NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Neville

Selling FacebookProfile.com

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In May 2006 I started up FacebookProfile.com and it almost immediately started getting good traffic.

Today the traffic is over 2,800+ unique visits a day. In July the total was 73,735 unique visits.

As I’ve become more involved in other ventures, I decided to not let this site stagnate and sell it while it’s still on an upward traffic trend. I’ve placed it on auction at the SitePoint forums here.

I’ve already been offered over $3,000 by people prior to this sale, so I’ve set my minimum bid to which I can get out of the sale to $3,000. Even from the hour or so ago I’ve posted the ad I’ve got several high bids.

With Facebook Apps out and Facebook users coming on board by the tens of thousands per day, I’m sure someone could really take this site to the next level.

With the amount of traffic and high amount of advertising clicks (even though there are only two ads on the site) the site should fetch my asking price. Hopefully the person who buys it knows how to properly place ads and use different systems other than Google, they could really boost profits right away.

Lebanese Newspaper

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One day a bunch of people from Lebanon tried adding me as a friend on Facebook. One of them notified me my full Facebook profile was published in a national newspaper over there!

If you go to Google Images and type in “Facebook” I am the first image to come up, so they used that image in the newspaper:

I’ve got no clue what that article says, but it’s pretty funny :-)
It reminds me of the article in the Russian Wallstreet Journal.

In case you’re wondering, since I own FacebookProfile.com (Which I’m currently selling) I published some screenshots of my Facebook, coincidentally they’ve reached the top of Google.

What’s interesting is since I published that fully un-edited screenshot of my profile I get about one phone call per week (usually from some bored teenager) who says, “Ummmmm….do you know your phone number is on Google?”

6th Street Downtown Austin Loft

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For the past few months I’ve been renting out a room in a house of a friend. It’s in the same neighborhood my house is being built, about 5 miles from Downtown. It’s nice, quiet and I can get a lot of work done.

However nice and quiet no longer helps me get work done. When I was in college and needed to study for calculus, nice and quiet was good. Now I do a lot of creative design work and need loud, interesting and stimulating places to do work.

So for the next month I’m living in a 4,000 sq. ft. loft right on 6th Street, the epicenter of Downtown entertainment in Austin. I wrote about this area earlier. This loft is made for SEVEN people, however it’s only me and one other person living here.

Here is a photo I took directly off the roof of the place of 6th Street:

This loft is extremely spacious (4,000 sq. ft. is HUGE), and it has 20 ft. ceilings, and is located right above some of the busiest bars in Austin.

I’ve been living here for a little while, and while it’s definitely fun, there are some pros/cons:

PROS:

  • I can walk everywhere I need to go, or take my scooter if it’s slightly further.
  • Tons of coffee shops, restaurants, bars and theaters right next door.
  • My gym is 4 blocks down.
  • High ceilings make the already large loft look larger and feel more spacious.
  • Location, location, location.
  • PERFECT for entertaining.
  • Rooftop access which offer awesome panoramic views of Downtown.
  • Puts me in an interesting and Central area, perfect for product photos.

CONS:

  • No free parking for at least 12 square blocks except at night & weekends.
  • Homeless people all around during the daytime.
  • 6th Street isn’t the most attractive thing in the day time, its night time appeal is much larger.

I still have my other rented room, so this is like my ‘2nd home’ for the moment.

Since this is directly in the heart of Downtown, there are all sorts of sights and sounds all the time. I enjoy the noise and commotion that happens outside, so I often keep the doors to the place open. There’s a fire station across the street which creates the full Downtown effect with sirens going by every now and then.

This is definitely a place to throw a party since it’s very big and you can’t beat the location. Checkout some of these panoramic pictures I took on the rooftop. I’ve been wanting to try some panoramic photography so this was a good chance. These images are a compilation of about 13 photos each which I then stitched together using Photoshop.

Here are some inside views of the loft:

Here is a panormaic from inside the loft. This doesn’t properly show the scale of this place:

What the pictures don’t show are all of the rooms (7 total) which are all quite large themselves. The building we’re in takes up more than half a city block, and we take up the entire top floor.

I’ll be taking a lot of BodyMonkey photo shoots in this place, and hopefully the surrounding areas will provide for some interesting photo shoot locations. Speaking of Bodymonkey, I’ve got the logo animated and it will look something like this:

Toronto Trip

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I’ll be in Toronto from June 28th (Thursday) till July 3rd (Tuesday). If you’re in or around the area, hit me up!

Every time I go to Toronto I have a BLAST, and hopefully this time will be no different.

Here is my schedule:
June 28th – Arrive at 11am, not busy the whole day or night.
June 29th – Busy all day, going out at night.
June 30th – Busy all day, going out at night.
July 1st – Busy all day, going out at night.
July 2nd – Busy all day, going out at night.
July 3rd – Not busy all morning or afternoon, leaving at 3pm.

I’m always happy to meet new people over a quick cup of coffee, or meeting up Downtown for the nightlife. Call me if interested!

I’m staying in the Sheraton Parkway:
600 Highway 7 East (at Highways 404 & 7)
Richmond Hill, Ontario L4B 1B2 Canada

Making More Money Than His Job

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The Bottled Water Experiment (and part 2) were some very interesting experiments in a micro business, and since then I’ve got tons of feedback about them.

However it’s always cool to see someone else take the idea to the next level. Here’s a guy who saw these water experiment posts and tried it out, and is currently making more money selling water than his job!

Checkout this comment on part 2 of the water experiment:

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I started my own water business after reading this post. I put a twist on it however as I replaced the stationary location with a backpack lined with a trash bag full of ice and bottles, and parked my car in a stationary location with the ice chest and other water to come back and refill. I am MOBILE! I made the shirt that says “Bottled Water $1” and headed to the river on a very hot day. People could not believe that I was doing this, everyone thought the idea was so awesome, and I couldn’t take credit. But I did sell ALL my water. 200 bottles on the first day.

I did this 5 days in the first week, for 4 hours before my shifts as a manager at chick fil a. I found out that I was making more money from selling bottled water than from my real job. So I posted ads on craigslist, offering to pay college students $10 an hour to do my bidding. I got 14 responses, and hired 5 people. Now I have a guy at the river, one at the biggest local park, two on the college campus of VCU and one in the popular downtown business sector. Each person generates about $100 a day for 4 hours of work at ten dollars an hour. thats 20 hours of labor for me to pay so 200 dollars gone, but 300 dollars are mine, minus my costs of getting water from costco, which costs me roughly $100 dollars each day. and I make $200 a day for myself, and all I have to do is go buy water once a day. Thanks nev!
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I love how he took the concept, put a small spin on it then scaled it to make $200/day. That’s some serious summertime cash (not to mention good experience)!

Inventory Control Tattoo Experiment

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When I first started House Of Rave I was in high school and going to college soon. I didn’t have the space to store inventory or the money to buy it.

To solve this I used a drop-shipping business model where I sell stuff, but send the order elsewhere to be fulfilled. This worked very well because I could concentrate on the marketing aspects and not worry about inventory.

Managing inventory is very difficult and generally incurs lots of over head costs. I’d rather leave this to the pro’s and focus on what I’m good at. However since I’ve never kept inventory myself, I decided I wanted to give it a try. So I decided to perform an inventory experiment with a cheap, small and convenient product.

Temporary Tattoos.

If you go to Google and search ‘Barbed Wire Tattoo’, HouseOfRave comes up on the first two image results:

The images take you to the barbed wire tattoo page.
Those pictures were taken by me about two years ago when I was doing some product photos. I put a temporary tattoo on my roommates arm and took these photos to show what the product would look like when used. Since then they’ve jumped to the top of the image results for people typing in ‘Barbed Wire Tattoo’ and ‘Barbed Wire Armband’ and other various searches.

The search results vary from time to time, but I get a lot of searches for those keywords coming to HoR. However since I’ve switched suppliers, the new supplier doesn’t carry temporary tattoos, so I was forced to pull those items. However I still wanted to capitalize on the traffic the tattoo pages and images were pulling in. My new supplier offered to carry the product, but this was an optimal product to try something with.

So the Tattoo Inventory Experiment was born. I basically bought a bunch of temporary tattoos from the manufacturer of them and send them out from my house.
Since the tattoos are extremely light and thin, I can keep tons of them without a lot of space. They also sell for over a dollar a piece plus shipping, but cost me only a few cents each.

My ‘warehouse’ is an old shoe box, my ‘storage racks’ are just labeled envelopes, and my ‘shipping department’ is a box of envelopes and some stamps. Basically a mini-business in a box!

So when I get an order which includes a temporary tattoo, I simply write out the customers address on the envelope, insert the tattoo, slap on a stamp and send it from the mailbox at my house.

Getting into the real nitty-gritty numbers of the order costs:

–Cost per tattoo: $0.20
–Cost per envelope: $0.02
–Cost per Stamp: $0.39
–Total Cost for One Tattoo Shipped: $0.61

HoR automatically adds a standard shipping fee to the price of the tattoo, so usually people order other items plus a tattoo. Perhaps I should make it really cheap if someone orders only the tattoos. This way I can entice more buyers who simply want the tattoo and nothing else from the site.

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The next step was uploading all the new tattoos to House Of Rave and create product photos. This went relatively quickly since it’s all the same type of product. Photoshop editing took the longest.

All the final tattoo images can be seen on the temporary tattoo page.

Setting up this whole thing took me about one day. The total cost for everything was $60. So far I’ve already sent out a few tattoos via this method. It’s not the most professional way of sending a product (the tattoos arrive to the customer in a hand-written envelope with no packing slip) but it’s just a small experiment. Of the 200+ tattoos I have in ‘the warehouse’ I only need to sell about 30 or 50 of them to break even.

Managing my ‘warehouse’ in a shoebox is easy, but if I had larger products and THOUSANDS of them, it would be a nightmare!

BodyMonkey Work Schedule

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So BodyMonkey.com was officially launched on 4-20-2007, and two days later I got my first order. Since then it’s got 3 orders through the web and 2 orders through the phone thanks to the Yahoo Shopping Network.

If you visit the website and click through the sections, it’s easy to tell the site is not “there” yet as you can tell from the lack of images on the products. The products are also not properly SEO’d (Search Engine Optimized) which is a large concern for an online business of this type.

So in an effort to properly restructure the site the first time around, I have to do everything over again. It’s relatively simple work, but VERY time consuming and monotonous.

For each product I must:

  1. Delete the old product entry.
  2. Create a new product ID.
  3. Re-enter the price, description, additional options, images, sub-images and SKU.
  4. Re-index the product in the proper section.

This sounds pretty simple, but there’s always steps along the way that take up more time. Usually I will change the product description on the spot or add images I took with my own camera which usually involves some sort of photo editing and size cropping. I also re-name the products with SEO friendly words.

I want to just work on this all day, but I also do other stuff, so I must dedicate at least an hour or two per day to get this done in reasonable time. There are ways to streamline this process but it still involves lots of very boring work, and there’s no way around that!

To keep myself accountable for the work I must do in the next few months, I created a schedule for this month’s work:

I’ve also placed this schedule in the top-right calendar section of NevBlog so I am constantly reminded of it. Well, cheers to hours of boring work!

House Account

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In addition to my other million Bank of America accounts, I’ve opened up another savings account which I’ve dubbed the House Account so I can start saving for my new house being built circa November.

I originally wanted to have $8,000 in that account to prepare for buying furniture, TV’s, sound system, drapes, blinds, beds etc., but friends who already own houses told me that $5,000 should suffice quite nicely for a house this size.

I’ve started making contributions to this new House Account by putting 10% of my income in it. I might bump that up at some point if needed. As I mentioned before I’d like to pay for the whole house through one online business, but the initial expenses need to come from somewhere else, and this account is the place.

All my house expenses will begin coming up sometime around October 2007, so I have approximately 6 months to save up the House Account to an acceptable level. Hopefully I can push it far past $5,000 so I can keep some reserve cash laying around for miscellaneous house-related expenses.

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NevBlog Laboratories – Nevlab

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I always try out new programs, web widgets, technologies, Photoshop and Flash effects etc. and have no place to put them. To solve that I created a section of this site called NevLab.

This is like the think tank of a big company where people just tinker around with ideas, new products or processes all day in hopes of stumbling upon something new or useful later down the line.

It’ll be like my internet technology testing area and playground.

The lab is very rudimentary in it’s design and will remain so. It actually uses frames which I haven’t seen on a website since 1997. Since some of the lab creations will have scripts in the head/body tags or require specific page colors or plugins, frames are the best technology for the job. Using a content management system (aka Blog) would be a terrible option for NevLab.

The NevLab is officially open!

My Trip to China

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My trip to China went very well. The point of going was to educate myself about the place, because I knew absolutely nothing about it. In my lifetime it will be one of the largest consumer markets on the planet, so getting to know this place better couldn’t hurt.

I honestly packed my bags like I would be hardship backpacking through some 3rd world foreign land…I was WAY off.

I presumed from all the comparisons I hear on the news that China was like India, but it was in fact MUCH different.

I primarily went to Shanghai and Beijing which are NOT representative of most of China. It’s like coming to the United States, only going to New York City and presuming the whole U.S.A is like that.

LANGUAGE BARRIER
Here is why India gets all the international call centers instead of China: Very little English is spoken in China. We figured since we’re in Shanghai we would be able to get around very easily with only English…WRONG.

English was a very rare commodity, and when it was actually spoken, it was usually butchered. The Mandarin language is grammatically set up in a completely different way, so their English is sometimes very skewed….understandable….but skewed.

At a lot of restaurants we went to, they could not understand basic things like Coca-Cola, napkin, spoon, soy sauce etc.. If there were pictures on the menu, we would just point. Another tactic was taking picture of foods with my camera, then we would show the waiter and he would know “Ohh, they want dumplings”

FAMILIAR STUFF
Of course there were McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Pizza hut etc. all over China. McDonalds was relatively the same type of food and menu, I hardly noticed any differences. In these chains you would usually find people who spoke good enough (not good…just good enough) English to get you through an order.

IMPRESSIONS OF SHANGHAI
Most of my time was spent in Shanghai where I stayed at youth hostels or hotels, both always being quite nice. To me Shanghai felt like a mix between NYC and San Francisco. Just the impression I got.

I really liked it with all it’s very modern buildings, most of which had crazy illuminated tops or some sort of full-building lighting feature.

Pollution was quite bad though, as in on a clear day you cannot see the sun. It didn’t feel the pollution on the street that much, but a quick glance upwards and you can see the thick smog shielding the sun. I only saw the sun peer out fully one morning, and by afternoon it was gone.
The weather however was extremely pleasant and very mild.

Check out this picture of a relatively bright day with a bad pollution index. You can see how blurred the buildings across the river are:

The night sky in Shanghai was always lit up near this area along the river called the Bund. Lots of large buildings line the river, including “The Pearl” radio tower which is the big space needle looking thing. It’s like the Chinese equivalent of the Statue of Liberty, except it lights up in funky colors and is like a big lightshow in the night time.

FAKE STUFF
As me and friends travelled we couldn’t help but stand out as foreigners, meaning we were magnets for the street sellers. In some of the more commercial and shopping areas we were constantly approached by people selling knock-off watches, bags…you name it.

And of course…I bought stuff. It was however time consuming to sift through the different sellers who had good quality stuff and bad quality. I bought some really nice fake watches:

Pictured are a Breitling, Emporio Armani, Mont Blanc, Luminor Marina and Omega knock-off watches I bought for between $10 and $15. They have tons of great rip offs, and if you find high quality ones they are damn near indistinguishable from the real thing by the average person.

I also bought stuff like fake brand name cuff links….I’m not even sure if Louis Vuitton has cuff links that look like this, but oh well :)
After bargaining you can get them for about $1.50/piece.

TRANSPORTATION
Getting around was actually pretty easy. The roads & highways were very modern, they drive on the left like in the U.S. and most of the cars were relatively modern too. I was surprised to find out their emissions standards are higher than in the U.S., and also found it odd that EVERY taxi was a Volkswagen Santana 3000. I also see why General Motors is focusing so heavily on China, there are Buicks everywhere. I hardly ever see Buicks cruising around in the U.S. anymore.

Cab rides were relatively cheap, I don’t think I ever paid more than $3 for a cab ride, and I’m almost sure they were jacking up my price from time to time.

One highlight of the trip was a 250+ MPH bullet train that takes you from the Pu Dong airport to Shanghai. It’s top speed was 431 KPH which translates into 267 Miles Per Hour! It was pretty amazing since I got out of the airport thinking this was a poor, 3rd world country. The train whizzes by all sorts of farm land, small cities and even by the freeways where you see cars travelling at a pitiful 60 mph as you blow past them like they’re standing still! The bullet train cuts the airport to Shanghai travel time from 1 1/2 hours to 8 minutes!!

As for NORMAL train rides, I took a 12 hour train ride from Shanghai to Beijing, the captiol of China. The train ride cost about $40 because I chose the highest class ride I could get. I figured it would be a pretty boring trip, but it was actually VERY nice. You get a good size compartment with 4 beds in it, and 4 people. You get two meals, comfortable beds with warm blankets, slippers, toothbrush, dining table and more. It was nice because I left at 7pm from Shanghai, messed around for a few hours on the train then slept a full 8 hours. When I woke up they served a breakfast and you’re ready to start your day at 7am in Beijing! I actually preferred this to travelling by plane.

IMPRESSIONS OF BEIJING
Beijing definitely gives you a reminder that China is still a communist country. I didn’t get that vibe at all in Shanghai. First stop in Beijing, the Great Wall of China!

We took a private taxi 1 1/2 hours each way to get there, total round trip cost: $35.

Most parts of the Great Wall of China have been degraded to ruble over the last 2,000 years, but there is a large section which has been restored for visitors. We went here to go see this stretch of wall.

I don’t know what else to say other than it’s a big freakin wall in the mountains. I think the main objective of going there was 1.) to say I went to the Great Wall of China and 2.) to take a bunch of pictures on the Great Wall of China.

Probably my favorite picture: Doing a handstand on the Great Wall of China!

Here’s a “Where’s Waldo” picture, except “Where’s Nev”

We spent some time at the Great Wall taking pictures and whatnot, they had all the usual souveigneers and junk like any tourist attraction. We left shortly afterwards in the same taxi we came in (Who fortunately did not drive away with all of our stuff) and headed back towards the middle of Beijing to see Tiananmen Square.

Tiananmen Square was just a big ass concrete square with a bunch of people walking around. Dotted through the square were communist police perched on boxes. Their postures were ramrod straight and they moved their heads side to side like robots. At the base of each box was two fire extinguishers. I’m not sure why they had fire extinguishers in the middle of a giant concrete square, and they didn’t look friendly enough to ask.

This attraction was more for historical significance than anything. Of course I felt like taking another handstand picture:

*Note: More might be added to this post later.