Conundrum indeed.
Luckily though that means we can harness Jason's skills and insight for Aboard Entrepreneurship instead.
Premium
Premium
Domain Trickery
See the above image? Well, that was from an e-mail, which almost caused me to spend 4x the amount I had to spend to secure a domain that I would've liked (read: not needed).
After the success of The One Percent Project, it has been on our radar to do something similar again in future. So when I browsed my spam box and saw this e-mail from a company "Rescue Domain", I figured that they'd obviously WHOIS'ed my details from the .org equivalent which I already owned and proceeded to sell it to me for $49.
Lucky for me, I actually checked the domain availability with my default domain registrar, before pulling the trigger on this. The domain was available for the standard $9.95 there. Bargain.
Morale of the story: spammers and chancers are very clever. And anything that seems to good to be true, could possibly be better if you did your own research.
Premium
Online Friends
Yesterday is I was watching the interest and buzz grow for Aboard Entrepreneurship, I realized that a year ago it would've been impossible for me to launch a project like this. This is obviously not an exact science (as I don't have actual evidence to prove this), but if I had launched this project last year, it would've been very optimistic indeed.
During 2010, I did quite a bit of traveling and speaking at quite a few international conferences, which means that I got the opportunity to meet quite a few awesome people. It was specifically my trip to the States (New York & San Francisco), as well as Vienna for Schnitzelconf, where I met so many incredible people, most of which I consider my friends today.
Along with actually meeting these great people in person, WooThemes continued to grow exponentially, which means that I had some proper entrepreneurial experience and knowledge to bring to the conversation. So these inspiring relationships were very much mutually beneficial I believe.
Friends in high places.
So back to Aboard Entrepreneurship... You'll see that we already have quite a few amazing people on there and the thing that excites me so much on a personal level is that many of those contributors are my friends. So whilst I haven't seen their contributions yet, I just know that it's gonna be good.
The other benefit of having these friends is that they've been able to introduce me to other people within their awesome networks, many of which I would not have been able to reach out to without their help. So this is here where we'll be announcing some exciting news in the next couple of days, as we manage to add some very well-known contributors to the project.
Considering that I'm based in Cape Town, South Africa, it would just never have been possible for me to make the connections needed to launch such an ambitious project as this.
Premium
AE: Contributors Update #1
After successfully launching Aboard Entrepreneurship yesterday with 10 contributors, we've been blown away by the initial interest in the project. Hundreds of people have signed up to the mailing list and there's a bunch of awesome people who've reached out to us to contribute.
We're up to 16 awesome contributors now and I'd like to just introduce you to them (as the site currently can't hold all of them):
- Alexis Ohanian, ex-founder of Reddit and now works with both Hipmunk & Y Combinator. Alexis is also very much into social entrepreneurship, so this is a massive addition to the project and one we're incredibly excited about! :)
- Andrew Wilkinson, founder at MetaLab. Andrew's been involved in so many online web apps, that it would've been silly from us not ask him to contribute.
- Amy Hoy (Freckle) & Garrett Dimon (Sifter) are two awesome people I met in Vienna at SchnitzelConf last year.
- Lastly we're welcome two South African entrepreneurs, Christine Meintjes (KIKI) & Nic Haralambous (MoTribe), as we felt that it was important for us to highlight the entrepreneurial talent in our home country as well. :)
Expect a couple of updates like this in the next couple of days. :)
Who would you like to see joining Aboard Entrepreneurship?
Premium
Beverly Hills Oasis
You can't spend 4 days in Los Angeles (Hollywood to be precise), without taking one of the city tours to see "all of the homes of the stars". What bullshit.
Jeanne & I took one of these trips and proceeded to waste 2 hours of our time seeing the driveaways of the supposed homes of the celebrities. Whoop.
On the trip though, this photo was the best moment and one I'd share here. I absolutely love the tranquility captured in the shot and makes me think back semi-fondly on a shitty tourbus trip... :)