I will start 52 businesses this year

Thank you for stopping by! As you can see, this is an exciting page. My goal is to start 52 businesses in the next year! Yes, these will be generally simplistic self-maintaining and hopefully self-evolving websites; but that's just the point! As with most businesses, some will "fail" and most will only make a bit, but some will hit; and that gamble is what wakes some of us up in the morning.

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It’s been a few weeks.  Yes, I’m working on a few things, but more than anything I’m broke.  So I’m killing the golden goose by not building my businesses.  Instead, I’ve been looking for odd jobs to pay the bills.  Yes, I have a full-time day job, but our economy has dictated that breadwinner males just shouldn’t be school teachers, since there’s no way to raise 4 people on $35K.  For the ideas I do have, I don’t have the $10 for a domain!  So my A1A lately has been getting food and making sure nothing gets shut off in any given day.  I have, however, taken the time to keep building out the first 14 sites, and some time to work on some potential future weeks.  Scriptureforum.net has hundreds of chapters now, Printshopforsale.net sold about 4 books this month, making $15.  I also put an Amazon aStore on a few more sites.  Again, $15 is nothing, until you realize I haven’t put 1 minute into it this month.  And I’ve said it before, if you want me to design a business around your business (as was the case with #2, ramprint.com, pitch me the idea and we’ll see what’s up.) Another thing I’ve got going is an RSS aggregator for UnionStatesman–so if I don’t post a news article on a given day, it does it for me!

Okay, so this week I have a business I’ve dreamed of but not had the technology to pull off in the past.  I also don’t have the domain yet.  But MormonMediaWatch.org, which now resides here.  It will suck an excerpt of every news article that uses the word “Mormon” (probably limited to 10 a day), and then I and others can comment on the appropriateness of the usage.  If you’re from a different ethnicity, you may not realize the complete and general media sensationalism that surrounds the word “Mormon.”  But most times it’s used, even by the big companies, it’s used in an inappropriate way–either in violation of AP style guide rules, or in a discriminatory or inflammatory way, or with a simple pseudo-polite but out-of-touch mistake.  I really think many of these errors also come from pointed paid political operatives for capitalistic churches.

Oh, and besides reporters, I think the real main audience will be people just looking for daily news about the church–news that’s not necessarily inspirational or sarcastic, but a neutral and mathematical survey.  As always, please volunteer or contribute if it strikes you to do so.

It’s been hard to keep it up lately.  I’m working on a few things, but none of them are launchable, and missing my deadlines is not appropriate.  I’ve just been so overwhelmed by trying to live off a teacher’s salary this year, and more than that, being in an apartment (while I own a gorgeous house).  I’m the type of guy that really would have thrived as a classical “client.”  The patron-client relationship was the medieval and renaissance lord-artist relationship you picture from the movies.  A rich “patron” (yes, same word as “padre,” but with the -on attached to mean “super-father”) would hire a “client”–basically an artist-in-residence–who would just be a sugar daddied artist.  That’s where we get a lot of great art.  And that’s what I need, because I’ve done a lot of amazing things for a lot of people, but really can’t thrive until I have some security.  So I’ve gotta’ really build an empire of bread-and-butter so I can start using my real gifts.  Maybe it’s just the beginning of mid-life-crisis #2 (or 3, depending on how you count it–but the one you get when you’re 35).  In any case, I promise to have some businesses up soon and to upgrade some of my earlier ones.  There’s demand, and I’m just not filling it, and that’s not right.  ScriptureForum.Net is on track to get 1200 uniques this month (in it’s 3rd month!), and it only has half its chapters live.

So I again need partners, investors, patrons, and an energy drink.  And I need to get to work–no, literally, it’s 7:57.

One of my friends owns a pet shop.  I offered to find a way to partner with him on a website, and this was a neat opportunity.  I created SafariPetShop.com.  At first I created safaripetSTORE.com, forgetting to check google trends, which yelled that “Pet Shop” is way more popular than “Pet Store.”  I know, if you drill it down to the US, the leap isn’t so great; but it justifies buying both domains and redirecting one.  This business really is exciting for many reasons.  First off, I have a partner.  We haven’t formalized an equation yet, but basically I pitched the following simple formula: I get 1) 100% of the profit from 2) the first visit of 3) any walk-in traffic who comes from the site; PLUS 100% of the profit directly from the site itself.  So it requires no investment on his part, it just gives me a piece of the value I create and nothing else.  So if nothing ever happens, no one is out anything, and if someone comes in to buy a dog, I get $100-ish, and John gets all the dog food and supplies revenue ad infinitum.  Yes, this measurement is both subjective and requires that I trust him to know where his foot traffic comes from and to hunt me down and pay me; which is why it may not be extensively duplicable.  But I trust him. 

Really, designing any business a website in exchange for our owning the website seems really win/win, and itself a business.  The site is another Wordpress install, this time with a plugin called GetWIKI that will scrape open-sourced articles about pets into categories, and an aStore syndicating a catalog of pet related products.  So the next exciting part of this business: it has a storefront!  I used an Amazon aStore, and you have to click onto the site to see it.  It’s not elegant and I didn’t take the time to embed it correctly–it’s just there, but I eyeball matched the colors, and it has hundreds of products.  So if someone finds my site and buys a $5 bottle of shampoo, I get $0.25.  Probably John’s wife will keep the site updated, with new articles, new products to the aStore, etc. 

So there are two forms of revenue driving this site, an auto-evolving eCommerce store, a partnership with a walk-in store, a simple and non-Colin-centric content base on the website–it should go beautifully and definitely evolves my formula–I mean, I at this point assume every website I do from now on will involve an aStore or something similar.

I also spent some time valuating RAMPrint this week for multiple buyers (not just for the website, but for the parent company), which is the real reason I put up PrintShopForSale.net.