From Zero To One Million Dollars A Year In Sales

Yesterday I noticed in slightest of forms of how I can sometimes generate tension between other people trying to be as nice as possible.   I have a bad challenge of sometime wanting to grab the tab every time I go out and eat with other people, and although it may seem good in nature, and does have some benefits, there are sometimes drawbacks as well.  I’m not taking about the money aspect, I’m talking about building relationship tensions.

I’ve noticed if done repeatable it can create a slight bit of tension between I and the other person with whom I’m eating with.  Now let me forewarn you, this isn’t like a hating tension, we are all still good friends in nature, but by covering sometime and not allowing the other party to it can create the slightest bit of tension between you and the other person. Because now they feel like they owe you, and weren’t able to ‘clear the deck.’

The main reason that I try to grab is that we are in the relationship building business, we are in the entertainment business, like most of the companies in this industry we like to take very good care of our customers, and it isn’t that they are just our customers, in what we do relationships are huge in this business, it is a small industry of very powerful individuals.  So anytime we can do someone for someone else we work with, we will always go all out in trying to do what we can to serve. 

So naturally we want to cover the costs for whatever it is, especially of course when it is at one of our own-hosted events.  But what I noticed yesterday is that doing so repeatbly, over time can create tensions.   For instance if someone wants t pay, we should let them because it allows them to clear their deck, and feel like they contributed, and allow them to not feel like they are indebted.  (which they aren’t really, but I can see how the other party may feel that way.)

See I think, (I think) it’s fine, if you want to grab the tab at the first get-together with new people, but if later that day, so you eat again and do it again (for instance going to dinner) and you want to grab the tab again, you may be (and may not be), in the slightest of way building tension with the other party because they might want to chip-in too, and your not allowing them to do so.

Only after reading the book by Guy Kawakasi, which I reflected on a short chapter here, I was able to see it.   Last night we were at the Seattle Meetup, we had grabbed lunch and paid for everyone to go to the gaming place, which really isn’t that expensive and we were planning on hosting it because it was our event naturally.  But at the last dinner James paid for the dinner, which was cool, that allowed him to help as well.  But what I noticed (seeing it from the other side, of not paying) that another member was interested in chipping in, but James went ahead and grabbed the whole tab.  Which is what I’d normally done, but now sitting in the other persons’ shoes, even though I didn’t want to grab the tab, I could feel the other person really wanted to chip-in, because they felt like they owed us for the previous stuff we did.  But only after a day I realized it, and noticed that it does cause some tension and that the way to do it is to simply allow them if they want to, to chip-in.   Now James is a great guy! And I’m not saying anything bad about the situation, everything at the dinner was good, everyone is good, but I noticed that it can cause tension with others (but not everyone), depends who it is, but now seeing that it can cause tension with certain people.  It was my fault for creating that atmosphere, of ‘I got it, don’t worry about it’ and paying for dinner in the first place.

But again, everything is fine in our relationship, James is awesome and did nothing wrong, and of course I’m not calling out, but this post is more about ‘reflecting’ and noticing ‘the smallest’ of improvements that can be made, and challenged to see if we can’t improve upon them.

This post is about having more finesse in your relationships, even though everyone is in good standing, as an entrepreneur for someone who wants to be really successful we need to look at the smallest of improvements we can make.  It is about trying to become a master communicator, and not that I’m one, but I will try my best and study it, and notice even the smallest of areas which were we can improve upon.  Even though grabbing the tab is good and its doing favors, it’s more the best way to build relationships, a higher-level of more sophiscated relationship mastery is needed, and that’s what I hope we are all trying to achieve. 

The athletes receiving medals this year at the Beijing Olympics didn’t earn their medal when they crossed the finish line.  They earned their medal in the gyms and working out everyday, in the gym where they practiced their sport everyday is where they became a gold medalist.  Only in public everyone saw they were a gold medalist, but they became a gold medalist in the daily workout routines they had. 

Remember.  It isn’t the big things in life that matter, it is the smallest things in life, the things that don’t seem to matter at all, the things we did every day that   make the big differences in our life.

Although it may appear from the outside looking at a company as it moves forward, and becomes more successful that stuff is now getting done faster and faster.  And in some respects they are, but in a lot of aspects they really aren’t.

Unfortunately I have noticed a decrease in overall productivity in the last 1-2 months and only until now I’ve really started to ask myself why and found the root core reason why it is.  I’m staying busy sure, but being busy, and being productive are two completely different things.  The core reason I’ve found now that I’ve been unable to develop as much as before, as the company has moved forward there are a lot more obligations to take care of, and we are actually a smaller team than before as well.  But even as general, there are more people to talk to now than ever before, and all of that takes away from what I need to focus on.

At the early stage of any your startup there is won’t be much demand for your time.  Your flexible and you don’t have any customers to respond to or big contracts you need to keep track of, and because of that you can just focus on doing that one thing you need to do, for me it was programming the first beta of Tracking202.

I moved to San Francisco on about a passive income of a little more than $1,000, barely enough to live.  But it forced myself to succeed, because I had to, and not knowing anyone in the city and not yet having any customers to talk to, or anyone else really for that matter, I was able to go to work, and be productive and not just bus.

But now the complete opposite is true, as we have moved forward it has been becoming increasingly difficult to get even just the simplest of things done.   Where as before we were bootstrapping and all we had to do was code all day, now, we work with many people, we have customer support posts/twitters/aim/emails to respond to, affiliate networks want to work with us, we are going to events, we are putting on events and simply talking to a lot of people.  After we have gained momentum the world load, more so the relationship maintenance has gone up considerable and has taken us away from our business, which is developing software products.   Going on AIM any more is a disaster, as with over 400+ affiliate marketers on a single AIM name you can expect to get nothing done when logging on anymore.  That is why starting next month I’m going to probably remove AIM completely and switch entirely to email.

There are many distractions attacking for our time every-day.  I’ve only now in the past two months realized the core reason that I wasn’t getting anything done, its not that I haven’t been busy, I’ve been working, but talking with everyone has replaced programming, which is what I should really be focused on.

So what is the point of this post?  That as you start to move forward your going to get distracted, more things come up to do, and you are only one person, you either have to scale out the team, or go-back in a cave and focus on that one thing you do best, which is generally the best route.  Make sure to focus on what you can be the absolute best at in the world.

Stay focused on what your doing, you can really get 200% of the work done, in ½ of the time, lately I’ve been distracted, but starting next month all AIM is going off, and we’re going to launch a new product.  That is what we need to do.  And I hope you can focus on what you need to do, I’ve lost 2 months of productivity, maybe this post can share some insights into the future distractions that will arise for you and you’ll know about them in advance and be able to adjust better than I was.

Have you asked yourself this question before? “Should I program myself, or pay someone else?” It is a question asked every day by internet entrepreneurs, and it is a good question. I too had to figure out what direction I would take years ago. In this video I will share some of my thoughts on which direction is best to take, depending on certain your situations.

To sum it up though, learning how to code can never really be a bad thing for your business. In that knowing an extra skill like PHP and MYSQL for instance will only be benefical to you in the future, and is probably not a bad thing to take a step back and learn some time.

Really if you have a small project, it is general ok to pay a freelancer. But if you want to build a web 2.0 company with some really innovative software unless you plan on doing it right, don’t do it at all.  And if your going to pay and fund a large web 2.0 startup you need to invest alot of money, and hire a team of programmers, and potentially an IT consultant, and vest ownership over several years.  See if you really want to build sometime long-term you’re going to need long-term people, you can just pay someone in another country for $500 to build you something that is going to be bought out for millions of dollars.  Sorry its just not going to work, and I have seen people try to outsource big ideas to cheap freelancers and it almost fails every, single, time…

Trust me a $500 freelancer can’t just build a Tracking202.com and I can’t scale and keep making a better tracking system by paying some rent-a-coder online whenever I need them.  You need long-term employees who will build it, or you need to build it yourself.  If it is a big project, either do it right, hire a team of full-time employees to do it, or build it yourself so you are the system artitect, and later on hire other coders to build off your existing platform.

Cloning Dinners is a simple, but powerful concept to maximize your time networking with others. I wanted to say thanks to James Seligman from the Seattle Meetup202 Group for recommending Never Eat Alone, the book that I read this from. It’s an awesome book, I highly recommend it. An example of a super cloned dinner is Ian Fernando’s IANteract dinner, where he took out 20+ people and paid for dinner. This helped strengthen the relationship with Ian, and other affiliates at the dinner.

Ok, don’t make fun of me now.  This is my first attempt at using some new video equipment, it’ll get better as it progresses.  I’m going to switch from text to video blogging, and see how effective it is.  The studio is modeled after the one over at the gurumastermindvideoblog.com. Have to give credit, where credit is due.

Max over at MoneyBites.com asked me to make a short video post for his new startup BlogGears, which you can find here, and which I promised to link-back to.

Ok in this quick video I wanted to share some ideas I had running a table over last week at the Affiliate Summit. Because everything was pretty unorganized this first time around, I forgot 2 things.  Add theses to the list.  It would have been nice to re-do everything and make it nicer, but sometimes we just need to get things out and not try to be perfectionist even if there is some flaws with it.

1) It’d be a good idea to have more than 2 people at the booth/table because it is hard talking to everyone with one person, it just won’t work.

2) If you can get others in the crowd walking around with your t-shirts, this was of course easier for us because we already had users that liked our product at the event, but none-the-less, others could do the same as well.

Sometimes it isn’t until we lose something that you then later realize how grateful we should have been to have what it is we had in the first place.

What I mean is, there are many things we take for granted, and the things we take for granted are exactly the things that will be taken away from us!  And it isn’t only until it is taken away from us that we then realize that what we had before was incredible.  Although this could be applied to many things, that we only realize how important something is and how important we should have made it until we almost lose it, I will put in relationship to health.  It is like health, when you have it before, we take it for granted, and it isn’t until we almost lose our health and vitality that when then look back and say WOW, what did I have before and now I’ve lost it, when maybe I could have prevented it…. 

Life and Business are like the ever-changing seasons. That being said, this month will go down as being a winter in my life.  There are times in our life where everything seems to go bad, one bad thing after another and they accumulate on-top of each-other, bad thing-after-one-another.   If you’ve ever had a bad month you’ll know what I mean, I like to call theses the winters’ of our lives, when everything goes smash.  Although on the bright side, like the seasons which are always consistent, after winter is summer, so I look forward to next month as things can only get better from here on out. 

Although there have been a lot of challenges this month, the worst thing was going out hiking last week.   The coastline of San Francisco is incredibly beautiful, a-sight to be seen, HWY-1 is a great drive, especially with the S2000 with the top down and enjoying the sun and looking out over the beaches of California.  But what lurks in this coast-line is an incredible vile plant called the Poison Oak, and this plant is quite possible the worst thing you could ever encounter while hiking.  

I ended up getting poison oak all of my body, I had shorts on, and a t-shirt, with sandals.  I got the poison oak on my legs and got it all over my arms as well.  Poison Oak is one of the worst things you can ever get on your skin.  If anyone has encountered it before they know the horror stories of what comes after you get poison oak on your body, and if you have never encountered it, let me share with you how bad it is so hopefully you will never have to run into it yourself!

Poison Oak is all-over the coastline of California, surprise to me!  If you touch any leaves you have to get the poison off from your skin within 5-20 minutes, after that it seeps into your skin and it is now in your bloodstream.  After it is in your system 2-10 days later you will start noticing a break-out of what first appear to be bug bites, but they are blisters in the skin.  They just sorta appear, and the poison says Hello, I’m blossoming in your skin, that’s probably the best way to describe it.  After the poison starts coming out it also develops into rashes and pretty much just makes it way throughout your body until all the poison is gone.  If you have the guys, you can see some pictures here.  Now if you want to see my-pictures, I’m probably not going to show you, but it isn’t as bad as some of those on there, but it isn’t good either.

For the last several days i’ve been unable to do any work, there was a spree that in the first 70 hours I was only able to sleep for 2 hours because the irritation was so bad.  In fact, I don’t even know if I could consider that 2 hours of sleep because I was pretty much waking up every second while just trying to sleep.  I’m now on some pills from the dermatologist, I’m on a heavy regime (top one modified slightly if you want to see it) trying to remove all the poisons from my body.  It has been some of the worst days of my life this past week dealing with this poison oak, fortunately I believe it is finally starting to heal after spending all-days trying to do whatever I can to heal myself.  There was even a point that it got so bad, if I could spent $10,000 to get raid of it I would have, but of course there isn’t any way to do this, which brings me to the point of this blog post.  

Although I have generally been happy that I’m young (21) years of age currently, and don’t have any serious problems, I only realized really how good my youth is (and yours) on a highly appreciative level after I lost it this week.  In that I’ve been grateful before, but now I’m super grateful because I know what it is now like to not have my health and I can now say that I’m much more grateful now than I have ever been that I’m able to have the energy and vitality, everything that goes with being young right now.  I don’t know if you ever encounted a bad-health problem in your life, maybe its breathing problems, maybe its back-problems maybe its something else, I don’t really know, but if you have, you’ll look back on yourself and say wow I had it really good before, and you’ll really have a greater appreciation towards being healthy than you ever had before.  

Because you had it, took it for-granted, and then you lost it, and then after losing it realized that wow, what I had before was really great, and I WISH I could have maintained what I had before, and I could have, should have, but.. diddn’t..

What I mean to say is, things like HEALTH we take-for-granted, but there are many things like health that we take for-granted, and it isn’t until you lose it that you realize how important it was before.  And the problem is, that just when you realize how good you had it before, just when you really appreciate what you had, and WISH you still had it, it is at that point when you lost it that you realize this, it is that point when you lost it and you now can not go back and fix it, and that you COULD HAVE and SHOULD HAVE, but DID NOT.  

Don’t wait till its to late, to do what you wish you would have done.

Don’t take your health for granted, it isn’t until you almost lose it like me this week that you will look back and say wow how good did I really have it, and WISH you had it back. (and you could have done something to stay healthy, but only now realize it, to late.)

Don’t take your family for granted, it isn’t until you LOSE someone that you realize Wow how important they were, and wish you could have gone back and spent more time with them, when you could have.  

This post is to serve as a warning.  There are things you have right now, that are extremely important to you, but you might not realize it yet.  There are things you have right now that you will lose, and it is only after you lose them you’ll wish you would have realized how grateful you were before to have it, and that you could have done something to keep it, but didn’t.

So don’t let it be to late, your going to be old one day, and lose your health for instance.  And when that day comes you’ll say two things.  One I did a great job in keeping myself healthy and there isn’t anything I could have done better, and I’m glad I did it.  Or two, I was so healthy before, I wish I had it the way I had it before, but i lost it, and I only realize now… that I had it really good but there isn’t anything I can now do to return myself to the way it was before.

Or it could be family as well in another instance.  Someone you know and love is getting older and you might not be able to see them later.  Come the day they will pass, just like you and I, and you’ll say to yourself two things.  I’m so grateful that I took the extra time out of my life to spend it with my relative and I can’t think of anything better we could have done in the last years of our life than what we have spent our time doing together.  Or two, oh my, it isn’t until now, that I realize how important they were in my life and I should have spent more time with them, I wished I would have, but did not, and now it is to late, I only know realize how important they were to me after I have lost them, and I wish I would have spent more time with them had I only realized back then, how important they really were to me.

Steven Truong found this, the source is from Escape From Pianosa. I thought it was valuable enough to share with everyone.  

Forbes.com interviewed several of this year’s top billionaires, and as I was reading through some of them, I noticed three things that repeated over and over again:

1. Exercise daily.

2. Follow your passion.

3. Read. A lot. At least two hours a day, but many said they read four or more hours a day.

 

 

The reading is the key point, read more, I think I need to do some more reading this week.  If anyone needs to read this week its me. Looks like readers group voted on: Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth

I have to give a long and overdue shout out to my friends: Sean and Noah over at GetClicky.com.  Tracking202 was actually inspired to be created based off their service, and revenue model.  We currently use the servers that Sean suggested to use, there is also a bunch of other stuff that Sean and Noah has helped us out with, that I won’t mention here.  They’ve been a big help I should just say!  And I want to say thanks and give them a shout out here, they have a great product for anyone who is in the web-business.  Pretty much all of you!

It was a great product, extremely residual, and it has had steady success, and analytics was then something I was interested from there on.  I thought what a great idea, web-analytics as a product, so we decided to make a PPC-analytics.  Well everyone knows how that story went, the PPC crowd is just a “wee” bit different than the general webmaster crowd, and does not like hosted analytics that track their keywords!  And the PPC crowd is probably 1/100th, if not 1/10000 the size of the general web-master crowd.

The service is acutally called Clicky, but they had to register GetClicky.com, because the name was taken.  I still acutally call it GetClicky anyways, but the official name is Clicky! 

About the service, well I’ll keep it straight and to the point.  The best part about Clicky is it allows you to have a real-time view of all the visitors on your site, the SPY view, like the DIGG SPY, lets you see live time page actions happening on your site.  It also allows you to customize your service, and track and follow each user throughout your website.  So instead of a general: “you have 1000 visitors today” you can see, “this user, this user and this user came to the sit, and looked around at theses pages” and see what users are acutally using their software.

You might consider really just checking out their live DEMO, to see it for yourself.  I too wanted to use a live DEMO for tracking202, but um, that wouldn’t of worked because everyone would see all the KEYWORDS going through the software! But their demo works great! check it out, they have a free trial, and an upgradeable preminum account if you exceed 1,000 visitors a day.

My buddy over at Developer Hut, Jon Waraas also uses Clicky! One of his reasons is so google can’t see his stats any more.  (maybe he’s doing something he isn’t suppose to?) Just kidding, Jon like others doesn’t use Google Analytics so Google can’t track you as easily.  So they have a free trial, check it out.  I want to say thanks to Clickyfor everything they’ve helped us with, and they were the inspiration to run what we have going now.  

GetClicky.com

So I always use to think, up until now, that doing a lot of favors for others builds the relationship with the other person, and try to ask for as-little back was the way to build a great report with someone.  But I can see the opposite side now, on why it is good to also ask for favors in return as-well, because it can relive the pressure of someone feeling like they owe something to you. If you keep giving and ask for nothing, they will be less likely to ask for more favors, and in doing so you will be less likely to receive help from the relationship if you ask nothing in return, and give give and give.

But if your only giving and don’t allow yourself to receive the relationship is not as good as it could be: because we have stopped the giving AND receiving of favors to one’s self. I just read this and I’d like to share it with you here, the last part is what made me re-think a significant part of how I try to do as many favors as possible for people, but I can see why it wasn’t always the best way to just keep giving, and try to ask as little as possible in return.

“GIVE FAVORS: There’s a karmic scoreboard in the sky.  This scoreboard tracks what you do for people. If you want to be a world-class schoomzer, ensure that you’re hugely positive on the scoreboard. You accomplish this by helping people-especially folks who seemingly can’t do anything for you.  And do this without expectation of return. Eventually, the scoreboard will take care of you.

 

RETURN FAVORS: Since I believe in doing favors, I surely advocate returning favors.  When something is done for oyu, you have accepted a moral obligation to pay it back.  Great schoomzers return favors and do so with joy.  This not only moves the scoreboard a little in the positive direction but enables you to ask for more favors.

 

ASK FOR THE REUTRN OF FAVORS: Counterintuitive as this seems, you should ask for the return of favors.  Doing so reduces or removes the pressure from a person who feels he owes you somethign.  Thus, it provides an opportunity to clear the deck.  Then the other party can ask for new favors.”

 

The Art of Start - Guy Kawasaki,

Ok for those who know me by now, I love quotes, because they sum-up alot of powerful information very quickly. I stumbled across an article of upcoming tech-entrepreneurs, and each successful entrepreneur got to post one lesson that they’ve learned, and I’ve included them here so you can see them for yourself.  It’s always a good idea to be surrounded by good ideas, even though may not everything is applied, it is still always good to be in a constant flow of what good ideas are, especially ideas about building business if you are an entrepreneur:

“The way you become successful is not by hiding your great idea, but by including people around you and asking for advice,” Radfar says. “And you have to believe in what you are doing.” - Hooman Radfar and Austin Fath

“When you have a position to fill, figure out who would be the best in the world at that role—somebody so good it would be unimaginable that they would take the job,” Frame says. “Once you determine who that is, figure out how to hire that person.” - Andrew Frame

“Try to figure out what the absolute coolest thing to do is, because cool as a condition brings employees and investors,” says Kopf. “Cool makes every day worthwhile.” - Jared Kopf

“Being resource-constrained to begin with focuses you on the essential things,” says Miller. “Also, London is a great place to launch a global enterprise, the way it’s plugged in to the rest of the world.” - Richard Jones and Felix Miller

“There is a very small group of people in this industry that run nearly everything, and that it’s incredibly important to know who they are and be connected with them,” - Dalton Caldwell.

Success in technology is now “becoming a function not of the size and resources of the company that builds it, but of the size of the community that supports it,” - Eric Ries

“Choose who you take advice from carefully, but once you’ve chosen them, listen to every word they say,” Cunningham says. “I’ve set out on a journey, and I have no map and no idea what the landscape is going to be. But there are people around me who have taken similar journeys, over similar landscapes.” - Paul Cunningham

“There are some days when it looks like everything is going to blow up and other days when things look insanely good,” says Altman. “If you let that get to you, you never actually get any work done.” - Sam Altman

“Stay open,” Dorsey says. When Twitter launched, the software required a phone number to join. Once he allowed users to sign up using their e-mail addresses, expanded the service to include IM, and added a programming interface for developers, the number of users and posts shot up. “All made Twitter more approachable by a greater number of people,” - Jack Dorsey

“Everything in life seems to be about relationships,” says Bowman. To build his company, Bowman’s had to quickly meet influential customers and investors. “The power of networks is exponential,” - Jud Bowman

“Listen to the customer before you build,” he says. “It’s very easy to construct a monument to a problem and end up with something that no one will write a check for. You need to understand what issues are business imperatives, what’s keeping someone up at night, and what management is screaming about.” - Todd Graham

Being self-funded has its advantages. “We’re not running toward some sort of exit, so we can take our time and build a proper business,” - Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar

“If you think you have a good idea that could make for a good business, surround yourself with smart people, and go for it,” - Seth Coe-Sullivan