Positive thinking

I'm getting really interested in the power of thinking in the business context. I'm reading a book by Daniel Tammet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIDMCC2SJek and it is totally fascinating and challenging. I have been thinking about some of Daniel's observations on the role of intelligence in success. He wonders whether talent can be learned or must be born. He has some very interesting observations about the role of coaching, practice and positive thought in the evolution of success.



How does this relate to smingl? Well, setting up a business is an immensely personal challenge. When people like what you're doing, you bask in the glory but when people criticise, you take it personally and deal with it as personal criticism. So how to evaluate criticism when it's so personal? This is, I think, where positive thinking comes in. You need to set an over-arching goal and keep repeating it to yourself as a sort of mantra (read Daniel Tammet on the effect of trained meditation - again, fascinating). The purpose is to keep counter-balancing any negative thinking related to criticism with lots of positive long term thinking about success. This helps you to deal with the criticism in a less emotional manner because a bit of feedback doesn't break the ultimate goal of success. But it should be a structured plan for success, not a naive 'I can beat the world' type of feeling. I have written some achievable goals for myself and I feel comfortable with them. They require me to hit certain points in the evolution of smingl which will almost certainly involve change and challenge. If I can deal with change, I can hit my targets (hate that word - this isn't about numbers, it's about goals). So this is why Daniel's book has been timely and very interesting.



Please do keep sending me feedback. I keep thinking of that often recycled Henry Ford quote along the lines of: If I'd listened to my customers, I'd have made a faster horse. I love this sentiment for its sheer bloody mindedness but I reserve the right to make some combination of car-horse to get to where I want to be.

Growth growth growth

Good things are happening with my users. I'm getting new ones every day-ish and the best bit is I don't know most of them. Someone somewhere must be chatting a bit about the site and that is great to know. I've also started twittering and facebooking. I realise as a web 2.0 entrepreneur I should be a bit more au fait with all this stuff but I've had 6 years in the off-line hinterland bringing up kids and I've turned into one of those scared, grouchy folk who criticise new technology without trying it. Not any more, Twitter is right up my street (I'm full of useless soliloquy) and I've even linked to all my friends on facebook. When I logged in I found a whole pile of new friend requests that I never knew existed. Brilliant! Keep smingling ....

One month on

I've been tracking my web usage since the site went live and it's encouraging to see an increasing number of people visiting the site. The tricky bit is to get people feeding through from google. A friend of mine helpfully told me that when you type 'internet dating' into google, smingl comes up below 'Conjugal prison harmony dating' and 'Shemale dating'. Hmm - we'll have to work on this one. Meanwhile, I've been pestering my friends (well I thought they were my friends) and trying to get them to sign up. A few statistics for the data geeks out there - of all my friends contacted in the past couple of weeks, 62% responded to my email, 35% logged on and only 15% posted a photo or filled out a profile. This is a poor conversion rate especially the % posting photos. Photos and filled out profiles are what make the site feel trustworthy. You're a lot more likely to trust something if you feel other people have put their trust in it and exposed themselves. This is my small catch-22 at the moment - people are cautious. Even friends who know they can trust me are cautious about trusting the internet. Smingl is still an unknown quantity and a little difficult to summarise in one sentence so people are holding back. So the challenge for me is a) to get a better conversion rate of 35% logged in and b) to get these individuals to expose themselves a bit and stick a photo on the site.



Next big step is to get our payment facility live and to do our full live launch in September. This is going to take a bit of planning on the marketing front so I need to keep myself enthusiastic and motivated so that I can make the right decisions now for the Autumn launch. If this were the C4 documentary, it would still be all smiles but they'd be cutting to shots of cloudy weather and the odd shot of my face crumpled into a frown.



Final thought - for those who thought that you just set up an internet company and let it roll, here is the unadulterated truth. It's just as difficult and dirty as selling lightbulbs in the first few months. You have to push, push, push, find your inner salesman, pester your friends and keep thinking of new ways to get yourself out there.



Until next time ...

smingl.com!

It's finally live - but only as a beta site. It feels a bit like your first drag on a cigarette - a lot of anticipation, a brief high and then a nasty sore throat. Yes, it was exciting to go live but immediately the nasty gremlins were back screwing up functionality that worked fine on the development site and fell over once it went to the live site. You find this stuff out gradually - it's not like there's a little active X control that you can set up to whizz round the site to tell you where drop-down menus don't work or where photographs are still showing up as cartoons not photos. Gradually we're discovering them and beating them into submission but still they come. My best analogy is to compare these little gremlins to a snagging list on your dream home. The house looks great, it has the right number of rooms, the kitchen's all shiny and new but the tap on the top floor doesn't work and the door into the sitting room gets stuck and there's a big fat hole just by the backdoor that you have to remind people not to trip into.

Anyway, here are the exciting bits of setting up a new site - every day you can check to see if anyone new has signed up. I have an easy way of doing this because their thumbnails appear along the bottom of the landing page so new thumbnail = new user. To start with there were no new thumbnails and just the same picture of me and my lead developer reappearing again and again but now, excitement is mounting as I spot new people turning up on the site. I don't know who some of them are or how they found us but I hope they like the site and I hope they're telling their friends.

Next step is to fix the XXX???!!!! remaining gremlins then get our payment system live then prepare the site for a full launch in the early Autumn. In the meantime I have to be patient (not one of my strengths) and try not to blow my top every time another gremlin comes and chews at the site. What I want to do is scream at my developer for not having everything fixed by now and sulk at my friends for not signing up after a couple of pleading emails. What I have to do is accept that it takes time and patience and it will all come good in the end.

Will post with more news soon ....