250k subscribers and total upload views in excess of 50m.

So one week later and what did the Youtube coverage achieve for Shoes of Prey?

* 450,000 views of the video (making it the 5th most viewed video when it debuted – worldwide!)

* 90,000 comments (making it the most commented on video for that day – worldwide!)

* 700,000 page views on their website.

* 100,000 shoes designed and saved in new accounts

* 1000+ new facebook fans

As they go on to say in their blog the target demographic of 13 – 17 year olds don’t have a lot of disposable income and it hasn’t led to a proportionate increase in sales (compared to previous conversion rates) but those numbers totally floored me so I thought I’d send it around. And while they might not have hit their target demographic spot on there is definitely a flow on effect with the parents and older sisters of JuicyStar07’s viewers pushing up Shoes Of Preys sales figures. They’re also building a loyal fan base of aspirant customers who will hopefully convert once they finish school and enter the workforce.

I asked one of the founders of Shoes of Prey, Michael Fox, what they paid for the spot but understandably JuicyStar07 would like to keep that under wraps. What he would say was that “it’s definitely more than paid for itself” and “on every other metric it’s been incredible”.

I’ve had a little experience with promoting through Youtube in the past having worked on seeding Chupa-Chups “Life Less Serious” campaign through the Taboo Group here in Melbourne. While we didn’t get the best results with what ended up being quite a delicate operation, exposure on the Angry Aussie’s channel definitely increased traffic (the main metric for that campaign) to the campaign site.

I can see great potential for product demonstration, reviews and opinion pieces for everything from new music tracks to web services (travel search review, comparison sites etc) or FMCG product launches. The key advantage with Shoes Of Prey being that while it was a paid video the product was relevant to the demographic and they developed a mechanism to convert viewers of the video into users of the custom shoe designer.

The next question is how you can use Youtube to promote what you’re working on?

Ned

Today we officially shut down Orgnition for good.

We could have kept going, knuckled down and thrown another 6 months at it. Hopefully we would have come out on the other side with a functional business which generated enough revenue to keep us going at it for another 6 months. In the end we just didn’t have it in us to keep going on a business which we no longer believeed in. There was also an enormous opportunity cost in sticking with the Orgnition business – a business we both acknowledged we would not have entered if we knew how hard it was to get off of the ground.

Already looking around at other projects I can see that some look awesome from a technical or business point of view but I am also being realistic about the time involved in putting them together and the hard work and pain that is all in front of me.

Cris Pearson recently sold out of Plasq to focus on Skitch. When the settlement cleared we had a celebratory lunch and he reflected on the business he had just left and the one he was now dedicating his life to. I realised then his success took around 5 years to come to fruition. And now he was just starting that process over again with Skitch – a product that’s been out for a while and which he will be dedicating the next 5 years to.

For Tom and Fenn they’ve been working on startups for 6 years before they started Adioso. 6 years of “mixed results” in various enterprises. Adioso as a business is still at an early stage but building on their previous record and with some solid backing they’re now positioned to make some serious changes in the travel industry.

I was reading a job posting on Hacker News the other day (more out of curiosity than anything) and one line in particular really stood out in the requirements: you must be prepared to make our startup the focus of your life. This one line, combined with the idea that it’s going to take at least 5 years to make something significant gives me new enthusiasm to not only try again but also to dedicate myself to the next project.

I’ve learnt a lot from this “failure” and I think learning anything means that it’s not a failure at all, just a milestone on the path to being successful.

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” – Henry Ford

Ned

“The core thing would be just do something awesome. Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.

A lot of things are evolutionary, and it is easy to get caught up in what the geek culture thinks. There’s lots of valuable businesses that can be built there, but i think that is where a lot of people tend to spin their wheels, and I’ve been caught up there before.

When I’ve had more successful things, I’ve thought, “Back to basics. What do I want? What do I want to see in the world?” And create that.”

-Ev Williams as quoted in Seth Godin’s Linchpin.

For a while now whenever someone has asked me what I want to do my answer has been “awesome stuff”. I’m not sure exactly where I’ll go and what I’ll be doing in the next few years of my life but I know that it has to be awesome: if it’s not awesome, I don’t want to be doing it.

That’s why I like working on things like the Yahoo Serious Film Festival. It’s a lot of work which may ultimately go nowhere and if it gets off the ground it may never make any money but I love working on it because I think it’s awesome.

Josh and I are working on a new project around the real estate industry and it’s a really competitive market. There are a lot of established players as well as new entrants doing cool stuff. We caught up the other day to define what it was that we were trying to achieve here and the conclusion was that we want to add something to this arena and that whatever we add it has to be awesome. If it’s not awesome, we don’t want to work on it.

That doesn’t mean every day is full of awesome, in fact most days so far have been utterly devoid of awesome. But in the long-term what we want to build is awesome and we’d like to think you’ll agree with us.

Ned

*image: the eternally awesome Deborah Harry on the set of the Muppets.

The examples used are of Ted Turner and his success in shifting the family business from billboards to television and John Paulson’s highly calculated profiteering from the collapse of the housing bubble in the U.S. It’s really awesome stuff.

As per all of Malcolm Gladwell’s writings it is well researched and referenced though one section in particular stood out for me. It is his excerpt from Scott Shane’s book “The Illusion of Entrepreneurship”:

“Yes, he says, many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks – but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories. The failures violate all kinds of established principles of new-business formation. New-business success is clearly correlated with the size of initial capitalisation. But failed enterpreneus tend to be wildly undercapitalised. The data shows that organising as a corporation is best. But failed entrepreneurs tend to organise as sole proprietorships. Writing a business plan is a must; failed enterpreneurs rarely take that step. Taking over an existing business is always the best bet; failed entrepreneurs prefer to start from scratch. Ninety per cent of the fastest-growing companies in the country (USA) sell to other business; failed entrepreneurs usually try selling to consumers, and, rather than serviing customers that other businesses have missed, they chase the same people as their competitors do.

The list goes on: they underemphasize marketing; they don’t understand the importance of financial controls; they try to compete on price. Shane concedes that some of these risks are unavoidable: would-be entreprenuers take them because they have no choice. But a good many of these risks reflect a lack of preparation or forethought.”

The whole article is worth a read if you can get your hands on it, seems to be hidden behind a pay wall online.

Ned