Yu-kai Chou

Living the life of an entrepreneur is tough. You work your butt off and get paid almost nothing for years, and the chances are you will fail at the end. Living the entrepreneurial life is definitely not the “easy” life.

However, in my opinion, it is the most fulfilling one.

I believe that being an entrepreneur is the best way to make sure you live a life of passion and adventure – a life that leaves you a legacy and stories to tell your grand kids.

The corporate life story

Lets look at a regular corporate life person. This person graduates from college, finds a job, gets married, possibly gets an advanced degree, has kids, advances in her job, gets old, and then there’s goodbye. That just sounds very unfulfilling to me, especially when you are working at a job you hate like most people are.

Sure, some people love their jobs, and I’m all for that, but most people settle for a job that they don’t like just because they are afraid of change and and slowly wait for their midlife crisis.

That’s when they buy their fast car.

Even for those of you who say you love your jobs, if you suddenly had $10M in your bank account, how many of you will choose to quit your job this week?

Yes, you might say that this question is unfair as you could say that about anything. However, I can tell you as a sure fact that lots of successful entrepreneurs who HAVE over $10 Million in their bank accounts keep going back to the torturous startup life because it is just too exciting and addicting to stay away from!

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There’s always going to be people smarter than you and people dumber than you

Everyone wants to be successful in life. However, not everyone has what it takes to get there. Life is competitive, and to constantly keep up and excel over your peers is a tough and struggling battle.

Sure, some people believe that they can dominate everyone based on their natural abilities and intelligence, but you would be a fool to deny that there isn’t someone smarter and stronger than you out there (if you happen to be that one person who truthfully qualifies for that, email me and I’ll apologize to you personally). For most of us, gambling that you are the ultimate genius is a risky way of winning any battle.

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7 Tips to make your blogpost go Viral

Everyone wants to write content that goes viral and spreads like wildfire. However, it doesn’t always happen. Mostly by luck, I was able to create some content that went viral.

The blogpost I will refer to here is: Seesmic will Destory Tweetdeck

1. Say something controversial in the title (but use the best objective and logical statements to support it)

People love controversial stuff. As long as you truly believe in what you say and can back it up, throw up a controversial posts and give people a reason to click on it. If you just say something like, “Seesmic Desktop emerges as an alternative to Tweetdeck”, people won’t care, and they won’t share it.

2. Include at least one name that people have heard of in the title

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Chou Notes

1. Being happy and positive often is a talent, and it actively makes your group stronger. Create value by being happy.

2. When you get criticized for your work, as long as the person is not trying to personally hurt you, don’t take it personally and thank them for pointing out how you can create the best result. Your goal is to create good results, not get approval from others.

(Note: the deployment of our equipment will happen next Monday November 24th, 2010. Please don’t download the App and use it before then!)

Hey guys,

It’s been a while since I updated on my startup life. Some of you found out what I’m doing outside on your own (very impressed!) but I’d still like to update those who only see me on my blog so readers know what I’m up to.

Update of our older model

In the past 6 months, we’ve had moderate success with our social personalization engine for ecommerce sites, gaining some small wins here and there. After we switched to a high price, low volume mode we converted a few clients at a decent rate. However, the entire process was a bit slow for our quick-moving personalities, especially factoring in the slow sales cycle, 2 months implementation time, and then a free trial. We saw this as a good business but not a way to change the world.

Starting RewardMe

Then about 2 months ago, our team started to experiment with a side project called RewardMe, specifically a mobile app that uses gaming mechanics to get customers addicted to brick-and-mortar businesses. We realized that the flaw with deal type apps like Groupon is that they focus on the one-time bargain hunters (people who may not come back until you give them another 50% off), and the real sustaining money is in getting customers to return often and refer their friends (what FarmVille does very well in the virtual space). So we started working Rewardme in September. We finished the iPhone version of our app in a month, as well as our hardware design we give businesses.

Setting Milestones

Based on the Customer Development process, we decided that if we could convince 10 local businesses to launch with us and adjust their operations before we had anything tangible to show them, that would be enough validation for a viable business. Most of the ideas we had in the past took for ages for us to get a handful of business buy-ins since businesses don’t want to waste their time on unproven products. So with a goal of 10 in mind, we started to talk to businesses.

Huge Success

Surprisingly to us, after 1.5 months of customer development (part-time), we signed up 40 businesses to launch with us and 50+ moving forward in the pipeline. The places that signed up with us include Wahoo’s Fish Taco, Denny’s, Coco’s, Post Bagels, Chef Chu’s, and Coupa Cafe next to Stanford. We also have Togo’s, Johnny Rocket, Noah’s Bagels, and Extreme Pizza in the pipeline. That quadrupled our goal! That’s when we realized we potentially have a big hit in our hands that could change the industry.

Raising Money

We wanted to expand aggressively so we took this to the Band of Angels to raise a $600K round. We’ve already made it to their due diligence process (3 out of 100 startups) and we thought it’s a good time to reach out to other investors to see if anyone is interested in this potential big hit.

If you own a brick and mortar store, or are an angel investor who would like to participate and add value to this exciting startup, let me know!

Last week I went to Los Angeles and did a pitch at the TWiST – LA event. I won first place out of 10 Startups and got the chance to chat with Jason Calacanis, who is very influential in the startup world and blogosphere, on his live show about Viralogy. Pretty awesome.

Well, just wanted to do a quick update on my life. For more details about the actual pitch, you can check out the post on the Viralogy eCommerce Blog

Chou Notes

Some comments I have about Jay Chou’s concert. I’m not a big fan, but I do think he’s super super talented.

The 3 Qualitative Metrics of Traffic

A lot of websites out there just measure traffic. Traffic is a quantitative number that is easy to measure and helps you see important trends and how successful campaigns are. However, especially for sites that need some kind of conversion like signing up or buying a product, undifferentiated traffic can be misleading.

A visitor is a real person

Traffic is the amount of visitors on your site. When you say “visitors”, these are actually real people, and everyone has their own personalities, their motives, and their own wants. Yes, sometimes it’s just a numbers game where a small % of your traffic will convert. However, wouldn’t you actually want 100 people on your site that are looking to really buy things than have 1000 people who are just surfing?

Stumbleupon gives high quantitative but low qualitative traffic

This misconception in traffic-success is most obviously seen with StumbleUpon. When you get “Stumbled”, your traffic that day will increase gigantically. However, chances are your average time on site will decrease dramatically. That is because Stumble can get you a lot of traffic, but not a lot of quality traffic. Even if people did read your post or article, they’re in a pure surfing mode and will likely not signup or buy your services.

In that sense, I came up with three qualitative metrics that is important to consider when driving visitors to your site. These metrics are: Relevancy, Timing, and Trust.

1. Relevancy

Relevancy is whether this person is actually part of your target market. If you own a sports site that is looking to get subscription and merchandise purchases, but the visitor on your site is not really that interested in sports and never buys anything online, this person is not relevant. It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 people like that on your site. You won’t convert anything.

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