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How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

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Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#61

Post by 0xbear »

crgt wrote: post #52
rabidrat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you successfully followed this plan? It seems to have a couple of holes in it. I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less. I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because…

I also have done this. When companies reach out via recruiters, it never hurts to ask for what you want. Worst case, it's an easy screen; best case, you get what you want..

As a rule recruiters won't have answers for you, and they can't negotiate either.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#62

Post by a-saleh »

mikekchar wrote: post #50
a-saleh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I realised that my brain just doesn't work that way. It seems that for any meaningful, productive work I need at least hour and half. On smaller budget I can only do chores, i.e. pay an invoice or answer a trivial email. As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour" For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the m…

I think it's a matter of practice. I experimented with trying to do a long kata (the old Core Wars game) one pomodoro a day [0]. I didn't finish it, but I managed 66 pomodoros. I kept a detailed TODO list and I was really surprised that I could maintain a fairly decent pace. The link has Asciinema videos of every Pomodoro I did. It's painfully slow watching me type, but if you use the ">" key, you can speed up the vi…

Thanks for the link, I would like to try something similar. Probably would take on some project for a new command line util at work that I wanted to create for some time :-)

Having it work related would mean that sheduling would be easier. I would try to do that for first half hour of the day. If that really does improve the 'getting into the zone' so much, that would really be awesome.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#63

Post by a-saleh »

rabidrat wrote: post #36
isalmon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming it's because you have a full-time job that takes the majority of your time: 1. Cut your expenses 2. Go to your boss, negotiate working part time 3. Use this time to start your side project 4. Make sure you don't use you company's equipment, make sure you don't work on your project during the time you're supposed to do your regular work.

Have you successfully followed this plan? It seems to have a couple of holes in it. I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less. I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because…

I have done this as a junior dev to finish my school. I negotiated 6hr days, and I know few people that did something similar to i.e finish theses, e.t.c.

People that go i.e. from intern to full-time often stay at 4h a day, untill they finish school.

On the other hand, I am not sure how well this kind of negotiation will go once I will want to go back to 6 from. 8 h days.

We will see, I definitely plan to do this if we'd have another kid in my family.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#64

Post by mattcanhack »

mikekchar wrote: post #59
travisjungroth wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You spent 30 hours on a coding problem? How big was this thing?

Hmmm... It's a couple of thousand lines of code I think. I forget. If you go to the link, the code is there (I run everything through Github). Each pomodoro is in it's own branch and I kept them around so that I could study the diffs later (haven't gotten around to it yet). My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. B…

> Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)

I would definitely be very interested in this. Seems like a smart way to work remote or on personal projects.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#65

Post by kevmo »

raldu wrote: post #48
kevmo wrote: post #5

"We, marketers, are selfish, lying, short-term thinking scum. We believe that our job is to manipulate people as we market to them." The book Propaganda by Edward Bernays is an excellent read about how to think long-term about marketing. Define your ultimate goals -> dial out several levels and think about what conditions drive people to participate in those goals -> work to create those conditions. Interesting to th…

Propaganda is the exact opposite of what digital marketing is about. In fact, the provided quote from the article is supposed to highlight that the "time for propaganda is over" in an ironical way. Propaganda is the way of the TV, shouting, manipulation, disruption, etc. Focusing on a defined audience, on the other hand, is the way of the "new" marketing that Godin (an the article) talks about. Therefore attempting t…

"In propaganda, "everybody" is your audience, not a defined segment."

Everybody _can_ be your audience. Or a group of 1,000 can be.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#66

Post by a-saleh »

rabidrat wrote: post #36
isalmon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming it's because you have a full-time job that takes the majority of your time: 1. Cut your expenses 2. Go to your boss, negotiate working part time 3. Use this time to start your side project 4. Make sure you don't use you company's equipment, make sure you don't work on your project during the time you're supposed to do your regular work.

Have you successfully followed this plan? It seems to have a couple of holes in it. I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less. I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because…

Thinking about this more, certain internal HR hiring-budget structure might be what is putting dent in this plan.

In my company, if there is open position, afaik there seem to be two things associated with it, a rack and some budget.

Before I learned this I would often suggest things like "why don't we hire these two students on part time, instead of just one of them full-time", but sometimes it turned out we only have one rack, even if we have enough budget for both of them.

So, that might be why you have to fight so hard for part-time, because the guys hiring you want as much worked-hours as possible for their limited amount of racks?

Still, junior/intern racks seem to be easier to get, so that might be why my company does offer part-times for students. And we have several cs/se university faculties the city, so we would be missing out on really skilled people if we didnt.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#67

Post by erdle »

gist wrote: post #41

> Seth has published 18 books and is regarded as one the best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy or Tim Ferris, so he doesn't need to be in the trenches anymore. I hate statements like this ie 'best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy..'. Who considers Seth equivalent of David Ogilvy or anything close? That's really quite ridiculous actually. Oh yeah and Tim Ferris is certainly no Ogilvy either. Ogilvy built a world renow…

100% Ogilvy is a God.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#68

Post by mikekchar »

mattcanhack wrote: post #64
mikekchar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... It's a couple of thousand lines of code I think. I forget. If you go to the link, the code is there (I run everything through Github). Each pomodoro is in it's own branch and I kept them around so that I could study the diffs later (haven't gotten around to it yet). My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. B…

> Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a fai…

OK. I'll do it. I've been resisting re-awakening my blog because I have too many other things to do, but it's probably time. Sometime in the nearish future (give me a week anyway ;-) ), take a look at http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio//index.html. If you don't notice any changes since 2013, feel free to email me and kick my ass ;-)
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