Rollinglobe No Sleep ‘Til Switzerland 2010 Promo Tour!!!

At Rollinglobe we’re running a Promo Tour through Barcelona, Florence, and Interlaken, Switzerland to launch our Rollinglobe Store and giving away trips to Oktoberfest, skydiving in the Alps, and surfing in Morocco. Check it out!!!

Quora… what AskJeeves always wanted to be

Quora is what Ask.com (AskJeeves) always wanted to be… but it’s not really anyone’s fault. If anything you could argue that AskJeeves was about 10 years too early for the perfect conditions to truly flourish. Disclaimer: I am jumping the shark. Who’s to say Quora is anything but a flash in the pan with a great team tackling a big problem in a legit bubble of hype. But then again, that’s why blogs are here… for a seemingly unqualified observer to prognosticate their opinion to an open mind.

This phenomenon of curiosity is prevalent everywhere we look, from a think tank in DC to a church congregation on Sunday to a dog sniffing new territory. At its most basic level, it’s curiosity of a subject that evokes action. A dog sniffs around the park because there is an element of unknown and the desire to discover the unknown is innate. In the simple mind of a dog, I would imagine the process goes somewhat like this:

Peanut breath > Squirrel stench > Jackpot… a furry light appetizer

This process isn’t too far from our standard method for search online… shit, Google makes billions catering to this natural tendency. Type in a single point of curiosity and bam! Sniff around all you want until you can find exactly what you’re looking for…

Now, being the intellectually superior beings that we are, humans have created a more sophisticated method of interaction… language. Instead of acting on an unknown, we question it. But it’s naïve to think that this complex system of interaction happened over night. Millions of years were needed to set the foundation for communication let alone, reason, rationality, and most importantly qualification.

And that’s the argument here. In order facilitate a legitimate interaction online in the form of Q&A, you needed a foundation. You needed to communicate and argue with reason and rationality, borne from an actual identity with some level of qualification. Applying this methodology of questioning to a world with out these structures left you with at best, an unreliable set of answer… and that’s what AskJeeves was.

Today, Quora has the foundation of communication and qualification (namely through their old employers, Facebook) to facilitate a higher level of interaction.

What’s your favorite startup?

I was in a meeting recently where the question, ‘what are your other favorite startups?’, popped up. What a great question. In the imperfect science of entrepreneurialism, our hypotheses are based on the laws of comparison. A recognized theme, trend or belief applied to a new market, group, or subject.

Now the key word in this conversation was ‘other’… being any company besides my own, Rollinglobe, which was the main topic of the meeting. My natural answer was Etsy. Etsy in the lateral comparison I use when describing Rollinglobe. Rollinglobe is the Etsy for tour operators and travel vendors (see how I just did that?). The model is solid. Use technology to enable, in our case, local service providers to reach larger markets.

That concept is part of a larger theme, which I fully embrace…. the use of technology to overcome, breakdown, or diminish barriers. While, there are plenty of examples of truly innovative ideas that create a new need or world, I’m admittedly too much of a realistic, pessimist, or idiot to identity those ground breaking concepts.

For me, I like looking at tried and true businesses, interactions that happened yesterday and will happen tomorrow, and going from there. These businesses have natural barriers and they have adapted to function within or around these walls… and the challenge is to hurdle.

I love making a standard practice easier. That’s why my second answer to the question was Venmo, and my third answer was 20×200. I threw in Flavors.me because I just think it’s cool as shit.

But which came first? There’s definitely a chicken and egg thing going on here. Did I start Rollinglobe because it emulates the theme I embrace? Or did I weave a decent sounding concept into the rationale for why my company will be successful?

I like to think the idea was always there and it’s getting nicely polished along the way.

Convincing Your Market

Last post I talked about contextual and societal qualifiers that prove the value of a product… in a less than demure fashion I might add (Sorry about that, but you perked right up when I started talking about shit, didn’t you?).

The point is, that to truly replicate a market online, you can not forget about the challenge of proving a need. Just throwing a product out there, available to the market, will only get you so far. And it is here that innovation is needed to bring e-commerce to the next level of the game.

We as sellers we have to create a world of need (or desire) through the use of context. And how do you create that seemingly easy to comprehend world of context? Content. Explain your product, its advantages and disadvantages. Tell a story. Paint a picture. Sing a song. Anything to put your customer in a mindset where the world isn’t right without your product.

But let’s be serious. A good thing is only good when you can share it with others. The others don’t necessarily have to have the same product but they need to understand that there is value in owning it… maybe even coveting it. Often times the value of a product is only as high as what others will pay for it. This is a KEY element of any market that we must acknowledge. Social validation drives consumer goods.

As the organizer of a market you must embrace and endorse the often intangible contextual and societal elements that drive the value of good.

I said earlier how certain elements were in place to help create e-commerce 1.0, namely the developments of transportation and shipping, currency markets, identity security, etc. Today there are several elements in place to help create e-commerce 2.0. Content creation couldn’t be easier with Flickr, Youtube, WordPress… I could go on and on but the point is create that world of need. If you’re looking for product validation all you have to do is bringing in the social worlds of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The elements are there, now go out and start convincing your market.

Convincing Markets

Last post I talked about creating a market and ended on the note that qualification is key to truly bringing a market online. In order to sell something, you MUST convince the buyer.

So how do we, as sellers, convince someone to buy our product? We simply have to prove its value. If you’re lucky, the value of your product is innately understood in the marketplace. Even when you’re not qualifying the need for A product you are qualifying the need for YOUR product, right here right now. To do that, you need a value proposition.

Without getting to in depth, you need to create an environment where the need for your product is realized. There are many ways to do this but the most natural is context. Let’s take an example.

Toilet Paper

You are going to eat. Your body will extract all the nutrients of that food and dismiss the rest. At which point it will expel any unneeded or unwanted byproducts. Now the body is a beautiful thing but sometimes it just doesn’t get the job done and you’re there left to clean up the mess. Low and behold, I’ve got just the thing to help you out… toilet paper.

There you go, you’ve described a situation, highlighted the problem, and supplied a solution, your product. All in a context that anyone can understand.

But why?

Well besides the hygienic reasons, and I’m no doctor, I can definitively say that you don’t want to smell. Why? Because the people you interact with on a daily basis expect you not to smell like shit. It is the law of the land by which we live.

And there’s your social validation. If you want to be part of a normal, functioning society, you’ve got to keep yourself clean. And the best way to do that is by using my product, toilet paper.

Seeing a digitized image of a white, fluffy roll of paper on Ebay does little to convey the need for such a product. But the context by which we live and the societal rules that we abide by clearly prove the need for Charmin Extra Soft.

Ding Ding…. Round 2

I started this blog a few months ago sparked by the motivation to get involved in the start up community but more importantly to reflect and categorize my thoughts as I enrolled in the greatest crash course ever created… starting a business (or at least attempting to).

I’ve been selfish… and I’m not surprised, it’s pretty typical behavior for me. In school I could sit there, listen, read a little, and understand a topic. Homework was never a strong point of my academic career. It was for those who didn’t get it, who needed the practice. Why waste my time going over stuff I already knew when there was so much out there I didn’t know. I probably spent more time trying to figure out how to get out of homework, a TA session, or going to class, than if I just followed the syllabus. But it didn’t matter… the only thing that mattered was the test and grade that followed. All those hours boiled down to 2 tests>1 grade>1 semester>1 degree. Nowadays it seems like the values of that test, grade, and even degree are diminishing with every year I get older.

No one cares where you went to school (or shouldn’t at least) and your GPA is a meaningless number to anyone worth an opinion. I shouldn’t say that, academic pedigree and performance are decent filters and indicators of general intelligence and competence. If you are in school, then test scores, clubs, and accomplishments are extremely important because it shows how you interact in your natural environment. Just like standardized tests, these aspects serve as a great basis for comparison. But it’s as much about ‘what you HAVE done’ as it is about ‘what you WILL do for me’.

So what’s the whole point of this tangent? There are no tests in the real world – save me the alpha dog, everything is a test bullshit. You’re barking up the wrong tree.

Now I like tests. It’s a method of intellectual validation that I’m generally pretty decent at. So you can imagine that in the class of entrepreneurism, without those structures of validation, I’m feeling a little at a loss in the ego department. So in the short term, I’m tending to this need with a blog. Hopefully it will serve its purpose in Round 2.

Is the Content Model still kicking?

Two words to kill any interest in a consumer web business these days are “niche market” and “advertising revenue model”. I can not tell you how many times I’ve heard the words large, scalable market, hard revenue model, and 10x returns. I’ve always been more open minded when viewing opportunity but it seems like the investor community sticks to these rules like their own version of the 4 noble truths.

So you can imagine my intrigue when seeing the piece last Wednesday from peHub on the early success of StockTwits, a microblogging service originally based off of twitter with a focus on stock trading. The story applauds their early success, and rightfully so, based on a service that caters to a very niche market of day traders and other finance professionals, or at least semi pros. While they state advertising won’t be the only revenue source, citing a premium subscription version, I can’t really view the site as much more than a certain type of content-advertising site…. and I don’t say that in a bad way whatsoever. Stocktwits keeps a super attractive demographic engaged for hours creating what I like to call “fast twitch user generated content”. I couldn’t imagine a better group of consumers to address if I were a marketer.

The value of Stocktwits is obvious to me… and that is outside of any knowledge of their plans for the future. I also understand the attraction as a disruptive technology for the financial industry, definitely high on the wish list of many. And the kicker is the guy behind it all, Howard Lindzon. He’s the type of successful, repeat entrepeneur in the financial content space, Wallstrip, that investors say they love to back. I followed him Twitter for a while but there was too much clutter and I didn’t really like his tone. Anyway, a repeat entrepeneur doing what he does best, engaging a great, ableit niche market with a technology that affects their bottom line is a recipe for success… and some VC big boys, Foundry and True, have put their money where my mouth is, Stocktwits has raised 4.6 million to date. There is definitely a little “Entrepeneur license” going on here but I’ve got to ask the question… Is the content model really dead?