t - -

We got pretty excited here at t– to start posting the various thoughts and issues that came up for us as we blaze our path to entrepreneurial fame (or at least mild recognition).  However, reality set in as we had a close deadline to apply to a local incubator.  A lot of work went into writing, editing, rewriting, and again editing the application - along with building a team to support us.

We now emerge a couple weeks later with no word (yet - but not ready to give up) from the incubator, and a few other setbacks.  That said, nothing has happened to compromise our vision or intent to follow through.  We may potentially end up approaching things slightly different, but nothing fundamental changes.

I have decided to start digging into Ruby on Rails some.  I’ve spent a little time looking into the language and how it flows and I think my biggest concern is that it’s almost too clear/easy.  I’m far too used to more cryptic languages - and I find it ironic that a language from Japan is so easily translatable to English.  Still it looks very interesting, and hopefully it will facilitate standing up some prototypes faster than planned.

I just got out of a meeting with someone I met at a local new media/tech meet up a couple weeks back.  I had mentioned at the dinner with him that one of the (several) projects I was working on was based around the idea of local advertising and he was working on a similar site.

It reminded me that it’s always good to talk to people about the market and particular ideas as it helps to say out loud potential pitfalls and potential opportunities.  Everyone is tripping over themselves to talk about how big local advertising is going to grow, but there are still a number of problems to get around before it’ll truly be big.

He and I were taking fairly different approachs to our projects, and I’m not sure either solution is necessarily better.  My project is focused on providing a service as the primary function - with content that’s fairly simple to gather and produce.  The advantage here is that I can more easily expand to additional regions without having to get people on the ground producing original content for me.  The downside is that without any particular content I lack a defensible position.  The service is easily reproduced (and indeed exists in some areas already).  While I have a much greater focus on how to allow accessibility for small-time local advertisers, building and defending my user base will be extremely difficult.

His approach is obviously focused on creating unique content centered around the particular geographic area (primarily at the city level).  This creates a great edge if the content is quality.  People can only get that specific content in one spot, and he creates a strong means to defend his brand and property as long as the content quality remains high.  The downside being that expanding to additional markets becomes more difficult.  By requiring a high level of quality in content, he needs to find quality people in each new location.  This is assuming, of course, that one market is not ultimately enough to support significant growth.  I think you’ll find as you begin to build a brand respected in a local market, growth will come pretty strong for a while, especially as more and more people begin to be comfortable enough with exploring online advertising as such a small scale level.  But my concern is that even in a large metro the market tops out too soon to keep most people happy, and the real value is in actually being a national level operation but with content and properties existing at the hyper-local level.

Aside from the general strategy, we also discussed how to best go about building the advertising.  Part of the reason for the meeting was for me to share some knowledge of how the online advertising industry works.  Ultimately, in regards to the very focused local advertising, I don’t think the overall principles change.  I think the winning approach for either of our strategies is by providing two tiers of access.  On the one side, you will still need to maintain the traditional sales account exec that goes out to bring in substantial advertisers personally.  But you don’t want to that sales person to waste their time chasing $300/month deals constantly, so I think key will providing a very simple self-service system.  You want to create something so simple that the local Mom and Pop store owner can come on, easily create a banner ad, and easily choose who it targets and how much it runs.

But the biggest potential I think in really pulling these small businesses into a local platform to advertise is by providing as much transparency and reporting as possible to show just how well they reached specific users.  Online is a weird method of advertising to a lot of these local business who are used to at most putting a small ad in the local newspaper.  So you need to show them as in depth as you can that they reached people actively interested in their business and that these people responded in some way to the message.

All in all, it was an interesting conversation and left me with a lot to think about towards this problem/opportunity.

I’ve been going through the domain name searching process. Again. For those of you who haven’t been through this, it goes something like this:

1; Brainstorm dozens of possible domain names
2; Find out which ones your friends hate
3; Realize the good ones are squatted
4; Search for related concepts or the obscure ancient Germanic/Latin/Greek/Cyrillic root words
5; Aha!
6; Search to see if the name is registered
7; Kick yourself for doing the search on Network Solutions since they are now squatting that domain
8; Repeat step 1-6
9; Scream into a bucket for five minutes to calm yourself
10; Go back to the first domain name you thought of and try to buy it from the squatter

So I’m at step ten. I haven’t been successful at buying registered domains in the past, since many weren’t up for sale, and the rest were all too expensive. But today I encountered a new situation. The current owner was only interested in leasing the domain that I was interested in.

So the thought process for these squat-tards goes something like this:

{

Domain names = Internet(real estate);

If(real estate = leased property to businesses) = true;

Then(Domain names = leased property to businesses) = true;

}

Now, there might be a shred of logic in this type of thinking. If you happened to be one of the first hundred people on the internet and managed to register “profitablepopularname.com” then you might be able to convince some Fortune 500 company that the value would pay off.

However, I just didn’t feel like saying “Here’s a great idea- go ahead and screw me.” to the squat-tard today, and here’s why.

1; Cash money- We rent apartments and houses because we might move one day, or because the average rent is half the cost of the monthly mortgage payment that it would take to own it. With domain names under ten dollars, a domain name lease should cost about three cents a month for a 30 year fixed. However, the rates I’ve been quoted are closer to $20-$50 a month.

2; Rose.com by any other domain- A name is important, because it is usually the first layer of exposure and interaction with your brand. However, if you’re starting at ground zero, your content is far more important. People will remember a good name if they associate it with good content- as long as you stick to some simple rules. If you can make it easy to pronounce, easy to spell, and not too obscure, customers won’t have an issue remembering it. After all, what does a rain forest have to do with shopping, or a “one” followed by a hundred “zeros” have to do with search? Great brands are molded- not defined.

3; Google is my address bar- With RSS feeds, email links, tweets and google, how often will people be typing in your domain name by hand? If you have good content/value/service, your customers will remember your name and type it in if necessary, but the days of hoping that a valuable new user will stumble across your site by “guessing” at domain names are over.

4; allofthegoodnamesweretaken.com- It’s true. Maybe. Well, at this point, anything that resembles a word in a language that uses Roman letters is being used or squatted. The iCANN system is broken. Domain squatters might technically have a “first come first serve” right to the names they own. However, I equate this type of behavior with going to CVS and buying all of the meds, then standing in front of the store hoping someone might have a pre-heart-attack. We really shouldn’t support these people, and domain leasing rewards them for their scummy behavior more than buying the domain outright. It would be much wiser to spend the resources building up your site so that you can one day rightfully and legally take the squatted name.

5; Leverage- Rather, anti-leverage. (Is there a word for that?) When your site hits it big, your internet landlord will have major leverage against you. All of the work that you have put into associating value to that name becomes a liability. You can try to give them the finger, but they’ll give you the car door. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t even play one on TV, but my understanding is that you wouldn’t have much choice but to pay the ransom that is set each year by the actual domain owner. They could probably even sell it to your biggest competitor if they wanted. And the worst thing is, the better that you do, the more money they would demand. Could you try to take the legal route mentioned in the previous point? Maybe. Although I would suspect that by entering into an agreement with the actual owner, you’d have less of a case against them for squatting on your trademark.

So with that said, have any of you entered into a domain leasing agreement? What were the terms? Are there any major sites out there that rent their domains? Did i miss anything?

Discuss.

[Photo credit: Shadphoto]

Not only is t- - the name of this site, but it’s also the fictional pseudological code that we use to express randumb thoughts.

Here’s my first.

If x!=Patriots;

Then x= “Hates Patriots”;

If y!=Scientology;

Then y= “Hates Scientology”;

output: “Patriots = Scientology?”