Recent Posts

November 2010

Where Faith And Hope Are Requirements

Posted on November 4, 2010

Ever felt like you were losing your faith and lacking in hope?

I have.

These types of thoughts usually lead right into a nice bout of depression which is always a bitter battle. A downward mathematical equation calculating the slope of a line built on despair.

But one thing that I notice is that the fight begins when I felt that I no longer have questions. When the fullness of having things proves me safe in my supposed tangible security. Which I so arrogantly praised myself for acquiring. And with everything defined, categorized, and shelved so nicely, it would leave me in a place that no longer allowed for me to ask who I am and why I am here. Already summarizing that life had little meaning and even less value.

When I used to get to this spot, I would always voice that I no longer felt I had a reason to hope and that I had lost my faith. And go about looking for faith and hope not as objective solutions, but almost deities, defining the value using my subjective context.

And what would happen is that despair would seep right on in, dragging me deeper into feelings of pointlessness.

Lately I’ve been solving these issues by challenging my perspective. Going out and finding families and people who are in great need and have great pain. People whose lives have been torn apart by affairs, theft, drugs, or death.

These are the people who prove that we are not anywhere close to as knowing and mighty as we think. They are the ones to whom faith and hope are requirements. Simple reminders that we will all be broken someday and will cling to our faith and shout our hopes aloud.

Because when you are small, what else is there?

Startup Thoughts : Prestige or Profit? (Part 1)

Posted on November 3, 2010

In the startup community, it appears to me that the metric of success is primarily focused on making money. This is not surprising as for most every businesses, this is the only value that matters. And you can break down the process into two conclusions.

a) Startup makes money = Success
b) Startup doesn’t make money = Failure

But I’ve come to focus a lot on a third option, a value that most people don’t think about, which is what I would call “Prestige”, and the concept is rather simple.

Create something with the goal of increasing your visibility in a particular group or scene. With hopes that by increasing your personal brand recognition, your prestige, you will have better opportunities in the future. This is where I feel I am lacking right now, in my community, or as Seth Godin would say my “Tribe”.

I need to increase my own personal visibility to generate the one thing that I desire right now more than anything else, opportunity. If I were more connected, with people that want to get stuff done, I could indeed make powerful things happen. But so far, Bend Oregon is not the bustling hub of entrepreneurial activity that one would hope, and is in fact far from it.

So lets put this into a real world scenario.

I’ve built a mobile app and I have to set the goal. Do I want to focus on Prestige or Profit? Well with profit I could specify a target sale amount of my app, say $.99 cents. And then just get an idea of the volume it would sell over the course of the next two-three years and grind away trying to create the value to sell the specified volume.

After the research I’ve done on the number of units one could potentially sell, it seems that it is a shot in the dark. But I think I could probably move about 250k thousand units based on current trends, then again I could just as easily move only 10k units.

My other option in trying to build out my community. Give the app away for free, and promote myself by saying something like

“Hey, connect with me on linkedin,twitter, or facebook. I’m looking to meet people who want to make amazing things happen!”

How many units could I move then? Well again, from some of the research I’ve done it looks like there is the potential for a 1000:1 ratio of free vs sold applications. That is, for every one app you sell, you could have given away 1000 applications for free.

What gave me this idea? It was when I was researching in-application advertising. I could give away my app away for free, but implement ads, hoping that enough traffic would be generated as to monetize the traffic from my app. But then I thought;

“Why couldn’t I buy out ads, to build out my community, in my own application?”

This goal totally seemS resonable, because I’ve been studying some of my rich friends. And even though they have a ton of cash, they never cash out, they still continue to work. You can even see this with people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others. So knowing that I still have about 35 years worth of work left to accomplish, I would rather be working with people and on projects that actually change things. That make both an impact but also a profit.

And currently, that is what my brain is chewing on.

Prestige or Profit? Prestige or Profit indeed…