This is a Public Service Announcement… well more of a blog post that hopefully will inspire you to build something awesome than to accept a job.

First off, congrats to the new graduates of 2010. You now have degree in hand, or mail (yea, UVM couldn’t print all of them for the entire Arts and Science school so I got mine in August) and starting the job hunt. Good Luck finding a job, the economy is in the tank, you have no experience and some entry level jobs are being filled by people who are way too qualified and have another degree than you.

Before I lecture or suggest a way to go about finding a job, if that’s what you want, let me tell you a little story about my first job out of school. I accepted a position at Ziff Davis Enterprise as a Project Manager, which later became a Blog Manager with a 63% raise. Come to think of it, it wasn’t really a job, it was a client. Rather then accepting the position as an employee, I was given the chance to work as a consultant. This was one of the best moves as it had some great tax advantages and got to learn a lot about business, like net 60 pay (ouch!). The 63% raise came about because of negotiation and 3 months of JFDI in the work place, it also came with telecommuting on Mondays and Fridays another nugget to try for negotiation.

Takeaway: If you do get an offer, research how to get a better offer with Salary Tutor. This is written by a close friend of mine who I have used to easily increase my consultant rate and pay.

Now let’s take a step back, this first job offer I didn’t apply to. Yes that’s right, after I got back from traveling Europe I got a phone call about an position and that my name was given to him by a friend. I had a phone interview, which was supposed to last 5 minutes but ended up going 30 and an in-person interview which turned into an offer. How? Networking! That friend, was someone I met while attending events and ended up getting a free diner out of it.

Now, before you start writing that resume or work on interview Q and A, attend a couple of Meetups and networking events in your area. Most jobs are placed by connections and not by a perfect resume. So rather than focus on writing the best resume, order some business cards with your name, phone, email, twitter?, and 3 words describing what you are about. Hand these out and work the room.

Okay, so you want a job right? Wrong! You want money, nothing greedy but something to live off. My suggestion to the recent college graduates would be to layout the following schedule.

1. Spend 1 day (Monday?) applying to jobs via the old resume/email approach. This way you can at least tell your parents your trying.
2. Spend 2 or 3 nights attending meetup or networking events in the area you are interested in. This will allow you to speak to people coming from work who may know of openings or potential hirings.
3. Now focus the rest of the time on making money online. Think about it, why spend all that time trying to find a perfect job when all you really want is money. How? For starters, read about startups

My first suggestion would be to build a online business that can scale and pay the bills. Now starting a business is not for everyone, but is blogging or wearing a shirt really a business? It can be if you JFDI. If you are going to spend 3 or 6 months looking for a job only to accept something that pays a bit more than flipping burgers, why not accept the fact that you aren’t going to make money in a job and focus on the real problem, making money. By far the best blog post to read when you are thinking about a job.

I admit, I have been there, looking for a job, it sucks! Granted I have only really worked one official job in my life and was laid off! The rest has been as a consultant for myself, but even as a consultant if you need larger clients to grow your own businesses finding them can be tough. I know for myself I wish I did even more when I was young. There is so much opportunity in todays world, even more so now. I am trying to find this for myself by getting some irons in the fire while supporting them with my consultant work, but that’s me, what about you?

What are your passions? Do you want to build a business or just want to make money? What type of lifestyle do you want? All of these questions really hit me like a ton of bricks when I read the four hour work week. I highly suggest reading it and taking a step back now and focusing on what you want than wasting X years trying to just get by.

I may not be the perfect role model as I still don’t have millions in the bank, yet. My hope is that this post inspires you and gets you to JFDI (Just Freaking Do It) and create a happy life for yourself.

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Summer is here! The weather is hot, the sun is out, and most likely your thinking of ways to make a buck this summer.

Fear not as the guys over at Garage Sale Tracker have put together the must have iPhone app for any treasure hunter. They recently reached out to me and I am glad as it’s an idea that I have had rolling around in my head for some time. I am glad to see someone has step up to the plate and JFDI it

It is always said that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, well with the Garage Sale Tracker app, you can now find local estate sales or tag/garage/yard sales in your neighborhood as well as around the country.

Garage Sale Tracker basically put together a website and an iPhone app that will so you listings of estate sales, garage sales, yard sales, consignment shops, and even tag sales. It’s a great way to spend a morning going to various houses and seeing if there is anything cool you can pickup for cheap, especially in this recession.

Check it out this holiday weekend and be sure to post up your next yard/garage/tag sale on their site to help drive foot traffic!

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So it’s May 2010, how are those new years resolutions coming along? Most likely you have canceled your gym membership since you are still over weight and that diet is none existent, right? So with that, I propose a different strategy, a bucket list.

I am sure you have seen the movie and maybe even created a master goals list yourself, but why not JFDI and take some action with this years bucket list for 2010. My biggest goal in the past year has been launching a new company and closing another. I have learned a ton from launching SEO Drop and even more by closing it down. What it could have been, what ifs, etc. With uBlanket I am realizing that a new wave is a coming. After recently presenting to some VCs our model and financials, it is clear uBlanket is going to be big, but that’s for another post.

Bucket List 2010
Now imagine for a second that you WILL die on December 31, 2010. How would that change what you are doing now? Think about it for a bit, would you change what you are doing or what you plan to do tomorrow? Would priority change of what you REALLY want to accomplish in 2010?

It’s a big first step in JFDI and yes, you can say well I would just live on an island racking up debt and then who cares cause I am dying. True, but expand your context and open your eyes.

There is a bigger problem here. The problem is that you are afraid of success. Yes, success, not failure. I am guessing you AREN’T driving that new Ferrari, right? So that Ford is yours right? So your failing and with that not a success… yet.

So with that, let’s jump into some ideas for a 2010 bucket list and some of my own to help and myself get started.

• Start a new company
• Travel – Where? Europe, Asia, Road Trip
• Learn how to Surfing, Skiing, Hiking
• Spend 30 minutes more a day with my family

I think you get the point. Be sure to focus on actionable items with a specific time. Remember, giving up that 1 hour of LOST or American Idol gives you 1 hour to focus on this bucket list.

For my own use and to kick my own @$$ into JFDI, here is a snippet from my 2010 Bucket List.

• Spend $50,000 in paid-online marketing by end of year
• Create 10 episodes of a video podcast
• Launch another successful side profitable company
• Learn to wakeboard
• Finish my 2008 goals except not relaunching Hippy Green

If you do post a 2010 Bucket List please trackback or post a link in the comments.

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I have been a fan of Groupons for a while. I first heard about them this past summer when I was suppose to signup for a rock climbing class. Groupons was spun out of another startup and has already been ripped off by other cough, cough living social cough. Groupons has even taken their concept a step further with live off groupon, pretty interesting.

But how in the world can a business be worth over a billion dollars in under 18 months?. This just blows my mind!

This question came up recently as I was working on creating a evaluations of a profitable 6 month startup (Yes 6 month!) that I recently launched. I am always amazed at how someone can put a value on a company that is less than a year old or one that has not even produced a penny.

Then again, do evaluatins really matter though, aka Twitter? How much money have they made versus how much money they have raised?

The most interesting insight I saw with Twitter in regards to valuation was listening to Tim Ferris. He is an angel investor in twitter and recently discussed when you have a large valuation you can’t just try and produce a revenue because the moment you bring in money and establish revenue your valuation will start to reflect it. This means twitter would need to be pushing at least a hundred million a month in revenue to sustain their valuation.

This is 2010 and not 2005. In my opinion, startups need to start with real revenue models that create a profitable business in the short term or a high margin business allowing the business to raise money on PPC and make it back in volume.

Perfect examples are the the ladders and the new billion dollar valuation that we started with, Groupons. They leverage PPC since they have established a lifetime value for a customer. Once you have a basic model, it’s just a matter of spending as much as possible squeezing out that revenue/spend.

What do you think about valuation, should startups just be judge on revenue or short term profits?

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So while surfing my facebook news status last night, I saw a post via Josh Mackey who had a link to a video Chat Roulette Funny Piano Improve #1. I also noticed it was spreading on twitter this morning.

So here is the business/passive income idea. Create SEO targeted videos for high traffic search terms in various niches. Dating, Shopping, Food, Health, etc. Targeting these keywords with videos of you playing music targeting that are funny and interesting while playing music to random strangers on chat roulette. Chat Roulette is starting becoming a fad and mark my words, chat roulette is the new twitter… kinda. It’s gotten more hype then Oprah can send in a day, just watch the Daily Show video clip.

Okay, so how is playing music while chatting and creating screencast videos going to make you money? Easy, created a bunch of these funny videos that start working on get traffic on youtube and social media. Whore it out on Twitter, del.icio.us, etc. Well all that traffic will hopefully turn into a YouTube Partnership Program. Icanhaz Adsense. So granted, this may not be a ton of money to start out with, but these videos will be around for a long time to make money via SEO/Adsense and chat roulette.

It’s days like these that I wish I was a better musician or even a rapper, but since I am none of those, I figure I will pass along the idea and hopefully someone will take it and run with it.

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Food & Energy

Yes, in 2010 the world faces many problems. Problems that CAN and SHOULD be solved. I broke down what I think are the main problems that the world needs to focus on heavily. These two focus points are large markets (as in trillions of dollars) so although change is hard to do in these markets, if you CAN you will become huge. So yes your 1% models work great, but remember, how do you plan to reach 1%? Okay, let’s dive into it some ideas and possibilities.

Food

Yum! How can we improve the current situation? Food is seen as a scarce resource.

Fun fact it takes 58 to 100 days to grow corn. It’s not like a term paper where you can wait until the last few days and pull some all-nighters.

Food takes time to create. With that being said, how can you grow food faster or produce higher quality (vitamins, nutrients, etc.) foods with less space. A new concept that has been making way is Vertical farming, imagine that! Research and products/companies need to start focusing around this concept.

Just think about NYC and how many people buy groceries, fruit, vegetables, etc. Now imagine a warehouse in Broklyn that is growing fresh foods that you can deliver locally via bicycles. Now take this concept with a netflix subscription model where your focus is to get users to sign up for daily/weekly/monthly fresh food (freshdirect like, but have a custom meal plan focused around your budget). So you can kill two bird with one stone and get food delivered to your door, grown locally, and within your price range. This business could even partner with grocery stores to sell them fresh fruit rather then import them from around the world. If anything, we need to export this food to other countries. By focus on growing your food locally you cut down on the largest cost, transportation.

Side Thought: Growing food is one major concern, but another is recycling and disposing of food. For starters creating and recycling food (as in composting) should and needs to be integrated into our lives. Take a look at this “waste” station at a Starbucks in Korea.

From left to right: Cup, Lid, Liquids, Other Waste. So just think about a cup of coffee and how you can recycle each part. This might be over kill and could be accomplished by 1 container and smarter trash systems, but growing the food is half the battle packaging and shipping the food is another, it all requires energy.

Energy

This whole idea of everyone having electric cars and renewable energies is a pipe dream, at least for the next decade. The current grid can’t handle every American switching to an electric vehicle. Also keep in mind where the current power is coming from, especially for you Tesla owners. Can you say Nuclear Powered Car?

Also, where are you going to plugin and how are you going to pay for that electricity. Say you run out of battery on your drive and you have to plugin, can you at a gas station? Do you pay them or is it like an airport, if there is a plug, its finders keepers. Just some food for thought…
Now look, I am one of the biggest fans of Tesla Motors and what they have done. I have to hand it to Tesla Motors stepping up and JFDI. They actually are selling a fully electric car you can buy and even lease now! If anything, I wish I would have done it and want to help every which way I can.

Okay, back to Energy. We need to find better ways to create clean energy and leverage tax incentives to help migrate America from the 20th century to the 21st.

The next billionaires will be in the power business. Solar installations, Nuclear Plants (WTF? Yes, Obama just gave a ton of money and yet, closed a plant the same day), Wind Farms, Tide Harvesting, etc. It’s a business that everyone uses and will use for the rest of their life. Yes, you could be off the grid, but think about how many buildings & people in NYC/LA that still use power.

I know one of my lifelong goals is to build power plants (both wind and solar). Just think about it, you pay for all your costs initial (including fuel!) and just sit back selling it until you need to rebuild or upgrade. With traditional coal plants you build your plant and then deal with constantly buying coal. Can you say, How much is enough?

I was going to add transportation, but thinking about energy, if you could solve that by having renewable resources, we already have the electric cars, it would just take time convert everything over. The other interesting fact that electric transportation is important, is that you can use power from both renewable (wind, solar, hydro) and fossil fuels to power.

So rather then continue to rant and rave, I want to hear what do you think. How can you help these two problems we are facing? Do you think cutting back on wasting food at home really helps? What about food lost in transportation?

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Think about it for a second, how much is enough? 1 Million, 100 Million, 1 Trillion? Both personally and as a business or corporation how much is enough? Can you accept a specific number and focus on humanity rather then squeezing out another penny.

I don’t have a tv and watch a lot of shows/documentaries on Hulu. I was recently enjoying the film Mixtape, Inc. that discusses the undergrounds of hip-hop and remixing copyright material for a profit. The record labels and their MBA bean counters are always looking at their projections and missed sales due to mixtapes and illegal online downloads rather then accepting $XXX Millions and trying to do some research and development into how to be more profitable. Can you say, Why do the People Making the Decisions Never Understand the Problem?

You should checkout vyemusic.com it’s a “search engine” for music. Remember that thing called Google, it’s like that as it scraps the net for content and organizes it but doesn’t host anything…so you can listen, preview, and download music that vyemusic finds. Don’t worry, under the DMCA as long as vyemusic.com removes any links the RIAA asks and since it doesn’t host any music, in should be in the clear. It’s also interesting because it was created by a 16 year old who happens to have a Dad who is a lawyer.

It makes me think of the concept of change, think about a large profitable work horse of a business. You build up this mega monster that can do so much in profit, but you just feed it enough to keep it alive.

Soon find yourself losing it all at an accelerated pace due to competition. Understand that if you are making $$$ at something, someone is going to try and beat you at it because they want a cut of the action. Your work horse that was once a profitable business is now a sinking ship because you did not upgrade it for the battle that has begun. While you were racking in the money hand over fist, your competition has be focusing on your weak spots and improving and build a monster of it’s own. Your competition just bought a gun to a sword fight and is ready for battle. Understand that you need to be always moving forward, reinventing and trying new things.

People are so scared of change, but change is the only constant we have in this world. To help prove my point visually, watch a clip from Caprica. This scene shows the CEO who just announced to the world that rather then charging for thier product (ie. holoband) that they will give it away for free. This concept of change related to Caprica just made that work horse that produced 60% net profit of his company into a sinking ship. The CEO was going to be voted out of his own company at this meeting, but he has another idea and approach for this battle (ie. Research and Development of a Project…).

Okay, so how does this relate to the music business, startup, and how much is enough. Remember Napster back in the day, kids downloading all that music for free. Record labels wanting their piece of the pie. It wasn’t until Steve Jobs steps in and announces online buying of music. The demand for digital music was there, but there was no model or company that offered up a LEGAL way to do it. In todays world, bands like Girl Talk who remix music would have to pay over 12 Million an album to get access to those 10 or 30 seconds of a song. Just to give you an idea of how many songs and timeframe take a look at the wikipedia entry for one of his albums. The world needs an outlet or way to pay a fair royalty for a song that is remixed.

So what is fair, well that gets to the point, how much is enough? How much is a song really worth, is it $0.99 on iTunes? Is some music worth more today when its new and fresh then 10 years ago. Is that Ace of Base album still worth $9.99? Do record labels and artists who make it to that 1% really need millions of dollars?

What are you thoughts on the subject and how can we fix this or will this battle continue to go on and the RIAA continues to sue everyone and their mother in hopes of getting a fraction of a pie back from it’s sinking ship.

One last thought to leave you with is Bill Gates. Think about it for a second, he built and launched Microsoft which charges for licenses to it’s software. This monster of a company has made so much money, yet Bill’s day to day now is in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where he helps others. So did that profit from a copy of Windows that you bought go towards helping the poor or by pirating a copy give you cash as you are poor. (ie. pay what you think it’s worth can afford)

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When I think about my personal startup ideas and major failures, JDFI was always number 1 on my list. What is JDFI? Just Freaking Do It. I have launched and failed on numerous websites/ideas in 2009. In 2010, I do not want to have the same go around happen. This is why I focus so much on getting things out there as soon as they are ready (or even before). Rather then research and focus on marketing data where I would tweak the website until I felt that it was perfect, I say JDFI and launch it. Slap a beta sticker on that bad boy and focus on getting feedback from peers. Accept that things are not 100% right all the time and launch, iterate, launch iterate. People are accepting today more then ever. Gmail fails for an hour and people live with it, it may be tough with all those negative tweets about it, but life goes on and people will understand.

The funny thing about perfection is you can actually be better if you stop shooting for it. Last Christmas I got some golf lessons and although I lost a couple of balls in the water and on the roof of a house, the best lesson I heard was don’t try for perfection. During the putting practice lesson, the golf instructor suggested to imagine a 3 foot circle around the golf hole. Focus on getting the ball within that distance from a long putt rather then going for the hole. This way even if you miss, you 2 putt your way off the green.

By focusing on not being perfect you can actually lower your score because you are accepting the 2 putt system rather then trying to perfect your putting technique where you end up normally adding 3 or 4 stokes due to distance and direction.

Applying this system to a startups, you realize that you don’t need 100 servers or even 1, you can launch on a shared hosting account. Have you heard of digg (d i double g), Did you know that Digg was launched on a shared hosting. Yes, an almost top 100 website in the US was started on a shared hosting account. So rather then focus on perfection the first go around, shoot for something close, like a decent wage to live off of and no VC money. Once you are making say, $10k a month, then focus on building that startup into a megacorportation.

Just with this philosophy of JFDI, I have been focusing on the simple steps and getting ideas out there. Remember you can’t push a rope, you can only pull it. So focus your efforts on what you can pull and worry about the millions of things that “might” happen later because some of those things will keep you from launching your ideas today.

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I recently had an exciting time of traveling to Vermont with my Dad for a presentation he was giving. Him and I spent a lot of the drive talking about various problems America is facing and ideas on ways to improve them, but when trying to solve or give ideas on how to solve the problem it always came down to who has the power to make the decisions. What I started to realize is that in many cases (even past experiences of my own) the people who are making decisions seem to be the ones who DO NOT understand the problem at hand. Why is that?

Every time I meet a corporate CXX or dare I say (50+ year old VP) I realize that these people seem to be the ones who are making the decisions yet fail to understand today’s every changing market because they do NOT understand or even know what is out there or what the problem is. These are the same people who have FUCKED over America as a Harvard MBAs who is trying to save that extra 10 cents but doesn’t see how that 10 cents effects the entire rest of the company causing a decline in sales because that 10 cents is separating the company from the competition (like using organic eggs, they may cost more, but it’s a huge differentiator and a big reason why people buy a specific product).

Another issue that I see decision makers having is accepting change and innovation. Innovation is key and a big part for fueling companies. A lot of the companies out there (even ones that I have worked for in the past) seem to fail at accepting the changing market and fail to focus on ways to improve the future bottom line by constantly revamping the product. These companies and decision makers are just accepting a decline and maybe only focusing on slowdown the decline of a product or project and doing as little of extra work as possible.

Most business fail to realize that even if they are making money today, they may not be making the same amount of money the same way tomorrow. (ie. Google Adsense, remember those $10 clicks) Business and customers change daily, so if you are focusing on one specific niche and fail to keep up with the demand curve by innovating, then you are going to fail at some point or another. It’s the same thing when it comes to peoples expectations and future goals. Accept change and understand it’s the only constant in life. Stop settling and betting the farm that your product will sell today and tomorrow to the same person.

The key to having everyone on the same page is to set expectations and understand where everyone is coming from and what you plan to do. I see in America large business are run by people who do NOT understand this current market. People want to create a big brand awareness around their product, but do they know of the various ways to do this? The people making the decisions may say, let’s build a twitter app or an iphone app that does xyz, but these people and decision makers do not use twitter or own an iPhones. The decision makers may have read a review about an iPhone app making $1 Million dollars so they obviously think it’s the best idea since slice bread. Since they are the decision makers, and the boss in most cases, people won’t step up to the plate and say it’s a bad idea.

So maybe the next time your boss or the head of whatever who you work for says let’s do this… ask yourself, are they in the know or just staying the course.

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If you have a passion, you really shouldn’t be working for the man. Seriously! It’s 2009 almost 2010 and times have changed. People are making money wearing tshirts for a living! There is no reason you should not put yourself out there as a “expert” in a field and not make money.

Full disclosure, I was sent the book, “Celebritize Yourself” by Friedman, and asked to post a review. I have done a number of these in the past and I don’t get any compensation other then a free copy of the book. I have been putting off reviewing this book because I was pretty disappointing or maybe I have just so much knowledge in this field, that it’s old. Either way, it was not an exciting read for someone who wants to become a e-celebrity (online celebrity?) online. Similar to @garyvee, although I love him, his book, “Why now is the time to Crush it! Cash in on your passion”, which is similar in context, was also a bit of a disappointment for myself as well. Sorry Gary, I still love you man! I think it’s just that I am a huge Garyvee fan and have heard all of this over and over again and know that it IS time to cash in! So although I wasn’t to excited about the book, there are still some great takeaways. I wanted to provide and post up some of the cream of the crop content from Celebritize Yourself, let’s dive into some exercises that were covered in the book that I HIGHLY recommend.

1. 5 Reasons why I want to be a celebrity in your field. If you remember my book publishing 2.0 post you will realize that you NEED to put yourself out there. Are you ready? Can you handle it? Do you realize you are ALREADY out there? Okay, this last one hit me hard recently as no matter what you do, you are already OUT there. A simple Google search will bring up information or not, and both outcomes say something. So be true, honest, and yourself.

2. Do you want to write a book? It seems books are the new business cards of self proclaimed e-lebrities. Do you have a fan base of 100,000? Are you willing to spend time to learn technology and interact with people to build a following of 100,000 fans?

3. Outsourcing your book (at least the first draft?) – I find it amazing that most of the book discusses how you can leverage having a book and how you can write one quickly with the help of editors, ghostwriters, and co-authors. I am all for outsourcing, but if you are going to use your book as your business card, really put yourself into it.

4. Bold Aggressive Action – It didn’t say that exactly, but it did cover taking action and just waiting for it, won’t help. I have found that even a little action is more then enough, you don’t need to build a top 1000 website the first go around, just something to start with and keep going. Most people fail because they give up to early. I know for myself I have started to lose interests in a number of passions, but I think that is because I have been changing how I want to make an impact and how my current values of changed.

5. The Best way to Be is Entertaining, Informative, and Motivated. I have attended a number of motivating seminars and panels and I must say that some people (like @garyvee) are so uplifting that you can’t but help get you started on your next idea.

This book is not for everyone and I would tend to think that it’s for someone who has no understanding of the internet and looking to make a name for themselves in a small niche without technology. So if you are one of those people take a look or order a copy. I for one don’t recommend or encourage my readers to check it out. If you are serious, checkout the Problogger Book, I highly recommend it.

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