A Long Day of Fire Fighting, Jumping in Dumpsters, and $40,000 to Start a Company in China

It’s been a long day today. I went to bed at 4am on Monday morning, woke up at 7:30am, had a long day yesterday, and then feel asleep exhausted last night at 9:30pm. My alarm clock failed to go off this morning, so I was an hour late to work, which was not good considering I have to be there for Josh to get in.

After I arrived, I got Josh working on the competitor campaign while I got everything ready for the affiliate campaign. Since we we were having problems with our mail server, we decided to switch to our links campaign for a few days. We were all ready to get this going, but unfortunetely our informational web site, http://www.email-marketing-software-resource.com, went down. It was on DataPeer which filed for Chapter 11 two months ago. It seems we forgot to switch it over to Preation hosting and it finally went down for good today. Hopefully Aaron will get it up on the Preation server by tomorrow and we can start the links campaign. I also have a great bootstrapping story from today… had to jump in a dumpster today to get six chair boxes we threw out so we could get the bar codes off of them and turn in the $50 rebate on each of them. Good times.

I did have a nice lunch with Josh at Kurama’s today. I tend to eat sushi about 4 times per week now.

At 5:30 I picked up some drinks, cups, plates, and four pizzas and went to Kenan Flagler to set up for the Carolina Entrepreneurship Club Business Roundtable Discussion. We had 13 show up and had a good meeting. We all told our story and talked about or businesses or business ideas. We also heard an interesting idea from a local entrepreneur who was trying to refine his target markets and plan for a universal indentification device. I then took home Jeffrey from Beijing, an MBA student and experienced entrepreneur. I learned from Jeffrey that you must have $40,000 in your business bank account before you can even incorporate a business in China. What a terrible thing! This removes the possibility of entrepreneurship for 95% of the population there. That definitely needs to change soon. He also said that China was just as much of a capitalist country as the U.S. now. Interesting.

After the meeting, I took Erin to Bath and Body Works and the Bear Rock Cafe and then worked at her dorm for a little while. I am looking forward to the CEC Event next week, the Student Entrepreneur Panel.

I got home about 10:30 and have been answering emails since. Hopefully tomorrow will be less hectic and not so many things will go wrong.

Quote of the day: “That sounds like John Ashcroft’s wet dream” - Erik Severinghaus in reference to the Universal Identification Device

Preparing to be a Manager

Tomorrow morning the intern for Broadwick, Josh, starts.

I spent today working with our programmer Aaron to add new features to IntelliContact Pro. We now have message scheduling, a built-in HTML editor, and have developed a much more efficient 3 queue system of sending.

I spent the last half of the day preparing the affiliate campaign lists for Josh’s arrival. I used DigDB coupled with Excel to dedupe and sort out the various lists which we will be contacting over the coming month for our links and affiliate campaigns. We’ve built 134 affiliates so far and 110 links to our informational web site http://www.email-marketing-software-resource.com.

Our goal is to have at least 500 links and 400 affiliates by the end of Josh’s internship in four weeks. This should enable us to get to the top of the search engines for ‘email marketing software’ (we’re currently 5th in Google) as well as greatly increase our CPA sales.

Tomorrow morning Aaron, Josh, and I will also be meeting with Todd Ballenger, CEO of KendallTodd and advisor to the Carolina Entrepreneurship Club. We are hoping he will be willing to help us and perhaps join as a board member. We’ll be going to do an overview of the business.

It will be interesting to see what I learn from being a manager. Looks like I’ll be on the 8:30 till 5 schedule forever now. Oh well.

At the Center for Entrepreneurship, I am working with Paul Chang to finish the Entrepreneurship Resource Center. I need to talk to him tomorrow about where to go to approve new articles. I also need to send a follow-up message for the Carolina Entrepreneurship Club Business Roundtable on Tuesday.

I also need to organize the student panel for the Kauffman Grant tomorrow. I’ll call or email David about this.

Off to bed.

Power Outages, Writing, and Farm Subsidies

I went to bed this morning at 4am after finishing the article “The History of the Market System” between midnight and noon. I woke up at 7:30 to take Erin to class, and then came back home. I checked to make sure the search engine spider was still running on my laptop and then went back to sleep until 1pm.

I woke up and began the day by calling Jim Minschew from Wachovia. He’s the sales rep for our merchant account and gives me a daily account of the new reason why our merchant account has yet to be approved (not his fault, just strange policies of underwriters). I then called Aaron about picking up a couple desks so we could re-arrange the office.

About 3:00pm, in the middle of a game of NBA Jam on the SNES simulator on my laptop, the power went out. Hurricane Isabel had been ranging outside all day and finally made us lose electricity.

I called Erin and asked her if I could come over to her dorm. She said sure so I gathered up all the frozen food we had and my computer and a few books and went over to Ehringhaus South, avoiding downed trees and being wary of intersections with dead stop lights on the way.

There, I watched the news for a few minutes and then started work on the book. Between 5pm and 11:30pm, I wrote “How The Market System of Today Works: Economics 101 for the Aspiring Entrepreneur”

I am glad I got this article as well as The History of the Market System out of the way. I’ve been meaning to write both articles for a year now.

After I finished the article, I said goodnight to Erin, cooked two Chicken Pot Pies in the oven, and began work on the next section of the book, The Important Role of the Entreprenuer. I finished this section and then began to do some research on international trade.

I spent about an hour from 2am to 3am, researching about the problem of farming subsidies in the EU and the US. I’ve been against these for so long. It is ironic and sad how Europe and the U.S. the two biggest backers of free trade, provide subsidies of $320 billion per year to their farmers. This makes no sense from the standpoint of comparative advantage, which I spent 4 hours writing on earlier tonight.

Check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3198113.stm
and http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/242.html when you get a chance.

Well that’s all for tonight. I’m about to get to sleep. Staying over at Erin’s dorm tonight. Hopefully power will be back on at my place by tomorrow/later today. I have a lot of work to do in preparing for Josh’s (Broadwick’s new marketing intern) arrival on Monday.

- Ryan

Publication Date

Zero to One Million is still on track to be ready by November 15, 2003.

Welcome

Welcome to my online journal. I will be adding to this several times per week. I invite you to come back often to see how I have progressed in building Broadwick Corporation (www.broadwick.com) and publishing Zero to One Million.