Dominik Balogh

Getting lost in perception in a B2C market

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:24:00 -0500

We build the biggest things, we engineer, we can captivate and eat any animal. Humans are the most important beings. The most intelligent, most capable.

But according to what? Well, humans are the most capable according to… humans. There’s seemingly no jury to evaluate us, so it made sense to evaluate ourselves.

So we measured the importance and intelligence based on the range of factors that matter most to us in the range of a given environment surrounding us.

This perception is, of course, very relative and very human.

When you zoom out to a distance far enough, there’s not a big difference in capabilities between ants and people. The significance of each on a large-scale interactions is negligible. The features or capabilities to achieve anything is very close to zero for both.

Ask a dolphin who is the most capable and intelligent — he’d say it’s dolphins, because they can survive water-only conditions for billions of years and visualize communication using long-distance sound waves. These are the metrics of ultimate importance, at least for them.

An ant would say ants, because their unconditional ability to cooperate in coherence is the most intelligent way for life to not collapse on itself.

Not so long ago it seemed very clever and important to build hardware and software with lots of choices. “People love choices. Let’s include a lot of features. Many buttons. Let people build their own system. Offer them 76 different variations.”

Dell has failed in the B2C market for getting lost in perception, Microsoft is hard in the recovering process. It just turned out people don’t want complexity and choices in software and hardware. Features seemingly important were not important at all for most of the market. Only Apple and a few others came and made the decisions by ignoring the “general knowledge” perspective. Facebook guessed we don’t want to share with options in a new window. We want to like with no options in the existing window.

Zoom out to a large scale. Don’t get lost in perception of what is important by asking dolphins or ants. Don’t ask humans too much either.

Women, startups and yellow elephants

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:36:00 -0500

“We need more women to start a business.”

- Why?

“They offer fresh thinking and disrupt different segments.”

- So…?

“So we can make more money.”

- Why do you need more money?

“To make more money.”

…

Oh, right… so it’s not about women. We might as well say we need yellow elephants. Imagine how many people would travel around the world and pay you to see a yellow-born elephant.

My understanding is that in the economy, if you can multiply an investment, it doesn’t matter what or who you are. Although these factors are tightly related, we don’t really need anyone, we really only need money.

Why McDonald's is so successful

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 07:27:00 -0400

Stop in the restaurant area on an international airport and look around.

What you mostly see is 5 or 6 restaurants each positioned just by the other one. But the long lines are only at McDonald’s.

Children, tourists, pilots, stewards, asian people, indian people, white people, black people, airport staff, terrorists, whatever.

How is it possible that everybody likes McDonald’s food? Now if course it’s not the food itself. It’s the consistency.

If you’re hungry and you know you have a certain amount of time before you need to leave, the only thing that matters is no surprises now, please.

You’re just not in a situation to try an unknown restaurant if you 1) don’t know how much time you’ll need to spend there, 2) don’t know how the food is going to taste and 3) don’t want to risk leaving dissatisfied with unfilled expectations.

You’ll rather eat something totally generic. Not as tasty, but in 20 minutes, and with no surprises. McDonald’s has built a network of exactly same restaurant branches with exactly the same generic food all over the world, and you know it best, because no franchise is as widespread as theirs.

I’m curious to find out how “no surprises” analogy can be applied to other businesses as well.

The contrast (of stock cultures)

Tue, 31 May 2011 16:25:00 -0400

There is no stock culture in Europe. In contrast, for United States, incorporating is the only way to go for a startup. The reasons are obvious. Selling equity quickly and easily to the right people can be a key part for a startup to be successful. From what I understand:

You need to motivate early employees so they do their best to make their (yours) equity grow in value
You need to raise funds by selling stock to accelerate quickly and again, grow in value

Obviously, in a limited liable company, none of this is possible. Here’s what’s happening in Europe:

Universities do not educate and governments do not provide a good stock environment
The result is that general public have very limited knowledge about it
Then very few lawyers, bookkeepers and accountants understand stocks
Then startups choose to form limited-liable companies
Then they can’t motivate employees by offering stock
Then investment market is complicated and fewer people/angels invest

See the chicken-egg pattern? Nobody is interested in stock because nobody is interested in stock. Even if you form a stock-based entity in Europe, how much is your lawyers, contracts and accountants going to cost you? Who are you going to sell your stock to? How can you motivate your employees? Employees don’t even realize why stock is valuable, since there is no acquisition knowledge in the first place.

Motivated employee @ Google parking lot, Mountain View.

A system which works so well in US is almost non-existent in most of the EU countries. The technology culture is different. I’m not sure whether this is one of the primary reasons why US has a better startup track record, but I suspect it is.

Cyprus or Luxemburg aren’t changing the culture, they just provide a stock-friendly land. I think EU badly needs a stock enlightenment as a whole. Until this contrast between two largest markets is smoothened out, EU will always play the second league. Only the investors have the power to blur out the edges and enforce a new culture.

Paperwork

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 10:51:00 -0500

I’ve been in the belief for quite some time that legal business paperwork is minimized in California to provide a less “hostile” business environment. I have recently found that this is not the case. No matter if you use a mediator or not, the amount of paperwork and energy required to fill a basic request is about the same as in European Union, if not more. Surprisingly, most of the forms are actually very similar to those in EU, and also similar to those in other states across the country, such as NV or DE. Processing times in CA are currently from about 20 to 100 times higher than anywhere else. The legal/stock advantages still prevail, though. On the fast route of moving a lot of cash across Atlantic to USA, I guess european lawyers and businessmen didn’t have enough time to tweak-out everything as they would prefer to nowadays.

Open source vs. closed source

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 21:12:43 -0400

It often falls down to a very colorful discussion when the open-source versus closed-source topic appears. Which one is better?

Without Unix and Apache, there would probably be no cheap internet. But without Microsoft or Oracle, there would probably be no online finance management.

And so there’s no simple answer to questions such as open vs. closed, wireless vs. wired, or diesel vs. petrol.

You can get a diesel engine with a 1,5x higher torque than on a comparable petrol one, but you can’t ignore that it’s also 400 pounds heavier. With the additional weight on the axle, you need to hack a problem. Yet providing the hack brings even another new problem.

With any additional benefit added to the system, there almost always comes at least one drawback. The world of economy, engineering and inventions is not perfect. There is no ideal product. We make tradeoffs every day and just prefer to use those which suck less in the given conditions.

So the next time you’re deciding between solutions, don’t ask which one is better. Ask which sucks less for the target use. Sticking to one just for the sake of belief is blindly risky.

The importance of small business

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:12:24 -0400

Operating a small business is very important for the big future of an entrepreneur. Even if the business only generates about the same profit in the early days or years as you would get in a normal job, it’s still worth all the risks and challenges. You’re forced to think, learn and expand your horizons infinitely. By not having enough money, you are feared. You have to be effective and do a lot of things on your own, which means you need to learn many new methods over a period of short time. I call it a “Benefit of the business doubt”, which always forces you to do better. Thanks to it, you can evolve 10 times faster in the first 2-5 years of your SB compared to all of the previous years. You also meet established business people, you learn how they think and what they expect, which you mostly can’t when being just an employee. Though there are some executive job positions which make perfect business sense and provide a comparable level of doubt or stock benefits, let’s skip it for now.

Some years back, I had to learn European accounting very quickly to manage it on my own. It was a nightmare at the time and I’m luckily not involved in accounting operative anymore, but thanks to the real experience, I’ve learned and understood some optimization tricks and other tweaks on a worldwide level, while fresh economy graduates are usually still hardly able to construct in their head, say, how VAT works and what it affects - and it’s unfortunately not so much of their fault, but the flawed HR and education system. It then struck you when a manager with MBA and 10+ years of job experience asks you about the elementary invoicing “issue”. But it also helps you realize that all the work was worth it even if you didn’t make much more money than in a so called “safe” job.

After my media, advertising and consulting business ramblings on my own, we’ve formed PoweryBase (now incorporated in CA) with my partner in crime, and we accepted a more difficult route of storing user data in the “cloud”. We started to find out what the mobile platform has to offer. We’ve made some incorrect decisions, some great decisions, didn’t prepare the best exit strategy from the beginning and found many drawbacks. We also didn’t market much due to focusing on development heavily. However, our products are great and have an interesting potential. Last but not least, users love them and use them almost every day. Thanks to the data we own, there are still many opportunities to push the business models further.

But the more important fact is, we’ve learned so much from our solution in just a year, and we’ll also use that experience in more complex projects. Server side services, databases, geo-data, syncing multiple mobile devices live, notification systems and users’ feedback on syncing experience is a valuable knowledge you need today to build interesting products. You can hire many kinds of skilled people, but you can’t hire your own real life solution experience. You see more options, you learn technological limits, various approaches, and you can make better decisions in the near future. What sounds very easy is really not, because small details and new features in the service may highly affect the software + hardware operating costs overall. Even with today’s very cheap highly scalable storage solutions. Managing or reading technical support requests of your customers for a period of time also teaches you what customers really need.

There’s always the benefit of business doubt, no matter who you are and how far you are. Sometimes it’s even smart to do stupid decisions and jump into the waters in which you have no knowledge of, because it’s going to force you to learn about it and you’ll be more smarter next time. There’s always much more to learn, and I’m often wrong in many things, but experience from managing a small business always proved itself to be a very valuable experience in life.

Set long term goals to stay motivated

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:33:24 -0400

Enthusiasm is the best tool to make great things happen. Enthusiasm is a form of very high motivation, because without motivation, there are not many reasons to do anything in the first place.

I believe only 2 kinds of motivations exist:

to receive currency or other trade value unit
to achieve a personal growth (a peace of mind)

Anything else is just an indirect path to the same finish, and these two mentioned actually almost always overlap. Like working 3 jobs to save money for your children’s study, for them to be achieve a growth and receive easy money, and for you to finally achieve a peace of mind. And so, we can nail the motivation types to just one, because receiving money is, in fact, just a way to reach the personal growth or the peace of mind.

Everybody should have a long term goal, a goal that keeps him or her motivated. People without motivations are often sad and may feel worthless. Set a long term goal, start working on it today and stick to it. Want to become a master in economy? The best UI designer, programmer, analyst, teacher, or maybe a great family supporter? There’s no reason to not make the first step today.

Plans may change overtime, but always having at least one will ensure that you’re motivated. Ikea started as a teenager selling matches on the street. High motivation was what made it the largest furniture maker in the world.

Ping sucks because it's popular to say it sucks

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:49:45 -0400

Following some tweets in the recent days, it doesn’t take long to find out that industry critics don’t like Ping all. It quickly became popular to say it sucks, because everybody says it sucks.

What surprises me though, is that some investors and social music network founders share the same view too, while their field of view should be a little wider.

We all know that in the process of growing, iTunes became a very slow over-bloated software — but iTunes is also the world’s largest monetization music platform and Apple obviously wants to strengthen its position for everybody’s sake. Currently, they went for a restrictive approach (intentionally, or just not enough time to develop better?) with Ping and it may eventually fail as a social tool alone if it’s not going to be more available. But in this analogy, you could bash Facebook that it was only open to university students at the time. If we’re going to bash a social network, why drawing conclusions today? If it’s meant to be social network, then it needs time. I don’t think it’s great, and it probably also doesn’t work like everybody would expect.

However “restricted”, what would one expect from a multi-billion music (among other areas) company with an audience of 160M registered users? A new last.fm? Maybe the internet doesn’t need a new last.fm in Apple’s design. Most of the people don’t want to listen to radio. They just want to buy their favorite music 1-click. I think the world primarily needs a place to buy mainstream music quickly and discover it too, whatever software it’s tied to. iTunes continuously forces major labels to wake up. The sooner it goes worldwide and breaches all legal barriers, the better for the whole industry. Even if it establishes a monopoly, the current situation is worse anyway. Discovery as Ping is suggesting helps establishing iTunes as the best place to buy music. Current social music networks do not sell music in the terms of how iTunes does.

Maybe Ping really does suck and Apple doesn’t understand the social network game at all. Maybe Facebook execs have been money hungry and couldn’t close a deal (or vice versa). Still, industry insiders should extend their views and not play the childish social network terminology game — just because they can’t invest in it or just because they like last.fm approach more. It needs time. If time is not going to help, I will join all the critics. But not today.

Rework: 15 hours a day to become a hero

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:47:39 -0400

Like almost all technology entrepreneurs, I’ve spent most of my life sitting in front of a computer, often until late nights. The irony is that in fact, our future goals are to spend as little time with computers as possible, but we mostly feel comfortable with them, we don’t regret the past and don’t feel like we’re missing anything important.

The reason why we’ve devoted a section of our being to technology is very clear: we’ve chosen one field and we want to be the best in it. It’s not possible to focus on more than one thing. But is it good or wrong to work 12 hours a day? Do people tell you that you work too much? What does “too much” mean? Where’s the line between work and a hobby? If you spend half of that time just reading and educating yourself or emailing on a smartphone, is that considered as work too?

Rework says:

“Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.”

As much as I believe this is true, I also believe there are times and certain fields where there’s just no other choice. Sometimes it’s necessary to work “too much” to accomplish a goal with great results. You can easily find already rich people working very hard, or even Steve Jobs replying to random people on a late Saturday night. With thousands of employees, enough money and so much experience, can’t they just delegate or figure out a faster way to get things done? Maybe they really aren’t able to, but instead of figuring this question out, maybe we should rather ask: Would Apple exist today if Steve Wozniak didn’t work hard back in the days? Would Microsoft exist if Bill Gates went partying at 9 PM every day in his teen years instead of working?

There’s a certain goal threshold which you need to cross before you can stop working or start delegating heavily. Sometimes there are more thresholds depending on your actual goals and strategies.

However, I haven’t heard of a single entrepreneur who’d like to die with hands on a keyboard. Neither myself - I enjoy not working and I’ve developed my own system. But I sure know that the real hero is not finished at 5 PM. The real hero does what he wants, what he likes, with who he likes, anywhere, no matter the time. And if dying trying to stay on or reach that threshold one day is his goal, then who is entitled to judge whether the methods are too much or not?

Smart people can recognize smart people

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:29:09 -0400

When you read short online biographies of successful people, they mostly start or end with a level of education, usually a university degree. Big companies’ HR bureaucracy aside, I’d like to understand what message they’d like to deliver by including this information, and in fact, it’s hard for me to recognize whether it’s a negative or positive one. It goes something along the lines:

“John Smith graduated from Harvard University with an A. B. in Computer Science. John worked at Amazon as a VP of marketing and developed a known and very successful expansion strategy. John later founded project.com and sold it to Google for $900 million after 3 years of operation, with 20 millions registered users”.

Translated:

“At school, John Smith learned from old smart people how to build a sand tower by using a beach bucket. John is also known for studying architecture on his own and building an astonishing 200-acre golf course in the middle of San Francisco with his bare hands over a period of 3 years, working 16 hours a day. Tiger Woods called the course most enjoyable and challenging he’s ever played on. The planet’s most famous golf course has been later acquired by Nike for $900 million, making John one of the hardest working, most rich and successful startup entrepreneurs in the world”.

Now, I had to strongly overexpose for the difference to be more clear - much more people can use a beach bucket and fill it with sand than those who can successfully graduate from Harvard. But my point is simple. Study is important, in some fields critical, and can also be a part of business strategy - but with the level of some people’s accomplishments, I’m personally not very sure what their degree means in the bio. Smart people recognize smart people. You are not going to ask Larry Ellison where he graduated from before you decide whether you want to conduct business with him, are you?

An entrepreneur can care and consider his graduation to be a big notable accomplishment, but before including it, he should ask himself a very basic question first: “Does my target audience care?”. I think only the dumb one does. Your target audience better be smart.

Too many great ideas

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:47:00 -0400

The big issue of all entrepreneurs is that they evolve very quickly. Too many great ideas magically appear in their mind. The excitement from the latest idea quickly overlaps the previous one, which could be just a few months old. All of the previous ideas suddenly don’t seem to be that great anymore and it’s getting more and more difficult to keep the attention on them.

It’s not possible to do everything. Even Virgin can’t. Filtering ideas is important, but filtering is not easy, because the greatest idea is often much more riskier than a good one. Should my company spend 1 year building a great idea to generate $10M, or should it completely devote 3 years of work to the top risky idea worth $1B while missing many other good opportunities? It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a $10M vs. $1B situation or $10,000 vs. $100,000, the point is still the same.

I guess there is no simple answer and no “ideal” strategy. Sometimes it may be smarter to stick to the previous ideas and keep enhancing them. Sometimes you need to postpone or delegate all of the previous ideas and follow just the top shower one.

But, of course, there’s always an another great idea waiting in the queue.

Waiting for the next big thing

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:00:22 -0400

The market is hungry for the next big thing. Obviously, nobody knows what’s the next big thing until already everybody knows it is. Investors bet on their instinct and do the trial and error business.

Let’s try to define what “the next big thing” could actually mean. A product which is:

public
for everybody who can use a piece of electronics with a network connection
can scale extremely well right now
can generate almost obnoxious revenue within 5 years
can return 20+ times of the original amount invested

On-demand digital streaming, music, video, news with rich content, network TVs, YouTube, mobile devices, they are all a part of the next big thing. But in the jargon, even though their market is currently very large and fresh, it’s not “big enough” by the terms of our definition.

There’s no way you can turn on your TV or home stereo today, a display in a car or an app on a mobile device and enjoy any digital content by universal standards. Why?

What all of these businesses have in common is that they can’t scale well and fast enough in the current world’s establishment. They are tightly controlled or legally challenged by a very few, mostly very old fashioned vendors. If not by them, then by bureaucracy, lobbying, governments, currencies, country borders, restrictions, regulations, policies, standards and copyrights.

Yes, tons of money has been made already, but still just a pathetic amount compared to the true today’s potential. Committed players are fighting their way for the sake of advantage which they’ll own when the world changes, such as iTunes, Hulu, or even YouTube. All great services which altered the business, but it’s a slow industry transformation, not an instant game changer with a clear road ahead. Much of the credit goes to Steve Jobs, but even him and all of the young geniuses are forceless. It’s very similar with the new sources of energy. Until people’s hearts are not touched anymore by the sound of a 6 liter gasoline racing engine, until new kids are born, until some companies disappear — or until the world changes rapidly — it just won’t scale.

Neither social networks are the winners, because their original concept is not for everybody and because of the prejudice of older generations. A typical computer-aware grandmother may use Google and click on AdWords even without having an e-mail address, but the current social network concept is designed by young people for the young people. It’s a little beyond the possibilities of grandma’s thinking.

Social networks work because you can find people there, that’s the whole idea. If everybody’s account would be private and prone to search and nobody would use a photo (having a friend named John Smith, good luck finding him without a picture), there would be no reason to go searching for a non-existent, hidden friend. However providers work on user privacy preferences, they default them to a configuration which won’t close their business while hoping not too many people will change it. Even Eric Schmidt is concerned enough to consider suggesting current teenagers to change their name in the adulthood. Still, social networks analyze user data for targeting just as many other providers do, so if you’d like to maintain your privacy, you better not use the internet. All people will slowly adapt to the new definition of personal privacy just as we’ve adapted to everything. But however amazingly fast-growing social networks are, they are still too complicated and slow by the terms of our definition.

Maybe the next big thing is not a single product. It could be an era, more of a part of everything we are establishing today, but much more integrated, connected via APIs and standardized. Digital media, mass social networks, electronic wallets an IDs, cloud operating systems, location awareness, worldwide business directories, gathered people’s habits, linkings and preferences. Data and tools available to users anywhere based on what they prefer, what they’re doing and where they are with much less bureaucratic limitations. We’re on the edge of slow transformation of many industries into a set of smart services from multiple companies, with business methods beyond the current possibilities. Google has the best chances to lead thanks to their gathering & targeting business strategy which they’ve been pursuing since 2001.

But they are not the only one, and they can’t acquire the whole internet and the whole mobile market.

Bigger piece of cake

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 14:04:00 -0400

It’s widely known that successful internet entrepreneurs are millionaires. They mostly became rich quickly. That statement is correct, but depending on how we understand the words “rich” and “quickly”. What media mostly mean by assigning an attribute of a young millionaire is obviously the net worth of a person, or his disposable fortune in liquid assets, not the actual cash.

But is it really liquid assets? There’s a difference in liquid assets of Steve Jobs and another very successful founder, even if their net worth is similar (e.g. Mark Zuckenberg). In a late stage startup company where venture capitalists already own a lot of stock, it’s very probable that founders own just as low as 5% of the company. If the valuation is high, that amount still represents tens or hundreds of millions. But, in the worst scenario:

this stock may not be vested yet and may be unprotected for dilution
stock owner is bound not to sell the assets until a specific milestone
stock owner may not leave the company
may be fired by board of directors before vesting, making him lose most or all of his assets
the acquisition price when exiting can actually be low enough that founders get nothing

In a great scenario where the company is strong, each founder owns up to 30% (such as Zuckenberg allegately does), and they are not bound to outrageous terms. But until the acquisition or IPO, it’s very probable that founders haven’t directly sold much of their own stock yet under high valuation. It’s a usual restriction but at the same time mostly makes perfect sense for everybody involved.

And so, for the years until the acquisition comes, founders’ earnings are “just” average executive officer salaries. In fact, the salaries may be lower than average to keep the costs down as much as possible while the company is still heavily dependent on investments.

If 3 to 5 years can be considered a short time, if the company is doing great and if the founders are investment-smart, we can agree — internet company founders can become rich, quickly. But the point is, until the acquisition is closed, until details are publicly/SEC disclosed or until the founders are seen driving 400K+ cars (kidding), general public does not know the actual reality. Maybe the founder is going to be really wealthy. Maybe he’s not. Maybe he’ll receive a lot of acquirer’s stock. Who knows — the investment contracts are never disclosed.

The more smart founders are and the more convincing their project is, the higher chance they’ll eat a bigger piece of cake when exiting or going public.

Why earliest seed fundings should ideally be avoided

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 09:00:00 -0400

I’ve recently realized there’s actually a clear reason why “fools” made it into the FFF joke. By investing in a seed “round”, you’re just most probably a fool, no matter whether you’re actually a friend or family at the same time. Such rounds should be ideally avoided.

If an internet startup company needs $15,000 for a few months of living expenses of its two or three founders (5K for each), how could these founders run a company? What they’ve been doing until now? How comes they don’t have such amount of money already?

A person (students including) skilled and motivated enough to analyze, develop, code, manage and run a startup already has to have all these skills from an actual job, freelancing, consulting or previous business projects. That directly suggests he should also have saved some money for the new project. Sometimes it’s also possible to devote up to 20% of time to the previous income solution while working on a new startup to keep at least a basic income during initial months. It’s still a big distraction, but it may work. But in any case, if a founder doesn’t have any savings, it unfortunately means he can’t manage his money and, more importantly, his life. There’s always a way to save. Founders should never have this problem.

And so it just feels weird to invest into people with zero work or business experience and no money. Only fools could believe that such example founder could manage a profitable company. Strangely enough, they sometimes can.

I see the seed investment more as a motivation. In the earliest tech-demo stage, founders should have enough of their own money. There’s no need for offices or even employees. That’s where wealthier angels help. FFF seed investment is just a good sign that someone supports founders’ commitment. After all, Y Combinator’s initial applications aren’t meant to be seed investments either. It’s more of an upfront paid holiday invitation to keep the investment business going, to stimulate the “startup market”, to meet and to learn — with free lectures from business insiders included. It’s a very clever tool to force people to think outside the box and a filter to find out who’s worth of angels’ time.

That participating in Y Combinator’s filter provides great education, source of contacts, marketing and angel investments, that’s of course, a completely different story.

Knowledge

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:02:00 -0400

I recall Seth Godin’s quote that every day is a great day to start your own blog. By the time you’re thinking about it, yesterday was already late. Not having enough time to publish is just an excuse, we all know it. You need to find the time for those things which you believe they may help your business in some way.

Myself, I have been pushing the idea of starting a personal blog away for the last 3 years and always for the same reason. At any given time, it’s almost granted that you do not possess as much knowledge as someone else interested in the same field of art. There’s always someone who knows better, so why being pathetic with sharing your knowledge?

Blogging usually involves presenting one’s personal opinions, often based on one’s previous experiences in a particular field. People talk about what interest them. It’s widely known that many smart people also became rich just by blogging about their interests.

But enterpreneurs, hackers, investors, founders and nerds mostly blog to continuously produce a self-promotion, which concludes making money indirectly. By creating an array of people which are interested in the same art as you, it’s highly probable that you’re increasing your business opportunities for you or your company. You’ll eventually meet interesting people.

To be effective in approaching that business goal, you need to gain trust of your readers. But how do you gain trust? Obviously it’s not the best idea to start advising on proper drifting on a race track if you haven’t even driven a car yet. People will very soon find out, your opinions will be challenged and your efforts ignored. You need to publish your true skills, whatever skill it is. Providing advices, advices on examples from your own mistakes, or other valuable information, are all efficient tools in gaining trust. In the end, your readers can too become better in the art discussed. It’s a free lecture.

The thesis above suggests that you can always teach or make an impression only to people who are more stupid (or less educated, if you prefer) than you at any given time. Ironically, the problem is that people more educated than you are usually the ones you want to make your friends and the ones you’d like to do a hypothetical future business with. Those who feel they know more than you don’t have the time to read your opinions or advices. It’s natural that people tend to listen to those more informed and educated, not less. We constantly learn more from the environment. I bet you’ve already found yourself making fun of your own personal and professional opinions from the recent past either on your own blog or just in your mind.

So how could one possibly also teach and interest people more skilled than himself? Ironically, the answer is the same infinite loop theory which kept me from going for it sooner: at any given time, a person does not possess as much knowledge as someone else skilled in the same art. A business method which seemed very obvious to you for months or even years can be completely disproved by your colleague in ten seconds. We all keep studying forever.