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