Diary of a startup – Pt 1

What do you do on a Saturday morning? Wake up, eat breakfast, look out the window drinking your coffee…

Normally I am working, as always. This Saturday was a little different however. Kellie and I were having our breakfast looking over the river (see pic), when she came out with something that she wanted to do. She wanted to start an online cooking show. Sounded easy enough, and she certainly has the chops for it, she is a great cook. But the question was, would there be a market for the product, how would we make it work, what would be involved in creating it, and how long would it take to make money?

Anyone that knows us knows we have lots of fingers in lots of pies, my theory is that one day one or two will get really hot and we will know that they are the ones to focus on, until then, we keep doing what we do.

My first reaction was, forget it, I am to busy already. Then I calmed dwn a bit and thought about it again, but what if we could kill three birds with one stone…

1. Start up a business for very little startup capital
2. Focus entirely online for revenues thus making it a pure online business
3. Document the entire process for my next book.

Now it sounded appealing. I get calls from people all the time who have a great idea for a online startup. They typically go something like this…

“I am going to start this site that is going to talk about something that I am interested in, and then sell it to Google for 1 billion dollars just like YouTube”

Hate to burst your bubble, but um, no you won’t. That being said however starting with a realistic goal, means that perhaps you could replace your full time job with something that earns an equivalent amount of money in a shortish period of time. Would you settle for that? I think most people would say yes.

So how do you go about this. Well I Have a pretty clear system for starting an online business which we will make available at some point but for now let’s go over the basics. I always start with brand, everything else will need that so it is a good place to start. We have decided on the name Cooking with Kel.

The next step was to determine if we could start this business quickly and cheaply, so we had to work out the parts of it.

Part 1 is the actual show. Each show would be about10 minutes in total and feature one meal. Now we are not TV producers and we only have a tiny JVC handycam to film with, so a test show was in order.

Part 2 was the website and everything that would be part of a weekly package. Recipes, Information, Ingredients etc. As always, it would have to all look very professional, as that is something that is a competitive advantage for us.

Part 3 was how would we be able to drive traffic. That seems like the easy part at this stage.

Part 4, was how long would it take to produce a clip, who was going to do it, could we systemise it?

Now we had some tasks., and with that we set to work, Kel went in to hair and make up (our ensuite) and I set up the studio (our kitchen). The biggest hurdle we had to overcome was how to keep our son quiet whilst we did this. Upstairs with a Star Wars DVD took care of that.

Now at this point I want to reiterate something. We had NO CLUE what we were doing when it came to filming a video like this. Neither of us has any experience at all to believe we could do this, just a desire to do it and NO FEAR that we couldn’t.

So we started filming, and after a couple of false starts, we were into it.

The result was that three hours later we had an edited first clip, right up until the bit where we ran out of camera disk space (trap for young players). NOt just edited but it had a branded title slide, theme music and transitions, ready to go.

I have to thank Apple and the outstanding iMovie software that made all this very easy, but that is beside the point. We had our product. Next the domains were registered, and hey presto… business is born.

We invested half of a Saturday, and created something entirely form scratch. Will it be a success? I don’t know, but at least we are having a crack. And all it has cost in $$$ so far is the domain registrations. The site is next which will be based on an easy to implement platform, and then on to launching the business. Meantime we have systemised the process filming, down to placement of tripod for different shots etc, so we make it easy for next time.

So instead of sitting around next Saturday and reading the papaers to check the lotto numbers, what can you start? Can you put life into an idea that you have had? Can you get something going.

As my mate Justin Herald says, Have a Crack!

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This is the first in a series of posts about how to start an online business. If you have any questions, please leave your comments and we will get back to you. This area is one the specialties of our business, and one we have done many times.

Tagged as: startup diary