Our trip though was for R & R and not business thankfully though while we were there I couldn’t help but notice how many things done by the Hayman team and in delivering the Hayman experience, provided some unique insights into concepts that could be deployed in other places and other businesses.

One of these was the notion of offering a ‘peak experience’ to the customer base, not something that everyone will want to do, and the cost of it can be one of the factors that makes it exclusive, but something that can be nevertheless considered a pinnacle experience, a really neat thing to do.

On our day of arrival at Hayman Island, David and I trekked down to the reception to book a couple of adventures, one of these was to be the Chef’s Table and the other a few hours snorkeling on the reef. Chef’s Table wasn’t occurring until the night we were leaving, however there was a similar and even better experience (we were told) on offer called the Fontaine Bench.

At any one time there can be up to 500 guests at Hayman Island, and there are at least that many people again providing the labour and skill that keep things ticking over smoothely. Fontaine Bench is available for two nights a week and it’s only available to two people at a time, something David and I had not understood when we made our booking.

We booked the Tuesday night Fontaine Bench and rather than drone on about the amazing food and wine you can take a look at the menu, constructed just for us on that night, and one which changes as the Sous Chef sees fit, which can be often. The chefs at Hayman like to experiment and innovate, they have fantastic facilities at their disposal and use them to come up with new and unusual dishes.

The Fontaine Bench experience is for two people at a time and you are seated on an elevated bench at a table looking directly into the serving and preparation area of the Fontaine kitchen. La Fontaine is Hayman’s premier fine dining restaurant, where you can buy a hamburger for $150 a pop. We indeed saw a couple of these hamburgers being lovingly prepared by the Sous Chef, Anthony Healy, whose joy and delight in being in charge of the kitchen that night was simply infectious. His ingredient knowledge and ability to share it was also second to none.

Of the 12 courses we had, Anthony was able to talk us through the intricacies and ins and outs of most of them – food prepared to delight and entertain and inspire has a story and it was Anthony’s job to tell us the story of the food. It was such a great reminder to me that those who really love and know and understand what they’re doing are just so outrageously positively infectious.

But the key learning from me from the Fontaine Bench was that it’s good to have a really premium product available in your offering that can be that special one that those who use it wax lyrical about, and help bring other customers to your standard offering.

I really like the notion of having a standard offering and then a premium offering. With just about every type of product there will be a bunch of those who want and appreciate the regular experience and then a small handful who want a little bit more.

David and I spent a few weeks working with Marcus Padley who writes the fabulous stockmarket newsletter Marcus Today a few years ago, working up a renewal campaign to put a bit of spice into his subscription renewals and to remind people that his product offering really was the best of its breed. One thing we introduced after chatting to several renewing subscribers who talked Marcus up to the sky, was the Life Member category. It wasn’t cheap and the idea was more of an experiment to test the actual loyalty of these members, but we set the price at $5000 and waited to see what would happen.

Within two days there was a Life Member enquiry and subsequently sale. Two days after that another one sold, same again two days after that. We finished our stint with Marcus and this campaign, but I gained a really great insight into the mindset of the customer who really loves what you do – they will pay a bit more (or a lot more even) for a higher level of your product and maybe even a closer connection with you.

Crikey also figured this out when the founders were being sued and needed to find substantial funds even after selling their house, to pay their legal fees. They introduced the Life Member category, and lo and behold a raft of people who loved the Crikey newsletter and believed in the founder’s fight, signed up and leant their support. While there was an ideological underpinning here, the Life Members did get some special benefits: a special insider news just for them, and unique access to founder, Stephen Mayne,  that other subscribers didn’t get.

It’s true that your super premium product is unlikely to ever be the core of your business, as in the Fontaine Bench, but it can be the place where you build such strong customer loyalty around your brand that these super customers become your advocates and brand warriors. And even if they don’t they’ll just secretly enjoy their premium status in your customer group, knowing that they’ve paid for the privelege, and hopefully thinking it was worth every cent.

David and Fiona with the highlight of their Fontaine Bench dinner - the Martini Igloos.

So was the highlight of our recent Hayman visit Fontaine Bench? The answer to that question is ‘yes’. What then was the highlight of Fontaine Bench? Well that would have to be the Martini Igloo, pictured. A martini sorbet served in a carved ice sculpture, each one individually made for one service only. Pinnacle, peak, premium, call it what you will, this was one experience I’ll be talking about for a very long time to come.

Photo: David Eedle

David and Fiona write about their first visit to Hayman Island in 2006 in their book Niche Content Millionaire – the story of the startup, growth and sale of their business, Arts Hub.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

However, we didn’t just want to map out and then tell the Arts Hub story, we wanted to condense the journey into some key lessons for those who wanted to venture into niche publishing. It was our belief then and it still is that one of the great frontiers online that has only partly been exploited is that of niche content.

What we mean by that is that if you can provide content of a high quality in a specialist or niche field for a bunch of people who are interested in or work in that area, then you can create a product that those people will pay for. Many of us understand that it’s important to keep abreast of the trends and challenges in our industry or even in an area that is a hobby for us, and pulling this sort of information together for people has a value.

One of the opening stories in the book David and I subsequently wrote about niche content and the Arts Hub journey, Niche Content Millionaire, was about our treat to ourselves and our children immediately after selling our business. David describes the bliss of being at Hayman Island in the Whitsundays, dropping the elder children to Hernando’s Hideaway (the island’s Kids Club, right next door to the Hayman Island State School – believe me they have a school there!) only to find out that the children needed their runners that day as they were going out on the reef, and that rather than David having to go back and get said runners, a porter was called to do the task. In the life of a harried parent, such service is gold.

In May this year I succumbed to a delectable special offer by email from Jetstar Holidays for a 4 night getaway to Hayman Island and the offer being just too affordable to be believable, I signed us up for it. The only dates we could get were in the third week of August and David and I are just back from our getaway to Hayman Island in the gorgeous Whitsundays. This time our visit was without children.

Hayman Island - has mastered the art of an Australian style of sophisticated service

It’s not often I’ve been known to say that a merchant has improved their service, but I must say that whilst the service we received at Hayman Island in 2006 was faultless and fantastic, this time round David and I agreed, it was even better.

When it comes to elite service, how do you get better? Surely the calibrations of certain kinds of service quality become much thinner, and individual perception and preference starts to have more of a sway?

Well what I noticed about the difference in service at Hayman Island Resort this holiday was that they seem to have perfected the art of an Australian style of great service, that is relaxed and empathetic and in tune with the customer. All our requests were deftly met and with absolutely no resistance, I can not say that that is my usual experience with any kind of service here in Melbourne. And that is not to bag Melbourne establishments.

Now you can say that it is easy to provide good service in a perfect climate when all the guests are relaxed and happy and not in the mood for trouble of any kind. However when you understand the sheer logistics and complexity involved in providing all the bits and pieces Hayman Island does to its customers with absolute ease and mastery, then I think you would be churlish to say that they have it easy.

I mused on this issue of even better than fantastic service on the plane home to Melbourne and decided that behind the scenes, Hayman Island must have one really great staff training program and that there must be some kind of focus around constant improvement, otherwise we would have experienced either the same level of service as in 2006, or not as good service.

And the impressions that this classy Australian style, friendly, warm, attentive but non-interfering service had on me – well I can’t wait to get us back there.

Hayman Island might be one of the older elite resorts in the world but to my mind the service quality there is the best I’ve experienced. In fact there were a number of lessons about business and excellence I took away from our recent visit to Hayman Island and I’ll share a few more of those with you over the next few days – one I want to tease you with is the Martini Igloo – more on that tomorrow!

Photo: Sarah_Ackerman

If you’d like to know more about how we celebrated the sale of our business Arts Hub, read our book Niche Content Millionaire.

PS – the constant references to Hayman Island are due to the writer’s hankering to return there as soon as earthly possible. The Into the Mountain folk, unfortunately have no commercial connection with the resort or its owners.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

The first thing I told this client was to narrow his focus down from the twenty plus objectives that he was looking at, to between one and three things that could form the bedrock of his new business. There’s more about the issues around trying to get the right focus in your business in the post “The One Thing”.

Over the holidays though I thought harder about this client’s position and business proposition and realized that once he was underway he was probably going to face the other big issue David and I faced during the Arts Hub journey, and that is what I call, ‘the last 2 percent’. We’ve written in detail about what the last two percent of issues were that held us back from having the ideal business in Chapter 4 of our book Niche Content Millionaire – and what we needed to do to overcome these.

But the notion of how much energy you should expend on finessing the final bits of your business is worthy of some thought.

Sort the 'last 2 percent' and the sun won't be setting on your startup.

Anyone who has started a new business knows that once you get going, and getting going in itself often takes much more energy than you’d expect, that if you’ve got your fundamental assumptions right, things go reasonably smoothely in the early phases of your business. You’re fuelled by the excitement of the new venture, the potential of bringing a new product/service/way of doing things to market, surprised and then delighted when customers start to use what you’ve created and ecstatic when you get some feedback, and in those early days, all feedback is good. It shows there’s someone out there who’s noticed what you’re doing and who cares enough to say something about it.

In time, your burn rate reduces, that’s the amount of money going out the door in relation to the money coming in. In the very early days your burn rate will be high, unless you’re starting with no budget whatsoever, and if that is the case, you’ll be putting in an enormous amount of sweat equity. If things work out for your startup, there’ll come a point where what comes in is greater than what goes out and you can at this point consider your business to have become ‘cash positive’.

Now, I’m not saying these early days are not stressful and don’t require an enormous amount of effort. You may come to believe that you’re not just the company founder, you are also a counselor, parent, financial advisor, and problem-solver extraordinaire. And if you were running a department for the government or for someone else, you’d just delegate most of your problem-solving to someone on your team, but as this is your own startup, and your business is so new and unknown, you tend to do most of the crisis-solving and fire extinguishing yourself.

But for us the really dangerous period came when everything on the surface was working fabulously well, our business was firmly ‘cash positive’ and David and I started to truly delegate issues and problem-solving to those on our team. We no longer felt we had to do it all. There comes a hazardous time when exhausted owners start to corporatise their business and set up units or areas to their business with a staff member in charge. You have a plan, each leader knows their gig and what’s expected of them, they take over and by and large, things work.

However, at this point we’ve noticed that inertia tends to settle in. What in the early days would just not be tolerated, say in dealing with a customer issue, becomes commonplace. Decisions are made that lead to systems being set up because of need, rather than research being undertaken as to the best way to meet that business need. If you’re the founder of a new start-up you make sure that every item of expenditure leads to value into your business, or value to your customer. There are no such things as budgets to spend freely just so a department or business area can function – if the expenditure can not be shown to enhance revenue, then it doesn’t occur. But if you’re a Team Leader you have no such investment in expenditure being tied to revenue, and we’ve noticed that whenever you get people in charge, you get someone lobbying for a bit more.

David and I got Arts Hub to the position of highly-functioning business in around three years, and beyond that all the work on the business was about finessing the final bits. At times we didn’t really have the energy to do the necessary tidies and would let an inefficient business practice go unchecked, until it caused a problem for us a bit later down the track.

What I would say is that when you start up a new business, don’t forget the amount of time, energy and devotion that will be required at the point where it’s all working fine and the business makes sense. Crossing the last t’s and dotting the last i’s are really important and go to the heart of why you started in the first place – you wanted to provide something really good to the market. If as founders you’re exhausted, then have a think about hiring someone to do the nit-picking and quality and cost control that you used to at the outset. Once things are working well, it really is time to hire a General Manager and to look at what should be the next phase of your business. If you don’t close off your last ‘2 percent’ issues you’ll find yourself holding back on the next stage of the business, which is where it gets really exciting, and that’s the growth phase.

The ‘last 2 percent’ is a notion that plagued telecommunications companies for ages as well, when they would describe the most difficult bit about the business was where the copper wires connect to the house. It’s the last bit that really counts the most, and it’s not usually where most of the effort tends to get expended.

Life is a lot like business and I suspect we all have ‘last 2 percent’ issues lurking around in our lives, ready to give us a really good bite on the backside when we’re most unsuspecting. I don’t believe you can be prepared for every contingency (though you can plan like crazy), but I do believe it’s worth putting a bit of time aside to close out any lingering issues you have in your life or your business. Is there a better way, should this issue just be dumped and involved parties notified, what’s the fastest way to achieve resolution, and what’s required to achieve that? Spend a bit of time every month to closing out the ‘last 2 percent’ issues and you’ll never need to know what it feels like to hold yourself or your business back from the exciting next step.

Photo: Flickr ronnie44052

Note – Fiona Boyd has a couple of coaching slots available for business and startup clients in 2010. Email Fiona@collectzing.com for more details.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

One formula I thoroughly detest is the inappropriate use of a list. Usually the post starts with a description of a problem you have (even if you don’t have this particular problem) and then proceeds with a way too long list on what you should do to solve it. I find these list posts akin to interfering people who search around looking for others they can wedge in on and share their advice with. Often the advice is meaningless, useless and if actually followed, can have downright dangerous consequences for the recipient.

This is why when scanning a blog post today from Free Pursuits I was pleasantly bowled over with what I believe anyway, a blog post should really be about. A straight up pointing out of the ‘elephant in the room’ or ‘the emperor with no clothes’. The post is by Ashley Ambirge and is a guest post for Free Pursuits as Ashley actually has her own blog called The Middle Finger Project.

The Dream Protection Plan, smart words to keep the Dream Zappers at bay

Ah,what a breathe of fesh air! How long have we all been captive to those folk who have no restraint in sharing their inappropriate views on our lives and our ideas? And, for once, while there is a short list in there, Ashley does not follow the ‘list post formula’. The post is called The Smart Ass Guide to Dealing with Dream Zappers.

There are quite a few gems in this post, but one that jumped straight off the page for me was Ashley’s countering of the usual trotted out argument by the well-meaning brigade when one of us dares complain about another person’s trashing or belittling of something that’s important to us – that we should not take it personally. Hang on, what’s this about, don’t take it personally? Life is personal. Being a human being is personal – there’s actually nothing ‘not personal’ about the way other people treat us and the way we respond to it – wake up, it’s all personal!

I remember many times in corporate and then later when David and I were hawking around the business plan for SeekCulture.com (which eventually evolved into the business – Arts Hub) when I would come up against a particularly obnoxious individual who saw it as their business to reform my whole life according to their world views and ideologies. Admittedly, these were usually much older folk and looking back now, I can see they were also the manifestly unsuccessful. The successful of their generation were busy getting on with the enormous workload they carried and bringing up their families – they certainly didn’t have time to go on the hunt to undermine and as Ashley Ambirge would say Dream Zap the next generation of workers, thinkers and managers.

But every now and then these Dream Zappers appeared in the guise of a generational contemporary. In our book, Niche Content Millionaire, David and I share bluntly one of the most undermining experiences we had in the very early days of the Arts Hub experience, when a couple of investment managers at a government-funded business incubator we’d (unfortunately) joined took us through a journey where they built us up to expect funding and then at the last minute revised their dialogue and expressed that we weren’t really investment-ready, or what they were looking for. Now, when you read Niche Content Millionaire you’ll find out that there was a rather devious hidden agenda going on here. But wait a minute, what sort of person feels they have the right to waste the time of another and through their actions or words, take a well-aimed zap at their dreams?

Not someone you want to know is my view!

As you can probably tell just writing about this topic of the underminers, belittlers, the Dream Zappers makes me seethe and is a reminder to me that in the last 5 to 6 years anyway, I’ve been incredibly fortunate in that I’ve been able to mainly avoid or just dump a Dream Zapper. Indeed this is even true of the extended family who at various times have all shown themselves to be really brilliant, highly accomplished Dream Zappers. A little distance and time not spent with them has resulted in more courteous and respectful relationships – the interference, undermining and shooting down has ceased, even if they all secretly still sit there thinking about how they can take us down a peg, the thing is no-one feels free to actually try do this anymore.

Ashley has a few interesting retorts to Dream Zapper comments in her post and I’m in firm agreement with her that in life it’s best to have a few of these retorts ready. I have no idea why, but some people will take it as an affront that you are going about your life setting your goals and dreams, and working away like a navvy to achieve them. Their preference is that you don’t get to your dream, that you in some way fall short so that their negative view is vindicated. These people exist, they are real, so why not prepare yourself for when a Dream Zapper appears on your horizon with a list of fabulous retorts to their common putdowns?

What would you say to someone who told you your dream was not practical? Could you make it funny and educative at the same time without being offensive, but letting the Dream Zapper know for future reference that you will not be toyed with? Or hey, why not plain just offend them? It’s not like they’ve taken your feelings into account is it!

I ask this because I’m aware that as we head off to the holiday season many of us will be exposed to people at parties and functions who don’t know us and don’t support us and may take potshots at what we have to say and share. Maybe so many awful things happen with families at Christmas because people feel too free to be overly-familiar, to give advice, to share their opinion about others.

I’m not going to write you a list, but I am going to suggest that as a New Year’s Resolution you do some really active dream protecting and take a little time to note the 5 Dream Zapper comments you most fear and expect to hear in 2010 about your business or lifestyle dream. Then write the antidote comment– the amazing quip that shows you for the really brilliant soul you are, and the one who is actually committed to achieving their heart’s desire and to doing it without trampling all over anyone else.

Now you have your ‘dream protection’ strategy in place, go slay em in 2010!

Image: Flickr Robert Couse-Baker

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

This year has been an unusual one for David and I – we wrote a book together in February and March (Niche Content Millionaire), and then we started a blog site, softly around May as a way of producing content that built on and expanded out from our learnings over the past 15 years in the online space.  Most of of which we share in our book.

We also had a need for a new income stream into the family and as luck would have it, a former client who David had written a technology platform for, called him to return and work on the next version of the technology. They had outsourced version two of the platform and had nightmare on top of nightmare, disaster on top of disaster during the experience and just wanted the guy who developed the original thing to come back and sort out the mess.

And that’s what David has been doing this year – sorting out another company’s messy overwrites of his technology and then prototyping up the next version and some new modules that look set to give this company a way to have a really good grab at a rather huge market. Interesting work, and quite exciting now that David can see that what he originally developed six years ago, has been able to lead to something much bigger and way more interesting. As things stand this means that our family is considering the possibility of a move to the US to support David in leading the rest of the technology development with this firm.

What's the one thing you can do that will cut through to the heart of your business and create amazing results?

I’ve also pursued some new strands to my skills set and in February did an intensive life coaching course with the Life Coaching Academy based on the Gold Coast, and have taken on a couple of clients. This is enormously satisfying and interesting for me because it allows me to work with people starting up new businesses and to help them work out the steps required, the order of those steps and how to keep themselves focused and achieving at a time of maximum newness. All things I had to conquer when I was involved in starting up, growing and then selling the Arts Hub business.

But as the year nears its end I’ve been struggling with a ‘to do’ list that never quite seems finished I’m reminded of the days at Arts Hub when I always felt under pressure, under the pump so to speak, to do a zillion more things to bring in new members.

What I learnt at Arts Hub was that when you feel you have to do an enormous amount to get through, then it’s time to simplify your approach and ask yourself the question – ‘what is the one thing I can do, that if I put a heap of effort into it and do it consistently for as long as is required, will lift my business (or life) to the next level up?’

I remember clearly heading towards year’s end at Arts Hub and we had a big outstanding tax bill that would have to be cleared by February, sales were down as they usually are moving into Christmas and all was looking a bit gloomy. Instead of coming up with some vast plan on how to get revenue up, I asked myself the ‘one thing’ question and came up with the notion that if we could get members to renew their membership early for a special benefit to them, then we could bring some cash flow forward and clear our tax debt and set ourselves up for a good start to the next year. We hadn’t explored the potential of an early renewal strategy at Arts Hub prior to this and only having been around for three years, it clearly could be quite risky. However, I think our offer was good (there were prize draws and members got additional free months for renewing early) and our copy was snappy, to the point and got good results.

I go into this issue of good copy in our book, Niche Content Millionaire, in quite a bit of detail. My firm view is that really elegant, well-written copy can help sell your product like virtually nothing else. Great copy reaches out and grabs us and makes us want to get involved – it’s clear and honest and not shouty – and doesn’t claim that if the person doesn’t act on the offer they’ll suffer damnation. Instead, good copy points out a benefit or two, has an offer that has a value, and is good to read, often it can be fun to read and can make people smile as they consider whether or not they’ll pull out their credit card and act on it.

So back to the one thing. Life coaching also seems to be about finding the ‘one thing’ that your client can get on with in the week between seeing them again, that will make a large difference to what they’re doing. What’s really interesting is that the ‘one thing’ is often not difficult, overly challenging or demanding. It’s just if you do that ‘one thing’ instead of a zillion other, less relevant things, you’ll get your results much quicker. It also means that some of the other things you’ve been doing methodically and religiously and that yield way less impressive results, end up falling off your list as you allow your ‘one thing’ to have a primary place in how you go about your business.

I’d like to ask you now to consider the ‘one thing’ you could do either in the lead up to the holidays, or when you come back in the New Year that could make that out-of-proportion, big positive difference to your business in 2010?

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

For quite some time it appeared, to me at least, that everyone was preoccupied with small thinking and making themselves a small target. As someone who loves to talk about ideas and to explore the possibilities, it seems that one couldn’t have an intelligent ideas-based discussion anymore. Some fearful person was going to shoot one’s germinating discussion and ideas down in flames. But just lately, things have been changing.

My guess is that as we come out of the GFC that life and business will speed up for those in any industry, but I’m particularly mindful of those entrepreneurs working online, and those in niche content spaces.

I’d like to draw some parallels with my experiences during the start-up and early growth phases of the business I founded with David Eedle, Arts Hub. We started in the last quarter of 2000 and got out of the gates pretty strongly, but experienced a real dent in our growth following the events of 11/09/2001. Just like every other business around us, as world financial markets trembled in the aftermath of what happened on that fateful day, business conditions deteriorated. Many little businesses, like ours, struggled to survive. But we clung on tenaciously.

I guess what was noteworthy was that since about April 2000, local internet businesses had been falling over at a great rate as worldwide the collapse of the dotcom era took hold. As mentioned, we just clung on for dear life, kept our business in our living room and kept our expenses low.

Then came 9/11 – a change of external climate that we could not have predicted and which had an immediate negative effect on our business revenue.

Rules of engagement help you avoid finding out how far the rabbit hole goes

Fast forward to 2004 and the financial difficulties of 2001 had more than passed, we were moving strongly forward and building good membership numbers and excellent revenue growth. We had set up a separate office in Bleakhouse Lane, Albert Park, had some great people on our team, particularly in the content area and things started to get really hectic.

It’s now that I’m reminded of something I learned through 2004 and 2005, which is when everything speeds up and opportunities are coming at you thick and fast, the really smart thing to do is not to rush around trying to grab each and every opportunity, gorging yourself on every bite of the cherry. This is something David and I have done both in the consulting era of The Dramatic Group Pty Ltd from 1996 through 2002 to the Arts Hub era circa 2003 to 2005. Mainly this has been driven by a scarcity mentality that was conditioned by having arts companies as clients, who are always worried about the next funding dollar.

From 2003 to 2005 we took on several additional projects and a partnership that we would come to regret. Projects and partnerships often look good at the outset, but I don’t think we’ve ever been involved in anything that hasn’t taken at least three times the time, energy and resources than was proposed to us. We might have avoided some huge distractions on our time and energy if we had a really clear set of rules and guidelines for getting involved. That time and energy could have been used better by staying focused around building our core business.

And this is what I think the smart thing to do is. Get clear on what your business is, and what new strands you do/do not want to be involved in, develop a set of rules about what you are willing to invest time and energy in, and make sure these are consistent with your business values. Then exercise your rules. Say no, only say yes when you really want to and you can see the direct connection to your business values, and of course, quality outcomes for your business.

I suspect that as we recover from the GFC things will hot up substantially. Before they do invest some time in working out your life and business values and rules, so that you can make really good decisions when the pace of everything picks up.

For some yarns on which rabbit holes David and I went down with Arts Hub and things we invested time and energy into that we wished we hadn’t, read our book, Niche Content Millionaire – the story of the startup, growth and sale of Arts Hub.

Picture – Flickr kat.dodd

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

In around May this year, David got this blog you’re reading going. At the start of 2009 we had written a book together about our experience of starting up, growing, and then selling the online niche content and community-focused business, Arts Hub. Because David and I both see a huge pathway forward online being all about creating more niche content communities, we hoped to distil our experiences into some key points and tactics that the next generation of internet content players could use to save time and get big faster.

Time is money in the offline and online worlds, and in business David and I have often found time to be the more precious resource. It just drips away all too quickly and whilst you can reduce your expenses back to virtually zero or claw back most bad debts, it is impossible to slow time down or to recover any that you’ve lost or misused. Therefore, having gone through several startup experiences, David and I have really come to place a premium value on time. And if we can impart knowledge that helps others do things faster, we figure we’ve made a contribution that could make a positive difference to a startup player.

We called our book, all 176 pages of it Niche Content Millionaire – a title that we hoped, spoke to the opportunity ahead for the next generation of content players. In our view there are many opportunities in the content space to build niched, loyal audiences in content areas that the majors are never going to be interested in, but which can yield businesses with values in the several million. Not huge, not in the billions, but niche content businesses capable of being sold for a million or so. Or kept long-term and providing solid cash flow for the founder.

So far, I think so good.

However when we started the blog to help us go into the concepts in the book in more detail and to interview some of the key players in the book and other business people whom we admire, we probably didn’t take enough time to work out what it should be called. David and I assumed that the title of our book – Niche Content Millionaire – would work just as well for our blog.

As time goes on this has proven to be untrue because we found ourselves writing more and more about the business issues we learned from the Arts Hub journey and how these can apply in the here and now, and less about actual niche content businesses.

We still think there’s plenty that can be talked about in the world of niche content, however the more we write, the more it becomes clear that some of what we know and have learned is relevant to all sorts of other types of businesses too.

So, we’ve now put a bit more thought into what the blog should be called and what it will actually do. Pretty soon, date unspecified, but in the not-too-distant future, the Niche Content Millionaire blog will be renamed Into the Mountain. And our slogan is – How not to fly your business into the mountain – a bit of fun referencing a friend of ours who listed a search business on the NASDAQ in the 1990s and rode the internet wave to success. This guy used to say to David and I “you haven’t made it in Silicon Valley if you haven’t flown at least one business into the mountain”.

The phrase itself has stuck in our minds – and we hope to make Into the Mountain, the blog where you hear from real internet and general business entrepreneurs about how they kept adapting, creating, innovating and changing in order to keep their businesses alive and to not become one of the casualties of the internet era. We’re also hoping they’ll share what they believe the secrets to their successes to be.

In regards the book – Niche Content Millionaire – we still firmly believe this is a really valuable read for anyone considering starting, or actually running an online niche content business. We share our insights and failings quite openly, and if you read the book, you’ll find out that David and I tell you all about those rabbit holes we went down that we should have avoided, as well as the things we got right.

And when the new Into the Mountain blogsite is up, we will proudly sell our book from there, and hopefully the confusion between the book and the blog that readers have raised with us, will fall away.

So stay tuned! Into the Mountain – real life stories and advice helping you to not fly your business into the mountain, by learning from the stories and experiences of other entrepreneurs – is on its way to you in the very near future.

PS – if you have a view on the new name, please leave a comment. We’re convinced some of you will hate it, hopefully others will love it, but either way we’d like to think it’s a little bit different, and more relevant to our content than our current name.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

David and I became what I call, seekers some time ago, back in 1996 in fact, when in June of that year he left his full-time, financially comfortable but time-gobbling senior role running a major performing arts facility. In December of 1996, I found myself pregnant with our first child and looking forward to continuing rising at 4am to get to the studios to put my breakfast radio program to air, not one bit. It didn’t help that I had all day sickness and only got through my shifts by putting on “American Pie” so I could scarper to the bathroom for a good heave. That’s the 8min 28sec version by Don McLean I’m talking about, not the Madonna one.

1996 was an interesting year in Australia. We had a change of government that brought in a new conservative outlook and governance style and for organizations like the one I worked for (ABC Radio), the red pen came out and expenses were reduced, jobs cut and resources trimmed with vigour. Indeed anyone working at the two public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, the mood was grim and unsettling and the pernicious negativity in the workplace wasn’t something I wanted to get too used to.

So, we threw ourselves into growing an arts management consultancy, because at that time that’s what you did when you left corporate, you set up a consultancy.

Over the next few years David and I worked really hard to build our little consultancy business and did a series of really unique, quite ground-breaking projects. Because we sat outside corporate, everything we did had to be better and more innovative than what could be researched and reported on by a company’s staff. Some things we did include a national ticketing analysis of box office data from venues around Australia looking at all sorts of patterns and factors that affect and have an impact on purchasing a ticket to an arts event. David also developed the first live online ticketing platform for the 2000 Adelaide Fringe Festival – the largest festival in the southern hemisphere.

There were other projects. I remember trundling through the beaches and bays of the Bayside City Council coastal patch figuring out the exact locations of where some of the famous Heidelberg School artists had painted some of their most beautiful works. The current gig was to do all the research involved in creating a Coastal Art Trail for the area.

I’d already identified the paintings and written the text for the signboards they would be displayed on, but the final task was to identify the location of where each work was painted. The day came to do this and I had 13 month old Clea with me and unknowingly to me, she managed to get her hands on the car keys as we trundled through the sand. Imagine my horror when I found the keys had been lost.

Fortunately I was just so exhausted from working and lugging a small child around that I didn’t really have time to think and just found my strategic mind taking over. Where had we spent most time on the beach? When did I last hear the keys jangle? Where was that? For how long has there been no jangling sound? As it was I decided which part of the beach it was most likely the keys had been dropped and concentrated on that patch. I hunted around that section and noticed a glint in the sun. Amazingly, the keys were partly buried in that spot. I marvel because the beach was full that day, the sun was going over and if I’d really considered what I was trying to do, I would have just given up as soon as I noticed the keys gone.

Life since corporate has been a bit like that. Seek and ye shall find. A concept that the founders of www.seek.com.au have built an outstanding job search business around.

After three years consulting and pitching all sorts of wonderful projects to various companies and winning some contracts and not gaining others, David and I summoned up the courage to do something completely our own. That was when we started up what was to come to be known as Arts Hub. If you’ve bought our book – Niche Content Millionaire – then you’d know all the inside secrets of how we built this business, what we got right, the rabbit holes we went down, the bad advice we took, and the good advice that helped us correct course.

For the first time in my life I could not really call myself a seeker anymore. Instead I was now an obsessive, totally dedicated to building an online home for artsworkers, a place where they could share knowledge and ideas, find their heroes, share their journeys – and get a job. It’s nice to be this way for a while and certainly this approach helped build a really great business with a loyal audience who loved our product. I know this because they told us so over and over in surveys.

In a conversation with another entrepreneur last week we mused about those sitting outside the online space or who were really new to it and decided that at the moment there are many, many people who you could describe as seekers. Open to new experience, seeking a new way of going about their lives, breaking down paradigms of how they should earn income and willing to try new ways, new styles and fail or succeed on their choices. The unkind would say these people are naïve, and I put myself in the seeker category at the present time, and don’t believe the seekers are naïve. They just haven’t found their clear path forward yet and are willing to hear from others and to try out systems and methods that are sold to them.

My issue is that you can make a lot of other people rich while you are being a seeker, and I’m hoping that if you know any seekers, you tell them about our book. It’s not a system, we can’t guarantee results but we can reveal to the seeker the key principles that allowed us to grow a business from zero to quite respectable (with a corporate structure even) in a relatively short period of time.

And maybe that’s my point – once you’ve exposed yourself to plenty of ideas and ways of doing things it’s then time to synthesise what you’ve learned and jump in and implement. Niche Content Millionaire can help you do that!

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

The story spans 170+ pages, from the late 1990s, the launch of our first site in 2000, and its sale in late 2006.

What you’ll discover reading Niche Content Millionaire:

• How we went from nothing to everything
• The disaster that nearly killed our business a couple of months after launch
• Why we think subscription sales beat PLR and Google Ad sites any day
• How to research and create a niche content subscription site
• The kinks in the grand schemes and how you can avoid failure
• How to manage your staff
• How to create powerful well-written content
• How we ran marketing campaigns that netted thousands of dollars at a time in subscriptions, plus how not to market to subscribers
• The villains and heroes we encountered along the way
• How the business was saved by mystery money loans in brown paper bags
• How it feels to sell your business for millions

Niche Content Millionaire is a PDF format eBook, you can purchase for immediate download using PayPal or your credit card. The cost is $49.95.

Click here to purchase Niche Content Millionaire right now!