The Characteristics of Focused Entrepreneurs

There are two types of web entrepreneurs:

1. Those that make money
2. Those that lose money

The irony of the second type of entrepreneur stems from the fact that it’s their decision to lose money. Some people are too squeamish about making money. Their revenue model always sits within future plans. “We need to scale build users first, before monetizing them.”

I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I come across that have decent technology; yet, they have absolutely no idea how to monetize. If they say their monetization plan is through serving relevant ads, I ask about what type of CPM they’ll generate based on the ad position. Are they going to use a set of 160′s, 300′s, or 728′s? (Ad sizes)–or custom build ads. They have absolutely have no idea what I’m speaking of. In fact, they get offended anytime someone brings up advertising.

Don’t be bashful

Making money online isn’t selling out. The online realm has a certain entitlement to be “free.” Everything’s open, free and fun. Yay! Ladddy-fricken-dah.

This is fine if you have balance. Balanced open-source and balanced freemium revenue models are fantastic; however, problems arise when people believe everything should be free online. People shy away from making money online because they don’t want the open-source warriors that hang out on Reddit all day to think less of them.

The fear of money can come from a variety of factors, but two I see most often sits in their environment.

I. Location, Location, Location:

Many web 2.0 startups in the Silicon Valley are horrible at making money. They don’t feel like it’s cool, or trendy to make money. Their business models center on raising capital, burning cash flow and flipping their companies to Google–and if they’re unsuccessful, to Microsoft, eBay or Yahoo.

News flash: if this is in your business plan, you will fail.

II. Power Users:

The second are the entrepreneurs that focus on features, not actual value. They focus on enhancing a certain app component of twitter; they focus on new visualizations of rss-realtime social graphs (whatever that means). Their focus is on the wrong place: themselves. Social media power-users are the worst market to go after if you want to make serious money online. The customers in this realm are overly critical, overly-needy, overly vocal and overly broke. That’s right, broke.

The Seven Habits of Focused Entrepreneurs:

1. Focus on People, not Personas

The entrepreneurs that dominate the online world are those that don’t live on Twitter. Many of them usually cut internet access most of the time (Paul Graham).  They’re not tied to their blackberry. In fact, they dominate the online world without lifting a finger. How? Because they dominate the offline world.

Focused entrepreneurs focus on people. They meet and interract with people at networking events, dinners, charity events and whenever they feel like grabbing a beer. They’re not hermits that focus on online personas. They don’t tremble at the feet of a well-known bloggers. They don’t live in the sewers of tech blog comments; instead, these entrepreneurs build relationships offline. They understand that people are people. And even though technology has taken hold in this decade, people still drive technology. There are real people behind Twitter’s avatars.

2. Downsize and automatize

Downsize the tools you use (both online and offline). For help on this, see how to conduct a gadget audit. Focused entrepreneurs only use a handful of core apps that all have one thing in common: they assist in generating revenue.

In addition to this, there are certain actions that require habitual, routine maintenance. For example, social media marketing centers on targeting specific keywords that are aligned with your product, and getting in front of every individual that tweets those words. This is a 24-7, 365 task that must be automated. Focused entrepreneurs make it their job to outline the goal, or objective of this and have others carry this out for them.

There are two ways to automatize your applications:

I. Through Technology

First, you can have technology automatize your applications. Here are three pragmatic applications that get this done:

1. Sharefeed: Allows you to schedule tweets. This allows you to schedule and send out important articles that you’ve discovered over periods of time. Instead of tweeting great articles back-to-back, which can annoy your followers, use ShareFeed to spread your tweets out throughout the day.
2. Nutshell Mail: This services takes LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and sends you a daily digest email of anything important that’s gone on within your social networks. It’s excellent for keeping in touch with friends and sending them a quick note on their birthday–without getting sucked into hours of Facebook stalking.
3. AwayFind: This services acts as your own personal assistant. It alerts you whenever an important contact emails you–otherwise, it allows you to go on with life.

II. Through coaching

Second, if you’re generating enough revenue to support it, I suggest hiring and training a team of social media marketers. Spread the love, and share the wealth. Have them to carry out your work by teaching them. I suggest long checklists. Writing a checklist of very specific steps and actions will help you understand your overall goals. Mentor and train people and show them the overall goals of focused social media.

These are people that get in front of your customers through a variety of repetitive, but specific tasks. I’ll  reveal the methods for doing so in later segments, or even as a special report.

If you’re interested in learning more about dominating the social media space without lifting a finger, let me know in the comments below.

3. People lie

People lie, data doesn’t.

Or does it?

It depends on how you interpret the data.

How to test an idea in the marketplace:

In order to test an idea in the marketplace, there’s some folks out there that suggest running a Google adwords campaign and measuring the number of clicks on certain keywords:

For instance, if you’re advertising “California Hotels,” you can test specific titles and call-to-actions through Google.

1. You set up the keywords and different ads within Adwords: “Book a Hotel Now” or “Beautiful California Hotels”
2. You then let the campaign run for a specified amount of time
3. You measure the click-through rate, which is calculated by taking the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions ((clicks) / (impressions) = Click Through Rate)) So if the ad touches the eyeballs of 100 people and 1 person clicks on the ad, you’ve got a Click Through Rate (CTR) of 1%. If you have an ad that has 50 impressions and has 1 click, you have a CTR of 2%.

In this example 100 impressions isn’t enough–quantity matters at a certain point. However, it gives you a better sense of measuring and testing ideas in a marketplace.

This is fine; however, there’s a better method. In the above method, data can lie. It doesn’t capture the whole story.

It’s About Conversions, Not Clicks

Within Google Adwords there’s a conversion tab that most people overlook. This is the most important metric of all. It’s not about who clicks to your site, it’s about who clicks and then converts.

Say for instance, you’re like me and you’re planning on building an online book, and selling the offline version. As of now, the book isn’t yet complete. So until then, my objective centers on building excellent content–content that I’m really passionate about, and then tailoring the content to actually help my readers.

There’s nothing I can calculate based on that objective; however, there is the metric of building a dedicated, committed base of readers. I can measure this by seeing who subscribes via RSS or email (which is located at the top right of the site).

So my conversion metrics for now are RSS and email subscribers.

These are the metrics I track, not clicks to the page itself. That data can mislead. That data can lie.

4. Disconnect for Nowness

Within Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a branch known as Shambalah. This is not so much a religion as it is a lifestyle. Shambalah is a vision. The actual term Shambalah refers to an ancient, mystical city that people believed espoused enlightened ways of living. The recent pioneer of Shambalah is Chogyam Trungpa, who outlines a critical component of this ancient way of living: nowness.

Nowness, or the magic of the present moment, is what joins the wisdom of the past with the present. When you appreciate a painting or a piece of music or a work of literature, no matter when it was created, you appreciate it now. You experience the same nowness in which it was created. It is always now. – Chogyam Trungpa

You can’t experience nowness while staring into the abyss of your smartphone. We live two lives: a virtual life and real life. Which one matters more? Unfortunately, a lot of people spend time in opposite proportions of which one matters. Virtual life is easier; if you lack confidence, you can hide behind your keyboard. Focused entrepreneurs are those that live life in order of importance: (i) real-life first, and then (ii) virtual life.

In order to promote nowness, I’ve been undergoing an experiment ever since writing this book: freeing myself of technology when I’m on the move.

How did I do this? I got rid of my cell phone.

Disconnecting promotes awareness. Guaranteed. Try unplugging the talk radio on your way to work today. You’ll notice things around you that you never noticed before. I’ve had people go through this exercise and report that they’ve commuted to work five years, and once they disconnected,  they were amazed with how much they were missing. Disconnect. Promote awareness. Practice “nowness.”

5. Persistence

Focused entrepreneurs are persistent. They’re persistent because they understand their goals. Their goals drive their long-term focus which leads to persistence. The entrepreneur that fails at a handful of startups in his family’s basement isn’t a fairy tail. I interact with entrepreneurs like this everyday. They’ve tried, failed, tried, failed, tried, failed and then succeeded. This really requires three elements: (i) Persistence, (ii) Focus, and (iii) a wife that doesn’t go insane.

6. Polymaths aren’t dead

The age of the polymath isn’t over. In fact, it’s what will separate you from other cogs that specialize in specific functions within your organization. A polymath is one that’s well-versed in a variety of subjects. For instance, Leonardo Da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin were clear polymaths. They excelled in mathematics, physics, art, politics and more. Today, however, our education institutions and corporations are herding us to adopt more specialized practices. Why? Because if you look through history, generalists manage specialists. And unless you’re an entrepreneur, you’re expected to take orders and specialize in a specific function.

As they say, a “Jack of all trades is a master of none.” However, your goal is to be a Leonardo of all trades. And this isn’t impossible. This can be done through simple hard work and focus. The best part: it can be done for free. In a future chapter, I’ll be showing you how to hack education and learn the secrets of the polymath, which will put you above and beyond any specialized cog.

7. Break away and back to the basics

When it comes down to crunch time, the focused entrepreneurs don’t mess around. Suddenly the vocal, warm entrepreneur turns serious. He or she immediately gets in the zone.

Shaun White, pro snowboarder and skateboarder illustrates this perfectly. When training for the Winter Olympics, Shaun knew he needed an edge. Every single year everyone unleashes something new. Something that’s never been done before–something that until then, was impossible. And snowboarders unveil near-impossible tricks every single year. The only issue is that there’s a lot of buzz and talk within the snowboarding realm. The best snowboarders know one another. They hang out, they’re friends. As the Winter Olympics approached, Shaun knew he needed to get away. He needed to cut out distraction, cut out the noise, and even cut out the cell phone. If he trained as normal–with friends–he knew they’d be feeding off one another and his focus might suffer at the expense of looking at what everyone else is doing.

So what did Shaun do? He got away. Literally. He built his own half-pipe in an obscure part of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. He was the only snowboarder with access. It was just him, his board and the half-pipe tucked into the beautiful Rockies.

We think of Twitter and our online social networks as distractions, too. Ironically, so does its founder, Ev Williams. Though there’s routinely controversy and attacks on Twitter, there’s also much praise. Even I have been critical of some components of Twitter in the past. Many get carried away with social media and it ends up distracting them rather than helping them. However, at its core, Twitter still allows users to share bite-sized information. The key is deciphering the important buzz vs. the wasteful noise.

As Ev puts it, “Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.” Ev doesn’t listen to the noise of others; he moves back to the basics. When he’s had success, he got their by thinking, “Back to the basics. What do I want? What do I want to see in the world?”

What’s next

So now it’s your turn. What do you want? What do you see out there that’s not in the tech blogs, but in the world? What’s out there that’s missing, and how can you change this? Once mastered, these 6 habits will allow you to sit with the best–the focused entrepreneurs

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