Raj

Hunter & Sons

I’ve recently started work on a new project called Hunter & Sons, a digital magazine focused on style, gear, gadgets and more for men. While this isn’t the first website I have built, I am decidedly taking a new approach to generating and sustaining traffic than I have for other sites in the past. Below are a number of theories that I am hoping to prove/disprove in the way that I am growing this site.

Generate Initial Buzz via Social
Social media has already established itself as a major driver of traffic for new websites and apps across the web. We only need to look at the massive spikes in traffic that e-commerce sites and product sites have experienced simply by being pinned on a Pinterest board or discussed on a Facebook wall post, for example. Social can create a big boost in initial traffic and new visits, but how can social be used to sustain that traffic over the long run? That’s a question I am hoping I can find answers to with this new site.

Good SEO Foundations = Sustained Traffic
This goes without saying. SEO is no longer the pseudo-science or black sheep of the web that it once was even a few years ago. Companies, individuals and blogs alike recognize SEO’s major role in ensuring one thing: rank high for search terms and be ready for the influx of traffic. With Hunter & Sons I have done some specific things to ensure that our SEO foundations are setup well, including the nomenclature of the URLs I am using, the language of the posts and the push to link back to Hunter & Sons across the web. Google provides all webmasters with a great tool known as their Webmaster Academy. While many of the items on the list are quite simple, it’s surprising how many sites forget even the simplest of SEO items which can have a big impact on their results. Focus on the fundamentals, and you set yourself up for success in the future.

High Social Engagement Will Drive Traffic Growth
One thing that may not be sustainable as the site grows is the high level of engagement and communication that I am doing while running the site. I have opened up a Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ account for the site, and have plans to update and maintain a Tumblr as well as an Instagram account. Managing my own social media accounts is tough enough; managing the engagement and posting of content across 6 social media channels will prove challenging. However, getting back to my first point: I believe that generating a large amount of buzz initially via social will hopefully reach a tipping point, whereby it will start to grow by itself without having to necessarily manage the engagement as much as I am right now. This is definitely something I want to prove as I think this initial investment and hurdle is a big reason why small businesses and local businesses aren’t jumping onto social media as fast as they should be.

Hopefully within the next 2 to 3 months I will start to see some decent traffic for the site. At the moment, within 6 months, I am hoping I can see approximately 10,000 visits per month. Here we go!

Raj

The New Industrial Revolution & The Maker Movement

I know a lot has been written lately about the rise of crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and the like, which is why I enjoyed Chris Anderson’s article on this new era of manufacturing. He touches on some major points, most notably that yes, while we are mainly an economy that relies on high end services, manufacturing is still the base that needs to be present in order to make sure everything hums along properly. Most people in the country cannot become consultants or bankers or doctors or lawyers, yet they still need fulfilling jobs and people still need/want things.

The Maker Movement takes manufacturing and makes it widely and broadly accessible for anyone to create and make goods with minimal (relatively speaking to the past) cost, something that will need to happen if we want to ensure a strong manufacturing base in the future. We all know that small businesses are the ones that keep the economy moving along, and I think the Maker Movement can become a tremendous opportunity for a lot of people. I still believe they are people in older manufacturing jobs that could benefit from this new access to capital, ideas and markets, who would better serve the economy by switching into this new market of making things at scale with minimal cost up front.

As long as we continue to invest in programs and services that help would be entrepreneurs grow and learn from each other (think local events like Meetups, online resources like Google’s new Entrepreneur center, other online web resources and the myriad SaaS services out there now to manage a business, etc.) we will start to see more and more innovation continue to happen at the lightning fast pace we have been accustomed to in the Internet era. And that is definitely a cause for celebration in a weak economy.

Raj

Paul Graham’s “How Not To Die”

I was having a few drinks with my good friend and old NYU roommate Josh, who is also the co-founder of an awesome startup called GoChime (if you haven’t heard of them, definitely check it out, especially all of you who want to find how social listening can drive commerce). He sent me Paul Graham’s brilliant article from 2007, and I was simply blown away by it.

Rather than posting the article in its entirety here, I have simply linked to it and encourage everyone who has ever wanted to start a business or who has ever had reservations and fears about starting a business, to give this article a good read. Josh mentioned to me that he re-reads this article every time he feels times get tough (which, as you can imagine, happen a lot for a startup) and it somehow gives him just enough solace and encouragement to keep on keepin’ on.

A quick blurb from the article:

So I’ll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don’t give up. – Paul Graham

I can definitely see why he revisits the article, and I have found myself reading it a lot over the past few weeks since my buddy introduced it to me. I’m sure countless other people out there toiling away on their idea revisit the article as well as a sort of compass to get through the tough times. And for that, I say thanks Paul.

Raj

Weekly Reading Roundup for August 19th, 2012

A collection of articles and posts over the past week that I have read and would like to share.

Raj

Corporate Success & Change

The HBR ran this post on how companies need to manage change by capitalizing on it so as to build their next money making business. It’s an interesting argument in that it internalizes change as a driver for growth within a company, disallowing the company from effectively sitting on it’s laurels and not innovating within a constantly changing marketing. I tend to agree with everything written in the article except for the part where they say continue to win with the shell/original business. Having two concurrent businesses running at the same time can be done, and has definitely been done in the past (just think about multi-national conglomerates). It’s clearly a winning strategy as diversification of corporate revenue is always a good thing.

However, I do think it can be difficult to keep motivated in the original business when all resources from a corporate standpoint are looking to the “next big thing” at the company: people within your own organization will see you are basically building Noah’s Ark for when the floods come to destroy your existing company, but the new company will continue to float on, thereby completing the cycle. Nevertheless, companies need to manage employee expectations and also the timing of their jump into the next business, both of which are understandably easier said than done.

Raj

Weekly Reading Roundup

Below is a collection of various articles and posts across the web that I have been reading or are currently reading.

Raj

Backblaze Lands $5M in Funding

I had the opportunity to meet with Gleb and a few members of the Backblaze team while out in San Francisco. This is a great win for them! Their technology is absolutely incredible and they managed to create their own cloud storage custom built that seriously competes with AWS and other similar cloud storage systems. Their competitors are the big guys in the field, but they should all be worried with the ease of use of their technology, as well as the cost of their inputs. Without going into specific details, let’s just say their cost of servers is MUCH less than their competitors, which allow them to provide their service at such a low monthly price point while also earning profit (as Gleb says, they have been profitable since the early days of the company post-bootstrapping).

If you are in the market for an incredibly simple, easy to use backup solution where you do not have to think of your backup, go with Backblaze. They have an incredible team and an incredible product and I cannot speak anything but highly of them. Congratulations on this round!

Raj

Raj Design Group Launch

Raj Design Group Web Design Agency

I’m proud to announce that my web design and web development portfolio site is now up and running over at Raj Design Group. It’s been a very long time since I updated that site and I wanted to make sure I was updating it with the recent projects I have been doing over the past few months. I’ll still continue to blog about some web design, design and client work information here, but most of these blog posts will now be going to Raj Design Group.

I’m excited about the direction of Raj Design Group and think it can be a very powerful force to help small businesses develop and implement a comprehensive web presence strategy. Thanks to everyone for all of your support in making this happen. In particular, I’d like to thank my parents, Danielle, Will and Ashish for giving me that extra push to get this up and running again.

Best,
Raj

Raj

Old Websites

Every now and then I do a few searches across the web to see what comes up when people search my name and/or my username (I believe I have been using “rajamatage” for almost 13 years at this point). One thing that I love about the Internet, and something that I am sure others absolutely loathe, is the fact that it can remember anything and everything. You have services like the Wayback Machine, whose purpose is to simply remember websites the way they were and keep a sort of permanence on the web, and then there are other sites out there that have simply been around since the beginning of (Internet) time.

You may ask: what is Subject 54? Why that name? I honestly couldn’t tell you; I think I thought it just sounded cool at the time.

I recently came across my rajamatage.tripod.com and Subject 54 websites that I made at least a decade ago using free services like Tripod and Angelfire. I can’t even believe that, not only are my sites still up and running, but both Tripod and Angelfire are around as well! You may ask: what is Subject 54? Why that name? I honestly couldn’t tell you; I think I thought it just sounded cool at the time (check out the title of the webpage: “SUBJECT 54: You don’t know what it is and neither do we…”).

That was back when sites like Webmonkey were independently owned and dedicated to the craft of building simple websites. I don’t even think people were talking about CSS standards or W3C compliant websites at that time, but I definitely remember using stylesheets to tweak placement and colors on the screen. Seeing those sites definitely brings back some awesome memories of scripting my first sites and thinking about different websites that I could build (even back then I was thinking about a site called CampgroundReference or something along those lines that would display information on campground sites, ratings about those sites, and activities you could while at those sites…I was a boy scout at the time, after all). Crazy to think that that was only 10 years ago, but  also makes you realize that 10 years is a very long time.

Raj

uBeam & The Implications of Wireless Power

Every now and then you come across a company that gives you pause because at first, what they seem to be doing makes sense. But after some reflection, you realize the potential is far greater than originally thought. uBeam is one such company. After having raised $750,000 and currently in stealth, the company’s technology will allow devices within a small room charge themselves wirelessly. No cords. No connecting to anything physical. No need to even place the item on a mat and have the item outfitted with some sort of special equipment (that was one of my biggest issues with the technology, since it wasn’t truly as simple as walking into a room and getting power to your device).

“At that time, Arrington wrote that with her demo he’d witnessed ‘the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time.’ uBeam almost certainly showed the same demo to its other big-name investors, and the big money was clearly soon to follow.” – TechCrunch.com

If they can pull this off, and make a device that will charge all electronic devices within a room, the implications could be enormous. Imagine a world where electrical power is as ubiquitous as wireless internet (I know wireless internet still has a while to go to get total coverage everywhere in the world, but for the most part, it’s everywhere). You will no longer have to worry about battery power or devices failing when you need them most (think hikers who need GPS to find their way). Or perhaps even have the GPS unit beam the electricity to the unit itself, creating an endless feedback loop.

“At energy hot spots in public spaces, ‘all you’ll have to do is lift your phone in the air and charge it.'” – Elle Magazine, Genius Awards 2012

On the flip side of that is the energy source and the energy provider. Utilities will have to quickly scale up their operations in order to meet the new burst in demand, supporting ever “connected” devices requiring power 24/7. It will be akin to the Internet exploding into the trillions upon trillions of web pages as we know it today, with an ever increasing number of “connected” nodes i.e. servers, equipment, people, mobile devices, etc. This then has implications on where we source our energy: perhaps alternative forms of energy such as remote wind farms or solar cells in space become viable since all energy sources will need to be harnessed to be able to provide ubiquitous amounts of energy all over the globe; oil, coal and natural gas may not be enough to satiate all of that demand, but I am sure in the short term they will be stressed much more than they are right now.

I hope Meredith Perry and her team are able to pull this off. Based on what I am reading, it seems like they already have, and will continue to iterate on their awesome product.