Comment on everything
It came to me in a flash driving down Route 61 recently on my way back from an assignment at my current day job.
In his great book “The Art of the Start” Guy Kawasaki has suggested when launching a new company that a mantra, a commonly repeated word or phrase, can be more helpful for charting the course of your new company than a lengthy and difficult to remember mission statement.
Guy argues the mantra should be mostly for members of your team, people who are actually part of your company and so will be helping to get things started.
It’s something to sort of keep everyone on the same page.
It is NOT a tag line, “a guideline for how to use your product or service”, something more aimed at the customer or end user.
In this case, however, as I quickly discovered with n10ah, I believe and hope the line will blur between users and members of the team in this service we call Hessinger Media.
If my vision is to work at all for the new network, it must be largely interactive. (We’ve seen that already with some of the great suggestions for topics we’ve seen already.) And I believe we will see more in the future when things finally get rolling.
But when I sat down and started to think about what I really hoped this network would be all about, I realized it was about comment.
Early on in n10ah’s existence I made a conscious decision not to censor contributors, to try to let them say what they wanted to say within the context of the discussion.
It was a difficult balancing act and one I still don’t believe I’ve mastered, but we’re just getting started and I’m hoping that broader choice of subject matter will get us where we want to be.
I want people to be able to use Hessinger Media, or whatever the service’s name will eventually be, both to share their own creations—writing, music, film, even helpful products, services and ideas—with the community and at the same time let others comment on what is shared.
But commenting is a catchall phrase to describe everything, commenting on your world, on those around you, on current events, politics, culture, science, you name it.
“Comment on everything” will be our battle cry. We hope that you will.
Yogi’s gone
My nine year old’s mouse died recently.
It was a sad day, though I rarely interacted with the little creature during his life. He was old (more than two, I think) for a mouse and I guess nobody had expected him to make it that long.
My son took it hard even though (or perhaps because) he was at his grandparents’ house at the time and we had to call him on the last day of his little holiday to break the news.
Yogi’s last hours were as pleasant as we could make them. My wife, who cleaned his cage and fed him regularly, was particularly attached and spent the time stroking his little head, singing a special song my son had made up about him and telling him about “mousey heaven.”
All this may sound either rather silly or very familiar to you depending on how close you have been to family pets yourself.
I recall clearly the deaths of a dog and two cats growing up, all three of them animals I had spent a lot of time with and cared for.
The point is that something about the experience especially disturbed me this time around and, though I know I’m not alone in having this happen, it stiffened my resolve about a few things that have bothered me for quite some time.
When my wife headed off to pick up my son she took a short detour to a place my parents own in the country where many of the family pets are buried.
Yogi was laid to rest in a small painted box my wife had once bought for my son and then put aside after she discovered a worrisome odor and that some of the paint was chipping away. But for a beloved childhood pet it served as the perfect coffin.
The trouble was that as important as I knew it was to my son that I be there, it was impossible for me to go along due to an increasingly consuming work schedule at my full-time job.
Though I’ve never minded working hard, there is increasingly something about not having the ability to simply put my work aside, particularly work that in some cases I know could wait, simply because of someone else’s expectations.
This growing disquiet about living for someone else’s priorities rather than my own has become an important (though not the only) impetus in my personal voyage toward entrepreneurship.
I am not naive enough to believe that the expectations of customers and other consumers of my product will not be equally demanding, but three things, I believe, make the entrepreneur’s path, particularly the path of the bootstrapper, quite different.
- Entrepreneurs, particularly bootstrappers, serve only one master, the customer, while those employed serve various layers of management, fellow employees who exert their influence through office politics and ultimately the owners of the business. (Heavily funded entrepreneurs also serve their investors, but this is another issue)
- All these expectations may have little or nothing to do with the final quality of the product being produced and in many cases, as I have seen, may have a detrimental effect on it. (A focus on serving those actually using his/her product is something the bootstrapper can never loose.)
- Any time sacrificed from family or other personal activities is to create something that ultimately belongs to your family and thus in some cases may benefit them in a much more long term way than a weekly paycheck and that fact makes those sacrifices easier to make
I’m sure there are many bad reasons to get into entrepreneurship. They might include the misguided notion that entrepreneurship is some short-cut to instant riches, the belief that people working for themselves don’t have to work as hard or just a natural contrariness about taking orders from someone else.
None of these, it seems to me, are good reasons to start your own business, but one reason may be. A desire to take a direct responsibility for the choices and sacrifices you make instead of letting someone else make those choices for you.
In the end it is easier to live with your own mistakes than someone else’s.
Ideas, ideas, ideas
Here are some of the concepts for content here at Hessinger Media that readers of another blog, n10ah, have helped develop along with a few of mine.
Feel free to add some of your own below in the comment section. (Read more about just what exactly this Hessinger Media is anyway right here.)
Some of the ideas suggested so far:
· Reader wookin’ pa nub suggested blogs on some of his greatest passions: video games, sports, women (Don’t pretend to know how the last subject would be handled precisely, but we’re going to avoid going too nuts if we launch it or my wife will kill me.)
· Wookin’ pa nub also recommended a blog on 80’s culture, something that sounds like a whole lot of fun
· Tiberius suggested (under the same post) a blog for Star Trek fans and as much of a fan as I am of the original 60’s series I like the idea of expanding this to cover a broader range of science fiction and fantasy television and film.
· Harper’s Fairy also suggested an anime and manga blog, something I can see has some major possibilities
And here are some ideas of my own.
- A blog dedicated to my alter ego Big Daddy Blue with music, info and posts on blues culture
- Informational blogs on entrepreneurship (another passion of mine), business design for the novice, and perhaps other subjects like local and national news commentary, politics, alternative energy and film.
- The n10ah independent music blog which in some ways started it all
- Some e-commerce
And much, much more.
Read the brainstorming post that got us started and be sure to add your 2 cents.
Who is Shawn Hessinger?
So who am I and what am I all about?
My name is Shawn Hessinger, a journalist and blogger and the founder of Hessinger Media.
I am also the host/editor of www.bootstrapme.com, a blog on bootstrap entrepreneurship at the Creative Weblogging network and Hessinger Media will be a bootstrap business startup in the classic sense.
For more on me read this.
The name of the company is pretty simple and straightforward and inspired by a post from business idea blogger Dane Carlson about “20 things not to do before starting a business.”
One of Dane’s suggestions is “Don’t waste time picking a business name. As a sole proprietor, you already have a business name: your own!”
This is kind of a different version of an idea my friends and I had as teenagers when putting together garage bands about being careful not to put the choosing of a clever group name ahead of the quality of the music.
The name may change, especially if someone suggests a great one. But the core of the idea revolves around eclectic content and something I call “personal media”. More on this later.
It’s an idea we’ll be developing in the coming months.
What is Hessinger Media?
Welcome to Hessinger Media, an online startup and experiment in eclectic content blogging that we hope will eventually offer not only a high quality variety of blogs to visitors but free high quality blogging services to users.
Over the next few weeks and months we will be laying the foundation of this new network here at the Hessinger Media blog and asking for plenty of feedback.
We hope our service will offer entertaining and enlightening content of all kinds to visitors and inspiration to future users of the site.
Some of that content will include special interest, current event, regional, news, e-commerce, music, video and podcast material in time.
Keep reading and giving feedback as we go and share this site with friends. We hope to hear from as many as we can during the startup.
