zero budget heroes

Cool tunesBag.com video for startup2.eu pitch

Wed, 07 May 2008 02:37:45 -0400

Cool tunesBag.com video for startup2.eu pitch

Four Lessons for Entrepreneurs from Working Two Weeks as Press

Sat, 03 May 2008 09:04:04 -0400

Four Lessons for Entrepreneurs from Working Two Weeks as Press

Things are changing for the MI … (seen in London /...

Fri, 02 May 2008 18:12:28 -0400

Things are changing for the MI … (seen in London / Piccadilly Circus)

ruff stuff

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:23:02 -0400

so we’re taking part in the startup 2.0 competition now, which is kinda awesome. we’ll be producing a video to get higher visibility, so stay tuned for some seriously cool/silly/sexy/hot/lame home video action.

this weekend, i will also post an extensive article about views on the importance of blogs, bloggers, the small world we live in and about learnings on approaching bloggers.

this is it for now!

in the future, i’ll also include the recommended track of the minute. you’ll find a lot of hiphop there, sorry if i bore you.

recommended track of the minute:

Lupe Fiasco - The Cool - Hi Definition (ft. Snoop Dogg)

internet world - a story of courage and failure

Thu, 01 May 2008 06:23:18 -0400

So we were at the internet world fair yesterday. “Business for the digital age”. And business it was. In fact, there was so much business and suits it was creepy and we completely out of place.

Hansjörg came all the way from Vienna to check out the Seminars and probably talk to a few people. Did not happen. Why? Read on.

The sessions would suggest that there is a lot around entrepreneurship, starting up, running and improving your company, exploring new ventures and areas and plain simply just learn a lot from a lot of smart people.

We’ve sat through an awful presentation of Sun NetBeans. The app is interesting to quickly build all kinds of apps (desktop, mobile, web), but well.. I’ve seen better.

The “How to attract VC” seminar was interesting, but lasted on 30 mins. After each session, everyone had to leave, there was no time for talks, discussions, questions or any other kind of conversation. Pissed us off big time.

Firsttuesday, at least, will host an “afterparty” on the 6th of may which I’ll probably attend.

They hosted an “award show” with 3 finalist startups pitching for the award in front of a jury of 3, consisting of James Gray (just sold Getmein.com), an editor from FT.com and the director of the London Business School.

I will not name the Startups, but the one claiming “there is no way to send money over the internet yet” was plain awful and actually the FINALIST of a 150 companies. The other one who was asked by the jury how their traffic figures were wouldn’t give a straight answer to the question, even after 6 months in operation, stating that since they’ve introduced a “photo feature” churn has gone down a couple of percent. Wow. Naturally, the 3rd one with the better presentation and the better prepared guy won.

To sum it up, the internet world is a sales party, not a meeting place for entrepreneurs or startuppers. The sessions are way too short to get something valuable out of it, there was never time for Q&A and pretty much everyone ran off right after they’ve finished.

We did however manage to grab hold of James Gray, the founder of getmein.com which he sold to ticketmaster, asking for advice on how to create momentum for a small startup with a (naturally) great idea. We had a brief chat, he was very friendly, and gave us our business card, promising to be happy to discuss matters further via e-mail. Let’s see how that goes, but that was the only thing where we really felt we had gotten something out of that timewaster of a conference.

So, what’s the learnings:

Don’t ever go there again if you don’t want to end up getting spammed with direct mail and e-mail crap from several companies trying to sell you their stuff
Don’t ever go there if you want to learn something
Don’t ever go there if you actually want to meet people
We will be more careful in selecting the stuff we go to

Waste of time and money for the plane ticket, but a good hit on the head with the bat of frustration. Keeps one focussed. Hansjörg is probably now out in London kicking someone’s arse to blow some steam off. Just kidding.

Well, at least we got admitted into the startup2.0 competition and will produce a video about tunesbag.

Cool T-Shirt received today - we’re ready to rumble!

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:15:47 -0400

Cool T-Shirt received today - we’re ready to rumble!

Picking the right sessions @ Internet World

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:25:54 -0400

Today I’m sorting out the various sessions offered @ Internet World next week - there are a lot of brainwashing Microsoft/Google seminars but also some interesting Web 2.0 and Digital Marketing sessions, e.g. “Small Business and Social Networking: The New Frontier” and many more.

Today's FM4 webtip: tunesBag

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:16:36 -0400

Today's FM4 webtip: tunesBag: Nice to hear … best Austrian radio station features tunesBag as webtip of the day!

Planning the trip to the "Internet World" / London (29 apr - 1 may)

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:25:38 -0400

Next week will be a very exciting one - Blundstone an me will attend the Internet World taking place in London. This event covers the most important companies in the digital business and we will try to talk about tunesBag as much as possible with the right people and check out the possibilities for cooperations or other deals.

This week our job is it to finish a short presentation, get the business cards and order cool T-Shirts with our URL on it.

I have to admit that - although I’m an official zero budget hero - I have booked a flight with BA instead of Air Berlin, Ryanair, EasyJet or SkyEurope. Why that? The low cost airlines have such stupid departure times, are far, far away from London and their websites promising cheap prices just suck (in fact the price difference is about 40 EUR between BA / Air Berlin for example). It’s incredible for me that going by plane in Europe is still so expensive.

How to NOT launch a webservice with a lot of data traffic

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:11:15 -0400

Today I read an article on TechCrunch about the ongoing troubles at “HP Upline”, a service which should be named “HP Downtime” according to the author.

The article features a statement from HP that technical reasons are responsible for the long downtime, so maybe an overwhelming amount of incoming data might have been the reason.

This sounds very funny for me as they should know that such a service attracts a LOT of traffic and needs massive pipes, uplinks, storage and other resources. While we can only dream about the big budgets and hype that they’ve gotten for simply just being a known brand and filthy rich, there was a reason for a private beta.

Its not only because we’re using the “invite model” as a marketing tool. It’s because we try to improve our service by slowly opening up and fixing possible issues and bottlenecks before we launch publicly.

Mashable, Centernetworks & Read Write Web about Pitching

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:52:14 -0400

Interesting, three really huge blogs cover the same theme within a few days - how to communicate with bloggers the right way. Rick from Centernetworks talks about the right Embargo strategy and Mashable/RWR list some major mistakes when doing PR to blogs.

Embargoes: Managing the Embargo Process from Either Side of the Desk

12 Things Not to Do When Pitching a Story to Mashable

Five Wrong Ways to Pitch RWW and One Great Way

added from the comments - blundstone’s summary:

summing it up:

don’t nag

don’t be “in yo face”

don’t think you’re better than everyone else

be humble and respect their professions (they’re not idiots and if they get the feeling you treat them like one, there’ll be silence)

make it convenient to cover you (use e-mail, read what they cover when they cover and provide the necessary info in an accurate fashion)

be patient and wait.

Track your activities

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:39:56 -0400

Tracking and measuring is a very important task when doing PR and marketing - no matter if you spend a lot of money or if you are part of the zero budget heros.

Blundstone and me decided to make things simple - a spreadsheet @ google docs where we simply enter the name of the activity (e.g. press article, adwords or blog post), the number of users we generated using this channel, the costs (if any) and the time we spent on this activity.

This way we should be able to find out how to spend our time the best way ;-)

Look Mom, I am in the NEWS (thanks to Nana!)

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:28:01 -0400

Look Mom, I am in the NEWS (thanks to Nana!)

quick update

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:15:56 -0400

we’ve been talking to tamar from mashable. she’s a really nice person. check out her blog and her twitter.

we’ll also try our luck to do a nice little super lo budget video that we’ll hope to go viral - one in a series of many, entirely shot on my nokia n95 - just for the fun and sake of it.

stay tuned, it’s gonna be fun and so corny it’s good (i hope) ;-)

- blundstone

ps: yes i’m lame like that to use emoticons in my postings

shoutout to Allen from centernetworks for featuring us this...

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:48:31 -0400

shoutout to Allen from centernetworks for featuring us this weekend and to Thomas from popurls for connecting us with Allen.

buzz:

centernetworks

grobigou

wangtan (chinese)

Some good tipps for startups

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:29:13 -0400

Some good tipps for startups:

Hire the right people
Talk about your idea (stealth startups suck!)
To-Do lists and milestones are needed in a startup as well
Focus on the simple things

Creating a buzz: Closed beta registration system

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:30:23 -0400

At tunesBag we decided to establish an invitation-only registration system in order to create some sort of buzz and as it turns out, it is working quite successfully. A lot of people are interested and about 80% of all people who left their email address to be notified about the upcoming beta decided to sign up with our service within 24 hours after sending out the invitation.

In the case of tunesBag, the beta invite system isn’t only a buzz building method but also a method to control the huge amount of incoming data (today the processing queue was quite long for some hours due to about 5000 incoming tracks at once), so it has technical reasons as well.

Invites can also be used to attract bloggers who can share invites with their readers - there’s nothing more sexy than rare ware. We will keep this system for some time now in order to make the system stable under load and deliver the best possible experience to new users.

Key message: When people are asking for invites in forums or blogs you’ve won.

first installment of an accompanying video log. man do i look...

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:07:40 -0400

first installment of an accompanying video log. man do i look ghetto or what. ignore the fatface and dont worry, I do have ears. damn n95!!

- blundstone

Having a good product is not enough

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:02:11 -0400

You’ve developed an exciting piece of software, your level of caffein would last for the daily output of one Starbucks store and you’re dreaming of XML at night.

There finally comes the day where you decide: It’s time to get some public attention for your project. You start telling people about your outstanding product, send them screenshots, invite them to the closed beta and talk to journalists and bloggers about your vision.

This is the part that can be incredible funny (like yeasterday, when I had a photoshooting for News at the Haus der Musik) but it can also be very, very frustrating. In this blog Blundstone and me will talk about in which cases we failed and how we finally succeded ;-).

Let the ride begin!

— Hansjoerg

a quest for total awesomeness

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:41:17 -0400

…is a blatant lieing headline as we of course are already totally awesome. anyway.

so here i am, trying to promote tunesbag.com on a zero budget in the uk and pretty much the rest of the world.

and we of course came up with this brilliant idea (amongst others), why the hell not share that with the rest of the world - i’m pretty sure, looking at the growing european startup scene, that our successes and failures might be helpful to others too.

i’ll save you the moaning and bitching about how we europeans have it much harder because our home markets are so fragmented, etc. bla bla bla, but there’s one thing a lot of us have to be clear about:

we don’t have a silicon valley over here.
the european startup scene is smaller.
there’s less money and we don’t have a vc as our next door neighbour.

yeah, it sounds hard. but we’ll win. against all odds i am quite confident that we got the balls and the guts and are very manly and all that. i’m getting ready to kiss some major ass. for cheap (or nothing).

so long,

blundstone