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July 2, 2020

Don’t ignore your dreams

Here’s an article I found published by Paul Graham in 2012.

It’s short, but sweet. I particularly like the “Don’t ignore your dreams” part.

Quote:

A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — can see myself — making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes.

If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might be: don’t be a cog. The 5 regrets paint a portrait of post-industrial man, who shrinks himself into a shape that fits his circumstances, then turns dutifully till he stops.

The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family, suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of mistake, because you make them by default.

I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands

Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list.

— Read on www.paulgraham.com/todo.html

June 12, 2020

Why personal blogs ≠ branded websites

When I started freelancing in the early 2000s, I used a brand name instead of my own.

I created the brand so I could finally charge friends and family for the web design and graphic work I was doing for free because I was a “real” business.

Over a fifteen-plus-year period, I’ve gone through several naming iterations. When things got stale, or when I had new ideas, I rebranded as something new.

When I started KVNW in 2015, I wanted a company name I could put my entire self into. One identity to rule them all.

I believed having a brand name lent more credibility. I wasn’t a freelancer with a remote team of sub-contractors, I was an agency.

So, I named KVNW using the letters of my name—”Kevin W.”—minus the vowels. As close to a personal brand as you can get without being under my own name.

And yet, it was still outside of me. Not my name, nor my real initials.

It was something else. Something safe.

The difference between personal and founder-centric brand websites

This topic came in response to someone on Twitter saying that a founder-centric website using a brand name vs. a personal name is an “arbitrary” distinction.

And I disagree. So let’s get into it.

For one, personal blogs/websites are inherently tied to a person’s identity. You have a personal tone, view, and perspective in every post and page. You sign each post with your name. Every pixel belongs to you. Signed by you, good or bad. We’re following a person, not a brand.

There’s a sense of permanence in a personal website. You only have one name. You can’t just create a new name for yourself and start a new one. Unless, of course, you take up a moniker like Bono or Bob Dylan, or actually change your name entirely. But that’s not practical for most people. This is your one, given name.

There’s a certain skin in the game with a personal blog. You can’t distance yourself from what you put out. It’s you, your thoughts, your views. It’s one thing for people to criticize a brand. It’s another to criticize a person. It feels more personal. More of your reputation is on the line, even if it only feels that way.

The best personal blogs are multi-faceted. You’re a real person. You aren’t simply the work you do or the industry you belong to. The best personal blogs let you be… personal. You can talk about your life, your family, your outside interests. You can be “you”. And I like that.

Having a separate brand identity feels “safer” to the founder. A brand name looks more “official”. You can pretend you’re a whole team with lots of money and infrastructure. But we all know (or quickly learn) when it’s just a single person behind a brand name. This is a great place to start, though, if you’re not super confident yet (or many other reasons).

A website under your own name puts your reputation on the line. And your reputation is all you have in business. It’s scary to do that. But it also shows commitment. More skin in the game.

It requires (and demonstrates) confidence. You are signing your name to every piece of work or content you put out. That takes guts. And to some degree, a belief in what you’re doing. I respect that. Artists sign their work. Personal websites feel like art in this way.

You can’t sell a personal website. Or at least, it’s really hard to do. To sell a personal website, you would have to translate it into an eponymous brand name or rebrand it entirely so that it is no longer revolving around the person behind it. You’d need to distance the founder from the content. And then, of course, it’s no longer a personal website. It’s different.

The only way to rebrand a personal site is to evolve. Since you can’t sell or rebrand your personal website without extraordinary effort, your only choice is to evolve your voice on your blog/website. And that’s interesting to me. It’s human.

For example, I’ve watched Paul Jarvis over the years go from web designer, to author, to online educator, to maker, across various niches. Evolution.

It might make you look “smaller”, but if that’s who you are, why hide it? I’m a big believer in using your small size to your advantage. I figured out what I do best (marketing strategy) and cut out the sub-contractors and never looked back. I now stand on my own personal reputation. I deliver my own services.

Closing thoughts

The one permanent thing you have is your name.

For that reason, I applaud, commend, and enjoy reading and subscribing to people’s personal blogs/websites. The skin-in-the-game factor mixed with a personal touch creates an experience that brands can’t replicate.

Similar to watching a tight-rope walker cross a chasm without a net or support, the higher table stakes make the experience more engaging.

Yes, there are a lot of great websites out there with identities that are highly synonymous with their founder. Sites like Wait But Why and The Oatmeal. And I like those, too. There’s nothing wrong with them.

And yes, there’s a time and purpose for brand name websites. It depends on your goals and what you want to say.

But to me, there’s a difference. However subtle.

And it’s not arbitrary.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know!

June 2, 2018

Roundup: Focused marketing for general businesses, creating a brand name, what good marketing feels like, and doing the bare minimum

This Week:

How to Do Focused Marketing for a General Business 📹 (video)
How to Create a Great Brand Name 📹 (video)
This Is What Good Marketing Feels Like 🐶(kevin.me)
Aim for the Bare Minimum 🏃‍(kevin.me)

1. How to Do Highly Focused Marketing for a General Business (video) 📹

This video changed how I look at marketing. Yes, it’s that powerful.

Do you focus your marketing on demographic information? You might be doing it wrong. Derek Halpern speaks to a group of fitness professionals about marketing to people based on three core categories of customers:

The Informed
The Afflicted
The Oblivious

This content is a game changer, especially if you have a business that is fairly general (like mine) and can serve a wide range of people and problems.

I recommend watching this video in full. But since it’s long, you can click the gear icon in the bottom right of the video and change the speed to 1.25x or 1.5x to save you some time. That’s what I did.

> Watch full video

2. How to Create a Great Brand Name (video) 📹

This video is considerably shorter than the one mentioned above, but it packs a punch. In this TED talk, Jonathan breaks down all brand names into 7 core types:

Eponymous (names)
Descriptive (what the company does)
Acronymic (acronyms)
Suggestive (words hint at the business attributes or benefits)
Real (dictionary words)
Composite (combinations)
Invented (made up words based on word parts and misspellings)
Associative (reflect imagery or meaning back to a brand)
Non-English (words in other languages)
Abstract (made up with names with no intrinsic meaning

Next time you are creating a brand name for yourself, your product, or your client, give this short video a watch.

> Watch full video

3. This Is What Good Marketing Feels Like 🐶

I wrote a quick article about what my dog reminded me about how good marketing feels. Hint: it feels good 😊

> Read the full article

4. Aim for the Bare Minimum 🏃‍

Here’s another quick article I wrote this week. It’s about creating a daily habit that moves your business forward. I tell a story about how I turned exercise into a habit and apply it to how you can do the same with your marketing efforts.

> Read the full article

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

February 23, 2017

Paying Yourself

Last week, I was invited to be a panelist along with two other entrepreneurs at a local meetup for startups.

Beside me in the hot seats were owners of two very different but successful companies.

One panelist, Avery Swartz, owns a tech/digital marketing training company called Camp Tech. The other guest, Jackie Schwarz, owns a dance program for youths, whereby the students make their own music videos and develop self-confidence along the way.

Avery has, to this day, never paid herself from her training business. Instead, she consults on the side to pay her bills. Her business is growing steadily as she continues to reinvest her earnings back into the company. Smart move.

Jackie is now starting to take some income from her company, but she has already sold multiple franchises of her business and is on pace to sell many more.

I have no doubt that both of these companies will be million-dollar businesses soon if they aren’t already. But what strikes me as interesting is that they put their business’ health before their own personal profits.

Never did they eat the fruits of their labour until (in Jackie’s case) the fruits were plentiful enough to eat AND grow the next crop at the same time.

Let’s continue with the fruit analogy.

When you’re a farmer, you start with a few seeds and perhaps a small plot of land. It’s your job to grow those seeds and nurture them until you have a ready harvest.

The problem I see with many startups is that when they plant the seeds in the beginning, they are already hungry. They have no stockpile or alternative means of survival.

So when the first harvest arrives, they need to eat some; half, most, or any.

And now they have the same amount of seeds that they had in the beginning, or even less. So, they put them back into the ground for another season and hope for a larger harvest next time.

Do you see the problem with this? By eating the fruits of their labour too soon, they never grow their output. They eat the fruit and the seeds, so the next harvest is simply a repeat of the last season, or worse.

When you’re starting a business, the biggest piece of advice I can give you is to:

Have a stockpile so you don’t need to eat your own fruit too early.
Reinvest as much of it as you can for as long as you can.

Does this work in the real world?

Many will know Amazon for the success that they are today. And if you follow the stock markets, you’ll know that for a LONG time people waited for Amazon to turn a significant profit, which they started doing somewhere around early 2015 (but I could be wrong so don’t hold me to that).

Nonetheless, we’re talking about more than a decade with almost no profit and major reinvestment.

They simply kept reinvesting their profits into new business models, new ventures, lowering overhead, etc., until one day they finally decided to turn a real profit.

Former Amazon Employee described their business strategy back in 2013 like this:

To me, a profitless business model is one in which it costs you $2 to make a glass of lemonade but you have to sell it for $1 a glass at your lemonade stand. But if you sell a glass of lemonade for $2 and it only costs you $1 to make it, and you decide business is so great you’re going to build a lemonade stand on every street corner in the world so you can eventually afford to move humanity into outer space or buy a newspaper in your spare time, and that requires you to invest all your profits in buying up some lemon fields and timber to set up lemonade franchises on every street corner, that sounds like many things to me, but it doesn’t sound like a charitable organization.

I was lucky enough back in 2014 to realize this truth.

While I was new to the stock investment game at the time, I knew they couldn’t hold off on taking profits forever without major shareholder upheaval.

I also knew they were investing in an entirely new business model, consisting of cloud services (AWS). I knew that their cloud services were slowly and quietly becoming massive.

You’d pay fractions of a dollar to upload or download gigabytes of data, and big organizations and small alike were using their hosting service to host their entire platforms. This was the future for Amazon, and the retail business was the tip of the iceberg.

So I invested in Amazon at about $330 per stock, and today it’s worth over $850. Not a bad ROI in roughly 2 years.

The moral of the story

The moral of the story is that if you truly want to build a business with a moat around it (lots of capital and a competitive advantage), you need to invest as much as humanly possible back into the business.

Buy the tools you need to grow, invest in the next employee or team member, take that course, go to that conference, spend that money on things that will enable you to sell more of what you sell in the future.

Don’t squeeze the oxygen from your business too early – it doesn’t matter what vanity metrics your take-home salary is at the end of the year. What matters is the long game.

But you need to find a way to survive while the long game plays out, and that’s where your resourcefulness as an entrepreneur comes into play. It shouldn’t be beneath you to have a job or side hustle while you build your early-stage business.

That’s what I did and I wouldn’t do it any other way.

December 8, 2016

Restrictions in Business

You hear so much about growth, scale, rapid execution, and innovation. All of those things can be assets to a company – and are in many cases. They are the reasons we have advanced as humans.

But what about creating restrictions instead? Could they make your business healthier in some cases, or would it simply stunt its development?

A thought experiment…

Imagine:

You can only work 4 hours per day
You can only have 10 clients at a time
You can only have 1 business for the rest of your life
You can only offer 1 service for the rest of your life

If it was possible:

What does that business look like?
What does your life look like?
What does you be doing differently?
Does it allow you to be more creative?
Does your business be more lucrative?
Does you be happier?

In a perfect world, I would own the simplest business: Lucrative, not time-intensive, zero complexity, original, creative.

That’s my business utopia – but is it realistic? Probably not.

But can restrictions actually enhance your focus, creativity, and improve your business?

Probably, yes.

Plan of execution…

In 2017, my plan is to trim my service offering at KVNW to the core essentials. Trim the fat, make it more efficient, systemized, and lean. How will I do this?

My first plan is to create products. Specifically, productized services and information products. Less custom work and more fixed-scope work for people who will benefit the most. I’ll still offer custom solutions, but at a higher premium.

It will mean cutting out certain service offerings, consolidating and simplifying what I offer, saying no to certain opportunities, referring out clients who are no longer a good fit, systemizing my process, making work outputs repeatable and consistent, and focusing on my best clients.

I’m sure there will be reports on my progress on this blog, and if it doesn’t work, then I can always return to the complexity of custom solutions with varying methods of delivery.

What will you do to simplify your business, and what restrictions will you put in place to help your business grow? Leave a comment below.

November 7, 2016

#DigitalStrategist

I’ve been inspired lately by the idea of creating a community. I think about it a lot.

I recently read (well, listened, actually) to a book called The Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter. And while the book wasn’t necessarily life changing, it got me thinking again about how exciting and fun it would be to build a community to both learn from and serve.

“But who do I serve?”, was my first question.

Do I serve an audience of people who resemble my agency clients? Those people are mostly entrepreneurs of service-based businesses. But is that enough of a thread to bring them together? My gut instinct is that it is not. Although I know it could be, in theory. There are far stranger niches, after all.

My clients are typically busy business owners who care just enough about the work I do to make sure it gets business (read: financial) results for them. However, they are not seemlingly the type to join a community of people who could theoretically range from dog walkers to corporate lawyers.

I even went so far as to claim a stake in the sand with the idea by registering a domain called Servicepreneur.com. I register a lot of domains. I’m one of those people who registers a domain with every idea I have. But I’ll probably never use it.

One of the great things about the Internet is that no matter how small your niche is, there’s probably a community for it. The best part is that the smaller your niche, the more traction you’re likely to get with that audience — at least, in theory.

For example, Servicepreneurs are anybody who owns a service-based business. And that accounts for a LOT of people. But their business challenges range so dramatically that it’s hard to put them in the same group.

Even within the realm of service entrepreneurs, I personally only solve one problem for them, which is attracting and retaining the right clients. What do I know about human resources that they don’t?

Aside from that – it’s a big world with a lot of industries and it doesn’t make sense to add a mining consultant with a hair stylist and get them to speak the same language about the problems they are facing.

Finding a niche

So what are some good niches to create a community around?

Some examples are:

Industries
Interests
Professions
Working and Lifestyle
and Relatable Professional & Personal Challenges

Theoretically, the list could go on and on, but this broadly covers the ideas I have right now.

A good friend of mine, Dmitry Kornyukhov, started a community for translators. Rather than creating a forum or chatroom, he went a step further and hacked together a WordPress blogging platform that all members can publish content on themselves. He gave a voice and community to the translation industry.

It’s pretty amazing what he accomplished actually. Especially because he a) had the idea, b) built it himself and c) is completely self-taught.

The community now has roughly 2,000 members and is thriving under his leadership after about one year. He took the membership concept and successfully brought it to his industry.

So what will I start?

I have tons of ideas, and it’s not easy to pick one. Another idea I liked was Remotepreneur, which would be for business owners who do business remotely (online) and/or have a team of remote workers. A distributed workforce as they call it.

I’m a remotepreneur and my team is entirely remote. Although I do see about half of my clients and some of my contractors at least once or twice a year.

Who knows, maybe I will launch that idea one day. But for now it’s another idea on the shelf (with the domain to go with it *wink*).

Enter: #DigitalStrategist

The last idea I have is one that speaks to me directly. I’m a digital strategist. It’s a hard job because it relies on knowing a lot about a broad spectrum of Internet technology and marketing.

To be an effective digital strategist, you need to know about fundamental business principles, like cash flow and creating a break-even analysis, and of course the principles of marketing as a whole.

But you also need to know about how the Internet works; how people use it to make purchase decisions, human psychology, design fundamentals, web development, search engines, digital advertising, copywriting, content creation, email communications, public relations, social media and the list goes on literally forever.

And despite how challenging it is to reign in the complexity of near-unlimited options for achieving business goals through digital channels, there’s no real centralized place for us strategists to chat about ideas and get feedback from one another.

The term “Digital Strategist” has been around for over a decade and has since seen an upward trend consistently over time. This indicates that the role is not only sticking around, but getting more popular.

Also known as digital marketing strategist, digital media strategist, content strategist, social media strategist, “strategist”, UI/UX strategist, web strategist and various other renditions, this role is becoming ever more important as the need for a wide breadth of knowledge increases with every new technology and tactic.

For that reason, I’m investing into creating a Slack community exclusively for self-identified digital strategists (in all of the various forms). It will be called none other than #DigitalStrategist.

Digital strategists are people in an organization who create the roadmap of digital marketing tactics to be used to achieve measurable business results. This person oversees the implementation of the technical and tactical work, but usually does not complete most or all of the tactical work themselves. But of course some do that too.

I don’t know how big the group will become, but significant growth is not the primary focus. The point will be to make it a tight-nit community of people who care about the work they do; people who want to be a member of a community of like-minded professionals with whom to share ideas and reign in the complexity of our jobs together.

Is this you? Shoot me a message on Twitter and we can get you on board.