Three Awesome Books I Read Recently

In: Books By: Brian Armstrong

1 Mar 2010

I read a bunch of books over the last 3-4 months.  Many of them were unremarkable, others were pretty good, and three were really outstanding.

Here is a quick write up on the three outstanding ones.

1. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) – by Richard Feynman


This is an auto-biography of Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning scientist, who worked on the atom bomb in the 40′s (amongst other things).  From that description alone I thought it might be a pretty academic book, but I was totally wrong.

It was at times laugh out loud funny, and other times made me want to cry.  It’s basically just a collection of funny stories from his life, from pranks he used to pull while at MIT, to how he learned to pick up women in bars, to how the army mistakenly diagnosed him as mentally insane, to how he learned to pick the locks on safes containing national secrets for fun.

I think what I liked about this book is that it is a great model for how to live life – he always stayed curious.  Here you have a brilliant guy, by any measure, but you can see how he deals with adversity and setbacks, and learns to just appreciate the little things in life.  He was a renaissance man also, having lived abroad for years in Brazil (a trip which reminded me of my time in Argentina) and he made an effort to learn from many fields outside of physics (art, music, etc).  I was actually really sad when I finished this book because I was starting to look forward to reading it every night.  It just…made me happy.  A book hasn’t done that for me in a long, long time.

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Here is a question from a Breaking Free reader that I though others might find useful (my response below)…

Brian,

I would like some feedback on a business idea…

I’m thinking about a 3D scanning and 3D printing service with a website to solicit business.

A 3D scanner is around $3,000, and a 3D printer is about $15,000, so startup costs would be a little “high” I guess.  The scanner can scan an existing object, and convert it to a CAD file.  Then, with that file, someone could “print” a 3D object in ABS plastic, even if the part was complicated.  It is an efficient way to see/test a prototype idea.

Not sure how much market there is for something like that.  The client would need to ship an object to me to scan, and then I would probably be required to send the object back with an electronic CAD file.  And if I offered the “printing” service, I would send the ABS model back to them, all for a fee.  This is kind of a new thing developed in the last couple of years, and could save some companies money in their product development.  The startup cost probably keeps the small entrepreneur out of that market.  But, I could spend that much if I thought I could recoup my investment, and eventually make a profit.

Right now I am working part time for $10/hour at the local community college tutoring math.  I am a licensed Engineer in Texas, but finding a job is difficult.  If I could book 30 to 40 hours a week tutoring at $20 to $30 an hour, I might consider being ok with that.  I am a UniversityTutor.com tutor, but on my 3rd (free) referral, with just 1 client 1 hour a week at $20/hour.

- [Name Removed]

Hi [Name Removed],

Interesting idea.  One way you could test it out is to see what keywords people are searching for on Google near where you live.  I’m not sure what keywords it would be exactly, but if you lived in Houston for example you might see how many searches are being done for “3d printing service houston” and keywords like that.  This would give you an idea of the market size.  You can use a tool like the Google Keyword tool for this type of research.

Then do those searches yourself and see what websites come up.  Are the results good? (i.e. people providing this service at a reasonable price)  Or do you feel you could do something substantially better marketing/price/customer service wise than what is currently out there?  What will be your competitive edge?

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Things have been growing nicely at my business, UniversityTutor.com, in the last few months.

Here are a few graphs that I have auto-generated each week to see what’s going on.  I really like the idea of having a “dashboard” for your business like this to help you see the cycles and spot anomalies early on.  If you can’t measure it then you don’t know how close you are getting to your goal, so I recommend having something like this for your business if you don’t already.  These I custom programmed but you could have your programmer do something similar or make them in Google Analytics or Excel.

These show daily totals for a bunch of different metrics that I track, and a cumulative total for number of paying subscribers.

The last month:

The last quarter:

A few points…

  • If you are wondering what happened around Jan 1st to cause subscribers to go up, I don’t really know.  I think it was just the new year.  December was sluggish.
  • I did do some marketing to get new tutors (hence the spike in the yellow line) but I don’t think this  is what caused the whole subscriber increase – it was probably just from tutors starting the new year and wanting to get new jobs.
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Quick post to let you know I’ve decided to move from Buenos Aires back to the bay area (where I grew up).  I’ll be moving in a few days.  I was planning to keep traveling for a while but a great opportunity came up to work on a new startup.

While I was back in the bay area for Christmas I randomly emailed some folks who had posted on Hacker News about their startup.  I went and met them for coffee and we ended up meeting for the next 6 hours!  We talked business and strategy, geeked out on programming skills, and talked about the future.  They liked my background in startups  and what they needed in a programmer was a good match with my skills.  Their idea is solid and has some big potential.  A week later they made me an offer to come join them and I decided to accept.

They are 3 very smart guys who just got funding for their idea, and it is a y-combinator company, something I’ve always wanted to be a part of.  The startup is still in stealth mode so I won’t post a link to the site yet (I will when we launch).  Their investors are high profile and the sort of people I want to meet.  The bay area is also the center of everything in the technology startup world right now, and I’d love to dive into that scene head first.  Part of me was reluctant to give up traveling the world for a bit, and technically it is a “real job” which conflicts with the message of this site :)  But it is a startup and my own projects will keep running on the side (luckily they run almost entirely on their own at this point – both businesses and investment property) and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get involved in this group.

In short, I can’t wait to get to the bay area.  Vagabonding has been fun for a bit, and Buenos Aires is a magical city that I won’t soon forget, but I can’t wait to see what opportunities lie in Silicon Valley.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong


Image by Thomas Hawk

Edit: Seoaholic has since be re-branded and re-launched as InboxSeo.com.

This is an exciting announcement.  For the last few months I’ve been working on a new web app (was contracted to build it actually) and today is the beta launch!

The site is Seoaholic.com.  The name is a made up word which combines SEO (search engine optimization) and “work-a-holic”.

This is a beta launch so the tool is still a work in progress, but feel free to try it out and send me any feedback on what you like and don’t like.

The main benefit of this tool is to bring more traffic to your website by:

  • Building more incoming links to your site
  • Improving your search engine rankings
  • Tracking your keyword rankings over time to see big picture SEO changes to your site

As you may know, building incoming links to your website is one of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings.  Seoaholic goes out to find “link opportunities” for you and ranks them by (1) how valuable the link would be if you got it (2) how likely you are to actually get a link from that site.  Seoaholic helps you (and your team) track the process of getting incoming links from those website owners.

A link opportunity is typically a page on a website that is already linking to your competitors or related websites, but they aren’t linking to you yet.  It might be a blog post, a list of resources, job posting board, etc.  You have a good chance of getting a link from these pages because they are already linking to sites like yours (by good I mean maybe 25% chance of success instead of 1% like most link building campaigns).  The last step is still up to you: contact the website owner to ask for a link, submit your site (if their site allows it), or write an interesting piece of content they would be likely to link to.  This last step is standard linking building stuff, and remains a manual process (we don’t want this to turn into a spamming tool).

The tool manages the rest for you (finding the high value opportunities, checking if they actually linked, managing your team’s progress, and seeing how it ultimately affects your rankings).  We imagine it being used by anyone from small time bloggers (who want to improve and track their search engine rankings over time) to hardcore SEO consultants who do this for a living.

Here Is A 90 Second Demo Video

If you don’t see the video embedded below (i.e. you’re reading this in email) you can click here to watch it on YouTube.  Click the “full screen” button below to get a better view or try it in HD.

And Here Are A Few Screen Shots (Click The Screenshot To See A Larger Version)

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How To Start Your Own Country

In: Education|How To By: Brian Armstrong

26 Jan 2010

This is sort of a funny topic I’ve been reading about recently, and I wanted to share some findings.  It’s mostly just meant for fun (mental masturbation in the wider sense of “breaking free”) but has some interesting long term implications.

Read on future King and Queens!

First Of All, Why Would You Want To Start Your Own Country?

This is usually people’s first reaction to the idea of starting a country, and rightfully so.

The simple answer is: you think you can make a better one.  Maybe where you currently live the government is annoying you in some way (like wars, taxes, environmental policies, oppression, extortion, etc – whatever you care about).  So after doing some strong letter writing campaigns that don’t accomplish anything, you start to look at what other countries are out there.  If you still haven’t found one you like, people eventually get the idea in their head that they could do better if they started one of their own!

But there is a more complex and serious answer to this as well.  Which is that there is a market for governments just like for anything else.  Allow me to explain.

When you go out for dinner you have to pick a place to eat.  You give the restaurant some money, and they give you some food and service in return.  If the food sucks you won’t go back, and if it’s great you tell all your friends about it and the restaurant thrives.  In short, there is a market for restaurants.  No surprise there.  This idea of “voting with your dollars” obviously works and encourages good restaurants.

But just like restaurants, there is a market for countries. You choose to pay money (taxes) to a government in exchange for some sort of services (military, roads, health care, etc).  And if you aren’t happy with the service, you can always leave and choose to patronize another country with your business.

But people rarely, if ever, choose to switch countries despite constantly complaining about the service.  Why is this?  Why doesn’t anyone seem very happy with their government, but you can find a pretty decent Italian restaurant in every city?  The answer turns out to be that the market for governments is inefficient.

We can see this by looking at two questions, and comparing the restaurant market to the government market:

  • How easy is it to start your own?
    RESTAURANT: It’s relatively easy (get investors, incorporate, lease a space, hire some chefs).  Whether you will be successful or not is another story, but it’s at least not that difficult to try if you think you can make a better restaurant.   As proof of this you can see the thousands of new restaurants opening each year.

    COUNTRY: You need to discover new land (not possible anymore, every square inch of dirt on Earth is claimed by someone at this point), conquer another country by force to take their land, or pull off a military coup.  You could argue winning an election for president should be on this list, but that’s not really the same as having your own country – any country democratic enough to allow elections probably doesn’t give the president 100% power to do whatever they want in the same way an owner of a restaurant could.

  • How easy is it to switch (as a customer) if you don’t like your current one?
    RESTAURANT: Easy.  Go down a few blocks.

    COUNTRY: Hard.  You’d probably have to quit your job, sell everything you own (house, car, etc), move away from everyone you know (unless you could convince them to come with you), and go through lots of paperwork to establish citizenship elsewhere.

What is the major consequence of this?   Well, it means that, on average, the service provided by governments is worse than the service provided by restaurants.  They can get away with it, because they know it’s such a pain for you to actually leave, and there are few other options even if you wanted to. Simply put, it’s an inefficient market.

To say “on average, it’s worse” may actually be too kind.  Indeed, governments on occasion actually murder thousands of their own citizens, so in some countries it’s not even close.  But even in the U.S. people have still occasionally gotten fed up enough to leave (when the draft was instated during the Vietnam war for example).  Compared to restaurants, the threshold is much lower.  I might not go back to a restaurant if the waiter was rude, or I just like the salsa at the other place.

So how can we make countries more like restaurants and get better service from them? Those two questions above hold the key.  Somehow, you’d have to make it easy for anyone to start a country, and easy for citizens to switch if they saw one they liked better.  Economists would call this lowering “barriers to entry” and reducing “switching costs”.  This is, at the risk of oversimplifying, what makes markets more efficient.  And more efficient markets make for better service because they have to compete against each other to win your business.

Now, you could easily say “but countries will never be as efficient as restaurants, they are far apart, natural barriers, etc, etc…”.  And I agree with you.  But efficiency exists along a spectrum, and the closer we get to the ideal, the more improvement we’ll see in government service.

To prove this to yourself you can take a quick look at cable companies.  They exist somewhere in between restaurants and governments on that spectrum (both in efficiency and service).  It’s harder to start a cable company than a restaurant (more capital required) and consequently fewer of them.  It’s also more difficult for customers to switch if they don’t like their cable company, because there are contracts and only one or two options in most neighborhoods.  It’s no accident that service provided by cable companies is far inferior to restaurants (“your food will arrive somewhere between the hours of 8am and 6pm tomorrow…”) but not nearly as bad as governments (cable companies haven’t murdered anyone yet, that I’m aware of).  My point here is that there is a range of efficiency in markets and it seems to correspond with a range in quality of service.  Any gains in making government markets more efficient would have some benefit, even if they don’t get all the way to restaurant levels.

So now that we’ve seen why someone might want to start their own country, you might be wondering…

Ok, So How Would You Actually Start One?

Let’s look at the three main ways people have tried over the years, with varying degrees of success, and a real life example for each.

1. Build Up A Man-Made Island

Ok this one is pretty hilarious.  In the 1970′s, a group of people (led by Las Vegas real estate millionarie Michael Oliver) took over this “island” that was just below sea-level (and thus unclaimed by any nation).

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My Business Will Take Off This Year, If ONLY…

In: Education By: Brian Armstrong

18 Jan 2010

What’s holding you back from accomplishing your business goals this year?  This might help you stay on track…

OnlineProfits.com just re-launched their site.  I told people about this last year and it seemed to have pretty good feedback.

The people who teach this are pretty top notch in their industry, check out the contributors.  A few of these folks I’ve met and have helped me out with my own businesses.

Click a profile to read more on their site (they have a free newsletter on the reports page too).

Over the last month or so I’ve quietly rolled out some changes to BuyersVote. These were little things I discovered that I wanted while using the site.

Take note: this is one of the best reasons to build something (in a startup) that you actually want to use for yourself! If you’re an actual user, the software will be way better because when something is annoying or difficult you’ll fix it right away.

Address, Phone, and Websites on Items

Now you can enter an address, phone number, and website for an item.

This was really annoying before (especially for websites) – where you’d have to enter the website right in the title of the item because there was no other field for it.

Now if you enter these extra fields while editing an item, it will appear on the show page allowing you to visit the “External Site” with just one click, or Google Map it, etc.

Badges

Now on item pages there is a small badge that people can copy and paste into their website.  This would mainly be useful if it was your product and you wanted to show off reviews you were getting or encourage people to post more reviews.

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So you just built the next great web app, the launch day has finally come and …. silence. Crickets chirping. You anxiously check your Google Analytics stats and see that despite having the coolest new website ever, nobody seems to care. More precisely, nobody knows about it yet.

This is one of the toughest moments for entrepreneurs (especially engineering types) when you realize that building the whole thing was the easy part.  Now it’s actually marketing the damn thing that is going to take a while.

Here are 5 ways I’ve used to launch a website and get the first users to my site.

1. Target Your Niche On StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon

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Ok, so about a week ago I received an email from a Breaking Free reader.

He began “Dear Citizen Brian” and went on to explain that yes, he was in fact a real life super hero who dressed in costume and patrolled various areas of Australia, intimidating the criminal element.  He also wanted help spreading his message and building his blog.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this email, so I clicked through to his website and instantly fell in love.  There it was, a person who had a crazy idea of what he wanted to do and JUST WENT FOR IT, not giving a damn what anyone else thought.

He wanted to prevent crime, and had literally adopted a secret identity as a super hero.  Let me say it again: yes, he is actually serious.

Captain Australia

I quickly added a new item to my list of things I MUST do before I die: interview this man and find out more about him.

Why? Because he is an example of someone who has truly broken free and pursued his passion.  If he can become a real life super hero, when what excuse do you and I have for not accomplishing our goals?

If you want some background first, you can check out his awesome FAQs, including more info on his armoury (which includes mace and an iPhone) and super powers (such as photographic memory).

Without further ado, here is my interview with the real life super hero, Captain Australia. (He took the liberty of recording some video responses as well.)  Enjoy!

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About this blog

Breaking Free is a collection of articles on tech entrepreneurship, business, and life written by Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »