You have to suck before you succeed

It occurred to me that it's been quite a while since I last posted here. In keeping with my New Year resolution to write at least one post a week, I thought I'd come back and write what's been on my mind recently. ^_^

So this month I've started reading this book called "Launch", and it's really exciting. As the subtitle suggests, it's basically a manual on how to succeed with your internet business and make tons of money doing it. Annette and my dad are reading it too.

I'll admit, I'm usually pretty skeptical about get-rich-quick-scheme books, but this has some very good ideas and material in it, and while the stories may seem a bit unbelievable, they're inspirational and true.

In a nutshell, the idea is to build a big list of emails, give customers a taste of things to come, and then make a big deal about your launch. It's like how Hollywood releases awesome trailers of movies months before they hit the theaters, or how Apple makes announcements about their newest smart devices. You create a buzz, build up anticipation for whatever you're offering, and then you open up shop. The most important element here, it seems, is building a good email list, so you can talk to your customers and build a relationship with them.

I'm only on the fourth chapter so far, but I decided that I had to check out the author guy's website and find out more. So Annette and I did some research on Jeff Walker, checking out his blog and such, and my god, I think we have found ourselves a new hero!

If you were to go and check out his blog at http://jeffwalker.com/blog/, you'd find this sincere, smart, down-to-earth man from Colorado who has made it his mission to help entrepreneurs build successful businesses quickly and easily. He posts videos every week, and he talks in a really conversational way, with a big smile. Maybe he'll trip over some words on occasion, but he doesn't edit those parts out. He just speaks for 5, 6 minutes straight on whatever topic he has, in one take! Gotta give him some respect just for that!

I'm not sure why, but Jeff reminds me a bit of the author who got me interested blogging, James Dashner. If Dashner ever decided to take up video blogging, I imagine he'd pretty much be like this guy. ^,^

This book and the whole idea of building an email list couldn't have come at a better time. My dad, sister and I have been racking our heads on how best to release our websites to the public, and this seems to be something cool to work towards.

Also, if you'll remember, at the beginning of the year I made another resolution to talk to every one of my 115 Facebook friends. Guess what? I already accomplished that goal in the first week of January. I wrote every person I knew a personalized Happy New Year message, and I got roughly an 80-85% response rate! Just imagine... If that had been an email list rather than FB friends list, and I had been selling them something rather than wishing them a great 2015, I would have been raking it in! :P

And that is why I've decided to start collecting all the email addresses of our iPad contacts and putting them in a spreadsheet for future use. Maybe I'll go through my Gmail contacts next, and ask for the emails of anyone I'm missing from Facebook. In "Launch", there was a couple who got their business started purely from reaching out to their friends and family first, and they're living in France now! If it worked for them, it can work for me and my family too. So far I have about 50 emails, and I only got up to "J". I decided to do the rest tomorrow, and in the meantime tell you... whoever is reading this right now... about how excited I am about all this. ^_^

Oh, and the title of this post comes from something Annette said while we were on a walk this afternoon. We were saying how we could make it as big as Jeff Walker and the rest of them, and how everyone had to start at zero. She said something along the lines of, "I guess we all have to suck before we can succeed." I thought that was really true, and really funny! XD

So yeah, even if we make a few mistakes along the way, I'm sure someday we'll look back on all our hard work and experiences and laugh about them, clinking flutes of champagne from a fancy hotel in Italy or something. ^_~

If you're interested in any of this, I implore you to check "Launch" out of the library. Buy it, if you must. Just read it! Also check out Jeff Walker's website and blog, and I'm sure he'll become your hero too. ^,^