Chaudywogbaaga

What I mean by business forum is the space, real or virtual, that the business happens in. Very specifically, this is the space where the sale occurs. It could be a storefront, a webpage, anywhere the business of attracting customers can be done.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m trying to find one! I tend to operate new business ideas on the premise of very small cash investments. In other words I try to get businesses off the ground as cheaply as possible. One of the things that suffers the most in that formula is forum. I can’t easily get a storefront for selling my goods for nothing. I can get a website for next to nothing but the internet is everyone’s forum so it is very hard to be heard above the din of everyone else selling.

I’m not the first person to be a cheapskate and try to operate a business for next to nothing. In centuries past street vendors would ply their trades for the cost of a cart to haul things around. Then there are door to door salesmen. Not the kind you see today, these were people that were down on their luck and couldn’t afford the cart! One story that resonated with me was of a man during the great depression who made statues out of plaster and went to people’s doors to sell them.

The problem with these methods are that they are forbidden most of the time. They are considered a nuisance. While I don’t want to be a nuisance, I do want to support my family. These low investment sales are the pressure relief for people who are trying to survive. No one would do them if they had the money to sell in a different forum. In the end all salesmen are a nuisance but in some cases they are necessary.

A home can be made into a storefront but my home is quite remote so it would not be very effective. There are also a nightmare of liability and regulatory concerns with making a storefront in the home.

Then there is the “craft show". With the entrance fees to these events you would think that the crafters are selling in huge quantities. All the crafters I have spoken to have said that they often walk away with no sales at all. That may just be the economic conditions that we’re in currently.

There are public forums on the internet like ebay and etsy but again, being seen amidst all the other listings is a challenge. Before you think “Now you’re just being lazy!” think about the challenge of competing on any platform other than price in ebay. How do you demonstrate quality? What about craftsmanship? It is doable but it isn’t straightforward. Etsy is more geared to demonstrating quality and craftsmanship but it’s categorizing is not as robust which makes it difficult to be found.

So far I haven’t figured out how to create my own forum that will allow me to get people’s attention and not cost thousands of dollars. It would seem to me like this would not be an easy task, otherwise everyone would be doing it and therefore it would again be difficult to be seen but here is what I can figure out on how I would go about creating one.

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Okay, I’m a Facebook holdout. I know that I would probably get sucked into it and I just don’t have the time for more hobbies. I maintain a few websites, black smith, metal cast, and RPG for fun. I’ve purposefully given up computer games long ago because I just don’t have time so I am very cautious about adding things to my roster of hobbies. I already spend way too much time reading science and tech articles that while I find fun, don’t usually end up having any value to me.

I get why people have Facebook accounts, it’s an easy way of keeping contact with friends in a mass mailing super directory kind of way. It makes keeping in touch easy, like sending a funny email to everyone in your address book. I just don’t have time for it.

So why do I say it’s scary? As anyone with an email account and no Facebook account can tell you, they send emails. A lot of them. “Come join us!” They cry as if you are causing all the people on Facebook torment because you’re not there to enrich their day. That I find annoying but not scary. It’s the email I just got that I found scary. Facebook is stalking me! An old school buddy just emailed me to join. In the email there was one friend that had already sent me an invite that has been permanently recorded in the Facebook servers.

Then there were nine other people that it said I might know. Two of them I didn’t recognize. Three of them were old co-workers. One is a good friend from my childhood. One is a current friend. One is my Brother. And one, is a person that I’ve had discussions about publishing books on Macs on a POD provider’s forum.

Facebook connected us from a forum? So they’re compiling every bit of data they can about me and I’m not even a member! If a person walked up to you and did all this research about you, figuring out all the people you know saying “I know these are all people you care about.” you could go to the police and have a restraining order put against them! Why is it OK for a company to do this? “It’s only marketing.” “That information is freely available, we just put it together.” No! If I collect that kind of information about someone I would be a stalker. The same should apply to a company.

Facebook, stop stalking me!

I have an apprentice in metalworking. A young man that likes the idea of being able to make things out of steel, aluminum and brass. For a long time we’ve talked about metalwork and he’s helped me with blacksmithing projects. He always talked about getting some kind of forge or foundry set up. I sometimes wondered if he ever would but he’s a very determined young man so I feel it’s just a matter of time.

In fact his hesitancy is very much like my own initial fears. I turned to the internet and sites like backyardmetalcasting.com and didn’t make a move until I was sure I understood. He is doing the same, only I am his information source instead of the internet. I’m an information aggregator for him. I’m also quite sure that some of the things I’ve tried to explain to him were just as incomprehensible as when I tried to learn them through pictures and text (with the occasional video).

Well, today he surpassed me in a way. Even though it was his first cast, he found a practical use for his casting. Something I have not done. Sure I love my castings and I’m proud of them but they’re mostly art. Not really practical. His casting was to replace a part on his car. It wasn’t a big part, but it saved him thirty dollars and that’s more than all my metalwork has earned me.

I’ve been using my iPod Touch for about a year now. I like it a lot, but it is a bit small to read on. I’ve done it, it’s just not a great experience. I also read a lot of websites on my iMac. I wonder if the reading experience could be much different from a computer?

The one thing that makes me interested in the iPad is the 3G data plan. Being able to pull down maps and info while on the go would be extremely useful.

The one thing that is sort of disappointing but understandable is the size of the storage. The base iPad has as much storage as my iPod Touch. It is currently half taken up by music and then pictures (and the pictures are a small format they’d take up more space on an iPad). They show how you can watch movies on the iPad, but practically it can only store one to five movies at a time. Now that doesn’t sound too bad for a road trip but it’s not a movie repository like you would want in your kitchen. A 64 GB iPad would be able to store ten to fifteen movies.

So I’m mostly interested in the cheap 3G. A 16 GB iPad and a 3G connection for helping me when I get lost trying to find a customer’s house.

I am interested in the iWork programs, mainly Pages and Numbers. I don’t have much use for Keynote, although my daughter seems to like it. I do my book layouts in pages and I do some spreadsheet number crunching from time to time. I wonder if the iPad versions would suit my needs while I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my geek friends?

I have an Apple Store 30 miles away, I’ll be taking a trip up there to check it out when they are released.

My mother got a Mancala board for the kids. It is generally looked at as a good way to teach counting for younger kids. The board is very similar to the one in the picture. This seems to be the simplest kind of board. There are apparently many different variations. I’ve seen this kind of board before in museums, but had no idea how to play it.

As with most games play is simple to explain but difficult to explain all the strategy involved. In truth it’s a very engaging game. I found myself wondering why the game wasn’t more popular in the United States but quickly realized that there were several big obstacles to it.

One, there are many variations of the game. This is true of a number of games like dominos and many other card games like spades (i’ve never ran into two people that played spades exactly the same). This makes it hard to explain.

Two, the game is ancient. You can play it by digging little divots in the dirt and stones. There’s no way to copyright it. It’s almost too simple. It’s almost opensource before there was an opensource.

There’s something I fine especially fascinating about the game, more about it after the jump.

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I woke up two weeks ago in the morning during a storm. My computer was shut down when I came down stairs. We had lost power during the night so I didn’t think too much of it. My iMac had survived numerous power outages. Not this time.

I tried turning it on. I heard the hard drive spin up and then a sickly click. I know that sound and it’s not a good one. It did it again and again. Then it showed an icon of a folder with an x on it. Meaning no file system found. I was unhappy.

I immediately started looking into web pages on rescuing a dead hard drive. Here are the bad points.
1. The hard drive will have to be replaced
2. Retrieving the information for sure (ok mostly for sure) is expensive.
3. Retrieving the information cheaply is not a sure thing.

Here are the good points
1. You might be able to save the information on the drive cheaply but you’ll only get one or two shots at it.
2. If it’s vital information and/or you have the money, it’s very likely that you can pay someone to get the information off it.

Seeing as I have very little money, I opted for the cheap method. This is how I went about replacing my iMac hard drive and attempted to retrieve data from my failed hard drive.

My method after the jump.

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I’ve published seven POD (Print On Demand) books. I really enjoy the process, I really like getting a professionally bound book in the mail that I made myself. The problem that I see is that POD does not transition from hobby to income as you would expect. There is very little way for a POD book to grab people’s attention like it could on a bookstore shelf. Sure there are search engines that could somehow get people to find your book but most people don’t buy a book by just looking at it on Amazon or Barnes and Nobles website. They often hear about a book from a friend and go out and look for it. This is not what POD was supposed to be. The model was, you make your book, post it online and then people would stumble across it and every once in a while they would buy it.

What it comes down to is that a book has to be in people’s hands. You have to start out with a stock of them to sell on a bookshelf and then the people that initially buy them tell their friends then those friends go searching for it. POD printers are recognizing that by offering volume discounts, something they thought unnecessary before.

This was originally the big draw to POD. You didn’t have to buy a thousand books to get your book published. Now POD printers offer to print you a hundred books at a slight discount but you couldn’t sell them competitively in a bookstore because of the higher cost of POD printing. In essence you have to give some books away or find a physical venue to sell them at. Then maybe the critical mass of word of mouth will get people buying.

Now to test that theory out!

I’ve been putting off making this update. Thing have gone. . . mediocre. There were some rough months there and things aren’t perfect yet but they’ve picked up as far as income is concerned.

The bad thing is that I haven’t been able to get business going on the things I find really interesting. Things like my metalwork and blacksmithing. Now I have learned a lot. I know better what kinds of things sell by watching other blacksmiths and vendors. The result is frustrating. In essence most of the time people are willing to pay $5 for an item and usually the figure is closer to $4. That is the threshold for impulse buying in most cases. Successful merchants usually have hundreds of these minor items for sale and then a few WOW items. The balance of the two are important. If you have one without the other you loose sales.

If your items are priced over the impulse buy range, then very few (nearly no one) will buy. If you don’t have higher priced WOW items, then your wares are just chintzy and not worth it.

I’m trying to come up with things that I can make for $4-5 and obviously turn them out quickly. I have a few ideas but I’ve been spending all my time trying to recover from the time and money wasted on earlier attempts.