A little bit of Steve
At this very moment, we are all entrepreneurs doing an entrepreneurial project together, Pajamanation. But this is only the beginning of our entrepreneurial activity. Think of what we will be in a year. They have asked me about the size of our market, so we put something together and said a couple of millions sure, 20 to 30 perhaps. But all this is aiming too low. Really too low. We should not look at our new economic agenda like a botanist who says how many potential homeworkers will there be? A botanist does not make any sense in the Cambrian Explosion (the mashup world of today). There will not only be homeworkers making use of Pajamanation, or consultants with a home office or freelancers, or women staying at home with the kids, or the kids themselves outsourcing ideas or school papers. There will be many more, think of the disabled, think of the sick, think of the unemployed, think of the economically challenged worlds out there, think of people in their day job quickly doing a microjob on the side (sunlighting), think of moonlighters (people who have a day job and do a microjob in the evening), think of teleworkers who are looking for a pause and do a microjob instead of playing solitaire, think of SMEs who will outsource all their bottlenecks in the form of microjobs, think of corporations where internal entrepreneurs will outsource feasibility projects, think of individuals, think of families as a whole who are doing microjobs.
The right question for PajamaNation is: how many people on earth have creative ideas, at least one a year. A wild guess: one billion. But this means that I exclude 5 billion and label them Zombiestan and it also means that people normally only get one creative idea a year, which is nonsense.
Critics of course are saying that they need access to computers. But talk to young people nowadays, wherever you are: they cannot envisage their lives not having a cyberspace. They will live digitally.
Lately I have been feeling a bit like Steve Jobs (I wish ☺ launching the iphone. I have been approached by people wanting to make products, services and even companies for the sheer mass of people we are going to reach and this is good. This is very good. Here come the apps, de dev kits, the links, the services, the cross-fertilization. Yummy.
As I told you before we have been talking to www.worldlawdirect.com. They want to set up a legal desk for homeworkers, they want to do micro-insurances for us, they want to do escrows for us. They smell the potential. One of our greatest deals www.lulu.com said yes to an alliance whereby all our members can publish their books. Lulu is more than famous, they smell the potential. Yosi found two other companies that want to offer services www.zira.biz and www.websplanet.com
But recently I have been approached by others with more ideas. Nasir, our manager of Malaysia came up with a good idea for our pajamadomains and is now thinking of a venture to involve all country managers to be the biggest second-level domain shop next to www.marcaria.com. Charles Palanco, the CEO of www.paltrust.com is not only convinced he should join us with P2P lending he also came up with two new products (PeopleTrust and Cardtrust) for our specific audience. An interim office in Montana wants to add us as another line of business. I told you about the great project that Stephen Wolfram offered us.
But you? Ask yourself what you can do for your nation ☺)
A killer product you can offer to all of us, someone in your country we should talk to, a service that is badly needed. Be creative, before somebody else is, because before you know it we will be booming and then it is too late (although you were on the front row).
Walter
August 24, 2007
August 22, 2007
It is Amazing, is it not
On the beach of Cap d'Antibes
Today I was sitting at the beach of Cap d'Antibes (that is in France by the way) with our Pajamanation manager of Austria, Markus Schuller. We joked about the many directions we took with PajamaNation. It is quite extraordinarily, when you come to think about it, that we still exist! That is probably the most astonishing fact of our endeavor; we seem to survive against odds. And while we are debating that we need a better site and better systems, customers come and go, they are not bothered, not even conscious about our problems. They just post microjobs (which is not easy, believe me, I tried it), they do microjobs for others, they leave their profile, they register. My God, they have guts and patience! This is certainly the best proof of our future success, that with such a lousy site and such whimsical management (I target myself here), we grow every day. Amazing.
But actually we did the same as our customers, while some of us were debating, others worked on it and when the workers stopped and started debating, the debaters started to work and this is the result, let's sum it up.
1. We have companies with VAT numbers, with shareholders, with bank accounts
2. We have a great mission statement which makes me feel proud and a good positioning too as Entrepreneurship 2.0. Open the source code of entrepreneurship to the world (difficult? Of course this is difficult! Changing the world has never been easy)
3. We have 84 trademarks worldwide and a great name (which makes people smile when you say it)
4. We have more than a hundred second-level domain names in these countries (and for the Spanish-speaking countries we have an alternative name –pyjamanation- because pajama seems to mean masturbation which could trigger the wrong sort of 'microjobs'
5. We have more than 60 country managers (as Yosi says 33% are doing their best, 33% are doing something and 33% are doing nothing). Fair enough, that is a reflection of the world as well. We are human, not superhuman.
6. We have customers, more every day, hits in more than 50 countries (Venezuela and Kenya on top, which means that we have rescheduled the world as we know it), microjobs from a lot of countries (I have not seen this in any site) and 3000 people who registered and left their profiles. We even had to pay money back to people who paid mistakenly, how about that!
7. We have the best architecture in the world (our new system works with catalyst and Mason- not that I really know what this is, but Chris tells me it is the Bentley of programming) and we paid the top guy at Amazon to work that out for us. We only had him on our payroll for two months, but God that hurt!
8. We have a great management team who work for free
9. We have a blog (which I write every day and I love to read it too, it is actually one of my favorites), a wiki, a group on Facebook, several movies on Youtube in two languages; we have been on TV in Portugal and Venezuela and shortly in India (I love the way Ricardo sat their in pajamas, that is the kind of brand we need, it should be in the contract that all our managers have to wear pajamas during interviews)
10. We have closed great partnerships with www.lulu.com, www.bitwine.com, www.paltrust.com, www.worldlawdirect.com, and some others are in the make
11. www.Wolframscience.com has a three-year job for 1000 microworkers for us which will get us global press when our new system is out. It is a great assignment believe me.
12. In September we will have our own server farm in Sweden and a series of new contracts made by our lawyers, which will solidify our positions towards licenses and option agreements.
Amazing, is it not, that we sometimes think, that we do not really exist, although even a passing thought, it is a wrong one. We are changing the world, but our pace could improve.
I would like to end with the lyrical words of a Skype email I got today and it made me think of all of you, so here it is:
When the unexpected happens, it's important to remember the people who stuck behind us and whose loyalty humbled us. I want to thank everyone for their support, patience and being part of the Skype community. And for those of you who missed out on using Skype last week - I want to especially thank you as well.
Today I was sitting at the beach of Cap d'Antibes (that is in France by the way) with our Pajamanation manager of Austria, Markus Schuller. We joked about the many directions we took with PajamaNation. It is quite extraordinarily, when you come to think about it, that we still exist! That is probably the most astonishing fact of our endeavor; we seem to survive against odds. And while we are debating that we need a better site and better systems, customers come and go, they are not bothered, not even conscious about our problems. They just post microjobs (which is not easy, believe me, I tried it), they do microjobs for others, they leave their profile, they register. My God, they have guts and patience! This is certainly the best proof of our future success, that with such a lousy site and such whimsical management (I target myself here), we grow every day. Amazing.
But actually we did the same as our customers, while some of us were debating, others worked on it and when the workers stopped and started debating, the debaters started to work and this is the result, let's sum it up.
1. We have companies with VAT numbers, with shareholders, with bank accounts
2. We have a great mission statement which makes me feel proud and a good positioning too as Entrepreneurship 2.0. Open the source code of entrepreneurship to the world (difficult? Of course this is difficult! Changing the world has never been easy)
3. We have 84 trademarks worldwide and a great name (which makes people smile when you say it)
4. We have more than a hundred second-level domain names in these countries (and for the Spanish-speaking countries we have an alternative name –pyjamanation- because pajama seems to mean masturbation which could trigger the wrong sort of 'microjobs'
5. We have more than 60 country managers (as Yosi says 33% are doing their best, 33% are doing something and 33% are doing nothing). Fair enough, that is a reflection of the world as well. We are human, not superhuman.
6. We have customers, more every day, hits in more than 50 countries (Venezuela and Kenya on top, which means that we have rescheduled the world as we know it), microjobs from a lot of countries (I have not seen this in any site) and 3000 people who registered and left their profiles. We even had to pay money back to people who paid mistakenly, how about that!
7. We have the best architecture in the world (our new system works with catalyst and Mason- not that I really know what this is, but Chris tells me it is the Bentley of programming) and we paid the top guy at Amazon to work that out for us. We only had him on our payroll for two months, but God that hurt!
8. We have a great management team who work for free
9. We have a blog (which I write every day and I love to read it too, it is actually one of my favorites), a wiki, a group on Facebook, several movies on Youtube in two languages; we have been on TV in Portugal and Venezuela and shortly in India (I love the way Ricardo sat their in pajamas, that is the kind of brand we need, it should be in the contract that all our managers have to wear pajamas during interviews)
10. We have closed great partnerships with www.lulu.com, www.bitwine.com, www.paltrust.com, www.worldlawdirect.com, and some others are in the make
11. www.Wolframscience.com has a three-year job for 1000 microworkers for us which will get us global press when our new system is out. It is a great assignment believe me.
12. In September we will have our own server farm in Sweden and a series of new contracts made by our lawyers, which will solidify our positions towards licenses and option agreements.
Amazing, is it not, that we sometimes think, that we do not really exist, although even a passing thought, it is a wrong one. We are changing the world, but our pace could improve.
I would like to end with the lyrical words of a Skype email I got today and it made me think of all of you, so here it is:
When the unexpected happens, it's important to remember the people who stuck behind us and whose loyalty humbled us. I want to thank everyone for their support, patience and being part of the Skype community. And for those of you who missed out on using Skype last week - I want to especially thank you as well.
TRANSPARENCY TOTAL
Day 8: Transparency (let's kill another taboo)
I think we covered a lot since 7 blogs. This one gets a bit more practical. In order to do everything what we want to achieve, we need to rethink our model. Originally I had enthusiastically promised 50% of the company to the country managers. This is no longer a viable position for VCs to come in. So, we restructured that position in ways where everyone still benefits: 20% for country managers and 10% for management, together 30%.
An option pool will be created for country managers of 20% or 45,000,000 shares. The option strike price will be fixed at 0.01333 Euro so with 225, 000,000 shares it is set to when the value of the company is 3M€. When we sell or do an IPO the option pool will be exercisable, that means that you get the difference between the strike price (0,01333) and the purchase price (hopefully 2$ :-). The option pool is dilutable as are all other shares.
The CMs will receive 30% (net) of the revenue. If a merger is being made, 25% will go to the company which brought the users and 8% will be retained by the CM; so we give 3% extra to the CM because we know he is adding value for the rest of us.
It may seem less, and it is of course, but in the end positions are meaningless. I ended up with 0.6% of Qwest Communications and this was more than enough.
At this very moment we are also consolidating our management team, all of which I must add, work for free.
• Walter De Brouwer, ceo (Belgium)
• Yosi Dagan, Sales and Marketing President (Israel)
• Chris Vertonghen, CTO (Belgium)
• Andy Roberts, Country Site Coordinator (UK)
• Jean-Antoine Bord, Vice President Africa (Kenya)
• Ricardo del Rio, Vice President South-America (Venezuela)
• Paul Velho, Vice President Europe (Portugal)
• Chanterria Mc Gilbra, PR Officer
• Sunita Raho, Design
We still have openings for VP Asia, VP Pacific, VP Eastern Europe and VP USA/Canada but we will fill these in later. Of the option pool for management we have reserved until now: Yosi (4,5m), Chris (4,5m), JA Bord (1m shares), Ricardo (1m), Paul (1m). Of the 22,500,000m shares we have reserved 12m shares and there are still 10,5m in the pool. Also note that at this point, none of these have vested.
What will happen now is that Worldlawdirect, Brad Haskins, is going to put this in contracts (country managers, Vice Presidents, staff, option contracts) so that our legal dashboard is in order.
I think what would be cool now is to hear from our three new vice presidents how they see their new role. I would like to invite Paul Velho to be the first.
Walter De Brouwer
I think we covered a lot since 7 blogs. This one gets a bit more practical. In order to do everything what we want to achieve, we need to rethink our model. Originally I had enthusiastically promised 50% of the company to the country managers. This is no longer a viable position for VCs to come in. So, we restructured that position in ways where everyone still benefits: 20% for country managers and 10% for management, together 30%.
An option pool will be created for country managers of 20% or 45,000,000 shares. The option strike price will be fixed at 0.01333 Euro so with 225, 000,000 shares it is set to when the value of the company is 3M€. When we sell or do an IPO the option pool will be exercisable, that means that you get the difference between the strike price (0,01333) and the purchase price (hopefully 2$ :-). The option pool is dilutable as are all other shares.
The CMs will receive 30% (net) of the revenue. If a merger is being made, 25% will go to the company which brought the users and 8% will be retained by the CM; so we give 3% extra to the CM because we know he is adding value for the rest of us.
It may seem less, and it is of course, but in the end positions are meaningless. I ended up with 0.6% of Qwest Communications and this was more than enough.
At this very moment we are also consolidating our management team, all of which I must add, work for free.
• Walter De Brouwer, ceo (Belgium)
• Yosi Dagan, Sales and Marketing President (Israel)
• Chris Vertonghen, CTO (Belgium)
• Andy Roberts, Country Site Coordinator (UK)
• Jean-Antoine Bord, Vice President Africa (Kenya)
• Ricardo del Rio, Vice President South-America (Venezuela)
• Paul Velho, Vice President Europe (Portugal)
• Chanterria Mc Gilbra, PR Officer
• Sunita Raho, Design
We still have openings for VP Asia, VP Pacific, VP Eastern Europe and VP USA/Canada but we will fill these in later. Of the option pool for management we have reserved until now: Yosi (4,5m), Chris (4,5m), JA Bord (1m shares), Ricardo (1m), Paul (1m). Of the 22,500,000m shares we have reserved 12m shares and there are still 10,5m in the pool. Also note that at this point, none of these have vested.
What will happen now is that Worldlawdirect, Brad Haskins, is going to put this in contracts (country managers, Vice Presidents, staff, option contracts) so that our legal dashboard is in order.
I think what would be cool now is to hear from our three new vice presidents how they see their new role. I would like to invite Paul Velho to be the first.
Walter De Brouwer
August 21, 2007
Day 7: God spoke to us and apologized
Day Seven: Never thought this would happen
Google apologized!!
We take pride in moving quickly, and we think this philosophy helps to create lots of new and innovative products. But it also leads to errors that -- upon reflection and your feedback -- we need to rectify. This was one of them. We make mistakes; we do our best not to repeat them -- and we really do try to fix the ones we make. That said, the very least that our users should expect from us is that our mistakes be new and innovative, too. ;)
Customers not happy with Facebook's Open Doors Closed Policy (we should learn from this, open up, no closed platforms)
For those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature. That's because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They'll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it. I rarely do that, and have missed some important messages from people trying to contact me. As a next step, I think Facebook should offer to forward the actual messages to an outside email address (and/or provide a password protected RSS feed). Eventually Facebook should offer full POP or IMAP support for their email. They can still restrict it so that you can only receive messages from friends, but at least you could access it from your desktop or web based mail application.
Thank you for your comments in email, but now, thanks to Andy and Yosi, the comments on the blog are enabled, so comment freely. You asked me how the coops would look like, well this was my original idea for people setting up a virtual company. What do you think?
How do I set up Me Inc. in 15 easy steps?
1. What will be the name http://www.domainsbot.com/
2. Write the 1-Pager containing:
• Launching date
• Ownership
• Mission
• Vision
• Contact
3. Make a preliminary spreadsheet of the first two years (P/L) and see how much money you must lend from F3 (Fools, Friends and Family) not to have to worry about cash flow
4. Write the contents for a website and
• register a domain name www.pajamadomains.com
5. Choose a logo and house style (business cards, stationery, email signature) www.pajamaproducts.com
6. Find a template for your website www.pajamaproducts.com
• find a host provider www.pajamahosting.com
• add some digital pictures www.istockphoto.com
• introduce payment software www.paypal.com
• Keep the statistics to adjust what you offer www.google.com/analytics
7. Open a bank account (online or offline)
8. Find an accountant online to provide you quarterly with three statements (P/L, cash flow, balance sheet) and make him do the tax formalities www.pajamaproducts.com
9. Find a lawyer for a cheap lawyer on monthly subscription www.worldlawdirect.com
10. Create your tiger team and divide the labour
• secretary www.pajamanation.com/cybersecretaries per hour
• Translators www.pajamanation.com/translators
• Credit Collection www.pajamanation.com/creditcollection
• IT remote help www.pajamanation.com/ITremote
11. Select your marketing mix:
• lead generation www.pajamanation.com/leadgeneration
• Internet Marketing
12. Collect your Business docs and contracts library www.worldlawdirect.com
13. Build up your confidence with some merchandising (cap, T-shirt, mug) www.cafepress.com or www.zazzle.com
14. Lend money from the community www.paltrust.com
15. Become a member of www.linkedin.com and www.facebook.com Pajamanation Groups
Google apologized!!
We take pride in moving quickly, and we think this philosophy helps to create lots of new and innovative products. But it also leads to errors that -- upon reflection and your feedback -- we need to rectify. This was one of them. We make mistakes; we do our best not to repeat them -- and we really do try to fix the ones we make. That said, the very least that our users should expect from us is that our mistakes be new and innovative, too. ;)
Customers not happy with Facebook's Open Doors Closed Policy (we should learn from this, open up, no closed platforms)
For those of us that use normal email for our day to day business, getting Facebook messages is more of a problem than a feature. That's because Facebook makes you log on to the site to read messages/emails from your friends. They'll send a note to your normal email address when a new message comes in, but they make you log on to Facebook to actually read it. I rarely do that, and have missed some important messages from people trying to contact me. As a next step, I think Facebook should offer to forward the actual messages to an outside email address (and/or provide a password protected RSS feed). Eventually Facebook should offer full POP or IMAP support for their email. They can still restrict it so that you can only receive messages from friends, but at least you could access it from your desktop or web based mail application.
Thank you for your comments in email, but now, thanks to Andy and Yosi, the comments on the blog are enabled, so comment freely. You asked me how the coops would look like, well this was my original idea for people setting up a virtual company. What do you think?
How do I set up Me Inc. in 15 easy steps?
1. What will be the name http://www.domainsbot.com/
2. Write the 1-Pager containing:
• Launching date
• Ownership
• Mission
• Vision
• Contact
3. Make a preliminary spreadsheet of the first two years (P/L) and see how much money you must lend from F3 (Fools, Friends and Family) not to have to worry about cash flow
4. Write the contents for a website and
• register a domain name www.pajamadomains.com
5. Choose a logo and house style (business cards, stationery, email signature) www.pajamaproducts.com
6. Find a template for your website www.pajamaproducts.com
• find a host provider www.pajamahosting.com
• add some digital pictures www.istockphoto.com
• introduce payment software www.paypal.com
• Keep the statistics to adjust what you offer www.google.com/analytics
7. Open a bank account (online or offline)
8. Find an accountant online to provide you quarterly with three statements (P/L, cash flow, balance sheet) and make him do the tax formalities www.pajamaproducts.com
9. Find a lawyer for a cheap lawyer on monthly subscription www.worldlawdirect.com
10. Create your tiger team and divide the labour
• secretary www.pajamanation.com/cybersecretaries per hour
• Translators www.pajamanation.com/translators
• Credit Collection www.pajamanation.com/creditcollection
• IT remote help www.pajamanation.com/ITremote
11. Select your marketing mix:
• lead generation www.pajamanation.com/leadgeneration
• Internet Marketing
12. Collect your Business docs and contracts library www.worldlawdirect.com
13. Build up your confidence with some merchandising (cap, T-shirt, mug) www.cafepress.com or www.zazzle.com
14. Lend money from the community www.paltrust.com
15. Become a member of www.linkedin.com and www.facebook.com Pajamanation Groups
August 20, 2007
Darwin's Coops
Darwin's Coops
I started this blog by stating that companies need to evolve, and if they are not prepared to do this, they will go to the dogs. If you look at our original idea for Pajamanation, we can safely say that we have not been afraid to evolve together with the rapid pace of evolution of the internet.
Andy in his invited blog, says that not only companies need to evolve, also we, the members of these companies need to evolve, in other words, we need to learn new things faster than before. That is why I like his idea of being the mentor of a group of country managers ready to evolve to new heights.
Yosi, in his blog tells us that our choice of partners should focus on whether they are ready to evolve or not. That is three times that we pay tribute to Darwin: our company, ourselves and our partners.
Let me now introduce a fourth stage of evolution: our clients, our customers need to evolve. Great companies predict what their customers will need in future, but the greatest change what they need. That is partly our mission: to change what our customers think they want. Therefore, I would like to introduce the concept of "coops". The idea centers around the leveraging of our identity. As a homeworker we can have several identities: ourselves, our incorporated self, an alternative identity, etc.. but there is more. We have to show our customers the way to a higher level of identity leverage. Besides their personal identity, in our future pajamanation platform they can choose to have one or more virtual companies. A virtual company is a digital entity, not necessarily a legal one. For instance, I am a copywriter and I make a living working from home for clients who need my services. But I can crave for something bigger so that I can pitch for more complex jobs. So I set up the virtual company BROCHURE. Via pajamanation I let the world know that in that company I am looking for three partners: a designer, a translator and a printer. Together we can deliver products such as brochures or websites or power points, which on my own I could not do. Therefore I have created a second opportunity to get homework for myself.
In future we are going to set up a third level of complexity (1-self, 2-virtual company): the supercoop. A supercoop is a collection of virtual companies. Suppose that one day we see an appeal on pajamanation that MEDIA (a supercoop) is looking for virtual companies doing brochures, advertising sales, ad metrics, SEO etc.. We can then apply with our virtual company to do even more complex jobs and so pitch against global media companies working for global clients. The only difference will be that we will do it at a fraction of the cost that the brick and mortar companies will do it.
Anyway, that is my rant for today. Does that make sense to anyone?
Summary
There are three wizards to be build:
1. Me Inc, individuals becoming personal multinationals working from home (for instance a translator marketing his services and connecting with other translators in other countries)
2. Coop, Me Incs working together in a virtual company to do more complex jobs
• translator + copywriter + designer + printer (brochure makers)
• SEO + internet advertising + linking (internet marketing)
• Journalists + advertising (publishers)
• Public Relations + Marketing (internet PR)
• IP radio station + IP TV station + banner ads + text ads (internet ad agency)
I started this blog by stating that companies need to evolve, and if they are not prepared to do this, they will go to the dogs. If you look at our original idea for Pajamanation, we can safely say that we have not been afraid to evolve together with the rapid pace of evolution of the internet.
Andy in his invited blog, says that not only companies need to evolve, also we, the members of these companies need to evolve, in other words, we need to learn new things faster than before. That is why I like his idea of being the mentor of a group of country managers ready to evolve to new heights.
Yosi, in his blog tells us that our choice of partners should focus on whether they are ready to evolve or not. That is three times that we pay tribute to Darwin: our company, ourselves and our partners.
Let me now introduce a fourth stage of evolution: our clients, our customers need to evolve. Great companies predict what their customers will need in future, but the greatest change what they need. That is partly our mission: to change what our customers think they want. Therefore, I would like to introduce the concept of "coops". The idea centers around the leveraging of our identity. As a homeworker we can have several identities: ourselves, our incorporated self, an alternative identity, etc.. but there is more. We have to show our customers the way to a higher level of identity leverage. Besides their personal identity, in our future pajamanation platform they can choose to have one or more virtual companies. A virtual company is a digital entity, not necessarily a legal one. For instance, I am a copywriter and I make a living working from home for clients who need my services. But I can crave for something bigger so that I can pitch for more complex jobs. So I set up the virtual company BROCHURE. Via pajamanation I let the world know that in that company I am looking for three partners: a designer, a translator and a printer. Together we can deliver products such as brochures or websites or power points, which on my own I could not do. Therefore I have created a second opportunity to get homework for myself.
In future we are going to set up a third level of complexity (1-self, 2-virtual company): the supercoop. A supercoop is a collection of virtual companies. Suppose that one day we see an appeal on pajamanation that MEDIA (a supercoop) is looking for virtual companies doing brochures, advertising sales, ad metrics, SEO etc.. We can then apply with our virtual company to do even more complex jobs and so pitch against global media companies working for global clients. The only difference will be that we will do it at a fraction of the cost that the brick and mortar companies will do it.
Anyway, that is my rant for today. Does that make sense to anyone?
Summary
There are three wizards to be build:
1. Me Inc, individuals becoming personal multinationals working from home (for instance a translator marketing his services and connecting with other translators in other countries)
2. Coop, Me Incs working together in a virtual company to do more complex jobs
• translator + copywriter + designer + printer (brochure makers)
• SEO + internet advertising + linking (internet marketing)
• Journalists + advertising (publishers)
• Public Relations + Marketing (internet PR)
• IP radio station + IP TV station + banner ads + text ads (internet ad agency)
August 17, 2007
How to build a Win-Win partnership and leverging the power of more than 50 country managers
I would like to thank Walter for inviting me to post on his blog. I really appreciate this blog as it expose the ‘behind the stage activity’ in Pajamanation.
I would like to write about partners and partnerships, but before going into that we should look on the value that we can bring to table.
We have country managers in more than 50 countries. Pajamanation’s country managers are special people with talents in various fields and with entrepreneurship soul.
The power of our organization is when we can leverage the power, efforts and knowledge of the country managers.
When I look on any activity that we are doing on global level, I ask myself if it can be leveraged by the country managers. If it is not, it is a waste of efforts from my point of view. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do activities that are good ideas for a specific country and maybe , on a local level, but then it will be handled by the country manager and not by the corporate (and it might be that other country managers will learn from it and follow it).
Real good and long lasting partnership means to build a Win-Win situation.
What can we bring to a partnership:
2. Local PR activity in more than 50 countries
3. Our growing user base
4. More revenues
Now let’s look on what we can get from a partnership:
1. Best services in the world for our visitors to improve the quality of their life and to professionalize their home services, integrated into Pajamanation
2. More revenue
3. More users
4. Promotion and good story
When we are looking for best service from potential partners, we are looking on the current best service and try to see if the potential partners are open to evolve.
Then , if the service is the best and has a value, people will likely pay for using it.
As we moved into the free model, and we are selling services around our core business, we need to have many users. At this stage, the best we can get from a potential partner is more users.
The partners that we are selecting now are partners who want cross-promotion.
Cross-promotion means that they are going to promote the partnership via the press, their user base and other means and we are going to do the same with every country manager.
And you know how it is in life, if someone is easy to get, probably the value is low, and if someone is playing hard to get others are eager to get him/her J and probably the value is higher.
The same is with partnerships. If it is just “put our link or widget on your web page and start earn money” the value is low.
We are aiming to meaningful partnerships, and this takes efforts, understandings and misunderstandings, agreements, technical coordination, development and business coordination but the value is much higher.
We should be proud of the wonderful team of country managers and in the business we have built so far. We should be proud in our noble vision and mission of changing the life of many people around the world. Look on our mission on the right side of this blog and you will see how great it is.
And I can tell you, my dear friends, that many of the potential partners I’m talking with, are very interested in what we are bringing to the table and see in it a lot of value for them and for the society.
Together we WIN BIG!!!
Day Five: Namaste Gary
Day Five: Namaste Gary
New Jersey, May 2004. A Saturday evening just after nine o’clock. An engineering student from Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro (ok, a ‘nerd’) just installed a new toy, a webcam. He is playing around with it and makes a webcam video of himself miming to the song "Dragostea din tei" by Moldovan pop band O-Zone. Little did he know that the following 1:40 minutes were not only going to change his life but also the complete direction of the internet economy.
The video became such a phenomenon watched by millions of people and downloaded more than 1,000,000,000 times. It switched to YouTube for sheer mass. On YouTube itself in the first month it was translated in 87 languages by 263 performers out of 148 countries. There were derivatives of this song as rap, country, rock.. all done by internet consumers, not professionals. Gary Brolsma became known as Numa Numa, after a phrase in the song. He was with Ophra, ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's The Tonight Show, and VH1's Best Week Ever. The unwilling and embarrassed nerd became a mainstream celebrity, subject of a large article in the New York Times and frequent guest of NBC Today Show. Gary’s Numa Numa song is the most downloaded song on earth now.
Gary Brolsma is credited with singlehandedly
• justifying the existence of webcams
• the power of YouTube
• the proof of viral marketing
• the impossibility of a record house to uphold their copyright when all the world is singing their song.
What made Gary universally viral was the fact that he was genuine, that he was totally happy with the new toy he just installed but above all Gary was a “Mensch”. We recognized ourselves in him.
Today I was going to tell you how we are going to go to millions of visitors. We will be able to if we are genuine, if we are proud of what we do and if we are “Menschen”. This is very, very difficult and most viral programs fail, because they do not have these ingredients. Faking reality if a lot harder than you think (although at my age the difference between stimulation and simulation becomes blurry :-).
For us this means that we need to be proud of our product, install it, be so happy with it that our passion and our enthusiasm flows over in the cups of millions of others. Mensch to Mensch.
P.S Gary graduated but still every day, millions of people download him and more than a hundred new versions appear on YouTube. He was voted the Number 1 Internet Icon by 40 Greatest Internet Superstars on VH1.
New Jersey, May 2004. A Saturday evening just after nine o’clock. An engineering student from Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro (ok, a ‘nerd’) just installed a new toy, a webcam. He is playing around with it and makes a webcam video of himself miming to the song "Dragostea din tei" by Moldovan pop band O-Zone. Little did he know that the following 1:40 minutes were not only going to change his life but also the complete direction of the internet economy.
The video became such a phenomenon watched by millions of people and downloaded more than 1,000,000,000 times. It switched to YouTube for sheer mass. On YouTube itself in the first month it was translated in 87 languages by 263 performers out of 148 countries. There were derivatives of this song as rap, country, rock.. all done by internet consumers, not professionals. Gary Brolsma became known as Numa Numa, after a phrase in the song. He was with Ophra, ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's The Tonight Show, and VH1's Best Week Ever. The unwilling and embarrassed nerd became a mainstream celebrity, subject of a large article in the New York Times and frequent guest of NBC Today Show. Gary’s Numa Numa song is the most downloaded song on earth now.
Gary Brolsma is credited with singlehandedly
• justifying the existence of webcams
• the power of YouTube
• the proof of viral marketing
• the impossibility of a record house to uphold their copyright when all the world is singing their song.
What made Gary universally viral was the fact that he was genuine, that he was totally happy with the new toy he just installed but above all Gary was a “Mensch”. We recognized ourselves in him.
Today I was going to tell you how we are going to go to millions of visitors. We will be able to if we are genuine, if we are proud of what we do and if we are “Menschen”. This is very, very difficult and most viral programs fail, because they do not have these ingredients. Faking reality if a lot harder than you think (although at my age the difference between stimulation and simulation becomes blurry :-).
For us this means that we need to be proud of our product, install it, be so happy with it that our passion and our enthusiasm flows over in the cups of millions of others. Mensch to Mensch.
P.S Gary graduated but still every day, millions of people download him and more than a hundred new versions appear on YouTube. He was voted the Number 1 Internet Icon by 40 Greatest Internet Superstars on VH1.
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