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)

Johnson & Johnson Invited Me to Baby Camp!
Apr 7 2008

So if you are plugged into the blogosphere you no doubt heard about Johnson & Johnson’s baby camp.  I was one of the lucky ones invited but either a) my email filter ate the first round of invites or b) I was one of the mommy bloggers who was added to the list later. So by the time I got the invite and responded, they were already full…plus I couldn’t go anyway.

I did want to blog about it when I first got the invite but since I wasn’t able to attend, I didn’t want the world to know why I couldn’t attend.  All were good reasons: 1) my husband was out of town, 2) my cousin and family were visiting from New York on a trip planned quite some time ago, and 3) they were full.

I haven’t read a lot about the outcome of the camp yet.  A few posts on the blog storm about the invite process, who was not invited, the fact that babies weren’t allowed to come, and why some were uninvited because of various reasons including they were attending the BlogHer business conference or were nursing can be read here:

Queen of Spain – So you want to talk to mommy bloggers?

City Mama – Needed something to talk about at the BlogHer conference.

Maryam Scoble – First Night and Going to Camp

Mom 101 – Johnson & Johnson Baby Gate

Robert Scoble – J&J ‘breaks into jail’ with baby camp (check out the comments on this one for a nice letter from J&J trying to explain the situation)

I have met in person or communicated via email with all of the above bloggers except for one.  I’m anxious to see what happened at the camp.  Right now when I type in “Johnson & Johnson Baby Camp” into Google I only see links on the first page to posts about how they mishandled the invitation process.  I’m anticipating that they ‘saved face’ at the camp and the bloggers who attended will have much to share with us when they have a chance to write about it.  The coordinators said they would send me information after it was over so I’ll most likely do another post on this soon.

Overall, I think it was a great move on J&J’s part to make a visible first step to ‘friend’ the mommy bloggers.  Yes, they made a few mistakes but, just like starting a new business, trial & error is part of the game. If they learn from their mistakes, I’m sure it will all end up on a positive note!

BlogHer’s Annual Reader Survey and Parents of Teens Contest
Mar 14 2008

BlogHer’s Annual Survey

BlogHer is doing their annual survey and would love your opinions.  This helps them attract advertisers to be a part of their network.  In return, they get great ads (which I and other bloggers give valuable space to on our blogs) and they share a little of the money with us.  So please click on the image above or right here to take a brief survey.

Contest for Parents of Teens at NeenMachine.com

If you are a parent of a college bound high school junior or senior, here is a contest that you won’t want to miss!  NeenMachine.com has teamed up with ApplyWise (a leader in college admission counseling) to offer one lucky winner the ApplyWise College Admission Counseling package for free – (a $299 value). To enter just leave a comment on this contest post at Parenting Tips at NeenMachine.com and give your child an edge over the competion.

But hurry – contest ends March 28, 2008.