Gary Writes A Blog

This is class.
Kraft who make the world famous brand Vegemite decided that they should change the name for a new cheesy-ier version of the product. (Of course you wouldn’t want to call it Vegemite-Cheesy, why would you want to spend millions building a brand and then make good use of it?).

Instead they called it…

“iSnack2.0”

It lasted three days and brought about hundreds of complaints before the name was withdrawn. Either Kraft are super-stupid or maybe they are just super-smart as they have managed to get masses of global press about their new cheesy snack for free.

When I was studying entrepreneurship, we used to have to present possible business ideas and how the business model would work.

I lost count of the number of times people would come up with an idea for some type of free website and then just say “and we’ll make money by showing adverts”. I always think they might as well say “and we can’t think of a way to actually make money on this”. Probably 90% of people were basing their future Internet business’s on this.

I always try to avoid an advertising based business model, but last week I happened to notice a little possible niche where I thought it might be possible to drive some traffic to a website. Traffic (number of visitors) is one of the most important steps in a website as you can have the best product in the world, but if no-one sees it, no-one will ever get to use it. I’ve learned that simple statement the hard way over the last couple of years…

I spent about 3 hours doing market research on the niche, seeing what the competition was like, the number of searches for the niche’s keywords etc. and decided it was worth investing a little more time on.

I bought a domain name and on Friday I built spent about 5 hours building a website to put on it. (The whole process is a little more complicated than this as I design the site and domain name to perform well in the search engines for the particular niche based on the market research I carried out).

Instead of spending months building a new product to put on the site, I just want to see if it can get some traffic first. As such, I broke my own rule and signed up for a Google Adsense account that will show Google adverts on my site. It was pretty simple to sign up and it only took 5 mins to integrate into the site.

The site went live at midnight on Friday…

Total costs: Domain name £6.50
Time invested: 8 to 10 hours.
Total profits from Adsense after the first day: £0.17

Whooyoo!!!! already I’ve been paid about 1.7p an hour! The goal is to get the total made up to £1 by October the 1st. I’ll report back how it goes in the comments…

What happens when you have only had a few hours of sleep in the last couple of days and then you find an old synthesizer from the 1970’s that only has one sound that works and also a ukulele? Then try and record it on your mobile phone???

Here’s the answer…

Synth

Was at the Sweden – US entrepreneurship forum yesterday. Various speakers on entreneurship from both sides of the Atlantic. I think the mindset gap is about as wide as the Atlantic (positively and negatively for both countries. I guess you just have to try and see which parts are best for the way you want to live your life, and steal the best ideas!)

It was a mixed day in a hall that was half-full with civil servants from various government bodies pretending that they are actually assisting entrepreneurs instead of the reality which is a massive bureaucracy and jobs for the boys (or girls) and are mostly used as an extra funding source for Universities. I could go on a big rant here about a culture of grants versus a culture of actually getting customers, but I can’t be bothered.

The positives were the speakers from Silicon Valley (I think that’s Americas version of Silicon Glen) and the new ambassador to Sweden who was an Internet entrepreneur and helped run Obama’s widely successful Internet fund raising campaign during the election.

His main point for entrepreneurs was to be a farmer and not a hunter. Instead of the hard sell, shouting at 100 people until one of them finally gives in (example: banner-ad advertising) try to organically grow customers (example: valuable facebook application).

Easier said than done, but definitely the right path…

I haven’t been mentioning that we re-started the Predictor minileague again this year, generally because I haven’t been performing too well.

Anyway, I thought I would post the current rankings now, so that we can see how even more spectacular my final victory will be.

So far, Neil has been guessing luckily…

713. stideon 17
972. craigyule 17
5998. gudgeb 12
6354. frazman78 12
11293. GaryfraetheDale 9
11564. rubbish_runner 8

Was at the cinema last night to see the Swedish language film “Prinsessa”. Thought it would just be a chick-flick, but it was actually pretty good. It even got a round of applause from the audience at the end.

Gary’s review… 4 G’s out of 5

Great to see a Scotland victory at the weekend (at last).

Well done “Derek” Brown… (listen tot the commentary below).

I have said for years that the first name on any Scotland team sheet has to be McFadden, by far and away the player that can make things happen for Scotland . Unfortunately, we won’t have him fo Wednesday though…

Nutmeg!

The flat that we were looking at (see below) had a nice location and 2 bedrooms and although it was a bit small it matched our needs. We thought about putting a bid in, but it quickly went out of our range and ended up about 25% above the original asking price.

In Sweden they have an even worse system than in Scotland. They also have “offers over”, but instead of it being a blind and fixed auction, it is more like an eBay auction with no fixed ending time. That means that you can see others bids and bid multiple times, so it was just jumping up in 5000Euro steps every hour or so.

With the pound having lost about 15% of it’s value against the Kronor, it makes things look even more expensive. Still looking and we’ll be going to more viewings tomorrow…

I like where I live, it has lakes, forests, parks and an underground station that takes you to the city centre in 12 minutes.

Unfortunately, in the next couple of months, I have to move.

In the last 14 days we have been to see 14 flats in different bits of the city (and discounted 100’s more through online viewings). Only 6 have been suitable and nothing has really ticked all the boxes yet. Seen a great one tonight, but as we had to queue to get into the viewing, I think it will be outwith our budget by a long margin.

It’s knackering chasing around like this and I have the feeling that it’s going to be on-going for a while…

Last week it was Ice Age 3, this week it was the royal opera…

On Friday we went to see the Barber of Seville at the Stockholm Opera. 5 of us got tickets a couple of weeks ago for the special performance where every seat in the opera house was 150Kr. We (I) had to queue for about 45 mins, but we got seats in row 7 which wasn’t too shabby.

The opera was the first opera I had seen that was a comedy and it was superb.