Where has all the time gone? It’s been a while since I’ve written an entry, in fact over five months long. This month I head to Seattle; mostly for fun, partly for business. For fun, I get to visit the Space Needle and enjoy Seattle’s cafe lifestyle: Starbucks, Zokka, and others. For business, I’ll keep my eyes open and absorb whatever catches my attention.

Outside of running my yogurt cafe (mochii.com), I spend about 10 to 14 hours a day on our web 2.0 start-up investments: KlickNation.com and Ribbd.com (pronounced ‘Ribbed’). Thankfully, KlickNation has kicked into gear and now boasts over 40,000 users in just two weeks. Which means, we can finally begin monetizing. Good timing cause I was getting sick of eating peanut butter sandwiches everyday. I have taste for good wine but I live on a beer and keg budget, at the moment. Anyway, where was I? Yes. The Web 2.0 companies. Our aim is to have over 1 million users within two months. Why? Cause 40,000 current users - about 6,000 daily active users - translates to about 20,000 to 25,000 page views/day. Our applications generate income from paid advertisers. Advertisers generally pay between $0.71 to $4.00 per CPM, or 1,000 page views - depending on the niche and quality of viewers. We’ve got users in over 125 countries, most of which are outside the U.S. Good, but not so good. Canada and England account for 50% of our users, the U.S. 30%, and Indonesia about 15%. Under KlickNation, we launch our flagship product today or tomorrow. I was up till 5:30AM this morning working on it. It’s top secret, at the moment.

Some of my friends ask me if I ever miss the security of a salary job. My answer: Hell No. I love what I do. I love creating products and watching the products succeed and to learn the lessons of a failure. It’s all part of the ‘rush’ that I get. When a product succeeds I’m on a high for days, sometimes weeks. When it fails, I get a bit cranky. There’s no guarantee in anything that I do, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun waking up every morning and having the opportunity to participate in new ventures. I’ve learned a lot from starting various ventures in the past 11 months. Most of them have failed, but two of them are very promising. It’s an awesome feeling waking up every morning knowing that my investments are working hard for me while I sleep and that other people appreciate our products. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but the intrinsic - and sometimes extrinsic - rewards are exhilarating. My advice to everyone is “Do what you love to do.” I couldn’t even begin to think of living life any other way. Be bold, you have one life - make the most of it.
Cheers,

- Mark

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.