I babble about business, babies, and parenthood on this blog, so those of you who come here to read my posts on entrepreneurship but do not have babies, please forward this post to your friends and family who do have babies. For those who have babies and dabble in business, these tips might be right up your alley. If you have babies and have no interest in business, then send it on to the folks you know who are knee-deep in business and encourage them to have a baby! 🙂
Today’s guest baby tip is written by one of my favorite dads, Daddy Clay. Clay is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of DadLabs. DadLabs creates all sorts of cool, informational, not-so-informational, and downright hilarious videos about being a father in this new era of “let’s share parenting responsibilities, shall we?” On Monday’s they have a new video in The Lab, on Tuesday’s they are in The Lounge, on Wednesday’s they have Daditude (Daddy Owen is pretending to be pregnant by wearing a pregnancy belly), and on Thursday’s they are all about Gear Daddy. Check them out!
Welcome any and all baby showers/keggers!
For lots of guys, as soon as the excitement of a positive pregnancy test wears off, the first concern is about money – well maybe the second concern – the first concern we’ll deal with in another post. But money is definitely a big worry. This concern hits an early peak on the first visit to the baby Mega-store – usually a scouting mission. There, a guy silently tallies up the expenses of all the items on the “necessities” list while trying to seem enthusiastic to the expecting mother. How are you gong to afford all the baby gear?
Women long ago figured this whole deal out. Need to outfit the nursery? They gather the gals for a baby shower to play cute little games and open gifts with nifty wrapping. They giggle and gossip. Sound like fun, fellas?
Get over it. Go along if you are invited, and tap into the power of community. Actively encourage your wife to land as many showers as possible.
And here’s a radical idea. Throw a dad shower. But we can’t call it a shower. Not gonna happen. Let’s adapt. How about having a Baby Kegger instead?!
You provide the beer. If you don’t like the idea of setting up a gift registry, host an auction. Ask your funniest buddy to MC and offer various goods and services up for sale to the highest bidder. Any bids on the last round of golf with the expecting dad before his life changes forever? Got to let the motorcycle or the season tickets go? All proceeds go to the stroller fund – – or the 529 plan.
Let your guy friends in on the action of supporting your new life as a parent.
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If you like this tip, you might be interested in our other recent guest baby tips:
Note to new readers: these tips are based on our experiences, as well as those of our friends and readers. Please always consult with your doctor before implementing any tip that might impact the health of your baby. If you have a tip you’d like to submit please send an email to blogger at babblesoft dot com for possible inclusion. Please check the ‘baby tips’ category to make sure your tip (in some form or fashion) hasn’t already been posted. If it has been, feel free to comment on that post and support the tip. We also welcome respectful challenges to the tips because as is noted in our inaugural baby tip ‘everything is relative!’ We will, of course, give anyone who submits a tip we publish credit and a link back to their site!
I’m making some progress on my personal 2008 goals. I signed up for yoga and have lost between .5 and 1 pound. Regarding my business goals, I’m still working on the executive summary, financial projections, visuals, and finding an attorney in order to raise funds. If all goes well documents will be substantially ready by end of next week, and I’ll be well on my way to finding the perfect lawyer…if that’s even possible. 🙂
Posting will be light over the next few weeks so in the meantime please check out the Work It, Mom! interview of me where they asked me the following questions:
What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
You’ve written that you and the other founder of your first company were “washed out.” How did you recover from that? Was it hard to jump back into the entrepreneurial game after that experience?
Many women entrepreneurs have mentioned that they felt they were not taken as seriously as businesswomen once people knew their companies were geared toward mothers. Has this been your experience?
What lessons from your first company are you applying to your second?
What’s most challenging part of your working-mom juggle?
What advice would you give a working mom who is trying to start her own company? What pitfalls would you tell her to avoid?
You have a great general attitude — what motivates you besides, well, creating a super-successful company?
Then pop on over to Thom Singer’s Some Assembly Required blog and check out my guest post on Building your e-Network where I expand on the following tips:
Do what you say you will do when you say you will do it.
When someone reaches out to you for help, answer them.
I plan to raise seed financing from angel investors for Babble Soft, and here’s what I will have in my toolkit.
An Executive Summary. Thankfully people have moved away from the 35 to 40 page business plans that used to be required when I raised money for my first company. Now it’s easier to get your foot in the door with a 5 to 7 page summary. If they are interested, they will ask for additional information. In a typical Executive Summary you will see sections on:
The Company
The Problem
The Solution (i.e., Your Products)
The Market (including Competitors)
The People
The Numbers (i.e., the Financial Projections).
Financial Projections. In my opinion, creating Financial Projections for an Internet startup is often an exercise in futility that shows you have an idea of how you will make money. Most experienced technology investors know that predicting the future is a crazy process at best especially when you are starting from ground zero and success primarily depends on many viral factors. Financial projections for IBM are much different than financial projections for an Internet start-up. The assumptions you make are the most important part of the model as they give the investor an idea of the homework you have done on the market.
Since Babble Soft is not Twitter, I’m not already a gazillionaire, and I have a million things to do, I have a sharp MBA student, Anand Balasubramanian, helping me create an Advertising and Subscription based model. I love energetic, rock star, cheap, student help! He has done a great job so far building a simple, easy to understand financial model for me.
Visuals. Since I’ll be raising funds for products that do not exist yet, I have engaged a great local design, user experience, and information architecture firm, Projekt202, to create a few mock-up pages illustrating both the web and mobile components of our new applications. They seem as excited about the vision as I am and are taking on some of the financial risk with me. It makes me so happy when I find people who get what I’m trying to do! I’ll also have a demo account of Baby Insights and Baby Say Cheese ready to log in to demonstrate our existing applications.
An Investor Leads List. However you choose to keep track of your calls, meetings, and referrals it’s important to do so. I have met entrepreneurs who want to raise funds who aren’t organized about the process and end up looking a bit flighty. Unfortunately the investors are allowed to be flighty but they usually don’t tolerate too much flightiness in entrepreneurs. Remember: “She who has the gold makes the rules.” After a while it’s easy to forget what you promised to get to whom and who referred you to whom. It’s important to remember at what stage of the investing dance you are in with each potential investor. On this spreadsheet I plan to keep track of:
Name
Contact Information
Professional Background
Who Referred Them to Me
Investment History
Typical Investment Size
What Items They Need From Me, and
Personal Assessment on the likelihood they will invest.
Passion Tempered With Wits. I think that often the big thing that can swing an investor, especially an angel investor who has been in your shoes before when building his/her company is your passion. Why are you doing this when there are much easier ways to make a buck? What will keep you going? What excites you about the business? I am passionate about helping new parents and caregivers connect and find answers. I am passionate about building a business. I am passionate about finding great people to work with. If that passion is tempered with some logical thinking, that’s a big huge ‘ole plus! All of us entrepreneurs are a bit crazy at times so I just hope I don’t lose my wits in the middle of an investor pitch!
Since I am still working on everything above except for my passion which has recently been reignited, I’ve got a lot to do before the meetings I already have set up with potential investors in the next couple of months. If you have suggestions on other things I should have in my fundraising toolkit, let me know by leaving a comment below. It’s been a while since I have raised money and I’m always open to learning new things.
Join me for the journey. Subscribe to the blog and hold on to your stomachs, it’s bound to be a scary roller coaster ride at times!
UPDATE Jan 12, 2007: Found|Read republished this very post on their blog and called it My Funding Toolkit. Check out that post for some great comments! They have many more readers than my blog currently does so I’m delighted that they chose to share it with their readers!
In case you missed it, here is the hilarious video about Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft that was shown at his final keynote address at the Computer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas yesterday. I think it’s so great to see his fun side! As an entrepreneur, I am in awe at what he has accomplished in his lifetime and even did a post about a prior appearance of his with Steve Jobs a while back.
The video stars Brian Williams, Steve Ballmer, Matthew McConaughey, Robbie Bach, Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Kevin Turner, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and others. Thanks to Long Zheng for posting his own video and helping me find a link. Here’s the link to the YouTube video that will hopefully show properly below (its been off & on again).
If you are a regular reader of my blog you have no doubt caught on to the fact that I have begun the fundraising effort for Babble Soft. If you are new you might want to check out The Entrepreneurial 7 Year Itch to get some background.
I’m currently working on creating a business plan comprehensive executive summary (who has time to write read a 30-50 page business plan?!?), the financial assumptions and projections (with assistance from an MBA student), creating screen mock-ups of our new applications (with Projekt202, a fabulous local design company), and setting up meetings with potential angel investors. This process is an ongoing, reiterative process that can sometimes make you want to pull your hair out. As soon as you type the last character on your plan, it is outdated because something has changed somewhere that you may or may not know about. Strange but true.
While doing all that, I also need to finish software testing of our new Baby Insights mobile application, learn more social media, make SEO changes, make sales, establish partnerships, and make progress toward meeting my 2008 New Year’s Goals! Hmmm something might have to give here…
Stay tuned for more about my journey to persuade people to part with their money in exchange for hopefully a lot more money at some time in the future…
I don’t really like making New Year’s resolutions. However, I’m making an exception this year because I figure I’ll try something new. Maybe I’ll even make quarterly resolutions! This is the first year I’ve had a blog which means I can now write them down and let my readers hold me accountable. So here it goes.
Business Goals
Raise funds for Babble Soft. I will finish the business plan, refine the pitch, and set up meetings with angel investors.
Establish additional nanny partnerships and other corporate partnerships that lead to increased revenue and revenue opportunities. I have to make hundreds of calls, send hundreds of emails, set up meetings, and close deals.
Identify and become a member of at least 2 organizations that will help build my network to reach our customers. If you have any suggestions on what organizations to join I would love to hear them!
Convince some great companies to advertise with us. If I can demonstrate a significant increase in users (SEO please work!) of our applications, I believe those advertisers who want to reach new parents and caregivers that are breastfeeding, bottle feeding, changing diapers, taking medicine, pumping, and trying to get some priceless, precious sleep would be *extremely* interested. Plus with our planned new applications that audience widens and deepens.
Find great people to help make it happen! Must find great people. Must find great people! Key team additions needed are 1) Experienced Senior Product Manager with strong technical skills to manage products from design to implementation to market and 2) Experienced Internet Partnership, Social Media & Ad Sales Manager (does such a person even exist?). Must find great people!
Personal Goals
Lose 5 pounds. I will eat less and exercise more.
Take Yoga classes. I will locate, sign up, and attend classes. Anyone have any recommendations for instructors in the Austin, Texas area?
Laugh more. I will find more funny and fun people to hang out with. 🙂
Be less concerned with what other people think. This will probably be the hardest one for me to accomplish and the hardest to measure. Worrying about what people think of me, my decisions, my company, my appearance, my parenting, my words, etc. sometimes unduly stresses me out and takes up way too much energy that should be devoted elsewhere. I’m not alone in this issue. I’ve seen many bloggers write about it but more women than men which may be a result of our society or more likely Oprah. I will work to drastically reduce the negative self talk in my head. I think Yoga will help me with this goal.
My Personal Goals are mostly in my control. I decide what to eat. I decide when/how to exercise, etc. I decide when to pick up the phone and sign up for a Yoga class.
Achieving the Business Goals, on the other hand, are less in my control. I can do everything right but if the angel investors don’t understand or care for the market or market need I’m addressing then funding sources might not be available. If the stock market crashes and everyone quits investing then, c’est la vie. If the funding doesn’t come through then I won’t be able to hire great people, etc., etc. I believe I have the most control over establishing additional partnerships and joining organizations but that’s what I believe right now on January 1, 2008. As the Internet has proven, things change at the speed of each new thought!
What are your goals? Feel free to leave a comment here and/or leave a link back to your blog to where you posted your 2008 thoughts.
If you’d like to see if I meet my goals (or even heckle me – I don’t mind as long as its funny and helps me with my Laugh More goal 🙂 ) subscribe to this blog’s feed and share your wonderful thoughts with me.
I’ve seen companies doing soft launches of software products which makes me wonder what a hard launch is. So far the main difference I’ve noticed is that the official press release about the new application or new feature doesn’t go out until after the ‘hard’ launch. My guess is that a lot of bug fixing is going on between soft and hard launch.
So, I’m happy/thrilled/ecstatic to report that we just soft launched our new sleep and immunization recording features of Baby Insights Web! We are still working on some development issues on Baby Insights Mobile and plan to hard launch that app in January 2008. The mobile app is not web-based (yet) so we don’t have the luxury of a soft launch.
Babble Soft is offering FREE 3 month gift subscriptions valued at $19.95 until March 15, 2007 to anyone who discovers a software bug in our NEW Baby Sleep and Immunization features of Baby Insights Web. Gifts are transferrable! Sign up for your FREE account today. Happy hunting!
So far the soft launch has been uneventful (i.e., no major bugs), which is nice. Thanks go out to our development team Cressanda and especially our project manager. I recommend them highly. The smoothness of the soft launch is also because we don’t have thousands upon thousands hundreds upon hundreds of users yet. I’m banking on our foray into SEO to help get us there. I mean if the “right people” (a.k.a. target market) don’t know we exist; it’s not surprising that we don’t have thousands of users yet. Even viral marketing takes a bunch of upfront work because you have to get to the right early adopters who have major Internet influence. I need to figure out how to do a video and get it in YouTube.
Given the fact that over 4 million babies are born in the US each year then include Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and other Internet savvy countries, I’m anticipating that once those new parents and nannies find out about us, the floodgates will open. Babies and floodgates…not sure if the analogy works but I think you get the point. 🙂
I’ve been spending my time the last couple of days doing website updates to reflect the new features. And I’m working on pulling the pieces together of a business plan for some potential angel investor meetings that I have scheduled for early next year. If you know an angel investor (or you happen to be one) who likes the baby/new parent/web application/social networking space, please send them my way! The applications we have now are only the tip of the colossal iceberg.
Now for a short SEO break:
Whether you need breastfeeding support, are excitedly following your pregnancy week by week, are experiencing baby sleep issues, or are already under way creating your baby’s first year album, Babble Soft offers unique, easy-to-use Web and Mobile software solutions that improve communication between caregivers about baby’s and mom’s schedules.
Baby Insights helps caregivers keep track of baby’s breast & bottle feeding, sleep periods, diaper changes, medicine doses, and immunization records, as well as mom’s breastfeeding, pumping and medicine intake. Having important information stored in one location makes communication between parents, their nanny, babysitters, grandparents, or doctors seamless and reliable and gives new parents insight into their baby’s patterns to help with crucial baby care decisions. Baby Say Cheese lets you create a wonderful online baby’s first year photo album with milestones and family tree that you can share with friends and family.
If you are interested in reading about how I cope with manage software launches, fundraising, and SEO consider subscribing to this blog’s feed. If you are an entrepreneur, it will be worth your while…even if I crash and burn….which I won’t…because I said so, that’s why. Now go play with your Power Rangers. Sigh.
As I contemplate a plan to raise angel financing for Babble Soft in 2008, I have begun mentally preparing myself for the inevitable ups and downs of the process. I have raised funds to the tune of $15 million as founding CEO of my first start-up, Isochron, back before the first Internet bubble burst, so I have that experience to leverage. But that was just over 7 years ago and a lot has changed since then.
Isochron, which we started as part of a business plan competition back in 1997, was sold in 2002 after the bubble burst. I had already left in 2001, but Erin stayed on for two more years until 2003. The Founders/employees were washed out (i.e., got nothing) and the Investors got only a small fraction of their invested capital back. At that time many companies were just disappearing all together. When it was sold, Isochron was on its 4th CEO with me being the first. Now it’s on its 5th, is still operating and as I understand it doing reasonably well, but not the high growth trajectory we had hoped for back when we started. Looking back, if we (and our investors) had truly understood Porter’s 5 Forces we would have approached the business differently or maybe even run the other way because with a customer like Coca-Cola you don’t have much negotiating power! But hey, we were young entrepreneurs (I was 27 – what did I know? ) who felt we could conquer the world of distribution to and maintenance of vending machines and other equipment after that. Mostly because we were tired of going to school vending machines and them being out of stock of what we wanted so we figured we could help sove that problem with creative technology.
Since then, I have taken time to decompress, teach entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin business school, have two amazing kids, consult, and dabble with the notion of Babble Soft. Erin and I did some development and had a beta product ready in 2005 to use when our daughter was born, but it really wasn’t until 2007 when we launched our Web application and she started full time care, that I became serious about committing to the bigger vision of Babble Soft. I quit straddling the mental fence probably around October of 2007 and jumped squarely onto the side of the fence that has a vast open field with mountains, land mines, cool rivers, placid lakes, tornados, sunny skies, rainy days, ego bruises, good decisions, bad decisions, no money, fun, and most importantly a yet to be discovered journey!
After Isochron, I didn’t think I’d ever want to do a tech startup again. It was hard. It was tiring. I aged. It was stressful. I was disillusioned. It didn’t end like I had hoped/planned it would. But if you read my Entrepreneurial Self Portrait, you’ll see that I since discovered that it is in my blood. Looking back, I wouldn’t trade the experience and lessons learned for anything!
Do I wish I had made the decision earlier to dive head first into Babble Soft or another tech company? Sometimes, because I spent money on the wrong things due to not being focused/committed, which leaves us less money to spend now and means I have to raise funds sooner than I might have had to. But I know deep down I will not regret the decision I made to stay home with my kids when they were babies, work from home, and maintain a fairly flexible schedule for them. So maybe now’s the right time to really scratch my 7 year entrepreneurial itch! 🙂 This time I want to make sure I laugh a lot more…which is not hard to do with little kids around.
Stay tuned for more stories about my start-up journey. Next up in this series will be a subjective post on the pros and cons of raising outside capital.
If you are interested in reading ‘the rest of the story,’ you might consider subscribing to this blog’s feed (tell your friends too) so you won’t miss a thing! Even if you just can’t bring yourself to subscribe right now because you have a boulder on your head, would you mind helping me increase my chances at winning $50K from Intuit in their Just Start competition by clicking on the Quickbooks widget on the top right hand side of my blog or clicking here. Thank you!
Wendy at eMoms at Home did a post recently where she asked her readers “How do you Use Social Media to Promote Your Business?” I didn’t have time to answer then and I’m sure I missed out on the free books, which is OK because I never seem to have time to read any books these days. I’ve had a few days off from software testing, so I figured I’d do a post about it.
There are so many aspects to social media that it’s tough for an entrepreneur to keep up. I mean we still have to sleep! Fortunately, I’m fairly social. I mentioned on a post that Liz Strauss did recently called Business and Life: Are You Making the Most of the Conversation? that “I am a Participant, rarely a Lurker, and often a Listener.”
It is fun making friends all over the world and it’s easy to be social from behind your computer when it fits with your schedule. In the past I resisted joining sites like facebook because of the time commitment.
To do a social network right, I figure it means committing significant time to it. When you are launching a start-up, planning to raise funds, taking care of kids, maintaining a house, etc., it’s not easy to be as active as one should be in these networks over time. But so far it’s been fascinating to see how other people interact with the networks. I mean can you believe that facebook has over 55 million users all over the world? That is amazing! So here’s what I’ve done and what I’ve observed:
I started this blog (it had a different name before) with the help of Connie Reece. She gave me the kick start I needed! I think I did my first post back in May 2007. The blog has been fun and I know it has driven some additional traffic to my company site, Babble Soft, but to date I haven’t seen that it’s resulted in more than just a few additional sales. As a result of having a blog, I joined MyBlogLog, FeedBurner, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, and BlogHer. Wendy was also kind enough to invite me to join the Home Business & Entrepreneur FeedBurner Ad Network. I haven’t made much money from these particular ad networks (maybe in total $100) but it has given me exposure to other bloggers and made me aware of other businesses.
I entered some competitions to hopefully win prizes and get additional exposure. I can’t remember all of them but I know I did one at Alpha Moms and I just entered Intuit’s Just Start challenge where I have the potential to win $50K for my business! The ‘vote for me’ widget will be on the right hand side of my blog until shortly after their voting deadline of December 16. After I sent an email to some friends asking if they would vote for me, I found out that people had to log in to do so. Knowing how much I hate to create unnecessary logins, my guess is that I won’t win on votes, but I might win in the unique idea category and because we have jokingly referred to our Baby Insights application as “Quicken for Baby.” 🙂
I have participated in some blog memes: 8 Random Things About Me and Blogging Tip Meme. Neena just tagged me again for a My Favorite Words theme. Memes give you exposure but they are time consuming so I think after doing this last meme, I will have to put a notice somewhere to let people know not to tag me unless they let me know first because I would hate to leave a meme go unanswered. I’m answering the Favorite Word meme by bolding my favorite words in this post (in case you were wondering why some of the words are in bold text). Isabella at Change Therapy I hope that’s OK with you! What do these words say about me? I guess that I’m a driven, committed, somewhat zany, looking to learn, searching for connection/peace, sleep deprived, mom-ified, and sometimes creative.
I joined LinkedIn. I’ve found LinkedIn to be useful for business related networking…for answers to specific questions. I haven’t yet established a deal or attempted to look for employees there which I hear is what it’s meant for. I’ve been able to answer a few questions on LinkedIn but I don’t think I’ve contributed to the increase of anyone’s business yet.
I joined facebook. Mostly to learn from the king of social networking sites. I may do some targeted ads there some day when time and money permit. I also set up a company page on facebook for Babble Soft.
I just joined twitter. I even added the little widget to my sidebar, and I integrated it with facebook. I really resisted joining twitter. I had no idea why anyone would be interested in my day to day activities. More importantly I didn’t think I would be interested in anyone else’s day to day activities! I already have about 20 followers. You may be wondering what pushed me over the edge and made me join twitter…well it was the Duran Duran concert I attended earlier this week. I was there and I suddenly thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if I could tell my friends and random strangers about the fact I’m at this cool concert?’ and then all of a sudden I “got” twitter! Will it result in additional business? I’m not sure. Time will tell.
I have not yet joined MySpace or YouTube (but I’ve been to the site many times). If I had to guess, I will probably join YouTube before MySpace, but first I need to create some videos!
Overall, I think I’m still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building a powerful online network and I’m a little bit afraid of getting in too deep and getting stuck in a networking hole somewhere. I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but it’s a fear I face nonetheless. Maybe I’ll find peace there instead.
After doing some research on hiring an SEO firm, I decided to go with the full service firm option. It wasn’t an easy decision and I was concerned about spending the money, but now it’s done. I just signed the paperwork with SpryDev for our search engine optimization internet marketing campaign!
SpryDev is based in Austin, Texas and I found out about them from a reply their founder, Ben Finklea, left on the Bootstrap Austin email list. I had been thinking that I needed to find someone to help me with SEO and there was his email with his guarantee:
By the end of your contract you will have at least as much additional business from your Web site as you spend on our services… or we’ll work for FREE until you do.
I took it as a sign. Of course I checked out a few others but given that time is of the essence (I will start fundraising in 1Q 2008), he is based in Austin (I can meet with him face to face if any issues arise), and I didn’t have to get anyone else’s approval (I’m still bootstrapping) except for Erin’s (my husband), I made the decision to go with them fairly soon after our initial conversation.
Ben must be pretty darn confident about his services, and based on our few discussions he seems like an honest guy. I have heard stories about bad SEO experiences so I was paying particular attention to what he was saying and how he was saying it. He didn’t act like he knew everything and seemed interested in learning about new things. He said they haven’t worked with a company in the parenting space before, but he did some preliminary research and felt like he and his team would be able to increase our web profits and that he would be able to cover his guarantee.
He was proud of the fact that his firm has never engaged in paid link campaigns to increase their clients’ rankings…especially since Google recently updated PageRanks of several sites. He was also proud of the fact that they didn’t follow a practice of internal linking between different pages within a domain to increase rankings. I didn’t know this but apparently Google announced they would only count links to one domain so if people were linking between “www.companyname.com” to “products.companyname.com” those internal links will no longer be counted when determining search results. Honestly, I don’t know why people would have thought that would work or why Google’s algorithms wouldn’t have already taken that into consideration.
Rose Holston is the project manager for Babble Soft. I’ve already filled out a fairly extensive questionnaire about our market that she will use to help create the internet marketing/SEO plan. I mentioned some of the target markets that Naomi mentioned on her post about ‘monsters and pants.’ Thanks Naomi! Rose has two kids and she could instantly relate to the need for Baby Insights. She is a self-professed anal retentive Excel spreadsheet mama. I wonder what kind of keywords she will come up with to reach that audience. 🙂
I told them I would be blogging about my SEO/SEM full service firm experience in order to help other entrepreneurs with their SEO decisions. So check back often and feel free to share your SEO thoughts so others can learn as well. I am looking forward to working with SpryDev and to making significantly more money than what I end up paying them!
Picture by my friend Sandy Blanchard
Shane and Peter issued a challenge on their blog (which I first read about on Naomi’s IttyBiz blog) where he asked their entrepreneur readers to answer questions he came up with (i.e., interview themselves). It’s his way of interviewing people by getting the interviewee to do all the hard work! Great idea by the way.
Since I just finished a post called Why I Don’t Want a Monster In My Pants, I said to myself “what the heck, let me see what I can make up come up with.” I was just helping my son with his Transformer puzzle that he’s putting together here next to me, and I have some time before the rest of the house wakes up so here it goes…
What’s your personal mission statement? To make a difference and change the world for the better (not for the worse).
What’s the biggest mess you’ve dealt with this year? Depends on what you mean by mess. On the parenting front, I would have to say potty training messes. On the business front, I would have to say spending more money than I had hoped to. I probably should have invested in Google stock or figured out how to invest in facebook instead.
What current entrepreneurial efforts consume your time? Product management, product development oversight, software testing, user story generation, press release writing, assembling (with help) gift cards and mailing them out, thinking, blogging, dealing with &#$#% Microsoft’s Vista OS which results in IE crashing every 30 minutes! All that fun stuff.
Why do you do what you do? What inspires you? When do you get most excited? It’s in my blood. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. He actually made baby powder back in Sri Lanka and sold it door to door. Plus, I’m not sure what else I would do. I like creating things that didn’t exist before. I like bringing to market products that make life easier for people. Now if people actually use them and want them, that’s a bonus!
I am inspired by my children’s smiles and laughter. I’m inspired by blue skies and majestic trees. I’m inspired by people who overcome great odds and challenges and are still great people/parents. I’m inspired when people make sparkling connections with other people and the world around them.
I get most excited when I get a good night’s sleep.
Boxers or Briefs? or as Naomi says, Bikini or Thong, duh?!? No comment.
What do you do when you’re not [designing | programming | managing | writing | toiling for the wo/man]? Sleep. Tickle my kids. Negotiate with my kids. Hang out with my husband. Argue with my husband. Watch TV. Chat with my family. Hang out with friends. Walk. Think.
What one thing made the biggest difference when getting started? Lack of sleep. Our son didn’t sleep through the night (and he still wakes up) until he was 4 years old. I can’t be held responsible for any of my decisions between the years of 2001 to mid 2006. He is the reason we started Babble Soft and we even had another little one in the middle of the non-sleeping chaos.
What’s your exit strategy? Happiness or Acquisition by a Happy company that has a lot of money. If a Happy company does not exist or does not want to acquire us then I guess we’ll grow big enough to continue to stay private. Get it? Me either.
What is the last thing that made you belly laugh? My kids laughing together (i.e., making each other laugh). Kids can make you cry, whine, scream, yell but the greatest thing they can do is make you laugh like crazy at the silliest things. Oh and I laughed pretty hard when I saw There’s Something About Mary and the Austin Powers movies. I almost forgot about the DadLabs manly breastfeeding video. My gosh it is so hilarious that I had tears in my eyes!
Have you ever been in business before? Yes. I’ve also been in a swimming pool before.
At what point do you consider yourself successful? I don’t believe one ever attains success. It is an ongoing, evolving learning process. Check out all of the cool people I have interviewed on the topic of success right here. I think the closer one gets to feeling at peace with oneself and the world around them and can complement that feeling with a very comfortable financial position, the closer they are to success.
Oh, who am I kidding it’s when I can get 6+ months of uninterrupted nights of sleep…now that’s success!
What was your first experience with a computer? I think it was at computer summer camp and we were working on Atari’s or maybe it was an Apple. I remember learning some BASIC coding. Of course I can’t code anything to save my life now.
My first memorable experience was on a Macintosh. I happened to be fairly good at typing and in my junior high typing class I was second only to a girl who was also an expert pianist. She typed 90 words per minute and I typed 70 and that was on a typewriter not a computer. Because of my typing speed and accuracy, my mother asked me to help her type up her exams and some other documents she needed for her medical students on her Mac. I remember feeling so happy and proud that she trusted me to help her with such important tasks! My very first computer was a Mac Classic that my mom got for me during my 2nd year in college and it cost something crazy like $1,100.
Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates in a jello wrestling match, where’s your money? No comment.
Where do you do your best thinking? Everywhere and nowhere. I’m a non-stop thinker. I even think in my sleep. Some people think that’s odd. I am told my grandfather (who was also an entrepreneur) was like that. It’s genetic. I know this because my son does not stop talking. He has not learned that he can keep thoughts in his head and that he doesn’t have to tell everyone everything that runs through his mind.
Writing this post has taken me 20x longer than it normally would because my son (who finished his Transfomer puzzle) has asked me a million questions and reported to me everything that was going on with his puzzle, his friend who is coming to visit, his friend who is not coming to visit, the basketball game he is going to see with his dad, and marshmallows. Now he is here trying to read this post and asking me why I’m writing about kids and work. He is just so darn adorable, amazing, wonderful, and he wants to sit on my lap. 🙂
What does your average daily work / life balance look like? How much time do you work, play and sleep? Let’s see. I pretend try to sleep 7 to 8 hours per night. I check email constantly sporadically throughout the day. Depending on who drops the kids off at school, I usually start working between 8:30 to 9:00 a.m. each day. If I don’t have a lunch meeting I watch CNN for 15 minutes while I eat leftovers or a PB&J sandwich. I then wrap up around 4:30 or 5:00 in order to pick up the kids. If I can, I’ll fit in a 30 to 45 min walk (which is rare) around the neighborhood if the weather is good. Then I do some more work and blogging between 8:30 and 10:00 pm (unless we’re watching one of our favorite TV shows after the kids go to sleep) and on weekends (like I’m doing now).
I think it also depends on how you define work and play. Some of my work is play (like blogging and setting up partnership deals and meeting cool people) and some of my play (hanging with the kids) is work.
If I could introduce you to anyone, who would it be? Oprah Winfrey.
What stops you from giving up when you are frustrated? I don’t know. Probably the fear of what I would have to do instead of doing this. Plus the fear that if I stop now, all the time and money I’ve invested would have been for naught and people will make fun of me. I’m hoping for another tech bubble so I can be a part of it before it bursts!
If Chuck Norris and Steven Hawking had a baby (hey it’s my damn interview), would you vote for her for president? It all depends on her IQ, parenting style, athletic ability, knowledge of world affairs, ability to persuade huge groups of people to do great things, and her knowledge of universal physics. It would also depend on who she is running against.
By the way, I saw Steven Hawking once at a restaurant in California. He was with his assistant (I think) and I remember wondering if he felt lonely.
My question: What is something you do (or have done) that makes your kid(s) genuinely laugh? If you don’t have kids then your spouse, your friend, or your family member. Tickling does not count as an answer. There was no requirement that I answer this question so I’m just not gonna do it, but I look forward to Shane’s response.
Thanks Shane for these interesting and bizarre questions and for motivating me to do your work for you. 🙂 I have a hard time refusing any challenge! I started this post yesterday and am finally getting around to posting it today because we just got back from the Austin Zoo. The Austin zoo houses endangered and abused animals and it’s the perfect size for kids. They have lions, tigers, and bears oh my!
Since I don’t think Shane is going to pay me for this interview, if you like this Entrepreneurial Self Portrait, won’t you give it a Stumble please? 😀
Since I have been overcome with software testing, deciding on a full-service SEO firm, addressing Holiday cards, doing the company books, staring into space, and looking for other people who will help me for free, for reduced fees, for a free lunch, with all of the other stuff I need help with, I did not notice until a few days later when I checked her blog that she mentioned Babble Soft. Oh and yeah, she didn’t link to my blog so I didn’t realize she was writing about me. 🙂
Here is her off-the-cuff list of potential markets for Babble Soft:
Babble Soft has two groups of people to which they can market, parents and non-parents. To save space, we’ll just talk about parents here. In the parent category, we have:
– Mothers who are anal retentive.
– Fathers who dig all the latest technology.
– Parents who live in the US and are subject to the BULLSHIT PARENTAL LEAVE laws, forcing them to go back to work too early.
– Parents of multiples.
– Parents who work opposite shifts.
– Parents with older kids, especially those with high needs.
– Mothers with post-partum depression. (When you’re depressed, you need someone to think for you.)
That’s off the top of my head. If Babble Soft were to specifically target any one of these groups and market to them appropriately, she’d have more customers than she’d know what to do with. That’s not even getting into potential baby shower gifts, gifts from distant grandparents, gifts from nagging grandparents, gifts from over involved grandparents, etc.
Nothing surprising there and they all make sense to me. I made the comment on her blog that even if you aren’t depressed but you are sleep deprived (probably the same thing) and you can’t stand your spouse, you need someone to think for you. 😉
The challenge as an entrepreneur is how to do that with extremely limited resources and no budget. Anybody invented effective cloning technology yet?
I haven’t done any formal Internet marketing to date, but I’m biting a big financial bullet next week and that will soon be changing. We’ve done some PR (press releases, traditional media stories) but no one at the big publications like Parenting, Pregnancy Magazine, Parents, etc. will give us the time of day because [fill in the blank.]. I can’t afford to pay $15K+ to advertise on sites like that or on the granddaddymammy of baby sites babycenter.
Since this dilemma is just one of the reasons why entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart or the sane, I guess I’ll go see about answering Shane and Peter’s Interviewing You: The Entrepreneur post this pleasant, unusually warm December Saturday afternoon while my daughter and husband nap and my son works on a Transformer puzzle on the floor next to me…
I’m a bit behind on posting about this video, and I know everyone else and their dog blog has already posted about it, but it is just so funny I figured it was better late than never. It’s the Here Comes Another Bubble – The Richter Scales You Tube video that is set to Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire” song.
A technology bubble may be coming and maybe we learned from the last one. I just hope there are more women (and not the line of men as they show in this video) that get a chance to play this time around and gain experience, money, and respect for surviving the the next big one! Let’s just hope it’s non-toxic like kid’s bubbles are. 🙂 OK, I’m rambling now….here it is:
I have never done any active SEO work for Babble Soft or this blog, but now the time has come to do some. With the pending release of two new features to Baby Insights and my plan to raise angel money in 2008, I need to make sure people (our potential customers) can actually find us.
We have unique products that sometimes people don’t even know they need until they see them. How does a couple in their 8th month of pregnancy with their first child even have a clue about all the things they will need/want to remember after their baby arrives? They typically don’t! Many people still don’t think applications like ours exist. Right now we average less than 50 unique visitors to the Babble Soft website per day. I get more visits to my blog and from the cats in my neighborhood than to the company site!
Any links we have are because of luck, the kindness of friends & strangers, or links from our Partners. We have had some press mentions but it seems like the online press has a moratorium on putting actual active hyperlinks in their articles for some reason. I mean how insanely crazy is it to let your readers easily go to the sites of the companies/people you are writing about? Ugh! I guess they think it would be a bad thing to drive traffic away from their site? I haven’t figured that one out yet. Thank goodness for blog writers who don’t have those rules!
Do it ALL myself. At the moment, I can’t do this physically because there aren’t enough hours in the day. Plus I am not an expert in this area. This is the cheapest option when it comes to dollars but the most expensive when it comes to my time allocation and sanity.
Find a consultant who can tell me what to do. See above comments for Option 1. Unfortunately, I can’t clone myself and have my clone work for free also and implement what the consultant tells me to implement. 🙂
Find a one man/woman shop. This is a possibility, but how do I find that one person who can put a comprehensive SEO plan into place?
Find a full service SEO firm. This is also a possibility (with cost being a big factor). The challenge is to find the right firm who is willing to work ‘flexibly and creatively’ with a small self-funded company.
This is a critical decision on many levels. I can’t afford a mistake in this area especially since I’m leaning towards option 3 or 4. This means I will have to take a calculated risk and place a bet on an individual or a firm that after a few months of hard work and payments, will start to pay off. I have to part with precious cash up front for the hope of having it all come back to me and then some!
If any of you have gone through this process, I’d love to hear about the things you considered. What questions did you ask? What did you do on your own? What did a firm do for you?
I have written about DadLabs before at DadLabs Keeps Us Laughing and I’m writing about them again because they are cool, professional, funny, laid-back, politically correct, and because Daddy Troy just interviewed me/Babble Soft yesterday for a Gear Daddy episode that will air in January 2008!
Daddy Clay also included Babble Soft in a piece in our local Austin American Statesman called Gifts for new or expectant parents that went online today and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Such thoughtfulness!
Our relationship with DadLabs is just one of the reasons I think being in Austin, Texas is so cool. It’s such a friendly, connected town that is so supportive of small companies. Many of us entrepreneurs know that it’s a long road full of challenges, good decisions, bad decisions, no money, some money, nice guys/gals, not-so-nice guys/gals until (or if) we reach our goals of sharing our products and ideas (profitably) with the world and it’s nice to be able to help each other out!
As I was leaving their studio, Daddy Owen was preparing to put on a Pregnancy Sympathy Belly for his Prego Man experience. They have a very verbally forthright video on their blog with their pitch to Daddy Owen as to why he should be the one who plays the pregnant dad at Daditude – Prego Man the Pitch that I thought would be a bit too verbally graphic to embed here. But for those who don’t have kids in earshot or want to see Dads talking about how it is to be pregnant, check it out.
I will, however, embed The Lounge – Mother-in-Law where they interview the moms who wrote Baby Proofing your Marriage, that I’ve mentioned before, sharing their thoughts about experiences with their mother-in-law. Enjoy!
UPDATE: When embedding the video it broke the layout of the following posts on Firefox (thanks Pearl for the heads up) so I had to remove it. You can always check the video out by clicking here.
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