Ted Murphy Ted Murphy’s Personal Blog

I am throwing a party at my house at the end of the month (woot woot). May is going to bring some bring news for IZEA and it is time to celebrate! I started putting together my pre-party check list and came to the topic of beer. At my last few parties the beer has gotten kind of warm, the keg lines were long and there was too much foam. I went online and did a search for “keg coolers” to keep the beer cold for my guests. I clicked on the first link and landed on a site called Keg Works.

WHAHAHAH?!?! This is an entire site dedicated to serving beer at home and parties. It’s not your ordinary e-commerce site, it is filled with tutorial videos, tips, detailed product descriptions and comparisons. These guys know how to serve beer. I spent a good 30 minutes engrossed in the site before I made the leap and bought a jockey box kit. I had no intention of making that big of a purchase when I started searching, but the content on the site compelled me to do so.

Problem : Warm beer, long lines and too much head.
Solution : Jockey Box
My guests : Happy

Own Your Niche

How did they sell me? Every product listed on the site is beer related, which is one of the reasons that they ranked #1 when I did a search. When I landed on the site they had what I thought I needed (a keg cooler), but other (more expensive) items that offered a better solution. I was able to do research, find easy instructions and feel comfortable purchasing a product that I hadn’t planned on buying.

Massive e-commerce stores like Amazon are great if you know what you want to buy, but they tend to fall short when you are looking for a more specialized product. If you are a web entrepreneur that represents a huge opportunity. Chances are you won’t be able to compete with Amazon on selection, but you can compete with them by focusing on a niche and serving that niche better than they can.

In the social media age everyone thinks what they are doing or saying is newsworthy (guilty as charged). We are shouting our news through our Twitter streams, blogging our hearts out and vying for attention from anyone that can validate the worthiness of our announcement. The problem is that 99.999% of this “news” doesn’t really matter in the long run. It isn’t going to change the world and it is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Will anyone care social media marketing 10,000 years from now? Will it change the way in which all of us live that far into the future? Maybe…. but probably not.

You want news? How about this?

• It’s estimated that by 2050, the number of centenarians worldwide will reach nearly 6 million. And some say that half of the babies born in the U.S. today will live into the 22nd century.
• Today, humans speak to each other in nearly 7,000 languages; it’s estimated that 90% of those languages will be gone by 2050, displaced by English, Spanish, or Chinese.
• In 1971, President Nixon declared “war on cancer.” In the forty years since, the U.S. has spent some $200 billion on research, but we’ve only cut the death rate by 5% (measured since 1950). Cancer still accounts for 13% of deaths worldwide.
• In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000.

The above news is from longnews.org, a site dedicated to sharing the news stories that will still matter fifty, one hundred or ten thousands years from now. In other words it is the news that REALLY matters. I discovered the site from the TED video (no relation) below:

I have been working on a new super-secret project with the IZEA team for the past couple of months. While the new service has many aspects, one of the bets we are making is huge growth in mobile photo sharing via smart phones. I love the quality of my digital SLR, but I rarely have it with me when I want to capture a special moment. When I do have my SLR it may take me a few days to download photos to my computer, then upload them back to a photo sharing service like Flickr.

Taking pictures with my iPhone is exactly the opposite. I always have it with me and it is extremely easy for me to share my photos instantly via the iPhone’s Internet connection. Sure, the quality isn’t as good but the immediacy and social aspects make up for it. I am not alone in my usage habits. The iPhone 3G is the most popular camera on all of Flickr.

In 2010 the total number of images captured on camera phones will reach 228 billion, exceeding the number of photos taken on digital still cameras and film cameras combined. Mobile photos are going to be big business. Some would say they already are. As time goes on the quality of the cameras embedded in mobile devices will only get better. Eventually people will simply ditch their stand-alone cameras in favor of their smart phone.

If you are working on the next big startup you may want to consider how you can take advantage of this tremendous area of growth. I am.

Anyone who has worked with me knows that I am not a huge fan of meetings. I like my meetings short, sweet, small and productive. I think my distaste for meetings came out of my experience running agencies. In the agency business time is literally money. Every minute you spend is either billable (costs the client) or non-billable (costs the agency) and both scenarios can be very expensive. When you have ten people in an meeting for one hour billing an average of $175 per hour your meeting just cost $1,750. You better make damn sure you all needed to be there and actually accomplished something.

Enter Bring TIM!

I stumbled on this product this weekend and immediately placed an order. Bring TIM is a meeting cost calculator. You bring it to a meeting (I am going to leave it in the conference room), dial in the average hourly rate and number of people and hit start. You can see the cost of the meeting in real time so everyone is aware of just how expensive the time is. In my opinion this is a must have for any business, especially those that bill clients based on time (I want to get my lawyer one).

I have no doubt that this will freak out some of my team members but I can’t wait to put it into action. You can order your own here for $24.99.

The other day I was sitting in a meeting with my lead developers at IZEA. I asked each of them a question I often ask, “how are you feeling?” I went around the table and most of them said “good” – with one exception. That individual responded with “I’m nervous” to which I responded, “good, you should be”. That is no doubt a strange response from the leader of a company, but it is not the first time I have given it.

The truth is I want my team members to be a little nervous. Not nervous for the sake of being nervous, but nervous because they care about what they are working on. This particular developer is leading a team that is rolling out IZEA’s next big service. We are less than a month away from the launch date and there are plenty of little issues (and some big ones) that have to be addressed. There is a ton of excitement… but there are also a lot of unknowns. All of us want this to be a huge success and we have invested time and money into making it work. Should this person be nervous? HELL YEAH! I am.

I’m nervous like a heavy weight boxer stepping in to the ring.

I look at every new initiative as a new fight for the belt. I have won some and I have lost some, but every time I step in to the ring I am full of an unexplainable energy that keeps me from being complacent or over confident in my abilities. I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking over the win/loss scenarios. I think about every detail. My legs bounce… my eyes twitch. I am consumed by the task at hand. My heart and mind are committed to success.

So…. when a fellow leader in my organization tells me they are nervous about a launch I am happy. I want them to be nervous. I want them to be attached. I want them to be thinking about where things can wrong. I want them to feel like they are in my corner of the ring. I want them to be ready to come out strong and go the distance.

You are nervous because you care. You are nervous because you want to win. I love that. Let’s kick some ass.