clear.your.mind

Many people ask me why I decide to do a web application, and why I decide to go free with it. “You want Google or Yahoo to buy you?” well, if they want to talk, we will sit down and talk, but that’s not the reason why I, along with another developer, are doing 15tags. But, why doing it free? that’s everyone’s question.

Users and free web applications

Charging isn’t necessary I think. I encourage everyone to think about it, for at least five minutes. Do it, come on. Why we have to charge for the web app? to earn money. Ok, that’s sensible. But what if we can do a free web application and still, we can earn money? for a second, just think about that. Accept it as a fact, just for a second. Ready? ok, now we have in our hands, a fully developed web application, and an income that allows us to chose what to do. We can give it away for free, or we can still, have a functional fully supported web application.

At this point there will be people saying “…ok, but I will charge anyway. Is my choice” and I say yes, it’s yours and nobody else.. What I’m trying to think at loud here with you is the possibility to think outside the box. If you can do a web application, I’m sure you can find a way to support it without asking five dollars to every user, can’t you?

Continue reading this article »

Today I read an interesting post at the Whitespace blog from Paul Scrivens, CEO of 9rules Inc. Really, it called my attention. The post title is “Could you walk away?” here is a little bit of it:

If you walked away from your job right now would you be proud of what you have done? […] I’m thinking of all those companies that started something, but didn’t leave any legacy but that of failure and I’m not sure I could walk away from a situation like that. Of course there are times you have to realize there is nothing more that could be done so you have to leave things alone.

This post really made me thinking. If you quit right now from your job, or from a project, you will be satisfied about the outcome? if you are, you are just trying to be satisfied or you are truly satisfied? it is possible to quit or walk away from a work, job, project you are pretty much satisfied with?

Those are really interesting questions going through my head (thanks Paul, just what I needed, more questions! pshh!) but the sentence that called my attention was I’m thinking of all those companies that started something, but didn’t leave any legacy[…]. I worked my way through a lot of difficulties to get my company started, now I finally settled down and I’m ready to start working on projects I like (side projects, clients projects, charities, etc); so the question isn’t if I’m going to leave a legacy, because that will be my new objective with the agency, but instead, my question is what legacy I’m going to leave behind me?

I’m working on it!
Cheers
Javier Cabrera
P.S.: Congratulations to my very good friend Tim, he is about to start his business. Tim, I’m 100% here for you, good times, bad times, doesn’t matter. I wish you all the luck in the world, and I hope to help you the best I can in every step you find a difficulty during the long walk to success. Just remember: only an idiot will think on success without failure; you can’t avoid failure, but a lot of people choose to avoid success. Have fun, don’t stop trying and always remember your victories.

Guy did it again with his last post How to Suck up to a Blogger. I love how Guy’s posts sound pretty basic and obvious, yet, are full of wisdom; that’s something I think I could never accomplish (well, maybe with time). Guy talks about a new marketing strategy (or PR strategy, as you wish), it’s about using bloggers to reach users, visitors, and clients. If you are launching a service, or a new products and it’s Internet related, what you think its a better strategy:

• Paying for an AD in your local newspaper?
• Sending a press release to a PR list?
• Making a call to your Blogger friend who has 5,000 visits per day to tell him a little bit more about your new product/service and maybe send him a free sample to review on his blog?

I will go for the third one, of course. That’s what Guy aims to with this post, how to get yourself a list of Bloggers in order to do marketing later. He compares this strategy with the one he used a lot before joining Apple, back in the old good days; but instead of using it with bloggers, he used it with newspapers journalists and it worked amazingly well.

4. Give schwag. In case you hadn’t noticed, most bloggers don’t make a lot of money from their blogging efforts. Thus, samples of your product, t-shirts, tickets to the Stanley Cup Finals, etc can go a long way. I’m not saying you can buy bloggers, but you can make them happy pretty easily. Dollar for dollar, schwag for bloggers is one of the best marketing investments.

So there you have it, good PR + Marketing with bloggers = new results, new horizonts.

Related Links
Let the good times roll by Guy Kawasaki: How to suck up to Bloggers

Christopher Hawkins wrote a pretty good article on his blog. I think this one is better than the Guy Kawasaki one (which btw, didn’t show up my trackback; damn you Guy! >_< ) because it's a true story and not just theory. Here, let me give you an advance of what you will find in Christopher's story:

How does any business get customers? By advertising? Nobody pays attention to that anymore. By clever PR? Sure, there’s always the odd person who will hire you because he saw that newspaper article about how you donated 100 hours of your time to build a website that takes donations to help cure those poor kids in the oncology ward of the local hospital.

That’s something isn’t it? The more I read about this kind of networking, the more I realize I’ve doing it wrong.

Related Links
Christopher’s article

I would like to encourage you today to motivate yourself thinking how to organize your life to work faster and smarter. To do that, I will show you how a regular day in my entrepreneur life looks like. I’m a web business owner and like such, I follow a schedule (or at least I try to follow one!). So here we go with my usual entrepreneur day:

Morming

I usually wake up at 9, 9:30 AM and, after the usual things everyone’s does, I make myself a small breakfast based on a cup of coffee with milk and a lemonade. I usually sleep 4 or 5 hours per day, so I go to bed pretty late; that is why I get up at 9, 930AM every day. It’s like automatic right now, I just stop sleeping at 9:00 AM and my eyes open by themselves (spooky!). My advice here is that you need to waste no time sleeping more than you actually and really need. 4, 5 hours per day is all you want, so don’t sleep 10 or 9 because you will be wasting your time. When you die, you will have plenty time to sleep. No pain, no gain.
I take my breakfast on my desk while I check my emails on my Mac Mail Application (so cool, and so fast) and after I answer some emails, I go trough my RSS feeds for a good bunch of posts. I like to stay informed about tech news, so this is my “favorite time”.
I’m still a little sleepy, so I start to organize my day right in the middle of the coffee, the RSS feeds and the emails. I use a HPDA to write a template (handcrafted!) because my printer can’t take the 3×5 index cards (it jams!)… so I do them myself. No bother at all. I like to do one for today and three more for the days after, so I always have the following day ready.

Usually I setup my physical actions with only two actions per day; one is always reading a chapter from a current book (otherwise, I just forgot!) and the other may be having a private meeting with my imaginary counselors (as weird as it may sound) for about 30 minutes, or giving a friend a call, or sending a congratulations email to someone, or just listening to some relaxing ocean waves mp3 on the Itunes. Physical actions (also called Sharpening the saw) are made as a training exercise for your brains; if you don’t motivate yourself every day, you won’t be able to keep going on the game. The basic idea is to learn something new every day or every week, and keep your brain up to date for at least for 30 minutes per day. Those 30 minutes will stay with you forever. Great advice there.
After I answer all my emails I usually finish something from the night before (I just read the previous day HPDA card and if there is an incomplete action I pass it trough the today’s next actions card).
I spend most of my morning posting on forums, blogs and talking with people about business, is like a drink of energy I need for the rest of the day. When you post on different forums and blogs you’ll start driving some traffic to your website, and hopefully, someone will be interested enough to start visiting you regularly. That is the magic of marketing, you can try every single technique out there because most of them are free and the only thing you must invest is time. So that is what I do, I invest my time ;)

Afternoon

I’m trying to change my lunch habits because I’m a fat pig and I’m just keep “growing in all directions” every day. I usually lunch a fresh meal while I watch the local news for a while… although lately I’m watching more CNN and the BBC (they just have better and more interesting information). My break lunch its usually one hour and 30 minutes. I like to have long lunches on a regular day, but on busy days I just grab some hot dog while I work (so don’t think it’s easy to be a business owner).

After that I like to keep working on my marketing list until 3:50 PM when my ICal application start bouncing on my dock yelling me “it’s client’s time!”. On regulars days I continue working until 4:00 AM (oh yes!), but when there is something my clients need to have done quickly enough I start working on their projects as soon as I get up (and after checking my emails). But there aren’t many emergencies today, so I may work until the evening. At this time I feel like going for another coffee to the kitchen. I don’t take more than 3 cups of coffee per day.

Evening

I usually like to have a good dinner and a sleeping night, but I can’t. Every minute I spend doing anything else than work I think I’m wasting my time and money, so I can’t even think on anything else than work. Once I finish eating (and once I wash my own plate) I go directly to my Mac and keep going trough my “HPDA Today’s List”. There are always something to do or plan for the next day, you won’t be bored, I can guarantee that. Being a business owner is the most fun thing in the world! the minute you get up, the minute you start doing what you like the most, working on your business!

After going trough my Today’s Page, I usually go to sleep at 4:30 AM. If I’m exited about something I usually don’t sleep at all! I remember once one of my friends was on MSN and she went to sleep at 2:00 AM (argentina time). She is from United States, so she went to 10:00 PM actually. I was so thrilled with a client’s website that I forgot getting some sleep! my friend waked up in the other side of the world and saw me still online! she told me something I will never forget: go to sleep, you zombie. I laugh my arse off!

For regular people, working at nights may look like something from another world. I like to work, I love the game and being on it, so I usually dream about my work and what I’m doing during the day. It’s a non-stop train!

Close to 4:00 AM I answer some emails, talk with some clients (if there is one connected) and make a couple of phone call. Then, I go to bed thinking on what tomorrow will look like.

Social Life

Mr Burns from the Simpsons said on one episode:

To success in business life you must kill the four deamons: those are Family, Friends, Religion and Love life. If you do that, you will success.

50% right, 50% wrong. You need to give something in order to gain something, you won’t be able to success if you don’t. It’s all about your surrounding. Some people will be lucky enough and they will find time for their friends, family and love life while they have a business. Others won’t. That is the reality. There isn’t magic formulas here people. You will read people saying “yes, I go to pool twice per day and later I watch some movies with my friends” and you will find people like me, or others, with no time for that stuff. There are different realities, so you need to be ready to lose something in the way of success. Being ready is the best advice you can get from anyone. One thing I can promise you: it will be damn fun. Believe me!

Thanks for reading.
Cheers
Javier Cabrera
CEO, Emaginacion

Related Links
Yaro’s entrepreneur day
Articles for entrepreneur
David Allen’s GTD book

Download your FREE copy of this PDF (429 KB - light!)
25 full color pages!
Full of wisdom!

Get acrobat Reader for free (Win/Mac application) if you don’t know how to see this document.