Erich Stauffer

In one of my last posts about networking in Indianapolis, Jeremy Houchens of Pro Media Publishing said, “Thanks for including the links to the local events!”, which when juxtaposed against a recent comment from Ashley Hardy of ANH Media about how, “You know all the networking events in Indianapolis”, and it made me wonder if I really had become a source for Indianapolis networking knowledge.

Jeremy, Ashley, and I are all business owners with loose affiliations and referral partners that allow us to sustain and grow without the burden of an employee/partnership relationship. This is more than just the gig economy‘s freelancers who are in the business of creating jobs for themselves. This is about building bigger companies with less employees. It’s The Startup of You without the Long Hallway. It’s Mesh Networking.

Now I know ‘mesh networking’ is already a term for interconnected devices who can communicate to use each other as nodes on a network, but that’s exactly what I’m suggesting these new types of solopreneur businesses are. The business owners are the ‘devices’ and through each other, they find work.

3 Ways you Know You’re a Mesh Networker

1. You’re a power connector - a power connector connects two people who didn’t previously know each other, thereby helping two people at once. Mesh networkers need to be power connectors in order to leverage their networking time.

2. You’re building a business, not a job for yourself – like Steven Covey, you begin with the end in mind and that end does not include you being in the employee corner of the Cash Flow Quadrant for long. Your end goal is lower-right and you’re moving there as fast as possible.

3. You’re not interested in partnerships and employees right away – you’re more interested in finding the right referral partners who can funnel business to you while you’re funneling business to them. It’s all about strategic partnerships and selling first.

7 Indianapolis Networking Events You May Not Have Heard Of

1. Power Circle Network – PCN is a free version of Rainmakers and BNI-type networking that meets weekly on the north side in Carmel, Westfield, and Noblesville; on the east side in Broad Ripple, Cumberland, Greenfield, and New Palestine; on the south side in Greenwood, Southport, Beech Grove, and Franklin; and on the west side in Avon and at Initech Park.

2. Linking Indiana – a Facebook and Smaller Indiana group that holds monthly networking events with a training session – usually with a speaker, but sometimes simply fun exercises like “speed networking”. In the past the events have been at the Rathskeller downtown, but they could be anywhere in the future so sign up for the Facebook group to stay informed.

3. Meetup.com – after 9/11 the founders wanted to use the Internet to help people meet together in person around topics they loved or found interesting. It just so happens that meetups (as they are called) can also be used to network with other like-minded individuals. I currently run a meetup on Indianapolis Marketing. Most meetups are free. Verge Indy is currently the biggest meetup in Indianapolis.

4. BNI Indiana – Business Networking International is a networking group that meets weekly in groups all around the Greater Indianapolis area. It’s a paid membership group, but this and the strict attendance rules means the members are more likely to come. Seeing the same people week after week leads to trust and more referrals. You can attend each BNI meeting twice for free to try them out.

5. Glazer Kennedy Insider’s Circle Indianapolis aka “No BS Indy” – you won’t see this billed as a networking group, because it’s not – but anytime you get a room full of business owners in one place, networking is bound to happen. Scott Manning teaches business owners how to grow their business as fast as possible and charges them for this information, but you can go twice for free.

6. Blog Indiana – this conference is an annual event for bloggers and Internet marketers hosted by Noah Coffey and Shawn Plew. It’s a chance to meet the big players in the business like Douglas Karr, Erik Deckers, or Tricia Meyer. It’s also a chance to meet up-and-comers like Ben Risinger who built DoItIndy with Scott Tolin and just recently founded Somnium Media with Stephanie Eppich Daily and Susan Decker. It’s a two-day event.

7. The Combine – this conference is also an annual event for startups, which is sponsored by, among others, Sproutbox. Like Blog Indiana, The Combine is a two-day event, but it’s in Bloomington spread over the IU campus. This is where I saw Merlin Mann speak and I met Cedric Savarese, the founder of Form Assembly, and up-and-comer Nick Tippman, both of whom I invited to Verge Indy (’cause I’m a mesh networker).

As you may have read in my bio, not only do I write this blog and build web sites, I do affiliate marketing through Cost Publishing, which publishes over 100 web sites covering topics ranging from technological gadgets to food to business products and services, but what I don’t often talk about is why I write or how I got started.

I started out writing books on PFS Write about the songs I’d hear kids sing at school. This was before Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web and Marc Andreessen wrote Netcape. I had to collect each song by hand and type it up on my computer at home. I called it, Gross Songs Kids Love.

When the time came to translate the files from PFS Write to a document type that could be read on Windows, my dad had to use his computer at work to print each document to file. During this process he must have read the material for the first time and was not as pleased with my efforts as I was. However, one of my teachers in high school thought the idea of capturing kids songs was good. That was the same year Amazon.com went online.

In high school, I wrote books during Math class like “Tales from Trigonometry Class”, which was a set of fictional stories about heroic teens overcoming their fears of asking the Swedish exchange student out and other feats of the heart.  It was printed and distributed by hand. If I find a copy, I’ll reproduce it here someday.

In college I started buying used books from local libraries and selling them on Half.com under the name BluBux Company. In the early days, the margins were big enough for this to be profitable, but over time, the market became saturated and I had to get out. It was the first experience I had working together with my wife (before we were married). She would help me input all of the books into the system to be sold – an arduous task.

After college I started making websites and promoting them online. That’s when I discovered affiliate marketing and how to make money online. Since I was named after a figurine designer named Erich Stauffer, I started this blog to promote it, and eventually wrote a book about Erich Stauffer, the figurine designer. I also wrote a fictional story about time travel and teen romance – a theme for me I guess.

In the summer of 1988, my parents bought a Chevy Suburban and drove our whole family down to Walt Disney World (the only time we ever went). My dad worked for GM at the time and so when we got to the Epcot Center, we got to cut in line to the now closed, World of Motion ride. It was a view of the future. Or should I say, a view of a possible future – one that mostly hasn’t happened – but that’s not what this post is about.

Rebecca Murphey, a JavaScript engineer at Bocoup, wrote in her blog about how her dad bought one of the first personal computers:

“In 1982, Timex came out with the Timex Sinclair TS-1000…the computer, a few times thicker than the original iPad but with about the same footprint, cost $99.95.”

My dad bought one too and I remember having to hook it up to a special data tape player/recorder that acted as the ‘hard drive’. It’s what loaded and recorded changes to programs that displayed on the screen. I remember piecing the parts together and waiting for it to appear on the black and white television screen. We could load BASIC and type in commands, but we didn’t do much more than that. This post isn’t really about my early exposure to technology, it’s more about the man who exposed me to it.

While we didn’t have humanoid robots in our kitchen, we had dishwashers who washed our dishes for us – and a furnace that detected a sudden change in temperature and automatically adjusted accordingly. My dad grew up in a house with no running water. He took a bath in a metal tub in the middle of the kitchen next to the fire-burning stove. He used a Sears catalog for toilet paper in the outhouse out back – yet he was the only person in his class to build an automobile from spare parts.

I can only imagine my son re-discovering a vehicle from today, trying to understand this “hard app” (car radio) he found. What is it like growing up with a computer in every room and in every pocket? What is it like to always be on the Internet, always knowing where everyone is and what everyone is doing? What is it like to have your entire childhood documented in status messages, online galleries, and Youtube channels? When I went to high school, we weren’t even allowed to carry beepers.

I can only imagine how no running water, building your own car, learning how to program, and buying one of the first personal computers can shape the way you teach your children about technology. And I can only imagine how growing up with Timex Sinclair TS-1000′s, Atari 2600′s, Nintendo NES’, Windows 3.1, Netscape, Winsock, Windows 95, Nokia Cellphones, College Club, Myspace, and finally Facebook can change how I teach my children about technology. I worry that technology enables too much using and not enough doing. That’s part of what this blog is about – giving back to what I’ve learned from the Internet – and my dad.

I recently wrote about how I typically work and network in Indianapolis and while it started out as a way to discuss how to get the most out of little pieces of the city (what in my mind I call “hacking the day”), it ended up being more about networking and how I spend a typical day in the Carmel, Indiana area.

After writing it I ended up telling my friend, Jason, about Jerry at the Great Harvest Bread Company in Carmel, Indiana. Jerry recently joined our BNI group in Carmel, and his business cards can be used to get a free loaf of bread.

Every Thursday morning I attend a BNI networking group in Carmel. After the meeting I head over to the Subway next to Jason’s Deli and Office Depot. I get the $3 breakfast combo, which includes a 6-inch breakfast sandwich and a regular drink. I then sit down with my laptop and get online using the local Wi-Fi. LePeep, La Hacienda, and Jason’s Deli all have Wi-Fi so I encourage you to try any of those during lunch.

If the seat by the outlet in Subway is taken, I head down the strip to Starbucks. This particular Starbucks is loaded with outlets and many coworkers, commuters, sales persons, and solopreneurs hang out here during the day. I believe this is primarily because of a) the size of the Starbucks – it’s unusually large for a Starbucks, b) the sheer amount of outlets to plug in your laptop or mobile phone, and c) it’s central location to Indianapolis and Carmel.

After attending meetups and other networking events, I’ve started to know a lot of people around Carmel and Indianapolis. Usually, whenever I’m in a Starbucks I’ll run into someone I know and because of that, these cities have started to feel more like a community. I don’t know everybody, but my chances of running into someone I know are now greater than not running into someone I know. And although I check into Foursquare, it doesn’t ever seem to help me run into people, which is odd.

As I am an Indianapolis web designer, my meetings are sporadic and sometimes far in between. I use these ‘holes’ in the day to work out of various locations such as Starbucks, Subway, or Panera Bread. After doing it a while, you start to learn what other business professionals have chose to use as their personal office. There is a dog walker and an oil salesman at the Starbucks at 96th and Meridian and of course there is my habitual use of the Starbucks at Meridian and Carmel Drive.

The greater Indianapolis area is large in size, but it’s a small community. The people you actually want or need to talk to is relatively very small compared to the population of the whole city. For me, it’s business owners who can make a decision to buy from me direct, can be a referral partner, or can be a connector to someone I need to talk to. This is really what networking is all about because you also want to be those same characteristics to other people in your network. You want to be that power connector.

Robby Slaughter, a business process consultant in Indianapolis, has made it his goal in 2012 to help 1000 people. Because Robby is a power connector, he’s able to help a lot of people and I actually took him up on it and Robby had a one to one with me over the phone. Robby is a fellow BNI member of another chapter and he helped me figure out what would be some good referral partners for me and how to tweak my 60-second asks, some of which I’ve implemented. Thanks, Robby!

I’ve actually mentioned Robby Slaughter before as being one my local heroes. I ended up finally meeting Robby last August at Blog Indiana and then immediately saw him again when he spoke at Linking Indiana. Robby also wrote a guest blog post on my web design site entitled, Increasing Productivity In Website Maintenance, which was appropriate since he’s a productivity expert and I design websites around a CMS called WordPress. Thanks again, Robby.

A while back I wrote about a new trust system for the Internet called, “YourSCOR – A New Metric for a New Economy”, which is an idea for a Self-Collected Online Report, or SCOR for short. It would be similar in use to how a FICO score works today, but instead of being built from credit history, it would be built from social transactional history such as your Klout, Ebay, or Amazon score. It could also include your FICO score, but that would only be one part of it – just as your credit history is one part of who you are as a person.

As Marc Andreessen pointed out in the May 2012 issue of WIRED magazine, the Internet in Netscape’s day was all about anonymity, but today, there is a large push toward knowing exactly who you are online. Google was part of that push when it required all Google+ users to use their real names instead of pseudonyms.

Even FAKE GRIMLOCK said, “BECOME REPUTATION SYSTEM FOR INTERNET ONE OF BIG OPPORTUNITIES NO ONE CLAIM YET.”

That’s because it’s hard.

But don’t hackers like hard problems to solve? Don’t they want to change the world? The problem with hard problems is that they are hard. I later regretted writing Problem Solver Seeks More Things to Fix because of all the problems that came sans-knocking wood afterward. I won’t laundry list you, but it made me rethink the whole “hard problem” love thing.

Reverse anonymity is not the only trend happening on the Internet today. There’s also a move towards hyper-localism. In a world with perfect information, there would be no need to travel farther than the nearest location to get what you want and the Internet+Mobile Apps is bringing us closer and closer to 100% knowledge of our surroundings. This knowledge allows us to make better decisions and #shoplocal.

So what’s the next big thing?

In my last article about Why Google and Facebook Might Not Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years I talked about how Forbes thinks Google might not know how to pivot to mobile. My guess is because their going to leap over it and create the Next Big Thing: Google Goggles.

Why are Google Goggles the next big disruptor? Because they can do everything cell phones can do, but better. Why do you need a mobile phone when you’ve got a heads-up, augmented reality GPS device with retina and voice recognition? Does all of that exist today? No. Will it eventually all fit on a contact lens? Probably.

Almost everyone thought Google bought Motorolla to enter the mobile marketplace or to get access to their patents. What if it was to create a whole new industry around a new way of interacting with the world? The same world they helped organize? Now that’s an augmented reality.

Forbes recently wrote an article about Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years, which had echoes what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Outliers, when it said, “Your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.”

The author (and Forbes) were getting ripped on this article on Hacker News – but no one can predict the future – we can only look at the past – and even though the timeline is short (15 years), history says Facebook and Google will fail unless they [can] pivot. The gist is that they can’t pivot. It’s not in their paradigm to accept what’s next. Can you?

But the statement, “X will fail unless they can pivot” is true for every company. The companies that make up the Fortune 500 don’t have a long life on the fortune 500. To say that the web will die out and vanish is reaching, and to say that it will in the next five years is really reaching.

Does the author (or any analysts) really expect mobile usage to dry up the well of search advert dollars or that mobile apps will eliminate the public/customer need for search?

The anti-trust lawsuit that is being dredged up against Google will do more to slow them than anything else in the next five years.

And, to say that Facebook can’t have staying power because MySpace didn’t is far from an analysis.

I do agree that the web is not dying – all apps need a website even if they think they don’t. Facebook will do (and has done) better than Myspace because they are a software company first, ran by programmers who have kept Facebook constrained, which has helped it grow.

The problem is that Google only got into social because they were chasing Facebook, just like Microsoft went to the cloud to chase Google. And Facebook only got into mobile because the people demanded it – but they were (and are) late to the game. They are buying Instagram because they are scared of it – not because it will help them grow.

I read something from Seth Godin today that said basically that not all companies can grow. Some do better when their small and can’t scale across that middle “dead zone” to be a big company. Some companies don’t work as a big company either (like web or graphic designers – at least not using the business models in place now).

“Perhaps getting a little bigger isn’t what you want, and it might not even be possible.” -Seth Godin

A while back I wrote Tips for Graphic Designers Starting Out in Indianapolis, but recently I ran across an article by Meg Robichaud entitled, Everything I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Freelancing that I think does a much better job of explaining exactly what to do when starting out freelancing as a graphic designer.

Admittedly, I winced a little bit when she wrote, “Let’s be clear. I have to laugh when every blog about freelancing starts off with ‘I quit my job so I could work for myself, and be my own boss.’”, considering that’s kind of what I did here and here, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know – and now I know – and can agree with what Meg is trying to say. Here’s what she says:

“Be awesome. Tell everyone.” – Make something good and let the world know (specifically your future clients and/or employers know) via Twitter, by blogging, on Forrst.com, Scoutzie.com, and Dribbble.com.

“Stop waiting for them to come to you, just go to them.” – If you want to get new clients or land a new job, go to the company you’re want to work for and ask to work for them. Show them your work and how you can help them out. Make it about them, not you.

There’s other stuff about time tracking and time management, but it really boils down to those these two points: 1) Do something. 2) Ask people if they want it. If you repeat that all day long, you’re going to be a success. The hard part for some people is:

a) Not being able to span the gap of time between needing to be financially successful and not being financially stable. You might have to do some things you don’t love to survive.

b) Not knowing what to produce to show people. Because you can make anything for anyone, you have no constraints, which makes it hard to choose something. Choose something and go.

c) Asking people for things when there is a possibility of the answer being no is hard. Fear of rejection is even harder for some people. Put yourself in a position where they need you.

In closing, nothing worth doing is going to be easy and there is no one out there who is going to do this for you. This isn’t a video game where you click on a business and wait for a status bar to fill up your bank account. Life is messy. And fun. Do your best and you’ll get the most out of it.

You’ll find a low rumbling in the hacker community about how email is broken 1, 2 (or not broken 3, 4). Email is still the main communication medium on the planet besides Facebook, SMS, and the web’s attempts to change that. The problem is that it is still relatively unsecure, it is generally heavily filtered at the server and local level, and can’t do advanced (yet simple) things like embed video.

Attempts to *fix* email have resulted in new platforms like Google Wave or Facebook Messages, but people are so heavily invested in their current email readers (Outlook, Gmail) that making a new platform for email is not really wanted. So what I’m proposing is to make new systems for the people who DO want it and NOT for the masses.

I’m a web marketer. I want to be able to send out cool emails. I want my clients to be able to send out cool emails too. I define “cool” as being able to easily create and manage your own custom email signatures and be able to send active content like embedded videos (a la BombBomb email). This can be done through various services and programs today, but it’s piecemeal.

I’m envisioning creating a marketing portal like Salesforce.com for managing your online marketing. It’d be a cloud platform for people to login, send marketing messages, add to or edit their blog, manage their marketing message response rate, and other CRM-like functions from a marketing-centric side of things – instead of a sales-centric side of things. Maybe it’s not needed. It’s just an idea.

Read about my other idea of creating a reputation service for the Internet.

I really like the song, Time to Pretend, by MGMT. It has an interesting sound and a playful beat, but when I read the lyrics online, I was a little disappointed in the content. When I heard the lyrics in my head, they sounded much different – so I decided to re-write some of it to be more optimistic, but still keep the same tone:

I’m feeling rough, I’m feeling raw, I’m in the prime of my life.
Let’s make a startup, make some money, have the time of our lives.
We’ll write some code up, get some funding, and dance with the stars.
We’ll make the software, and the website, and drive elegant cars.

This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute?

…

But there’s really nothing, nothing we can do
Love can’t be forgotten, life can be the start up of you.

The original lyrics are tainted with drug abuse and divorce while longing for a time when they used to spend time digging for worms in the sandbox at home. I remember picking cedar berries out of my friend’s sandbox, making highways, and rivers. It was a time to create with little fear of failing. The older you get, the harder life gets so why not fail early, fail often?

I can see why MGMT may want to live recklessly and die young. It’s a cop out to the life intended for us. Life is hard, there is no doubt. But within those constraints, there is fun. Life can be a game that can be beaten. The fear in each of us is the fear of losing – so don’t lose. Choose to win. The only ones way to lose is to stop trying to win. So choose to win.