Building A Web Business After Hours
Mar 18 2009

SXSW Interactive 2009 is now over and what a grand event it was!  It was a nice break from my day to day routine.   I had a few late nights but not later than just after midnight one night and most other nights I was home by 10:30 pm and one night I was even home by 7:30 pm.  I met up with so many cool people…people I already knew in person and people I had met online.   As many of you know I work at the Austin Technology Incubator by day and work on Babble Soft whenever I can (i.e., After Hours).  ATI helped coordinate and sponsor a nightly party called the Entrepreneur Lounge at Fogo de Chao (a Brazilian restaurant) which was a great success.

The panel was extremely well attended and I’d say about 85% of the people in the room were working on a business after hours and 10% were thinking about it.  It was a perfect and very engaged audience!

I had been hearing that the panels at SXSW overall had not been going well.  I experienced a few myself, but I and others kept hearing they weren’t organized, inexperienced people were either running them or on the panels, and people weren’t getting much out of them.  Based on that grapevine talk, I decided to adapt and get a little more formal than we had planned to be.  We originally were not planning on having a PowerPoint presentation but literally hours before the panel, I asked Jeremy Bencken to meet me and we pulled together on his cute and really small laptop a brief presentation as simple as putting our names, jobs, information and key takeaways on separate slides.  As simple as they were, it helped us frame the discussion.  We also decided on some opening questions and remarks as a team while we waited in the “Green Room” before the panel started.

I was a bit anxious beforehand because it’s been quite some time since I’ve spoken to a room of 150+ so I was out of practice but after a few minutes it came back to me.  It’s an amazing and surreal experience to have so many people looking at you to impart knowledge and share your stories with them.  The panelists did an awesome job of describing the ups and downs of doing a business after hours.

Here is a copy of the content on our basic slides:

Aruni Gunasegaram – moderator
Day Job: Operations Director, Austin Technology Incubator
After Hours: Pres/Founder, Babble Soft, LLC
Company Blog:  Babble Soft Blog
Blog: entrepreMusings.com
Twitter: @aruni

David Altounian
Day Job: Co-founder/CEO, Motion Computing
After Hours: Co-founder, iTaggit
Twitter: @daltounian

Jeremy Bencken
Day Job: Co-founder/GM, ApartmentRatings.com
After Hours: Chairman, BuzzStream
Blog: buzzstream.com/blog
Twitter: @jeb512

Elisa Camahort-Page
Former Day Job: 2005-2006: Worker Bees
After Hours: Co-founder/COO, BlogHer Inc
Blog: http://BlogHer.com
Twitter: @elisac

Gretchen Heber
Former Day Job: Journalist, Austin American-Statesman
After Hours: Co-founder, NaturallyCurly.com
Blog: naturallycurly.com
Twitter: @natcurl

7 Takeaways

• Protect your IP from your day job
• 8pm to midnight is a beautiful thing
• Don’t beat yourself up
• Set expectations with your family/friends
• It works for some but not all niches
• Partners rock; get one
• Use care in raising external funding

Texas Social Media Awards
Jan 21 2009

Oddly enough, I was nominated for the Texas Social Media Awards.  There were 125 nominees and I happen to know at least one of the people who nominated me and that was Thom Singer, our local networking guru.  Thanks Thom!

There are some heavy weights in social media on the list and I’m honored to be among them!  The list was created by people who happened to know about the awards, so I think they are missing some key social media people in Texas.  However, they seem to have most of the relevant Austin folks on there with a few notable exceptions.

The judges will be hard at work selecting the top 25, and they will be announced on February 13.  The winner will be announced at a party on March 15, 2009, the day before my Building A Web Business After Hours panel happens at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi)!  😎

The judges will take into consideration comments left on each person’s entry and mine is listed under my name Aruni Gunasegaram.  So leave a comment there if you are so inclined and maybe I’ll have a better chance of making the top 25 than I did at winning that free trip to Tobago.

I’ll be on a blogging haitus for the next several days for a much needed life break.  I’ll be back sometime mid to late next week.

What They Don’t Tell You About SEO – Part 4
Oct 22 2008

And now for a long overdue post on search engine optimization.  The business reason for waiting this long was that I wanted a quarter to pass after I officially ended my search campaign (i.e., June 30, 2008) with the firm I had been using before analyzing the results.  The personal reason is that well, um, given my various activities, I didn’t have the time to do it until now. 

To get more background on my SEO experiences, check out my posts: What They Don’t Tell You About SEO Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. 

Although I signed up for an annual contract, about 4 months in it became apparent to me that it wasn’t working for a variety of reasons.  I think it was obvious to them also because 6 ½ months into it, we were very far away from achieving their guaranteed results of making more than we spent monthly on search services by the end of the contract.  Something miraculous would have to occur.  Was it anyone’s fault?  Yes and no.  

There were things I should have researched and understood better before engaging a SEO firm.  I made the decision hoping it could be part of a ‘silver bullet‘ solution to raise our trial and conversion numbers and as we all know, the silver bullet doesn’t usually hit where you want it to.  I also think that the firm could have advised me better upfront on things like website conversion, dropped the ball a couple of times, and could have proactively paid more attention to the direction things were going.  When I last checked their site, it looks like they have changed their focus more to SEM (search engine marketing) than just SEO.  

Although it does hurt to have spent the money (especially considering the economy today), several of my peers have spent tens of thousands more dollars than I did with similar results.  So I feel a little less dumb when I look at my company’s P&L statement.  In fact I know several web company CEOs in town who have suspended their SEO/SEM campaigns to focus on other ways to bring more qualified/convertible traffic to their sites after not seeing expected results.  

Overall, I learned a lot and when the time is right, I may consider re-engaging with SEO again.  I have no hard feelings against any of the people I worked with at the firm.  They are all nice people, and since I don’t want to focus on feeling let down, I have chosen to think about it as educating myself and helping someone somewhere feed their kid or pay their rent.  Such is life! 

The biggest lesson I learned was: SEO is not a good choice when you are creating a market!  It’s hard to predict what people will search for when looking for your product in a market that is not well defined.  It’s hard to even know how many or if they are looking for your product!  I’ve mentioned before the example of a baby blanket.  When you are looking for a ‘baby blanket’ or a ‘red soccer ball‘ you know what you are looking for.  When you are looking for a way to get your baby to sleep better at night or understand his feeding patterns, you may not even know you are looking for a web and mobile based tool to help you track his activities.  So even if you land on the Babble Soft site, you don’t have a frame of reference to compare it to. 

So I chose to end the contract rather than spending thousands of more dollars for another 5 ½ months with all signs pointing to the fact we weren’t going to achieve the hoped for results.   I could have continued but I didn’t want to have to deal with a situation where none of us wanted to be in thereby making all of our lives more stressful.  I’ll never know if I did the right thing but given the economy, I’m sure glad I’m not having that big cash outflow each month when I’m not seeing the equivalent or greater cash inflow.   Maybe I let them out easy, but I think the money is better spent paying our mortgage instead!  Here are the highlights: 

Facts for SEO Analysis on Babble Soft: 

• Search engine traffic went from 14% just before the beginning of the campaign in December 2007 to 36% in September 2008 with a peak of 58% in July after ending the campaign.
• Referring site traffic went from 42% to 46% with a peak of 51% in August 2008 due to a fabulous article on BabyCenter called The basics of baby schedules: Why, when, and how to start a routine.  This article resulted in a record amount of trial signups and still sends qualified traffic to the site and I didn’t spend any money for that lucrative mention!
• Direct traffic went from 43% in December 2007 to 17% in September 2008 which is good because the number of people who know to directly type www.babblesoft.com or another URL link on our site is few in the world.
• Trial sign-ups went up 200% from November 2007 to June 2008.  They increased 500% from November 2007 to September 2008 because of the BabyCenter mention.  However, since we just launched the web and mobile applications in 2007, the base amount wasn’t that high to begin with.
• Conversions went up some as well but that again was because the base to grow from wasn’t that high.  They didn’t go up near the amount we all hoped for to cover our SEO costs.  That’s why percentages are great to quote but they don’t mean you are breaking even yet. 🙁

Key Learnings from my SEO experience: 

• SEO is not a great place to spend your money when you are creating/making a market.  There are just too many unknowns.
• Focus on getting mentions in places where your target audience visits (e.g., BabyCenter).  This is hard to do without PR help but sometimes you can get lucky.  People have spent tens of thousands of dollars on public relations firms as well and still not achieved the ‘perfect’ story placements.  Since I don’t have a big marketing budget, I am taking things into my own PR hands and hoping I’ll get a big mention from the free Help A Reporter Out (HARO) PR leads I now get.
• If you have the budget, experiment with keywords using Search Engine Marketing (e.g., Google Adwords) until you see what keywords work to get qualified traffic to your site, and then revisit SEO.  However, if you are creating a market this could prove to be an expensive endeavor because you might have to do A LOT of guessing!
• Spend a significant amount of time making the appropriate conversion changes on your site.  In other words, make sure your site gets people to sign up and part with their money!  Make sure your SEO firm not only understands the importance of conversion but can also identify the changes and make them up front.  There are people who know how to make your website flow and your text copy sing a siren song.  You need to find someone who gets your market and if you are creating a market, you might be the expert and have to wing it yourself.  

I think that the SEO/SEM firms are going to face hard times with the changing economy as many businesses will.  If you have the time and money to do it right and you’re selling something like ‘red soccer shoes’ or ‘Halloween costumes’ then SEO might make sense for you.  If not, it’s probably best to turn over another low-cost marketing rock while you create and define your new market.

Sign up for free email updates to read about my continuing saga of building a web business after hours (soon to be a SXSW 2008 Interactive panel)! And please Stumble, Email, or Digg this post so others can learn from my SEO experience.

Some Assembly Required for Women
Sep 7 2008

A couple of friends of mine recently released a book called Some Assembly Required: A Networking Guide for Women and for some bizarre reason, they actually included me in their book!  I guess that means I’m a good example of how to network. 🙂

I’ve known the authors, Thom Singer and Marny Lifshen, for probably close to 8 or 9 years now.  I met them somewhere along the journey of my first high-tech startup and we’ve remained in touch off and on since then.  In fact, Marny was one of the very first beta testers of Baby Insights when her daughter was born! 

For long time readers of my blog, you may remember that Thom Singer did a great guest post called Networking and the Stay at Home Parent that continues to get a lot of eyeballs.  If my 2009 SXSW interactive panel idea is selected, then Thom will serve on the panel with me because he is building his speaking and writing career after hours just like I’m trying to do with Babble Soft. 

The book is easy-to-read, easy-to-understand, and a great reference guide for those looking for some tips on how to network.  Although it’s written for women in mind, much of the advice they share is great for men too! 

I attended an informal book party they held this weekend at Marny’s house and gladly paid for my autographed copy.  Check it out and look for my name in the Acknowledgements and in a nice little vignette on page 172.  See below for a link to buy their book at Amazon:

Building A Web Business After Hours
Aug 14 2008

Earlier this year, I had such a great time at SXSW Interactive 2008, that I submitted a panel idea for SXSW Interactive 2009 called Building A Web Business After Hours and more people than I thought are interested in seeing it happen! 

Panel Description: Many businesses are built after-hours or during odd hours of the day and night. Join us for a panel discussion by entrepreneurs who built (or are building) their Web/E-commerce/Other business while holding a day job, multiple jobs, or who are currently balancing two+ career options. 

For those of you who don’t know, I am attempting to build a web business (Babble Soft) after hours and lets just say it has it’s ups and downs but mostly it’s really hard and challenging with a big upside bejng that in my day job I get to be around other entrepreneurs.

How many of you (or people you know) are building sites and businesses in their spare time (on the side)?  What kind of businesses are they?  Many great businesses start with tinkering on the side…

I’ve started to assemble a great group of panelists including: 

• One of the co-founders of BlogHer, the top female blogging site in the world that has partnerships and customer relationships with some of the top recognized brands in the world!  Elisa Camahort Page, a co-founder, awesomely mentioned my panel in her Time to vote for SXSW panels post.  Check out Elisa’s post to see the other great panels she’s recommending.
   
• Thom Singer is the director of business development for Austin based vcfo.  Additionally he is the author of four books about the power of business relationships and is a professional speaker.  With the support of his employer, he successfully manages his job and his own business, speaking to companies around the country on how to network.  He blogs at Some Assembly Required.  

• Karen Bantuveris, Austin founder & CEO of VolunteerSpot, knows firsthand what ‘juggle’ means.  She’s built VolunteerSpot from the ground up while running a successful management development and executive coaching business, and being active in her daughter’s school PTO Board and Scout troop.  She even manages to sleep, occasionally.�
   
• Jeremy Bencken, co-founder of ApartmentRatings.com, Tenant Market, and PR for Pirates.  Jeremy and his wife, Katie, founded ApartmentRatings.com in 2000 out of their one bedroom apartment in Mountain View.  They bootstrapped the site while attending business school at UT-Austin and then during full-time jobs for 4 years before selling the company to Internet Brands in 2007.  Along the way they grew traffic to over 12M unique visitors per year (without an ad budget), built a base of advertisers, fought off frivolous lawsuits, and got their site featured on NPR Marketplace, and in stories in the NY Times and AP.

• Gretchen Heber is CEO and co-founder of NaturallyCurly.com, a multi-dimensional company for people with curly hair she founded with business partner Michelle Breyer. She and Michelle founded NaturallyCurly while holding full time jobs as a journalist for the Austin daily newspaper.  NaturallyCurly.com is an online magazine, social network and shopping boutique dedicated to curlyheads. The site came about, in part, because of Heber’s having been told as a child: “It looks like you combed your hair with a stick!” among other beauties. She is married, has three boys, and resides in South Austin. She is active in her neighborhood association and not much else because she’s an entrepreneur and has three young boys, and goodness, who has time!?
   

Please, please, please go vote for the panel by clicking on this link: Building A Web Business After Hours.  I believe 30% of the weight on whether a panel is chosen is from people like you voting.  The only downside is that you have to create a log in, but the upside is that you will be in the SXSW system and see all the other cool panels going on and vote for many more! 

Thanks and I look forward to seeing some of you at SXSW next year. 8)

The Trouble With Checking Emails
Aug 12 2008

While out on vacation for almost 11 days, I had to check emails.  I can’t fathom not checking emails at all and coming home to thousands of emails.  I think I would have cried…not that I don’t already feel like crying over the mental draining-ness (not a word I know) of keeping up with day to day emails.  Currently, I actively check 3 different email accounts. 

I know that tons of busy business people get overwhelmed by email and some have even stopped responding altogether to email, but I haven’t reached that point yet.  Companies like NutShell Mail (I met the founders at SXSW here in Austin earlier this year) attempt to solve it by having all of your emails going to one place.  Right now when I’m home two of my email addresses download into one Outlook and the third to another set up of Outlook on a different desktop at my day job.  When I’m on the road, I have to log in to 3 different webmail accounts.  Fortunately, I’m not on the road that often. 

What I found interesting is that I ended up probably deleting about 40% of the email I received (which included newsletters, news updates, blog feeds, friend updates, etc.) while I was gone.  I’m still deleting some even though I’m fairly caught up because if I tried to read them, I wouldn’t get to anything else!  It’s making me wonder if I should even be getting those emails and instead rely on the ‘if it’s really big news, I’ll hear about it from someone’ belief. 

The risk of doing this is looking stupid if something big has happened (especially in your market) and you unknowingly wear a blank stare when someone exclaims ‘Did you hear about xyz?!” 

I guess one always has to take calculated risks in life.  In my current life situation, I have to take the risk that I might not be in-the-know in exchange for paying attention to the rest of my life.

How do the rest of you cope with email overload…or do you?

Women 2.0 Conference – The Rest Of The Story
May 16 2008

So here’s the rest of my Women 2.0 Conference story.  If you want to see tons of pictures (which sadly I and my deep pink Banana Republic shirt don’t appear) please check out the official Women 2.0 Conference Wrap Up post.  You can also see Sophia Perl’s (another semi-finalist) post on it here.

Friday – May 9, 2008
I took my rented yellow car and drove around the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area to meet some people.  I met Jeff Nolan, who was one of the venture investors in my first company, for lunch at a place called Buck’s.  We only just got to know each other while at my last company before I left, but he seemed to be one of the good guys.  I mentioned him in a post I did about angels and venture capitalists a while back.  We might get to work together again and this time in hopefully a more creative and collaborative way.

I tried to meet up with Guy Kawasaki later that afternoon but he had something mildly important to do like make some sort of silly book submission deadline, so we traded tweets and emails instead.  Then I went to the Stanford mall.  I’m not a big shopper, but since I had a few hours to kill, and my husband wanted me to get him a Stanford t-shirt (It’s one of his alma-maters) I wandered around a bit and read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, but was not feeling in the “now” at the time so didn’t make much progress.  So I got some hot chocolate, my rings cleaned, and happened to find a couple of light-weight jackets at really good sale prices to protect me from the Bay Area cool evenings!

Later I had the pleasure of meeting up with Maryam Scoble for wine and fabulous brie with a flakey crust. Yum! Maryam and I met through our blogs.  I initially heard about her and her husband Robert Scoble from our very own Austin based Connie Reece.  Robert even did a Qik video of me at SXSW but I don’t think that many pregnant moms or parents with newborn babies, preemies or twins are watching those videos.  Go figure!

Saturday – May 10, 2008 (conference day)

You can see the agenda for the conference here.  It was an interesting day in a tent near the Stanford golf course.  Walking in grass was a challenge for many of us who were wearing heels.  Those wearing pointed heels especially suffered by sinking into the grass/dirt, but since I would trip and fall on my face in pointed heels, I wear more flat ones.

The most interesting sound bites, in my opinion, came from the Power Panel: “Igniting the spark through strategies taught and lessons learned”

Terri Ghio, Unique Solutions and TBS Connect said: Make sure you have an audience, a secret sauce, strategic alliances, and ability to build the blocks and barriers for success.

Amy Love, Protégé Performance Group said: Build an inner circle, share your dream, think big, and have the confidence & energy to move forward.

Dr. Jwala Karnik, JwalaCo said: Be open to inspiration, tell people what you want to do, and just take the first step!

Dr. Maggie Haertsch, VOICEMAP said: Have passion and be totally committed, focused, and fearless!

Pat McEntee, AuxoGlobal said: Women entrepreneurs are different and that’s OK.  Women look at things they want to spend their time on differently.  Women build different companies. The fact that many retail companies are currently dominated by men is not going to last long, but women should build companies that men feel comfortable in.  By the way, Pat is a guy!

I mentioned the winners of the napkin business plan challenge in my yellow car post, so I won’t mention it here again, but I did want to mention one company and founder who was on one of the panels: Erica Estrada of d.light design.  She is impressive and her company is very cool!  They make affordable, small, solar power lighting units for people in third world countries who have no access to electricity.  So the kids in who live in shacks can study/read after dark and parents can cook or work after dark without having to use a kerosene lamp that not only stinks and has to be bad for your lungs, but also doesn’t last very long.  I really do wish her and her company great luck, good partners, fabulous investors and perfect timing!

I ended the day by eating sushi with the friends I was staying with.  They even took a picture of me (see below) drinking this huge cup of sake! The waitress finished the bottle on me, so the sake overflowed into its holding bowl.  I was glad I wasn’t the one driving us home in my rented yellow car. 😀

Coming soon I’ll post an update on my SEO experiences, so you might want to subscribe to read more about the birth pains of a web business.  It’s not pretty.

Moms Gone Viral
May 2 2008

I was planning to write a post updating everyone on our search engine optimization experience today but the real world injected itself with a sick kid at home.  High fever and rescheduling meetings doesn’t leave much time for writing long, heavy posts.  Plus I had to sneak in a nap in the afternoon while our daughter napped since we didn’t get much sleep the night before. 🙂

So instead, while my husband takes care of the kids this evening, I thought I’d write a post on the example of an unanticipated, viral marketing story with a mom twist.  So here it goes…

Once upon a time I met a friend on the Internet.  I found her blog and commented away.  After some time, we realized we had similar visions and she invited me do a guest post on her blog called Entrepreneurship: A Blessing or a Curse.  We kept in touch, spoke on the phone a few times about ways to work together, became twitter pals, and finally met in person at SXSW here in Austin back in March and clicked even more. 

While at SXSW she got further proof of what she already knew which was that the name of her blog, then called eMoms at Home, was not really reflective of the demographics of her readers and would-be readers so she had a mini-meltdown, picked herself up and came up with a cool new name called Sparkplugging!  Since she was and still is an advocate of entrepreneurs and especially those who work from home, her cool, new name opens the door wide open to many of us who are moms or not but like to spark up ideas and play with them until something happens.

So after SXSW, she went home and saw a post about dads on twitter and decided to do one for moms.  Within hours she got tons of replies and created a post called The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter that started with 250 moms.  I commented and subscribed to comments on that post and every day new moms would leave a comment with their twitter name until May 1, 2008 that is.  Twitter sent out an email to everyone yesterday, May 1, and in it they included:

Mother’s Day: On The Way

We’ve noticed a trend of parents twittering the moments of their baby’s birth so we know there are some new moms on Twitter. Are you a mom on Twitter? Is your own mom on Twitter? Maybe you even made “The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter”? Mother’s Day is just around the corner so don’t forget to @reply the moms you know with a thoughtful phrase–but keep it under 140 characters, moms are busy people.

List of Moms on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/6cxgp5

And today I had 150+ comments in my inbox and they are still coming.  Now she has close to 400 comments on that one post! Did she do anything extraordinary to make it happen? Not really.  Did she tell people on twitter about it? Yes, of course.  Did she know others would tell and re-tell more people about the list? Possibly.  Did she know twitter would pick it up in their mass email to everyone? Doubtful (but I don’t know what went on behind the scenes).  So in hindsight what played in her favor to have a post she wrote on April 8 (before her name change) take on a life of its own?  Here’s what I think:

• She took the initiative to do something that ended up being quite time consuming, but she saw from the responses it resonated with hundreds of moms on twitter that it was a worthwhile endeavor. 
• She told her friends about it who re-tweeted and blogged about it. 
• The tweeters kept the link going within twitter and in the blogosphere. 
• Mother’s Day was around the corner and the guys (I think they are all men) at twitter saw the activity and might have said to themselves “Hmmm. How can we mention a major holiday, get brownie points with our wives/mothers, and promote twitter at the same time” and voila a mention was born!

UPDATE: I sent a link to @Biz to this post and he informed me there are several women who work at twitter!  So of course I followed them.  Here is his tweet: 

biz @aruni awesome! I included the moms list because it was noteworthy – also, women who work at Twitter: @crystal @krissy @alissa @lane @sara

In case you haven’t guessed who this friend is, it’s Wendy Piersall.  I guess only Wendy can tell us if she planned all of this, but to me it’s another example of viral marketing that in hindsight makes sense but when started, the current result would have been highly unpredictable. 

To me, this is why it is so hard to orchestrate a viral campaign.  You can plan everything down to the “t” and still not have it work out the way you wanted.  It’s hard to predict when there are so many variables.  You can also just do something you enjoy doing that helps others and see a “spark” turn into a flame!  Way to go Wendy! 😀

Oh and by the way, I am @aruni and Wendy is @eMom on twitter…

The Blogger Mom, In Your Face
Apr 12 2008

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Thursday, April 10, 2008 called The Blogger Mom, In Your Face written by Sue Shellenbarger featuring none other than the most well known mom blogger on the Internet today: Dooce.  She has been blogging for close to 7 years now…before most people (including myself) even knew what a blog was!  I got the opportunity to meet Heather Armstrong (a.k.a Dooce) at SXSW and exchange a few words with her after she finished her panel.  She is such a down to earth person.

I think it’s great that the WSJ has chosen to highlight a mommy blogger who according to the article might be making as much as $40,000 per month on ad revenue for her blog!  Wow!! It’s not without its downfalls though because full time blogging for that kind of money is a crazy, often stressful job.  I blog very part time (3 or so posts per week) so I can’t say I can relate to the stress of full time professional blogging, but I can certainly imagine it…especially if I had to post original, often personal content every day like Dooce does.

According to the WSJ article, “Among the Web’s 200,000-plus bloggers on parenting and family, few have succeeded to the extent of Ms. Armstrong; countless at-home parents would love to be in her position. But less obvious is the behind-the-scenes price an at-home mom pays to shoulder her way to prominence in the blogosphere — giving up her privacy, sustained time off and any remnants of work-family boundaries at all.”

Sue Shellenbarger did a fantastic job with this article by illustrating both the ups and downs of professional blogging, unlike the recent New York Times article called In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop which emphasized primarily the negative aspects of blogging as a profession and inferred that full time blogging can be fatal.  If they had mentioned how many journalists had died in the same period, then I think it might have made the article a bit less biased against blogging.  Check out Marc Andreessen’s funny take on this article called The New York Times Covers Blogging including statements like “Bloggers Have Bad Breath,” “Bloggers Have Herpes,” “Hitler Probably Blogged,” and “The Bloggers Have WMD.”

Other mommy bloggers that were highlighted in the WSJ article are:

5minutesformom.com
designmom.com
parenthacks.com
scribbit.blogspot.com
fussy.org
notesfromthetrenches.com
stirrup-queens.blogspot.com
izzymom.com
suburbanbliss.net

Asha Dornfest at Parent Hacks linked to a guest post on my blog about traveling with a baby and I saw a significant amount of traffic because of her mention, which goes to show that she definitely deserves to be on this list!

If you think there are a lot of mommy bloggers, you should check out Twitter because there are a ton of mommy tweeters out there.  In fact, Wendy Piersall at eMoms at Home just did a post listing the Moms on Twitter and the list is still growing! 

I have to say it’s much easier sometimes to come up with 140 character or less tweets than full blog posts!  I wonder if we can monetize our tweets.   Anyone want to pay me $10, $5, $1, 25 cents for a tweet? 😀   Twitter are you listening reading?

Oh and if you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to my feed because if I survive the next 5 years of motherhood, maybe I’ll end up being one of the top mommy/entrepreneur bloggers!  Unlike Dooce, however, I will have to hire someone other than my husband to help me figure out how to monetize my blog…

I’m Applying for the Women 2.0 Napkin Business Plan Competition
Apr 7 2008

I’m applying for the Women 2.0 business plan competition in California for my company Babble Soft.  Thanks to Angie Chang for leaving a comment on my recent Economy and Entrepreneurs post letting me know about it.  At the time the deadline was April 1, but they’ve since extended it to April 15.  They encourage companies located outside of California (and the Bay Area) to apply so we’ll see if they will actually select a company from l’il ‘ole Austin, Texas.

It’s a pretty short application form that challenges even the most frequent twitter user (i.e., type your thoughts in less than 140 characters) with maximum character requirements between 210 to 410 characters to describe things like your target market, business summary, or competitive advantage!  It sure made me focus on picking what I believe are the right words.  The online application form is run by Angelsoft, which I mentioned in one of my SXSW posts.

I will be submitting my application later today and then mailing in my paper napkin with my best paper napkin handwriting ability (UGH!) soon thereafter.  I might have to ask my husband to write it for me because his napkin handwriting talent is much better than mine. 🙂

Wish me luck!!

SOBCon 2008 – Register Now!
Mar 31 2008

SOBCon08 is “Biz School for Blogging.” This year’s event tracks entrepreneur bloggers and corporate bloggers alike, with an innovative format and a stellar cast of speaker/instructors.  It is the brainchild of Liz Strauss, a fabulous blogger who I have mentioned often in previous posts. I was thrilled when she named me an SOB (Successful and Outstanding Blogger) back in October 2007.

She and a great group of supporters and presenters are hosting SOBCon2008 in downtown Chicago on May 2-4, 2008.

Sadly, I can’t make it this year but plan to be there next year if at all possible!  I had the pleasure of meeting Liz at SXSW earlier this month and several of the bloggers who will be participating in the conference.  If you are a business blogger, you should definitely check it out and sign up for this conference if you can!

5 White Men, Rebranding, and Dads
Mar 22 2008

What do 5 White Men, Rebranding, and Dads have in common?  Well other than the fact that Dads are usually men, probably not a whole lot.  These are just some of the interesting things happening around the blogosphere.

5 White Men Talk About Social Media was written by Connie Reece at Every Dot Connects.  Connie is a huge presence in the world of social media especially here in Austin, yet was overlooked for a panel on Social Media the Chamber of Commerce was putting on.  She voices her frustration at women still being “invisible” even when they are playing a major role in the world of social media.   Connie got me started in blogging almost a year ago!  She is also one of the main reasons the Frozen Pea Fund initiative got started as a result of Susan Reynolds struggle with breast cancer.  Here’s a quote from her post:

This afternoon I got an email from fellow Dot-Connector Brenda Thompson with the subject line: “Five White Men Talk About Social Media.” That got my attention and I opened the email right away. …

It irked me too. It’s not like the organizers would have had to look very far to find some outstanding women to speak, and I’m not just referring to myself. In less than 30 seconds, Brenda and I came up with a list of five or six local women who would have made great panelists.

See, lists are easy to make. But women on lists are still invisible if conference organizers aren’t looking for the list.

Looking Minnesota. Feeling California and The Gaping Void Between Our Brand And Our Audience were two recent posts written by Wendy Piersall of eMoms at Home.  After her recent trip to SXSW Interactive, she realized she needed to rebrand because many of her readers are not eMoms or even parents!  I love Wendy’s blog for a variety of reasons but mostly because she is open and honest about her experience as an entrepreneur and she readily shares her blogging and business tips.  We met through our blogs, had a couple of phone conversations and when we finally met in person at SXSW, it was like we just “got each other” as entrepreneurs and as moms!  I’m not sure if she has come to a decision on the new name, so go check out her posts and give her your 2 cents!

AllTop Dads launches.  Thanks to Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World my entrepreMusings blog is near the top of AllTop Moms blogger list.  It’s a great place to go to check out all the top mommy and daddy bloggers.   If you don’t know Guy, he was once asked to interview for the CEO position at Yahoo! take on the CEO position of Google and he turned the opportunity to interview down thinking there’s no way Google Yahoo! would amount to much.  He often refers to it as his $4 billion dollar mistake, but he reflects back and realizes that instead he was able to be involved in his children’s lives, which is priceless!  

So as I said when I began this post, there isn’t much in common between these links, but all are great reads!

The Economy and Entrepreneurs – Hold On!
Mar 17 2008

Unless you live under a rock or don’t drive a car, you have no doubt heard about or felt the state of the US economy.  It’s in a state of well let’s say ‘confusion’ with indications it’s moving in the wrong direction.  Gas prices are at record highs, people are filing for bankruptcy, they are losing their homes, the government has a record amount of debt, the stock market is going down, etc. etc.

So where does this leave us entrepreneurs who want to raise funds to take their businesses to the next level?  Well, that’s a good question and a challenging one to answer.

I’ve had a handful of meetings with potential investors and a couple of them have expressed interest in participating, but they might change their minds given what’s going on in the economy.  As the saying goes “It’s not in the bank, until it’s in the bank!”  Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in NYC, linked in his Read the Blogs post to a post on the Bear Stearns bailout by JP Morgan, which illustrates why even if you think it’s in the bank, it might not actually really be in the bank!  Our personal savings accounts are also going down with the market.

I had several conversations with entrepreneurs coming from different parts of the country at SXSW Interactive who have been struggling for a while to raise funds for businesses that are up and running with strong visitor and user traction.

So despite only being less than two months into the process, all of this has forced me to revaluate my fundraising plans for Babble Soft.  Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart as there are many ups, downs, and false starts.  The economy changes however have a huge impact on the success or failure of a startup.  If the economy is doing great you get all sorts of crazy new ideas/businesses popping up with chances to live and prove themselves.  If it’s bad, even the companies with wonderful ideas can suffer, die out, or never even get a chance to shine.

The good news is that of all the industries out there (except for maybe the alcohol industry), the baby market is fairly recession proof.   People don’t stop having babies nor do they stop buying things for their babies or things to help them take care of their babies.  The bad news is that what we are trying to do at Babble Soft does not yet have a predefined “mental need or want” (because it’s so new) like say bouncy chairs, bright/shiny toys, Baby Einstein videos, or diapers.

On the plus side, we have not taken any outside money to date so we don’t have to worry about how and when we pay investors back like some other start-up companies.  The downside is that if we don’t raise money right now, it will take longer to bring the exciting, potentially life changing vision I have to the world or worse we might miss the market opportunity.

I’m still trying to figure out the best plan of action.  I wish we had more money to create a new user experience, enhance our current applications, and create new applications ourselves.  I’m evaluating trying to raise a smaller amount of money and growing slower.  Now’s the time when the creative juices start flowing!

If you know an entrepreneur, give them a hug (if you can’t give ‘em money) because it’s going to be a tough roller coaster ride for the next probably year or so.  Some will be able to hang on and emerge stronger and better, some will get off gracefully, others might fall off unexpectedly, and yet others will wish they had fallen off before they lost their money and lost some of their sanity. 🙂

If any of you have any thoughts, advice, virtual hugs, or even questions please share below…

Venture Capital Investment Competition at USC in Los Angeles
Mar 8 2008

For the past few years I have served as an Advisor to The University of Texas at Austin MBA team that competes in the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC).  

It all started when I was an adjunct lecturer of entrepreneurship at UT Austin and since then I’ve continued to advise as they need me and my schedule permits.  This competition did not exist when I got my MBA, and even if I had the opportunity to participate I was too busy trying to start my first venture.  What a plus it would have been for any entrepreneur to have seen a term sheet presented by experienced investors in an academic environment rather than in real life when you feel like you have to learn another language just to understand parts of the investment terms!

This year the regional competition was held at USC in LA on March 7, 2008.  The UT team this year was comprised of:

Ben Jones – MBA 2008
Kyle Reese – MBA 2008
Rajiv Bala – MBA 2009
Ryan Sanders – MBA 2009
Scott Chiou – MBA 2009

I connect them with local venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to help them prepare but we had a late start with only about 5 weeks to get ready and midterms in between this year.  Other teams have semester long classes to prepare for this competition!

At the competition, 6 teams were given business plans for 3 real companies including NiLA, makers of environmentally friendly lighting, on Wednesday, March 5 at 5:00 pm.  They use the Internet and other relevant sources to research the companies and come up with questions for the entrepreneurs.  On Friday, they heard the entrepreneurs pitch their business concepts in front of 11 real live venture capitalists, including Aditya Mathur of Revolution Ventures, Nathan Joyner of Pacific Ridge Capital, Neal Hansch of Rustic Canyon Ventures, representatives from Tech Coast Angel Group and many more. 

They then go into little rooms and subject the entrepreneurs to answering several of the same questions over and over again from the 6 different teams.  Why would any entrepreneur do this you might wonder? Because the VCs are in the room while they are being asked the questions so they are getting exposure that they might not have had otherwise to them.

After the questioning sessions are over, the teams again regroup and come up with a PowerPoint presentation which outlines which company they would chose to invest in and why.   For the company they choose to invest in, they create a term sheet.  They present their choice in 3 minutes in front of the VCs.  The VCs then grill them for about 15 minutes on their company choice and investment terms.

At the end of the day, the judges decide who wins and who takes 2^nd place.  The 1^st and 2^nd place winners get money and the opportunity to compete in the national competition at University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School in April.  I have personally seen one student get a job on a team I advised in venture capital because of participating in this competition.

As an advisor I get to be a fly on the wall and watch the VCs deliberate and observe the decision making process.  Plus I build my network in areas outside of Austin.  Personally, I believe this experience has helped me gain better perspective on what venture capitalists are looking for which is why I’m currently seeking money from angel investors or smaller boutique/seed stage venture firms. 

So I’m sure the suspense is killing you as to whether or not our team placed and unfortunately they did not. They picked the company with the biggest market potential but with the highest risk and the VC judges picked NiLa, which has a great opportunity but less risk and less upside.  Goes to show you that most VCs are not early stage investors!

There are so many variables that go into winning from judges backgrounds, to student’s experience, to understanding of the market of the presenting companies, etc. that you can’t always prepare for everything.  But what an experience! 

Flying back to Austin today for SXSW Interactive and will post about my experience as a newbie SXSW attendee.  I’m looking forward to meeting many of the people I’ve met through blogging and twitter!

8 Random Things About Me
Aug 5 2007

A blogger I admire a whole bunch, Connie Reece of Every Dot Connects, tagged me for the 8 Random Things About Me game (meme?).  I’m not sure what a meme is but it seems like a ‘tag your it’ kind of game and then you have to spend a bunch of time crafting a respectable blog response. 🙂

She helped me get up and going with my first blog and has given me advice and suggested connections that I should make in the blogosphere.  All out of the kindness of her heart.  What a big heart!  I still have no idea what her “I’m my own first cousin” statement means.  I made the mistake of commenting on her post as follows:

Me: What an interesting post! I don’t even know if I could come up with 8 random things about me because none would be as interesting as yours.

Connie: Oh, Aruni, of course you could come up with 8 random things about you that would be interesting! Consider yourself tagged. Write that post, link back here, and tag 8 others — some of your fellow mom- or dad-preneurs or other Austin Business Bloggers. I bet that if you  get started on it, you’ll have fun.

Me: Yikes! You’ll see from reading my blog that I’m up to my ears in software testing, but I will certainly give it a go later this week. I think some of the people I have met in the blogosphere have already been tagged in this game.

So here it goes:

1. I was born in Sri Lanka.

2.  I used to ride on the University of Texas at Austin Equestrian team (which apparently does not have a working website) in undergrad.  I always seemed to pick the craziest horses during competitions!

3.  I used to work at Mr. Gatti’s Pizza my junior/senior years in high school and the summer after my freshman year in college.  I love their parmeson mix.  My co-workers had a nickname for me: Pep-Aruni.  Get it?

4.  I have lived in Sri Lanka, England, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and Texas.  I have traveled to many more places than that.

5.  I have lived in Texas now for 27 years.  8 years in Lubbock (Happiness is Lubbock, Texas in my Rearview Mirror was my favorite Mac Davis song), 4 years in Austin, 4 years in Dallas, and now 11 years back in Austin.

6.  My first paying job was a paper route in Lubbock when I was 13 years old.  I remember the cold, icy mornings delivering the Saturday and Sunday papers and the sometimes hot, dusty afternoons delivering the evening paper.  I did this all on my 10 speed bike with one of those shoulder bags with pouches in back and front to hold the papers while I pedaled.  I threw the paper with one hand and tried to avoid crashing with my other.  Ah, those were the days…

7.  I like to sing but right now I usually only sing in the car to the Top 40 tunes.  After Babble Soft makes it (crossing my fingers), the next thing I will pursue is a singing career…probably won’t get too far since I’ll be in my 40s (or maybe 50s) by then. 🙄

8.  I’m married to a White guy named Erin who grew up in Mexico City and who you would never know is 100% fluent in Spanish.  He was born in the US and then moved to Mexico City with his parents because his grandmother (who is 86 years old) runs a restaurant there.  He’s sometimes smarter than me and that’s why I married him. 🙂

Now I am not sure if I know 8 bloggers to tag since I’m still a new blogger (4 months and counting) and I’m not Marc Andreessen, but here we go (in no particular order).  I’ve included links to the posts of those people who have already been tagged:

1.  Carole Hayes – Alias Tex: Telling thier story to every stranger that arrives.  Carole happend upon our company site by seeing a blog post at The Lactivist.  Carole is one of our biggest fans and she is awesome!  A news station in Dallas, WFAA, ran a story on Babble Soft on August 2, 2007 and she was the subject of the story.  Interestingly, one of my friends in Dallas saw the piece and called me to tell me that she and Carole where in the same Mom’s group when her eldest daughter was born almost 7 years ago!  Small, small world…

2.  Clay Nichols – Daddy Clay’s Blog: it’s only pee – A fellow Austin, Texas entrepreneur demonstrating that it’s OK to be a great dad!  He is co-founder of dadlabs.

3.  Maryam Scoble – Maryamie: Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble’s musings about Life, Love and Everything Else… I heard about Maryam from none other than Connie Reece.  She met Maryam’s husband, Robert Scoble, during SXSW, a music and film festival to end all festivals, held in Austin every year.  Connie actually gave him a 6 month gift subscription to Baby Manager because apparently Robert and Maryam announced their pregnancy on twitter (still haven’t figured out what twitter is yet) but as of today we don’t know if Robert lost it or left it somewhere or even remembers meeting Connie.  Maryam is so nice and responds to my comments on her blog.  I’ve commented a few times on Robert’s blog but he seems to think I’m not worth acknowledging….probably because I’m not Marc Andreesseen.  I just saw that he got Faceslammed by Bill Gates which makes sense if you think about it.

4.  Thom Singer – Some Assembly Required  – Thom is a fellow Austin blogger who I’ve known for years.  He writes books on networking and how to be the best networker around!  He recently got back from a trip to Ireland and said he kissed the blarney stone.  My challenge to him is that the next time I see him, he has to demonstrate his newfound ability to persuade people to do things he wants them to do.

5.  Mack Collier – The Viral Garden: blurring the line between company and customer.  Mack has given me some links to some informative articles about business blogging and much needed words of encouragement!

6.  Randa Clay – Randa Clay Design (already tagged) – I love her current ‘juicy’ lime graphic on her blog!  I know I need to change my blog header but I haven’t had time to figure out how to modify the css file.  I would love to have one as vibrant as hers someday.  Her lime graphic makes me wish I was on a beach sipping margaritas. 🙂

7.  Jennifer Laycock –  The Lactivist: nursing out loud! (already tagged) – I admire her ability to get the word out about breastfeeding and offer her support and insight to so many of us who need it.  I like the fact that she’s not preachy and aims to highlight the facts and the laws surrounding breastfeeding.  She acknowledges that breastfeeding doesn’t work for everyone and we should not look down on women/families who choose to bottle/formula feed.  I totally agree!  I found her site, while doing follow up research on our launch press release and she posted a “not so flattering” post about Baby Manager.  I think I have since recovered…barely…  😯

The following are ‘long shot tags.’  They are people who I know are extremely busy at the moment but would I’m sure have great responses if they have the time to respond.  However, if one of them does answer (or points me to the post where they have already put down their answers to this game), then I would have met my requirement of 8!

8.  Wendy Piersall – eMomsatHome: starting, running + succeeding in home business and blogging.  I have learned SOOO much from her blog about ‘how to blog.’  She’s amazing.  I will be doing a guest post for her in the near future.   I heard about Wendy from again, none other than Connie.  Connie met her at a conference and told her about me and later told me about her.  Thank goodness because I wouldn’t have made as much progress on this blog without Wendy’s tips!

9.  Marc Andreessen – Blog.Pmarca.Com: Often Wrong. Never in Doubt.  I am fascinated by his writing on high-tech business start-ups especially since I’m on my second high-tech startup.  When he was accepting comments, he actually replied quite often to my comments which was like ‘wow, Marc Andreessen responded to me on his blog.  Totally cool.  I matter in the universe now!’  He recently wrote a post called Why a startups initial business plan doesn’t matter that much.  I totally agree.  Now I can just mention Thomas Edison when someone asks me for a business plan.  I emailed him to see if he would mind me tagging him, but haven’t heard back.  I so enjoy his thoughts on startups that I’m hoping he will have the time to tell us 8 Random Things about himself.  I even created a category just for him. 

I think the protocol is that you link back to this post when you make your post.  It has taken me days to construct this post from contacting people to see if they would mind being tagged, to determine if they had already been tagged, to adding links, etc.  I’m cross-eyed now.  I’m not sure I can handle another tag but I hope it’s clear why I could not leave Connie’s tag unanswered!