NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Archives for 2011

Pretending I know how to play the bass

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One of my completely-non-financial-related  March 2011 goals was, “Play bass scales for at least 30 minutes per day.”

This isn’t just a goal to get better at the bass guitar…in fact I BARELY EVEN PLAY the bass!

But a funny thing happened recently….

A very close friend is getting married, and wanted me and my brother to play a set of jazz at her wedding! In Indian weddings, close friends of the bride/groom do all sorts of dances…so this is me and my brother’s entertainment contribution.

Unfortunately I suck at the guitar.  I mean…I can play several songs really well, but I don’t know much music theory, which means I simply memorize songs but can’t improvise.

This left me roughly 3 months to become an expert bass and guitar player (fortunately my brother is really good so he can just cover me the whole time).  So the learning began….

I kid you not….to learn more about the guitar, I started downloading iPhone apps!

Here’s one of my favorite apps (Jam Tracks) that lets you select a key and it plays a “backing track” which you can play along with:

Then it shows you simple scales that go along with that key….so as long as you play those scales, the backing tracking and your playing will sound good together.

This gets you playing your scales in a MUCH MORE FUN way than simply repeating it without music.

So hopefully in the next month I’ll be able to get good enough (and have enough stamina) to play a 30 or 45 minute jazz set!

Just for fun I tried playing a song all by myself with some of these newly learned scales. Check it out!

The bass line is simply the first four notes of a scale, and the guitar track is me simply improvising on a guitar scale.  Put them together…BAM!  It looks like I know what I’m doing (sort of)  ;-)

Now of course I need to practice, but the thing about this performance is it’s in front of a lot of people.

If you want to get good at public speaking…you should probably give a lot of speeches in front of an audience for practice.

Hence….if I’m playing in front of people, I should probably give it a shot a few times before doing it live.  Who knows…maybe I’ll get terrible stage fright and freeze up?

Fortunately I live in Austin, which happens to be the Live Music Captiol of the World…..and it turns out one of our friends hosts an “Open Mic” night on Monday’s.  I took some friends and signed up.

At first the open mic was mainly semi-professional people playing solo with their guitars and singing…but then they opened it up for a random jam session. Random people jumped on different instruments and we just started playing.  I hopped one of the guitars first and the bass later (don’t have video of the bass part).

A friend took some video of me playing….I honestly had no idea what the hell I was doing, but it turned out ok.   Everyone else was playing by ear, and I was sitting on a stool with an iPhone on my lap! Watch the video and you can see me literally reading scales off the phone :-)

….so that was my first real live jam session.   I must say, I actually got a wee-bit nervous before getting on.  However once playing I hardly took notice of the crowd.  It was pretty fun :-)

March 2011 Goals

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Well BOOYAH to the February 2011 goals.  The new March 2011 goals are out:

Let’s re-cap:

1.) House Of Rave product selling on NevBlog.
This is the product I’m making that I talked about here.  The videos are all recorded, and now I’m editing, uploading, formatting, setting up etc etc for it’s finalization.  I must say I’m pretty proud of it and think people will really enjoy them and learn a lot!

2.) HoR updates from Mitch advice.  Implement and document.
I really really enjoyed this series from Mitchell Harper of Interspire:
You can see it here.  I think it would be beneficial for ANY business to follow this advice (it’s a great watch).

3.) Taxes finish. <– Least excited about.
This one is just a taaaddd self-explanatory.

4.) At least 30 minutes a day practicing bass scales.
Unlike taxes, this one is actually fun! …and I’m doing it for a reason.  A very very close friend is getting married, and in most Indian weddings people do dances and other things during the wedding (or one of the 75 million events that precede it).  Instead of a dance, me and my brother are going to play a jazz set during the final wedding reception before people go into the main ballroom!

Basically we’ll be playing “wallpaper music” which is just background music.  However there’s an interesting problem….I kind of suck at the guitar!

Fortunately my brother is excellent, so he can pick up my slack.  With this in mind it makes sense I “back him up” on the guitar or bass….and if we’re playing jazz, a bass guitar would sound great.   So I brought my old bass guitar from high school to Austin and have started practicing “jazz walking” scales.

The bass is much easier than guitar since there’s only 4 strings and you generally just pluck one note at a time….so I’m picking it up quick.

The hardest part is getting my left hand strengthened enough and my right hand (I use to pick with) accustomed enough to playing for a full 30 or 45 minutes.    Therefore I’ll be practicing jamming to random songs using my scales for about 30 minutes per day.

Perhaps I’ll record a few things and post them soon!

Who would you buy 10 percent of?

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I’ve watched this fantastic Warren Buffet speech about 10 times, but have never tried this till now. He says:

Think for a moment I granted you the right to buy 10% of one of your classmates for the rest of his lifetime (and you can’t just pick someone with a rich father).  You’ve got to pick someone who’s going to do it on their own merit.

…and I gave you an hour to think about it.

…which one are you gonna pick?

He goes on to say you wouldn’t necessarily pick someone with the highest IQ or the highest grades etc. etc…. (watch the video if you want to hear what he has to say next).

This is a fantastic way to judge who amongst your friends or acquaintances you think will be the most successful.

I also have had a highly-favored saying (I have no idea where I first heard this) that goes:

“You are the sum total of the top 5 people you hang out with.”

So by my math, if you’re trying to become successful (in whatever field), it would make sense to hang out most with the top five people you would pick to own 10% of.

Try it right now in your head or on the sheet I’ve provided below…it’s kind of interesting :-)

To get you started, I’ve filled out your first choice already:

Enjoy :-)
-Nev

What I’ve been doing with this HoR Product

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A goal from this February was to “Complete HoR Product” (that’s House Of Rave) for those of you with dirty minds….

I did complete it, and I must say it was more work than I expected.  I asked for questions people had and got some great feedback via comments and emails.

I’ve never built a digital product before, so learning the new technical things was time consuming yet fun.  Fortunately I DO have some experience making videos, so this part was easy…but editing them was a new beast.  Turns out that part is fun also :-)

My goal was to create a digital “course” that people could go through step-by-step that would show three very frequently asked questions I get from friends, family and strangers:

  1. What is HouseOfRave and how did it start?
  2. How does it actually work?  How do you send orders?  How do you make profit? Who sends the products out?  etc etc etc…(lots of questions answered in this segment).
  3. How can I do it too?

Those are the three main BROAD CATEGORIES I’ve identified.  I used those categories to break the product into three parts since each part has MANY sub-questions.

I wanted to give anyone the chance to get a “private tour” from me of House Of Rave…the kind I’d give a curious friend or family member….but that usually takes a long time and involves us both being at a computer for an extended period of time.  Unfortunately I can’t give THAT many people a tour…till now.

People are always FASCINATED to see behind the scenes of the business….as most people have never seen behind the scenes at ANY business, especially one like mine.

There’s usually too many questions people have to get answered in a single email (or 10)…so this course seemed like the coolest way to do it.

I’ve been pretty transparent with House of Rave in the past, but it’s definitely created some problems being so open.  That’s why for this product I will be charging a small fee.  Not only do I feel justified in doing this, but I also think it’s WORTH IT.  I pretty much open the kimono to House Of Rave and show all the numbers, analytics etc and how everything works.

Will anyone buy it?  Who knows….

…but I do feel proud of the work done.

I made a members-only webpage with all the content on it.  This is actually a departure from my traditional blog-only format, as it has too much content for just screenshots and text.  I wanted to literally SHOW people what I’m doing, so there’s a lot of personal video and screen capture.  I was actually astounded at how much more information can be conveyed over a single video than a full blog post.

Here’s some screenshots of the members only area I made:

Here’s the first page called “How HoR Started” which goes over how and why I started this little “experiment” when I was 17.  I’m hoping this part will inspire a lot of people to realize that “even they can do it” …as I had very little experience when I started this biz.  It also shows the process of HOW I started it, came up with the idea, researched it etc….

The next section is called “How It Works” and is what I consider the real “meat” of the product.  This section took the absolute longest to make, and shows ALL the behind-the-scenes stuff people don’t get to see unless I personally show them.

I know this will shed some insight into this type of business to people who are curious.  It also shows you how easy it is to currently run!

Each of those videos is anywhere between 5 minutes and 20 minutes.  The videos take BY FAR THE LONGEST to film edit and upload.  So while that page is only 5 or 6 pages long, it has A LOT of great content.

I found myself re-watching some of my own videos because they were so interesting!

The next part is entitled “How You Do It” and it goes over two main points.  The first is how you can sell one item online almost immediately…I even show a real life example of setting up a very simple site and allowing people to buy from it with a credit card…with ZERO DOLLARS investment and the whole process takes less than 5 minutes and involves no webpage building or programming.

I think that part is very important to show people, because they often make it WAY TOO HARD IN THEIR HEADS.  They think to sell ONE item they need all sorts of programs, subscriptions, merchant accounts blah blah blaaahhh… not true.

The second thing I show is how to build an ecommerce store in less than an hour with zero programming skills.  I show the free way of doing this (slightly harder), and the paid way of doing it (super-duper-cooper-easy).  This part smashed the myth that all this ecommerce or “selling stuff online” business is complicated.  I want people to take action in this part, because simply doing some small project like this will teach them more than reading about it all day long.

The product is 95% done…all the content is completed, I’m just working out the password protection part and payment then I’ll release it soon!

Need a quick answer

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Problem:
Nearly every day I get emails or questions from people I know about how House Of Rave .com works.  To some, it’s unfathomable that I run a rave company, yet never have been to a rave.  I can show only so many people how it actually works (literally show them on a computer).

Solution:
I’m currently doing a whole guide (like a “course”) on how my drop-ship business works.  It’ll show all the stuff I generally don’t just “put out there” because of privacy and competition issues.

Question to those interested:
Look at the below list and let me know if you have further questions than what’s covered here.  Or let me know what you’d be MOST interested in hearing about.

You can simply comment on this post or email me:
nevmed ( a t ) g m a i l . c o m

Course Outline:

All of these will be a combination of text and detailed video tours (I really like doing these videos)!
Part 1.) What it is now:
  1. Makes a couple hundred thousand revenue, bare minimum of 30 minutes of work per day.  About 1-2 hours per day spend on.  Great lifestyle business.
  2. How it started:  When I started it (17), why I started it (experiment),
  3. Part 1.) The beginning, learning the technical side and being curious.
  4. Part 2.) Finding something to sell.  Narrowing down my options.
  5. Part 3.) Finding a drop shipping.  How to find a drop shipper.
  6. Part 4.) Getting a site setup quickly.  Go over all ecommerce options.
  7. Part 5.) Pro’s/Con’s of drop shipping.

Part 2: How it actually works:

  1. How it works: a private behind-the-scenes tour of how HoR works.  I wanna show you how it works so you can understand it’s achievable, I started HoR cause I saw another kid did something similar.  Understand you don’t need to be a programmer (I can’t even write HTML).
  2. How someone goes from browsing the site to purchasing.
  3. Sending the order to the supplier.
  4. Entering the tracking information.
  5. Handling customer service.  Emails, inquiries, phone number.
  6. Show the analytics, Show the past numbers, reports.
  7. Accounting system.
  8. Show around Shopsite back end.
Part 3.) How you can do it to:
  1. Bonus: How to sell just one item.  People think they need to setup big ecommerce site.  Using PayPal .  Other simple ecommerce solutions.
  2. Bonus: The 1 hour business.  How to get an ecommerce business up and running in 1 hour.

Question to those interested:
Once again, let me know if you have further questions than what’s covered here.  Or let me know what you’d be MOST interested in hearing about.

I’ve already got a lot of this already completed, but I really want to make this a TRULY informative “course” I can refer people to whenever they start asking me a million questions about HoR.

You can simply comment on this post or email me:
nevmed ( a t ) g m a i l . c o m

Thanks for your time!  :-)
-Nev

HoR 2010 Revenue n’ Numbers Recap

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Well, it’s that time of the year again where I foolishly share all my confidential analytics about one of my Ecommerce businesses HouseOfRave.com!

All numbers are for the full year of 2010 (That’s Jan. 1st till Dec. 31st 2010 for all your dummies out there).

Let’s get started with a general overview:

For the most part it looks like I have moderately predictable traffic.

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Something noteworthy here is sometime in late July 2010 I installed the Asynchronous Google Analytics which can keep track of all ecommerce activity on the site.  Naturally this pushed down my average conversion rate (since stats weren’t collecting for half the year).

It also accounts only the revenue generated after that period.  I think the numbers are pretty close to accurate (I haven’t verified to the cent, but I know they’re not way out of whack either).

SO I technically don’t have all the correct information on this graph until after July 2010.

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Looks like Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, FireFox really close, and Chrome gaining lots of traction (I pretty much exclusively use the Google Chrome browser because it is…well…awesome).

What was surprising is that pretty much 98+ percent of visitors have a high speed connection.  Dialup is only 1.34%!!!

Hahahah….I remember those funny Dial-Up screeches :-)

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Here’s revenue screenshot from my back end Shopsite panel:

Some of the tracking info such as hits & pages is linked with the Plesk Stats, so they get deleted after 12 months or so (hence the zero’s for Jan – Apr).

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For what it’s worth, here are the Plesk statistics for HoR (almost all of 2010 is shown, I only get last 12 months of reports):

The Unique visits show on average about 80% more visitors than the Google Analytics show.  I attest this to people looking at (or linking) images (from Google Image Search or similar + blogs etc) and leaving.  So technically these ARE “unique visits” but they don’t TRULY count since the person doesn’t stick around long enough to browse the site (or ever even get to the site).

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Well, that’s a nice little recap in numbers of 2010.

Time to close out 2010 and bring in 2011 (damn, this post is like 2 months late)!

The House of Rave Confessions

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I own a business called House Of Rave.com.

It’s a drop shipping business, which means I don’t physically handle the products myself.

PRO’S:

  • If I stay on top of things, I only have to do a minimum of an hour or less of work per day (except maybe busy seasons).
  • The business makes money when I sleep.
  • I’ve slowly built a “moat” around the business which makes it (just a little) harder for newer competitors to compete with me.
  • I can say “I own a rave company“
  • It’s helped me pay for college, supported me even after college.
  • By itself, it pays me enough money to live a pretty cool life, travel whenever I want and still save money.
  • This business allows me to abide by the rules I heard from Joe Sugarman, “Anything you can do to eliminate people or paper, do.”
  • It provides me a FANTASTIC “testing grounds” for trying out marketing techniques.  Like when I read something great in a book, I can easily implement it to HoR with ease since it’s 100% my business.
  • It’s always on top of cash flow, meaning I never have much debt (other than about $10,000 – $15,000 revolving debt on an American Express card).
  • Because of the above, I get crazy amounts of airline points (in fact I just checked I have half a million airline miles I’ve never used until TODAY when I booked a flight to Vancouver….fo FREE).

CON’S:

  • I must do at least SOME work everyday.
  • If I get hit by a bus, the business will cease to exist.
  • It’s unlikely it will ever get HUUUUGGEEE (without a change in the way things are currently run).

House Of Rave is what Tim Ferriss refers to as a “Muse”…a small business that you can run from anywhere which pays for your lifestyle.

However I’m no fool (well, at least not completely).

I am a middle man.  And as technology improves, manufacturers get more sophisticated, and consumers get more educated….I will be phased out with my current model.

I don’t foresee this happening anytime soon, and I do have time, but it will eventually happen.  Fortunately I’ve found ways to overcome that for now, but looking at a 5 or 10 year forecast, it will move in that direction.  If someone else took over, they could make the business BIG and sustainable in the long run, but it’s never really been a passion of mine.  It was one of many side-projects that made enough money not to pull the plug.

I’m really grateful I’ve had House Of Rave all these years.  I’ve started a lot of small businesses here and there, but HoR has been around the longest (first live order was placed in 2001).

But there’s a yearning to branch out even further.

I’m getting hungry.

HoR Updates 2-7-2011

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Every week I said I’d document at least two updates to HouseOfRave.

Here’s two of them (damn these stupid goals….keeping me all accountable and stuff)…..

1.) Updated this High Output Light Base for wedding planners.  I actually use this thing during parties for “mood” lighting by simply placing it in the corner of the room.  You can actually see an example of that on the page.  I snapped some pics, made a quick video and wrote some fun copy for the page.

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2.) More prominent email address capture placed on the top-right of the page.  For some reason I’ve always had the email capture hidden under the left-column navigation.  I’m already seeing a higher number of signups per day.  I’ve kept the old one there, because I use that valuable top-right corner during promotions and holiday seasons.