Archive for August, 2007
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
At about 10:45 PM I received and email on my Blackberry indicating that I was officially incorporated, and that all the documentation was in transit. To incorporate I decided that I did not want to go through the hassle of filing for incorporation myself for 2 reasons. First, because I am currently living in Toronto and wanted to open a US corporation, not having a US address would make the whole process much more difficult, time consuming and expensive for me. Secondly, the opportunity costs were much less if I were to hire a document filing service company and so I chose to deal with MyCorporation and purchase their expedited service. Intuit as I hope most of you have heard of, is the owner of this company and also the reason that I decided to choose MyCorporation rather than their competitor Corporate.com. I was amazed at how easy and seamless the whole process was and how helpful the rep who helped me was (Marvin, who also gave be a $25 discount). All it took was a quick 30 minute call to their call center and 1 signature on a piece of paper they sent me via UPS (which I returned the very same day). Then two and a half weeks later (today) I received my incorporation package with all my corporate documents. It even comes with a CD that takes you through the whole package and explains everything about its contents and a copy of Intuit’s Quickbooks. I am just so impress by how well put together this program is and how easy they made it for me to open up a company. I would definitely suggest to anyone wanting to open an American corporation, that they check into using this company’s services.
There is only two things that I need to do before I am ready to do business and that is open up a back account and get a mailing address. It will be a bit of a hassle to open up the bank account because to do so I need to get an Employer Identification Number which I need a social security number to get. This will force me to deal with the IRS which I doubt will be nearly as easy as dealing with MyCorporation. At least opening a mailbox with mail forwarding should be easy (2 words: Mailboxes Etc).
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
The week long competition for my companies logo and stationary design has just finished and I have to say that the results were far better than I had ever expected they would be. During this 9 day competition, I received 108 design submission, of which 25% were in the quality range that I was looking for. I did receive several submissions that were completely ridiculous, but all in all, I had great designers working in my best interest. I have to say that I gained more than just a great logo and stationary design, I also acquired several design contacts that are going to be willing to work with me in the future whatever I may need.
There is something that I notice throughout the competition with reference to the quality and direction of the designer’s work with reference to why one designer in particular easily won. Arpad, the designer above all the other designers listened and asked questions about what I wanted. He was very professional, and I noticed that above all the other designers he was more attentive to and spend more time envisioning what I was looking for. I found that many designers were not trying to put themselves into my shoes and therefor submitted many pieces of work that were completely in the wrong direction. What I want to let anyone planning to create a competition and designers know is that success is in the details. What I mean is that the design brief is the most important thing that the contest holder has to work on, and designers focus on. Too many times did tell the designers, “this is not what I’m looking for, read the brief”. This brief should have created the foundation for every design submitted, but it failed to be so with every designer except with 5.
Now come the fun part… I have about 5 designs that I am intending on testing out on my consumers, and what better way to do this than through a good old fashion split test. In the same way I picked my company name, I will pick my logo. I know that whatever logo I do finally end up with will be the best because it will have been chosen through unbiased empirical evidence. I am going to be using Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and probably Shopify to determine the consumers response to my new logo designs and how well they convert into a sale. I am looking forward to the results and I will keep you all posted.
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
My competition has been running for almost 6 full days and I have to say that I am overwhelmed by the response from the design community. I have about 22 good submissions out of 87, which is astounding. I have been communicating with every designer (through comments and private messages) who has been producing good results in order to steer their designs towards what I want. The designers are very receptive to all my comments and have been very forward about asking me to clarify my objectives. One thing that I have notice in going through other competitions, as well as the public and private comments the designers have left me is that there is definitely a right and wrong way of running one of these competitions. First off for your sake you want to be as clear and descriptive as possible when you are writing up the title of your competition. You want to give people clear reason to click on your post over that of others and I will insure that they know what its about before they get into the nitty gritty details. The evidence is in the clicks…All the surrounding posts except for a few other well written ones have about half the number of click and submissions. The second is that it is important to summarize the project clearly in the sub description so that designers know what to expect. The third and most important in terms of getting exactly what you want is to have a clear, outlined and precise project brief. From the comment that the designers have made, they were pleased with the bit of extra time that I put into the brief. This has also helped me in the sense that I know what I want and if a designer is not giving me what I want I can just refer him to the brief
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
There is definitely no such thing as bad press just bad monetization…This video was brought to my attention by a friend and it got me thinking about the media. I believe that it is wrong in coming across as if it is on a moralistic higher ground than the story it is covering. This is an news story that ABC covered yesterday and I have to say that this site will get a whole lot of exposure that will benefit its bottom line. Now this post has nothing to do with the story in the video itself, but about the fact that both ABC and vidmax.com, the stunt men and maybe you will benefits from coverage of the stupid things people do for money. The news agency (’the publisher’) will benefit because its viewers will remain entertained by watching idiots being paid to hurt themselves. Thus their able to command top dollar for ad spots on their network. The website (as a content provider) on the other hand benifits because they increase their exposure and thus increase their ad revenue through traffic volume. This website also has the same relationship with the stunt men except that this time they are acting as the publisher, where as the stunt men are the content providers. No I’ll have to admit right away that I am leeching the content off this story for my own gain, but this is my point. Before you criticize this type of social leeching I want you think about something. If at any point you mention this story or this post to anyone, then you in turn become a publisher and thus receive a beneficial payment (social benefit…aka: Wow you are an interesting person with interesting stories). Now if not with this particular story, then I know it will happen with others. The point I am trying to make is that we are all someway acting as a content provider or as a content publisher to further our own bottom line. Just make sure you focus monetizing your efforts and on maximizing your benefits.
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
Submission By: arpad
A day and a half after posting my logo design competition I already have 38 logo submissions. Now I’ll agree that there are a lot of poorly designed submission, but what is important is that there are several promising ideas. Sitepoint lets you critic all the submissions, which in turn allows the designer to progress towards a perfect logo. I am amazed at how powerful the internet is in bringing together talent from around the world to work on a project. What I also love is that not only is this a much more affordable to achieve something great than directly working with a professional, you are also working with many professionals competing at no cost for their time. You only pay for the final design you choose to declare the winner, and you get to choose how much you are willing to offer. By the end of the competition (Sunday, 26th of August) I expect that I will have an array of amazing designs to choose from.
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
Something has to be said about maintaining a quality impression when your business is serving consumers. I walked into a Quiznos today and ordered a sandwich, and by the time I walked out of the door I vowed never to return to that Quiznos again. First of all the guy behind the counter was very unreceptive and non-animated when he greeted me (his opening words were “What to you want?”). I believe that first impressions are vital and will give you a certain degree of forgiveness and flexibility from your customers if something should go wrong further down the sales pipeline. If you are able to immediately establish a friendly relation with the customer he/she will often overlook minor imperfections in you service because of this relationship. Well in my case, immediately after I ordered the guy preparing my order dropped his knife on the floor and then picked it back up. Without even hesitating he went on as if nothing happened and was about to cut the bread before I spoke up and asked him “Hey, did you see that knife fall on the floor”. He did not even flinch in his response by saying “Ya!”. It was not until I asked him, “Do you think it might be a good idea if you washed the knife before you use it to cut the bread I’m about to eat?” that he actually turned around and did what I asked of him. After that I micro-analyzed every mistake that he made (which every consumer will do after their faith and trust has been violated). This included not asking me what I actually wanted in the sandwich (lettuce, tomato, CHEESE…), and with the sandwich (pop, chips, soup…). Not only was this guy bad, but the other guy at the till did not say a word to me before or after I paid except to say “Over there” (while pointing) when I asked for pickled peppers.
I can say with absolute certainty that they will never see me there again. There is a chance that the 2 customers before me will never go there again, especially after walking out of Quiznos with a disgusted look on their face. They both saw the knife fall and when they grabbed their meals they did not seem please to have purchased it. This is not the first Quiznos that I have been into that I have had a bad experience with, which indicates there might be some underlying customer service issues. I’m not a difficult customer to deal with either is that is what you were thinking. What is funny is that I know now why they are the only food retailer on the only block who is not completely jammed by traffic. Anyways stay away from these guys:
Quiznos - Store #4768
228 Wellington St W
Toronto, ON M5V 3W1
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
As everyone knows every corporation needs a logo and stationary and as only some of you know - I can’t draw worth a damn -. So I decided to once again utilize the social networking aspects of the internet and bring designers to me rather than the other way around. I setup a design competition on a very useful website called Sitepoint.com. This is an amazingly useful webpage and as it turns out running a contest on the site is very responsive. I submitted the competition at around midnight last night and within 12 hours I already had 19 submissions. There are already several of the submissions that I like, and I am sure there will be many more to come. The details of the competition can be seen on the contest brief page if you are an artist and want to compete for this prize money. One thing that I forgot to announce is that I will probably be picking about 3-4 winners and utilizing their designs I will let my consumers pick the most successful design. As I did when picking my corporate name, I will use Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and Shopify (as recorded in my previous posts) to guide me to the best and most responsive logo. I’ll let the CTR (Click Through Rate) and CR (Conversion Rate) make the decision for me. I’m giving the power to the consumers.
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
…I have received almost 10 private messages in the last two days either complimenting or criticizing me on my posts. Whether to make a point for or against or just to poke fun at me, I welcome all comments that you may have about me or my posts. I challenge you all to come up with witty and insightful comments that will further discussions in the posts and lead to progress.
P.S. I have a thick skin so don’t worry, your “smart” little comments wont even sting a bit…but please keep them constructive for the sake of progress 
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
In my previous post I forgot to mention one other important factor that help me decide what name I should pick: Conversion Rate! I used two important services for this. The first is Google Analytics which I have to say is an amazing tool. I do have to admit I am still a novice when it come down to utilizing it, but I still found the important information I needed. The second is the Shopify e-commerce shopping cart which allowed me to quickly setup a mock e-commerce site in order to test out my conversion rates. Another one of the reasons I picked Silverback over Airwear was because Silverback converted almost twice a well as Airwear, which I imagine is because of the Nikeish affiliation.
Share This
· Digg This · Facebook It!
Silverback Apparel Inc. <- Loves -> 
The Result
After much deliberation I have finally chosen a name . I am currently in the process of incorporating under the name Silverback Apparel Inc. in the State of New York. There are several factor that came into play for why I ended up with this name, but I will mostly attribute it to one of my favorite companies: Google. First off I was not looking for something that everyone liked. Vanilla is not my thing and so I wanted something that people either absolutely loved or hated. Silverback was exactly that. It was either the favorite, or the one that people did not like. It is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors in business and I know that Silverback is very unique in my product category. Especially after reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and his blog I really realized now that I made the right decision. He is a branding and marketing genius and has become known in the last 5 years as one of the most innovate and creative people in his industry. His books are a definite must for an budding entrepreneurs. I know that I have chosen well also, because every time I tell someone my corporation’s name they remember it. This will go a long way to saving me money, resources, and time which is going to be important during my future branding and marketing campaigns.
The Process
Referring to my previous posts I basically after polled about 50 people and ended up with this list (in order of polling results):
| Rank |
Name |
What I personally though of these names |
| 1 |
Vérité |
Liked but too boring. |
| 2 |
Airis |
This was my second favorite but it does not stand out enough. |
| 3 |
Airwear |
Something you would expect from Nike or Airwalk. |
| 4 |
Nuair |
Nike thing again. |
| 5 |
J Denis |
Too many designers use this sort of naming scheme. |
| 6 |
Silverback |
Personal favorite because it speaks to me and my target market. |
There was no conclusive winner when it came down to the results, although Vérité was liked by everyone. I intended on using the simply to create a shortlist of names and this is what I got. Once I had this short list it was time to figure out what was the best way to figure out what consumers would respond to the best. The best way that I believe that you can achieve this is by testing the names within the market, and that is what I did. By utilizing Google’s Adwords program I was able to put these 6 names through a campaign that included 27,918 impressions evenly distributed throughout the names. I ran the campaign for several days and low and behold I did have a conclusive answer: Airwear and Silverback. These two both out preformed the other names by such a wide margin that I did not even bother thinking about the other names again. This left me with having to decide between the two, and because of the uniqueness of Silverback and the ease of rememberance, this was a quick and painless decision. An there you have it! Google to the rescue once again. This is a tool that is in my opinion under utilized and I know that I will be using Adwords much more from now on.
Next entries »
Posts (RSS)