Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

We’ve launched a new blog devoted to many of the common motivational issues that entrepreneurs face daily. Called The Entrepreneurial Savant, it consists of observations and little stories collected for an unpublished book of the same name.

The subject matter is very different than this blog- here we focus on observing things that directly relate to our current business while on Entre Sav we take a wider world view of the business of business.

We’ll be adding new material daily so take a look and let us know what you think!

That’s Seth Godin in an amazing interview with Tamara Adlin of UX Pioneers, a blog on the subject of user interface/experience design, a subject near and dear to our hearts.

I had no idea that Seth’s personal experience was so broad and hands-on, having started many successful businesses rather than simply pontificating. It helps me understand why I enjoy his blog so much. And I’m going to go out and read his books that I haven’t read yet.

In the nineties I made a good part of my living writing non-fiction how to books, mostly on business subjects. Once I got involved in web development and online marketing most of my writing went online too. Now, a decade later I am not a writer, I am something called a ‘content creator’. The difference is that I have no intention of handing my content over to a publisher for peanuts. Instead we’re using those skills to make money, something publishers don’t get.

The print publisher model is buy and publish a lot of books and hope one in one hundred is a hit. It’s the ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks’ strategy, which is about the least strategic business approach imaginable, especially because they excel at finding really good content creators and getting their work for practically nothing. The problem is what they do with that content.

I’m going to give you a specific example. Ten years ago I co-wrote (with my brother Richard) a best selling book on kitchen design. We were paid an advance of $30k which was earned out fairly quickly. We then received royalty checks quarterly and still do though they have dwindled down to a few hundred bucks each. All in all maybe $100k which is not bad for six months work. Or is it?

Now imagine that I take this content, update it a bit (I own the copyright with my co-writer) and build a comprehensive kitchen design web site around it- hundreds of pages of really great information all organized and written. I optimize it and run some PPC and build traffic. The kitchen design business is a $40 billion a year business in the US alone and virtually every purchase is a big ticket item. Once we’ve built some traffic, we monetize the site and I think its likely to make a lot more than a $100k a year (yes it’s in our plan).

Here’s the kicker. There is a ton of similarly valuable content all ready to go sitting there in publishers’ backlists. Why not build a business monetizing this stuff and splitting the proceeds with the owners?

If you’re in the publishing business you might want to give us a call.

When Gibson published his last novel, Pattern Recognition, he announced that he was no longer writing speculative or science fiction including the cyberpunk genre he is widely credited for inventing with his incredible Neuromancer, written in 1984-5. Neuromancer got a lot of things right about a not too distant future that increasingly resembles the present. Because the present is evolving so quickly, Gibson now sets his books in these times. And that’s why I’m reviewing his latest as a business book rather than a sci-fi novel.

Anyone starting a tech-related business (which is really any business) these days has to try to anticipate where things will be a year or more out. This used to be relatively easy as there was a much slower development pace and information traveled in predictable ways. Now a business can be vaulted to the stratosphere in hours or plunged into non-existence by a previously nonexistent competitor. To survive we must all be futurists and scenario planners on a daily basis. Since Gibson is, at his core, a scenario planner par excellence, his new books are a crash course in this arcane art of predicting ‘what if’ situations so you can develop a business response.

Spook Country sets up a plausible scenario: A shipping container with a mysterious payload is being tracked and sought by several groups spread across North America. One is a Cuban crime family, another a journalist covering technology-enabled art and another a possibly Government-backed set of spooks (agents). Gibson weaves this together with an array of innovative uses for technology including iPods, GPS, virtual reality (remember that?), etc. The locations are wired and the characters are imbibing various exotic drugs and cocktails. It’s all very entertaining but it is also enlightening. How will the way we do transactions change? What does being trackable in real time, anywhere do to consumer behavior? What are the valuable commodities of the near future?

As you read this and Pattern Recognition (which accurately predicted the advent of consumer-generated video with a brilliant premise) you will find yourself speculating on these and other questions. Put your business in the context and you may find opportunities others are not seeing.

Any book that accomplishes that is a great business book. And Spook Country is even better: It’s a great read too.