philsmy.com

Category: SmallBiz

  • Professional Darwinism

    One problem people of my personality type have is this love of starting things and an inability to finish them. Start new projects, blogs, businesses… anything. I am very guilty of this, as a quick google will confirm. But recently there have been a lot of upheavels in my life and this has brought this…

  • Very Handy Site for the Cross Time-Zone Worker!

    I was looking today to figure out how to schedule work time for California (Toygaroo) while I am in Kyoto (Japan). I stumbled across this site. There are probably others like it, but this is the one I found. TravelMath lets you pick two places (very nice that you can just enter airport codes) and…

  • Toygaroo in TechCrunch – and growing up

    TechCrunch did a nice article about Toygaroo and the Shark Tank appearance… and the resulting investment from Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary. It looks like the company and the site are starting to get some traction and we are still getting some great traffic – even after the ridiculous original spike from being on the…

  • The word is out about Toygaroo and Shark Tank!

    So, now that the show has aired, and most people have watched it either live or via DVR, we can start talking about it! If you want some details on what transpired you can read: this article. Basically, we took $200k from Kevin O’Leary and Mark Cuban in exchange for 40% of the company. These…

  • The immediate aftermath of a Shark Tank appearance

    Last night my company, Toygaroo, was on Shark Tank (America’s version of Dragon’s Den). Our segment was around 8 minutes long. Let me say that we hadn’t really done any advertising before and our pageviews, pre-sharktank, were pretty close to 0, once you factor out employees and testing. Yesterday we had 70,000 page views. All…

  • My company Toygaroo on Shark Tank premiere.

    My new company is Toygaroo. Toygaroo is an innovation in the toy business. It is a rental company – similar to let’s say something like NetFlix – where you can rent toys instead of buying them. It was started by some great people out in California and I was brought on as CTO, bringing along…

  • Rich Schefren & Strategic Profits… not Strategic Customer Relations!

    In my last post I commented on how I wanted to take the Rich Schefren course about Strategic Entrepreneurship (a term which, by the way, is the title of another business textbook from several years ago, so I find it a bit hard to see how Rich can claim he was ‘the only one thinking…

  • How not to sell – Earth to Rich Schefren!

    Recently I watched the incredibly long, 2-part, sales pitch from Rich Schefren over at Strategic Profits. Supposedly Rich is a ‘guru’s guru’ (when it comes to internet marketing I guess, not as in a spiritual guru). So, I made it through the pitch and I have to say there were some things I found interesting.…

  • The value of things

    One of my pet peeves is when I get emails from ‘Internet Marketing Gurus’ who claim that when I buy their course I will get all these ‘bonuses’ at greatly reduced prices. Here are some recent ones: Bonus #1: 1 Ticket To “GURU Traffic School”: VALUE: $2,500 Bonus #2: 1 Ticket To Any Live Event…

  • Great article

    The Japan Times today is running a good article – not just about setting up a business in Japan, but about starting and running a business anywhere as an expat. Inspiring! Mobile game startup boss set own bar from ‘The Japan Times’