NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Neville

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.

February 2011 Goals

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A new month, so new goals…

Got my January 2011 goals completed.  I’m liking having only a very small amount of goals for the month.

I think anything more than three (maybe four) is too much for my little brain to handle.

Here’s the February 2011 Goals:

GOAL: Complete HoR Product:

One of the most-asked questions I get (over email and in person) is how a drop-shipping business like HouseOfRave works.  People are always perplexed that I can own a rave company, yet never have been to a rave.

For a very select few people, I can take the time to personally show them how everything works.  We’ll sometimes speak for HOURS about how customer service is done, how I update the site, how traffic comes to the site, how promotions work, where I get the products, how I started it etc etc etc….and “going to a rave” NEVER comes up.

So for this goal I’m going to digitally give a behind-the-scenes full tour of HoR, how it was created and exactly how it runs.

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GOAL: Every week 2 HoR improvements documented:

A big improvement in customer service over the holidays helped make running House Of Rave relatively simple.  However I wasn’t focused on other improvements during that time.  This month I want to ensure that other improvements start being made again….even if they’re tiny.

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GOAL: 5 days a week wake up at 7am:

I’m a lazy bum who works from a home office, plus it usually doesn’t matter ONE BIT when I do my work (for example, do anyone care if I wrote this blog post at 10am or 10pm?)..

…naturally my sleep cycles get a little wonky.  However the last month or two I’ve actually been doing something completely uncharacteristic of myself…waking up at 7am.

I swear to you….this simple lifehack has accounted for more of my productivity over the last two months than ANYTHING else…BY FAR.

For example, as I’m typing these words it’s 7:45am.  I woke up precisely at 7am, hopped out of bed and sat my butt down and started working.  I NEVER “start working” immediately…however at 7am there’s really no brain function of mine fully up yet, so I don’t get distracted.  I simply look at the very first thing on my to-do list…AND DO IT!  Then I finish it, and to avoid just plain falling back asleep, I do the next one.   Before I know it, it’s noon and I’ve done 5 hours of solid work….which is often nearly my entire to-do list.

I am allowed to fall back asleep whenever I want to.  If I sleep at 2am and wake up at 7am, I only got 5 hours of sleep. I’ll generally work till noon or so, take an hour nap, then wake up and do whatever (more work, gym, errands etc).  This seems to be my optimal amount of sleep.  From doing this for about 2 months now (although not consistently everyday, I am almost totally convinced 8 hours of sleep is too much for me (presuming I take one nap).  It makes me MORE groggy to sleep a lot (isn’t it weird how that works) ??

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If I don’t….

A nice negative consequence always ensures my goals will be completed.  If I don’t get my February 2011 Goals completed by Feb 28th (damn leap year…) 2011, then I will NOT attend the massive SXSW conference which I’m pretty excited for.

I’m a dirty rotten thief

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So a few days ago I “accidentally” stole someone’s bike here in Austin…

The first & last time I blatantly stole something was in 2002 when I was buying a bag of Whopper’s candy at the University of Texas convenience store before a class, and the line was gargantuan.

Running extremely short on time, I sneakily walked out with the 85 cent bag.  I felt terrible.  After the class finished, I went back to the convenience store, checked out and paid for another bag of Whoppers, then put the bag of candy back in it’s original place in the store.

Net harm to the store = ZERO.

Weight it had on my conscience = IMMENSE.

An $0.85 bag of Whoppers nearly crushed me, so I was horrified I had actually stolen a bike.

…and it was a NICE bike which someone obviously put a lot of work into.  It was a “woody” looking bike with a custom paint job, hand-made wood-lined rims, reinforced and upgraded parts, and a gigantic lock chain that just screamed, “THIS BIKE IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO ME…PLEASE DON’T STEAL IT.”

It was Friday evening and me and friends were at a fun tech meetup, seeing old friends and making new ones, then we all left to have a pre-party at my place (which is conveniently located Downtown).

We were all drinking and went out to a big club known for cool people and fun dancing.

Sometime around 2am (when all the bars/clubs here close), I was under the impression the club was giving away a bike.  There happened to be a nice bicycle in one of the rooms of the club that looked like it was being “presented”…and someone told me it was a promotional bike they were giving away (I have no idea why I thought or believed this…I’m presuming alcohol played “a small” factor).

On a lark, I decided it’d be funny if I got the “promotional bike” outside the club and started riding around on it….well, I accomplished that goal!

Then I saw my friends walking home and got distracted, so I went with them (still riding the bike).  We walked three blocks back to my place where my roommate asked, “Ummm…where’d you get this bike??”

I explained it was a promotional bike giveaway, and I “accidentally” rode it home (I never meant to ride it more than a block away).  I somehow didn’t feel that guilty since it was going to be given away anyway.

I put the bike in my closet for the time being (we were about to have a small after party), and finally saw it under proper lighting:

My roommate exclaimed, “This is SOMEONE’S bike….it looks used and even has a lock on it.”

I couldn’t really argue these obvious statements, and quickly realized I was some douchebag who just stole a bike!

…a petty little thief I was.

I woke up extra-early the next morning and searched for the owner through Twitter (maybe someone Tweeted “my bike got stolen from Barbarella” or something along those lines)  and through the bike model number etc.   I then posted this in the Lost & Found section of Craigslist to find the owner:

No responses, so around 3pm I rode my own bike past the club where my stupidity occurred (for fear of being spotted on the stolen bike), and found some guys inside working on the club.

I asked, “Did someone here get a bike stolen last night?”

Them: “YES!  One of our guys got his bike jacked…like a wooden-looking bike.”  <– (said sort of angrily)

Me: “Well….I HAVE IT!”

Them: (suspiciously) “What do you mean you have it?”

Me: “Last night I was walking back to my place, and some guy walking by me said, “Here man, have a bike…I jacked it from Barbarella” and then ran off!”

Them: “That’s crazy….must’ve been some crack head or something.”

Me: “It might have been” <– masking the guilt in my voice.

Me: “Well, give me 5 minutes and I’ll ride it over!”

Them: “Oh man, thank you soooo much!  That’s a really good thing you did, he’ll be so happy to see it.”

I left sort of laughing how I stole the bike in the first place, yet am the hero for giving it back!

Here’s me right before I rode it back:

I rolled up with the bike, and was welcomed like a savior.  They even gave me a personal day-time tour of the club, showed me how they made their new 1920’s-style room, invited me to an event that night (free of charge for their hero of course) and apparently they had a closet full of…soups…(??)…they were trying to get rid of and offered me all of it.

They even started pouring me some scotch to toast the return of the bike (I declined simply because I didn’t want to be drunk at 3pm)!

So I walked out of the club glad THEY DIDN’T BEAT ME UP for stealing a bike….. and with two cans of soup :-)

I’d really like to think I learned something from this incident, but I was actually REWARDED for stealing then returning something.

So the moral of this story is: Steal a bike and get free drinks and soup!