This is either very unconventional, or rather fitting, depending on what you think the role of a blog should be, especially one that is a part of a greater, larger company.
This post will outline some company objectives I am setting and making public. They fall under:
1. Legal
2. Marketing
3. Sales
4. Content
5. Technology
6. Human Resources and Product Management
7. Social Reponsibility
8. Geographic Expansion
9. Offline Branding
10. Corporate Development
11. Helping Other Entrepreneurs
12. Balance and Common Sense
I am making these objectives in the public domain because:
a) it only encourages me to work twice as hard in hitting them
b) who knows, you might be reading this and realize there’s something we have in common and can collaborate on, we’re also looking for advertising clients, potential hires and partnerships, so read on. I can be reached at ash @ mojosupreme . com (remember to remove the spaces).
Of course, there is also:
c) it will help our competition. Great, I love competition. Also, I don’t even know what and who makes up competition in the Web space.
Some dates:
- January 23rd 2007 will mark the one year anniverary of the launch of WatchMojo.com Web TV;
- January 28th 2007 will mark the one year anniversary of the BloggerMojo.com blog network. The network launched with 10 blogs, now with 17 blogs and expected to have 20 blogs by February 1 2007. HipMojo.com is one of the many blogs.
For all intents and purposes, we’ll treat January 1, 2007 as the beginning of year 2.
The best decision I ever made was getting married (extra points right there). Considering what marriage actually is, that can be the best personal and professional decision.
The second best decision then, without a doubt, was to leave my old employer and start a company, Mojo Supreme. I was a pretty loyal employee, I contributed a lot to my old company, and in the end they proved that my loyalty was misplaced.
A year ago, none of this existed. Not the 3,000 original videos, not the 10,000 blog posts, nothing! I had no idea what could be. I am what you can call a reluctant entrepreneur. I never grew up thinking “I’ll be my own boss.” I started a company because I disapproved of how clients and employees were being treated, so I wanted to see if my notions of management were practical or delusional and unrealistic. It’s one thing to sit there and complain, it’s another to challenge and test your preconceptions. As well, I had just gotten married, with no kids, so the timing was impeccable.
But, once the decision was made to launch an enterprise, there was no doubt: this had to be big.
Are we there yet? No. We’ll never be.
Are we going in the right direction, hell yeah.
In one year, the network of sites we operate saw traffic grow by over 2,000%. Our library of content skyrocketed. I have nothing but admiration for user-generated or attributed content services, but I am a content guy. I understand technology, but I will always be a content guy first and foremost. I’ll gladly go against the grain on that one. Don’t get me wrong, we have many social media tools and use them (or will when we launch new ones). But, the pillars of the company will probably never be user-generated ones, I am not sure advertisers really favor that. And last time I checked, advertising paid the bills online.
We’re monetizing our traffic, with advertisers and licensing clients. We’re at the point of turning down business because we don’t have enough manpower. That I don’t like.
One of the better decisions within this decision to start a company was my maniacal desire to launch the blog network, and of note, this blog, HipMojo.com, which covers technology matters, investing and advertising; what I have studied at College and where I’ve worked for the past six years. Writing a blog is different than managing an online magazine, you need the right mix and balance between personal experiences and professional commentary/observation. I’ll be the first to admit that it took me some time to find my niche, as do all bloggers. The biggest mistake many do is try to emulate other bloggers. Like I say, I am not competing with anyone, I just push myself and compete with myself.
With all of this in mind, the following might be very unconventional, or rather fitting: I am outlining our company’s 2007 objectives and goals on this blog. I always like to make my goals public. It forces you to own up to them and make them become a reality. I have worked alongside and for folks who make big claims at the end of one year but by Valentine’s day of the next year fall in love (or settle for) what they see in the rearview mirror and give up.
I am not like that. I also don’t apologize for it. The reason why I am using this blog to post this is because our company operates in advertising and technology.
Blogging has opened up many doors and created opportunities. So I’m bringing these two themes together in the hope that this can actually make our objectives easier to attain. With that in mind, if you are reading this and see a way you or your company can work with ours, drop me a line.
Let’s start.
WHAT DOES OUR COMPANY DO?
Mojo Supreme is a digital media (60%), technology (25%) and services (15%) company founded in January 2006.
The company produces, publishes and aggregates:
- various forms of content such as contests, videos, top 10 lists and blogs
- along vertical categories such as Cars, Education, Fashion, Film, Food, Gambling, Health, Music, Politics & Economy, Space, Sports, Technology and Travel.
The recent focus on “context being king” and what not… well, that was a major premise of the company’s vision when we launched. I was starting to write my third book, called Context Is King, when I decided instead of invest and launch the company.
With this out of the way, let’s get to the objectives and goals:
1) LEGAL
Avoid any legal issues.
2) MARKETING
I’m aiming to double unique users to 500,000 unique users by end of Q1 2007, and to 1M per month by end of Q2 2007. Here’s our traffic growth thus far:
- Between June and November (a 5-month stretch), 500% growth.
- December grew November’s traffic figure by about 100%.
- This made June to December growth rate weigh in at about 1,200%.
- From January to December, the company’s growth rate came in at over 2,500%.
Percentages are fine and dandy, so for the first time, I just unveiled absolute traffic numbers. If you missed it, read it again.
3) SALES
We make money from advertising and licensing.
We have a lot of companies who ask us to create videos for them. I guess it helps to have people see what the end product will look like at WatchMojo.com.
And when it comes to the end product, it helps that we have a great team to make the content look so good.
Short term, we’ve had a lot of success with licensing; long term, I am chasing advertising dollars with a vengeance.
I am an advertising guy, I worked on the sales side from 2000-05. I’ve worked with small business as I have with major Fortune 500 advertisers. In that period of time, I probably served hundreds of clients on thousands of deals, selling upwards of $7 million in advertising. At the end of the my tenure, I was an employee of News Corp. and I was doing very little. That’s par for the course in a large media firm; one of the things I really enjoy now is meeting decision makers are thinking ways of building their business. It matters, it makes a difference, especially now that we have enough traffic to help generate results for advertisers.
We focused on content and technology in Q1 and Q2, finally turning to building traffic in Q3. Q4 was about building relationships and revenue streams, which we did. 2007 will be about continuing that.
4) CREATE MORE CONTENT, BETTER CONTENT
Our library of content spans:
- http://www.WatchMojo.com over 3,000 original video content covering entertainment and informational clips, lasting between 1 and 3 minutes;
- http://www.BloggerMojo.com a rapidly growing blog network with blogs in Cars, Education, Fashion, Film, Food, Gambling, Health, Music, Politics & Economy, Space, Sports, Technology and Travel categories, its Technology blog HipMojo.com has already been featured in Barron’s, Yahoo! and read by members of the entrepreneurial, venture capital, advertising and stock market community.
- http://www.TenMojo.com the largest collection of top 10 reference lists;
- http://www.StreetMojo.com the largest contest aggregation service on the Web.
There’s a lot more. The point is 2007 will boil down to crystalizing all of the content and making it gel together.
I think we can certainly create more quality content now that we have a solid foundation and clear categories we cover. We’ll probably add a few blogs to complete the channels, but my focus is to better manage all of the content.
5) TECHNOLOGY
CMS
We’re on the verge of launching a long-planned content management system and relaunching with a new redesign. We missed our December target because we were launching new products, like our video meta search engine. But expect the new redesign and comprehensive network-wide CMS in January or February 2007.
This will help us better weave together all of our content, increase pageviews per uniques, increase time spent on the site, etc.
CDN
Producing and publishing video content, naturally we get contacted by Content Delivery Networks all the time. As our traffic grows both in North America and around the world, we’ll probably be looking at adding a CDN some time this year. In fact, we’re in talks with one to strike some kind of broad marketing agreement.
6) HUMAN RESOURCES & PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
We have a great team. We’ve certainly done a lot with our team. I think back of the pros and cons of the team we had at my old job and I would pick the current team I have anyday. Less negatives, far more positives. Less corrosive personalities. Less cooks, frankly. And different types of cooks, actually.
But, I still have some gaping holes in the bench that I have to address.
For MetaMojo.com:
I need to find a great candidate to head up search. We also need someone to manage classifieds and listings (contest) units. This could be one person or it can be numerous.
Boost our profile in vertical search. We are a major player in terms of numbers of categories we develop vertical search products for but being far away from Silicon Valley, the truth is that we just don’t get as much coverage as we should. It’s not the end of the world as Silicon Valley is not where our clients, our clients are on Main Street, but you get the idea.
Ramp up our recently built video search. First step: work on a design!
We’ve signed one monetization deal with one company, I’d like to secure more such deals. Our vertical search is strong in content, we need CPC partnerships with commercial database/results companies to offer a more well-rounded search experience.
Strike one major distribution deal whereby our vertical search complements a major search company’s mass market, organic and paid search results.
Raise search volume! We had 50,000 search queries in December, 2007. I know, considering that the monthly search volume in the US is 7 billion, that is not even a rounding error. Of course, we’ve hesitated to push the queries until we implement our paid search feed. It’s a catch-22.
But our strategy has never been to get people to stop going to Google and go to MetaMojo.com, so in that context, 50,000 and growing is not bad. The point is, we have a great vertical search product and with vertical search being a key growth area in search for 2007, we need to focus on that some more.
Previous blog entries on the product:
- Head to head: MetaMojo vs. the Other Search Engines
- Google’s SOAP Search API Shutdown: A Lesson for Entrepreneurs
- Yahoo!’s Credibility Problem with Geeks (or, why we stopped using Y!’s API, and they did not care)
- Official Launch of Domain Specific, Vertical Search Engine MetaMojo.com
- Google Borrows Page from MetaMojo.com (Really!)
For StreetMojo.com:
Begin the syndication of the contest database. This is done, I just need to launch it on the site. It would make sense to have a product manager (could be the person running search initially) to reach out to marketers and educate them on the product and its benefits.
Here’s a press release about the product.
For BloggerMojo.com:
Find bloggers who are as passionate about some of our verticals as I am about business, sports, politics, etc. We had 10 blogs in February, 2006 and added 7 more this month. It’s time to strengthen the network and add three more by the one year anniversary.
Get the word out on how great and useful Blogger Mojo can be for media professionals, PR agencies etc. When I see Edelman launch tools to take the press release into the 21st century, it validates half of the mission of Blogger Mojo. But to realize that vision, I realize I need to better communicate what Blogger Mojo is and how it can be used.
We already have 10-20 media entities use it, and use it more frequently, but this number can be much more.
7. SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
I wish I could one day be in Pierre Omidyar’s shoes and sign checks for projects that I believe in. Until then, this is the best I can do: free PR.
Looking to get the word out on something? Looking for promotional help? Drop us a line. We’d love to help get the word out.
8. GEOGRAPHIC EXPANSION
I’m looking for ways to get a presence in NYC. I do not think we need to be in SF frankly. I am looking to make that happen one way or another by end of Q1 2007.
We’re also embarking on setting up a UK strategy by end of Q1 as well.
And, while we were at it, we’re looking to bolster our Spanish-speaking video library. We’ve started producing videos in English, French and Spanish from our HQ in Montreal.
On these areas, feel free to email me if you have suggestions, interest etc.
9. OFFLINE BRANDING
Partnerships
We’re looking at starting talks with a book publisher, a TV network and a radio company. That’s all I will say publicly now. If you work for one and would like to enter a discussion on potential projects we’re thinking of doing this year, you know how to reach me.
Public Relations
I am considering hiring a PR firm because our company has so many interests, so many angles to cover etc., that we need a separate entity helping out cover all of the angles. Being someone who headed up PR for a company internally, I recognize what an external PR firm brings to the table. We’re probably not there for Q1, and right now, I cannot imagine justifying allocating funds to something like PR, but over time, definitely something I would consider.
10. CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT
Financing, Mergers & Acquisitions
We’ve financed everything internally, mainly using my savings. We can probably survive for quarters even if not a single penny came in the company, which of course is not the case. As it stands now, we might be able to grow the company, raise revenue and expand without the need for financing, but I do not want to repeat the mistakes of not growing things enough. My philosophy of spending 5 hours on business development for every hour of corporate development seems to have paid off dividends in terms of securing clients and building traffic, I just hope that I do not regret that decision over time.
I should probably make a decision on this and stick to it: some days I want to focus on building everything internally and organically; then on other days I realize that we need to raise financing.
The fact is that we’re currently headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Montreal is a great city that makes starting a business very feasible. But to scale a company, I am not sure Montreal is the best place to operate. The fact that we’re in Montreal is probably a negative.
There’s also other things that probably don’t help, but…
I also can’t say much on this, but it baffles me that we’ve already been approached to outright sell the company. I’d say it’s too early, but…
11. HELPING OTHER ENTREPRENEURS
Looking to start a company? Already launched a company and realize it’s not easy as you hoped? Drop me a line. I’ll help any way I can.
12. BALANCE AND COMMON SENSE
2006 was an interesting year. If you want to get attached to something, it should be your family, your wife etc., not a company or product.
I learned that when I was essentially shown the door last year by my former employer. I had built something and helped made millions for the founders, then I was out. You’re welcome!
I had to detach myself of the company and start from scratch. Then a few months into my new venture, I was facing the risk of doing that again. What got my blood boiling was that my former employer was driven by greed and arrogance.
2007 is going to be an interesting year, no matter what.
All you can ask for is health, happiness and hope that everything else falls into place. You can have the ambition, the vision, focus on execution but in the end need luck and good fortune for things to work out.
Happy new year everyone, good luck with your venture. If you see something we can work on together, you know where to find me.
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