Thatch Mound

Well, it has officially been half a year of going it on my own. Let’s take a look at the usual monthly charts, then spend a little time talking about the big picture.

First up, let’s take a look at the total revenue versus goals:

Looks like we’ve hit a bit of a wall, with July revenue coming in right around June’s unfortunately low level. This calls for evasive action. More on that below.

Here’s the breakdown of where the money came from:

This is generally a good breakdown, now we just need to get the volume of every piece to be bigger. Lots bigger.

The revenue shortfall is not nearly as bad as it seems when you measure up the total six-month goal with actual revenue:

You can see that up until July, we were actually still exceeding the overall goal.

With the apparent stagnation in mind, we sat down and mapped out some (hopefully realistic) goals for the next three months, as well as specific methods for achieving those goals. I’ll be sharing those in the coming days.

What about an update on the specific goals I listed last month?

1. Quarterly Newsletter by July 15. - fail
2. Photography website by July 15. - fail
3. Three new advertisers to Seattle Bubble by July 31. - fail
4. One advertiser to The Naked Loon by July 31. - fail
5. Merchandise shop by July 31. - fail

Yup, I failed to complete even one of them. A heaping helping if failure—yum!

I made good progress on the newsletter, but found that deciding what goes into the first one is taking longer than I had hoped. Once I get it launched, future editions will take much less time, since I’ll just be filling out a template.

New advertisers were signed up, but not as many as I had hoped. I may have to invoke the dreaded “cold call” to really begin improving performance there.

I only did a minimal amount of work on the merchandise shop, but part of that work was to assess the money-making potential, which was determined to be quite low, so that’s been pushed down to a lower priority.

As far as goals for August, I’ve got more to say about that than I care to cram into this post, so come back later this week for updates on that front.

As a way of expanding our business horizons, Jeni is planning to get into real estate photography, and possibly expanding into interior design services down the road. We’re trying to come up with a good name for such a business.

We’d appreciate your opinions on these following names. Please vote for which one you like best. If you think you have a better one, we welcome your suggestions!

Here’s our criteria for a name: it needs to be creative, short & memorable; with no specific references to real estate or photography. Although, it does need to sound nice with the words photography and design (for example, having something like “Photo” “Design” or “Studios” appended to the name).

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Today’s Seattle Times, page B-1:

The Naked Loon pokes online fun at Seattle
If you’re a germophobe, a naked cyclist or a burned-out dot-commer, you’re on The Naked Loon target list.

Prepare to be mocked.

Tim Ellis, a Kenmore Internet entrepreneur, brainstormed his travesty hit list of people, places and stereotypes before launching his online satirical newspaper The Naked Loon. Think The Onion, but hyper-local and less crude.

Now if only there were a simple, reliable way to turn media attention into dollars in my pocket.

I’d like to extend special thanks to Noelene Clark for taking the initiative to contact me and for penning and excellent piece. Thanks, Noelene!

So, Google News apparently started indexing The Naked Loon today, which has led to a few hundred people landing on various stories through a host of different searches.

Here’s my favorite (available here—at the moment):

Click to Enlarge

Awesome. The Naked Loon at the top of the heap of over a thousand stories.

Update: This one is pretty sweet, too (search link). 6-year-old me on Google News = Pure Awesome.

Bleh. June was not nearly the comeback month that I was hoping for. Not at all. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Read on for all the gory details…

First up, the total revenue versus goals:

See the purple bar over June? See how it’s not only lower than May, but also lower than April? Yeah, that’s not good.

Here’s the breakdown of where the money came from:

Nothing particularly noteworthy about the mix here, other than to point out that the fundraising drive carried over into June with moderate success, but clearly still not enough to make up for my apparent total laziness on the business side of things.

July will bring some interesting changes, as my wife Jeni will be getting in on the business. With her training in visual art, photography, and interior design, and my experience and contacts in the local real estate market, we realized that real estate photography would be a perfect fit. I’ll be assisting her with my real estate knowledge and also by setting up a website to sell her services.

In order to help me get things moving, allow me to lay out some very specific goals for the month of July.

1. Launch the Seattle Bubble Quarterly Newsletter by July 15.
2. Set up a basic website for Jeni’s photography by July 15.
3. Sign up at least three new advertisers to Seattle Bubble by July 31.
4. Sign up at least one advertiser to The Naked Loon by July 31.
5. Open merchandise shop for Seattle Bubble & The Naked Loon by July 31.

I’ve also got some major improvements in the works for Seattle Bubble, as well as a couple of entirely new ideas that I think have great potential, so I’ll be sure to post updates here as things progress. Hopefully I’ll get back on track in July.