The amazing adventures of Doug Hughes

Posts tagged ‘business’

Change, Fear, Life After Death

Back in 2009 my company, Alagad, had what I think of as The Big Layoff.  We went from about 13 employees and contractors down to three people in a matter of a fifteen minute phone call.  This wasn’t the first round of layoffs I’ve had to do, but it was the hardest.  I loved the people who worked with me.  I cared about them and their families and I felt as though I had personally failed them. Frankly, I did.  I’m sure that I could have done more to protect them, their jobs, and their families.  That said, they’ve all gone on to bigger and better things and I’m extremely happy for them.

In the year or so leading up to these layoffs I was constantly assaulted with panic attacks. My chest would seise, I’d get tunnel vision, my mind would shut down everything except worry.  White hot worry. I worried about the people who worked for me and the overwhelming responsibility I had to them.  I worried about paying my bills.  I worried about my family.  Through the support of my family, the remaining employees, and the miracle of modern pharmacology I somehow made it through that period.

Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t completely fry my nerves. I wonder this because I am again tearing Alagad down.  Three weeks ago we were faced with the very real fact that we would likely go out of business.  Both my personal and business accounts were overdrawn and we couldn’t make payroll.  Again.  We had to leave the PEO that provided our health benefits and payroll service.  The walls were coming down.

So I held a call with all four of us, three family members and one employee who may as well be family at this point.  We talked about shutting down and what that would mean.  Throughout this experience I felt calm.  Not happy, but calm, collected.  Worried too, but not like in 2009.  I sincerely felt as though I had done everything I could and that, if we failed, no one could blame me for not trying.

What’s interesting to me is that I don’t feel the same panic I did in 2009.  I don’t feel like a hole is being burrowed in my chest.  I can breath and sleep. I’m not entirely sure why.

I imagine that when death is imminent – when you are terminally ill – that a certain peace and calmness comes from that knowledge.  I imagine that you release your desperate grip on everything that holds you to the physical world. Nothing can harm you now.  There are no more consequences. You transcend fear.

That’s where I am. Nothing can hurt me now. And strangely, because of this, I am free.  I can do anything I want.  I can take tremendous risks without fear.  I am like the terminally ill patient who decides to live each day as if it were their last, because it might be.

Much to my surprise, out of that phone meeting was born an entirely new strategy we’re calling Alagad 2.0.  I’ve detailed it on an all-new Alagad.com website and will spare you the details here.  Suffice it to say it’s not the traditional way of running a software company.

I feel like the terminally ill patent who is given experimental treatment.  It might save their life, but might just kill them even faster.  There’s only one way to find out and I’m comfortable with this.

I can’t lie and say that I’m entirely at peace.  I still worry.  We don’t currently have health insurance and we depend on our prescriptions for our mental well being.  Many have criticized our new approach saying that we don’t understand the business.  But others have suggested it’s might actually be a good idea.

Maybe I’m just delaying the inevitable, but I’m ok with that. The picture that has emerged to me is that there is in fact life after death.  It’s a rebirth of some sort – a renaissance.  A new start. I look forward to it with an open and calm mind.

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

My Personal Time Management… Thingy

I’ve ranted and raved on this blog previously about how having ADD can make it hard to actually accomplish anything that’s not strictly necessary.  It’s also no secret that I have entrepreneurial aspirations, but I’ve had a really hard time successfully executing on them.

I have also been known to avoid doing other things that I should, like cleaning, laundry, etc.  Unless it’s a responsibility, like keeping the kids, cats, and chickens alive or doing work I’m contractually obliged to do, it’s rare that I willingly do it.  Trust me, my grass needs mowing like you wouldn’t believe, and I’m just not very likely to actually do it.  As far as I’m concerned, laundry is for schmucks who care if their shirts are wrinkled.

While drugs have helped me, they’re not a panacea.  They can give me the extra wind behind me that helps make things like lawn mowing a tenable idea.  However, I still have to decide what to do at any given moment, and that’s where I fall down.

It turns out that ADD is an impairment of working memory.  Working memory is essentially the memory associated with goals and task execution.  The net effect of this (I once worked for a company called the NetEffect) is that it can be really hard to remember why I’m doing something.  Essentially, every time I decide what to do I have a different perspective on the world and therefore my decision making process changes.  This is why I could work for two or three months on a personal project and then switch to something new and exciting as soon as the first project becomes something less than thrilling.

There’s a ton of frustration, self flagellation, and guilt that goes along with this.  I really, really, want to get beyond these roadblocks!

My psychiatrist recommended that I create a flow chart of my decision making process that I could hang on the wall.  The purpose of this is to keep all the little variables that play into what I could be doing visible and harder to forget.  I tried making this flow chart and got pretty much nowhere.  However, after a little more consultation, she helped me come up with another approach.

What I’ve done is break things that I can or need to do down into categories.  For me these categories (currently) are:

  • Family Responsibilities
  • Chores
  • Recreation
  • Personal Projects (Not Committed)
  • Entrepreneurship (Committed)
  • Contracting Work

These are categories of things that I need or want to do.  For example, a family responsibility might be to take a kid to the doctor.  Recreation is anything I enjoy.  Etc, etc.  There’s also a seventh category of On Hold, which where my personal projects go to die (but now with permission).

For each of these categories I’ve created a list of categories of my life that they relate to, general notes about them, examples of these types of things, best time of day to do them, best moods to do them in, and ways to convince myself to do them.

My goal is to take this document and use it to help keep in focus what I’m working towards and what’s really important to me.  I assume this will morph over time as I learn better how to use it.  Heck, maybe I actually can make that flow chart now that I have so much information about each category easily accessible.

For those of you who might find it useful, here’s the final document I created (click for a larger version):

This is my table of stuff to do, when to do it, and more.

Who knew life could be so complicated?

So… what do you think?  Would this work for you?  Any bets on this being useful for me?

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

ProjectSpark! #2: HappyPayments

I announced last week that I’m starting what I’m calling ProjectSpark!  As a quick summary, ProjectSpark! is my attempt to publicly describe business ideas I’ve come up with that I think have merit.  My intent is to collect feedback on the idea and, if I’m lucky, to try to build a team of partners with complementary skills to work together to bring the idea to market and to share in its guidance, ownership, and profits. Without further ado, here is my second ProjectSpark! idea:

I’ve mentioned in the past that I was working with some people to start a new non-profit called Supporting.us.  Unfortunately it looks Supporting.us is dead in the water.

The basic concept of Supporting.us was that non profits or charitable causes could create “Supporting.us Codes” which would look something like this:

Potential donors would recognize these codes and could scan the QR code in the image with a QR reader on their smart phone.  This would take them to a mobile-optimized web page where they would be able to make a donation with a single click.

Unfortunately, this won’t fly.  This falls under the realm of Third Party Payment Processing (TPPP) and I have been unable to find a way to work around this.  The problem is that credit card processors do a credit check on merchants (IE: Supporting.us) before they let them process credit cards.

With Supporting.us, we were essentially wanting to extend that processing capability to our customers, the charities.  But, since the processor wouldn’t be the ones deciding if our recipients were worthy of credit, they wouldn’t approve us.  Basically, it’s too risky for them.  What if we let someone use our system and they are fraudulent?  The processor will end up holding the bag on the chargebacks, not Supporting.us.  We’ve tried a few different processors and keep running into the same problem.  There’s still a chance we might be able to work around this, but I’m not sure how.

However, this experience got me thinking about mobile payments, which is, well, a huge area of investment at the moment.  You have the up-and-coming NFC technology where you can just wave your phone by a reader, rather than whipping out your credit/debit card and sliding it through the reader.  (I’m excited about NFC!)  There are also card readers that can attach to phones for mobile payment processing.  While both of these are awesome, they don’t really change how people actually make purchases and interact with stores.

So, I had an idea: What if you could change the way people buy things in stores altogether?

Think about this: What if you could walk into Best Buy (or any other retailer), find the merchandise you want to purchase, scan the barcode on the product using an app, and click one button to make your purchase?  At this point you’d own the item and could walk out the front door, skipping waiting in line.  Your phone would show a receipt for your purchase with a QR code that contained encrypted information about your purchase.

On the way out of the store, Best Buy’s security guys would scan your receipt’s QR code with their own mobile device to validate it.  This would lookup your purchase and confirm that the receipt is valid and that the user hasn’t already left the store before with this product.  Heck, this could be put into a stand-alone kiosk to remove the human element from the equation.

As a note, buyers would enter their credit card information into this app the first time they used it.  This would be securely stored either on the phone itself or, perhaps, in a PCI compliant data store in the cloud.

There are a couple of things that make this distinct from the failing Supporting.us concept.  First off, this business (let’s call it HappyPayments Inc, for the sake of a recognizable name in this article) would itself be a credit card processor.  They would fulfill the same role as First Data, or any other processor.  Basically, companies that want to use the HappyPayments to process mobile credit card payments would use their existing merchant account, but would use HappyPayments as the processor.  This would not prevent them from continuing to use the same payment processor they currently use for in store and online purchases.

HappyPayments would have an API that the merchant could use to either populate HappyPayment’s database with store locations, products, prices, inventory, etc.  Also, HappyPayments would also be able to call web services specified by the client to dynamically get this information.  Of course, it could also be manually managed if merchants so wished.

So, when I’m in Best Buy making my purchase, I select where I am from a list of stores near me that use HappyPayments.  This would be similar to how FourSquare works when you check in.  Using this, when I scan the product’s barcode, HappyPayments is able to lookup the price of the product at that store at that time.  When purchases are made, HappyPayments can relay that information back down to the store’s POS via a standard web service API (if the client wishes to implement this feature).

The fees for using this would be similar to any other payment processor gateway: A small percentage and a small transaction fee.  The mobile app would be free on the various app stores.  Any deeper or custom integration with store systems would likely have associated fees.  But, the idea here is to make money off of the transaction fees and not from the consulting fees.  This helps lower the barriers to entry and makes it easier for merchants to start using this service.

Now, this is not a simple nut to crack.  How does one get started?  Well, it seems that if you want to break into being a payment processor, there are some fairly high costs and legal requirements.  To get around this, new companies will often partner with existing processors.  So, that’s the approach to the first problem: partner with a payment processor to avoid having to actually be a payment processor at first.  As a part of the partnership, the processor would get a significant percentage interest in HappyPayments.

Secondarily, how do you get any sort of scale to get started?  And how do you finance development and the initial work that needs to be done?  Well, again, you partner.  In this case, I’d love to partner with a business like Best Buy.  They would make an initial investment to build this app (and business).  They would get exclusive use of it for a period of time while kinks are worked out.  In exchange for this investment Best Buy would also get a significant percentage of the company.

Once the system is stable, BestBuy starts promoting this in all of it’s stores to get people to install the app and make purchases using it.  Then, we open up the gates to other retailers and businesses that want to offer a similar buying experience. (Apple, perhaps?)

While that more or less wraps up the idea, I wanted to add that I recently learned that Stephen Gillett, who pioneered StarBuck’s recent forays into mobile payments, has moved to Best Buy where he be doing the same thing.  If I had a way to get in touch with Mr. Stephen Gillett, I think he might just be interested in this concept.  Who knows?  Anything’s possible, and it never hurts to ask.

So, what do you think?

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

All Hat, No Cattle

I think I’ve finally made an important mental leap, as far as business and startups are concerned.  It’s not just the idea I need, it’s the execution of the idea.  So far, with the exception of Alagad, my execution on my various ideas has been less than stellar.

What brought this realization on was a post I saw on Reddit the other day.  This image was posted to /r/entrepreneur:

Ideas are just a multiplier of execution 2009-07-28 It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. Explanation: AWFUL IDEA = -1 WEAK IDEA = 1 SO-SO IDEA = 5 GOOD IDEA = 10 GREAT IDEA = 15 BRILLIANT IDEA = 20 NO EXECUTION = $1 WEAK EXECUTION = $1000 SO-SO EXECUTION = $10,000 GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000 GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000 BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000 To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution.

This screencap was taken from Derek Sivers blog. Why the poster posted an image and not a link to the blog, I don’t know.

I’ve ranted in the past about how many brilliant ideas I have.  And, in all seriousness, I do think some of them are pretty good.  But it would seem that my execution has been pretty weak.  Truth be told, I already knew this, but this image really crystalized the idea for me.

In fact, I don’t even technically run my own company, Alagad, any more.  Randy Miller, my father in law, took over as CEO about a year ago.  I still drive the company’s concepts and technical direction.  But, when it comes down to making sure we get stuff done that we need to, I’ve handed that off to Randy. For Randy, this must be like herding cats.

To a degree, I think the fact that Alagad grew to what it was at its’ peak (13 people and 7 figures of income) was almost luck and perseverance more than a good execution.  I had the passion for what we were doing, but I pretty much was clueless on how to generate leads and make sales.  To a degree, I think that’s because Alagad has always tried to be everything to everyone.  I’d say “If it can be done on the internet, we can do it.”  True though this may be, it’s not the easiest thing to sell.

So, with all these ideas I’ve worked on over the years (TaskForce, urate.it, Supporting.us, Respondin.gs, CouponHor.se, and many, many, more), I’ve failed to get anywhere because my execution sucks.  That a fun realization to have, isn’t it?  (No.)

I was talking with my psychiatrist the other day about ADHD, which I’ve recently learned I have.  I was lamenting how many half finished projects I have.  I’ll be working on one of my ideas diligently, and then suddenly come up with some brilliant new idea that I’m totally incapable of ignoring.  It’s so easy for me to get knocked off track and feel like my latest idea cannot be ignored!  It’ll be quicker, easier, bigger, and when it’s done, it will finance all these other ideas I want to do!

This is actually why I started ProjectSpark! last week.  I’m really hoping to find some people who can help me overcome some of my weaknesses, such as execution.  Because, frankly, I don’t want to flop around like a fish out of water forever.

For those who don’t know, ADHD is essentially an impairment of working memory.  What that means is I don’t have as much storage as other people do in the part of my brain where I work with information.  So, when I come up with an exciting new idea I essentially can’t remember why my previous ideas shouldn’t be immediately usurped.  I’m always seeing the world from a new perspective.  This might also explain why I can’t remember names to save my frickin’ life.

To help overcome this, my psychiatrist assigned some homework to me.  She wants me to create a flow chart of my decision making process.  Basically, I need to draw up how I decide what I should be doing at any given time, and where that will lead me.  The idea being that I can constantly refer back to this flowchart to go through a decision making process that doesn’t change every time I make a choice.  This should help me prioritize my work and keep my eye on the prize.  Frankly, I have no idea how the hell to do this.  I’m going to draw something up and probably share it here.  And then later I’ll revise it with her assistance.  I see the value in this, but I’ve got no idea how to do it.

So, now I know I need to improve my execution.  (Not that kind, sorry to disappoint.)  Figuring out how is the next big challenge.  Any ideas?

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

Please Support My Wife’s New Business

So, my lovely wife Liz Hughes has started selling these health shake drinks by a company called Visalus.  She would like me to say that she also sell vitamins and supplements, etc.  Visalus an MLM gig like Pampered Chef (love it) or Tupperware (I’m ambivalent).

She’s actually gotten me drinking the shakes and, against all odds, I like them. I make them with two scoops of the shake mix, some unsweetened almond milk and Starbucks Via coffee.  Blamo, instant treat.  I am not exaggerating when I say I crave them throughout the day.  Trust me, this is a small miracle since I view most weight loss and health gimmicks as snake oil.  And, to my chagrin, I’ve been loosing weight again since I started drinking them.  I hit a new low today: 204.4, down from 232, though I’ve been exercising daily on the treadmill as well.

However, she has had some challenges getting started.  Her friends have not really stepped up to the plate to offer to have parties and support her.  So, I am here now to ask from my pool of friends and followers – especially those in the RTP area in North Carolina, even those we don’t actually know – would you please go to her website and read a little about this stuff?  If you are even marginally interested, please reach out to her.  Maybe you could have a party and invite some of your friends (or people you don’t like!)  Failing that, come to our place.  She’ll give you some of the shakes and talk about it with you.  Our kids will hang out with your kids and play with our chickens.  Who cares if anyone actually buys anything at this point? Just a little interaction can go a long way towards giving her some momentum.

The thing is, she’s really into this. For the last several years (4+) she’s had terrible pain in her legs and feet.  She’s gone to countless doctors, specialists, chiropractors, and perhaps some kooks too.  She’s cut out gluton, dairy, and other things from her diet in an attempt to resolve this.  We thought maybe it was Fibromyalgia or, I don’t know, something worse.  Nothing she tried actually seemed to help.  Until she tried this stuff.

To be clear, she didn’t try the Visalus shakes to cure the pain, she tried them to help her loose weight.  But they also seemed to help with the pain.  The weight loss thing  is slow going, but it does for everyone.  And furthermore, it really should be slow for health reasons.

Anyhow, she’s been really fretting over ways to get this gig going.  It’s something that is very important to her.  She has her own business cards now.  She’s going to a conference for Visalus representatives next week.  And she’s doing things way outside her comfort zones.  Things like posting flyers in the local YMCA and standing up to talk to rooms full of strangers.

And since it’s important to her, it’s important to me.  Hence my plea to you: Please, give her a chance!  What do you have to loose?  A half hour watching some rather over the top videos?  A semi-cynical conversation about product health claims?  Perhaps.  But maybe, just maybe you’ll actually be interested.  If not, then you’ve still done a good deed by helping my wonderful wife get her start doing this and we will be greatly indebted to you.

Please, get in touch with her by email at hugliz@myvi.net or go to her website at http://hugliz.bodybyvi.com.

Thank you so much in advance for being the totally awesome friends I know you are.

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

ProjectSpark! #1: CouponHor.se

I just announced that I’m starting what I’m calling ProjectSpark!  As a quick summary, ProjectSpark! is my attempt to publicly describe business ideas I’ve come up with that I think have merit.  My intent is to collect feedback on the idea and, if I’m lucky, to try to build a team of partners with complementary skills to work together to bring the idea to market and to share in its guidance, ownership, and profits. Without further ado, here is my first ProjectSpark! idea:

CouponHor.se

What the heck is CouponHor.se, you may ask? And why the heck is there a period in the middle of the word horse?  Well, the answers are forthcoming, I promise.  But first, some backstory…

I am pretty much addicted to NPR’s Planet Money podcast.  I discovered it recently and have been working my way through last year’s shows. Today I listened to episode #265: Groupon! Monty Python! Price Discrimination! which “aired” Apr 09, 2011.  In this podcast the Planet Money team explains how Groupon is just a recent way that people apply the economic principal of price discrimination.

What is price discrimination? This is essentially what happens when a seller sells the same thing for different prices to different people.  Historically, people have price discriminated through haggling.  Perhaps you are selling a trinket on the street that I think is attractive.  I might make you an offer, you counter offer, and I counter-counter offer.  This goes on for a while until we find a price that I’m willing to pay that you are willing to sell for.  The final price may be higher or lower than what any other customer may pay.

However, in today’s fast paced mass consumption society, this just isn’t practical any more.  Harris Teeter can’t bargain with every customer over the price of every product in their shopping cart.  However, this price inflexibility naturally causes some people who might otherwise buy something to not buy it.  For example, if Harris Teeter makes $1.00 profit from every box of frozen pizzas it sells, it might be able to afford to knock $0.50 off the price via a coupon.  This may encourage someone who otherwise would not pay full price to buy the product.  IE: The price is different for different people.

Groupon was 2011’s darling of price differentiation.  Or at least it was for a while.  It certainly took it’s lumps last year too.  The concept behind Groupon is essentially the same as any other coupon or discount offer.  Namely, consumers hope to get a discounted price and sellers hope to get increased awareness, increased traffic, increased sales, and, if they’re lucky, sell some add-ons to go with the deal.  For example, a glass of beer to go with a discounted meal sold to someone who hadn’t heard of the establishment before a Groupon email.

Groupon is only one of several hundred companies offering similar deal-a-day offers. LivingSocial is another well known example.  In fact, there are so many of these companies that they’ve been dubbed the Daily Deal industry and there are even conferences tending to this industry’s every need.

Now, at last, to explain what CouponHor.se is!  CouponHor.se is a Daily Deal website turned on its head.  Rather than a seller offering a given product at some discount to a certain number of people, a group of people offer to buy a product from any seller for a specified price.

To elaborate, what if I wanted to buy, say, a Nikon D3100 14.2MP Digital SLR Camera with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR & 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED AF-S DX VR Nikkor Zoom Lenses.  Let’s also assume that the market price of approximately $700 was too rich for me.  What if I wanted to pay, say, $600 max for it?  Maybe there is a retailer out there who would entertain that offer, especially if enough people bought into it?  That’s where CouponHor.se comes in!

As a buyer, I would be able to go to CouponHor.se and find this product (or list it if it’s not already there).  I can then set a price I will pay for this product along with a date that my offer is good through.  For example, I could say that I’m willing to pay $600 for a Nikon D3100 and that my offer is good for, say, two weeks.  I then put a certain amount of money down on this offer as a potentially refundable deposit.  I’m thinking 10% of the offer.  The buyer has now backed up their word with cold hard cash.

Now, this buyer goes off and promotes the heck out of their offer via Facebook, Twitter, and any other way they want. The goal is to get as many potential buyers to make their own offer.  So, let’s say I post to Facebook that I’m making this offer and a few other people see this, they can join in on the offer.  These people can make their own variations on the offer as well.  For example, maybe one of my friends is only willing to pay $550, but is willing to wait a month instead of two weeks.  Perhaps another friend is willing to pay $650.  The point being that for any given product any potential buyer can set their own offer price and how long they are willing to wait to make a deal.

The other side of CouponHor.se is for sellers.  Sellers can watch CouponHor.se for offers on products which they sell.  For example, a camera dealer may see that 1000 people have made offers for the Nikon D310.  500 of those are offering $600 or more.  They may then decide to accept all offers over $600.

To be clear, sellers would be able to choose a minimum price on offers that they’ll accept.  So those buyers who offered too low of a price would miss out on the opportunity and those who offered too high wouldn’t necessarily get as good of a deal as they could have.  However, the seller makes a large number of sales for the optimal price for each individual customer.  Furthermore, they can avoid making sales where they would otherwise loose money.  They can also wait for a certain number of offers above their cutoff threshold before they close the deal, assuming no other sellers close the deal first.

CouponHor.se would, of course, take a percentage of these sales for this service. I’m thinking that CouponHor.se would simply keep the 10% deposit that the buyer made and that the buyers would pay the seller directly.  This avoids potential Third Party Payment Processing problems that have plagued other businesses I’ve tried to start.

Those people whose offers were not accepted could elect to raise their offer and/or hold out for a future seller who will meet their price.  If a buyer’s offer is not accepted within the time frame they specified they would get a refund of all of their money, less a small fee.  I’m thinking 10% of the deposit.  So, if I offer $600 for the Nikon D3100, I have to pony 10%, $60, up front.  Now say my specified time period passes without my offer being accepted, I would get back $54 and CouponHor.se would keep $6 (10% of the deposit).  Ideally CouponHor.se would also have been collecting interest on the $60 while we held onto it for the buyer.  This provides an incentive for the buyer to make the best offer they’re willing to accept.  If they make a ridiculous offer they won’t get what they want and they’ll loose a small amount of money off of it.  Again, they’ve got skin in the game.

So, what happens if the buyer doesn’t follow through on their commitment to buy at the price they offered when a seller agrees?  This is entirely possible and may actually the best possible outcome for the seller.  Why?  Because the seller get the buyers deposit and don’t have to deliver any product!

And now to explain where the name CouponHor.se comes from.  Firstly, to me at least, the name invokes a mental image of a noble steed working for his master.  This horse could conceivably be the mascot and animated spokesperson of this business.

Secondly, the industry’s somewhat derogatory term for people who clip coupons and make use of daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial is “Coupon Whore”.  IE: Someone who will do anything for a coupon.  My thinking is, why is this a bad thing?  Consumers should wear this title with pride!  And, as luck would have it, Sweden’s top level domain name is “.se”.  I’ve recently been enamored with domain names that make use of the TLD as part of the name.  I submit to you some of my recent domain purchases: uAnswer.us, inItToWin.it, Supporting.us, and now CouponHor.se.

I think CouponHor.se is a unique name that stands out, clearly says what it is and what it’s for, and it is memorable.

And so now, dear reader, I turn this idea over to you. Please comment below and tell me what you think of this idea.  Is it a good idea or a crappy one?  What would make it better?  Also, do you want to be a part of the team that builds and owns this idea?  Do you want to invest in this idea to get it going?  Do you know someone who might be interested that I (or any other hypothetical team members) should talk to?  Basically, I request humbly that you brain dump in the comment area below.

Thanks for reading and look forward to your feedback!

Category:

ProjectSpark!

Tagged with:

Introducing: ProjectSpark!

My major goal in life is to get rich – or at least make a comfortable living – by starting up new businesses.  I’ve talked about this a bit in the past.  In fact, I famously (to me) blogged about how I was looking for someone to invest in me on the Alagad blog.  For a while, I was tweeting a new business idea every day via @dougsIdeas.

I really enjoy taking an idea from concept to reality.  However, the problem is that I’m just one person.  There’s only so much I can do in a day.  Furthermore, I’m not skilled at every little thing that any project may require. I’m not a designer (I submit http://supporting.us as evidence).  I’m not a copy writer (but I play one on TV).  I’m not a user experience guru.  I’m not an information architect.  I’m not a mechanical or electrical engineer.  My ideas cross a many boundaries and there’s only so much I can personally do.

My other problem is that I lack contacts, or at least the knowledge of how to leverage the contacts I do have in my network.  I don’t have a rich uncle who will be an angel for every little idea I have.  I don’t have money to pay people to do things that I may not do well.

Most successful projects and businesses don’t come about from the lone efforts of a single person.  It takes a village, so to speak.  (I volunteer to be the village idiot!)  So, I’ve decided that perhaps I can build a team of like minded people.  What if a programmer (me), an MBA, a designer, a writer, a social media expert, a sales specialist, and an angel all came to work together? Why does it have to be just one of each? Why not more? What if they all worked together really well and enjoyed the experience, while remaining focused on the ultimate goal?

So, here’s my concept:  I’ll start detailing what I think are unique and compelling business ideas here on this blog as often as I can. Maybe one a week? Maybe more or less often, time will tell.  I’m thinking I could add a poll to the post to gauge general interest in the idea.  Perhaps readers who think an idea is good, who think they can help out, and who want to own part of the business can offer to join a team to build the idea.

The idea would be to build a team to create the business.  Anyhow who participates would get a reasonably large share of the company.  Ideally, if four people work together, they’d each get 25% of the company, assuming they all put in roughly proportional effort.  The group would share in creating the company, running the company, and reaping any benefits and profits that may bring.

Obviously there are a lot of details that are completely undefined at this point.  For example, what happens if someone joins the team but doesn’t deliver or under delivers?  How are potential team members filtered for quality and fit?  How should compensation be handled? How about failure?  And what happens if no one ever wants to join any team?

For now I’m going to ignore that last question and let my optimism cary me.  I can’t be the only person who wants to work with a great team to accomplish something awesome. If I put these ideas out there, maybe these people will find me.  And, failing that, maybe this will lead to a future job as a Conceptual Idea Guy™ for some lucky company. Who knows?

I currently invision that participants would all be putting in sweat equity and paying for things we need however we can.  So, for example, I’d put in hours and throw in money as I can and I’d hope others would too.  The goal, of course, would be to generate income for either a big ultimate pay off or, at least, a steady stream of income. Once one project gets its sea legs we could put a management team in place and act as directors.  Profits could potentially be reinvested in whatever the next project would be.

In the end, I’m hoping to build a close-knit team of entrepreneurs with complementary skills and who work together well and thrive in a startup environment.  Perhaps this is a pipe dream, but it can’t hurt to try!

And so, with that, I hereby commence what I shall now call ProjectSpark! Interested? Comment below or end me an email at doug@doughughes.net.

Category:

ProjectSpark!

Tagged with:

Yes, And…

Yesterday I had my first improv class at DSI Comedy Theater in Carrboro.  I decided to enroll in an improv class to help improve some of my presentation skills.  It also might help a bit with the free association mindset used when brainstorming new ideas.  Furthermore, I figured it couldn’t hurt to push myself outside of my comfort zone a bit.

My initial impression of the class is pretty positive.  The instructor clearly knows his stuff and is very supportive and encouraging.  Everyone in the class seems really nice too.  I think we’re all there to have some fun and learn something new, which is good.

I did find the class a bit intimidating, however. I’m really not scared of making a fool of myself in public, so getting up on a stage and trying to free associate a bit isn’t that scary to me. What is intimidating to me is being social and meeting new people.  I’m in the category of people you might call “slow to warm up”.

The class opened with a few warmups where we had to move in odd ways and make a unique sounds.  For example, we stood in a circle and, one by one, made some sort of movement and made a noise.  We all did it – and I can’t actually remember what I did – but I felt like perhaps I could have been more creative.  I think I held back a bit because I wasn’t really terribly comfortable. This was true on all of our exercises.

If I’m honest with myself, I hold back in social situations a lot. I’m pretty paranoid about saying something outlandish or acting oddly and creeping people out. So, that leads to me stuffing my hands in my pockets and keeping quiet. Once I start to feel like I know the people I’m around, I’ll relax a bit, but that can take a while.  The class is six weeks long, so I figure in about seven weeks I’ll be perfectly comfortable!

After the warmups we learned the basic tenet of improve, “Yes, and…” This is improve at its’ simplest.  You just agree with whatever the person you’re working with says, no matter how outlandish, and then try to build on it.

So, here’s an imaginary improve situation I made up on the fly:

The scene: Two people are at a park sitting on a bench.

Person 1: Man, it is a seriously beautiful day today!

Person 2: It is a beautiful day today, yes! And, I’m sure glad they’ve cleaned up the toxic sludge in that river down there.

Person 1: You are glad that the’ve cleaned up the toxic sludge, yes! And, I’m surprised you didn’t land in jail for dumping it there!

…. the scene continues like this until the it ends ….

In this example, the participants always restate what the other person said, then say “yes”, and add then build on the previous thought.  “Yes, And”.

Agreement and building onto a thought is the core essence of improv.  While I found it awkward to do this on stage, in front of people, the core principal has direct applications in business and entrepreneurship.  Rather than shooting down new ideas before they’re fully formed, we should all build on them.  You never know what you might end up with, maybe the next great idea! Or, at least, perhaps something to laugh at.

 

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

And Now for Something Completely Different

I’ve decided to enroll in an improv class at DSI Comedy Theater in nearby Carrboro.  There are a few reasons why I decided to do this, but the initial inspiration came from a video clip I watched recently about QR Codes.  I’m working with a few other people from Alagad to launch a new non-profit that will make use of QR Codes to facilitate charitable donations.  While researching the idea I came across this clip from a presentation by a guy named Scott Stratten from a company called UnMarketing about where to use QR Codes.

I give talks a couple times a year.  Mostly these are on technical topics like building mobile applications or the finner points of web development frameworks, etc.  I’ve also given the odd Pecha Kucha talk.  I’ve been known to sneak the occasional one-liner into a presentation and love getting a laugh from the audience.

But, improve is supposedly much more than that.  Here’s how DSI Comedy Theater sells the classes to business people:

You won’t survive the business world unless you are able to communicate and collaborate in the workplace. Key improvisation techniques help business people to think on their feet, creating new ideas effortlessly, actively listening to others, and working productively inside team environments. Workshops will help you learn to read any audience and will heighten your professional flexibility, making it easier for you to accomodate clients, customers and manage conflicts in the workplace. You will make more money.

And that’s… The Bottom Line!

I like to think I’m pretty good at thinking on my feet and coming up with new ideas and interesting connections between not-obviously related things.  But it can’t hurt to practice and learn more.  And, maybe this will help improve my presentations.

Beyond that, I’ve been a bit of a cynical curmudgeon lately and avoid doing anything out of my tiny little comfort zone.  I used to pride myself on doing things I wasn’t comfortable with.  So I’m hoping I can find a way to let down my (remaining) hair and relax a little bit and have some fun.

I’ll post updates here and rehashes of the classes here as I take them.

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

Transition Point

Hi, I’m Doug Hughes.  This is a reboot of my personal blog at DougHughes.net.  I used to have another blog here a few years ago where I wrote about personal and technical topics.  This was back in a time when I was still getting my company, Alagad, off the ground and a lot of business and personal content was mingled together.

A while back I moved most of the content from DougHughes.net onto the Alagad blog and simply pointed DougHughes.net to Alagad.com.  That was fine and dandy, but it is now time for me to reclaim my own personal space on the internet.

The reason I’m doing this is because I’m going through a bit of a mid-career crisis.  I haven’t really talked about this publicly before and, honestly, I’m not quite sure why I’m going to start now.  Perhaps it’s so I can talk through the challenges I’m having.  Maybe I can get useful feedback from those people who read this.  Maybe it’s a narcissistic ego thing.  I don’t really know.

The problem I’m having is this: I don’t really enjoy the work I’m doing (contract web programming) as much as I used to.  There, I’ve said it out loud!  The world knows!  That at least that’s off my back!

There was a time when Alagad and programming was all I could think of, but these days I’m really longing to do something else.  A while back I hired my father in law as a program manager for Alagad.  Over time he took over many of the tasks I didn’t want to do such as collections.  This continued until we decided he should formally be the CEO of Alagad.  So at this point my role in Alagad is as a technical leader and programmer.  This has enabled me to luxury of thinking about doing something other than just Alagad.

In fact, in late in 2011 I quietly handed my resume around to a few companies but I didn’t really find anything I liked (that also liked me).  My idea was that I would take an extended leave of absence from Alagad, get a developer-level job with a startup company that I found interesting and use that as an opportunity to meet new people and learn new things.  It didn’t really pan out.

For those who are familiar with Alagad, please know that Alagad itself isn’t going anywhere, even if I do.  It’s being operated by capable hands and works is done, as always, by Alagad’s excellent employees and contractors.  If I step away from the company nothing will change.

Also, over the last few years I’ve brainstormed business and product ideas on an almost daily basis.  For a while I was trying to tweet one new business idea a day at DougsIdeas, but that petered out after a while.  I didn’t really get much feedback or interest in what I was trying to do.  However, I think some of my ideas are actually pretty good!  I even started work on a few of them, but I haven’t yet had any success taking them to any meaningful completion.

To complicate matters, I’ve learned that I have Depression and Attention Deficit Disorder.  I’m trying to treat these, but they sure can make it harder to do what you want to.  This has been very hard to admit to myself – or to anyone else, really.  I feel like I should be able to pick myself up do something, but it’s not really that easy.

What this all boils down to is this:

There are lots of things I want to do with myself.  By this I mean there are lots of businesses I would like to start or jobs I’m interested in.  I’m a curious person.  However, I don’t have a ton of time or money to invest in these businesses.  And depression and ADD often stymie me.

So, on this new blog I’m going to start trying to think verbosely about some of these challenges, things that I want to do.  I’m going to try to strategize ways to do these things.  I’ll also talk about other more personal things as well like family, friends, etc.  I’m going try to lay it all out for the world to see.  I hope to get some good feedback and support.  We’ll see where it goes.

Category:

Uncategorized

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud