Discovery of the Muse

After nearly a month, I think I may have found my Muse (the product I will create and sell and build an automated business around). This idea I've had ticks all of the right boxes. I found my market first, one that I am already a member of, cyclists, and I looked at the activities they participate in. I discovered a problem that many of them regularly face, and I have come up with an idea for a product that makes that problem much easier. I know two different ways that I could easily distribute my product, and right now, there are no competitors in those distribution channels. Now, I have quite a bit of market testing to do first to see if this will fly, but so far this idea seems to have the best chance. Obviously, until I do my testing and actually bring the product to market I can't elaborate on what it is, but I can say that if it works with cyclists, there are a number of other athletes that it could work for as well.
So, next on the agenda is to set up an adwords campaign and see how my product could fare online, and contact one of the manufacturers that I have found and see if they can actually create my product the way that I envision it.
I am quite pleased that I landed on the idea that I have, because I was really hoping that my business would involve my lifelong passion of cycling somehow. Maybe by next year I could actually buy that Specialized road bike I want...

New Years Resolutions

Thought now would be as good a time as ever to write up a list of goals for 2010.
So here we go:

1. Get under 200Lbs (to be competitive for road bike racing)

2. Start profitable online business (muse) with TMI of $1000 by Dec 2010

3. Write at least 3 articles per week for my blog

4. Read at least 1 new non-fiction book per month (preferably 2)

5. Set plans in motion for 1st world trip after the wedding

6. Less booze and coffee, more water and tea

7. Learn basic HTML programming

8. Save up at least one months worth of bills/living money

9. Read/practice/learn my Italian for Dummies book

10. Through lifestyle design, freeing my time for my new family, and my real life.

Percocets, Toradol and Missing Teeth

Just a short post today. If it doesn't make sense, I apologize, as I'm on a steady diet of painkillers and antibiotics, because I just had all of my wisdom teeth out yesterday. I'm pretty whacked out, but this time being laid up is giving me the chance to think about some more business ideas. Before I settle on a particular item or service, I am spending a few weeks working on coming up with as many potential ideas as possible, and from there will hopefully be able to pick the best one(s) and run with it. The other possibility is that from all of this brainstorming, I will be able to pull some of the best parts out of the pile, and have something organic develop that will be completely original.
One of the routes for product development that I am intrigued by is the one that Skull Candy Headphones used. The took a typical (yet uninteresting) product, and made it an artistic statement. By all accounts they have not improved on headphones, but by adding graphic art and bold patterns and colours, they have created something desirable. Case in point, they took a typical headphone, and created a business with 89 million dollars in revenue in 2008, and 120 million in 2009. Ridiculous and awesome.
Taking a typical product, and being creative with it sounds like a good time to me, so I will add this route to my list of methods of product development.
Anyways, that's what's been on my mind today. Deep, I know. I blame the medication.

PS, since I know Garret is the only one with this on RSS feed, Hi G-Money!

-Will

The Next Twelve Months

Life is going to drastically change for my fiance Jill and I in the next year. I now have a partner not only in life, but in my pursuit of my ideal lifestyle. I passed along my Four Hour Work Week book to Jill, and now she is on the lifestyle design bandwagon.
We are now both pursuing building automated online business, and killing our jobs. We want to define ourselves by the things that we have accomplished, and not by what we do between the hours of 9am and 6pm. We have always talked about how we dreamed of traveling to France, Italy, England, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, so we said "Why not now?", and we are now working on making that dream a reality.

In April, we will have our wedding in Los Cabos, Mexico as planned, and start working towards moving overseas for our first mini-retirement after that. Over the next year, we will be paring down the stuff we own, and at least purging all of the junk that we never use and will never need. Everything else will eventually go into storage.
We own our condo, and we should be able to rent it out to cover the balance of our monthly mortgage payment while we are away. We would like to spend a minimum of 3 months in each country, starting with France. Our goal is to build at least two online businesses using the techniques in the Four Hour Work Week, and generate $5000/month to finance our living abroad. Some of the places we plan on living, such as Bueno Aires, would require much less than that income to live on.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I have already started getting some practice at testing online businesses, and now I just have to find the right product or service to offer. I have all of the architecture in place to start an online business, I just need to figure out what it is I want to sell, or more specifically, who I want to market to.
We are preparing for the backlash from family and friends (although my dad thinks this is great) who won't understand us turning our nice stable life on it's head, but, really, it doesn't matter. We are both tired of just working to sustain a life we don't really want, and are now working to design the life that we can look back on with no regrets.

Coffee in a cafe in Paris, riding a motorcycle in the countryside of Italy, take in the view from the top of the Burj Dubai, surf in Hawaii, ride my bicycle down the Champs De Elysee, and the list goes on and on.
It's not just about travel either, it's about freeing up the time to learn and be the things we've always wanted. I've always wanted to learn Italian and French, write a book and work more on fashion design. Jill wants learn screenwriting and web design, and we would both like to have the time to spend with kids when we eventually have them. Building businesses with architecture for automation now can give us these things in the future. We both have the intelligence and the resources to make this happen, so here we go....

Check out the new iWant

I love new tech toys, and since I'm well locked into my cellular contract with Rogers Wireless, and am stuck with my Blackberry for at least another year, the next best thing is a new portable computer. I am quite interested in these new tablet computers from Apple and Google...

Here's a little update from over on Mashable.

Adwords Test is a Success

So, after a few days running my Adwords campaign, I've come to the conclusion that there are plenty of people out there looking for new places to buy premium designer jeans. I generated quite a bit of traffic for a minimal monetary investment, and I think that if I had a real site for people to land on, I could have a profitable business. The next step is to see if I can get the jean sellers (stores, online retailers, independent sellers) on board. I will need to show them why it would be profitable for them to list their products on my site. I think that I will offer the first 3 months for free to encourage people to join, and make it dead simple for them to upload their inventory and sell on my site. If I can get enough sellers to join the site, then I can proceed with building the structure of it all, with a database for the inventory, and all of the pages for navigating the site.

Anyways...

I am exhausted. NYE took it out of me. I will try to write something useful tomorrow.

It's now 2010....in 2011 I'm going to get another bike...I think this one:

Everybody Optimize!

Today I gave myself a crash course on optimizing a google adwords campaign. I did a bit of research, and figured out how to use more specific key words to gain targeted traffic, and how to use bidding to make sure that my ads always land on the first search page when someone searches with the keywords I've selected. All day today, before I tweaked my adwords campaign for better performance, I hadn't had a single hit on my website. Tonight, I figured out some adjustments to get the traffic that I wanted, and I got 48 hits on my website in under 2 hours, all with specific search terms so that I would attract the type of people that could potentially turn into real customers. I'm going to let my test ad campaign run until the end of the weekend, and that should give me a bit of an idea of what potential traffic I could expect to my site. If I can generate some good traffic numbers, I will look at having a professional design the home landing page for the website.

In other news, I would like one of these... This is my "budget" supercar.. The Aston Martin V8 Vantage