PicoBusiness

Oh Glory of Glories. Oh Heavenly Testament to the Eternal Majesty of God’s Creation.

(Homer Simpson)

click through to see more

What?? How is that possible? I hear you ask.

Honestly, I struggled with this for several months now. I knew that according to Friedman, “Inflation is a monentary phenomenon” (which means it’s caused by the government’s management of the money supply). But this didn’t square with the obvious fact in front of me: Oil prices are up, which means that food prices are up, flying costs more, etc. Prices are going up, not because of the government, but because of oil.

And it is true - certain prices are going up. But lets take a trip to the gas station as an example. Last year, you went to the gas station every week with $60. It cost you $30 to fill up, and you went inside and bought a big gulp and a bag of chips, which totaled $5. So you leave the gas station with a full tank and $25 to spend on other things - say, for example, dinner out some weeks, or a new DVD on the others.

This year, you again go to the gas station with $60, but it costs you $50 to fill up because the price is higher. Now you go inside and…. maybe you buy nothing. Maybe you don’t bother with the chips, and just buy the soda, spending only $2, instead of $5. So now you leave the gas station with $8 to spend on other things.

You won’t be buying dinner out for $8 and you won’t be buying a DVD for $8 either. You’re going to have to substitute something else - something cheaper. Like a movie on On-Demand cable, or a frozen dinner at home.

…So what?
Well, last year, your decision to eat out increased the demand for restaurants. Your decision to buy a DVD increased the demand for DVDs.

But now, you aren’t eating out, and you’re not buying DVDs. The demand for those goods is falling. The poor restaurant owner is obliged to find ways to cut costs or reduce profits in order to reduce the cost of his service. At the same time, he has higher food prices to contend with, and this will be a real struggle for him. On the other hand, the movie studios pay almost nothing for each DVD they make - they can easily drop the price of their DVDs to get you to spend your money on them.

You may not have quite the same experience watching a movie on-demand at home over a frozen dinner than you would going out and having a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant.

But you are affecting prices with your decisions. Some prices will go up, others will come down. Some restaurants will go out of business, because they can’t handle the reduction in income at the same time they are experiencing an increase in costs. Others, which may have better cost management techniques or more profits, can weather the storm.

Inflation, in its truest form, is increases in prices where you have no alternative - no way to choose to spend on X instead of Y to save money. According to Friedman, that only happens because of government’s interaction with the money supply.

Dave Pollard writes a great overview of “Your Genius At Work”, with some pragmatic comments of his own. If you’re not familiar with “Your Genius At Work”, it is a book that helps you identify what you are good at, and what you love, and try to help you find a combination of the two that will work for you. I haven’t read it yet, but I will.

Anyways, take a look - he’s got a great diagram and some thoughts to help get you started. I think he also identifies the trickiest problem in all of this - how to find the job/opportunity that actually helps your passion and your skills come together.

He also asks about people who have found fulfilling work, and if so, to tell people what you discovered. I’ve been thinking about it for the last few minutes, and I think I do feel pretty fulfilled overall, even if the job can be frustrating. So here’s my experience:

• I’ve worked in startups for the last 9 years, and I find startups to be much more fulfilling than large company jobs, because the value I bring to the organization is clear, significant and generally recognized.
• Over the last 4 years, inspired by a number of sources, I’ve started writing novels in my spare time (I’m putting my first online here, I just finished my second on May 14th). The discipline and excitement involved in creating something that large has been wonderfully fulfilling, as well as the ongoing sense of improvement in my writing skills.
• I have an experimental side business - Bellygraph, which is a great learning experience for me, as well as fodder for a number of posts here on PicoBusiness
• I have another experimental side business with some friends, which is also a great learning experience, and even more fulfilling than Bellygraph, since it is a shared excitement.
• I believe that I am setting a great example for my kids, that they do not have to live as cogs in a big machine - that they can strike out and find their own way. What could be more fulfilling than that?

In short, I have found fulfillment by taking a meaningful job, and spicing it up with a bunch of personal initiatives that give me paths to self improvement, and potential opportunities for new forms of income, all the while giving me the sense that I am doing right by my children by taking this path.

• Ten ways to improve your (small) business - This is a decent list, with some solid suggestions. It is well-targeted towards PicoBusinesses. I liked the “Write with a twist” especially.
• Successful sales tips for the technically gifted. C’est Moi. I am definitely going to have to memorize this list.
• 5 ways to start a company without quitting your day job. Also very useful, especially when you want to keep that income stream going.

Paul Graham writes another great article - The hardest lessons for startups to learn.

• Release Early

Honestly, this is the ongoing mantra of everyone in the startup community. The entire Agile Development community is built around releasing early, instead of waiting until everything’s perfect. Guy Kawasaki tells us to release early. Everyone in startupdom says Release Early. If you haven’t gotten the message by now, you’re not paying attention.

This is harder than Releasing Early - because you have to keep coming up with new ideas. Fortunately, your users will be the ones coming up with a lot of the new ideas for you. You just have to pick the good ones. I get this all the time with Bellygraph.

Like it or not, they’re your customers. But if you use their ideas to fulfill #2 above, you should be ok.

I’m troubled by this one, primarily because unprofitable startups and profitable startups should fear different things. As I work with unprofitable startups, I generally fear only one thing - that we will not have enough money to make payroll. Everything else is details.

This reminds me of my own essay: So you want to join a startup. But the trick is all in the wording. “Commitment” is hard. Doing something that you love and working to make it better every day is not nearly as hard.

There’s always room for more ideas and more businesses. In Atlanta, there are all sorts of streets named ‘Ferry’ - Johnson Ferry, Nesbit Ferry, etc. These were all businesses at one time. Read up on the Kraft website about how Kraft was built from startup companies created over the course of 200 years. If that doesn’t give you a sense of perspective about the permanence of startups, I don’t know what will.

Again, comparable to my own comments on the Joy/Gloom Curve.

In Paul’s world, if you work really, really hard at a startup (cram 40 years of work into 4 years), you’ll be able to retire after the 4 years. IMO, it just doesn’t work that way for most people, even in startupdom. But it is certainly more challenging and interesting work. It is certainly easier to feel like you’re making a difference, and it is certainly easier to feel that you are not just a ’sheep standing in a meadow with the other sheep waiting for the shepherd to tell you where to go.’

Stromcode, the guys behind free image hosting site glowfoto, wrote a well-written article on how he makes money. It’s a very interesting read, and has given me a bunch of interesting ideas for Bellygraph.

I received an unsolicted invitation to do some contract development work because of my work on Bellygraph. I had to decline, though, because I’ve got so many other projects. And I am happy with that choice - I doubt that the money would be worth giving up on the other commitments, which I derive significant enjoyment from.

Compare this time-lapse animated gif of Google’s evolution with the equivalent for Yahoo

Google’s strategy has consistently been about keeping it clean - adding a few announcements here and there, but all in all, focusing on one major thing - the search bar. Yahoo’s approach is interesting to watch - it starts out with a simple search directory (and my “canonical” concept of the Yahoo page is from that time) and quickly morphs into a more and more cluttered system with an overwhelming array of choices, of which searching and information directories becomes far less important than advertising and revenue generation.

And yet Google seems to be far more financially successful.

In a further demonstration that people can use the Internet for just about anything, One Red Paperclip is a blog about a guy who offered someone a red paperclip in exchange for something else, with the eventual goal of acquiring a house.

He started out with a paperclip, and traded that for a fish pen. Then, he traded the fish pen for a doorknob, the doorknob for a stove, and so on.

Now he’s up to a year’s rent in Phoenix, and the offers for that include a 1991 chevy blazer, a 24 hour topless lap dance and a 30 second TV commercial.

It hurts my chances to win, so by definition it is a selfless act for me to remind you about inBubbleWrap, a website associated with 800 CEO Read, that gives away copies of business books every day. No spam, no questionaires, just free books (and, if you don’t win, the opportunity to buy a previous offering at a discount).

What are you waiting for, sign up now!

Hugh is going to start producing new Gaping Void shirts on a more regular basis. I was waiting patiently for the existing shirt designs to sell out, because none of them appealed to me.

Happy day.

Now, I bet he could probably up his sales by a fair amount by promising to link to every customer’s blog URL, or add them to his favorites, etc. Just another way to seperate his product from the masses.

• Bad things usually happen right after you give up trying to prevent them because they haven’t happened yet.
• People will do just about anything in order to make sure their children are fed..
• People will claim that they were ‘trying to feed their children’ in order to justify just about anything they do.
• People will lie to you about just about anything, mostly to make themselves seem more important.
• Husbands without a timeconsuming hobby will cheat on their wives.
• When someone is mean to you, it is almost always because they are jealous.
• Most people trust anecdotes more than they trust statistics.
• Consultants and Evangelists shade the truth or leave out contradictory facts in order to keep their message clean.
• In any list of ten or more things, one of them is not true
• While it is true that even-tempered, easygoing people rarely make history. most angry, unreasonable people don’t make history either, and they end up bitter, depressed and alone.

A gentle introduction to RSS.

The only comment I would make is to use Bloglines instead of a local client feed reader. That way, you can use it even when you’re away from your favorite computer.