Justin

The Street Team is a diverse group of Chicago-area residents who have at least one thing in common — they love to hang out and stay in-the-know when it comes to the myriad of entertainment choices this metro area has to offer.

So far it’s been pretty exciting to be part of this team. I got to go to the NBC building in Chicago to take a tour of the news room and shoot a video intro in one of the tv studios. They had the professional camera crew and all the lights on and each volunteer was supposed to do a quick couple sentence intro. It was intimidating to watch some of the NBC pros calmly and smoothly give their pitch. If you’re curious, here’s my profile and video intro (requires Windows Media Player).

If you want to know what’s going on in Chicago, check out the Street Team Blog.

-Justin

It took time, but I came to see that networking wasn’t dirty or fake.  At a basic level it’s simply a force multiplier, amplifying the effects and opportunities that come from one’s work.  Still, it was tough to change my habits from what the had become.  Perhaps it was because I was still working with in the same group, or perhaps it was a function of the culture I was raised in, or maybe it was one of a myriad of other factors.  Isn’t it always easier to blame anything and everything but yourself?

Complacency sneaks up easily in a stable corporate job, which is one of the reasons Justin and I decided to take the sink-or-swim approach of doing our own thing.  Having been at it for a couple months now, I’m well on the road to being a convert – networking is important in a corporation but almost life-and-death for a startup.  Even with our limited networks we’ve been able to find fantastic contacts and resources to help our business.  One thing that’s helped my conversion has been discovering two networks of local entrepreneurs in similar positions as myself:

• Biznik is a small business networking group that was started here in Seattle, partly as a reaction to existing business networking associations that were stuffy and what I’d call "fake".  Members host all kinds of interesting and informative events.  I found the site through a post on Scott Berkun’s blog (highly recommended), and my first Biznik event was a website design and UI crash course hosted by him and Ario Jafarzadeh, a local user experience designer.  I’ve been to a few events and found the members to be open, friendly and definitely not "fake".
• Seattletechstartups is a small and informal group of techies in the Seattle area who are either doing or thinking about doing their own startups.  I went to my first meeting last week and met a number of interesting people (and ideas).  It’s amazing how many of them are ex (or current) Microsofties.

To my surprise, I had a great time meeting new and interesting people at these groups, and it didn’t feel "forced" in any way.  Networking also helped satisfy the need for social interaction that can be an unexpected issue when doing your own thing.  All in all, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far, but there’s definitely room to grow.  Here’s one small step in that direction: I’ll be attending the Seattle Mind Camp 3.0 on November 11-12.  What could be more fun than 300 people together for 24 hours, discussing whatever comes to mind?  Let me know if you’re going, hope to see you there.

-JL

Powered by Qumana

Here are the values for some domains that I tried:

• AOL.com: $981,722
• Microsoft.com: $1,644,314
• Google.com: $2,840,064
• Yahoo.com: $1,393,944
• twobitoperation.com: $14,406

Based on the value for this site, it’s obvious LeapFish has some significant errors with undervaluation.   Still, the attributes that they use to make their valuations seem pretty reasonable – I’ll definitely use their site when choosing the next domain name to register.  Let us know what your site’s worth!

-JL

Powered by Qumana

What is Qumana? and what can it do?

• A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) desktop blog editor
• Post to your blog without having to log into your blog site and it works on both Windows and Mac
• Manage multiple blogs from the same application
• Add Technorati tags to your posts (this helps other people find your posts easier)
• Oh, and it lets you add Q-Ads into your posts Q-Ads is their own ad system that allows you to add ads by keywords (not contextual like Google Adsense).

After I try using it a few more times, I’ll write a follow-up post with my thoughts about both Qumana and Q-Ads. It seems pretty easy to use so far.

- JC

Tags: Blog, Editor, Ads, Q-Ads, Qumana, WYSIWYG

Powered by Qumana

If you’re already feeding, you don’t need to do anything since it’s automatically redirected with the WordPress FeedBurner plugin I used.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, check out FeedBurner’s about RSS page or this RSS quickstart guide. If you’re ready to get started, click on one of the feed links on the right hand side of the front page or go to our feed for more help: http://feeds.feedburner.com/twobitoperation. RSS is a great way to keep tabs on a bunch of different news or blog sources without having to check the website everyday – the stories get delivered to you when they’re published. Even if you use the feed though, we still want you to come back to the site to post comments

Leave me a message if you have any questions! Also let me know if you encounter any problems.

-JC

I thought this issue was worth mentioning now because we’re seeing some high-profile bloggers speak and act on this theory. Most recently Robert Scoble decided to start moderating his comments section to weed out those that were purely negative and added no value to the discussions, for the sake of keeping himself more positive and sane. Bravo! My personal view is that you can’t please everyone all the time. Time is valuable and it’s better to be thoughtful about whom you choose to deal with, especially as it could be more detrimental than just wasting your time.
As you would expect, there was a ton of feedback, both positive and negative, towards Scoble’s recent decision. Two opinions that I found to be enlightening were David Heinemeier Hansson’s post about being a Shiny Happy Person and Kathy Sierra’s post on the science behind how angry/negative people affect you. They’re both facinating reads if you have the time.

While we didn’t have the crazy excitement of breaking ground on a new project, we were still energized and motivated and got a lot of stuff done, including:

• code-completion of our first-pass functionality
• tracing the core use scenarios and one-offs to create a set of core test cases and plans for more
• continued iterations with Julie on the logos and site design
• investigation of our production needs
• planning our large-block work items for the coming months

All in all, a very productive two weeks. It’s nice to see the project start to come together, and it’ll be much easier to accomplish work items separately as we were able to eliminate a lot of the ambiguities that can make early-stage project work tough. Now for the highlight reel:

• getting a PO box
• admiring our official business Operating Agreement – what a beautifully printed stock Word document
• the first purchase with our spiffy new corporate card
• multiple costco runs for cheap polish sausages and massive quantities of light beer
• the Diet Pepsi+Diet Mountain Dew+chicken+spinach debacle
• blowing our food budget by being too happy at happy hour
• one really, really clogged toilet

We’ve got a full list of things to do before I head to Chicago in mid-April, including good-to-write-about stuff like trademarking, business foreign entity registration, and site deployment processes. Stay tuned for more to come! For those who are really curious, mark your summer calendars for our projected Beta release. Exactly when in the summer depends on how many happy hours we can avoid.

-JL

• To document what we’ve learned about business for the benefit of others.
• To internalize what we are learning more effectively.
• To update all our fans on our progress.

There are also a few other self-serving reasons that I won’t be shy about (and those of you that know me, know I’m not shy about sharing anything ).

• Make extra money! It’s no secret that we have Google Adsense on our site. I’ve heard all the comments that they’re ugly and clutter the site. Well, ads are rarely there for aesthetic reasons. If we can make a few extra bucks on the site from the ads, then they’re gonna stay there – anything to help reduce the ongoing expenses! For those of you that aren’t familiar with Google Adsense, it’s basically a program where you put ad placeholders on your site for Google to place their customer’s ads. So in these cases, Google is like the middle man that pays website owners (like us) a pretty good share of whatever the advertisers pay Google. Oh, and they’re supposed to be relevant to whatever content is on the page (hence all those business plan ads). The other way to make money with a website is to join an affiliate program like Amazon Associates where you refer your visitors to Amazon to buy goods and you get a percentage of the sale price. You’ll see some of these links in the Recommended Resources page.
• Create a following of readers and users to publicize to when we launch. Hopefully by reading along with our journey, you’ll also want to see what we’ve been working on! We would also love your feedback, so this blog will be one of our primary communication mechanisms for when we are ready to show the world. I hope you all stay tuned in long enough (give us a few months)…

I hope this addresses some of the questions about the blog. Feel free to comment if you have others.

- JC