Google+ promoting Black Eyed Peas on Homepage

Special shout out and congrats to Robinhood.org who have worked in partnership with Black Eyed Peas and Google+… they are promoting their benefit concert in NYC central park on the HOMEPAGE of Google worldwide. Concert is tonight (Sept. 30th, 7pm) in central park, here’s the google+ page.

Props to PacSun Dress Irresponsibly Commercial

I saw this commercial last night while watching the daily show and was really impressed (very rare with tv commercials these days). They captured the essence and aligned themselves with the surf/skate/action sport lifestyle. By showcasing the core brands of the industry with solid creative direction, Pacsun very successfully was able to speak someone like me (their core audience)…

The entire time I was asking myself; is this a brands commercial or a retailer…but what retailer, is this Zappos’?…I was not expecting at the end for this to be Pacsun. They did an incredible job associating themselves with the identity of the brands they stock. I don’t shop at pacsun, but I do associate with the lifestyle represented in the commercial.

Sample deal site for notes

Saving these for notes:
New deal site concept: http://www.signpost.com/
I like how they call out their sample button: http://www.betaeasy.com/

Kenny Powers Kswiss

I was having a conversation the other night about why most commercials and old media is dieing…there’s no creativity and it’s boring. Projects like this Kenny Powers K-Swiss offers such a greater viral reach and restores an element of faith advertising…
Video count is at 4,633 as of July 12, 2011…this video will be in the millions within the week. Congrats to whoever put this together…

Zaarly.com startup pub crawl got naarly…

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Thanks to the organization by Shirley over at Zaarly, we had a fun night checking out different San Francisco startup offices. It’s pretty amazing what’s going on in SF, I’d get out here if there’s nothing holding you down…

Best office race track:

Best flip cup arena:

Best Themed: (growth in this category is encouraged)

Best Flipcup Prizes:(growth in this category is also very encouraged)

Most likely to be confused as a VC’s office:

Best Ice Cream: if you get enough people to tweet this, #OMGFreeBenJerrys they will come and deliver ice cream 😉

SEO Term: “vacation rental templates”

Happy to say that the promotion video I created using camtasia and uploaded to youtube has jumped up onto page one for the search term “vacation rental templates“. Here’s the link to the search result, you should see the video in position 10. Google result

Just created a homepage video using camtasia

This is going to go up on Webchalet.com homepage. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great starting point. I created it in about 6 hours and by doing it myself saved us $19k for which we were quoted…

Wibiya.com – sharing widget with translation

This is a social sharing bar for your site…what really caught my eye was the translation functionality. Had to make a quick note on this to reference later. http://www.wibiya.com/

Documenting how to launch a bootstrapped start up

How do you launch a start up if you don’t have all the connections from VC’s, Angels or Incubators? Below is my first attempt at documenting what we’ve done up to today and notes on our marketing strategies moving forward. The business is WebChalet.com where users can create & edit their own vacation rental website in minutes. We plan to launch May 2011.

Pre launch:
Tip 1: Have an official opening of the site, don’t have site live on your domain. Media is more interested in having the inside scoop of an upcoming launch. Need to provide them a 7-8 days notice and invite them for a private tour on your private test site. (thanks for the suggestion Andrew Powers from Pagelines.com)
-Set up a http://www.launchrock.com “viral coming soon” page. It’s a great tool that helps you manage your initial leads. (I wish they had the option to collect phone numbers though).

“Social Proof”– Now, I’m not a big fan of facebook pages as no one ever goes to them. But what’s important is to have a “people who like us” plug in on your new site for the sole purpose of your social proof plan. What this means in simplest form, when someone goes to your company for the first time if they see you have a lot of friends then you will look more established and social credibility. Same goes for Twitter.

Twitter: Before you make a sales call, follow the company on twitter. Just this morning before a cold call I started following the company I was about to ring. After being directed towards the webmaster I introduced myself and first words out of his mouth was “oh yeah, webchalet…you guys just followed us on twitter, what’s up”. Whammo… http://www.twitter.com/webchalet

Back to Facebook: what do you post? I wish I had started this earlier, but yesterday I posted up pics of us in different software development phases and we’ve already got positive feedback. What’s important about this is it brings people into the development process. When people feel like they have experienced the building of something, they are more likely to participate in any sort of way. Maybe it’s just referring a friend who might need your service. Or better yet, if they are a potential client, they will feel a bond with your company and product which money can’t buy. Point being, bring people into your company culture with pictures, stories, company day to day stuff…it’s more real and easier to connect with.
–Facebook sidenote: you need 25 follwers to set your own url like http://www.facebook.com/webchalet

Media Tip: Duncan Logan here at rocket-space made a great suggestion to me. Reporters want a story, they don’t want to just write about a company.
Plan 1: A story about a local vacation rental property manager that struggled with the overwhelming cost of setting up their website and found a san francisco based company that offers a fully hosted website solution for property managers at affordable prices. Following the 37 Signals business model of services the small business community.

Plan 2: Launching a start up while recovering from a broken neck & back…
I’ve sent an email to fast company & inc magazines thinking there could be “entrepreneur profile” story there…

Sample email I sent:
Your industry profile articles on Fast Company caught my eye and I was hoping to discuss a story about launching two start ups while recovering from a broken neck and back.

Story: I fractured my C4 & L3 vertebrae in a snowboarding accident April 19th, 2010 (At the time I was the CTO of http://www.sierrasnowboard.com )
Past 12 months: While recovering in bed, Sierrasnowboard which I helped start in 2005 and led to $23 Million in 2009 Sales, became entangled in legal troubles and was acquired out of chapter 11 in Oct, 2010. Out of work and with a broken body I found myself co-founding the following two start ups from my bed:
My Start-Ups:
-Launching in May: http://www.webchalet2.com (domain will be http://www.webchalet.com )
-Launched January 2011: http://www.justuno.com

Without going into all the details this past year has pretty much sucked all around. My recovery has been slow and an ongoing ordeal, but the one thing that gets me out of bed each day are my start ups and my own personal will. I currently have space at a shared office environment in San Francisco, CA. ( http://www.rocket-space.com ) and would like to discuss an article in conjunction with the launch of Webchalet.

If you have any interest in hearing further details, please feel free to contact me. I thought a good title would be “Launching a start-can be back breaking work”
Cheers,
Erik
Linked in: http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc
Twtitter: http://www.twitter.com/airik
415 497 9906

What next….
Last week we completed our product and determined we were ready to start signing our initial clients to test our software.
Current plan: spend the next couple of weeks adding our first clients to our private site and load test/de bug the software.
For a CRM (customer relationship manager) We are using a zoho.com free account (1 user our team logs in as the same persone- cost savings).

First 20 clients: sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty and bare down with cold calls. At the end of the day sometimes nothing is more effective than picking up the phone, which is what Sarah and I have been doing this week. I recommend waking up early (6am) and hit the phone early. Work from the east coast to west. By 10-11am you are drained and with all the losses, the few wins make it all worth the struggle. Helping solve someone’s problems and grow their business is a great thing.
Who to call: we’ve been playing around with a few things. Vrma.com on their local chapters actually list out their members names, emails, phone numbers & websites…however most members that pay to be on there have decent websites. So, where to next…I LOVE google places as they list local businesses. The other thing I’ve found is skip the sites on the organic search results from page 1-3. The people on the deeper pages are more receptive to help.

Load testing: Our dev team is using apache bench (thanks Adam from Lifesta.com for the tip) and app dynamics

Giveaway:: in conjunction with our launchrock coming soon, we entice people to sign up not just for an invite to view the software, but also to win a free year of hosting and website makeover. I’m excited to spend some more time marketing the giveaway, hoping to do more with twitter and facebook. I think the best exposure we can get with this is through bloggers and past winners talking about their free website. (we experience tremendous success at sierrasnowboard with our daily snowboard giveaway. For every 500 members that logged into our community for the daily giveaway, we gave a snowboard away. We were averaging 700-1200 members in 2010. I’m hoping to replicate the same success.

Misc. tip: Get out of your house!
After working from home and coffee shops I felt it was time to get serious. That’s when I found the San francisco shared office space of Rocket Space. (I’ve written about a few benefits of surrounding yourself with fellow startupers here.

Ok…so, in the afternoons when not on the phone or following up on emails or selling social lead generation tools with justuno, I get to brainstorm and begin developing a more structured marketing strategy which leans heavily on a scalable online marketing strategy, once I have this nailed down with webchalet I feel it can be applied to all my ventures.

Here’s where I am:
What’s listed for consideration (no particular order):

-Social: multiple layers to this:
–each client that signs up will have social marketing integrated through property likes, tweets and facebook comments. (should we use disqus instead?). Every new client we will educate on how to leverage these tools. Webchalet will also actively share/tweet our favorite clients properties.
–our own twitter account
–facebook fan page (fan plug in on webchalet.com for social proofing)
–Webchalet blogs (we need to be the expert in our field of vacation property management, online marketing and web development).
–Webchalet forums: we’ll see how this takes. Property managers in particular don’t communicate with their local competitors, so hoping through online forums they can network and learn from others outside of their market. This can be a great support tool for our customers as well when it comes to setting up their webchalet accounts.
—youtube: we are creating training videos. Starting with simple how to use our software and will grow from there.
–Active roll on quora.com

–Linkedin.com: join all industry related groups. spend time on questions with quora instead of linkedin.

-Footer associated links from all clients websites (seo benefit and lead generator)

-Expert Bloggers in our niche: working on this list. Would like to send them an invite to view our software before we launch. Having a blog article written about us from respected industry bloggers would provide great credibility. Top of the list so far is Cottage Blogger.

-Design review sites: submit our new themes or webchalet.com to graphic design review sites. On this point: having fantastic, beautiful, clean, smart themes to offer our clients will allow us to stand out from our competitors, showcase our clients properties better than any other provider…this will not win us clients, but build a brand for ourselves as the go to place for the best looking vacation rental websites. This is something that will gain us exposure with media outlets. “I want beautiful looking websites” is what I’ve been saying from day one

-Affiliate: ugghh…

-Group buying: I’m going to take a look at Appsumo.com. It’s a specific deal site for apps. Today they have a deal from themefuse which offers wordpress themes. Could be a great match for us, plus I dig their humor

-SEO: Identify your keywords and go after them…Vacation rental website design

-Media outreach: we don’t have financing to pay a pr firm. I like what the authors in Rework (37 signals) have to say. Press releases are no different than spam, you are sending it out to a bunch of people who don’t really care. Developing direct relationships with media contacts yourself is the most sustainable method. Well…we don’t have any per se, but working on this. (open to suggestions please :). Currently how handling: Generated a google doc with a list of websites and publications relating to our industry. We have reached out to friends who work at pr firms and they are helping provide contact emails. 7-8 days before launching we are going to do our best to reach out with our story.

Offline:
-Phones: sometimes you just can’t beat the traditional sales call.
-Onsite visits: the joy of being in the vacation rental industry is that most our clients will be in amazing places. I’m headed to maui on vacation and plan to pitch potential clients while in my boardshorts…
-Local seminars (set up a web strategy talk with local chapters of vrma)
-Industry organizations: either become members or find ways to have them include us in their email blast. Current list: vrma.com

-Local travel bureaus: similar strategy as above.

-Partner program/Sales rep: thinking could offer a 100% commission plan. Sunset model where they receive 20% of each month for first year, 15% year 2 then done.

There’s more to be said, but for now my backs aching and it’s nearly time to celebrate cinco de mayo…hope you’ve been able to pick up some pointers. Please visit us at http://www.webchalet.com to sign up for a private invite or be alerted of our launch.

Cheers,
Erik
Twitter: airik
Webchalet.com
Justuno.com
Socialerik.com

SF Summer Social Events

Best to just post this up as I can never remember everything going on…

SF Summer Events:

May 15 – Bay to Breakers

Mid May (TBD) – O’Reilly’s Oyster Fest

May 28-29 – Carnavale

June 4-5 – Union Street Festival

June 12 – Haight Ashbury Street Fair

June 18-19 – North Beach Festival

June 25-26 – SF Pride

July 2-3 – Fillmore Jazz Festival

Aug 12-14 – Outside Lands

Aug 29-Sep 5 – Burning Man

Early Sep (TBD, usually close to 9/11)– Power to the Peaceful

Sep 30-Oct 2 – Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival

Oct (TBD) – BM Decompression

Oct (TBD) – LovEvolution (aka the Love Fest…if it happens)

Oct (TBD) – Treasure Island Music Festival