Pajama Entrepreneur

This is an amazing story of how three bloggers in Spain managed to create the most popular pro basketball site (Hoopshype) in the US. Never mind that one of them doesn’t even like the sport or that they’ve been blogging (and continue to blog) out of Madrid. Fantasy Sports Ventures bought Hoopshype from the founder, Jorge Sierra, for an amount in the low seven figures, according to the Wall Street Journal, and continues to blog with his colleagues.

I have also been running Muniwireless for several years out of Amsterdam and am often asked how I managed to become the authority on the US municipal wireless market. My answer: anyone can blog from anywhere and become an expert, if he or she is interested, writes well, has passion and . . . a good broadband connection. I can do my work from anywhere in the world as long as I have broadband. Indeed, if you make good money from ads on your site, why not live in a place that has good broadband but a lower cost of living? Why not Buenos Aires or Bangkok?

Check out this series of interviews with entrepreneurs on the NPR website. The series is called From Scratch. I enjoyed the interview with Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse (the famous Berkeley restaurant), and champion of “Slow Food”, good eating, organic farming, and enjoying food in the company of friends.

Here’s an article in Wired about Michael Arrington’s rise from blogger to mini-media empire. When he started Techcrunch, he had no idea it would turn out to be one of the most influential technology blogs. Unlike boring tech websites run by large media companies, Techcrunch has personality (like its founder) and passion. It’s not written by a machine. There’s a strong voice behind it. Michael does not make apologies about who he is and how he writes. There are a lot of people who don’t like him and what he’s done, but he goes on anyway.

The flipside of success: saying no to advertisers

I also started my blog, Muniwireless.com, without thinking that it would turn into an operation with conferences, seminars and a quarterly magazine. But it did after 2 years of blogging.

The challenge for me (and I suspect every blogger who succeeds in creating a small media enterprise) is this: how do you keep writing passionately without offending your big advertisers? The answer is you can’t. At some point, something you write will piss them off, they’ll threaten to stop advertising and sponsoring your events. What I learned is that you just need to keep writing with passion and serving your readers.

If you start tempering your opinions and writing things to please the advertisers, you won’t have a audience much longer and your advertisers will flee, too. Besides, the tech business is volatile. One of the advertisers on Muniwireless decided to advertise less after a story I had written pissed them off. It was a convenient excuse; their business was not going well. I remember being very upset about their decision, but looking back now, I should have just told them to jump off a cliff. I had to be more diplomatic because Muniwireless was not just about me. There are other people working in the company.

That’s another challenge. When there are others working in your organization, you can’t throw as many temper tantrums as you used to, although if Muniwireless were still a one-person operation, I would have banished that particular advertiser to my 9th Circle of Hell.

At the DLD conference in Munich last January 2007, I spoke to the CEO of a media company about my experiences with advertisers and he said: “The most powerful word in this business is NO. No, I won’t shut up because you want me to. No, I won’t retract my post because I think I’m right.”

I was having breakfast yesterday with Alexander Casassovici, a young entrepreneur from Paris, who was in Amsterdam for the Nextweb conference. Alexander’s startup Wavestorm develops technology for the “Internet of Things” — machine to machine communications via Wi-Fi. We were talking about how this tech “bubble” is different from the first one in the late 1990s in that there are a lot of European entrepreneurs who are NOT moving to Silicon Valley. Back in the 1990s, a lot of non-American startups felt they had to move. Not so today. I believe there are 2 reasons:

- the high cost of living and working in Silicon Valley;

- this is a different generation of entrepreneurs who prefer to live and work in places like Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hongkong.

Alexander told me he’d rather live in Asia than in Silicon Valley. I’ve met a lot of other people who spend months working in places like Buenos Aires. More exotic than the Valley.

Another big change is that you can get good programmers and web developers in Eastern Europe and Asia, so you don’t necessarily have to go to California.

If you want to follow European startups, go to Alarm: Clock Euro.

Here are the first eight chapters on turning your blog into a media company. They are based on my experience as the founder of Muniwireless.com.

Part 1: birth of Muniwireless

Part 2: first year of Muniwireless

Part 3: finding a business model

Part 4: the Ninth Circle of Hell

Part 5: becoming a niche online publisher

Part 6: miracles happen in laundromats

Part 7: getting readers, rising high on search engines

Part 8: Microcast tells how to grow a blog into a media company

I will be posting more in the next few weeks. If you have questions, please post in the comments section below.

Did you ever think that anyone writing a food blog could get published and end up on the Today Show? Clotilde Dusoulier, the woman behind the blog Chocolate and Zucchini, the best food blog in the world (in my opinion) recently published her first book and is now on a book tour in the US and Europe. Her blog is read by thousands of food enthusiasts all over the world. Read the press coverage here from Elle Eten Netherlands, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Le Figaro and many others.

Clotilde, a software engineer, began her blog in 2003 upon returning to Paris from Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash. What’s an unemployed software engineer to do anyway? Her blog has become one of the most popular consumer blogs and it’s no surprise that she landed a book contract and a spot on the Today Show (an American morning TV programme).

Chocolate and Zucchini is mostly about recipes so if you hate cooking, the site is not for you. But Clotilde also has tips on where to eat in cities and towns that she visits when she goes on holiday and of course, she writes about gourmet shops in Paris. She writes posts about different types of butter, cheeses, charcuterie, etc.

If you have a blog that attracts a large audience, it is much easier for you to get a book published because it’s easier for the publisher to market your book. You will also get magazines to ask you to write articles for them.

So what makes Clotilde successful?

• Food is her obsession.
• She writes well for her audience, many of whom are in the US. Her writing style is friendly and approachable.
• She’s young, pretty, French and therefore, very “media-genic”, and she speaks English well with hardly any accent.
• Her blog has become a community, not because she purposely designed it that way but because she focuses on on topic and does it well.

Her prospects for the future

She could be the next Martha Stewart. She has a loyal audience and a book. Next up, hosting her own TV show and organizing upscale cooking holidays in the Provence. She can branch off into lifestyle-related topics such as interior design, entertaining, etc.

Leaving aside the hardcore group of foodies, what drives much of Chocolate and Zucchini’s success is aspirational (like Martha Stewart’s publications and her fans’ devotion to Martha herself) — a lot of women fancy themselves having Clotilde’s lifestyle: living in the Montmartre district in Paris, eating macaroons at Laduree, baking bread, sampling artisanal cheeses in a fromagerie in the Marais and dining at El Bulli outside Barcelona.

I see Clotilde going from blog to published author to media company (not unlike Martha Stewart’s empire).

Other famous food bloggers

Heidi Swanson

Heidi’s blog, 101cookbooks.com, is filled with recipes for vegetarian organic dishes. Like Clotilde Dusoulier, Heidi started her blog in 2003. She’s also a photographer and designer. Her recent book, Super Natural Cooking, has received excellent reviews. The book’s artwork and photos are all hers. I have the book and it’s a great resource for simple, delicious vegetarian recipes. My favorite is the homemade granola.

Claire Chapoutot

Claire’s blog, Clea Cuisine, features an eclectic mix of Japanese and organic food recipes. Her book, Agar Agar, was published early this year in France and is also available from Amazon.fr.

Pascal Weeks

Pascal is the author of C’est moi qui l’ai fait, a French food blog. Her book came out in 2006 and is available on Amazon.fr.

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To see a list of my favorite food blogs, go to my article on Rosecantine.com.

Recommended reading for anyone who decides to start a business is James Dyson’s autobiography entitled Against the Odds which Jason Fried of 37 Signals calls “one of the best books about design, business, invention, and entrepreneurship I’ve ever read.” Click here to read Jason’s post.

Dyson is the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. He calls the inventor’s life one of “failure” but adds that often you learn more when an experiment does not work out.

An excerpt from an interview with Dyson:

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous.

[Via 37 Signals]