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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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.

There are 260 chapters in the New Testament, and I have now cut and pasted all 260 into ScriptureForum.Net.  While I haven’t had any active traffic to that site yet, I have had a few positive inquiries from businesspeople.  That’s code for people who make businesses happen with their resources.  Real traffic is starting to build, too, with 73 unique visitors in February, and 394 thusfar in March!  So once someone, anyone, gets the hint that it’s alright to reply to a post and start a discussion, it’ll ignite.  Again, it just has to–it makes too much sense.  I also, having the site built out this far, started a discussion on phpbb.com offering my database to other sites.  That will give links to my site on other sites, and will perpetuate the cause without spreading me too thin to be effective.  The ads seem to be working well–they’re a) totally muted enough to be appropriate, and b) totally addictive to the end that I can never pass one by without mousing over it…  Check them out.

One of my backgrounds is in printing.  And since my parents own a print shop (ergo ramprint.com), and are passively looking to sell it, I am spending a good amount of time advising them on their business and how to get it ready for sale.  In any case, business is business, and 32 years of being directly or indirectly connected to the copy shop industry, business school, and my resume, qualify me to consult.  Add to that my parents, with 50 and 40 successful years running a dominant print shop, or my sister, having largely taken over their business years ago, and I can assemble a one-in-a-thousand team which could provide a solid low-risk ROI to anyone interested.  So my business model this week is to put up printshopforsale.net and take incoming phone calls.  Print Shop for Sale is the name of a popular book on the topic, and obeying that book publicly should springboard me with some ancillary traffic.