Thatch Mound

Okay, I’ve definitely neglected this blog for far too long.  Time to get into the swing of more regular updates.  I’ll be getting to the financial updates of the last couple months later this week, but for now I’d like to post an article I read recently that is rather directly applicable to my current situation: Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.

When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I’m not claiming it’s a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn’t matter much either way.

If we’ve learned one thing from funding so many startups, it’s that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it’s rounding error compared to the founders.
…
Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible.

Obviously I found this article to be pretty encouraging, since a lot of what the author is saying is similar to my own thoughts on the matter that I shared back in February.

Speaking of February’s post, now seems like a good time for an update on my former employer, about which I said the following:

First off, sure, self-employment is risky in a recession, but so is a “normal” job. During the last downturn, my previous employer laid off hundreds of people, and things were going so poorly that many of those who kept their jobs were concerned about the company going bankrupt. Although my job function was electrical engineering, my employer was a manufacturer, and historically manufacturers are some of the hardest-hit businesses in a downturn. Granted, one would hope that they learned their lesson in 2001, but there’s no guarantee.

Well, Genie has now been through two rounds of layoffs this year, and last week’s cuts included a number of engineers among the 500 who lost their jobs—even some in my former group.  Meanwhile, the parent company’s stock has fallen over 80% in the past year, compared to a 45% decline in the S&P 500 (which they are a part of).

So what’s the point of all this?  I guess I’m just saying that when times get tough like they are now, I feel that being “in control” of my own employment actually puts me in a better position than working for “the man” would.  When I’m working for myself my efforts have a direct affect on the success of the business, and that’s the best motivation I can think of to work all the harder to grow the company through a tough economy.

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).

 Loading ...

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.