Flavorless: My Month of Food Boringness

For the month of May, I’ve decided to take my Year of Living Without challenge to a new level: I’m going to go without food reward.

Basically, I’ll be eating the same very bland foods over and over again, with no variety.

That means I’ll eat the same three unseasoned foods every day, and it will be exceptionally flavorless and unvaried. No salt, added fats, frying or stir-frying, spices, mixing foods together.

No fun with food this month. I know, most people will think I’m crazy after reading this.

The rules:

I can pretty much only eat three things: boiled seitan without spices (think of chicken or beef cooked in water, no oil or salt or spices), various boiled potatoes (no salt or fat), and steamed or raw veggies. I’m going to eat each one of these separately, not together (so one meal of just the potatoes, then later just the broccoli in another meal, then finally just the seitan). Every day, all day.I’ll also drink olive oil separately (straight up, by itself) to get fat in the diet.I’m going to have black coffee and unsweetened tea. My only exception will be red wine at night.I’m going to have unflavored plant protein powder. This isn’t necessary for the challenge or for life, but I’ve been trying to hit certain macro targets (protein, carbs, fat) as part of a plan I’ve been doing and I need to protein for the plan.I am going to allow myself one exception per week, so that I can socialize with my family (we have some birthday plans), but I have to designate that exception at least 2 days in advance. No spur-of-the-moment cheats.

If you remember, the Year of Living Without isn’t about sacrifice or seeing how dedicated I can be … it’s to explore letting go, and the resistance I feel when I let go.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been reading and thinking about food reward — if you’re interested start with this great series on food reward by Stephan Guyenet (part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI, part VII).

In case you don’t want to read that entire series (it’s very long), the basic gist is that a system in our brain/body that responds to high-reward foods overrides our natural inclinations to stop eating when we’re full or when we’ve had enough calories to maintain the right bodyfat level.

What’s food reward? Things that make the food more palatable (or tasty), like sweetness, saltiness, being fried, good smell, nice presentation or colors, pleasing textures, variety, etc. Basically anything that makes you like food.

The amazing thing is that when you start examining your diet, you’ll find that it’s full of food reward. Which isn’t a bad thing, but if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s good to be aware of how this food reward system will make it harder for you to lose weight.

Wanting to eat high-reward foods is something that’s so ingrained in our culture that removing it seems insane. Imagine eating nothing but boiled potatoes, unsalted, unseasoned, no fat … for a whole month. Or a year. That would sound insane to most people I know. And yet, people have done it and lost weight (not recommended long term).

Anyway, I’m not doing this to lose weight. I’m not doing it because I think it’s incredibly healthy (long-term, variety is a good thing). I’m not doing it because I’m crazy. I’m doing the no-food-reward challenge to see what it’s like to let go of something so important to us. To experiment with my resistance to letting go of it.

I’ve just started, but already I can tell that this is something that’s so strongly embedded in my mind that letting go will be very challenging.

I love challenges.

If you’d like to follow along, I’m going to try to keep a daily journal. It won’t be exciting.

In March, I went without alcohol, which I thought would be very easy as I did it for more than a month last fall. But it was a lot harder than I’d expected, for the first week. I constantly craved red wine at night, when Eva and I usually have a glass or two. It didn’t help that Eva was drinking a glass of wine and my mouth salivated.

But after a week, the cravings went down. I went to a family party where everyone was drinking, and I just had water. And fruits. It wasn’t a problem.

The hardest time, other than the first week, was when I was alone for a week, and Eva and the kids were at her parents. Every single evening, I craved wine. I broke down one evening and had it, but it didn’t taste as good as I’d imagined.

In early April, I went back to wine, but it didn’t taste as good anymore. I was doing it more for the evening ritual with Eva than wanting the taste. I’m still drinking it now and have developed the taste for it again.

In April, I gave up buying new things (other than groceries). This was very easy, as I don’t really care about buying things most of the time … however, there were a few times when I almost slipped up:

I wanted a pocketknife, and went online to buy it. I almost ordered it before I realized I wasn’t buying things for the month.A couple other times I went to Amazon’s website to get something small, and again almost ordered without thinking.I really wanted to buy gifts for friends and family for my birthday, to continue the tradition I’d started last year of getting gifts for people on my birthday. I couldn’t though. I thought of making them presents but I got so caught up in writing my ebook on letting go that I didn’t have the time or energy to make anything.

Looking back on April, I thought the no-buying challenge was good for me. Even though I don’t buy a lot of things, it highlighted my habit of just ordering small things without thinking. It’s good to become aware of these urges, and perhaps put a check on them so buying becomes less unconscious.

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Unwired: A Month With Limited Internet, & Now No Cell Phone

In January, as part of my Year of Living Without, I experimented with limited Internet, and this month I’m going without my cell phone.

Limiting my Internet was a challenge, I have to admit. I make my living on the Internet, do my learning there, teach my kids things, do my finances, plan short trips and longer vacations, read and discover and check up on what’s going on with the world. So limiting this connection felt like I was limiting my life.

That experience alone, of feeling like I’m limiting my life, was worth the effort.

Some things I learned in the past month:

Just how much I rely on the Internet. For everything.I can process email in 15-20 minutes. By process, I mean do a quick task the email requires or put it on my to-do list for later, reply, delete or archive. By the end of the short session, I’m done. I gave myself an hour of Internet at 5pm (or later if I couldn’t do it at 5pm) to take care of email and a few other things.But because I had limited Internet time, I felt like I was falling behind on work. I would put lots of things off until 5pm, but couldn’t do all of those things then (I had to work quickly), and so I would prioritize and do the most important/urgent things at 5pm. That meant lots of little things would get delayed, which was fine for about a week. Then things started to pile up.I got a lot done. Without the distractions of the Internet, I learned a lot of programming (still not very good). I switched midmonth to Ruby on Rails, which I love but am still learning. I can write a basic Ruby program but haven’t created anything in Rails beyond what I’ve done following tutorials yet.I wrote a lot. Writing is much better without the Internet. This is by a factor of 10 or more. When you have the Internet at your disposal, writing often gets interrupted to go check on this or that. But writing with no other good options means you’re going to really be able to focus.A short amount of Internet time in the morning turned out to be useful. So midmonth or so, I gave myself the ability to do some limited work tasks in the morning. This made me more productive for my business, but slightly less productive as a writer. It was a good tradeoff though — every decision is a compromise, and I think this was a good one.Even making this exception, I didn’t use or need: social media, news, reading blogs or magazines, Snapchat or other sharing services, games, Youtube or other videos, Reddit or Hacker News. So a lot of what I might normally use was not needed, and in fact blocking myself from these things helped me greatly.Once you allow a little, you have to be very careful to define your exceptions, or you start down a slippery slope. For example, if I say, “It’s OK to go on Twitter to check on X because I need to find this out for this task” … if I’m not careful, I can easily start checking Twitter for something else that seems important, and then maybe just once for something that’s not important but satisfies my curiosity, and so on.

Given this experience, I’d like to continue to practice limited email and other work-related Internet tasks, allowing myself to focus on writing and programming and other focus-requiring tasks, but giving myself space to take care of the smaller tasks as well. And I’d like to continue to limit my social media, news, video and other less important Internet usage.

In February, I’m going without a cellphone. I’ve already started, and it hasn’t been hard yet, but I’m curious what it will be like going for an extended period without one.

Some background: for many years I purposely avoided having a smartphone and mostly just had a dumbphone that could just make calls and texts (though it did have an alarm, worldclock and calculator!) … but in June I got an iPhone as a Father’s Day gift. Since then, I’ve found it useful but very tempting to check all the time. I’ve gotten better at not checking it constantly, but when I’m out and about and not doing anything, checking the phone is still a default.

So this month, I’m going to go without the cellphone. And unlike the Internet, I’m not going to make a bunch of exceptions.

I’ll make one exception because I don’t have a good alternative: my cellphone will be my alarm clock only.

Other than that, the phone will be off all day. I won’t bring it out with me. I’ll have to look up directions before I leave the house. I’ll be unreachable for any reason. I won’t know the time as I have no watch. I won’t do Anki flashcards or read Instapaper or look at my kids’ Snapchats or check my email or read my blogs on Feedly. Nada.

Wish me luck!

View the original article here

How to Create a $4,000 Per Month Muse in 5 Days (Plus: How to Get Me As Your Mentor)

Photo: Stuck in Customs

This post is a follow-up to “How to Create a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend (Examples: AppSumo, Mint, Chihuahuas).”

The purpose of this guest post — written by Noah Kagan — is to show you exactly how a postal worker created a $4,000 per month muse. Included are all the tests, e-mail templates, and details you’d need to replicate his success.

Noah was employee #30 at Facebook, #4 at Mint, had previously worked for Intel (where he frequently took naps under his desk), and had turned down a six-figure offer from Yahoo. Since we first met, Noah’s helped create several multi-million dollar businesses, including AppSumo, loved by entrepreneurs everywhere.

For those interested in mentorship, don’t miss the end of this post.

There’s a time-sensitive chance to visit San Francisco for a week… to be mentored in-person by Noah and yours truly.

The journey of Daniel Bliss is a telling one.

Our goal was to take his hobby — he was a full-time postal worker — and turn it into a real business making $4,000 a month so he could quit his day job.

We started working a few months before when he won the AppSumo Make a $1,000 a Month Business getaway to Austin to personally work with me for a week.

The preliminary call after Daniel won the getaway went well. Here’s what he told me:

He was solving his own problem. This is an easy way to figure out what business you should start.

Daniel’s a rock-climber and it hurt his neck to look up while he was belaying (standing on the ground helping the climber above him) so he wanted to buy glasses to make his neck hurt less.

Here’s me with a pair of glasses on and Daniel.

 All the glasses on the market were $99, so Daniel figured there had to be a way to make and sell cheaper glasses.

When we talked, he had already found a manufacturer through Alibaba.

Daniel first learned about using Alibaba to find a manufacturer in Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek (page 175).

He searched suppliers on Alibaba and checked if they were a good fit by testing them on 3 characteristics:

1. How many years (if any) have they been considered a gold supplier?

Gold Supplier is a paid membership on Alibaba.com. All Gold Suppliers in China must pass an onsite check while those from other countries and regions must pass an A&V Check. Basically, this shows that they’re legit.

2. How is their website?

 Poke around to see if anything seems shady. Do they have any negative reviews or positive ones? Search their name/email on Google and see what kind of results you get. This should give you a good feeling if they’re legit or not.

3. Is their “minimum order quantity” reasonable for what I’m trying to do?

You want to keep your costs down and not worry about selling hundreds of items. Daniel originally targeted 50 minimum pieces to validate his business without spending a lot of money.

Once Daniel narrowed down suppliers he ordered a few samples to test in person. He took these to his climbing group. Always look at who you have easy access to when selling your product. A common pitfall is for people to look at everyone outside their network and get rejected.

 By himself, he sold 12 pairs. He sold 2 pairs to a couple he met while climbing and the rest to his climbing group.

So far, so good.

But then Daniel decided to spend valuable time creating a website: http://belayshades.com

How often have you bought a domain, imagining how large your new business is going to be? I KNOW you have. I have many times. You fantasize about how large your business is going to be instead of actually growing it. This is a common thing we help people with in our Make a $1,000 a Month business course.

Daniel’s been working as a postal carrier in Canada for 7 years, so expanding a business was foreign to him.

Daniel had gotten to the point where he was working without a goal so the first question I asked him was:

“To you, how much money is financial freedom?”

Once you know your destination, getting there is MUCH easier.

Tim’s written about figuring out your lifestyle costing, aka “financial freedom,” here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/lifestyle-costing/

For Daniel it was $4k / month to be able to travel to Thailand and go climbing as he pleased.

Now it’s key to do the math to see how many pairs of glasses he’ll need to sell to get to that point.

$4,000 / profit a month

The glasses sell for $60 a pair with shipping

40% profit margins on every pair of glasses.

$60 * 40% = $24

$4000 / $24 (profit per sell) = 166 glasses a month.

Basically, 5-6 glasses a day.

That doesn’t sound so bad, right? When you take a goal and break it into daily targets, it makes the goal seem WAY easier and more digestible.

Before Daniel arrived to work with me, he started worrying about competition and patents.

BUT NO COMPETITOR CARES. Ever!

How many burger places are in your town? Cafes? Japanese restaurants?

Exactly, A TON. There’s enough for everyone and — fortunately for you — most people run their businesses like shit.

Worrying about others in the beginning is just a fear of starting.

Daniel’s focus on filing a patent was another aversion to starting.

The next week, he was worried about liability and everything except growing his business.

I’m not saying you should avoid setting up your corporation or take precautionary measures when it’s the right time. The key is to see what’s actually important for the time being and handling it.

Eventually, Daniel arrived in Austin and we had 5 days together to get his business to at least $4,000 in revenue. Here’s what went down:

Now that Daniel knew his goal (sell 5-6 glasses a day) we used Quant Based Marketing to calculate how he could try various marketing tactics to grow his business and reach his goal.

Example of Daniel’s Quant based sheet

 See the actual marketing sheet here and feel free to use it for your own business.

What Daniel was previously doing for marketing was paying for Facebook likes and cold calling rock-climbing gyms to gain sales. It was going slowly.

The gyms said they needed time to see if they wanted to buy the glasses. When someone says they need time, it’s because you haven’t sold them properly.

For marketing, the key is to have a “lazy” mindset. With the quant sheet you can estimate the amount of sales you can get from all the different activities and then prioritize based on volume.

It’s critical to find the marketing activities that can scale and be repeated.

Daniel kept doing activities that weren’t producing, like submitting to PR Newswire. It’s not that it can’t work, but we wanted to get results faster.

So I asked Daniel, “If you could only use two of the marketing activities you’ve used before, what would they be?”

          1. Personal network + referrals

          2. Wholesale selling to climbing gyms / online stores

So we had our marketing sheet and planned to do 1-2 activities per day to see what worked best for his business.

Daniel searched Facebook for every single friend who listed climbing in their profiles and added them to a sheet.

Then Daniel individually messaged them. Yes, it’s work. To get The 4-Hour Workweek I’ve found it takes about 6 months of work to finally relax on substantial monthly income. [Note from Tim: This squares with reality; it usually takes 3-4 months to try enough that you can do a proper 80/20 analysis, then two months to design systems to scale what *is* working.]

Here’s the message Daniel used:

Hey

Hope you’ve been awesome.

I saw you like climbing. Me, too!

My neck always hurts when I belay, so I created super affordable belay goggles.

Have about 10 available. Are you interested?

Climb on,

Daniel

A few sales came just from messaging his Facebook friends. SCORE.

Then we created a list of every rock climbing store offline and online in Canada.

1. Search google for “rock climbing vancouver” or search “rock climbing” on Yelp
2A. Go to websites listed and get the owner’s name (if possible), email, and phone number. OR
2B. Hire someone on fiverr.com or craigslist to go through every listing and add them on a sheet for you like the one below (if you’re a lazy ass).

Daniel was already calling and emailing but not getting the volume of sales he needed from wholesalers and gyms. I asked to see what he emailed,. He showed me this:

Damn, that is a bad e-mail!

Main things for you and Daniel to learn:

         a) Getting a PDF from a random stranger is never something I want to open.

         b) Make the subject line exciting to read.

         c) Sales emails should ALWAYS be about the other person. Make it valuable for them so they want to reply.

        d) Nobody’s name is Hello. “Hey ”. Work to find the first name.

Here’s an improved version that we worked on:

Subject: Helping you make an extra $1,000 at your climbing gym

Hey Colleen,

Hope things are amazing with you.

I’ve been working with climbing gyms like yours and wanted to hook up your members with my new belay glasses.

http://belayshades.com (people go nuts over them)

Was thinking, we can email your members with a special discount just for you and we split the profit evenly.

Be a great way for you to make a profit and hook up your members at the same time.

Can you let me know by this Friday if this sounds appealing to you?

Rock on,

Dan Bliss

And here’s the email for online retail stores:

Subject line: Best person to talk with for new climbing gear?

Hey John ,

Fan of your store and the fact your founder and I both do jewelry making

Noticed you didn’t have any belay glasses, which are becoming super popular with climbers.

Love to see if this makes sense for your store. Other climbing stores are seeing promising results with it.

How’s this Thursday 4pm CST for a quick 7-minute call to see if this makes sense for your store?

Belay on,

Daniel Bliss

http://www.belayshades.com

To actually get a response, I had Daniel use what I call the quad-bomb:

1. Search their name on LinkedIn. Send them a connect request as a friend with a CUSTOM message. “Hey , Huge fan of your business and wanted to talk about some cool products for your customers.”

2. Email them.

I wait a day here as to NOT annoy them. If they don’t respond, then proceed to 3 and 4.

3. Facebook message them with: “Hey, just wanted to make sure my message got through”.

4. Tweet them. “Hey @twitter-handle. Love to see if we make some magic together. What’s best email for you?”

Why so many channels?

1. So many people are lazy and don’t put the effort in. You get out what you put in.

2. Sometimes people get busy, so your email may just get buried at the bottom of their inbox.

One of the key things that I drilled into Daniel’s head is to have a follow-up time with ANY person you are trying to work with. I use the line, “I have my calendar open, how’s X time to check in?”

Also I use followup.cc as a great free service to get reminders via email.

Rebuttal / sales sheets

Script out your answers to any possible questions during sales calls. This makes it easy to do your sales. This is also valuable so in the future you can have ANYONE do your sales a la The 4-Hour Workweek.

Here’s a sample of those sheets:

Rebuttals:

You guys are too small for us to work with

I feel we will work well together… we are small and you are big. Since we are small we can keep costs low and pass the savings on to you and your customers. Since you are large and have the reach for distributorship we can do business on a larger scale at smaller margins while still making a profit. Match made in heaven.

What about returns or defects?

We check each product by hand. If there is any problem, we stand 100% behind the product. We have a no-questions return policy for 30 days.

Can you guys do net-90 payment terms?

Yes, we can.

Where have you sold these glasses so far?

We are selling at local gyms and climbing groups all around Vancouver.

Can you give us a discount?

The price is the most affordable on the market. If you wanted to place a larger order, or can offer better payment terms, I’m happy to talk to my team to make it work for you.

Sales Questions to ask whosalers / stores / gyms

1. Something about themselves, a get-to-the-know-them question

2. What are your most popular items for climbers?

3. What are your favorite sites for finding out about new products? If tradeshows, which ones do you guys go to?

4. Do you guys already sell belay glasses?

5. How do you decide which products you want to sell?

6. [POTENTIAL TRANSITION] Well, it sounds like our glasses are right up your alley… (ONLY IF THEY ARE)

7. What’s your preferred amount for a starter order?

8. Is anything holding you back from placing an order of 30 with us today?

9. What are your preferred next steps to get this partnership rolling?

10. How’s x time for a check-in to make sure all is smooth?

Each day Daniel was in town, he allocated at least 3 hours to try a new method of marketing.

Who knows which will actually work? At the end of the week, we were going to re-evaluate and focus on the most effective ones.

Here are 3 marketing methods we tried out:

Posting on marketplaces

This involves posting your product to sites that already have your customers like eBay, Etsy, Craigslist or Amazon. All totally free, too. Done.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=321233764523

Messaging on Meetup groups

Try messaging meetup groups to do giveaways. No responses? Oh well, move on.

Facebook and Google Advertising

Here’s the exact FB ad we created:

Key things about this ad:

        – Target audience is really small (24,000 people)

        – Your target should be as NICHE as possible. The more unique — or direct the competitor — the better.

         - Newsfeed ads have been performing STUPIDLY well for me, so we chose that route. But what works for me may not work for someone else.

         - Limit yourself to your country and focus on just desktop computers, unless your page is very mobile friendly. Otherwise, you will waste a TON of money.

For Facebook ads, do NOT spend more than $10 a day while you are trying to figure out if you can make more than you spend from this marketing channel. DO NOT buy likes either — they are worthless. You have to rely on Facebook to communicate with your customers vs. having direct access. Get people to buy your product directly or give you an email.

Daniel tried Google Adwords with no success. Luckily, he used a free credit he got from starting a new account. You can get bonus AdWords credit via eBay.

On Day 4, we continued trying new marketing techniques to find which would work:

Giveaways

Daniel reached out to various Facebook pages and bloggers related to climbing. Search Facebook for “rock climbing” or whatever your product is, and you should be able to find a few pages related to your audience.

Here’s what he would message them:

Subject: Free Belay Glasses for you and your

Hey ,

You guys look awesome! Glad to see the climbing community growing in .

Wanted to let you know about these cool new belay glasses for rock climbers http://www.belayshades.com

Love to send you a pair to try out. If you like them, I’ll happily give you guys a special price you can share with your members.

Easy enough, right? Just email me by with an address we can ship to, and we will send a pair out to you.

Belay on!

Daniel

This did not produce any results

A better approach would be to mail out glasses to climbing writers and group owners and focus on building long-term relationships.

Google Top 20

If you were your own customer, what phrase would you search on Google?

For Daniel it was “belay glasses”.

In a non-spammy way, go through the first 2 pages of results on Google and leave a helpful comment or see if you can sponsor or get involved in that page. Way easier than trying to immediately rank for a keyword through SEO.

Daniel found a lot of forums and blog posts so he promoted himself on these pages. By looking at Google Analytics, we saw this drove a decent amount of traffic and sales to his website.

Posting on Reddit

There’s a decent amount of people in the /r/hiking or /r/climbing subreddits so posting a discount or asking for people’s feedback is a good test.

Daniel’s partner posted this thread and was able to sell a few glasses:

This sold 10 pairs, which is awesome for Daniel! But posting on Reddit and hoping to get responses isn’t predictable, and we want predictable.  Can’t run off to Thailand unless you know cash is coming in consistently, right?

Updating his website

His site wasn’t bad, but he had a video that did not explain his product, as well as a random banner slide show that didn’t speak to visitors.

Before:

After:

The key takeaway from the whole week: looking at what drove most sales so we can scale it up big time.

So from all the days activities, Day 2 seemed to be the most effective (reaching out to personal network and wholesale retailers).

Our goal for the five days was to grow Daniel’s business. By reaching out to his personal network and wholesale retailers and focusing what had already worked, we managed to make that happen.

Daniel got an email from a large online site named Sierra Trading saying they were interested in the glasses.

HOLY CRAP! He’d been waiting weeks to hear back from small local stores. Now an online provider is finally responding within a day. The store buyer originally responded via a Facebook message.

The order placed was for $4,200!!!!!

WAIT WHUH?!?!?!?!!!!

Lesson of the week: You never know what’s going to work when it comes to marketing. Try new things and then focus on what works until it stops working.

Daniel and the Amigos. Thanks to Anton + Robert for helping with this article.

Big thanks to HomeAway for sponsoring Daniel’s great loft in Austin, Texas.

If you want help starting your own business, and if you’re a US resident age 18 or older, Tim and I have a special opportunity for you.

Take the following steps no later than 5pm PST on Wednesday, October 30th, 2013, and you could get an all-expenses-paid trip to San Francisco to work with us on starting your business.

Many surprises await the one lucky winner. Big time. Seriously.

Step 1 – Create a video (2 min or less) on YouTube explaining why you should be chosen. Start the video title with “Tim Mentorship” so we can find it.

Step 2 – Fill out this form. Be sure to include a link to your YouTube video (from Step 1) in the “Tacos or burritos?” answer! This is to ensure you know how to follow directions.

That’s it!

If you’re like Daniel and want the blueprint to start your own business, personal support, and access to a community of 3,000+ entrepreneurs, take a look at “How To Make A $1,000-A-Month Business.”

Posted on October 28th, 2013

View the original article here

A Month Without TV or Video

‘I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.’ ~Groucho Marx

Of all the challenges I’ve done for The Year of Living Without, going without TV/video has been the one with the most mixed feelings for me.

One side of me: I all of a sudden had more free time, to read, write, do whatever I wanted without distraction. I enjoyed being free of TV and movies.

But the other side: I couldn’t hang out with my family when they watched TV. Which they tend to want to do every night, for an hour or two. I honestly didn’t want to watch the TV shows with them (we don’t have cable, but watch shows we pick on iTunes), but when they watched, I was isolated. This wasn’t always great.

I could have asked them to not watch TV, to join me, and some nights I did. I enjoyed those nights. We would hang out and talk, instead of staring at moving images. But I didn’t want to force them to go without something just because I wanted to experiment with it myself, so I tried to allow them to watch, most of the time. So I would go to my room and read.

And so the results are mixed.

Here are my findings after a month of no TV and video:

Well, in the beginning, I forgot to not watch online video, and so I slipped up once and watched this video on how the iPhone is isolating us. I’m glad I watched it, but when I realized I’d already violated my challenge, only a day or so into the month, I felt bad.A number of other times I automatically clicked on an online video, to watch, and had to turn it off after a few seconds when I realized what I was doing.I don’t really miss video online. It’s not a big deal to me.I wanted to do yoga this month, just 5-10 minutes every evening, but couldn’t watch yoga videos. So I had to make stuff up on my own.I did feel isolated from my family, as I said, when they would watch TV. It would be great if we could find some non-TV things to do in the evening instead. They love board games, so I might start proposing that we play board games together some evenings.On my daughter Maia’s birthday, she wanted us all to watch the first episode of Naruto, one of her favorite anime shows. I had to sit out. I felt bad.I did feel good skipping out on watching a bunch of re-runs of our favorite TV shows. We often just watch these things out of habit, because there’s nothing better to do. I’m not proud of it. I don’t think it’s a good use of our time. So I’m glad I sat it out (again, if it weren’t for having to miss hanging out with Eva and the kids).I got more reading and work done this month than normal. Really great.

So what will I do going forward? Here are my thoughts:

I’m not going to watch online videos unless it’s to learn something useful (no entertainment videos).Only one movie at the theaters per month, so I’ll have to be more choosy.Propose board games or other activities with the kids in the evening, instead of TV.I’ll allow myself 2 hours of TV a week. So 1 hour, twice a week. No reruns.

In October, I’m going without sugar all month.

I actually don’t eat a lot of sugar these days. When I first set out on this challenge, I was eating more sugar than I am now, so it seemed like a hard thing to do. I don’t think it’ll be too hard, except for a couple things:

Eva & I are traveling through Europe for the first part of this month, so I can’t eat any desserts on our travel. Tasting yummy vegan foods as we travel is a tradition, so I’ll be breaking that.My son Justin’s birthday is at the end of the month. We usually do pancakes or waffles or French toast for their birthday breakfasts, and birthday cake later in the day, so I’ll be skipping out on that stuff.

It’ll be a bit of a challenge, but I think I’ll be OK. Wish me luck!

View the original article here

My Failed Month of ‘No Sitting’

‘Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.’ ~Zen Proverb

In my second month of The Year of Living Without, I committed to not sitting for longer than 30 minutes at a time.

I have to admit failure here.

Well, not complete failure. I sat much less in August than I normally do, and was really pretty good in the mornings about remembering to get up (though I did forget a little in the beginning) and walking around, standing and reading, stretching, etc. I also was very active during the month, going for walks, runs, gym workouts, etc.

The problem came when I was tired, usually later in the afternoon and in the evenings. When I was tired, I just couldn’t seem to follow the plan. I would be tired from a long run (for example), and would lie down to take a short nap, and just wouldn’t want to get up. I forgave myself, and let myself rest. I told myself my body needed it.

Social situations were also awkward — when I would meet someone for dinner or tea, sitting is the norm. At first, I tried standing up, and explained myself, and felt weird standing up when they were sitting — I felt I was making them a little uncomfortable. So I caved there too, and decided not to make my friends or new acquaintances feel weird.

This Year of Living Without is not about making my life miserable, but about learning what it’s like to give up something I don’t want to give up. It’s about learning about resistance, and what it’s like to push back against that internal resistance.

I did learn about that in August.

Here are some lessons:

When you’re tired, it’s really hard to beat resistance.Rest before the resistance comes. Get lots of sleep to change habits.It’s hard to remember a day-long habit like not sitting for too long. Start with smaller sections, like just the morning, and then expand.In the beginning of a habit, have visual reminders where the habit takes place, so you don’t forget. Enlist the help of others to remind you too.Figure out what you’ll do in social situations before they happen. Talk to people before you meet with them, and tell them about your weird habit, and work out a plan together. Otherwise it becomes awkward and you cave in.Forgive yourself when you fail.Standing, stretching, doing exercises, cleaning, running, walking and generally being more active during the day makes you tired later in the day. I was surprised how tired I got.

Previously: My Month Without Coffee (update: I’ve been drinking coffee again recently)

This month, I’m going without video of any kind, which includes TV, movies, YouTube and other online video.

I resisted this idea mostly because it’s been my ritual to sit with Eva in the evenings and have a glass of red wine and watch one of our favorite shows for about an hour or so. This was our winding-down ritual, and it was something we shared. I didn’t want to give this up, and every time I considered it previously, I resisted. So I’m giving it up.

The biggest obstacle is losing that shared time with Eva (and the kids sometimes). I’ve suggested that we do something else together in the evening, but at the same time I don’t want to force her to give up TV if she doesn’t want to. So we’re still figuring this out.

My replacement habit is to write, read and do yoga in the evenings. So I’m actually looking forward to this. Actually, I’ve already started (3 days now) and am enjoying the extra time at night, but not enjoying missing the shared family time.

One small slip-up to report already: I watched this video about our smartphones disconnecting us from each other. I liked the video a lot, but then realized I wasn’t supposed to watch it. Oops!

View the original article here

Case Studies: How to Build Online Businesses That Gross $250,000+ Per Month

Debbie Sterling’s GoldieBlox is now grossing $300,000+ per month.

My specialty is modeling success. I analyze what works and ask: what recipe can I find that others can use?

In this post, we’ll look at five successful online businesses. Some of them (e.g. GoldieBlox) are now grossing $300,000+ per month…and it’s the founder’s first company! One (Fresh-Tops) has gone from 1 to 20 employees in six months. Some of the other stats are even more impressive.

Out of more than 10,000 contestants in the 2012 Shopify Build-a-Business Competition, these are the five businesses that sold the most in completely different categories:

Design, Art and Home
Gadgets and Electronics
Fashion and Apparel
Canadian [Because Shopify is based in Canada. Go Canucks!]
Everything Else

What do they have in common? And what can you replicate on your own?

For both questions, the answer is: more than you think.

The highest monthly sales by a contestant in the FIRST two months of starting, excluding any pre-existing businesses, was $196,811. How would that change your life?

Without further ado, let’s analyze these five rock stars, looking at what they did right and, just as important, what they did wrong…

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Ryan French, Creator of GameKlip

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

The GameKlip is a device that attaches your Android phone to a DualShock3 controller, normally used for the PlayStation3. This allows you to use a real controller to play games on your smartphone. It opens the Android platform up to more than just “casual” gaming with touch screen controls, and really gives you a full console experience at a fraction of the cost.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I was frustrated with the controls on my smartphone. Touchscreen controls worked okay for simple games, but anything more complex was impossible. I made a bracket to hold my phone onto my controller, and realized other people might want one too.

I didn’t reject any other product ideas. I set out looking for a solution to a problem I had, instead of looking for a product to sell. Once I had my solution, the GameKlip, I focused on finding a way to share it with others.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The first a-ha moment was when I snapped my phone onto my controller for the first time. I found myself playing games for hours, and really enjoying the experience. I stayed up all night bending plastic and trying out different shapes until I arrived at a design I thought was efficient and presentable.

The second a-ha moment was when I posted a video of my prototype and started pre-orders. I realized there actually was a demand for my creation. I used the pre-orders to fund my first batch of plastic.

The third a-ha moment came when I realized that I couldn’t continue hand-making the GameKlip forever. I spent all my money on a mold so I didn’t have to make the GameKlip by hand anymore. I couldn’t afford a mold for every phone, so I cut the product line down to just two versions, a model for the Galaxy S3, and a universal solution. The community met the new models with open arms and demand increased immensely.

My final a-ha moment was when I could finally contract my assembly process. I was able to use some of the funds generated from the new molded version to contract out an assembly line. Now that my production process was scalable beyond the hours I could put in myself, the GameKlip was finally ready for retail distribution.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

About half of my time was spent struggling with my spreadsheets and dealing with the post office, instead of focusing on my product, so I wish I found solutions to those earlier.

It’s easy to say that I should have streamlined my manufacturing earlier, but each step along the way was a learning experience. If I had jumped into contract manufacturing and assembly earlier, it’s very possible that I would have taken on too much. If I had unlimited units to sell, with no ecommerce platform to sell them on, it would have been a disaster.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

Keep things local. To find a manufacturer, I started with a simple Google search. I found that there was an injection molding company right across the street from one of the restaurants I frequent, but unfortunately their machines were all booked. Even though they weren’t able to take on my project, I was able to use their 3d printer for my prototypes, and they pointed me in the right direction for finding another company that could produce the part.

If you’re just starting out, I’d suggest doing some local searches and talking to as many people as possible. I started by calling a local shop that supplied plastic sheets for home projects. I described my idea, and asked if they knew anyone in the area that could help me make it happen. I found that most people were more than happy to spend a few minutes on the phone to help.

Try searching for a “rapid prototyping” shop in your area. They’ll be able to help make some physical prototypes of your product, and most will have connections with companies that can handle the manufacturing when you’re ready.

When I did get all my manufacturing processes figured out, I was really glad that I kept everything as local as possible. The GameKlip and packaging are made in the USA. It costs a little more to manufacture things here instead of overseas, but the added convenience of being able to drive over and talk to people is incredibly valuable. The packaging is printed, and the units assembled, about half an hour away from my apartment.

As for marketing, I approached that aspect of the company a little differently than most. Instead of making a traditional advertisement, I simply sat down and recorded myself showing the product and explaining what you could do with it. I think it’s important to let the product speak for itself. Everything exploded organically after that.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

I was an active member on Reddit, and Android forums like XDA Developers, long before I started GameKlip. When I did launch my product, the members of both of those communities definitely helped me spread the word. I couldn’t have done it without them.

The GameKlip has been featured on Gizmodo, The Verge, The Fancy, ABC News, PC World, CNET, Phandroid, Android Authority, Ask Men, as well as many other blogs around the world.

I didn’t make any pitches or hire a marketing firm to get these mentions, they all picked up on my story on their own. In my opinion, having interesting photos of your product is crucial! I made sure I had a somewhat large selection of quality photos available, to make it as easy as possible for writers to feature my story. If I had to do it over again, I would have gone a step further and created a press kit ahead of time. That way it would have been even easier for blogs to pick up on my story.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

The most useful tool to me was Google search. For example, to learn more about international shipping, I simply searched “best way to ship a package overseas” and found that lots of people post on forums with great information. The amount of information stored on forums is incredible!

Software wise, ShipStation is an app which allowed me to automatically pull orders from my online store and create shipping labels. Before I found this I was copying and pasting addresses into the USPS website manually. Now I click one button and the invoices come out of one printer and the shipping labels come out of another. The order processing efficiency still amazes me every morning!

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Having a real shipping system and the hardware to back it up (a label printer), would have helped a lot. My two most prized possessions at this point are a shipping label printer and an automatic tape dispenser. When I first started I was running sticker paper through my home printer, cutting the labels out with scissors, and using tape from my local office supply store. I managed to ship over a thousand packages this way, but I could have saved a huge amount of time and money if I adopted a better system earlier.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Don’t feel like you need to know everything, or that everything has to be perfect before you start. I knew nothing about running a business, had no idea how to have something manufactured, and had no idea how to ship a package overseas. I’ve now shipped thousands of units to over 80 countries worldwide. It won’t be easy, there’ll be many points where you feel like giving up, but it’s worth it.

What’s next?
I am still pushing forward at full speed. I hope to have the GameKlip on store shelves around the world.

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Debra Sterling, Founder of GoldieBlox

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

GoldieBlox is a book series and construction toy starring Goldie, the girl engineer. Throughout Goldie’s adventures, she encounters problems she needs to solve by building simple machines. As kids read along, they get to build along with Goldie, learning basic engineering principles with each story.

How much revenue is your company currently generating per month (on average)?

Over 300K per month.

To get to this revenue number, how long did it take after the idea struck?

About 6 months.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

When I first started, a lot of advisors were telling me to ditch the idea of a toy entirely and just do an app. I decided to do a physical toy (in addition to an app, which we are launching around x-mas this year) because I felt that the tactile experience of building things was a better way to introduce mechanical engineering principles. Screen play alone just doesn’t do it justice.

My earliest toy sketches were girly Legos… curved shapes, tiny decorative pieces, girly themes like princess castles and stuff (a lot like the Lego Friends line of girl construction toys that just launched, actually). I ditched this idea because I felt like it was reinforcing all the same old gender stereotypes. I wanted to push the envelope and develop an idea that didn’t rely on those stereotypes to engage girls. I knew that little girls are more than just princesses and that I could make something different and empowering that they’d fall in love with.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

My big ‘a-ha’ moment came when I realized I needed to incorporate a book into the game element. I did extensive research into the differences between the learning styles of boys and girls. I met with neuroscientists and teachers, and I spent a lot of time playing with kids. I asked kids to bring me their favorite toy. Girls would always bring me a book. Boys would bring me a toy. After the fifth girl brought me a book, I decided I needed to blend the construction components of my boardgame with a story. This was a huge ‘a-ha’ moment for me because it significantly changed the direction of my toy.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

My biggest waste of money so far was when I first hired a law firm. I met with a few different law firms and I felt really, really good about one with whom I really connected. I liked the lawyer, but he was expensive and because I had limited capital, I hired a cheaper law firm I didn’t like as much. I almost instantly regretted my choice. I eventually had to leave the cheaper law firm and went with my original choice. The cheaper firm made me pay money upfront, while the one I eventually went with was willing to defer payment until I was in a stronger financial position. I wasted a lot of money by making the wrong choice.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Prototype and test everything! It’s important to prototype everything beforehand. Then test the prototypes on your target demographic. Long before I approached a manufacturer, I designed the toy myself in my living room. I made crude working prototypes using ribbon, clay, wooden dowels, thread spools, Velcro and pegboard from the hardware store. I wrote and illustrated a book where Goldie built a belt drive to spin her friends, and mimicked the action in the book with the physical pieces.

I probably spent a total of $250 on the prototypes. I tested everything on children around the Bay Area – I went to over 40 homes and 3 schools. I observed girls and boys, ages 4-12, interacting with the game. Every time I observed a child and/or parent playing with it, I learned a new insight, which I incorporated into the next version. I quickly iterated and improved the design until it rocked.

2. Be prepared for the manufacturing part to take a long time. The whole process of prototyping and manufacturing is huge. Example: I sketched out detailed drawings and dimensions for each piece of the board game, but I needed the drawings in CAD. One afternoon, I snuck into an Industrial Designers Society of America “happy hour” to try and find an industrial designer who could assist me. I met a really talented engineer there who was passionate about my mission and agreed to help. Then, I needed the prototypes to be printed, so we used 3D printing technology to take them to the next level. I hired a professional sculptor to create the character figurines to match my drawings. I sent everything to the factory, and they made a manufacturer’s sample. Once I approved the sample, we began the tooling process, which is timely and expensive. It took several months of back-and-forth revisions of the plastic parts until the tolerances were perfect. This resulted in a lot of hair pulling. We are still tweaking the molds. Nevertheless, we finally hit the green light and went into production on a first run of 40,000 toys to fulfill our pre-orders from Kickstarter and our website. Seriously, you can’t underestimate the time that manufacturing takes.

3. Decide if you’re an entrepreneur or an inventor. When I started out I was incredibly secretive because I didn’t want anyone to steal my idea. But then a friend asked me if I wanted to be an inventor or an entrepreneur. An inventor works by themselves in a lab, but an entrepreneur needs to inspire others to lend their expertise. I realized that I needed help. I went out and found the best mentors in the fields I was working in and asked for their help. I had to be specific about what I needed and asked them exactly what I wanted them to do. I was amazed at how much help I got! I saved so much time and money by getting help from someone who had been in the toy business for 30 years.

4. Create an authentic and emotional story behind your product. When it comes to my marketing strategy, I am a brand-driven person and I believe that the most important thing is creating an authentic and emotional story and brand. We’re more than a product, we’re a social mission and I like to give the product a face and personality (mine!) For example, our decision to launch on Kickstarter wasn’t about raising funds. We used it as a platform for sharing our story in a video format. Because then it wasn’t: “Hey! Here’s this toy for girls,” it was: “Hey, here’s this female engineer who is trying to do something about a problem in our society.”

5. Plan your Kickstarter exit strategy. We started on Kickstarter, but a lot of these products just fizzle out when their campaign has ended. We started our Shopify store ahead of time so that people who missed the Kickstarter campaign could still participate. My online store was my saving grace because my video went viral and my shop was up and running to capitalize on the publicity. My online store far exceeded the sales I had made on Kickstarter.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

Our first PR win happened very early, in fact months before we even launched. I was still in the earliest prototyping stages, but I created a blog to share my stories of building GoldieBlox with friends and family. A friend-of-a-friend’s sister found the blog, she was a writer for The Atlantic. Another friend-of-friend found the blog, who happened to be a writer for TechCrunch. I set up phone interviews with both of them and gave them the “exclusive story.” They both posted wonderful pieces about GoldieBlox the day we launched, which created a ton of buzz.

Another win was that we got Tim Schafer (cult video game designer / Kickstarter celebrity) to make a cameo in our Kickstarter video with his 4-year-old daughter. He then tweeted the link to his 90,000 Kickstarter backers. I met Tim through my banker. When I told my banker I was about to go up on Kickstarter, he made the introduction to Tim’s colleague, Justin, who had just joined on board at DoubleFine Productions (they had raised over $3 million dollars on Kickstarter). I arranged a meeting to learn how they’d done it and to get advice. I hung around there a couple times, until I ultimately persuaded Tim to appear in our video.

When we launched on Kickstarter, we had a lot of influential people in tech backing our project: Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Alexis Ohanian (Founder of Reddit), Mayim Bialik (Actress, Big Bang Theory), the list goes on.

We also got written up in Forbes, Huffington Post, The Guardian, Wired, TIME, Ms. Magazine, The Boston Globe, The San Jose Mercury News, interviewed on BBC world radio, and NPR. We didn’t have a PR agency or anything. These reporters simply emailed into “info@goldieblox.com” and we set up the interviews.

But our biggest PR win to date was on November 14, 2012, we call it “G Day.” Eduardo Jackson from upworthy.com posted our Kickstarter video about a month after the campaign had ended. It instantly went viral. In just a couple days, the video spiked to almost a million views. There were so many orders, we literally sold out of our first shipment and had to push back the delivery date.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

StartingBloc, a social entrepreneurship fellowship program, was by far the biggest game-changer for GoldieBlox.

Pacific Community Ventures, connected us with a pro-bono advisor, Sam Allen (founder of ScanCafe) who has been instrumental to our business.

I got to pitch GoldieBlox on the main stage at SOCAP and met really great contacts in the social innovation space.

The books “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg and “Start Something That Matters” by Blake MyCoskie both inspired me.

And my mentors: Terry Langston (founder, Pictionary), Brendan Boyle (head of toys, IDEO), Bob Lally (co-founder, Leapfrog), Jake Bronstein (founder, BuckyBalls), and Clara Shih (founder, Hearsay Social) played a huge role in helping me learn about the toy business.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

I would ask for help from the start. Also, in the beginning I thought I had to make a range of products, but this spread my team too thin and it wasn’t very realistic. I had this idea that if you are a startup, you have to work around the clock until you just about kill yourself. If I had to do it over again, I would only work on one thing at a time.

What’s next?

This month we’re launching into retail stores. And we’re also very busy developing new products to add to the line.

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Nella Chunky, Founder of Fresh-Tops

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

Fresh-Tops is high end fashion for hipster trendy teenage females. Our products are inspired by pop culture with a girly twist. We sell everything from leggings, accessories, crop tops, sweaters and anything that our customers requests that makes sense.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I experimented with a bunch of brands until we found one that really worked. I ended up with my current brand by being inspired by pop culture, and a love for bright colors and creating fun, cute little things. I believe that to be successful in fashion, you have to stay fresh, and that’s where the name Fresh-Tops came from.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

My biggest tipping point was realizing how important social media is to the growth of my company. Being able to interact with our customers 24/7 on various social media platforms has been really, really important.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

My biggest mistake was with packaging. When I first created Fresh-Tops I was convinced that fancy packaging and the experience of our customers opening our products would increase sales. Nope. Its better to focus on fast delivery and high quality products rather than packaging, which only eat out on your profits. Once our brand became more established it made more sense to invest in pretty packaging.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Network. Getting to know people in my industry played a huge role in developing my company. We found all our manufacturers through referrals from personal relationships. Get involved with the market of your specific products. If you’re in the fashion industry go to every fashion event you can.

2. You can’t ignore social media. Our marketing strategy is completely focused on our social media. We use Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter to share pictures of our clothing. Then our fans share those pictures with their audiences. This social influence is very powerful. People tend to shop where their friends shop and they feel left out if they’re not involved.

3. Secure your brand name. We keep our ears open for the next popular network, and we’ll then immediately establish accounts. It’s important to do this for two reasons. First, to secure your brand name before someone else gets. Second, you want to be in these social circles in case they catch buzz. For example, there is a lot of buzz around Keek right now. It’s a social site which allows users to post videos no more than 30 seconds long. We don’t know how we’re going to use this as a marketing tool yet, but at least we have reserved our company user name before anybody else could.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

No company partnerships as of yet but we are looking to partner with a PR firm and a very well known web development company this year.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

We don’t really use any fancy software or tools. You’d be surprised how much you can do with very little integrated software. A couple of my mentors who I study, and who inspire me are Kimora Lee Simmons and Tony Hseish.

Conference wise, learnt a lot from Fashion Week and Stitch Trade Show in Las Vegas.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Our biggest challenges so far have been holiday seasons. During the holiday season, it was tough to keep up with increased demand, so I would have ensured our stock count was big enough.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

I would really suggest that if you are starting your own business, it’s very important to listen to your customers and use their input to drive the growth of your business. We relied on email requests and suggestions from our social media fans when deciding how to move forward and what items to add to our line, and it worked really well.

The second thing I would say is just do it. Keep experimenting and keep trying different things and different brands until you find something that works. Be versatile and flexible and you’ll learn and grow as you go along. Stick to doing a few things really well and don’t overextend yourself.

What’s next?

This spring we are starting a new line of shorts which are fun and colorful.

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Aron Slipacoff, Founder of Canadian Icons

Describe your business in 1-3 sentences.

Canadian Icons is an online museum and store that shares stories about iconic Canadian brands like Canada Goose and Manitobah Mukluks alongside rare objects from Canada’s past. We ship every order overnight for free – and sometimes even faster than that. Our aim was to make our website a place where you can always encounter an inspiring collection of Canadian treasures and find out about organizations working to produce, preserve and protect them.

How did you decide on your product(s)? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

We wanted to offer items with incredibly strong connections to Canada’s past. If it was something that really resonated with what could be considered to be truly ‘Canadian,’ and it was something iconic, the decision wasn’t really ours to make—the items and the stories behind them would just speak loud and clear.

The items in the Canadian Icons collection are as relevant now as they were 50 years ago, and they will be just as relevant 50 years from now. And, of course, everything had to be made in Canada.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The only real tipping point was when the media began talking about our unique concept of combining storytelling with online sales.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

We spent a lot of time early on pursuing a hard copy version of the Canadian Icons collection. We wanted to make a book that could live in the physical world but the web proved to be a much better medium to tell the stories and conduct business at the same time.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

It’s important to learn where you can add value and how you can stand out amongst your competition. We quickly learned that customer service was the way we could really provide value. We saw opportunity to fill a gap with our Canada Goose jackets in particular because our competitors weren’t great on service because the demand for these products is so huge. So we decided to offer the best possible service to our customers. This meant overnight shipping in Canada and 90 minute delivery within 50km of our office. We also decided to offer a full return policy, no questions asked and no postage required. Risky, but ultimately worth it.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

PR wins: Our PR approach for Canadian Icons was determined right up front, we wanted high quality links for Google juice, and we wanted brand mentions in good publications to help drive traffic and support our reputation. We hired a firm to help with PR and have received lots of positive media mentions in Canada.

Partnerships: First, I developed great historical content. I wrote stories about Canadian icons such as the canoe, the snowshoe, and the Group of Seven. I began to curate a collection of high quality content. Then, I approached national cultural organizations such as the Museum of Civilization and got them on board.

Once I had these great partners and stories in place, I presented an idea to some iconic brands, suggesting that Canadian Icons would be the most authentic Canadian place online to tell their brand stories and offer iconic Canadian products in a new way.

For brands like Canada Goose and Manitobah Mukluks, it was clear early on that they “got it.” Both of these companies take great pride in their product’s deep and unique connection to Canada.

What one thing (knowledge, skill, tool, etc.) would have saved you the most headache if you had it when you just got started?

There really weren’t any headaches. I had a lot of experience in Canadiana, in writing, marketing and PR, and I actually enjoy cold-calling and developing strategic partnerships and building relationships.

The hardest part, for me, was building the business online – the actual coding and backend – but that really wasn’t that difficult.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Build it and they will not come! You need to put a lot of work into PR. Get your name out there, get featured in the press, get backlinks. Getting in the media really helped people to get to know us as well, but the links that the media mentions gave us really improved our SEO ranking.

What’s next?

We are going to continue to strive to provide Canadian products delivered in a manner never before seen in Canada, stories and world-class service you can only really get right here at home!

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Gretta Van Riel, Founder of SkinnyMe Tea

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

SkinnyMe Tea is an all-natural detox and weight loss program designed to provide fast results and kickstart a healthier you. SkinnyMe Tea is formulated with all-natural, high-potency ingredients rich in antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and fibre. The natural ingredients in SkinnyMe Tea aim to cleanse and detoxify, increase metabolism, assist in the digestion of food, suppress appetite and much more.

How much revenue is your company currently generating per month (on average)?

Over 600K per month.

To get to this revenue number, how long did it take after the idea struck?

It took around 9 months after we launched to reach this revenue; however, as we’re still a very young company (we turn 1 next month) our revenue is still increasing.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I had a dream about “teatox” one night which gave me the inspiration for the name. When I woke up, I knew that I had a great idea and I started building my business literally the same day. While I have experimented with various ways to package and sell the product, my vision for the product has been the same from the start.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The biggest tipping point is when our revenue from one week was above my yearly wage at my previous job. That’s when it really hit home. I get so excited when we meet targets we never even considered possible when just getting started. I guess it’s time we start setting more challenging goals.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

Our biggest mistake was underestimating our rate of growth. We were constantly finding ourselves catching up. Apart from being quite stressful, this meant we had less time to look at the bigger picture and had no time for planning and creating strategies about the new directions our business should be going. That was a big mistake, being able to strategize high-level direction is really important for long-term growth.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Make sure you do your research and know which certifications you need. In Australia it’s important to find a manufacturer with TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) approval which isn’t always very common for tea manufacturers because tea isn’t often classified as a therapeutic good per say. That was a challenge in itself.

2. Make sure you will be able to scale your business to keep up with increasing demand. When you can afford it, be overstocked rather than under-stocked. In today’s push-button society everybody wants everything yesterday.

3. Social media can work both ways, it drives discussion but not always in the direction you intended. Be ready to deal with negativity, and listen to your customer’s feedback… sometimes that’s more important than the numbers game and driving sales.

4. Take a personal approach to social media. Your overall message should target your key demographic, but your responses should always target the individual.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

We have a lot of very well known customers but of course for their privacy we cannot reveal who they are. No significant PR or media wins and no company partnerships, we have tried to stay quite low key while getting started.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

We almost exclusively used social media to grow our brand. We found Instagram to be the best tool for us, we now have over 180K followers on Instagram! With social media we are able to harness the broader messages surrounding health and wellbeing and tie them into our marketing. We don’t just talk about the product, we talk about everything in the health industry and emphasis our product as a part of a healthy lifestyle, not a ‘just another diet’ per se.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

I would have given us more time to plan things out. If I had anticipated the incredible rate of growth we would be enjoying, I would have embraced it and planned accordingly rather than considering it some sort of fluke that would pass.

What one thing (knowledge, skill, tool, etc.) would have saved you the most headache if you had it when you just got started?

With so many websites around now, it’s really important to be able to give your website an individual look and feel. You should do something to stand out. For example with the ‘Happy Ending’ Shopify app we now add a personal message that says “You’re Amazing!” at the end of checkout. Although it’s a small thing, it’s a nice personal touch which our customers have responded really well to.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Just do it! Believe in yourself and your vision. Everyone has an idea, turn your dreams into plans before somebody else does!

What’s next?

We’re working on lots of innovative new products and the worldwide distribution of our existing products. We’re really excited for what’s to come.

Thinking of giving it a shot yourself? You don’t need to go it alone.

Check out Shopify’s “Build-A-Business” competition forums, which include all of the questions and answers from the 2012 competition that the above 5 companies won. The forums cover almost every topic imaginable.

Also check out the “Build-A-Business” mentor lesson videos featuring Tim Ferriss (that’s me), Daymond John, Eric Ries, and Tina Roth Eisenberg.

What other questions or topics would you like explored? Please let me know in the comments.

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ODDS AND ENDS ELSEWHERE: $10,000 MEMORY CHALLENGE RESULTS

Here’s another example of a success “recipe”…

The biggest memory competition ever held now has a winner! The competition was co-created by me and Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke, then announced on this blog — it challenged “ordinary” people to learn to memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute.

Irina Zayats, a 24 year-old Ukrainian woman, showed just how quickly a brain can be trained. Miss Zayats had no previous experience using memory techniques, but she learned to perform the gold standard of memory skills (memorizing a shuffled deck of cards) in just five days. In doing so, she won $10,000 and, to her surprise, a job offer from Memrise, the learning platform that ran the competition.

Keep in mind that the American record for this feat was, until recently, 1 minute 40 seconds. And those were trained competitors!

So, how did Irina do it? Here’s the full blog post, and an incredible video of her performance is below:

Posted on April 24th, 2013

View the original article here

The Unprocrastination Month, and the Relaunch of the Sea Change Program

Making a change and sticking to it seems to be one of the hardest things for most people to do.

I have the tool to fix that: the Sea Change Program, version 2. It’s leaner, simpler and more effective.

And we’re launching v2 with The Unprocrastination Month for January.

Sea Change v2 is a monthly membership program designed to help you implement and stick to changes, with a different module each month. Modules will be focused on helping you:

Stop procrastinating [January]Eat healthier [February]Meditate [March]Exercise [April]Write daily [May]Simplify your day [June]Get organized [July]Declutter [August]Be grateful [September]Reduce/eliminate debt [October]Read more [November]Let go [December]

This new version of Sea change is streamlined and sleekified, and does one thing: it gives you a very simple plan to make one change a month. Note: You don’t need to do the whole year — it’s a month-to-month subscription, so you can cancel at any time, though your access to the program will stop when you cancel.

Bonus: I’m also including a bonus ebook if you sign up for Sea Change — it’s my new ebook called 52 Changes. See below for more info.

How will the plan work? Each month, you’ll get a new module with:

The Simple Plan. Each module will have a plan with a few simple steps you need to follow during the month to create the new change.Accountability. We’ll be using accountability groups in the forums — it’s a powerful way to stick to a habit.Reminders. You’ll get an email reminder to stick to your habit every 2-3 days. No excuses!Articles. I’ll publish 2-4 articles each month on that month’s module topic.One webinar. There will be one webinar in the middle area of each month, on that month’s module topic. No worries if you can’t make it live, because each webinar will be available for both streaming and downloading in the members area.

And that’s it! A new module each month, simple, focused, with reminders and accountability.

We’ll kick off Sea Change v2 in January with the Unprocrastination Month. It’s aimed at everyone who has difficulty with procrastination, and wants a simple method for procrastinating less — and keeping the procrastination contained in small, enjoyable areas.

I’m a lifelong procrastinator, but I still get big things accomplished. I’ve learned to do this through:

understanding why I procrastinatelearning how to address those issuesusing human nature to work for me instead of against meexperimenting with what works and evolving the most effective method

I’ll show you how to do that in this Unprocrastination Month. Sign up below to get the simple plan, powerful accountability groups, regular email reminders, and articles and a webinar to help you beat procrastination’s butt.

I’ve dropped the Sea Change Program’s price from $26.99 to just $10/month. This is meant to help the program reach more people, and to help more people. By lowering the barrier to change, we’ll eliminate all resistance.

You can subscribe here — it’s a monthly subscription fee of $10 (which you can cancel anytime):

Important: Please make sure to return to Zen Habits after you pay by clicking the “return to seller” link, in order to complete your registration! If you don’t, your registration will not be fully processed.

Note: You don’t need to do the whole year — it’s a month-to-month subscription, so you can cancel at any time, though your access to the program will stop when you cancel.

Also note: Once you’ve registered, be sure to check your email for the confirmation email — it might be in your Bulk or Spam folder if it’s not in your inbox. Please click the confirmation link to confirm your email, so you can receive all the updates for member content, webinars, mini-courses and more. After you confirm your email, you’ll get a welcome email with instructions. You can also go to the Members Home Page for all content. If you didn’t receive a confirmation email, see these instructions.

Q: Do I need a Paypal account to register? A: If you have a credit card, you can register … but for this subscription model, yes, you’ll need to create a free Paypal account. It’s very simple, and only requires a credit card, an email, and the creation of a password.

Q: I never got my confirmation email after registering. Now what? A: If you didn’t receive a confirmation email, see these instructions.

Q: I need help! A: See this page, or email contact@zenhabits.net if you have questions or problems.

The new Sea Change v2 is designed to beat all the obstacles that usually defeat people when they try to make or stick to changes:

The plan is simple and concrete — removes doubt about whether you’re doing it right.The plan is easy — it takes just 5 minutes a day or so, so it won’t disrupt your life and there’s no way to say no.There’s accountability — the accountability groups we’ve set up are designed to keep you doing the habit.There are reminders — you can’t forget to do the new habit because we send out reminders every 2-3 days.There’s help — I’ll be doing a webinar on each month’s topic, and you can ask me questions there, or ask questions of other members on the forum.

There are really no excuses left, if you’re in the program, except the real possibility that you really don’t want to make the change.

As a bonus for signing up for the Sea Change Program, you’ll get my new ebook, 52 Changes, which will be published here on Zen Habits in the next 2-3 days. The book will be free to all Sea Change members, though you can also buy it separately if you don’t sign up for Sea Change. It’s designed to help you make a change a week for a year — which is different than the Sea Change Program but can compliment it. It also contains the 52 changes I recommend the most.

After you sign up, you’ll get an email from me explaining how I’ll send you the bonus ebook.

If you want to work on the exercise habit for January, you can do so in the Sea Change Program (you can do any habit you like, though most people will be following the current month’s topic) … or you can join my self-taught course, Simple Fitness Habit instead.

I’ve put together a panel of fitness experts to help you get fit, and have modules on Forming Habits and The Mindful Diet. I think it’s the best program on forming fitness habits out there. Check it out: Simple Fitness Habit.

View the original article here

The Clutterfat Challenge: Transform Your Living Space in a Month

Look around your living space, and imagine that half of your clutter were gone.

In one month, it will be. You’ll be living a beautiful, simple, clutter-free life.

Along with my friend Courtney Carver, I’ve created the Clutterfat Challenge — we challenge you to get rid of half your clutter in 30 days. Sign up today — it’s free!

It’s exactly like a bodyfat transformation challenge, where you might try to lose bodyfat in a month. But instead of getting rid of bodyfat, you’re getting rid of clutterfat. Trim off that excess clutter, and you’ll have a lovely streamlined living space.

Courtney and I have done this ourselves, and we’ve found incredible benefits:

Life feels better when you live in uncluttered space.Having fewer possessions means easier cleaning and less maintenance, which means more free time.If you sell your possessions, you can make some extra money.If you donate or give away your possessions, you give them life with someone who needs them.You create space to breathe, to create, to contemplate, to read, to relax.Eventually you could move to a smaller space, saving you tons of money.

Sign up for the Clutterfat Challenge, and get started:

Read the Welcome PageRegister for freeUse our clutterfat inventory recommendations and start counting your stuff, room by room.Add your starting clutterfat number and imagesDeclutter by selling, donating and trashing your stuffAdd your final clutterfat number and images at the end of the 30 days

At the end of the challenge, we’ll highlight some of the best transformations.

Update: Courtney has created a Facebook page for those who want to connect with each other during the Clutterfat Challenge.

To help you with the challenge, I’m holding a free live webinar on Thursday (Jan. 5, 2012) at 8 pm EST. I’ll talk about some of the best ways to tackle the challenge — how to tackle your mountains of stuff, how to deal with some of the tougher items, and so on. You’ll also be able to ask me questions live.

Join me for the webinar here: Clutterfat Challenge Webinar (free, and we won’t ask for your email).

Note: The webinar won’t be on this page until 8 pm EST on Thursday (Jan. 5, 2012).

The Clutterfat Challenge is 100% free, but we also offer the paid Clutterfree Course on January 10th to keep you motivated and excited about your journey. Through course materials, homework, live webinars and personal feedback, you’ll have all the tools you need to clear the clutter for good. Register by Saturday, January 7th.

When you register for the Clutterfree course, you’ll also receive the Clutterfree ebook with formats so you can enjoy it digitally anyway you like (Kindle, iPad, iPhone, computer), along with awesome interviews from Clutter-free experts Joshua Becker and Tammy Strobel, and my Clutterfree video Q&A.

View the original article here

Coincidentally, it’s Oral, Head & Neck Cancer Awareness month

We didn’t know this when we scheduled Roger Ebert’s TEDTalk to run today, but it turns out that April is a good month to become aware of oral, head and neck cancers. Around the US, many free screenings have been scheduled this week, and you may still be able to catch one on this calendar. In the UK, a similar awareness event happens every November. You can find more info on screenings throughout the year at the Oral Cancer Foundation website.

View the original article here

Five Steps to Having a Productive Month

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View the original article here

Breast Actives Breast Enhancement Cream (One Month Supply)

Suggested Use: Place a small amount of crème on the fingertips and massage thoroughly on breasts each morning,
or as recommended by your skin care professional.
Caution: If you are pregnant, nursing, or currently taking any medication, consult with a physician prior to use. Do not exceed suggested use. Storage: Store this product in a cool dry place below 30°C (86°F). Keep out of reach of children.
Active Ingredients: Pueraria Mirifica Extract - 10%, Red Clover Extract - .5% & Sepilift® - 1%
Ingredients: Purified water, pueraria mirifica extract, almond oil, avocado oil, rheocare ath, safflower oil, sepilift dphp, borage oil, vitamin e acetate, vitamin a palmitate, wild yam extract, chamomile extract, red clover extract, grapefruit seed extract, damiana extract, saw palmetto extract, fenugreek extract, aloe vera extract, hydrolyzed colagen, avena sativa extract, hyaluronic acid & germaden II.

Price: $49.99

Click here to buy from Amazon

CoralCal Daily Sachets (30 satchets - 5 Foil Packs with 6 sachets in ea) 1 month supply

CoralCal Daily 30 sachets.
This amazing marine coral calcium supplement purifies, alkalizes and mineralizes your beverage without changing the color or taste. Just drop a tea bag into your favorite non-carbonated beverage, and the premium grade coral minerals from Okinawa, Japan are released. These sachets transform ordinary beverages into refreshing and hydrating drinks.
CoralCal Daily uses premium grade, 100% pure, ionized bioavailable coral minerals collected from the fossilized coral granules of Okinawa, Japan. The Japanese government oversees the collection of the coral for the ecological protection of the coral reefs and marine nutrients. You will taste and feel the difference with CoralCal Daily. 5 Foil pkgs with 6 sachets in each (Total 30 Sachets) All foil packets are factory sealed.

Price: $24.95

Click here to buy from Amazon