Credit Card VC

Part of the Credit Card VC ethos, of course, is not spending money in the first place. That’s the thin thread I’m using to insert this meme into this blog.

One way to save a small pile of money every month and also save a bit of your sanity is to cut off your cable company. Now, I’m not talking about figuring out a way to get cable, and not pay for it, that would be wrong; the moral equivalent of downloading music without paying for it. Really, though, you shouldn’t have cable. If you have time to sit around and watch the Game Show Network, you are not spending the time you should be spending on your business.

This will not make you a Luddite. Indeed you can cut off cable, and the dish, and still be something of a video snob.

Here’s how:

1. Buy an HDTV. The prices have come down enough, it’s time to do it.
2. Get the rabbit ears antenna recommended for that TV. Do not go overboard and get one of those big ones from Radio Shack and kill yourself up on your roof.
3. Put the rabbit ears as high as you can inside your house, if you can put it in an attic, that’s best.
4. Go to AntennaWeb.org and figure out which direction to point your antenna.
5. In checking that out, you’ll realize that you get a lot of stations, more than enough for the times when you do need to veg out.
6. OK, here’s bit that allows you to be a video snob: The signal broadcast by your local stations is essentially uncompressed, meaning that you will get better picture quality from that little rabbit-ears antenna than you would from cable or a dish! That’s right, the stations send out the whole picture over the air, but the carriers take that signal and smash it down so it will fit in the pipe with all the other channels. So when you are watching that amazing snowcone catch that almost helped the Mets into the world series, you will be able to see every seam on the ball better than your brethren watching on cable.

OK, I know I haven’t been at this blog long, and I’ve already referred to Mark Cuban’s blog a couple of times, but now I’m going to do it again. He recently asked “How do you get people to see a movie without spending a fortune on advertising?” He got a zillion responses. I didn’t read them all, but in my mind it’s easy: Work harder to get more Little Miss Sunshines made.

So, he didn’t ask, but here’s my suggestion for how to get a lot more traction for his HDNet: Broadcast it over the air.

Here in Denver we have all the big networks broadcasting in HD, as they must under federal mandate. But we also have a bunch of smaller ones, Christian broadcasters, even shopping networks. If they can get a broadcast license, so could HDNet. It would be a great publicity play for the Maverick to do an end-around on the cable and dish providers. Combined with the fact that he could tout his ability to send true uncompressed HD images and the market penetration the HD sets have reached, well, this would be a huge win for him.

So, Mark, what do I want for this million-dollar idea? Only that you start in Denver as a test market.

Sometimes I see connections between items that aren’t commonly seen. Sometimes this makes me seem brilliant, and sometimes people look at me like I’m Jerry Fletcher.
For instance today I wrote one blog comment on Mark Cuban’s blog that made connections between three seemingly disparate posts.

But closer to the relevancy of this blog are two items posted right now on TechCrunch. One of them is also related to one of Cuban’s blog items, and it concerns a new company that is paying bloggers to write about a topic. This new one seems slightly less invidious because it actually requires bloggers to disclose the financial arrangement.

The interesting link to me is between that topic — trying to find new ways to generate essentially small amounts of cash — and the one that follows that about an outfit that makes very small investments in new companies, because that small investment is all that’s needed. This is all classic Long Tail stuff; i.e. making a few pennies here and there off a lot of people doing small things.
The bit about small investments should be familiar to readers of this blog, as we advocate investments so small that you could actually put them all on your credit card. It’s the way that software and the world are moving, the end of the “hit” manufactured by an expensive process.

I just want people to remember one thing: There is no easy money. Even if you can start a business on your credit cards, it’s not going to become a $20-million business without the idea AND boatloads of really hard hard hard work.

So, if you think you are smart, and maybe you are, just remember that there are boatloads of smart people out there. The only thing that will get you a big win is hard work. That said, I need to get back to work.

Thanks for reading.

OK, this blog will be about more than just the core topic (inspiration for entrepreneurs going it alone) and Google video and Mark Cuban’s commentary, but this is just too fetid not to comment about. There’s also a large and somewhat sad point to all of this, but you’ll have to read to the end to get that.
Take a look at Mark’s inside look at the GooTube deal. I’m not saying it’s accurate… who knows… but it sure would explain a lot of things:

• The crazy high valuation. The YouTube guys can tell their grandmothers that they sold for $1.65 billion but the reality is they sold for about two-thirds of that with one-third set apart for paying off big media. And of the money they got, most of that is in stock that — my view — will be worth a lot less because of this deal.

• The suits against the smaller video hosting companies.
• The big media companies silence about this deal. (They can’t talk if they were part of the deal and the contract says they can’t talk.)
• The weird (for Google) announcement that it is doing a video hosting project that is pretty actively anti-long tail. I think the techcrunch guys got it right that Google has been the model of how to make money with the long tail, and this deal is the exact opposite of it. But if they have some deal in place with all the big media producers, then this makes a lot more sense.

I wrote a book review about The Long Tail, and my day job is running a site that brings the long tail to legislation. I think the long tail concept is brilliant. I also used to be a reporter, so I know that if that post about the junk that went on behind the scenes is true, that will be the big story as no reporter can resist a scoop that will eventually become lawsuits, etc. We’ll be watching this unfold for a long time.

But to me the biggest story is Google turning it’s back on the Long Tail. They aren’t “dancing with the one’s that brung ‘em.” Luckily the thing that Google has started is now in motion, so if — IF — Google really does turn it’s back on the Long Tail there will be myriad others who will pick up the notion and move forward with it.

OK, back to work for me. You, too!

OK, this is a blog for bootstrappers, for people who like being in business for themselves, and really there’s no reason for us to be thinking about YouTube, etc.

But it is fun.

For me, the one guy who’s been spot-on through all of this is Marc Cuban, who’s been hammering away at this deal since it was just in the rumor stage. He’s the one who really brought up the comparison between YouTube now and Napster from back in it’s fun days.

And then on October 11th, he predicted that the suits would begin not against GooTube, but against some smaller outfit so that the big boys could establish some precedent without having to go up against all the lawyers Google can buy in the first trip to the courthouse.

I read Cuban’s prediction, and actually thought to myself: “Boy, I hope my memory serves me well enough to remember this when and if it actually comes true.”

Even my memory was able to hold up because it’s only been a week, and now Universal is suing a couple of smaller sites.

So, what’s the lesson for us? What are we, the small guys just trying to pay the bills, supposed to learn from this? Nothing really. The multiples of the YouTube sale, the whole Google zeitgeist, are classic Fantasy Business League stuff.

OK. Back to sales for me!