I kicked off our new blog series on the business side of technomading with a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating little ditty on the evolution of our business. To summarise, for all you late-comers (you know who you are) we started out with the grand and slightly naive plan of creating an automated iPhone app business (the apps sell themselves, you see) which has graduated into what we have now – the very sobering realisation that without concerted and continuous marketing, updates, and customer support any app, no matter how shit-hot, will be lost in the noisy black gaping void of a hole that is the iPhone App Store. Accordingly, we are working our little butts off. I wrapped up the post with the (hopefully) tantalising teaser that in this post, we’ll explain why we really don’t mind all that much.
Meaningful Work
We’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”. In it, he recounts the story of a typical Jewish immigrant couple, the Borgenichts, in New York in the 1880s who bootstrapped their own garment manufacturing business:
“When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction. His work was complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets.
Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfils us… Work that fulfils those three criteria is meaningful… Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning”.
The work we are doing on A Tasty Pixel has those three qualities, but I would also add a fourth dimension — we are pouring our everything into a product we believe in and can be proud of. Our app, The Cartographer, was built because we needed it as travellers and we’ve found it immensely useful on our travels. More than that, it has been crafted into an artisan iPhone app with an exquisite design. It is feasible, as an entrepreneur, that you could be doing work that has Gladwell’s three characteristics of meaningful work whilst working on a product which holds no inherent meaning for you. I can’t imagine that would be particularly captivating for long.
On Automated Income
Our dream of an automated income began after reading Tim Ferriss’ book “The 4-Hour Work Week”. One of the assumptions the book is founded upon is that:
“…for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfilment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is”.
This clearly doesn’t apply to us. Sometimes when we’re travelling, Mike pines for programming. He’ll quite happily tap away on his lappy until 3 in the morning and then lie in bed for another hour, brain buzzing away at the problem at hand.
Obviously, marketing and operations management is not my dream job but as least I’ve still got Gladwell’s three tenets of meaningful work going for me, and that’s a lot. Of course, I’m still in mourning for my creative endeavours and grieved a little bit last night after the realisation that I’m going to have to work full-time on A Tasty Pixel for the next month until launch, maybe longer. As the darkly comic universe would have it I’m feeling super inspired lately, I have several paintings in the works and I’m really excited about them all as well as some newly learnt techniques I want to give a whirl but they’ll have to wait. Presumably my marketing and operational duties will become more manageable once we’ve built up some momentum. If not, our voyage of discovery will continue, possibly into the realm of outsourcing or streamlining my duties. In the meantime, I’m learning invaluable entrepreneurial skills.
So that, my friends, is a little insight into why the transmogrification of our automated business model into a what-the-hell-kind-of-a-frenzied-time-guzzling-monster-with-no-end-in-sight-business-have-we-created is really not so very bad.
The Business Side of Technomading: Anti-Marketing Marketing
We feel so green with regard to all of this business stuff it’s easy to forget we’ve learnt a thing or two along the way. There’s so much information out there about running a business that it’s pretty overwhelming for someone who’s starting from scratch and it’s difficult to know where to begin. I haven’t actually read any conventional books on business (although I am currently reading “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” and am thoroughly enjoying it) but the two (yes, two!) that I have read have each introduced me to a concept that has completely obliterated many of my assumptions and given me some firm foundations to grasp onto. Another guiding principle I use doesn’t come from a business book at all but rather a sociology/social psychology one – an area a bit closer to home, for me.
I’ll talk a little bit about each over three blog posts.
Anti-Marketing Marketing
This one is by far my favourite as it provided me with an alternative to an area of business I had nothing but contempt for and it has had the biggest impact on the way we run our business. I first came across this concept in Chris Guillebeau’s ebook “Art + Money”. To quote from his ebook:
The beauty of this concept is that it is not only a painless way to go about marketing, it is enjoyable, as long as you’re passionate about what it is that you do. Basically it works like this:
It’s basically word of mouth on steroids.
A slightly more cynical take on this concept is to connect with “influencers” in your niche, a concept I read about in “Cloud Jacking: 7 Steps to Dominate Your Niche”. This can be done as authentically or disingenuously as you please. For example, we took a fairly strong dislike to the number one blogger in our target niche. We didn’t un-follow him straight away but after a time it became pretty clear that even if he did like The Cartographer – which we didn’t think he would – we didn’t actually want it associated with him or his website. We un-followed him and could put our efforts into connecting with people who we respected and were genuinely interested in getting to know.
The Cartographer hasn’t launched yet so I can’t tell you if any of this has actually worked for us but there are plenty of case studies out there for whom it has: Tim Ferriss, Kelly Rae Roberts, and Natasha Newton, for example.
For me, marketing always had negative connotations so I feel like the anti-marketing approach to marketing makes the entire prospect of running a business at the very least palatable and at the very best enjoyable and something I would do for free.