A Start-up Journey (Inspiration)

Wow, has it been a while since I wrote a blog post or what? The fact is, I have had my head down working on a start-up business. I am still in the throes of it. But guilt has prodded me into writing a post, in fact, a whole series.

Although I have launched over 30 ventures in my career, I was struggling to come up with something interesting to write, because my brain kept diverting over to my newest start-up and all the issues I am working on there. So I decided to double-dip, and write a series on starting an internet business. That way I can keep thinking about it, while I write.

I must confess, that as of this writing, this start-up has only just launched, so I cannot tell you if the stuff I am going to write in this series will end up being a “How to” or a “What not to do”, but it will be one or the other.

I guess we have to start at the beginning, the inspiration. Over the years I have listened to countless people tell me about their “great idea” for a business venture. Most of them don’t do anything about it. Frankly, ideas are over-rated and a dime-a-dozen. In fact, I would say almost worthless. Especially today, and especially in the internet space. Execution is everything. If you can’t execute, you won’t realize shit. That said, you can’t execute without an idea, so I’ll give it that.

So some of you may recall that I was partnered with Phillip Black for a while in Social Media Engine, an online social media training center. Phil and I were running around doing live workshops to promote our system and I was acutely aware that this was not the most efficient way to promote it. I mean the core of our product was Facebook training. Something that anyone in the world could benefit from, and here we were talking to 40 or so local people at a time. This was going to be way to slow for me, so I set out to find a better way to promote it.

I did like the idea of explaining to people what we had going on, I just didn’t like the limited numbers we were able to explain it to at a time. I needed to be able to get our message out to a broader audience that was not geographically bounded. Since we were already comfortable in front of cameras and speaking live, I decided to look into webinars.

Webinars seemed like a very logical choice. We could give our presentation to anybody in the world, save the cost of a venue, and best of all, I did not have to wear any pants. So I started investigating. Go-to-webinar, Webex, etc, I studied all of them. In the course of my investigating I ran across this concept of “Automated Webinars”, OMG. This was perfect. I could “record” a webinar once, and play it over and over as though live? This was too good to be true.

I found several scripts out there for “Automated Webinars”, unfortunately they all seemed to be targeting “Internet Marketers”, you know those people with the “Make 7 figures in a week online with my system” guys. They are the New-Age con men. People have fallen for the Get-Rich-Quick scheme forever so it seems natural that the internet is full of that. I think they may have even supplanted porn. But I digress. The programs I looked at all suffered the same fatal flaws, mostly because of who they were targeting. Some were just written poorly, most were missing what I thought to be critical features for what I wanted to do.

You guessed it. I had an inspiration. As someone looking for just this kind of thing, I knew the features I wanted. I thought, hmm, if I’m looking, then other people like me are also looking and they had to be as disappointed as I was. If only there were a system that had the features I wanted….

There are two kinds of ideas out there, new ideas, which are rare, and old ideas that can be done better, which are everywhere. I decided I could do this better, so I let Phil know that he was on his own and started diagramming the perfect webinar solution that was in my mind’s eye.

Next post in series: Partners