This is where I share my ideas, inspiration & thoughts. Generally though I'm just the Creator of Rockstar Awesomeness and this tumblog is further proof of that.
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Have you ever noticed how impatient business owners are these days in terms of growing and nurturing their businesses? And especially online… It’s all about developing an idea, get VC funding (or a massive loan from the bank), upgrade the office environment, hire a team of 20 (when you only need 5) and then splashing the rest of the cash on marketing. Sound familiar?
Well, I’ve never subscribed to that kind of thinking and whilst it isn’t wrong, it definitely doesn’t fit into my mindset of growing a business organically for as long as possible. I believe I’ve implemented this approach successfully in both ramping up my freelance design / development work and then creating Radiiate, whilst WooThemes was a side-project for about a year before I decided to commit all of my time to the venture.
I think it’s all about pulling the trigger at the right moment, which will probably differ from person to person, and business to business. The right moment will depend on a variety of factors ranging from your personal level of comfort with the decision to the viability / sustainability of the decision from a profit-angle.
The main thing to consider though, is the amount (and type) of work that needs to go into the business / project before you’re able to pull the trigger.
During the initial stages of a project’s lifespan, it’s very easy to develop big parts of the idea using a DIY approach (I developed the first Premium News Theme completely on my own and it eventually served as the basis for WooThemes’ launch). During this stage, you can take care of all the aspects of establishing the project, even though you may not be as great with some of the skills required (like admin or bookkeeping).
This approach allows you to invest time & money as you need it, which in turns means that you are streamlining your growth. This is also a much more sustainable approach, as you’re investing in further growth (because there is already traction for your project at that stage), instead of investing in overly ambitious, potential growth. I’m hereby not saying don’t invest in potential, future growth, but I am warning you against overly ambitious investing.
I’d like to illustrate what I’ve said above with a concrete example of how I implement this approach in my own projects… Some of the initial feedback on my latest side-project – RockstarTV – has been relating to the average audio quality and camera angles.
Both of these things relate to the technical equipment I have at my disposal at present and whilst I can afford to have gotten a swanky, new HD camcorder and external microphone(s), this would’ve been a “speculative” investment at best. Why? Well, I need to establish RockstarTV first (or at least try to), before I’d be able to determine whether a further investment would indeed be a viable option.
So, it’s about building the project organically first and then pulling the trigger at the right moment.
RockstarTV was most definitely inspired by the rip-roaring success of another (local) video blog project – From the Couch. I popped one of the Perel brothers – David – a little earlier to ask about their growth strategy and he said this:
When we started From the Couch we understood that there would be huge limitations with quality. We started filming with a cellphone… so you can imagine how bad the quality of the picture and sound was. However despite those snags we knew that we couldn’t invest in the idea until we saw a return.
The first return would be viewership, the second return would be business generated from potential clients who saw From the Couch and therefore contacted Obox.
Until the latter part was achieved we would only use the tools at our disposal. We knew that we had to see potential before any investment took place because that would just be a bad investment.
One of the biggest complaints we got was our sound quality but for people to complain about something like that is to not understand the effort, time and cost it takes before you can afford luxuries such as an external microphone.
As things got bigger and more successful so we have reinvested into our show, namely we have two video cameras, we have ordered a mic and also upgraded our couch and changed our location.
I believe that if you have an idea then you must execute as soon as possible but you must also be patient with how you invest your time and money into that idea. In the same way we only used our cellphone until real results began to show. So we executed our idea but limited the potential damage it may have caused to our back pocket and time.
So if I say it and David says a similar thing, does it make what we say true and / or right? Not really… But at least it should make you think about keeping things as organic as possible. Growth can easily become a greed thing, where you start wildly chasing (and investing) in potential.
But do remember that potential needs to be converted into something real; something of value sometime in the future…
No, the From the Couch guys didn’t pay me to write the post. And no, I’m not getting any kick-backs either… I’m simply inspired by their patience and persistence, which has resulted in them creating a really successful platform for themselves, from which they can build their next web ventures.
Excellent game plan.
Chasing instant gratification is not always the best Idea.
Great post, looking forward to RockstarTV
Here’s my golden rule of starting a business or undertaking a new venture:
Find something no one is doing that you think everyone should be doing and start doing that. Once you’re good at it, start charging for it. Once you’re great at it, start writing about how you do it. Once you’re tired of writing about it, start a video series on it.
My point is this: find something you love, cover every angle until you run out of things to talk about, and let your passion show. That’s what will make you successful.
Enjoyed this one!
Well said, Adii. The idea that this evokes for me is that if you are going to add something to what you already do, even if you can fund it well up front, that you’d greatly reduce your risk by thinking of it in a very modular way. Minimal up-front investing from some outside source, and then seeing if it can generate it’s own revenue and refining that to the point where you can use some of that isolated “modular” revenue to grow the project. It reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite movies, “Ghostbusters” – “Don’t cross the streams!” The same applies here.
Good points Adii. Far too often people get hyped up that their business is going to catch on like wildfire and they need to be fully prepared to handle all that volume immediately.
I’m learning (through mistakes of my own) what you described above; I hope to rearrange my web design business accordingly.
Much love to Obox and their FTC series, look forward to more of RockstarTV as well. Keep up the great work!
I strongly believe that the most important point in Adii’s post is a little something called patience… everyone needs to calm down.
I learnt to be patient with the web from two situations:
1) We have gone head first into a project before which hit a swerve, luckily Obox was still around but we were too close to sacrificing our bread and butter for a dream which in retrospect, made no sense at all.
2) Gary Vaynerchuk, he kept on saying in his videos that you can’t expect results in two months of trying. Every video he did he mentioned patience, patience, patience and that has stuck with me forever… he also mentions hustle but I am sure Adii will do a post on that one day as well.
But at the same time you have to ask what is patience? In our case it was about 10hits an hour, and each month we had to increase it by another 10. Anything more than that was a bonus plan and we keep on reminding ourselves that that is the target. In March hits went through the roof and it would have been too easy to re-arrange our goals and get excited by ‘potential’ but patience allowed us to look deeper into those hits and analyze the reasons for it happening.
Keep putting in effort and *get clever with your investments* and you will see results.
As an example: I can tell you right now that if Adii bought a mic tomorrow his hit rate wouldn’t sky rocket. Instead Adii needs to invest in time and focus on content (which he has both of) and through that he will see results. Once you have 1000 viewers which, directly or indirectly, you are earning money from then you can consider a mic… and even then I don’t think it is 100% necessary.
So ask yourself… do you REALLLLY need a 4 terabyte hard drive when all that is necessary is a 2gb memory stick? React to the moment.
And that my friends is a blog post within a blog post… sorry Adii.
Adii,
Good points, it’s so easy to invest in your *dream* with unnecessary purchases — simply because you’re emotionally attached to making the dream a reality.
Never fall in love with an idea, love the fruits it bears! No fruits, no love — let the idea earn the love.
David Perel,
Well said!
I just stumbled onto this amazing paragraph from this related article and figured I simply had to post it here:
You’re having a bit of a love affair with “From The Couch” at the moment aren’t you mate?
Excellent game plan,…… good job
Dude… This is absolutely genius:
Having built up WooThemes to be a sustainable business now, is allowing us so much freedom in terms of pursuing little side-projects that we’re passionate about. So really loving those (passive) fruits right now!
But 4TB drives are so cool… Not?
Thanks for taking the time out earlier today to share some wisdom about FtC’s growth and then do leave another blog post… erm… comment here! I really think you guys are a great example of being patient, patient, patient and then pulling the trigger at exactly the right time.
Learning from mistakes is often the only way though; irrespective of whether they’re your own or the mistakes of others. So it’s not a bad way of approaching your own business and improving it. And I also think finding that right moment to react / pull the trigger is extremely hard to find and there’s no black-on-white / right or wrong of going about it.
You touch on an important point about being able to fund a project from the start… Whilst I can easily use profits from my sustainable businesses (such as WooThemes) and invest it in better equipment and some marketing for RockstarTV, it wouldn’t suddenly turn the new project into a sustainable one. Throwing (mindless) cash at something doesn’t turn it into a profitable or value-adding project overnight. So spot on, on that!
Nah, its a pleasure dude.
With an HD camera and a standard camera I think FtC is going to need a 20TB hard drive to store all our stuff. #stress
Or you can buy a 1000 2GB flash disks.
Question is David: Do you really need a 20TB drive?
We record a lot of stuff at Obox Design that people don’t see (stay tuned) and that is taking up a lot of storage space on our Hard Drives.
I think soon we will have to get at least a 1TB hard drive to house all that footage…
At the moment we have about 300GB+ of footage (remember, its the raw video and the finished product that have to stored somewhere).
I’m tempted to edit my post and just include the following…
This obviously also means that I love what you’ve said!
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’m here all week. Try the veal.
To an extent… Yes indeed…
I think the FtC guys are only now starting to get recognition from a wider audience of people; recognition that they’ve deserved for a while now. And with RockstarTV’s launch, I’ve obviously tried to tap into what they’ve done to learn as much as I can from their journey.
Lastly… Considering they’re locally based, it is just much easier to relate to what they’ve done. And I wouldn’t say the “love affair” is without any premise either…