Lately I’ve been obsessing over passive income.  Namely how I don’t have any.

If you stopped working tomorrow, how long would it be until you ran out of cash?

This will be priority #1 in 2012.

-Nick

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When you google yourself, what do you find?  What does your electronic footprint look like?  Do you have a personality online?

It’s been said if a business doesn’t show up in Google, it doesn’t exist.  Is the same true for people?

When deciding whether or not to do business with a new contact, I pay close attention to their electronic presence.  Are they accessible? Do they have a consistent, likeable personality?  If someone has no online footprint, it makes me wonder what they’re trying to hide.

Remember the greatest door to door salesman ever?  He wasn’t selling cleaning products; he was selling personality.  And in some meaningful way, we all are.  Maybe not to that extreme, but being a faceless entity definitely isn’t helping you.  People do business with people.  And they do more business with people they like.

Privacy

To have an online presence you don’t have to leave all aspects of your life completely open to the world.  If you don’t want strangers looking at pictures of your kids, you don’t have to post them, or you can adjust your privacy settings.

While I don’t actively publish my phone number or address, this information is available to savvy users who want to find it.  In seven years I’ve had zero house calls and only a handful of phone calls — one of which made me $100! (Sold a dormant domain name)

Professionalism

A lot of companies want to appear larger than they are.  They use fluffy language and vague corporate-speak on their websites.  I was even guilty of this on Shoes ‘R Us.  With a few more years of experience under my belt, and a new commitment to openness, I crafted a completely new “about us” page for ShoeSniper.com.  I made a conscious effort to step away from the anonymous and cliche’d “about us” pages you see everywhere.

On each product page, I invite customers to contact me directly.  Because of this, I get lots of hate mail from shoppers — usually upset about a pricing error they found on the site.  I try to reply to these quickly — personally apologizing for the mistake.  In these emails there is no “we”, only “me”.  I explain how I receive an updated catalog from 35 stores one time per day, and do my best to maintain accurate pricing on 350,000 shoes.  The stores, I explain, can raise or lower their prices after sending the catalog and it might be 23 hrs before order is restored in the universe.

I’ve been accused of false advertising, been called a very dishonest company, (allegedly) reported to the BBB, and been threatened legal action.  Incidentally, the same people that send these emails are the same that like to type in ALL CAPS and have hotmail and/or AOL email addresses.  But when I reply with a personal apology, thank them for notifying me of the problem, and explain why it happened, it usually is pretty disarming.  For the companies that try to remain anonymous and hide behind impersonal walls, I think their customer service suffers.

In the next week or two, I’m going to try and add a live chat feature to the site to experiment with this theory a little more.  I can take the heat, and I think the live feedback from real shoppers will be very valuable.

XYZ Team

Do you ever get emails with no signature at the end?  Instead it will be signed, “Company XYZ Team”, “Company XZY Customer Service”, or “Affiliate Manager”.   This annoys the shit out of me.  The reply-to address is invariably some unmonitored inbox.  By not telling you who they are or how to contact a real person, the company is telling you exactly how much they care about your business.

Takeaways

1. Don’t be anonymous
2. Be authentic, be yourself
3. Be reachable

-Nick

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In a big political deal between Amazon.com and California, the affiliate nexus law that forced me to move to Nevada has been put on a 1-year hold.  As part of the deal, Amazon has promised to build a distribution center in California, bringing much needed jobs to the state and setting themselves up to collect sales tax regardless of whether or not they have affiliates in CA.

In the meantime, Amazon will lobby Congress for a federal solution to simplify the sales tax laws on a national level so they’re not caught up fighting the same battle in every other state.  The bad news is if they don’t get any action on that front by September 2012, the same law goes back into effect, and I’ll probably have to move again.  (The affiliate nexus law says if you have affiliates in a state, you have to collect sales tax just as you would if you had a real store or warehouse.  In nearly every case, out-of-state retailers have found it more cost-effective to cut off their affiliates in that state than collect and remit the tax.  Try running a valid comparison shopping site without even 1 or 2 of the biggest stores.)  And how likely is anything that could be branded a “national sales tax” by opponents to gain traction, especially in an election year?  I’m not optimistic.

But that’s all down the road.  The good news is our trial separation is over, at least for another 11 months.

I will definitely miss the view, but am happy not to have to make that 3.5 hr commute for a while (and not even get any skiing out of it!).

It was freezing and I forgot my beanie...

I told the pup he better get some energy out before the drive so he enjoyed the early-season snowfall as well.  And probably made some yellow snow as a parting gift.

Hey this is great, why are we leaving?

And then his feet got cold.

Ok we can go now.

Welcome (back) to California!

-Nick

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Would you accept a job with no base salary?  Would you like to get paid 100% on commission?  Or would you think that job is a poor option and look for something safer?

Many people say they want to get paid based on their performance, but few are willing to bet their livelihoods on it.

Business owners make that bet every day.  They have no choice.  Nothing happens until somebody sells something.  If the business makes no money, they make no money.

It’s a strong incentive to hustle, create value for customers, and do whatever it takes to make it work.

Just something to consider when making shopping choices and dealing with small businesses.

And now you’ll know the answer if someone ever asks you:

“What do entrepreneurs and used car salesmen have in common?”

-Nick

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I discovered Seatchute in the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, in a piece about preparing your company for disaster.  Seatchute is a product with a very specific disaster in mind.

The company manufacturers an executive office with a built-in parachute.  It is FAA-TSO certified for jumps over 500 feet.

UPDATE: Seatchute was originally built for airplane seats, but later applied the same concept to office chairs.

The cost?

$2995 each, which includes a Glass Punch, but not shipping and handling or taxes.

Customers

At 10-feet per story on average, only office workers on the 50th floor and higher might find use for their Seatchute.  Not high enough?  Sorry about that.

According to a 2009 video, Seatchute has sold more than 70 chairs to Manhattan clients, and that so far, thankfully none have been used.  I applaud inventor Pete Hilsenbeck for finding and filling a need in the marketplace, but there’s definitely something disturbing about the product and picturing what event might lead to it’s use.

Seatchute is designed to save lives, which is great, and tough to but a price on.  But I think it’s the price tag that doesn’t sit well with me.  Can you imagine a car dealer: “Oh you want the one with airbags? That’ll be an extra $3,000.”

It takes an event that unified our country (if only temporarily) and uses it to create division — between those who can afford the chair and those who can’t.  If another attack were to take place, I wouldn’t want to read about how the bottom 40 floors were crushed while the CEO parachuted to safety.

Although I suppose it’s really not much different from rich people living in more expensive, safer neighborhoods, installing expensive security systems, driving expensive but safer cars, or getting better and more expensive medical care.

Marketing Lesson?

Fear is a powerful motivator.

Seems like the kind of product they’d profile on The Daily Show.

-Nick

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RIP Shoes ‘R Us.  After 5 years of loyal service, it’s time to retire.  The replacement is a shiny new model with lots of cool features.  Just like you could at ShoesRUs, at ShoeSniper.com you can shop the inventory of all the major shoe stores in one place, and see their shipping rates, sales tax charges, and applicable coupons to make sure you’re getting the best value possible.

What’s new?

• A nice .com domain name instead of .net.
• A brandable name with reduced litigation risk from Toys ‘R Us.
• Improved product search and filtering.
• The option to Pick-Your-Price on any pair of shoes.  Register with your email address or Facebook account and tell us what price you want to pay, and we’ll let you know when that price is reached.
• Social media sharing and integration.
• Product comments powered by Disqus.
• Store ratings powered by Bizrate.
• Upfront return shipping information.

I need your help!

Try and break the site.  It’s a work in progress, and I can’t do all the testing myself.  Please poke around and if you see something funky, let me know.

Like ShoeSniper.com on Facebook.  Apparently if I can get 25 fans I can get a vanity URL, which is kind of a big deal.

-Nick

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Check out the view from my new office:

Awesome.  Now I’ll get even less work done.  The water’s a little chilly though:

-Nick

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I was looking forward to Never Get a Real Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business, and Not Go Broke, but it was kind of meh for me.  First time author Scott Gerber goes out of his way NOT to sugarcoat the difficulties of entrepreneurship, but it makes for an strange angle when the book is supposed to be about achieving financial independence through your own business.  I guess it’s better than to set unrealistic expectations, but I found it almost dreary in a way.  It was surprising to read such a constant negative tone about a subject meant to so positive.

Never Get a Real Job is aimed at the graduating and recently graduated millenial generation.  Gerber explains that if you rely on someone else for a paycheck, you’re never truly free.  But then he goes on to detail the common mistakes, misconceptions, and disasters of entrepreneurship.  By the end, I was left wondering if the start-up lifestyle was really a better way to go at all.  I think the idea was for the author to air all his rookie mistakes in the hope that readers could learn from them.

The business advice is nothing groundbreaking, but at the very least was a reminder of what I should be doing.  (Manage cash flow, keep customers happy, be creative, etc.)  On the positive side, the book does list some valuable resources for bootstrapping young companies in several areas.  I was familiar with some of the recommended companies but not all, so I’ll be checking those out.

-Nick

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I was working on a project that I was NOT looking forward to.  You know the kind: hours of tedious mind-numbing work with no foreseeable shortcuts or efficiencies or automation.

About Mechanical Turk

Just when I was about to start I remembered hearing about a service from Amazon I’d been wanting to try.  Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for a “cloud-based” outsourced labor force that will handle your most simple and boring tasks for pennies.  Alternatively, you can sign up as a worker and make money doing these jobs for others.

Each job is called a HIT, or Human Intelligence Task.  In total, I had over 1100 of these HITs I needed done.  Specifically, workers would have to take input from a spreadsheet, perform a search, and then enter the result into the next cell.  Simple and easy, but time-consuming and boring, especially to do 1100 times.  I priced these 1100 mini-jobs at $0.01 each — not knowing what was fair, I figured I’d start low.

Troubleshooting

I had some trouble figuring out how to set up my “HIT Template”, and after probably a half hour I was wondering if I should just bag it and do it myself.  Shortly after that though, I found the source of my problem and I was off to the races.

Hint: if you’re getting a weird error that says, “Dhtml template Must contain a question”, it means you’re not providing any place for your workers to put their “answer” to your task.  For my spreadsheet task, I used code like this:

${Column_Name}  <input type=”text” size=”35″ id=”Answer” name=”Item_Name”/>

This created a unique HIT for each row in the spreadsheet, where the value to be searched by workers is in the {Column_Name} column, and the result will go in the text box next to it.

Results

After I got this figured out, the results were amazing.  Almost immediately after posting my job, an army of workers started filling in the data.  The page was updated in real-time so I could monitor progress as it happened.

I uploaded 3 batches of work, and all were completed in a little over 2 hours.

• Batch 1 took 15 seconds per job (367 jobs)
• Batch 2 took 24 seconds per job (332 jobs)
• Batch 3 took 21 seconds per job (408 jobs)

A total of 25 workers helped out on this project, on a Sunday afternoon, completing an average of 44 rows each.

The accuracy was very good.  I spot-checked a few of the results and found no errors, and only had to reject 2 out of 1100+ for being returned blank — a 99.8% approval rate.

If I didn’t use the Mechanical Turk workforce, and instead did the work myself, it would have taken over 6 hours!

Cost

Each completed row was worth $0.01, so the hourly rate for the workers ranged from $2.40/hr on Batch 1 to $1.50/hr on Batch 2.  My total outlay for the labor was $11.05, but Amazon has to make some money too so they add their fee on top of that.  The fee is 10% of the job, with a minimum of $0.005 (half a penny) per task.  Since my tasks were so cheap, I was subject to the minimum fee, which amounted to a 50% surcharge on each HIT.  It seemed like a steep increase but it’s all relative; I was getting a ton of mind-numbing work done for 1.5 cents each.

Overall, my cost was $16.58 ($11.05 to the 25 workers and $5.53 to Amazon).  It took the workers 22041 seconds (6 hours, 7 minutes) to complete the tasks, and I don’t think I could have done it much faster.  So essentially I outsourced my work for $2.71 an hour with Mechanical Turk.

Worth It?

Absolutely.  With the data collected I think I can save far more than $16 over the course of the next few months. It’s an investment I hope will pay for itself many times over.

On the downside, I did spend a decent amount of those 6 hours I saved analyzing the work and writing this post.

Who Are These Workers?

Who are these penny minions?  I wish I could tell you, but they were anonymous to me (and I assume I was anonymous to them).  All I could see was information like worker A1G**********9 completed 105 tasks.  It would be interesting to see a geographic breakdown of where my workers were located.  In some parts of the world, $2.40 an hour isn’t a bad wage.

I’ve also heard stories of people logging on to do some work while they’re watching TV.  Most of the time I imagine the work is pretty brainless, so if you can earn a few extra bucks in your spare time, why not?  And when a job is too hard for the reward, they can simply move on to a new one; at the time of this writing there were 73,909 HITs available.

-Nick

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It’s hard to believe it’s been 3 years since I quit my job.  In that time, I’ve a lot of fun and a lot of stress.  There have been times when I’ve made a lot of money and times when lost a lot of money.  I’ve made some smart moves and some big mistakes.  But I’m still here, and I think that counts as a victory.

Life has definitely not been how I imagined it would be, but I was due for a reality check.  There’s no such thing as “business as usual.”  Overall, I’ve received an education in business more intense and more personal than any b-school could offer.

Now I’m facing a major fork in the road, and I’m not sure which path to take.

-Nick

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