Simplicity Rules

If you’re a marriage therapist or landscape designer who needs colon hydrotherapy, why not try barter?

Seriously, the Internet continues to make it easier to connect people with complementary interests. If you’re low on dough, you can probably trade for the service you need at Barter Your Services (via Barry).

There is a sign in a local coffee shop that says, “There are 1.5 million people in Portland. Why are you still single?” Granted, that’s a joke, but when the pool of possibilities increase, so does the likelihood that you can find just the right person, whether for dating, colon hydrotherapy, or whatever else.

I received six copies of this spam from yesterday evening to now:

Hits 52 Week High and Still Climbing Strong.
We saw DKDY at $1.31 on Wednesday and we feel its going to $5.00 on unexpexted news.

“Unexpexted,” indeed. The stock had its IPO recently, so “52 week high” is true, though misleading. Nevertheless, the stock is at $1.87 today.

It’s possible the stock got there on its own merit, but it’s a little fishy that the company’s website looks like this:

I’m not saying the company itself did this. I can’t imagine this having long-term viability worth the time and money of an IPO. But someone is driving up demand by sending spam. And with only 600,000 shares, it seems like this wouldn’t be that tough with access to millions of email addresses. You only need a handful of schmucks.

If it weren’t so sleazy, it might be brilliant

As a baseball fan, I’ve been waiting for First Inning to officially launch their site. In the meantime, I’ve wondered… how the heck did they get firstinning.com in 2005?

The answer is simple: it was available.

Anytime I get in a fit of domain name curiosity, I am surprised–either by what is available or what is taken. In this case, there are a lot of available baseball innings: thirdinning.com, fourthinning.com, fifthinning.com, sixthinning.com, and eighthinning.com. If you want a .net, only seventhinning.net is taken. If your thing is .org, you can have anything but ninthinning.org.

Football or basketball fan? You could have thirdquarter.com (or firstquarter.org, or secondquarter.net/.org). If you’re into college basketball, firsthalf.org is still available. Hockey has three periods, right? You could register them all.

Then there’s the other side of the coin, when I am amazed by how many domains are taken. I’ve mentioned this before in my riff on secrecy… MonkeyDonkey.com and DonkeyMonkey.com are both taken! Huh?

Google smartly grabbed the typo domain, gooogle.com (extra O), but they missed goooogle.com (two extra Os). Believe it or not, most .com domains for google.com with extra Os are taken. If you don’t mind having over fifty Os in your domain, you could get the only ones left:
goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com (52 extra Os)
gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com (53)
goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com (54).

But why would you? After all, wouldn’t you rather have gooooogle.biz (3 extra Os)?

Boostrapping has been on my mind lately, as I alluded to with number two in my long weekend lessons. The basic idea of bootstrapping is to spend little money and start a business/project by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. If you don’t wear boots, that’s okay–it’s an analogy.

Derek Sivers, who created the idea equation, said this recently in a Venture Voice Podcast:

Just give yourself a ten day deadline and just launch it. Just whip it up in ten days and just do it with almost no features. Don’t do a coming soon that sits there for a year while you try to perfect this thing. Just whip up something quick and ugly in a week or two with no money and just start doing it even if you only have just one client and one customer and then just improve upon it from there.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I think it really can be that simple. Of course, I’ve whipped up plenty of quick and ugly things in my time that have just sat there.

Bootstrapping your business talks a lot about how a business begins with customers. The quickest way to get there is to release something. And the quickest way to release something is to trim the offerings. From the book:

Don’t attempt to boil the ocean. If your initial concept is so grandiose that you can’t deliver, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Taking the incremental approach means that your initial offering might be a “featurette,” a component of a service that you can deliver today, with more tomorrow.

Since Thanksgiving weekend, I’ve been spending some precious spare time focusing on a very simple project. I’m trying to take both of these quotes to heart and in that spirit, I’ll be sharing very soon.