Besides having a really cool name, Wedobo is a cool idea for a site.  Think of it as the Groupon model but applied just to the wedding industry.  Every week, there’s a different deal for a wedding vendor or service.  And considering how much weddings can cost these days, the idea behind Wedobo is not a bad idea at all!

This isn’t founder Amanda Sudimack’s first company.  She’s been working in the wedding industry for 12 years and owns her own wedding photography and events company in Chicago called Artisan Events.

Wedobo was one of those ideas that Amanda just couldn’t get out of her head.  After many months of smoothing out the idea and development of the actual site, Amanda launched it barely 8 weeks ago!

What was it about this idea for a site that excited Amanda so much?  I interviewed her to find out.  If you can’t see our video interview above, please click here.  Below is a full transcript of our video interview above.

Transcript

Amanda Sudimack:
My name is Amanda Sudimack and I’m the founder of Wedobo, which is the first original deal site for the wedding industry.  Right now, we’re only in Chicago.  Every week, we profile a different vendor in the wedding industry.

The deals range from 40% to 80% off goods and services in the wedding industry, and we have this community of brides, vendors, and planners, within the site, that are all using the site for different reasons.

Tim Jahn:
How long has it been now?

Amanda Sudimack:
8 weeks.  It’s an infant.

Tim Jahn:
8 weeks…8 weeks?!

Amanda Sudimack:
[Laughs] 8 weeks!  Yeah.

Tim Jahn:
Wow! That’s awesome.  How has it been in the past 8 weeks?

Amanda Sudimack:
It’s been great!  It’s been phenomenal.  It’s been fun to watch it grow, and it’s been slow and steady.  And like any business when you start off, you have to put a lot of energy into it, and having to focus and figure out where we need to put our energy into to build it up.

But, so far so good!  I think it’s great that we’ve already started building a subscriber-ship and we’re seeing sales and all these good things.

Tim Jahn:
What do you love about it?

Amanda Sudimack:
I love that it’s new.  I love the challenge it.  We’re creating a new community, so we’re starting from scratch.  You have to build everything.  I love coming up with ideas and I love seeing them become successful.

I adore the idea and I think it’s great for brides and vendors, and I think it’s great for planners in the industry.  So the challenge is just for me to convince and convert everyone else to think that it’s such a great idea as well!

Tim Jahn:
Have there been any specific mistakes you’ve learned from already?

Amanda Sudimack:
I think putting together the team that you work with is really important.  That’s something we’re constantly working on.  Having people work together, that’s an interesting thing.

It’s happening so fast, we’re making such rapid fire decisions.  I think really, if there’s one thing I wish I could do, it’s slow it down just a little bit.  But you can’t slow down a speeding train.  You have to get really good at making quick fire decisions and making sure those were the right decisions to make as you’re going through so rapidly.

It is sort of like a bullet train going downhill at 50 miles an hour.  [Laughs]

Tim Jahn:
So what are you most excited about for Wedobo?

Amanda Sudimack:
You know, I’m most excited about – well, it’s hard, because I’m trying not to get – we’re still in such the beginning stages, so I’m trying not to get too excited about anything.  I’m trying to focus on what needs to be done because there’s so much that needs to be done.

Tim Jahn:
Is that hard?

Amanda Sudimack:
It is really hard, yeah.  Because I am somebody that – I have ideas and the ideas are constantly like ding, ding, ding!  And I can’t keep up with them sometimes.  Because of everything that’s going on, I’ve had to try to slow my – [laughs] – my ideas down a little bit, so that I can refine what we’ve built.

And obviously what we’ve built, I think everybody – every entrepreneur who does any sort of website.  You have this idea in the beginning but then when you get through development, it’s a scaled back version of what you want to do.

So, I still have all these ideas of where I want to take it but what I’m trying to focus on right now is what we have right now, and refining that, and then piece mealing the additions slowly.

I think that’s probably, going back to your last question, like the biggest thing that I’ve learned is trying not to do everything at once.  Picking one thing, doing it really well, and then adding the next section onto it.  Because I think you, at least for me, I had this idea that, you know, we’ll do this and we’ll do that and we’ll do this! [Laughs]

And then you put it all on paper and it sounds easy, and then when you actually go to development and creating the application, it’s a whole other beast.

Tim Jahn:
So you have a huge background in the wedding industry.  How long have you been in it?

Amanda Sudimack:
12 years.

Tim Jahn:
12 years? Ok.

Amanda Sudimack:
Yeah, ‘98 I started in the wedding industry.

Tim Jahn:
So whether you meant to or not, you’ve been doing research for a long time.

Amanda Sudimack:
Long time, yeah! [Laughs] I know, I had someone else ask me, what kind of research did you do?  Well, I’ve been in the wedding industry for 12 years!  [Laughs]  It’s a good chunk of time.

Tim Jahn:
I was going to say, why choose the wedding industry, and I know you’ve been in it for that long, but there must have been something that said, when you started to come up with the idea, that the wedding industry is the way to try this.

Amanda Sudimack:
For me, it is.  Yeah, for me it is, because I know the industry so well.  It was an easy entry point for me, but knowing the industry as intimately as I do, it allows me, in crafting the deals in and of itself, I’m already intimately aware of all these different vendors and how they work and how they operate.  Margin points, all that good stuff.

When we go to approach a vendor and we’re approaching them and we say, hey let’s do this deal, we have some background.  So for me, it was the logical choice to stay in the wedding industry.

Many of the creative entrepreneurs I’ve chatted with here at Beyond The Pedway have had some pretty ambitious goals.  But when I sat down to chat with Sam Davidson, I realized his company Cool People Care might be the most ambitious I’ve encountered yet.

Sam and his community are out to save the world.  But Sam didn’t exactly set out to do this from birth.  In fact, Sam and his Cool People Care co-founder Stephen Moseley both had jobs in the non-profit sector that they were happy at.  Becoming entrepreneurs wasn’t exactly the plan all along.

So how did Sam find himself working to save the world?

Opportunity knocked, and of course, Sam answered.  He explains more of his unique story in our video interview above.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.  A full transcript of the interview is below.

Transcript:

Tim Jahn:
Why don’t you introduce yourself and give us your elevator pitch for Cool People Care?

Sam Davidson:
I’m Sam Davidson and Cool People Care is designed to connect people who want to make a difference with a chance to do that.  And so, what we offer is daily content on our website that we distribute through email, through RSS feed, and through our social media networks, that allow people to find one idea to make a difference in less than five minutes every single day.

And then while they’re on the site or while we have their attention, we also showcase our various non-profit partners around the country as well as local events.  We really want to be that one stop shop for people looking to take the first step into making a difference in their local community and doing something of impact and importance.

Tim Jahn:
Your site says that you’re more than a website, you’re growing a lifestyle. What does that mean?

Sam Davidson:
Yeah, for us, we think that caring and making a difference isn’t something that you just do for 5 minutes.  That’s our hook, that gets people in the door, that’s step 1.  But it’s really about all the decisions you make that make up your day.  So it’s how you drive, how you commute, it’s the kind of coffee you drink, it’s how you vote, it’s where you shop, and so we want to showcase caring as being made up of all those decisions.

The kind of content that we offer really covers the spectrum of consumer decisions, how you spend your free time, what you watch on TV.  You name it, we’ll talk about it, as long as it can make the world a better place.

Tim Jahn:
A lot of people start companies to make money or to get billions of users, but you’re trying to save the world.  You are a business, I assume, so you do probably have a few people you have to pay, you probably have some lights to keep on.

How do you make money trying to save the world?

Sam Davidson:
We do that a couple of different ways.  One is through advertising on our site.  Obviously, we have a growing audience and people want to reach that audience.  The best fit for us is non-profit brands and any kind of corporate social initiative, and so we showcase those.

We also do a fair bit of consulting and brand strategy for non-profit and other socially responsible organizations.  But what’s really grown in the last 6 months has been our merchandise line.  We’ve always offered our own branded products but this year we started doing more with charities and producing fundraising merchandise.

Right now, for example, we have a Gulf cleanup line of bumper stickers, posters, t-shirts, that when you buy that, part of the purchase price goes to 2 different non-profits – the National Wildlife Federation and Shareholders Alliance of the Gulf of Mexico, which is helping in various ways with the cleanup efforts.

And so, while we do send a lot of that income to charity, we also make a little on that, cover some of our costs, definitely, on that.

Tim Jahn:
How did this all get started? How did you start Cool People Care?

Sam Davidson:
I come out of the non-profit sector and that’s where I’ve worked most and most recently.  Me and my co-founder Stephen Mosely met while working at a non-profit organization where we worked with teenagers and leadership programming.

We again saw the need that I discussed and really saw the opportunity.  So, we just said here’s what we need to do.  And so, being on the inside of the non-profit world really helped us to see how those run, to see how budgets are made, to see how money is raised, to see how volunteers are recruited, to see the struggles, the challenges, the benefits, to really see it from the inside.

We definitely didn’t start something we didn’t know anything about.  I think sometimes entrepreneurs think they can make money somewhere but they don’t understand the industry, they don’t understand the market, and they just see the potential dollars at the end of the rainbow and they chase it.  And there’s frustration, there’s a learning curve, and a lot of them may not make it.

For us, it was obviously we think doing the smart thing and being in a world that we understood well.

Tim Jahn:
I think you’re right about that.  Did you have the idea in mind prior to starting it or was it kind of you were working in the non-profit sector and realized there was something there?

Sam Davidson:
We were working in the sector and saw this need of young people to connect with organizations.  For us, that’s how it really happened, in that kind of chronological order where we didn’t enter the sector just to learn about it.  We were there, had jobs, were happy there, but just saw the opportunity and jumped on it.

Tim Jahn:
You had jobs and you were happy.  That’s interesting.  So many entrepreneurial stories start with people that weren’t happy and needed to find something else.  But you were fine, you didn’t need to start your own thing, right?

Sam Davidson:
No, we didn’t expect it to become that.  When we actually launched the site, we weren’t incorporated as a business and I had no business plan.  We just wanted to create a website that these people will find and connect.

It wasn’t until about 2 weeks in when we had our first check from advertising that we said, ok, we need to setup something so we can cash this.  And then we said we think we have something here that we think can be really good, so we set up everything, wrote the business plan, started dreaming and really strategizing about how to grow it long term.

Tim Jahn:
That’s kind of funny! It’s like, one day, oh crap, we have a business!

Sam Davidson:
Exactly, yeah!  Which is a good problem to have, there are worse problems obviously.  But a lot of what we’ve done over the years is reactive, I guess.  It’s been, oh here’s an opportunity that’s come our way, should we jump on it?

That can be beneficial because we don’t waste a lot of time, money, and resources trying something.  We just sort of say here’s an opportunity.  Our merchandise line started that way.  That was not in the original plan but somebody said, hey, if you guys put your name on a shirt, I’ll buy it, so we said alright, let’s do it.

Since then, we’ve grown it into a line offering 25 shirts over the last 4 years in different shirt styles and products.  It’s something we hope to keep growing long term.

What if you were able to find like minded folks at your local coffee shop, list a free classified ad there, discover new local music, or find deals from local merchants?  What if you had something that was like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Groupon and all combined, but extremely local?

Welcome to your friendly neighborhood social hub.

Jason Goodrich and his wife Gretchen Goodrich are doing just that with their new site, A Space Apart.  They want to help local cafes and coffee shops, and the people that frequent those cafes and coffee shops, to have a place to connect within the physical space.

Jason and Gretchen are the first husband/wife startup duo I’ve interviewed on Beyond The Pedway.  I was really interested in how they balance their everyday lives and family with pursuing a startup.  The story begins back in 2008 when Jason lost his job at the Chicago Tribune.

In fact, I’ll just let Jason and Gretchen take it from here.  Below is the transcript from our video interview above.  If you can’t see the video above, please click here.

Transcript

Jason Goodrich:
I’m Jason Goodrich and I’m the CEO of A Space Apart.

Gretchen Goodrich:
I’m Gretchen Goodrich and I’m Jason’s wife, and I’m also the CFO of A Space Apart.

Tim Jahn:
And the obvious question is, what’s A Space Apart?

Jason Goodrich:
A Space Apart is a communication tool that helps people meet the world around them by using familiar social media platforms, the structure of Twitter and that sort of thing, to allow people to connect within a space, rather than just in cyberspace.  It brings social media down to the local level.

Tim Jahn:
You’re a husband and wife team of a startup.  I think that’s a unique situation.  What’s that like in terms of going from being an employee to an entrepreneur but still having life going on?  What’s it like with life but now entrepreneurial things going on?

Gretchen Goodrich:
Oh, well, we have the business and the 4 year old and the mortgage.  It’s a big juggling act.  I try to be the pre-frontal cortex for all of that and it’s a little challenging some days for sure.  We just have to communicate a lot.  We have to stay in touch with each other a lot.

I try to provide a base for that stuff.  I have more of the organized brain and Jason has more of the visionary brain.  I have the organized, “ok let’s put all the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet and figure out how much this is going to cost!”  You know, that sort of thing.

We compliment each other in that respect.  He’s out there, he’s connecting with people, he’s making things happen.  These meetings, these conferences, and I’m basically keeping the ship running and everybody fed and trying to do some of the behind the scenes support for the business as well.

Tim Jahn:
So after you had the idea for A Space Apart at the Starbucks at North and Wells, what made you actually execute and say let’s do this?

Jason Goodrich:
The reason I was at the Starbucks at North and Wells, or passing by it, was for a networking event.  I had lost my job year, in August of 2008, and I was trying to figure out ways to connect with people, and to get partners and clients and things like that.

It just made a whole heck of a lot of sense to me because this world is about communication and relationships, and that’s the hardest thing to do, especially when you’re coming out of a career in journalism like I was at the Chicago Tribune.

I’d been in journalism my whole life, I didn’t even know what the terms are for the wider world these days!  So I was finding my footing.  And I thought, being a communications guy and thinking about the web as I was at the Tribune as well, trying to target information, make it relevant, contextual, timely.  That really struck a chord with me.  It was kind of a lightning bolt.

Gretchen Goodrich:
I think any time you start up a business, you never know what you’re getting into, especially if it’s the first time that you’re doing it.  We knew we were taking on a big task, but we’ve gotten a lot of really great feedback and made some really wonderful connections with people.

It’s definitely worth it.  It’s a lot of work, but it’s definitely worth it!

Jason Goodrich:
The challenges have been time, concentration, getting expertise.  Trying to find the people to help with it.  It’s been really great, I’ve had a really great experience in meeting a whole new crowd of people in the tech community here, through Jelly Chicago, through Social Dev Camp, being at OfficePort where I was the co-working evangelist.  I started TechThursdays, so that gave me a very wide exposure to some interesting quality people.

So that’s helped me get to this point and now I think we’re ready to take the leap.

Gretchen Goodrich:
I would definitely say that you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re getting into.  You just have to have a passion for it because it’s going to be a lot of work.  And you really need to make sure you’re with the right people.

There have been people come in and kind of go out.  Every person that has passed through has left us with something positive that we’ve built on, whether it’s a lesson where we’ve said we’re not going to go there again or something where we’re saying yes this is what we want and this is what we’re going to build on.

We’re just trying to take it all in and synthesize it and bring out what’s positive.  Bring out what works.  But we’ve definitely made some connections where you go down that road a little bit with that person or that team and you say, oh, maybe that’s not where we want to be.  And I think the biggest lesson from that is, don’t be afraid to let go.

If it’s not working and you can tell that it’s not working early out, don’t be afraid to let go.  Jason’s really good at that.  You always know where you stand with Jason.

Tim Jahn:
You talk about the passion and the yearning to create and do that.  I think that’d be hard if you’d spent so much time, even on a part of the business, if you have to all of a sudden realize this isn’t working, we have to change this.    I think that would be tough.

Have you ever come across anything like that, where the idea, you just realized isn’t going to work?

Gretchen Goodrich:
Yes, we have come across that idea.  And it was one of our core business ideas.  We kind of looked down that road and we saw, oh the technology has already changed, and so we really need to rethink how we’re going to do this.  Maybe reprogram some things.  And boy, that was tough.

Because when you put thousands of dollars into programming it a certain way so that it works with a certain technology and then you realize, oh, it’s all going mobile now, ok!  All of a sudden we need to think further ahead.  That’s rough!

When I first discovered Jason Sadler and his website IWearYourShirt.com, I was amazed.  Jason created a business that lets him get paid to wear a t-shirts – literally!

The way IWearYourShirt.com works is simple: companies pay Jason to wear their t-shirt for one day during the year.  During 2009, the first year Jason started this, companies paid $1 for January 1 and $365 for December 31.  This year, Jason has a buddy helping him, so the prices are doubled ($2 for January 1 and $730 for December 31).  And in 2011, more exciting changes are coming.

But how did Jason come up with this idea?  How is he able to be sold out 8 months in advance and have only a handful of days left to sell for this year?  Why hasn’t anybody been able to duplicate Jason’s success?

I chatted with Jason recently to discover the answers to these questions and also find out what drives him and his creative business.  Below is the transcript from our video interview above.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.

Transcript

Tim Jahn:
You’re definitely the first person I’ve ever heard of that decided to wear a shirt every day and get paid for it.

Jason Sadler:
Well, that’s good, at least I know I’m original.

Tim Jahn:
Absolutely!  So, how did IWearYourShirt.com get started?

Jason Sadler:
It wasn’t like I didn’t have a job.  I co-owned a web design company at the time in 2008 and watched a lot of the marketing and advertising trends, always reading Adage, AdFreak, and other advertising sites. I saw that a lot of people were cutting back on budgets everywhere, all over the place.

I knew there was an opportunity and I saw all the social media stuff.  Twitter was really starting to be talked about, everyone was already on Facebook.  Just being able to create a YouTube video with any camera and a tripod, and anybody could do it.

Really, the t-shirt thing was the afterthought.  It was really just use social media to promote companies and then what avenue could I do that through.

Tim Jahn:
Oh, so you didn’t even have the t-shirt part of it at first?

Jason Sadler:
No, the t-shirt was kind of the ancillary thing, because it was really like “alright, what can I now fit in, what’s the hook?”  What gets everybody in each day and then it’s so easy, because everyone looks at t-shirts, everyone picks t-shirts with brands they like, and sees that stuff.

Tim Jahn:
I imagine at first, when you were telling people about the idea, they might have looked at you kind of funny.  Did you have any doubters or people that were thinking that’s never going to work?

Jason Sadler:
Oh yeah!  The way that I really kicked IWearYourShirt.com off was I emailed my list of like 500 contacts and just said, “Hey everybody, I’m not pitching you to buy a day, I just thought of this creative idea.  I’ve talked to a couple of people about it.  They think it’s creative as well, just give me some feedback.”

And it was really kind of 50/50.  A lot of my contacts were my friends so they were like “Oh, Jason, that sounds cool, go for it”, not knowing exactly where it would go.  And then the other half were people who were like “what?”  You want people to pay you to wear a t-shirt?  You’re not a model…you may be ok on the eyes but you’re not a beautiful blonde girl, so why would people do this?

So there was a lot of doubt and everything else but I think people realized, especially quickly when it got started, just how hard I was willing to work to promote each company each day.  But, the biggest thing was when I hit the front page of Digg for the first time with my New York Times article, which was in December in 2008.  It was 153 all negative comments.  Like every single comment was negative.

And I think that’s just the Internet audience that has the biggest voice.  There are trolls and there’s other people out there.  I’m sure you get negative comments on things every once in a while too.  People are just more negative in nature then they are positive, so I just had to really realize that I needed a thick skin quickly and that people were definitely going to be jealous of somebody that wears a t-shirt for a living on the Internet.

Tim Jahn:
I was going to say, I’m sure after doubting, jealousy was the next emotion you experienced from others.

Jason Sadler:
Yeah, exactly.  I mean, people were very quick to be like “Oh, pssh, I could get paid to do this, if this guy’s just throwing on a t-shirt.”  I was like, yeah, go for it.  No copy cat has been able to keep up even close.

Tim Jahn:
Why is that?  Why can’t someone else just put on a t-shirt or a hat and succeed more than you?  What do you have?

Jason Sadler:
It’s funny, I was asked this question a lot last year.  I didn’t really have an answer.  My answer was just like, “oh well, you know…I don’t know. It’s unique, I was the first.”

It’s my personality.  It’s me.  It’s my outlook on everything, it’s the way I write the blog posts, it’s the way I put my character into my YouTube videos, it’s entertaining an audience every single day, it’s putting in 14 to 16 hours every single day working on all this stuff.

I don’t sit back and just let it run itself.  I know the more I put into it, the more I tweet to people – and not just tweet.  If you’re just throwing out tweets, that’s not doing anything.  But the more I tweet at people and talk to people about things.  Like, today’s shirt is for a cheese company.

I’m just going to search the keywords for cheese on Twitter and I’m going to find some people that are talking about cheddar cheese and ask them about it.  Because that’s the way that I know I’m going to get great response for things.  I know there was a model who popped up who was wearing t-shirts and I think she did it for 4 months and then gave up because no one was buying anything.

It only lasts so long when someone’s just sitting there and looking pretty.  It’s like “oh this is great!” but at the end of the day, it doesn’t do anything, it’s not ever going to go anywhere.

I think that’s really been it – my personality and my drive to keep this thing going.

Tim Jahn:
I feel like, especially people that come out of school and have the entrepreneurial spirit, they think about starting something right away.  But, I think there’s something to be said for, and I want to get your opinion on this, for joining a nine to five or getting a typical office job to figure out what you don’t want.

Is that how it worked out for you?

Jason Sadler:
I didn’t know this at the time, but I look back and I’m so happy that I spent the amount of time that I spent at my 9 to 5.  Maybe I could have spent a year less or something, but you learn so much more from the mistakes that you make and from the bad experiences that you have than you do from good experiences.

You never learn from the “oh, this is fantastic! What did I learn from this?”  Nothing.  It was good.

But when you have a terrible boss, when you have a terrible group that you have to work with, when you have crazy deadlines for projects that shouldn’t need crazy deadlines, when you’re working the day after Christmas in a 9 to 5 job, those are miserable things.

And you’re just like “how can I make sure that I never have these things happen to me again?”  Or at least learn how to deal with these things better.

I think that’s why customer service has been such a huge thing for me because I was treated like crap for quite awhile at that job.  And I think that a lot of people are treated like crap that are watching this interview or that read Beyond The Pedway or that check out IWearYourShirt.com.

You don’t have to be treated like crap.  Especially if you can work really hard and have a creative idea, or at least a creative outlook on things.  You don’t have to be treated like crap at a 9 to 5 job.

I first interviewed CEO Gini Dietrich a little over a year ago on a crisp April morning in her Chicago office.  We had previously been chatting on Twitter about whether or not it was beneficial for small companies to appear small.  Gini was interested in the conversation because her PR company Arment Dietrich was a small company that often competed for big business.

Her company was also gradually transitioning from traditional PR into more communications based practices.  But the biggest transition was yet to come.

In November of 2009, with the economy in a less than ideal state, some of Gini’s employees feared possible layoffs.  This simply wasn’t true, so Gini reassured her employees in an all staff meeting that nobody would be let go.  Unfortunately, over the holidays, a few of Arment Dietrich’s key clients cut back their budgets and Gini had to make a tough decision:  either let some people go and cut costs or keep everyone on staff and worry if they could make payroll next month.

Tough months followed for Gini and Arment Dietrich.  For a long time, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to make payroll the next month.

But today, Gini and her company (and their amazing blog Spin Sucks) are regarded as one of the leading authorities in the PR and communications industries.  Spin Sucks was named PR Blog of the Year this year and Gini has been traveling frequently speaking to all sorts of audiences about digital communications.

So what changed from a year ago until today?

Gini reinvented her business model.  And the reception from her peers, colleagues, clients, and community couldn’t have been more supportive.  Gini’s at the top of her game now and the future is only looking brighter for her and her team.

I wanted to learn from Gini herself how she got to where she is today, how the past year of ups and downs has affected her personally and as a creative entrepreneur, and what she’s learned from the past year.  Below is the transcript from our video interview above.  If you can’t see the video above, please click here to view it.

Transcript

Tim Jahn:
I was here last April.  What’s changed since then in terms of you and Arment Dietrich?

Gini Dietrich:
Since last April…a lot!  Pretty much everything.

In January, we kind of drew a line in the sand and said we don’t do PR anymore.  I wrote the blog post to say we’re transitioning the business model from very traditional PR to more digital communication, lots of marketing, kind of stuff.  I wrote it and then I sat there with my finger on the mouse and was like “I can’t hit publish!”

Tim Jahn:
It was that scary?

Gini Dietrich:
Yeah, it was that scary.  So I did a couple of other things and I went back to it, reread it, and I was like “Nope, still can’t do it!”  I think it took me like three hours to finally hit publish.  And I think if I had known – no, I know if I had known the response that I was going to get before I wrote the blog post, I would have done it a year ago.

The outpouring from the industry was phenomenal.  People were commenting congratulations, this is great, what innovative forward thinking, all this kind of stuff and I was thinking, really??  And it was funny, because as soon as I wrote that, all of a sudden it became clear to clients and prospective clients what we do.

Before, they knew they wanted PR and they knew that they needed PR, but they didn’t really know what that meant.  And as soon as I wrote that blog post, everybody was like, “Oh, I now know what I need!”

Tim Jahn:
You mentioned before it was scary pushing that button.  What other times in the past year has fear played a big role in being an entrepreneur?  I know you had some really hard times where you had to let people go and think twice about hiring.  Were there any other specific times where fear really played a role?

Gini Dietrich:
Honestly, it’s hiring people full time again.  It’s managing the cash flow so that we have enough cash to cover at least 4 payrolls.  I went through 15 months of “am I going to make payroll this week?”  I never want to go through that again so I’ve been piling up cash so I that I don’t have to go through that.  Now it’s, is now the right time to hire another person?  We need to hire another person, is now the right time?  Do we have enough cash?

It’s that whole cash is king, managing the cash flow.  It’s really scary for me.  Because 15 months of not knowing, I don’t want to do that again.  That’s not fun, at all.

Tim Jahn:
How about you personally, over the past year, through those ups and downs?  How has that affected you?

Gini Dietrich:
Last year was really tough.  I had a really hard time personally.  I spent a lot of time wondering what I could have done differently, what I did wrong.  I spent probably way too much time keeping people employed when I really shouldn’t have.  Because I get really attached to my staff.  I spend 12 hours a day with them, 5 days a week, sometimes 6 days a week, so I get really attached.

You know, I think the lesson in that is that you need to cut your ties as soon as you know, instead of hoping, because hope is not a strategy.  So, I had a really hard time last year.

But I read a quote from Confucius that said, and I’m paraphrasing this: “It’s not in that you fail but it’s in how you pick yourself up and go again.”  That really changed my mindset.  And that’s when I started thinking, how do we compete, how do we stay ahead of trends, how do we grow in a recessionary year?  I mean, this isn’t going to be the last time that a recession hits this business.  How do we stay ahead of that so we don’t have to go through what we went through last year?

Tim Jahn:
What’s the biggest lesson where you just right away think, oh, last year taught me that?

Gini Dietrich:
I think last year really taught me to always remain positive, there’s always a way out, and be thinking about the future, not just the here and now.  I’m a Vistage member and one of the things they always say is, what’s going to happen 2 to 3 years from now?  I never really understood that until I went through the recession.

The hotel this was all happening at is a bit of a hike from where I live, so I’d have to factor in some travel time.  The total time would probably come out to between 3 and 4 hours.  Sounded good so far.

And then the bomb dropped.

I am not sure what you charge but we have a $50 budget for this, so let me know if that works.

Of course, my first reaction was: What?! Is that a joke?!

When I explained this seemingly horrible scenario to my wife at dinner last night, she suggested the person may have honestly thought that $50 was a reasonable rate for such work.  Her reasoning was that the person may have figured an hourly rate of $25 or so and with the 2 projected hours, thought that $50 should cover it.

And to tell you the truth, that does make sense.  So in the interest of learning from such a situation, let’s open this one up for discussion.

What are you worth anyway?

Marketing consultant Chris Brogan charges $22,000 a day for his consulting work.  And obviously, his clients are willing to pay that much or Chris wouldn’t charge it.  They’re not paying for 24 hours of his time (or whatever amount he might grant them).  His clients are paying for his knowledge and ability to improve their marketing practices.

I think there’s often a misconception that the rate you pay for a service is for the time involved.  The truth is, it’s for the knowledge.  Somebody is hiring you and your services because you know how to do it better/quicker/awesomer/more efficiently/etc.

It’s the same reason I pay $20-$30 to get my car’s oil changed instead of doing it myself.  I could probably learn how to do it myself, but I choose to let somebody else do it, somebody who’s more knowledgeable than me at doing it.

The oil change guys have every right to charge me $20-$30 if I’m willing to pay it.  They’re providing a service that is worth that much to me because they are more experienced and knowledgeable at changing oil then I am.

As a creative entrepreneur starting your own business, deciding what to charge for your products/services is difficult.  You have to find that perfect combination of what you think your products/services are worth and what your clients are willing to pay for them.

When it comes to shooting video, I feel that service of mine is worth more than $25 an hour, so I charge more than $25 an hour.  But the person emailing me didn’t necessarily know this.

How do you decide how much to charge for your products/services?  What’s some advice you’d give aspiring creative entrepreneurs who are setting their rates/prices for the first time?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

(photo credit)

That seems pretty reasonable to me.  But there are a lot of folks who stand by the idea that the customer is always right.  That you should strive to keep the customer happy at all costs.  That the customer is the one keeping you in business, even if they’re being abusive to your staff and draining your resources.

When you’re a creative entrepreneur starting your business from the ground up, the first inclination is usually to get as many customers as possible.  The more customers you have, the more money you make.

Personally, I think it’s the right customers that are keeping you in business.  Customers that are lowering the morale of your staff and making them feel like crap aren’t keeping you in business.  The effects of their behavior will ripple throughout your company, as employees start becoming demotivated and don’t work to the best of their ability.

Michelle explained that a big reason her company doesn’t deal with abusive customers is because she wants her own staff to feel important and respected as well.  In other words, she doesn’t want to push her own employees’ happiness and well being aside in the name of keeping even the most abusive customers happy.

I couldn’t agree with her more.  If a customer is being verbally abusive to a member of your customer service team, are they really worth the business?

What do you think?  Should you get rid of abusive customers or just suck it up and keep’em happy?

(photo credit)

A few months ago, Jill Felska and Jenn Korducki quit their jobs at a large PR agency in Chicago and started their own social media branding and management company. As Jill explains in the video above, they decided “to enter the grad school of life” and learn the intricacies of business by simply doing it.  If you can’t see the video above, please click here to view it.

At first glance, this idea might seem absolutely crazy. After all, Jill and Jenn are both young. Neither have a business degree. Jenn’s even getting married soon! (congrats again, Jenn!)

But Jill and Jenn are anything but crazy.  These two women are very passionate about learning the ins and outs of business, by doing it.  In addition to running their company, Jill and Jen have a blog called Pursuing Our Passion where they document their story and share the lessons they’re learning along the way with others.

Lots of great nuggets of wisdom in this interview for all you budding creative entrepreneurs out there!  The full transcript of nuggets is below.

Transcript:

Jenn Korducki:
I’m Jenn Korducki and I’m the president and co-founder of POP! Social Media, which is a social media branding and management company.

Jill Felska:
My name is Jill Felska and I am the CEO of POP! Social Media.

Tim Jahn:
So you guys had both been working at the same PR firm for 8 months and then decided it wasn’t for you?

Jenn Korducki:
Yeah, we really appreciated the experience.  We value that and to this day, I will never regret the experience I gained.  It is a very new industry and I don’t think there are any experts in the field.  I don’t necessarily consider myself an expert by any means but I just thought that it was the perfect time to learn what it takes to learn a business.  That’s another thing that we really wanted to focus on – learning to run a business while helping other people.

I was just of the young mindset that it’s worth trying and it’s the time to do it if I’m ever going  to do it.

Jill Felska:
I wanted to know how to run a business and I wanted to enroll myself in the grad school of life, as I like to call it.  I’m a very big learning by doing kind of person.  For me, you leave the security of a big agency where we learned a ton, but there were also a lot of things we weren’t going to get to learn for quite a few years.  Like face to face interaction, doing a lot of the things that we do now on a daily basis, that we would not have seen for years.

While some of the security blanket stuff went away, like you have to buy your own health insurance and you are responsible for your check at the end of two weeks or whatever it is that you set – it’s not going to be written for you.  Some of that went away and there was definitely a little bit of fear.  But it also fueled this energy and this ability to say at the end of the day, I own this.

When I produce something for a client that really makes them happy or creates some kind of a difference, at the end of the day that’s mine, and I can say: I helped make that happen.  To me, that helped push all the other stuff out of the way.  It really made that difference and made me willing to take that risk.

Tim Jahn:
It really changes the perspective on the work you do when it’s your work, and not your bosses work, doesn’t it?

Jill Felska:
Absolutely.  I definitely cared about my clients when I was at a big firm and I’ve always been someone that wants to put everything into what I do, but I think that knowing at the end of the day that you not only have your name on it but that it’s a relationship that you’ve built, you cared about, you believe in the company you’re helping.

It really does change how you experience everything within the entire process.  It really kind of shifts the way everything happens I think.

Tim Jahn:
What did you do?  Did you guys come up with a plan beforehand, like four months into your time there you’d have the idea ready and leave, or did you just wake up one day and think, that’s it?

Jenn Korducki:
It’s a little bit of both I think.  Jill came to me one day and was talking about this book she was reading, about what it takes to start your own business.  It’s called “Making a Living Without a Job” and it got me thinking.  She came to me one day and said, I really think that I would want to run a business one day.  I said, I do too.  She said, what if we do it together and I said, why not explore that?

I don’t think she expected me to say that but it worked.  We set a goal for ourselves that if we felt comfortable a couple of months down the road, we’d leave our jobs and start this.  We did a lot of research in the mean time and then felt more comfortable, ready to do it, and ready to leap when we had to.

Tim Jahn:
What kind of comfortable were you looking for?  Are you talking financially, mentally?

Jenn Korducki:
It was definitely mental and a little bit financial too.  I think that, for us, it was feeling like we would see some success pretty soon after.  Like most companies, you don’t expect overnight success at all, but we wanted to make sure it was feasible and that we were filling a need.

We also wanted to make sure our family and friends were comfortable with it too, because it’s a big step.  Most of all, that we ourselves were comfortable.  I think that’s our definition, more so than the financial, although that certainly did play a role too.

Jill Felska:
Some of the best advice we were given right off the bat was that you can be really good at what you do, and really passionate about what you do, which I think that Jenn and I are, but one of the most important things that entrepreneurs sometimes don’t think about right when they’re getting started is the business of business.

And that is really what Jenn and I have tried to focus on, as well as what we’re doing for clients and what we love is learning those lessons.  I think taxes, figuring out how to setup an S Corp versus an LLC, was a big adventure we went on.  Learning when you pay your taxes each month, how you pay your taxes each month, what you owe, what you don’t owe, what’s tax deductible.

All that stuff is things you may not think about potentially when you start off on your own but it definitely all plays into it.  At the end of the day, I really think that if you can master that as an entrepreneur and understand all those little intricacies that go into it, then all those crazy, passionate, life changing ideas that you have, it gives you a leg up on being able to achieve all of them.  You already kind of have that ground base all the time of that business knowledge.

That is a lot of why Jenn and I got into this to begin with.  So that we could learn and grow that base knowledge.  Neither of us went to business school, we’re both journalism majors.  But we knew that if we really put our nose to the book and found some great mentors, we’d really be able to kind of pick it up along the way.

Tim Jahn:
What’s the biggest lesson been so far in the past three months?

Jenn Korducki:
I think there’s a couple but the one that stands out the most is that you just can’t be everything to everyone.  You really have to find what you’re good at, and realize that can change.  Our business strategy started out completely different than what it is now, but just knowing that there are certain times that you have to say no and put your foot down.

You have to respect yourself, respect your business and really cultivate your brand and what your brand is.  I think that’s been the biggest lesson.  Just knowing that you can’t say yes to every opportunity just because it’s an opportunity.

We don’t live as close to the train station as I had hoped.  We’re only a mile and a half away, but I’ve clocked that to be a 27 minute walk exactly.  And I’m a fast walker.  It’s only a 7-8 minute bike ride.  And I love bike riding.  But even then, I’m often traveling with a backpack full of my laptop, laptop gear, video camera, video gear, etc, which isn’t always conducive to walking or biking.

So my wife often drives me to the train station and picks me up when I return at the end of the day.  Sometimes, I get home late, as the trains don’t run as frequently as the evening wears on.  If I miss the 7:45pm, I have to wait for the 8:45.  If I miss the 8:45, I have to wait for the 9:45.  Who knows what happens if I miss the 9:45.  I’ve been lucky so far.

It’s an hour train ride from the city to my local train station, outside of rush hour express trains.  And the trains have gradually gotten worse at sticking to the schedule over the past few years.

But she still picks me up.  She’s there at the train station, waiting for me, after I’ve left her all day for meetings, interviews, lunches, and the like.

When you’re an entrepreneur, swimming against the flow (or trying to convince others that the flow should be going the other way), you need this kind of support.  Someone to support your good ideas.  Your bad ideas.  Your crazy ideas.  Your crazy-but-hey-wait-that-could-work ideas.

You need someone to bring you back to reality every once in a while.  To remind you of what’s important.  To remind you why you’re you.

Who’s picking you up from the train station?

(photo credit)

I’ve wanted to be a business owner, an entrepreneur since I was little.  It’s really the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do.  Some kids dreamed of being big sports stars, I wanted to be the kid who owned the league.  My dreams have always been big, and therein lies the problem.

Big Ideas are easy.  It’s safe to say most of us have that million dollar idea that if we just got going all of our problems would go away.  If we just created them we’d be on the cover of Fast Company and keynote speaker at the hottest conferences.  So if big ideas are easy, then why aren’t we all working on them?  The problem is that our ideas are often so big, they are impossible to move on right now.  The execution on these ideas is next to impossible in our current state.  It’s not that we don’t want to work on them, it’s that we don’t even know how or where to start…so we freeze.

We don’t have the capacity, the financing, the team, or most importantly the experience or know how to build on these big ideas right now.  So we sit and we wait, and we wait, and nothing happens.  Our ideas are so big and grandiose, that we wait for the perfect time to get moving on them…and that time never comes.

Your big ideas are paralyzing you from moving forward, on anything.

It makes sense.  Our minds are ingrained from the time we are little: go for the gold…go big or go home.  We want and expect everything to be home runs.  We’re a culture now expecting everything from a happy hour to a blog post to be “Epic”.  Idols aren’t built on small ideas, and we’re a culture that only values success to idols.

So what do you do?

Most books or other blog posts will suggest moving on that big idea right now.  They’ll offer some tips on how to get organized and how to write a business plan.  But is this really your problem?  I say no.  Not being organized enough is not your problem.  Not reading enough entrepreneur books or blogs is not your problem.  The problem is that your ideas are so big they paralyze you.  Your ideas are so big that they’ll never be more than ideas.

So I’m asking for something a little different.  But what I’m asking will actually help.  Put your big idea on the back burner.  Defeat the paralysis of your big idea by moving on to something small, and start today.  The only catch I’ll add is just make sure you get paid for it.

Small Ideas:

• Are Achievable:
  These small projects will show others and more importantly prove to yourself that you can start and finish an idea.  Right now this is a lesson that’s important to prove to yourself.  This small step builds confidence for the future, confidence you’ll need for bigger things.

• Are Practice for Bigger Things:
  The lessons we learn from these little projects (they don’t even have to be full scale businesses) teach you many things you had no idea you didn’t know.  You’ll learn how to scale and find resources, how to market products, and how to fail and fix mistakes.  You’ll be amazed at how much you’ll learn from these small ideas or projects.  Consider them practice for your future big businesses.

• Lead to Bigger and Greater Things:
  Small projects at least let people know you’re working on something.  They let people know that you’re more than just smart, that you’re more than an “evangelist”, that you’re a doer.  People want to surround themselves with those who do.  You’ll be amazed at the emails and contacts you’ll receive from people either asking to help or asking for you to team up on something new.  These new relationships you hadn’t had previously will put you in a space you didn’t even realize existed.

• Teach You How To Make Money:
  The most valuable lesson an entrepreneur can learn is how to turn an idea into money.  This is an invaluable lesson you’ll need for anything you want to start, and starting small achieves that quickly.

So keep your big dreams in front of you…but if you want to eventually achieve them, get started by starting small and moving on something today.

Photo credit

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Startup Weekend Chicago.  The basic idea behind Startup Weekend is a bunch of people come together, pitch their ideas for startups, choose the ideas they like and teams around each idea, and they bring the idea to fruition (and often into an actual company) over the course of the weekend.  If you can’t see the video, please click here to see it.

One of the cool people I met on Saturday was Michelle Riggen-Ransom, the co-founder of BatchBlue Software.  Their flagship product BatchBook is a social CRM site designed to keep your contacts centralized and keep you up to date on their various social media activity.

As Michelle and I were chatting, she explained how BatchBlue Software has a customer experience team whose purpose is to provide customers with a great experience and keep them happy.  Below is a transcript of our conversation from the video above.

Transcript:

Michelle Riggen-Ransom:
My name is Michelle Riggen-Ransom and I’m with a company called BatchBlue Software, out of Providence, Rhode Island.  I’m one of the co-founders and also the Communications Director.  We make software products for small businesses.

Tim Jahn:
And what specifically do you make?

Michelle Riggen-Ransom:
Our flagship product is a product called BatchBook and it’s something we call social CRM, which means it’s an online database which allows you to keep track of your contacts and also their social media activity.

Customer experience is hugely important to us so that’s actually our biggest department I think, even more so than tech.

Tim Jahn:
You have a customer experience department?

Michelle Riggen-Ransom:
Yeah.  These are the people that do our onboarding.  All paid accounts come with two hours of free one-on-one consultation.  You setup your session to get your own account setup the way you want to use it.  It’s to help small business owners use this thing that we built because we know that it is a barrier for some folks to get started with something like this and we right away wanted to take that barrier away and out of the equation.

Just say what do you need to do, here’s how you can do it, and then hopefully they’re off and running once they’ve had that training.  We have email support that we do, we’re on Twitter offering support too.  Customer experience is really important to us.

Tim Jahn:
I was going to say, that’s pretty impressive when you have a whole department dedicated to customer experience and all these channels for reaching your customers.

Michelle Riggen-Ransom:
I think that’s actually a challenge for a lot of businesses these days because you’ve got customers calling you, talking about you on Twitter, blogging about you.  If you don’t know these conversations are happening out there then you can’t really respond to them or address the concerns that might be coming up.

Tim Jahn:
From your own experience, what’s the secret to a great customer experience?

Michelle Riggen-Ransom:
I think the most important thing is to just feel listened to.  We’re of the mindset that even if you don’t end up choosing our product for whatever reason, we want you to have a good experience with our company.

Everybody is busy, time is limited for folks, and we recognize that the people that are taking the time to write into us are providing us with feedback whether it’s positive or negative.  We want to treat them with equal respect and equal attention.

I think really just feeling like you’re being listened to by the company and that there are actually people behind the screen when you’re sending a message out there.  I don’t know what the percentages are exactly, but for someone to write into you for whatever reason, you have to think that they represent only a small portion of the folks that are actually experiencing the exact same thing.

That’s why we take the feedback so seriously, because we feel like these are almost like the ambassadors that are stepping forth from your customer base to say, hey, here’s something you might want to think about.  We appreciate that and wouldn’t be in existence if folks didn’t take the time to do that.

Tim Jahn:
So if someone writes to you, decides they don’t want to be a customer, maybe has some feedback, whether it’s positive or negative…you don’t just write them off and say, alright, we’re done with these people, they don’t care about us…

Michelle Riggen-Ransom:
No, actually, if someone deactivates their account, our president writes to them and says we’re sorry to see you go, let us know if you have any feedback.  It’s surprising the amount of people that write into that and let us know.  Often times, it’s just well my company decided to go with another solution, I liked your product, it just didn’t get approved by corporate, or whatever.

Even that is valuable for us, because we don’t think oh no, our product is terrible!  People are actually giving us real reasons about this and helps us figure out what we do need to focus on if someone is saying the same thing.

We would never write someone off.  Even customers that are writing into us fourteen times a week or something.  Those people are a drain on our resources but we always want to try to help them with their issue, regardless.  The only thing we won’t tolerate is if someone is insulting or abusive or something with our customer experience team because, as co-founder of the company, I want to make sure my staff feels important and respected as well.

Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, suggests that companies funded with venture capital have to spend money from day one.

You have two companies, one that’s bootstrapped, one that is self-funded, and one that’s got venture capital money in the bank. The primary difference is this, on day one, a bootstrap company has to make money. On day one, a funded company has to spend money. They have money in the bank to spend. That’s their first task is to spend. To hire, to get a great beautiful office, to do all that stuff. That’s what they have to do, they have to spend money.

I agree with Jason’s thoughts here.  Companies that concentrate on raising venture capital more than anything else have their priorities out of whack.

But what about customer service?  Does a bootstrapped company care more about providing excellent customer service and a great customer experience, because they NEED those customers to survive?  Without the customers, they’d go out of business because they wouldn’t make any money.

One could argue that companies funded with venture capital don’t have to worry so much about customer service or providing great customer experiences because they don’t rely on customers to make money.  They get money from investors.  Investors are the ones these types of companies concentrate most on pleasing.

What do you think?  Do venture capital funded companies care more about pleasing their investors then their customers?  Are bootstrapped companies more likely to provide an excellent customer experience?

I’d love to get your opinion in the comments below!

Photo credit: isforinsects

In this interview, I’m chatting with Gregg and Tonya Tomlinson of fathead design, a Chicago based full service advertising and design agency.  We discuss why design is important and what exactly makes up good design.

Gregg and Tonya started fathead design over a decade ago, and have long lasting relationships with many of their original clients.  They pride themselves on awesome design (that’s why they kept the word design in the company name) and in keeping those relationships with their clients.

Transcript

Gregg Tomlinson:
To me, what makes really good design is reflecting the personality and the goal of your client.  Because at the end of the day, we’re just the vessel that they’re using to get their message across.

Tonya Tomlinson:
Listening is huge.

Gregg Tomlinson:
If you don’t listen to your client, and you don’t convey the message that they want conveyed, then as a designer, you’re not doing your job.

Tonya Tomlinson:
And that means not just designing, that means websites or anything you’re doing.  Even tweeting.  You have to listen.  That is a design, as it were.  You’re conveying exactly what they want, that’s their message, their means – that’s how they make money.  If you’re doing that incorrectly or not representing them, then that’s on you.  We think listening is the best way.

Gregg Tomlinson:
We’re a boutique advertising agency.  We do a lot of print and web design.  We do media planning for clients.  We do a lot of direct email for clients and pretty much take care of any type of advertising that our clients need.

Fathead is what happens when you get into an argument with your significant other about what you’re going to call your company.  We always tell people that if we waited a couple more minutes to name it, we probably wouldn’t be able to advertise it.

Tonya Tomlinson:
We wouldn’t be in the phone book.  We did both work for agencies and we both kind of grew weary of it.  We got tired, started doing freelance, one thing led to another, and here we are.

Gregg Tomlinson:
I got transferred to Chicago while I was working for Leo Burnett in 1995.  While I was working at Leo Burnett, the story of every single agency, I started doing a little bit of freelance work on the side.  I started getting more and more freelance work, to the point where I had to bring Tonya in because she was working for a smaller agency.  We started working on projects together which is something we’d been doing since college.

By 1999, we had enough steady work on the freelance side that we could both leave our jobs.  So she left her steady job in March of 1999.

Tonya Tomlinson:
Two days after we found out we were pregnant, so that’s always fun.

Gregg Tomlinson:
That was a good incentive to make sure you succeed at something!  And then I left Burnett in August of 1999.

The thing that has always driven me about this type of work is keeping the creative in focus.  Which is why we say it on our website and in our bio, and we say it every time we’re meeting with a new client, because we mean it, we feel like it’s gospel:  our name is fathead design and the reason we never took design out of our name is because first and foremost, we’re a design studio.

And we feel like that ethos comes across when you’re talking about website design, print design, designing an entire media campaign, whether it’s social media, radio, television, anything.  You have to approach it from a design standpoint.  What is the client looking to do?  What is their ultimate goal?  And then you handcraft whatever it is you need to to get that accomplished specifically for that client.

Tonya Tomlinson:
We’ve always had a relationship with our clients and over the years, we’ve always maintained doing whatever they want to do and growing with them.  There’s always that relationship there, where we don’t just provide one service and that’s it.  We want to encompass everything they need.  And that’s why we prefer staying small and helping them out and working with them so much.

Gregg Tomlinson:
Worst thing we could possibly do for a client is for them to come to us and say “we’ve got this widget that we want to sell” and we take a picture of that widget and put a reflected drop shadow on a white background in front of them and say “this is the way Apple does it and they make money, so you’re going to make money on it too.”

That’s absolutely the wrong way to approach a design concept.  The way to approach a design concept is actually take the time to speak to your customer and to learn about what they want.  What their needs are.  Their customers.  Who’s buying their product?  Why are they buying their product?  How are they using that product?  What kind of research did they do to get that product to where it is today?  And how do we get that message across to their potential client?

Keep your mind open.  Listen to your clients.  Don’t go into any project with a preconceived set of notions.  And don’t ever try to outguess your client without getting their opinion or their viewpoint first.

I see it all the time, when creatives or agencies or even freelancers will work with someone, and you can tell just by looking at their work that they already had this idea going into the project and didn’t really listen to the client.

Tonya Tomlinson:
And don’t put your eggs in one basket, because things can turn on a dime…and they will.

Intro

In this episode, I’m chatting with Cyrus Massoumi, co-founder and CEO of ZocDoc, a website that allows patients to find and book doctors instantly online . If you can’t see the video, please click here.

ZocDoc just expanded their services into the Chicago market this past Tuesday. I’m amazed at the passion and dedication Cyrus shows at revolutionizing one important part of an extremely complicated industry, with such a simple solution. You go online, find a time that works for you, and BOOM – you’re booked!

Since they just opened up shop here in Chicago, they don’t have a ton of practices outside the city available yet, but Cyrus said they will be expanding outward as they settle in here.

The music featured during the intro and credits of this episode is a song called “Jordan River” from local Chicago band Evan Holmes with Exit Ghost.

There are no “oh duh” ideas out there

Here’s the transcript of my interview with Cyrus.

Cyrus Massoumi:
I’m Cyrus Massoumi, the CEO and co-founder of ZocDoc.

Tim Jahn:
And what is ZocDoc?

Cyrus Massoumi:
ZocDoc is an online way for patients to find doctors and book appointments online, similar to booking a restaurant reservation on OpenTable or a flight on Expedia or Orbitz. You can come to ZocDoc, find a doctor who accepts your insurance and book an appointment instantly online.

ZocDoc came about from my own personal need. Three or four years ago, I was on a flight, traveling a lot, and had a really bad sinus infection. My plane landed back in New York and I ruptured my ear drum. It was a really painful process and I really wanted to find a doctor that could see me the next day.

I come from a family of doctors so I wanted to find an ENT specialist. I knew that’s who I had to go to and I went to my insurance company’s website at the time. I literally started going down a list of doctors. I wasn’t from New York, so I started calling down the list of doctors and had a number of problems. I had no idea who was good, the phone numbers wouldn’t work, one doctor I called had retired a couple of years prior.

It was such a difficult process and I thought to myself, everything else in my life is so efficient and technology has enabled me to make so much of my life so much easier. I can book things 24 hours a day and I don’t have to worry about calling between 9 and 5 – why can’t I do this for healthcare? I approached one of my co-founders, Oliver, who is a physician, and I said Oliver – look, why doesn’t this exist in healthcare?

He said you’re right, we should quit our jobs and start this company.

Tim Jahn:
When Oliver said alright, let’s quit our jobs and do this, what did you say?

Cyrus Massoumi:
Well, it was a huge risk, because we had this established path ahead of us. We knew that if we stayed there, we were doing well, we’d have a good career in front of us and everything was set. I thought the rest of my life was planned out.

All of a sudden, I moved to a place where it wasn’t planned out and there was all this unknown and all this risk. But it was something that we just couldn’t get away from. The idea was so compelling and it was something I felt so many people needed. The more people we talked to, the more people that were like, I would absolutely love to book my doctor this way.

I’ve always known I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Incidentally, I come from a family of doctors. Everyone in my family for generations, they’re doctors in every direction, and for some reason, I just wasn’t really good at science.

That was it, I knew that I was going to go into something else. I remember, one day when I was a small child, one of my father’s friends came in. I found this guy to be really endearing and he was such a nice, charismatic guy and I asked him what he did. He said he was a business man and I said, that’s it – I’m going to be a business man!

I had no idea what he was talking about but I think , I’ve known that I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’ve started companies and failed in the past. When I was in my early 20s, I started an internet company that sold software to ecommmerce companies. When all the ecommerce companies went away, so did all my customers. It was a really interesting experience.

I knew that I was going to get back to being an entrepreneur but I had to sort of find the right idea. I think that’s one of the things that was really important to me, because you give so much of yourself to being an entrepreneur – you’re all in. And if you’re going to be all in, you need to be so passionate about it. It’s really not about financial return but it’s really about building something that never existed before.

Tim Jahn:
So it’s been two and a half years, you’re here now in Chicago, expanding into your fourth market. What’s the biggest challenge been since that initial day when you got off that plane?

Cyrus Massoumi:
It’s interesting. It’s something I talked a bit about earlier, which is staying focused. As a company, we now do hundreds of thousands of interactions with patients on a monthly basis. There’s so much input that we’re getting and everyone wants us to do so many different things. We’ve gotten sovereign governments who’ve called us and asked us to expand internationally. I think to some extent, what’s made us successful thus far as a company has been having great people, staying focused, and just working hard.

That seems like common sense – of course you want great people, to stay focused, and you want to work hard. The challenge is that it’s not that easy. For example, we could be a much bigger company today if we were able to hire more. And we just can’t find enough great people to fill all the open jobs that we have at the company. And we have a really high bar.

Everyone that works at ZocDoc is great, really smart, really driven, they really believe in our mission of how we’re going to positively affect healthcare. It’s really difficult to find a lot of those people. But we’ve maintained our hiring standards and I think it’s been to the benefit of the company. Similarly, staying focused. We have a lot of very large hospital clients right now who love the product and want us to do this and that and all these different things.

I think that from a technology company perspective, that’s great, that’s how you grow. Sometimes, if you’re doing too much, what I call customized work for each individual client, you end up with a product that isn’t usable, isn’t scalable. And you lose the beauty of having one product that works everywhere.

I think that’s been a big challenge, because people have offered us quite attractive contracts to change ZocDoc in this way and do it this way. At the end of the day, it’s been our laser focus on this one problem that we’re solving. We want to do this in more places, better than everyone else, and right now, the focus is to do this in more places.

We have people voting in every city across the country. We still have the voting up on our website and we’re collecting feedback on which cities should be launched next on ZocDoc. Until ZocDoc is available nationwide, we can’t lost that focus, because that’s what made us successful thus far:

Tim Jahn:
Looking back, what’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone who’s back where you were on day one?

Cyrus Massoumi:
One of the things we were fortunate to have done is be persistent. In the early days, when we came up with the idea, patients would always tell us it was a great idea. Quite frankly, we heard a lot of feedback from doctors in the early days saying that there was no way patients would book on this, they wouldn’t want to use it, etc.

Even from, quite frankly, people in my own family. I come from a family of doctors and they were a little bit skeptical. I think my father, up until about a year ago, he was on an elevator ride in San Francisco for an orthopedics convention. He’s an orthopedic surgeon and he heard a doctor comment that his wife loved ZocDoc. My dad got so excited that someone had actually heard of his son’s company.

I think that you just need to be persistent. And if you have conviction and you’re being smart about the decisions that you’re making, no one can really – there’s no “oh duh” ideas out there. You actually have to go in and prove it. You have to prove that people would do this, you have to prove that you can get doctors to use this, you have to prove and you have to believe.

In the early days of ZocDoc, it was really tough because not a lot of people believed in us. We had to believe in ourselves. And I think that you see this as an entrepreneur every day and in the early days you don’t have enough experience with it. Literally, you have one road block after another. And you just have to keep on being persistent and find a way around that road block.

And literally, as long as you just keep your head down and you’re persistent, if you have a bad day, you sleep it off, you wake up and it’s a brand new day. You approach the problem in a fresh new way, you tweak something and you just keep going.

Intro

In this episode, I’m chatting with Scott Belsky, founder of Behance, a New York based company that provides products and services seeking to organize the creative world and help make ideas happen.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.  The music featured during the intro and credits of this episode is a song called “Sugar Mama” from local Chicago band The Dirty Rooks.

A special edition episode from Big Omaha

I had the chance to interview Scott at the Big Omaha conference in Omaha, Nebraska back in May.  The conference is all about highlighting entrepreneurs and the amazing work they’re doing in Omaha and the surrounding Midwest regions.

I highly recommend this conference and consider it the best conference I’ve been to all year.  The speakers provided tons of value in their presentations and the event was intimate enough (they cap attendance at 500 people) to allow you to build relationships with fellow entrepreneurs and truly connect with people.

The good stuff (aka, the transcript)

Scott Belsky:
My name is Scott Belsky and I started a business with a great, passionate group of people called Behance.  We’re on a mission to organize the creative world.

Tim Jahn:
That’s a huge undertaking in my eyes.  How do you go about organizing the creative world?

Scott Belsky:
These are the people who make our lives interesting.  These are the illustrators, designers, graphic designers, information designers, architects, photographers, creative directors, the people who really develop everything around us that enthuses us and inspires us.

Yet this creativity is a double edged sword.  Often times it creates this idea to idea syndrome and a lack of feedback exchange and leadership issues and a lot of organizational challenges that get in the way of actually making ideas happen.

Tim Jahn:
How did you get into that?  What made you all of a sudden decide to organize the creative world?

Scott Belsky:
Frustration.  Frustration with the fact that most of the people and teams that I cam across exploring this idea never made their ideas happen.  How many people had started writing something and never finished?  Or had an idea and started developing a business plan that just became stagnant and forgotten?  How many people constantly felt inhibited by the careers they had, from really doing what they wanted to do with their lives, because they had nowhere to start?

This was frustrating to see because we all pay the price.  The ideas that don’t happen hurt all of us.  When there are solutions to some of the world’s greatest problems or fascinating ideas that could become great entertainment, it’s just a silly loss.

Tim Jahn:
How important is it to you, the idea of never stop learning, challenge yourself every day, continue on new things?

Scott Belsky:
I think it keeps you fresh and grounded, knowing there’s so much more you need to learn.  I think having a learning environment that you work in is a really good cultural cornerstone.  Everyone’s willing to learn from each other.  And when something goes wrong, when you face adversity, your second question is what am I going to learn from this.  Where do I start listening and hearing to figure out the lesson learned in this horrible experience I’m going through.

Tim Jahn:
You found a problem, frustration, and acted upon it.  What advice would you give someone in a similar situation?

Scott Belsky:
Create little silly ways of holding yourself accountable to making progress.  I don’t think it’s some grand thing, you wake up one morning and decide to change your life.  It happens in steps.

It really starts with doing projects or taking on new jobs that inch you closer to what interests you most.  If you can just make sure that everything you’re doing is a step closer to that rather than further away, you’re doing what you need to do.  Address that frustration at some point and really do something with the idea that you have.

And then at some point, it means starting to take some risks and put some skin in the game.  When I was first starting Behance, I still had a full time job.  I realized design had a central goal in what I wanted to do and I realized that I needed to explore this.  But of course, the day to day regimen was always getting in the way of doing something.

I ended up finding Matias Corea, who now is our chief designer and my partner in the business.  He also had a full time job and I literally told him, I’ll pay you to work with me for a few months every night after work on this idea.  I committed some capital and in my mind, mentally, that was a real skin in the game moment.  I was like, wow, I’m taking this to the next level now.

I’m going to lose money and waste a lot of time of my own and someone else if I don’t stay accountable.  Knowing I had this meeting with him every night at nine o’clock made me do work to get ready for it.  I think people have to figure out whatever their mechanisms are.  How to hold themselves accountable to take steps forward.

Intro

In this episode, I’m chatting with Melody McCloskey, founder of StyleSeat, a San Francisco based company that provides online tools for beauty, health, and wellness professionals to build and grow their businesses.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.  The music featured during the intro and credits of this episode is a song called “Pi Is Exactly Three” from local Chicago band Coltrane Motion.

A special edition episode from Big Omaha

I met Melody the first night of the Big Omaha conference at the opening party.  We had a great, somewhat intense debate about startups, where you should go to start one, and the differences in what Chicago and San Francisco has to offer startups.

This episode is part of a series of special edition interviews I shot while at Big Omaha.  The conference is all about highlighting entrepreneurs and the amazing work they’re doing in Omaha and the surrounding Midwest regions.

I highly recommend this conference and consider it the best conference I’ve been to all year.  The speakers provided tons of value in their presentations and the event was intimate enough (they cap attendance at 500 people) to allow you to build relationships with fellow entrepreneurs and truly connect with people.

The good stuff (aka, the transcript)

Melody McCloskey:
I’m Melody McCloskey and I started a company called StyleSeat.  We want to empower beauty, health, and wellness professionals like estheticians, massage therapists, and personal trainers to really build their business.

It was a vertical that interested me because I love those types of people.  Everyone has a hair stylist and many women have an esthetician.  I love them as a customer base and working with them.  They’re creatives, expressive, fun, really good at what they do – they’re artists.

And that was really appealing for me, more appealing than building financial software for example.  Working with people that I respect and I’m excited about, who are entrepreneurs building their business, is really fantastic and something I really wanted to do.

Having your own company is very, very exciting.  Passion definitely drives everything I do.  My co-founder is also very, very passionate – we’re both super insane people that just work all the time and are really excited about it.  I’m just one of many crazy people in this industry.

Tim Jahn:
There are many, many crazy people.

Melody McCloskey:
Yeah, seriously, nerds!  We’re all nerds.  Really excited nerds!

Tim Jahn:
The best kind.  What drives that sort of dedication?

Melody McCloskey:
What makes me crazy? I dunno, how do you answer that?  I’ve never really been a very engaged person my whole life.  In school, I always tested very well but didn’t really care enough about curriculum or studying within the confines.  I was always reading all these other books that weren’t the books I was supposed to be reading.  I was very disengaged, a little bit bored, just not very inspired.  I hadn’t found that thing.

It took me a while to find something I was really good at, because I just was really bored with everything.  And it’s my fault for not engaging, for not finding that.  But when I did find that, it was like YES!  Software!  I get it, I love it, I love the building process.  All of a sudden a light bulb turned on.

I suddenly became this really happy person, really positive person, really excited, motivating our team all the time, talking about what we’re doing to everyone, getting really excited about customers, hanging out with them all the time, getting them excited about what we’re working on.  It was like finding that one thing I loved pulled it out of me.  It was finding that fit that did it.

Finding that one thing you’re really really passionate about changes everything.  I was mediocore at a lot of jobs until I started my own company and I don’t think I’m terrible at it.  I fail all the time, as do we all.  And there’s so much room for improvement.  I’m so at the beginning.

But it’s definitely something I’m better at then any other thing.  That is exciting and empowering.

When you think about starting a company, it’s a totally impossible thing to think about.  I was that person where I had the idea and I knew what I wanted to build and I knew the business potential and I did all the research.  But I hadn’t taken that initial first step.  If you think, well I’m going to start a company, that’s just insane.

But when you say, ok, I’m going to incorporate.  That’s easy, that takes a week.  You find a lawyer, write a check, and you’re incorporated.  Then it was like, ok, I’m going to get a designer.  I focused all my time and energy on getting a designer and I got one.  Then it was like, ok, I need an engineer.  So I focused all my time and energy on getting an engineer.

For me, the way the process came together was that I thought about the whole process as one go and I knew the steps I needed to take and focused on each step specifically.  Then it wasn’t hard.

A company is organic, it’s a living thing.  You have an idea and it’s this little seed of something.  Then it’s kind of this bug and you remember and think about it again and again.  You’re going to sleep and you’re planning this idea a little more and hashing it around.  You’re throwing it around, showing it to friends, building upon it, and the idea gets bigger and bigger.

Sometimes that turns into something, sometimes it doesn’t.  Great ideas aren’t a dime a dozen but they’re not uncommon.  Many people have hundreds or thousands of great ideas that could all be great companies.  It’s really about the execution.  When you find something that you realize, I could actually spend five years or ten years of my life doing this, that’s when it’s different.

Intro

In this episode, I’m chatting with David Hauser, co-founder of Grasshopper, a Boston based company that provides a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.  The music featured during the intro and credits of this episode is a song called “An Open Letter To Wherever You’re From” from local Chicago band Kid, You’ll Move Mountains.

A special edition episode from Big Omaha

I caught up with David at the Big Omaha conference, which happened May 13-15, 2010 in Omaha, Nebraska.  This episode is part of a series of special edition interviews I shot while at Big Omaha.  The conference is all about highlighting entrepreneurs and the amazing work they’re doing in Omaha and the surrounding Midwest regions.

I highly recommend this conference and consider it the best conference I’ve been to all year.  The speakers provided tons of value in their presentations and the event was intimate enough (they cap attendance at 500 people) to allow you to build relationships with fellow entrepreneurs and truly connect with people.

The good stuff (aka, the transcript)

David Hauser:
My name is David Hauser and my company is called Grasshopper.  I started the company six years and a half years ago with my business partner and we’ve grown it to about fifty people now.  I love doing it every day and we have a great time.

Tim Jahn:
What is Grasshopper exactly?

David Hauser:
Our core product of Grasshopper is a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs.  Press one for sales, two for support, on hold music, transferring, all that stuff you would normally get with a PBX but with no hardware or software needed.  Reasonably priced so any entrepreneur can afford it and have that professional image no matter what.

Tim Jahn:
What made you start that?

David Hauser:
It was a really simple problem; we didn’t have a crazy business plan.  Of course, we created a business plan after the fact.  Both my business partner and I had the need for it in past companies and it didn’t exist.  We didn’t want to answer our dorm phone or our house phone or cell phone and we decided we needed a better way.  So we created it.

We built Grasshopper to fix our own problem and luckily we found that a lot of other people have the same problem.  We’ve now served over 80,000 entrepreneurs since we started and continue to grow.

Finding what you want to do is not that hard.  You need to find what you’re passionate about.  For us, it happened to be a specific thing we wanted to do.  At the end of the day, we knew we wanted to serve entrepreneurs because it’s a community we love and a community we love being involved in, so this was a way for us to do that.

In terms of getting started, we raised no money, had nothing when we started.  We had enough money to buy the few servers we needed to get started and literally piece it together.  There’s a lot of challenges in doing that, like talking to vendors, trying to get them to buy into our business plan when we had no cash to give them.  Telling them we need to buy lots of big Oracle software and stuff but we don’t have any cash right now, so you have to trust us and buy into what we’re doing.

So we had to find some great partners who really understood where we were going and what we wanted to do, and we got them to buy in.

Tim Jahn:
That’s impressive, the whole idea of a trust based relationship.  I imagine that’s tough these days.

David Hauser:
I think it’s the same as selling your business plan to anyone else, like a partner or the first employee.  It’s the same exact pitch: do you believe in what we’re doing and do you buy in?  For a vendor, that partnership could be very easy as their risk is very low.  They’re financing something over 3 or 6 months.  Since their risk is very low, they’re willing to buy in, but we had to go through a lot of vendors before we found the right people.

Tim Jahn:
What did you do before Grasshopper?

David Hauser:
I started a few other companies, so I’ve always had the entrepreneurial spirit.  I started a company when I was in high school and continued from there, doing everything in between.  From promoting parties in New York to selling bus trips for skiing and stuff.  It’s always just been what I did.  To make money, I figured out ways to do it.

The entrepreneurial spirit has been in my family.  My dad and my grandfather both ran their own companies, so I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.  I think the good thing is my dad never encouraged me to go into his business.  He actually didn’t want me anywhere near his business.  He didn’t think the business would survive very long and it wasn’t a growing industry, so he said I should go do my own thing.  He taught me that spirit of being your own boss and creating something and a community of really employees.

Tim Jahn:
I like what you said.  You needed to make money so you found ways to do it.

David Hauser:
That’s where entrepreneurs come from.  It’s not about going to school.  You need to do something you love and make money at it.  The people that say you just need to do something you love, that’s silly.  You have to make money.  It’s not about making tons of money, it’s about making money so you can live a lifestyle you want to live while doing something you love.  And each person’s lifestyle is different.

The advice I like to give young entrepreneurs is go out and do something.  It doesn’t matter if the idea is right or wrong, just try something.  You might fail at it, but if you tried it, you’re going to learn something.  And maybe the best thing you learn is what you actually want to do.

When we started, we thought we were going to be the biggest telecom or whatever, but those things don’t matter.  What we discovered is that we truly love serving entrepreneurs.  And that’s where the company has gone over time.  If we hadn’t started, we’d still be sitting there talking about it.  My advice is always go out there and do something.  Try it, maybe you do well, maybe you don’t, but you’re going to learn.

Tim Jahn:
You talked a bit about company culture in your Big Omaha presentation.  How important is that to you, the idea of having a culture worth talking about?

David Hauser:
I think culture worth talking about is important and I think what’s even more important is culture you want to be in.  As a founder, you want to go to work every day and enjoy the people you’re with, and the environment in.  And not dread that.

I think a lot of people that come from large companies just hate that environment.  I never wanted to create that.  I wanted to create an environment that is fun, energizing, goal oriented.  It’s not all about fun, because that’s not really interesting.  It’s about working hard and having fun.  Having a culture that really promotes that has been a passion of mine for the past three years.  And being able to talk about our culture proudly and say this is what we’re about.

Intro

In this episode, I’m chatting with Dennis Crowley, CEO of foursquare, a New York based startup that builds mobile products that help make cities easier to use and the world more interesting to explore.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.  The music featured during the intro and credits of this episode is a song called “Dye Your Hair Red” from local Chicago band REGO.

A special edition episode from Big Omaha

I caught up with Dennis at the Big Omaha conference, which happened May 13-15, 2010 in Omaha, Nebraska.  This episode is part of a series of special edition interviews I shot while at Big Omaha.  The conference is all about highlighting entrepreneurs and the amazing work they’re doing in Omaha and the surrounding Midwest regions.

I highly recommend this conference and consider it the best conference I’ve been to all year.  The speakers provided tons of value in their presentations and the event was intimate enough (they cap attendance at 500 people) to allow you to build relationships with fellow entrepreneurs and truly connect with people.

The good stuff (aka, the transcript)

Dennis:
My name is Dennis Crowley.  I am the co-founder of foursquare, a New York based startup that builds mobile products that help make cities easier to use and the world more interesting to explore.

I’ve been working in the startup space for awhile.  I’ve worked for a couple of other startups that did mobile stuff that overlapped and tried to make cities easier to navigate.  I also used to run a project called Dodgeball which was one of the very early mobile social services.  We brought that to Google in 2005 and worked on it for a couple of years.

The project just kind of went away and Google ended up turning it off.  After Google turned it off, we decided that we would build something different, maybe a little smarter, something that would work better on iPhones and Android devices.

I think some of the motivations behind foursquare are kind of selfish.  We build things primarily that make it easier for us to meet up with our friends.  How do you take a Wednesday when you don’t have any plans and suddenly you have something to do?  How do you take a lousy party on Saturday night and create software that surfaces up the next best thing to do?

We’re taking baby steps to solve some of those problems.  Like social coordination and what to do, what’s interesting in Omaha.  This is my first time here in Omaha.  I’m a little disappointed that foursquare should be better at telling me the things to do.  We don’t do that yet but we’re working on it.  So I’m hoping the next time I come to visit Chicago or San Francisco, foursquare is actively prescribing experiences for me to seek out.

Tim:
What one piece of advice would you give to someone, like yourself, who has that drive to create and make change?  What one piece of advice would you give to succeed in that?

Dennis:
I have to give this talk tomorrow and I’m kind of struggling with what the talk should be about because everyone here is a fantastic speaker.  I think the whole theme of the talk will be about the past 10 years and how I’ve been having people telling me the things I’m working on are bad ideas and not interesting and no one’s going to use them.  If you believe it enough yourself, you just keep going for it.

It’s really productive to get feedback from people, except when the feedback is “this is a stupid idea.”  If you’re really passionate about it and you feel like there’s a place in the world for the stuff you’re thinking about, you should just try it and see what comes out of it.

That’s really the way I think about it.  I was building stuff in 2000 and people thought it was dumb.  I kept adding to it, we brought it to Google, they shut it down.  We thought maybe that means it’s a bad idea but we still wanted to do it…we’re just constantly hammering away at things we personally find interesting.  We find that when we do that, other people usually find the same stuff interesting.

Someone was asking the panel “have you experienced any failure in your career?”  My whole career has been one failure after the next.  The failure is when you pivot and you start working on something else.  When the Dodgeball stuff didn’t work out at Google, I personally took it as a failure.  But now, with two or three years hindsight, I’m thinking we learned a lot from that experience, we learned what was wrong with Dodgeball and tried to fix it.  We’re still passionate about the same ideas and we’re just going at it and just taking a second take at it.

It’s like when you write a paper in college and the first draft sucks, the second draft is better, and the third draft is the one you end up turning.  Instead of doing that over the course of a weekend, I spent ten years writing the same paper.

Tim:
Is foursquare the one you’re turning in, is it another draft, or are you just playing it by ear?

Dennis:
I don’t know, I’m pretty happy with the way this one’s going.  But there’s so much more that we want to do with it.  It’s hard to get to all the things we’re really excited about.  There’s just two many of them.  Ask me again in a year or so.  I want to take everything that I’ve ever dreamed of building, ten years of dreams and product ideas, and cram them into foursquare.

There are lots of problems to be solved.  You have all these people, places, things to do, and I’m constantly thinking of ways to make cities more efficient.  When you think about all the data feeds and maps and things we can do on mobile phones now, there’s this huge opportunity to make things that really change the way that people explore and experience the world.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Joe Reynolds and Ryan Kunkel from Red Frog Events, a Chicago based event planning company that seeks to provide the most fun people can have through their two main events, Warrior Dash and Great Urban Race.

If you can’t see the video, please click here. The music featured during the intro and credits of this episode is a song called “Sound It Out” from local Chicago band The Locals.

Here’s a transcript of my chat with Joe and Ryan from Red Frog Events:

Ryan:
Red Frog Events is an event planning company.  We have two creative, unique running events all across the United States.  One is called Warrior Dash and is an intense obstacle course that ends with a big festival, with music, beer, food, everything that goes along with that.

We also have our other running series the Great Urban Race which is an urban scavenger hunt type event similar to the television show “The Amazing Race”.

Our goal is to provide people with the most fun they’ve ever had.  People are seeking staycations or something to do when their friends come to town or with their significant others and dinner and a movie gets old.  People want a little more pep in their step and that’s what we provide.

Joe:
I was watching “The Amazing Race” in the spring of 2007.  I was inspired by the show and thought I could create something for the masses, something like that show that everybody could do.

So I dove right in and started that summer by launching a website.  I had an event in Chicago on September 15, 2007 and it went pretty well.  The event went well enough that I did 7 more around the country in the fall.  Those events also went well so I sold the house painting business I had in the suburbs and jumped in with a 20 city tour in 2008 with a $10,000 grand prize in Las Vegas.  We kind of made it into a full nationwide tour.

I am incredibly focused on having a company that is the best place to work in the world.  I think we’re achieving that so far with Red Frog.  It all starts with bringing in the right people.  When you have a great place to work, great people want to come work there, and it all kind of goes from there.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Danny DelPurgatorio and Larissa Shames from Vitamin, a Chicago based hybrid production studio delivering innovative creative content for an array of media platforms.

If you can’t see the video, please click here. The music featured during the intro and credits of this episode is a song called “Reminders” from local Chicago band Very Truly Yours.

Here’s a transcript of my interview with Danny and Larissa from Vitamin:

Danny:
Vitamin, to me, is a hybrid production company.  We do everything from live action to design, animation, stop motion, 3D, illustration, anything you can think of that’s creative.  We also like to just mix it up – we don’t really have a set model.  No matter what type of project comes in, we don’t default to a specific technique or look or style.  It’s more what works for that project and what we want to have fun with.  We like to mix things up.

Being able to do what we do at Vitamin is amazing.  I loved film growing up and went to school for illustration and drawing.  Being able to do that stuff every day is pretty amazing.  It’s really tough and stressful but that’s what’s exciting about it.

Putting all this energy and focus into something, trying to figure it out and going through that crazy process is worth it at the end seeing the final piece come through.  To do that every day, we’re lucky.  We’re really lucky.

Larissa:
The time it takes to create the average commercial is changing.  The more complex the spot, the more time you’re going to need.  You can go anywhere from a six week, two month project down to even a week.  Clients expect the same level of creative and quality with a quarter amount of the time.  How we accommodate that has become a real part of the game.

Danny:
That goes back to what I was talking about in the sense of keeping everything open and not being stuck on a certain technique or approach.  Sometimes great spots come up with awesome creative that we know we could do a great job on but they only have 3 days instead of 3 months.  What can we do for this situation that’s going to keep the quality up but that we can execute?

You have to be open and if you have to bust out the duct tape and paper clips and super glue to make a spot, do it.  If it’s gonna look cool, doesn’t matter how you got there, as long as it’s cool.  You need to be flexible and open and willing to dive in, knowing things are going to be tough and crazy, but at the end, everyone’s gonna be happy.

Larissa:
You also need to have enough tools in your arsenal.  We did a presentation on stop motion, because the guys here at Vitamin do some awesome stop motion.  There are different techniques for making stop motion to accommodate certain looks or styles, but doing it in a quicker way to make it easier.  It’s about compromising and coming up with a solution to make it work.

Danny:
To succeed in this industry, you need to be enthusiastic about what you do.  You need to do more than what’s expected of you.  If somebody asks for this, do that times fifteen.  And be into it.  If you’re not into what you’re doing, you’re not going to be any different than the millions of other people out there.

Larissa:
It’s such a competitive marketplace.  Just like anything, in any field, if you don’t have a passion about it, you’re just going to be one of the masses.

Danny:
We’re lucky to do this.  Be excited about what do you.  If you want to do something, do it.  Until someone says don’t, do it.  Learn everything you can, even if you’re not going to do all that stuff, learn every single aspect of the creative aspect.  I think that’s really important.  If you’re not learning every day, then there’s something wrong.  Challenge yourself every day.