NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Neville

The House

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*This post originally titled: “The House Of Rave House, Literally” (but removed for search engine purposes)

I recently just bought a house which will be completed in October/November, and I have decided to pay for the house entirely from HouseOfRave.com.

It will quite literally be a Hous e – Of R ave House!

I started this business in high school as an eCommerce experiment, and it has lasted since first opening its virtual doors in 2001.

I got serious about HouseOfRave not too long ago, and realized it can make several thousand a month easy. With a little love and care, HouseOfRave was making $6,000+ a month in profit….more than enough to pay for the mortgage and associated costs of a house.

My mortage on the new house will be approximately $1,400/month after tax and HOA fees, and I want this all to come from HouseOfRave (and later on some renters).

PROBLEM:
HouseOfRave has been suffering some growth issues, not from my side by my supplier side. I have also been working like crazy getting this last course done which has distracted me big time from HouseOfRave duties.

During the 2006 Halloween season I had a large increase in orders which the supplier could not handle, and bad things resulted: Chargebacks, angry customers, lots of refunded money and the loss of repeat business.

Then in November 2006 order pace started growing again with the holiday season rolling around and the December rush just compounded that problem. I was happy about the large volume of orders, but the supplier did an awful job of sending out orders and notifying me of problems. LOTS of orders were wrong, had missing items, were late or just plain didn’t go out. I also never got the final invoices for those crunch months, meaning I STILL didn’t know exactly how much profit was made or lost…not knowing how much money you made tends to be a small problem when doing things like TAXES. I was not happy about this, and it isn’t the first time this is happening.

WHAT REALLY GOT TO ME were the empty promises I kept giving (justifiably) angry customers such as “I’ll PERSONALLY send your order out today…” and the supplier would not send. I was pissing people off and sometimes just plain scamming them (from their perspective, which is the perspective that matters). Over the last few months I’ve been refunding money like crazy and found a new supplier who can handle a large load of orders.

If you run a crappy operation, it won’t be around for long, and lately that’s what HouseOfRave has been until I got the new supplier. Now I get orders, and they send them out….NO EXCUSES IN BETWEEN.

So it’s nice to focus back on growing the businesses rather than dealing with unnecessary problems.

THE RESULT:
House Of Rave has experienced a decrease in orders and is going through a big inventory change, meaning all the staple products that used to consistently make money are being shifted around and often completely removed.

THE PLAN:
Over the next 6 months I want to rebuild the HouseOfRave reputation and start making $5,000+ per month again. I also want to save between now and November approximately $8,000 for spending on the new house for all those home-associated costs like furniture, washer/dryer, fridge, hardwood floors, new fixtures. Basically all that stuff I used to ignore when my parents bought, I now understand!

I want HouseOfRave.com to quite literally pay for my entire house. It’ll be nice to have just ONE side businesses covering the expenses.

I predict getting HouseOfRave back to the $5,000+ mark will take 3 months. With the new supplier I have to change around all aspects of the businesses including the whole inventory, accounting system, ordering method, shipping prices and genre of products.

$5,000/month will be an attainable but difficult goal for 3 months time, as for the first time in 6 years, HouseOfRave might go into a loss this month!

On another note: I still have never been to a rave.

New Toys Toys Toys

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The week has been like Christmas morning, but instead of Santa Clause the UPS man delivers the goods!

My new home workspace now looks like this:

NEW DELL COMPUTER
I was thinking the main thing that will help BodyMonkey sell stuff is the shopping experience where you can view custom images and videos for most products. I’ve been doing most of the photo and video editing on my trusty Tablet PC, but that computer wasn’t designed for such process-intensive activities such as simultaneous photo and video editing….so I needed an upgrade.

I bought a 64-bit AMD Dell with a big hard drive and high performance graphics card. I probably could have built a better machine for slightly less money, but I’m in no mood to build a computer. The Dell so far has been perfect for the job. It set me back approximately $750.

NEW MONITOR
Photo editing and video editing generally takes up a lot of screen real estate, so I wanted a widescreen for a nice work area. I needed something with good resolution and a bright screen. I ended up buying a 22″ Acer widescreen monitor from TigerDirect for under $300.

I’m actually VERY pleased with how the monitor turned out to be, especially for that price!

WINDOWS VISTA AND OFFICE
I have a friend who works for Microsoft who gets MS products for deep discounts. So I ordered Windows Vista Ultimate and Office Ultimate. I usually just download pirated software, but Microsoft has become exceedingly efficient at verifying your Windows copy is legit before you can download updates.

When I ordered the Dell computer it came free with Windows Vista Home Edition….I DID NOT LIKE IT. It’s made for very novice computer user, so I’m glad I upgraded to Vista Ultimate.

Retail price of both Vista Ultimate and Office Ultimate together is something like $700+, but I got them both for $130 (Office is actually more expensive than Vista).

NEW TRIPOD
I had this GorillaPod thing for taking product photos, but after I upgraded to a real camera for product photos, the GorillaPod wasn’t sturdy enough to support the big camera. It also had short legs so it couldn’t take pictures from higher angles.

I ended up buying a professional and very sturdy tripod with extendable legs, so I can take pictures from about 6 feet in the air. I can also use this if I decide to buy a larger SLR camera or video camera in the future. This set me back about $80.

NEW PERSONAL CAMERA
My last Casio Exilim I bought was crushed somewhere between when I went to India and Germany….and half the screen is now whited out, meaning I can’t change settings or really see what kind of picture I took. Also the night pictures never came out well, so I wanted a new camera before I went to China anyway.

I bought a Cannon SD750. I don’t have much time before I leave for china, so I basically went to Best Buy, asked some guy what the best compact camera was and bought it. I’m sure money could’ve been saved if I Ebay’d it, but I don’t have that kind of time and have other stuff to focus on.

This purchase means I’ve gone through one camera per year, not including the camera I bought for product photos! This camera is AWESOME when it comes to functionality and picture quality. It set me be back about $370.

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I’m very pleased with all the purchases, especially the new computer. Having a separate computer for graphics and video editing has really increased my productivity as seen here!

This Makes BodyMonkey OFFICIAL

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BodyMonkey is OFFICIALLY a business….it has a shirt!
I wish that made it completely official, but it’s one step I got a kick out of.

Since I was just testing out what the logo would actually look like on a shirt, I paid $23 for one shirt to be made online. In bulk they cost much, much less.

Right now only the front says “BodyMonkey.com” while the back only says “BodyMonkey.” I’m not sure why I did that, but the next generation of the shirt will most likely include a “.com” on the back.

I also want to put the large BodyMonkey logo on the front instead of the standard small left-hand title.

The back logo looks GREAT, but I may need to scooch it up a bit.

The logo was actually just a very temporary placeholder while I got the BodyMonkey site redesigned, but it grew on me and I think it will stay for a while. It might however rotate and change with the season or corresponding holiday time.

It’s a weekend night, so I gotta get out and party….and I’m wearing the shirt!

Stereo 3D Pictures

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I randomly saw these stereo images on Digg, and realized you could make pseudo 3D images without any special skills or equipment.

Part of my scheme for the up and coming BodyMonkey is to let potential customers have a fun browsing experience while going through the products on the site, and I thought these would be pretty interesting on some products. Worth a shot.

I first tried to see if it would work on a picture of my guitar…It doesn’t look very 3D right now:

So to make it a stereo 3D image, I took one photo of it, moved a few inches to the right and snapped another photo. When quickly switched back and forth, they make the picture look 3-Dimensional!!

So I figured this could be an interesting thing for BodyMonkey.com on some of the product photos. Little gimmicks like this wouldn’t necessarily provide anymore incentive to buy more products, but it will keep people curiously wandering through the site, and have some entertainment value.

Most of the items BodyMonkey will sell are much smaller than the guitar, so the effect was not quite the same when I tried to make a 3D image of the Rocket Shaker, but it still works:

It might be a little too much or provide too little value, but it’s an idea to keep in mind!

I Bought A House!

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That’s right, I bought a house.

Technically the house is still just a plot of land with the builders temporary office and a large trash bin on it…but it’s MY plot of land.

I put down a $500 deposit and instructed the builder (Centex Homes) to build it far out as possible, so I won’t be moving in the new house till around November 2007.

The plot I bought was the last one in the entire neighborhood (71 and Riverside in Austin, TX.). It’s on a cul-d-sac and is an oversized lot so I’ll have a bigass backyard.

SUPPOSE SOMETHING GOES WRONG and I don’t end up wanting the house, I basically get my deposit back from Centex. However I can also sell the contract to someone else and make a nice 4-figure profit as the demand for space in the neighborhood is very high.

The cool thing is this community is strictly no-investors, so the demand for these homes is not coming from people just trying to flip the homes or rent them out, which is a sign that a bubble is not driving the prices, but just shear population growth (Austin is growing like crazy).

The reason this neighborhood had such great prices is because it’s in a relatively unknown area. However there are 4 major projects around the neighborhood under construction (and nearing completion), and a brand new highway with an exit/entrance right near by. It’s also only 5 miles away from Downtown.

There is nowhere to buy a house in Austin for $148,000 with that proximity to Downtown.

 

This is a bad Photoshop rendition of what the brand new house will look like. In actuality it will look much like that house on the right.

Me on my swath land (and an industrial receptacle in the background):

Move in date: November 2007
First Payment: October 2007
Price: Roughly $148,000 + additional features.
House: One story, 4 bedrooms, roughly 1,500 sq. ft.

One room will be my bedroom, one room will be an office, and two rooms will be rented out. There are 3 very large high tech companies not even a mile from the house, so I can pretty easily find some other young professionals to rent to.

Hopefully this turns out to be a good financial move in the long run, I have a feeling it will with the amount of development happening around here! I also have 8 months before I have to start paying for anything, which means I can get proper finances in place for the mortgage and start saving for all those expensive things associated with home ownership (furniture / tools / TV / bedroom sets etc. etc…).

Blogger.com Dropped NevBlog – Traffic Drops By Half

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Over the last few weeks I noticed NevBlog was not ranking in Google for any of the keywords previously bringing in lots of traffic (“Starbucks Liquor”, “Neville Medhora”, “Easiest Job In The World” etc…).

Even if you directly typed in “NevBlog” into Google the only thing that came up was other sites and my .xml site feed.

I usually don’t care about the traffic this site gets, but I care about some of the outgoing links, and without the site being indexed, those links were worthless…..I also can’t search for past posts to refer people to…..plus I just wanted to know what the hell was going on!

I thought it was a temporary hiccup in Google’s indexing, but almost a month has passed without improvement. I used Google’s Webmaster Tools and they said my site was being indexed just fine and nothing was wrong.

I casually mentioned it to my buddy Jon Brelig, and being the expert he is….he noticed a Robot NoFollow meta tag on my site. This was NOT on my Blogger template, instead Blogger put it in with the “Blog:Meta:Data” tag

THE PROBLEM:
Blogger.com made me switch to the “New Blogger” which apparently sneakily added a NoFollow tag. I figured there MUST be a setting on Blogger to fix this, but I haven’t found it.

THE RESOLUTION:
Removing the BlogMetaData tag from my Blogger template altogether.

THE FOLLOWUP:
I wrote this and removed the meta at 11:00pm on Monday night (2-26-2007). Just out of curiosity I want to see how long it takes Google to re-index my page for the term “NevBlog“.

House Of Rave on a new Supplier

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HouseOfRave will be going through some big inventory changes over the next few days as I switch suppliers. Changing suppliers is no small task because it will essentially be a whole new business. I will probably end up LOSING money on HouseOfRave this month, but it’s in the name of future expansion which can’t happen with the current supplier.

There are tons of different changes I will have to deal with:

ORDER PROCESS
I still will essentially get orders then forward them to the new supplier, but for now it must be done the ghetto way of manually entering each order into their website. This takes lots of time, but will be worked on as the relationship builds.

PAYMENT TO NEW SUPPLIER
I used to send money at the end of the month for products I ordered. Since I don’t have an established relationship with the new vendor, I must make sure to pay them soon afterwards. This has actually worked out quite nice, because I simple pay them each day for the products I ordered. I know right then and there how much profit has been made per day, the supplier gets his money right away, and at the end of the day I don’t owe anyone anything.

MAKING MONEY
This one will be hard, as with the new supplier I currently have a straight percentage discount for products which isn’t very high right now. Topping that off, the supplier has higher shipping prices than the previous which really bites into my profit. However with this system I know that if I bring in $1,000 I just made approximately (percentage of that) in profit.

TRACKING SALES
I used to track sales in a specifically designed Excel sheet so I could compare it to the actually invoice at the end of the month to check for billing errors. Luckily the shopping cart system I’m using (Yahoo) has more statistics features than Shopsite (which I use for HouseOfRave), so this will actually be an easier job. Also with the current payment system I have going with the supplier, I can easily see my per-day profits at the end of the day.

DIFFERENT INVENTORY
This is the biggest pain of all. Since HouseOfRave sells such niche rave/club stuff, I have to scour the new supplier’s inventory for stuff that would do well in that area, and their selection of those kinds of products is relatively limited. This might be a bad thing, but it also might be a good thing. Perhaps I may stumble upon a new genre of products that sells very well on HouseOfRave? I’ve learned you can NEVER quite predict which items are a big hit. I’ll just have to continually change things up on HouseOfRave to see what sells or doesn’t.

INVENTORY PICTURES / DESCRIPTIONS
This is a big change as pics and descriptions take the longest amount of editing and creating time. Because HouseOfRave was a very rave/club niche site, so it had a lot of blinky stuff with blinky images to compliment. Some of the pages would be filled with product images that looked like this:


Now for the most part the pictures will be stationary and the products will not be as “Blinky” which may or may not be a good thing. I always thought the animated .gif images the previous supplier always used were cheesy, but after removing a lot of the current products, I quickly realized that all the cheesy blinky product pictures were a big part of the site.

They just plain demonstrated the product effects very well. It’s funny how AJAX, Flash and other in vogue technologies can help a website sell more and look better, but sometimes a simple .gif image (which has been around since 1985) can be much more effective.

I started going ahead and making .gif images for some of the products the new supplier offers and also for BodyMonkey.com because I realized how much more interesting they make the site look. With a simple .gif you can convey a lot more information in one image….like how my studying is going

Updates

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H O U S E O F R A V E – U P D A T E :
Over the last 2 years HouseOfRave has gone from making a few hundred bucks a month in profit to $6,000+/month. However the supplier has been experiencing pains along the way with the increased order volume.

The same problems keep happening over and over and the same excuses are being given over and over. Despite all my best attempts, I can’t get them to fully cooperate with my steps for expansion, so after 6+ years of doing business, it’s time to say goodbye to them as my sole supplier.

HouseOfRave is currently in a state of two different suppliers as I switch sources, and by the end of February I will be completely switched to a new one who is oriented more towards customer satisfaction, fresh products and prompt delivery.

N E V B L O G – U P D A T E :
I believe comments will for the most part be gone from future posts. Comments are entertaining, but for the most part relatively useless. Occasionally I get some good ones, but the majority are a waste of time. I get GREAT emails, but comments are not well thought out and are generally self-promotion for someone else with a blog or some lame remark about blah blah blah…..

L E X U S – U P D A T E :
Lovin’ it!

E D U C A T I O N – U P D A T E :
After not being in school for a while the psychology course I’m trying to finish online before I go to China is uugghhh…..

I’ve been sticking to my schedule, but it’s not fun having read about, take notes on and then answer questions about bunk theories made by Sigmund Freud. Hopefully this course gets more interesting.

T W O – M O S T – I M P O R T A N T – T H I N G S :
The two things I’m most focused on for the next few days will be finishing the psych class and switching HouseOfRave over to the new supplier.

I might even have to ::shudder:: stay in on a Friday night and study.

M O O D – U P D A T E :

Resumite Sold, I’m $145 Richer

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Resumite.com was put on sale a few days ago, and now the auction is over.

Total I made was

So all in all Resumite for me wasn’t a failure, but not necessarily a stellar success either. It was something that had potential, but it just wasn’t in my interest or right timing.

All in all I learned something and made a little money. End of that saga!

Like most of the little sales like this, I put the money away:
30% – Bills Account
30% – Investment Account
20% – Permanent Savings
10% – Spending Account 1
10% – Spending Account 2

Finishing a Psych 309 Class

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Long story short with lots of important details left out:

1.) While in college I took a Psychology 309 class by correspondence so I could do it over the internet.

2.) I’ve always been pretty lazy about school.

3.) I have till March 22nd to finish the course (I leave for China on March 23rd and the class expires on the 30th or is marked as if I failed.

4.) I was almost done with the course when my computer crashed…no backups of the course work.

5.) I’ve got to re-do the whole thing in less than a month.

6.) I’ve been saying #5 for the last 4 months.

Each lesson has 2 parts, a computer-graded assignment and an essay for the instructor to grade. I have to finish the course much before the planned end date because something always goes wrong and a buffer zone is required.

Judging by my academic past, this kind of feat has never been pulled off (Oh yea, and I HAVE to make at least an 80 in the course). Each section of this class is really, really long and some of the questions are quite in-depth. So much for being a blowoff class like I initially thought. With everything else I have going on, this is going to be hard…..but possible if I focus on it.

In the top-right corner of this page I want to put a check-off list near my calendar to ensure I’m keeping pace with this schedule….but I’ll do that later because I’ve already spent 30 minutes making this post and TALKING about doing the coursework rather than just doing it.

Someone needs to call me up and bitch at me if the assignments aren’t on time….like a mean professor.