THE DREAM IN ACTION

Image by Strife81 via FlickrHAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY!

I went through some of my oldest blog posts this morning and found one to be particularly appropriate. In a time of leaning business practices and tight funding opportunities it is even more important to focus on businesses that will generate revenue! Sometimes this requires us to put aside ideas that need 1M views and a fancy advertising strategy to be profitable and remember the brick and mortar style businesses of days past. The question is, does a startup have to be sexy?

07.27 2007

Does it have to be sexy?

I was reading an article in Fortune Small Business magazine and I started to question the Web 2.o draw. The article was, “Old Dogs, New Tricks – How smart entrepreneurs find innovation and profit in sleepy industries. (May 2007)” Why is it that so many of us 20 somethings immediately think web start-up when we hear or think about being an entrepreneur? Why does it have to be some sexy idea that nobody has ever thought of? Why does it have to change the world? The article featured a man who bought up tired, less than successful radio stations in small markets, and another who ran a airport parking service. Sure, it’s been done before BUT that doesn’t mean that you can’t run a very profitable company that is equally as fulfilling that isn’t called Google or Yoono or del.icio.us or Ooxma. What about Jeff’s Dry Cleaners or Rich’s Rugs or Uptown Mattress Shop? The main thing is that you like what you are getting into, that you are passionate about the business your starting. If you are a software developer or a computer science major, get after it, make up a crazy name and make millions by selling one square inch of advertising space, show Zuckerberg who’s boss! But just because you’re young, smart, motivated and starting a business doesn’t mean it has to be cutting edge and innovative. After all we all, don’t we all need a mattress?

Fifty People, One Question: New Orleans from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I found this video by Benjamin Reece a few weeks back and after re-finding in I’ve decided that it is just too aww inspiring not to share. This post is out of the norm for Ryan A Graves.com but I think you’ll be glad that I shared it. Here is a discription of the film from Cameron Moll’s blog:

Benjamin’s recent projects is “Fifty People, One Question: Restored”. The idea is simple: Ask 50 people a stimulating question. Record their responses. The result combines cinematography, music, editing, and human emotion to produce one of the most compelling, well-produced indie videos I’ve seen in recent memory.

Remarkably, the video was shot entirely with an amateur-grade Canon HV20 camcorder — the same one I own (correction, I own the HG10) — but with a 35mm adapter and Nikon lens. Music is by Four Tet. Opening song is “Slow Jam” available at iTunes and Amazon.

There was a great post on the Viral Thinking blog today called, ‘Creating Your Personal Brand‘. This started as a comment on that post and I wanted to continue the thought here…

<comment> Personal branding is SO important. Even for businesses that aren’t just run by one individual, its important for that companies individuals to use personal branding!

Personal branding is essentially two things: CREDIBILITY and the ability to COMMUNICATE that credibility. As mentioned in this post, it is totally legit to “claim” to be an expert in the process of becoming one. If you are passionate about your area and diligent to become a true expert your are more valuable than the claimed expert who is not continually learning. Plus, if you’re in a position where you are continuing to learn you relate better with “normal people”, thus making yourself even more of a value and a stronger personal brand! </comment>

Along with the credibility and communication factors, another critically important aspect of powerful personal branding is AUTHENTICITY. With all the credibility and communication skills in the world, if you are not authentic to your community, you’re done. If they don’t think they are interacting with a true person you will immediately lose all credibility you worked so hard to gain. So to my point about claiming to be an expert, you need to be honest about the fact that you are in the learning process. Don’t claim to a PHD if you are in school, claim to be a PHD student…the powerful credibility is still there and your honesty will undoubtedly gain you more trust and credibility.

Lastly, possibly the most important factor of building a powerful, strong, and valuable personal brand is SWEAT. If you’re not sweating in your effort to build your knowledge base, build your expertise and in turn, building your personal brand, you’re not doing enough! You have to be out there constantly interacting with your community (this means one on one with individuals). Comment on blogs! Talk about your topic! Help people for free! If you are focusing on these four main points you will be on your way to building a valuable personal brand.

• Credibility
• Communication
• Authenticity
• SWEAT

So, if you are working on your personal brand I’d love to hear about how you are doing it. I’d love to hear about some of your successes or struggles in the process. Please share.

Today was awesome. I had a productive day at work, I started early (about 6:50am), got to work on some video editing which was fun, got news about a potential stint in Paris, and left a hair before 5 (always nice). Then when I came home I realized that it was an awesome “social media day”. That may sound a little “douchy” but I’ll tell you, it was awesome.

For a blogger, at least for me, its all about quality and quantity. I want tons of people to come to my site, and I want big names to come to my site. Often times big names can mean tons of people, if they share. Plus, they’re big names for a reason…they’re awesome! Two of my favorite blogs are…

• Fred Wilson AVC.com
• Gary Vaynerchuk garyvaynerchuk.com

… and both of those bloggers came to my site today!

Fred Wilson’s blog is probably top of my must read list so having him read my stuff is quite an honor…he’s got a style that is second to none. He has over 150k readers of AVC.com and has grown that by simplifying the mysterious world of venture capital for the everyday entrepreneur and investor. He respects his readers and he understands community (he replies to almost every comment I make).

Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV is one of the largest personalities on the web. At the very least he’s the most energetic! He hosts a 20 min wine show 5 days a week and is the icon of personal branding. ActionsTalk will be having Gary V on next week so don’t miss it!

The list doesn’t stop there…

Blake Samic - co-founder of ActionsTalk and all around bro

Joe Budde – my college roommate from sophomore year that I haven’t talked to since (sorry Jbud1)

Dave Cohn – an ActionsTalk contributor and good friend who runs Spot.Us

Soren MacBeth – founder of StockTwits.com

Frank Gruber – founder of TECH Cocktail (I’m going Nov 6th in Chi) also SomewhatFrank

Gregory Ng – a social web brethren – check out Gregs new frozen food site FreezerBurns.com

So, in growing a blog its all about the community and the content. Celebrating the small victories like this one are important. They are what keep you writing and excited about you blog…so really those victories are what keep your blog awesome. Thanks to all the readers…without you I’d quit!

AdaptiveBlue publically launched their new product today called Glue. My friend, Fraser Kelton, the VP of Business Development at AdaptiveBlue hooked me up with the product about a month ago through their private beta and it is awesome. It uses semantic web technologies to literally link your friends to the objects you view on the web. The company is focused on developing “personalization technologies that leverage semantics and attention”.  The number one thing that jumped out at me while using this product was ease of use.

Glue basically pulls the objects you consume ( any book, music, movie, or everyday consumer item that you view) and associates those products with you. Then as others view your sites (Blog, Twitter, etc.) or the host sites that host those products (eBay, Amazon, Last.fm, etc.), it shares your interests with others. Obviously, there are extreme monetization opportunities here. You get product recommendations from the people who are most influential to you, your friends!

Most web apps today have a purpose and a problem they are attempting to solve, but often times the barriers to making these application useful are large. The web applications that will really gain a lot of traction (quickly) are those where barriers to usefulness* are minimal or non-existent. Services like Plaxo and Facebook that now suggest friends based on the social graph behind the platform are incredibly effective ways to promote their product. Useful and easy = low barrier to entry. AdaptiveBlue has dominated this concept with their Glue product by automatically connecting or suggesting people to follow/friend based on similar product interests. They essentially develop your ‘product based’ social graph for you. Obviously they give you the option to ‘find friends’ because that manual process is still necessary as the technology is today, but eventually we will be able to add a service and it will automatically know who my friends are for that type of service. (!!!startup idea!!!)

If I’m viewing a product on Amazon it will show me which of my friends ‘liked’ or ‘gave their 2 cents’ on the product. Also, they will suggest others who liked the product (minimal barriers to usefulness).

See Glue bar on top of the page: On my blog other users who have Glue will be able to see a list of the products that I’ve viewed, like, or rated.

And finally like any good Web 2.0 application, I can create a profile with an avatar and personal information for others to use to rate my credibility or generally find more info about me.

After using Glue for about 2 weeks I found a book recommended from Eric Olson called “Creative Capital” which is the story of the father of Venture Capital, Georges Doriot. I never would have found out about the book without the product. I wasn’t looking for a book recommendation but just through the hidden social web that Glue builds I ended up making a purchase. Now you see the value, right?

Overall, I think that AdaptiveBlue is headed in the exact right direction. Bringing people and their activities closer and closer together. Unfortunately the majority of their products can only be used in Firefox as plug-ins, which is a huge limiter at this point. But, at such an early stage of development I think that the concepts behind their design in on point. Union Square Ventures is an investor in AdaptiveBlue which in my eyes is a success and a step in the right direction in its own right.

Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

Give Glue a shot and lets make product recommendations to each other. Let me know what you think of the tool!

I recently read Paul Graham’s Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy. It’s super encouraging for someone in my position because it affirms yet again that my efforts towards starting SocialDreamium are NOT wasted. It also affirms that starting a company now is actually very well timed. I’ve always thought that starting anything when times are bad is actually good. It’s just like the “buy low, sell high” mantra of investing. If you start something when an industry is down you can ride the upswing and potentially get very wealthy.

Kevin Rose talks about his take on Paul’s article and shares some of his experiences with starting Digg.

Why to start a new startup in a bad economywww.kevinrose.com

This video is a bit long, just shy of 1 hour. But, it is packed with great lessons from 37 Signals founder and CEO, Jason Fried. He goes through a series of tips or lessons before opening up for Q&A. Here is my take a two of his lessons that stuck out to me most.

What is the optimal size of a business?

Jason makes the point here that the idea that businesses always need to grow is wrong. People see business like they see tumors, only eternal growth is acceptable. Jason claims this is a bad idea. He pushes that 37 Signals will focus on being a strong and healthy business, not just a large powerful business. The point he’s making here without ever actually using these words is, quality or quantity. He also says that “his team equates success with being happy with what we are building over just making more money”. This is a powerful statement.

During another talk, I heard Fried make the point that you don’t have to be Domino’s Pizza to be a successful pizza shop. He encourages people to go out and run a successful mom & pop pizza shop that customers are happy with.

Treat your software as though it was physical.

Jason uses the example of the water bottle he is holding during the talk. It’s the perfect size for what it is supposed to be, portable water. If the water bottle was 2 liters he wouldn’t be able to hold it or carry it. So why not design your software the same way? If you make it the right size for the problem you are trying to solve, then your customers will be happier with it and you will be happier because your effort will be proportionate  to the problem you are attempting to solve.

I’ve struggled recently with where SocialDreamium will go. In it’s current state, less than 1 month old,  I’m still working on closing my first client for social web consulting, I realize already that eventually I will have a desire for it to grow far beyond it being solely services. For now, consulting is a very exciting source of revenue and probably the only space that I can add true value (for now). Not being a programmer I’m struggling with my inability to quickly build out an idea on the web. I’m learning (PHP, MySQL, API’s, etc) but I’m not patient enough for my learning to catch up with my ambition and ideas. So, where to go…

In constantly learning and looking for better ways to get going and better define which direction to go. I’ve found Mark Cuban’s blog to be an amazing resource. He talks about his experiences getting started, and more importantly the attitude he had to start successfully. That is exactly what motivates me to keep learning, keep growing, and keep dreaming.

In a recent post, Mark re-posted and older piece that he wrote on the importance and value of sweat equity:

The best businesses in recent entrepreneurial history are those that have been started with little or no money. Dell Computer, MicroSoft, Apple, HP and tens of thousands of others started in dorm rooms, tiny offices or garages. There weren’t 100 page long business plans. In all of my businesses, I started by putting together spreadsheets of my expenses, which allowed me to calculate how much revenue I needed to break even and keep the lights on in my office and my apartment. I wrote overviews of what I was selling, why I thought the business made sense, an overview of my competition and why my product and/or service would be important to my customers, and why they should buy or use it. All of it on a piece of yellow paper or in a word processing file, and none of it cost me more than the diet soda I was drinking while I was writing it up.

So, why is this encouraging ? Because right now I don’t have a lot of capital, I don’t have a lot of time to go hunt down VC’s or funding, but I do have the motivation to come home, every night from a full days work and continue, on MY work. I work on ActionsTalk to continue to build a reputation within the startup community. I blog here to educate myself and communicate with a vibrant and intelligent community of readers. And now, with the formation of SocialDreamium I’ll work to help clients utilize the social web to drive improvements in their customer relationships and their bottom line.

But I know that won’t be enough. I want to develop tools that businesses can use to make social media easier and more valuable. I want to be able to teach small businesses to utilize the social web using my tools. This web thing isn’t that tough but it does have to be taught and demystified for the masses, I want to lead that charge. The only problem; those tools aren’t developed (yet). So, if you have or know where I can find the resources to get those tools developed please let me know. I want to build this from the ground up. I want to utilize the free web and drive huge profit for clients. Will you help me do that?

This morning I signed a petition for Free the Airwaves that would help the wireless initiatives in the US. Remember the fuzzyness between TV channels, well those radio airwaves are currently controlled by the FCC and in Feb 2009 they are going to decide whether or not they will open up that “white space” spectrum, as it is technically termed, to the public. I’m a huge fan of almost any open wireless initiative. ActionsTalk featured Shaheeb’s project for WireFreeMKE a few months back and as these projects work individually toward the same cause we support less regulation of this potential reality. Free wireless, more internet, happy us.

This is the petition below. Please go and sign this petition!

To the members of the Federal Communications Commission:

I’m writing to urge you to open up currently unused parts of the TV spectrum (the “white spaces”) for wireless broadband and other emerging technologies. I applaud the extraordinary steps the Commission has taken to realize the potential of TV white spaces to date, and encourage you to take the next step at your meeting on November 4.

The potential benefits of freeing up this important public resource, more than three-quarters of which today is unused, are overwhelming.

The white spaces can:

* Pave the way for universal wireless broadband access;
* Extend broadband wireless to rural areas that currently aren’t connected at all;
* Enhance the reliability of public safety communications;
* Enable distance learning for students in remote locations or for whom traditional classroom-based learning is impractical; and,
* Bring high-speed mobile internet access to every high school and middle school in the country.

Opening up unused TV spectrum might be one of our best remaining chances to address the digital divide by creating affordable and truly universal broadband wireless coverage in the U.S.

I urge you to take this rare opportunity to connect millions more people to the Internet.

Now is the time to put the power of better and faster broadband in the hands of innovators and entrepreneurs. At your November 4 meeting, please move forward with rules that make the best possible use of these airwaves.

Image by graves.ryan via FlickrI’ve been using Google Chrome on my PC at work since the first day. I really like the browser for one reason and one reason only…SPEED. However, over the last few days I’ve had it crash on me about once a day. Each time I’ve had 5-10 tabs open and am usually moving back and forth between them pretty frequently. Is anyone else having this Chrome crash issue? It is doubly annoying because when I Ctrl-Alt-Del to kill the process I have to kill each tab separately because of the way that Chrome treats each tab as a unique process. This is how it can operate so fast when working properly but it makes it much more difficult to close out when there is an error.

I’m still liking the browser and still waiting for the MAC OS X friendly version but if it keeps crashing this often I will probably go back to FF3.

Another issue is that when writing blog posts in Wordpress I am unable to format correctly using Chrome. It is basically not recognizing <br> tags. It will take my entire post and combine it into one paragraph, leaving me no choice but to go in and add <br> tags throughout the post. Very frustrating.

Let me know if you guys and gals know of any solutions to either one of these issues. Thanks!

Miami University a traditionally very republican school seems to be a bit up in the air this year. Look at this video found on boston.com

Obama’s appeal to younger voters definitely will make this years election interesting on Miami’s conservative campus.

Paulson’s take on where we are: “We’ve taken steps to bring confidence back to the banks, but we will have a number of difficult months ahead of us.”

Peter Urban from Alberta, Canada launches Smibs.com’s first product, Doorbell, into public beta today! Testing Doorbell out last night I’ve decided to use it to manage my SocialDreamium contacts and clients. The product has proven to be extremely useful and powerfully simple. Smibs which obviously stems from Small/Medium Business sets out to make the sales process simple to manage for small biz. Doorbell is part CRM, part sales assistant, and makes it very easy to manage contacts and contacting customers.

This is exactly the type of startup that will work and survive in this economic environment. They have a product that will help so many small business work more efficiently and provide value to these businesses. They have a tool that companies will gladly pay for due to the productivity gains they will realize with this product. Smibs also has a free version of the product so people can use it on a limited scale. This is a great model (see Flickr), because it allows users to test and realize the value before they jump in, which will actually reduce the barrier to purchase. I’m not privy to the funding that Peter has taken for Smibs, (if any) but I see this company to be a very investable startup, even in this recession. Smibs runs lean, they charge for their product, and they are focused on solving a business problem.

The feedback that Smibs has received from there private beta users has been phenomenal! ActionsTalk is working to get Peter Urban and the Smibs team on for a spotlight soon. I’ve been talking with Peter via Twitter and Seesmic for quite a while and from what I can tell all his hard work in developing the Smibs products will really pay off. Best of luck Peter with Smibs, Doorbell, and future products. You definitely have the support of myself and ActionsTalk!

For those of you who read this far here is a free signup key for the first 50 users. Please if you were one of the people to use the signup key I would appreciate you letting me know by making a comment to this post. Enjoy!