Month: June 2005

I have the habit of underestimating my abilities and also underestimating the value of the things that I do for others. I recently have been in a very sticky situation with a group of angel investors who want to invest in a business that I’m running. Two years ago, a friend of mine gave me a really basic idea that I have evolved into a totally different product that is no longer related. He said that he wanted a piece of it, and thinking it would go nowhere, we came up with a gentleman’s agreement including a piece of gross sales. Now I need him out to get angel investment. Had I valued what I might do with the idea, I would never have agreed to the terms. I did so thinking that it would never become anything. So, I have lived another life lesson to value what I do.

After rushing through creating a brand new 40 slide presentation in one day and driving 3 hours to present it on someone else’s equipment, I learned a couple things from the experience. First, if you have video clips in there, be prepared to test it, and after you test it, shut down the powerpoint program and restart it. It appears that the video is not always rewound or something which caused it to not play. The other thing is to bring a larger version of the presentation that can be placed on a podium in front of you. When using someone else’s setup, they may put the laptop quite a distance from the microphone forcing a person to do some weird contortions to speak into the microphone and also look at the screen behind you. It is much better to have a printout that is big enough to read from a comfortable distance at the podium. The final lesson is to ensure that the presentation has been timed out and does not have too much content. I knew this one, and just ran out of time. Most of you probably already know this, and it is tips for myself for the future.

I had a question about exclusive territory contracts by a small company trying to get started. Here are some things to think about relating to exclusive sales territories.
1) only do one territory until they have proven themselves.
2) get their sales forecast as well as their marketing expense forecast. Bottom line is that you are after sales, not exposure.
3) get both of these on a monthly schedule so that if they don’t do what they say, you have the option to bow out of the relationship without a lot of hassle. The way life works, you can pretty much count on somebody really awesome coming along a day after you sign a one year exclusive contract. You need options that are easy to take – so plan for obstacles and opportunities up front.

About 3 weeks ago, I put up a blog using b2evolution. There were a few posts and a few people found the site due to it. Unfortunately, it has a feature that provides credit to people who refer visitors to the blog. Within 2 weeks, my site had picked up so much traffic that it filled my space allocation with log records and used 3 times my monthly bandwidth allocation in about a week. I had to shut it down. It was abusive traffic, not the good kind. Apparently certain companies were increasing links for various products by “referring” people to the site. Turns out, it was an automated system that kept calling the site with the right header information. Some of the programs were careful to call it a couple times an hour, and some were calling it every minute to be the most active referring site. Of course search engines would crawl the page often since it was changing every minute, so the product had a link from my site to theirs. With all the blogs on the web, that product probably had tens of thousands of links to the page, bringing them high on the search engine listing. I have since changed to WordPress which does not have the most active feature. I hope I dont have to shut it down again! If you have a site that auto-generates a top referer list, be careful! Make sure that you regularly monitor your traffic. Once they get you, the site must be shut down for over a week to clear it.