Nikolay's Blog

A stunning Rare Pink engagement ring

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:43:00 +0000

The first video of our Rare Pink engagement ring range. What do you guys think?

- Move it around 360 degress with your mouse
- Zoom in using the (+) sign loop
- Give us feedback

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Entropy - A Sad and Yet Inspiring Revelation

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:51:00 +0000

Many people who know me well will remember, at some point or another, having a light-hearted drunken conversation with me about the future of the universe and how one of my greatest fears is that the universe will end in a great contraction, much the same way it started, into a singularity. I argued that the alternatives, continuous expansion or eventual equilibrium, would be much better because they offered the slight possibility of living FOREVER, no matter how unlikely this would be.

A few days ago I watched a documentary called "Wonders of the Universe". It is a beautifully made series and in one of the episodes, University of Manchester's Brian Cox discusses a concept called ENTROPY.

What was curious to me at first was that I somehow could not remember ever learning about this even though I took A-Level physics and you would think I would know at least something about the "second law of thermodynamics" (given that I know the 1st and 3rd laws). So suddenly I was glued to the screen in eager anticipation.

I wont be a bore and go into details of the science, but I will mention one notion that stems from the concept of entropy:

ORDER tends to DISORDER

Think of a sand castle you have made. As time passes, the thousands of sand molecules are far more likely to loose their ordered form, from existing in such a way so that someone passing by would identify the sand castle, to eventually becoming nothing more than a pile of sand.

Disorder can only increase from an ordered state explaining the single direction of time

Similarly, over trillions of years, if the universe does not collapse in on itself, all the stars will burn out, the earth will long ago have been destroyed by our own sun and the version of the universe which lasts forever, will be one where the universe is a vast expansion of cold nothingness - all the order that once made up our stars and planets, will have become a vast equilibrium where every inch of space is exactly the same... just like our deserts. This was sad to hear; so much for living forever.

But just as this sad thought came and lingered, Mr Cox pondered out loud:

"It is not so strange that order tends to disorder, but rather, we should wonder why there was order in the first place?"

Curious...

Brian had managed to explain to me, using the concept of entropy, why we die; but I wondered why he had failed to attempt an answer to the question of why we live?

In a world where over time order tends to disorder, what lead to the miracle that billions of atoms should come together to create life, and not just any life, intelligent life, and not just intelligent life, but my life, someone who can stare back at the universe and contemplate its very existence? This is a question I love to think about. Mathematicians will tell us that this is not such a strange phenomenon in a universe this large, for while the likelihood of intelligent life existing somewhere is low, it is still positive. We are the one in a zillion places, the lottery winners of the universe.

Still, I thought deeper...

ENTROPY, is it possible it not only applies on a cosmic level, but also in our day-to-day lives. Could it possibly provide a reason as to why so few people are rich, why so few succeed, why so few live meaningful lives? We are born innocent and with unlimited potential, and yet time, parenting, our environment, the loss of energy and ambition as we age all seem to be signs of entropy in action. To fight against the strong pull towards disorder in our own lives is our one chance to make our lives mean something.

To build sandcastles in the sand, make something out of nothing, come up with inventions that change the world and grow businesses that outlive us. In a fight with entropy, man would resist the temptations that lead to mediocrity, avoid making poor decisions and he would have the will to act when most would do nothing. In this epic struggle, should we win, it feels like one little insignificant life on Earth can defy the very laws of science.

And suddenly a very sad thought was transformed into a happy one. Should we fail to find meaning, we should perhaps create it.

Entrepreneur vs Employee

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:20:00 +0000

Since I graduated and decided to not find a job and instead start a business, many of my friends have said to me, on a regular basis, one or both of the following:

"You're making quite a brave (possibly perceived as arrogant) decision to start your own business in these troubled times... I personally couldn't take the risk of not knowing where and when my income will come from".

OR

"Yes, starting a business is the dream, but I think it is better to go into employment, learn a bit, accumulate some capital and THEN do my own thing".

I used to think these were both reasonable points and wished those who stood behind them the best of luck in their endeavours - after all, not everyone can or is going to be a business owner and many first time business owners start when they are older.

Recently however, I have thought about some valid arguments against both lines of thought mentioned above.

The first of these is based on the RISK element. What is interesting about this risk, unlike say gambling, it is not easily defined or measured. It is definitely a perceived risk and perceptions, as we all know, are heavily biased and influenced by our upbringing and the media.

So, here is my possibly biased perception of both the risk of becoming an employee and that of starting your own business.

(a) Becoming an employee:

You risk not being able to develop the skills and capabilities that will make you employable for the rest of your life because you are not always able to CHOOSE what skills you develop in a job defined by your employer. Given the rate at which technology is advancing, people who are not constantly improving and learning may well find themselves the miners in a country that no longer mines 20 (or even 10) years down the line. Then what?
You risk loosing your job. In a growing global economy people forget about this risk, but we are currently in a troubled world economy and even if a grand recovery does eventually come, the economic cycle will surely deliver a number of other recessions in each of our lifetimes. What's more, companies go bust or contract for reasons completely unrelated to the global economy, putting all but the most valuable employees at the risk of being retrenched.
You risk not being happy. Many philosophers, work psychologists and more recently, behavioural economists argue that a major influence on our happiness is the ability to do meaningful work. In many large corporations it may not be possible to do this. How many people do you know who love their job?

(b) Starting a business

You risk not having enough money to live. However "to live" is a funny term. Sure, if I had a family and was used to a lavish lifestyle, "survive" may mean several thousand pounds per month. While setting up this business, to me, survive means something in the region of £500 per month. An easily attainable amount (even less that what some people in the UK receive in benefits each month).
You risk... um, I can't think of any others. Please feel free to mention any you may think of in the comments below.

Of course some people may say, you risk "failure" or you risk "having to sleep less" and so on. Like I said, this risk is a perceived risk and will mean different things to different people.

The second argument I have against being an employee is based on the concept of TIMING.
It seems like a reasonable argument: "Get a job, learn, accumulate wealth, exit, start a business, succeed."

Looking at my dad as an example, I put forward my argument against this type of approach.

My father is a major inspiration to me. During his life he has changed so many jobs, always looking for something better, something to stimulate him and wherever he goes, no matter the industry, he advances within the company at a lightning speed. He is soon going to be 50 and in the IT industry age tends to be against you - not in his case. He is doing better than ever and has managed to do all this while immigrating out of Bulgaria with nothing and then returning to start again many years later.

For the past few years he has been also working on starting a chain of Montessori schools with my step-mom. There is a huge demand for these schools in Bulgaria and they have already successfully opened several. He continues to inspire me with his ability to adapt and take advantage of opportunities. Had my dad been born in a capitalist country and had he not had a son at a young age and immigrated to a country where he had to provide for his family, I think my dad would have become an entrepreneur at a much younger age and a great one at that.

His example shows me several key things:

Specialising - great for an employee, but not necessarily the key to success for an entrepreneur. After years of specialising, you might know a lot about the one thing you do really well at company ABC but could you start your own company to compete with ABC? There are natural leaders, but there are also those that are made through effort and learning; and to be made takes time. It is a great (level 5 - Good to Great) leader that makes a business succeed.
Family and marriage - your perceived risk increases with having a family as the possibility of not being able to put bread on the table for your wife and kids is riskier than if you are alone. The average age for people getting married in the UK is 27. So once you graduate, on average, you have 4-5 years before you are married. This is a window of opportunity. Go tell your new wife you are leaving your investment banking job to start a business that may fail and see how she responds.
The Rat Race - Good employees progress in a company. They earn more with every year and therefore the financial opportunity cost of starting your own business increases. At first this may only be the amount you would earn in a graduate position but it may easily become 6 digits or more before long. This makes the financial decision to leave and start your own business even harder when you have been employed for a few years.

In summary, I think for young people, the risk of being an employee is generally greater than starting your own business. I also think there is a strong inverse correlation between the passage of time and the likelihood and ease with which people can start and succeed at starting their own business.

One possible solution that meets employee and entrepreneur mid-way, could be starting a job in a small company where you can be INTRApreneurial. You still get a salary, you are more likely to do meaningful and creative work and should the business succeed, you are likely to have equity options available to you, helping you make the transition from employee to business owner.

Below is my presentation on Intrapreneurship presented at the Manchester Entrepreneurs: "What's Next" event.

Intrapreneurship - success stories and how we leverage this concept at Rare Pink

The Four Quotes I Try To Live By

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:10:00 +0000

"Know Thyself" - Plato

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." Harry Truman

"Fail Fast, Fail Often" - Unkown, Silicon Valley

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to loose. You already are naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." - Steve Jobs

Rare Pink Logo - Your Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:19:00 +0000

We were going for:

Trustworthy

Luxury

Innovative

Elegant

Welcome to Brussels - Home of Bureaucracy and Red Tape

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:05:00 +0000

For the past 6 months I have been getting through all those once-off or yearly administrative business requirements such as registering, opening a business account, applying for and paying your VAT, compliance, regulations etc. To be honest, while it did take up time I did feel like the UK government and institutions had made a good effort in making as many of these requirements easy to understand and easy to get through (and many can be done online).

I applied for the business registration online - got it in a few hours. I walked into the bank and opened an account the very same day. I registered for VAT online, maid a claim to get back the VAT I spent on company expenses and got a deposit into my account just a few days later - which I found out about while checking my online banking. The truth is, I even got used to the amount of things I could do online and started taking this for granted.

A few weeks ago we came to the conclusion that we need a small office here in Belgium to facilitate a part of our business processes. So I planned to spend a week here to get things done. I started trying to do everything online - FAIL! Not only is there no English spoken or written in the home of the EU, but not much can be done online any way. Even the instructions regarding what to do when setting up were contradictory from one site to the other.

Land in Brussels and start visiting the organisations that are supposed to help me get things done. "No appointment, no meeting... sorry!" The biggest bank in Belgium does not work with companies in our industry - others don't seem to want your custom either. Documents must be written in French, Dutch or German and then once you spend a thousand hours preparing them, you take them to a notary (what the hell is that anyway???) and he charges you 1000 EUROS to put his signature on documents he couldn't even be bothered to write for you (after all you are funding his beach house).

The point of this rant is to (a) give my compliments to the team of people in the UK that have made taking care of our obligations to the state a breeze, and (b) to express my disgust as to how bureaucratic and anti-business Belgium is. This place would be nothing but a socialist non-country if it wasn't home to the EU parliament and institutions, with old grannies watching you as you empty your glass bottles into the recycling bins - ready to inform the authorities if you get it wrong - here "Big Brother" is no capitalist.

Necessity has made my tasks here a burden I have to face - but if we really had a choice, I would need a very good reason to set up a business or invest in Belgium.

Outsourcing Web Development - Learning the hard way

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:10:00 +0000

There is nothing more stressful than getting frustrated at someone for not doing their job, have a row with them and then realising that there are half a dozen simple things that could have been done to insure that the project is completed on time and as required. I realise now why good project managers are so well paid.

I am now glad I studied economics for 3 years because it has helped me to understand that so many things in life are about punishment and incentives - the carrot that keeps the donkey going and the boot that kicks it when it goes astray. Let me explain...

Several months of paying 50% for the development of our site, we still do not have a finished working copy. I recently spent some time on a website called VWorker and while I have yet to use their services and see if they are any good, the infrastructure that the guys have set up on this community makes it so much easier to get work done.

The community has over 250,00 registered free-lancers and companies which bid on the projects people post. Within 24 hours of posting we have had over 20 bids to do our work with the cost ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. We see everyone's reviews (something you can not easily do with companies you find when googling), and most importantly people are ACCOUNTABLE. If they agree to do the work within a month and they fail to complete the project within that time frame, then you have the option to not pay a cent or give them an extension.

They let you know from the get go that only 25% of development/software projects in the entire industry finish on schedule (25% are never completed and 50% are delayed) and they reckon if we think a project will take 2 weeks it is more likely that it will take 2-to-5 times that amount of time.

All of our 20+ bids agreed to pay only a 10% deposit (and not the 50% we have currently paid) and there are requirements such as weekly feedback which make it easy to gauge how far along the developers are.

Incetives and punishment - a community that has both.

Overall, I can not wait to try out this service as we were really happy with a similar service (only it was for design and not development) from 99Designs. We got 19 designers to submit 59 designs for our new logo. After choosing the winning one we were also able to ask the winning designer to tweek the design to our heart's conent. Check out our new DiamondsInAfrica logo below:

Global from Day One

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:10:00 +0000

What a crazy few months it has been, and all because we boldly decided that we would launch this business into the global market from day one - selling our products in any currency, any time and to any location in the world (with a few small exceptions).

When we first committed to our global approach I was certain that our flight and travel expenses would break the bank but the internet truly has made global commerce not only possible, but unbelievably easy as well. From incorporating a limited US business and opening a bank account there, to registering toll-free numbers in all our major markets - all of this was done from the comfort of my office.

I have also been calling customers from around the world using Skype and our very first client found us online from Serbia and made a detour on his way to a hunting trip in Namibia just to make a purchase in South Africa.

I have not been in the same room as our other two co-founders since April and yet we are all on the same page with regards to developments on a daily basis. Conference calls from our mobiles and bitesize e-mails seems to be all it takes.

There is only one last challenge I have to overcome with regards to the "think global" approach - that being reaching out to all our suppliers (spread across 5 countries around the world) and agreeing upon our terms of trade. This challenge begins today.

Apologies to any regular readers for the post drought of late, it seems the more I have to blog about the less time I have to blog.

Much Harder Than I Thought

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 30 May 2011 11:23:00 +0000

Yes, running your own business is rewarding, but no one ever tells you when it gets to be rewarding and that before that happens its a confusing and difficult time of transition.

Even the rat race, while we all hate to be in it, is at least comforting in its predictability. As an entrepreneur, there are now two processes I have to habitualise and develop to keep doing what I'm doing. These are:

The Will To Act, &
The Endurance of Risk

The Will To Act

As straight forward as it may seem, it is the first one that has been a nightmare to come to terms with. To get up and to set a plan for the day and to then go on and complete the tasks listed is perhaps the single greatest challenge I have ever come across. People in jobs find this much easier to do for two reasons. First of all they have momentum. For the most part they have been doing what they do for a long time so, going to work and "working" carries a very strong inertia. Employees also know that if they are ill or lazy or hung over or need to take a holiday, for the most part the company they work for will not shut down and die in their absence.

Running your own business, there is no momentum (at least not at first), the business stops when you stop and there is no "Big Brother" watching - the will to act and the motivation to do this on a day to day, hour upon hour basis is a test of endurance and stamina - two things I will admit, I had in short supply at first, but I seem to be finally accumulating more and more of both.

The Endurance of Risk

I seem to be coping better with the risk element of being an entrepreneur than I had at first anticipated. Sure, the fact that my income now depends almost entirely on my own efforts and that it may take a while before these efforts are rewarded, did scare me at first, but I am at least no longer afraid of failing. After all, I have little commitments, no children and no credit card bills to pay; as long as I have a roof over my head for the next few months, success or failure, nothing much will change in my lifestyle as a student to that of being a poor entrepreneur.

"Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance."

Virgil

Dabs (verb) – “To Touch Lightly and Quickly”

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:36:00 +0000

This is how the dictionary defines the terms “Dabs”. In many ways, my three months here will have this effect on the company, however the effect this experience has had on me will be far more pronounced.

My third placement began with all the usual excitement and possibilities to impose a positive change in the 11 weeks we have to do so. The only difference this time was that Dabs was the one placement I was really excited to be going to – an e-commerce company for someone (me) who is passionate about Internet marketing – what a match!

The first few weeks flew by and despite the fact that my commute took up to two hours of my day, I was enjoying my job.

Towards the end of February, something happened at Dabs which changed everything. I refer to this event as the fortunately-unfortunate incident. It was unfortunate because together with the other lovely people at Dabs, during the next few months we all had to enter a “crisis management” mode; but fortunate because I experienced, first-hand, the issues and difficulties which come about when a company has to upgrade to a new system. To cut a long story short – the company decided it was time to implement a new system, but once they migrated everything on to the new one, there were more problems than they had at first anticipated and unfortunately many of these affected their customers.

The lessons I learned over the next few weeks showed me that e-commerce is not only an amazing disruptive innovation, but also an economic system where agents operate in a manner far quicker than the traditional business world. Problems (and opportunities) are noticed instantly and people expect these problems to be corrected within days, hours, and sometimes even minutes. Things are almost back to normal now, and I feel like in the long term Dabs will be better off with the new system.

Of course I also got to ask literally thousands of questions, cornering various people in their offices or at their desks and extracting vital information from them. When starting up your own e-commerce business (as I hope to soon be doing) you never really know what you don’t know, but once you start digging deeper you find certain questions taking form; questions about shipping, protecting the company from fraud, the various systems being used and dozens of others. The more questions I asked the more questions I seemed to have and at Dabs I also managed to get many answers (Thanks to Neil, Helen, Michelle, Mat and Jag).

All-in-all, it was a very interesting placement. To cheer everyone up (and because its my birthday), I’ve made pancakes on my last day and leave the cool gang at Dabs with a few lessons I have learned:

Good customer service is a far more difficult job than I had at first thought. When we hire people to do this, make sure they can handle angry or difficult customers. Take them out once a month to paintball (or some other activity where they can de-stress and let go of all the anger customers impose upon them).
Always, and I mean ALWAYS have a contingency plan – not just for the good times but also for the bad. Plan for unlikely events using the “if…then…else” type of logic.
Don’t pay for expensive software unless you have a dedicated person who will be trained and have the time to use it. Even then, regularly re-evaluate its usefulness to the company.
Customers are morons. They will cry and bitch and moan and threaten. Do everything you can to please them.
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. If it is breaking and you choose to get a new one, make sure you’re not getting one that is even more broken than the original because anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so make sure you plan for the worst case scenario.
Be very careful when deciding that the job two employees are doing can be done by one. Overworking people suppresses creativity and innovation – especially if you doubled their workload but not their salary.
Finally, after the system migration there were some serious problems on days when it looked like the world would end. While some people could have just gone mental from all the stress, everyone stayed cool. So the last lesson I take away from Dabs is - DON’T PANIC, everything works out in the end if you’ve got a cool head.

Thanks to Dabs for a very important 3 months, now to put it all into practice in my own business.

Placement four is at Rare Pink. A new chapter begins.

Its Time

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:36:00 +0000

There is nothing quite as liberating and empowering as the simple realisation that we do hold our destiny in our hands and we are in fact masters of the universe.

Our business successes and failures become the ups and downs of a rollercoaster ride where in the end, no matter what rollercoaster you're on, you still get off saying: "That was Fucking Awesome!"... and you're off to find the next one!

As of today I am officially unemployed and super excited to be starting-up Rare Pink Limited - going live June 2011!

Student Entrepreneurs and Reshaping Britain

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:24:00 +0000

This weekend I attended the National Student Enterprise Conference (NSEC) in Manchester. You may wonder what a bunch of students from around the country, who usually spend their weekends indulging in booze and sleep deprivation, are doing at a 2-day weekend conference? It turns out that my peers were all there for different reasons among which there was one which we all shared – to become someone who drives change as opposed to merely accepting it.

The weekend was about how we can make a difference in helping the UK economy, how we can create disruptive innovations, how we can change companies from within and how we can start and grow companies that either make loads of money or help society, or both.

There was a perfect mixture of inspirational talks (from the likes of John Griffin - Addison Lee and Houston Spencer – Alcatel Lucent), panel discussions hosted by disruptive innovators (such as Rich Martell – Floxx.com and Kresse Wessling – Elvis & Kresse) and informative talks on various aspect of starting up a new business (Christian Busch – Sandbox and Ben Sheils – Accelerate).

I think, if you take away one thing from each conference you attend, then you can consider it time well spent.

My big "WOW" moment this weekend was Christian’s talk on “Creating the Winning Team”. I had given some thought to the fact that we would have to recruit some people almost as soon as we start but I thought of hiring like you think of finance, IP, operations – just another part of the system.

Christian managed to convince me in a talk just short of an hour that I was looking at this all wrong. He started with a saying VCs use in Silicon Valley:

"I would rather invest in an A team with a B idea than a B team with an A idea”.

Companies like Facebook and Google buy other companies not for their ideas but for the people behind those ideas, as well as people who made those ideas happen.

Christian discussed 5 ways in which you can convince high quality people to work for you (even though you may be offering them less pay than larger companies); see my video for more on this.

Finally he introduced us to Belbin’s team model as a useful tool for figuring out what kind of people are missing in your team:

As a final thought, you may wonder why people would work for a start-up or start their own business when the economic conditions are so unstable. From my NSEC experience I can give you two possible reasons.

The first is that starting your own business is actually less risky than working for someone else. You avoid all the risk factors which are out of your control: such as becoming redundant, not developing your skills, being unhappy with what you do and trade these "risk factors" in for: flexible working hours, an opportunity to develop and control over your own destiny.

My second thought on why becoming an entrepreneur is more rewarding than getting a job is based on the insights shared in this RSA video on what motivates us to work harder:

Berbatov - A Rare Reason to Be a Proud Bulgarian

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:38:00 +0000

Like Dimitar Berbatov, I am Bulgarian. It’s not the easiest country to be proud and patriotic about. We are small, eastern European, involved in organised crime all around the world, classified as the most corrupt country in Europe, our lovely beaches and seaside support a recent explosion of alcohol-related tourism and most recently, we have been ranked as the most unhappy nation relative to the money we earn.

Despite all this I do like to feel proud about my people and birthplace, even though I have not lived there for most of my life. True, I like to feel proud about South Africa as well (another place often associated with more bad things than good), but when asked where I’m from, I always say “Bulgaria”.

Moments to be proud of my country include singularities such as the 1994 Football World Cup when Bulgaria reached the semi-finals and Hristo Stoichkov got the golden boot. More generally I am proud of things such as our beautiful mountains, forests and seaside and the world-famous Bulgarian yoghurt and cheese.

Compared to some countries, you would think that when we do have an opportunity to be proud of our nation, we take it by the horns. Well actually, no.

Take our most famous recent football export – Dimitar Berbatov, for example. He appears to be, at least in public, a modest guy and true professional. He carries himself well and I personally have not once seen a scandal relating to him in the press. He has had a topsy-turvy start to his Man United career but no one can dispute that this season, he has been one of the star players of not only United, but I dare say, the world. Look at the Bulgarian press and you see a different image. Hatemongers spew out one criticism after another; the press for the most part ignores his successes and only blurts out his short-comings and that all famous team of 1994 seems to be playing a major role in ensuring that no one, not Berbatov or any other rising star ever emulates their success.

Excuse me for generalising, and as someone who hasn’t lived his whole life in Bulgaria, I may make some assumptions that others will dispute. I do however know that a people’s shortcomings are often reflected in the jokes we say about them. It comes as no surprise that there are numerous jokes and anecdotes of this “if your friend is successful you better pull him right back down” mentality which is engraved in the Bulgarian condition.

From the moment Berbatov scored 3 against Liverpool to claim a late victory for United, or when he almost made a new record by scoring 5 against Blackburn, or even last night when his 2 goals helped us stage a dramatic comeback against Blackpool, people around the world have talked about this man, this Bulgarian who lead Manchester United to victory. Football fan or not, United fan or not… Berbatov is another reason to be proud of our country and I personally hope he goes on to become the most famous and well-regarded Bulgarian footballer of all time.

Some Interesting Discoveries - part II

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:55:00 +0000

A few new sites I think are interesting, useful or both.

Here's a 10 second overview of each one and why you should check it out:

Thumbshots

I have recently become more interested in getting visitors to my site to act, than getting those visitors in the first place. Why? Because there are many ways to get people to your site, but once they are there, if they don't buy or use your service, then you don't really have a business now do you? Here's a tool that makes links to your site VISUAL with a small thumbnail preview. This helps with getting traffic as people who see a link to your site will also see a site preview.

But what about conversion? Well one of the biggest problems webmasters face is "how to decrease the bounce rate?" What if your internal linking also had previews, making sure people STAY on your site, and hopefully end up committing or purchasing.

The fact that so many companies and websites are using this tool tells me there are more benefits... soon to be checked out.

OnlyWire

I looked at social bookmarking a few years ago but then abandoned it - somehow it felt unnatural to be posting hundreds of links on different sites as bookmarks and I was worried that Google would penalise sites that do this.

Social bookmarking has since come along way with loads of different sites specialising in different ways. OnlyWire is an aggregator, automatically posting your news, blogs or links to about 50 different services, and you can easily post only to the specific site you want, without having to log in each time. Seems to be a useful tool for link building (to help with SEO) if used with moderation and if you know which sites would work for each particular link you are posting.

investment required: loads of time
return on investment: automatically use 50 different tools which bookmark, organise and promote your links to different communities; building links and making your information more accessible.

NetVibes

Think iGoogle but much, MUCH better. I love Google and use so many of their services, but I am afraid NetVibes is everything iGoogle could have been and more.

In my opinion, NetVibes has two main uses:

Use it as your browser homepage - with all the information you want to see when you first come online: mail, facebook, twitter, weather, news, blog feeds etc. This profile is private and only accessible to you.
Use it to promote yourself, your company or an interest. Think a combincation of about.me, squidoo and iGoogle. Here is my unfinished public NetVibes profile: http://www.netvibes.com/nivoda

Camerabox

We recently bought a new Canon G12 from Camerabox, and while it is yet to arrive, I can say that this site is by far the cheapest (we looked at many sites and different models), unless you can get your camera from the States, which is even cheaper. Also, they provide a 5 year warranty. Can't wait for it to arrive.

--update--
Two weeks and no camera. Camerabox may be cheap but their customer service is nothing near the level we have come to expect from an e-commerce business. Next day delivery... FAIL. call-back request.... FAIL. promises to fix their mess... FAIL. Buying from them again... NEVER!

Let me know your thoughts.

Remembering 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:28:00 +0000

As part of my new year's resolutions I want to make sure I get more memories, thoughts and ideas down on paper (or in this case, my blog). Having seen the Daniel Kahneman video on the two kinds of happiness - (1) the experience and (2) the memory of the experience, I know that dwelling on the past is the latter, but still, I can't bare to think that when I'm old and grey I will have to rely on my foggy memory alone when remembering the good old days. So here goes, 2010 in a nutshell:

Started the year off in Bulgaria with my family, with an unexpected 19 degrees on New Years Eve. Only 2 weeks later it was minus 10.

Got onto the Manchester Masters graduate programme after a video selection process... luckily they didn't choose us based only on our video making skills; there was a gruelling two-day assessment centre in March as well.

Went to Seattle in April (my first time in the States) and had the most amazing two weeks - a highlight of my time at university. Thank God for the volcano erupting in Iceland - which kept us there for another week.

Wrote my final exams as an undergraduate and then took my lovely Vaivara to Venice on our way to Bulgaria.

Graduated in July with all four of my parents there to see it:

Started the Manchester Masters programme in July and and have so far worked for Love Creative and Expotel.

Lived with 8 of the Manchester Masters in a city centre flat, doing "come dine with me" nights, X-box marathons with Tom and a trip to Amsterdam during our break.

In terms of social networks, since starting the programme, most people I meet have lead to an increase in my professional network on LinkedIn with very little growth on Facebook. I wonder if this means most 'friendships' are made while at school and university?

Spent a lovely white Christmas in Manchester with some of my closest friends (more like extended family):

HD version here

Merry Christmas to everyone and may your 2011 be prosperous, healthy and happy!

How NOT to Promote Your Brand at Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:58:00 +0000

Do not make an advent calendar with codes you have to enter everyday onto your special website where after 24 days of opening 2 calendars with 24 windows each, I win nothing, AND, on the last day you display the message: "sorry try again tomorrow"... there are no more windows!

Dear anonymous hotel chain brand that I shall not name, your efforts to promote yourselves through the festive spirit have failed and I my feelings towards your brand have gone from neutral to negative. Even if one in every thousand calendars is a winner, the structure of this competition means you are making 999 people unhappy for every one person you make happy - not because we all lost, but because of the effort we had to make to find out we lost.

Chocolates would have been better.

Some Interesting Discoveries

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:02:00 +0000

During the past two weeks I have come across several interesting discoveries on the Internet - new sites that are either in BETA or have only just launched (some of these you will not yet be able to sign up to without an invite):

Here's a 10 second overview of each one and why you should check it out:

Datasift

Take all that data out there on Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and loads of other social services, then "sift" and extract only information that is useful to you. Quick Example:

"Datasift can present you with a stream of the Foursquare check-ins at every Starbucks around the world, and then filter them down to everyone with a Klout score of 50 and saying something positive."

Suddenly social media becomes much more measurable, useful as a quick market research tool and data from various sources can be combined to tell one story.

Memolane

Take you entire social media experience and document it on a timeline, which you can then quickly scroll through to find: trips, posts, photos, tweets, videos and links you have shared in the past.

A fantastic tool for storing, sorting and quickly finding anything you have ever shared.

About.Me

One page, a snappy bio, your picture, cool url & all your social networks in one plae. Its the perfect link for your e-mail signature to replace having all your social networks listed.

Think of this as "the profile" - a virtual snapshot of you.

My profile: http://about.me/nivoda

Quora

While the above sites are pretty cool, Quora has so far been most useful. This is a site for asking and answering questions and while there are now a few such sites out there, Quora is perfect if you want to find answers for very specific kinds of questions.

All the early adopters and techies that basically keep sites like Twitter going are on here, answering questions about start-ups, e-commerce, entrepreneurship, funding and other related topics. This site is heaven for anyone interested in technology related businesses and innovations.

Within one day of asking, here are the answers to my first question.

North West Fund

There is nothing technically interesting about this site - just the message its putting across. After a long recession and funding cuts to the North West Development agency (NWDA), the North West is once again providing funding for entrepreneurs in the region. Unfortunately no more grants (like the amazing Innovation Voucher) but still, good to know the taps are open once again. Time to submit the business plan!

Initiative - Clearly A "Dirty" Word

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:30:00 +0000

I have always been a "doer".

Its not that I don't plan, I do, but too much planning makes me anxious and after a while I just want to be in motion, breaking, making, failing or succeeding. Of course I know all those age-old cliches: "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail" and a Bulgarian one which is roughly translated to "sharpen the axe twice, chop once"; however, I am a restless being and usually start 'doing' long before I have any complete plan. Facebook portray this kind of attitude on the walls of their offices (poster, right):

"DONE is better than PERFECT" - In Facebook HQ

What is perfect anyway? Robert Kiyosaki, in Rich Dad Poor Dad, talks about the 80:20 principle. This can be applied to loads of situations, but the one I really like is that:

"You can get 80% done with 20% effort, while the remaining 20% (to get to perfection), requires another 80% effort."

The point I believe he was making is to avoid perfection and rather go with completion (to get more done) because an obsession with perfection leads to nothing being done in the end. Why? Because if you are in a group of 10 trying to do a project with limited time available, perfection looks like this:

- PERFECTION but not completion - as a group you plan to achieve some specific goal, but after 6 months of little... NO... zero progress, you continue to hope that a day will come when all 10 of you magically appear in the same room together, where everyone will miraculously agree to the same project and in the remaining 6 months it will magically materialise. Also, no one will co-ordinate, somehow we will all do exactly the same amount and leadership responsibilities will be divided equally.

- COMPLETION - You take the initiative because time is running out and hope that you can get enough people on board with a charity project which may not be perfect, but it will make a difference.

- PERFECTION but not completion - You find out about an idea which may be perfect given our network and abilities, and you immediately notify the 9 other people it may (or may not) affect with an e-mail that covers every aspect of that idea, even though the idea is likely to still be half-baked and incomplete.

You spend several hours thinking about how to structure an e-mail which covers everything, anticipates any questions and clarifies issues you have analysed and decided may cause some confusion. You then prepare yourself for a ton of e-mails asking for further clarification which then take several hours to read and reply to.

In the process you might get annoyed at people who wrongly accuse you of this-and-that, but regardless, you put a smile on and reply.

- COMPLETION - You have a quick meeting with the people involved where and when it is convenient for them so that you can quickly share the basics and then see where the discussion goes, answering any reservations or questions along the way and you accept that not everyone will want to do this, but that this is fine because there are enough people who are happy to jump on board the ACTION train.

Which approach is more realistic?

I have always used the "80%, NOT 100%" philosophy and believe it is the main reason why I get so much done. It makes it really easy to take the initiative as well because once I like an idea, I just start working on it, worrying about the details as I get to them. Perhaps it is against conventional wisdom but somehow it usually works for me. Of course, sometimes it will fail and you learn from these failures.

Unfortunately, very little will be learned from the projects we don't do. We will continue to plan for the perfect project and perhaps a day will come when we all meet, plan and agree, and then we will be ready but our time together will by then have run out.

Initiative, it is clearly a "dirty" word in some people's vocabulary.

Expotel... Exposed

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 15:47:00 +0000

I can't believe I only have four weeks left at Expotel. Time has flown by.

At first when I started working here, the prospect of having to travel longer every day, no longer being bang shot in the centre of Manchester, and the ever shorter days, made me think of my second Manchester Masters placement as a daunting 13 weeks of work I just had to get through.

Then I met the 'Partner Services' team that has been my second home for the past 7 weeks. I was handed a project which was challenging but also perfectly aligned with my strengths and digital marketing experience. Expotel had clearly thought well and hard about what they wanted me to do here and this initial preparation meant I could just shoot straight into my project.

The first few weeks were all about getting to know the company and the industry it operates in. I was fortunate enough to attend the World Travel Market conference for three days, meet Sequel (our agency) down in London, represent the Partner Services team at the Agency Pub Quiz and go on two Familiarity Trips (MacDonald Hotel and the Red Carnation Dinner).

The perks and benefits list is endless. Every other day we have one of our preferred partners visiting and spoiling us with fruit bowls, lunch, sweets and chocolates... and how many people get 2 Christmas parties organised for them?

As for the work, there is nothing quite like being given a project to do, where you have the support of all the decision makers. Doors, floors and windows - they all open for you and its easy to move from one task to the other without bureaucratic time lags. Every business embracing change should do this - identify the key change drivers and manage them, "laissez-faire".

And while my job was mostly about PayPerClick, SEO and Social Media (three terms I probably use more these days than even "thank you" and "hello"), I have still continued to develop:

Finally got round to some practical PPC experience, learned about "conversion tracking" and got to use Bing's AdCentre as well.
Have been learning about AB-testing and my understanding of e-commerce has gone from an obsession with "getting traffic to visit a website" to "getting that traffic to convert into a sale" - a far more profitable obsession, I have since discovered.

In the coming weeks, I belive my focus will shift from the practice of digital marketing to the strategic planning of their marketing strategy for the future.

A key challenge at all our placements will be to build a legacy but then somehow ensure there are people and systems in place to continue what we have achieved, once we move on.

All in all, I keep feeling that these placments, with the trust and co-operation of our managers, could be more like a consultancy experience than a placement one - what a great way to describe them on LinkedIn or when we start going to job interviews in the next couple of months.

Social Media Optimization and other geeky SEO stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:57:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote my first entry to the 10 Golden Lists on Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Here are some additional notes on SEO to supplement that post:

Think local - Google has developed an obsession with giving you local search results when you search for results in a specific location. This makes sense and is a current window of opportunity while other local businesses adapt. A key part of your strategy, if you are a local business, should be to get a good presence on Google Places and optimise locally:

Make your search keywords include the city/suburb you are hoping to be found in.

Get links from other local sites - they will be more valuable than links from sites located in different countries.

Relevance - a recent observation I have made is that my blog is an SEO nightmare. I do not focus on one topic and for this reason keep confusing the search engines regarding what the purpose of this site is. For this reason, this SEO post is unlikely to ever rank highly in search results, which brings me to my last point.

SEO is NOT everything - I have set up SEO projects on other sites that have done fairly well so I thought maybe I should try something new with this blog. I now get most of my traffic from social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter and I've even started using a new term for this kind of digital marketing - Social Media Optimisation. SMO is an exciting new way of thinking that may never live up to my expectations, but pursuing this kind of digital strategy will give me an opportunity to escape the largely uncertain, ever-changing and saturated world of SEO and possibly gain first-mover advantage in what I believe may well be the marketing medium of the next decade.

Oh and look, a Facebook like button below...

Manchester United - first time VIP

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:55:00 +0000

When I was in my second year at university I worked for a while in the executive lounges at Old Trafford. I remembered wondering why people spent so much money to get fed a meal and watch a Manchester United game, when I though the real atmosphere and excitement of going to a game was going like a regular, true fan - dressed up, drunk, cold, singing and without having to worry about leaving ten minutes before the games finishes just to miss the traffic.

Last night I was fortunate enough to get invited to go to the game, for free, VIP style. I think I now have a better understanding, for the most part, why people fork out over £3,000 per person for a season at the suites instead of the £600 or so needed to get a Stretford End season ticket.

Captain's Lounge - Old Trafford

The decision is, for most people, purely a business one. Get a table of four for £15,000, and you get:

To watch the game, with tasty food, a free programme and gift, entertainment, great seats and a place to chill out afterwards if you are driving and want to wait for the traffic to pass.
A place to host potential clients
Incentives you can offer to employees who perform well
A great way to develop or sustain good relationships with suppliers, key clients or important contacts in your network.
The cost is probably tax-deductable while I doubt you can pull that off with standard season tickets.

I think for any mid-sized company with owners that are Manchester United fans, executive tickets for every United game is well-worth the money.

One thing I would do though, no matter what, I will have a system in place to make sure that there is always someone at my table if I can't make it - too many seats are paid for and empty. Even if its just a little thank you for your business (clients) or hard work (employees), I am sure there are people in your network that would appreciate the gesture - after all, its all already paid for, and for goodness sake, its tickets to a Manchester United game, the greatest team in the world.

30 Day Challenge Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:04:00 +0000

I'll admit it, this year I am yet to the do the 30 Day Challenge (now re-branded to "the Challenge"). I suck, I know. I have however done it for the past three years and although none of the websites I have created through the 30DC are making me millions, I have made money from all of them.

It was interesting for me to observe the evolution of the method used through the SEO of two sites which have similar competition and were created, step-by-step, using the suggestions from the 30DC crew.

The first is: Poker Amateur

The site ranking for the search term "poker amateur" is NON-EXISTENT. I have a very strong feeling that some of the suggestions from the 30DC that year were in fact black-hat SEO tactics (or at least 'not-encouraged'). This may have penalised me because it was ranking quite well for a while.
I realise that LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook & Scribd all rank really well with Google. Although the relevance factor is often missing, I am still convinced it is worth having a profile/articles on all of these - 75% of my traffic comes from these sites.

The second site is: Diamond In Africa

Ranking really, really well. In fact I see it as no1. for the search term "diamonds in africa". Could be slightly different for others.
I believe that 'phrase' is not commercially attractive and my intuition is that people searching for "diamonds in africa" are most probably not looking to buy. However I have two results on the first page of searches for "buy diamonds from africa". Score! Probably should set up some conversion tracking to check were people enquiring about prices have come from.
As our target market and greatest traffic is from clients in the US, I specified on Google Webmasters that the site should be focused on US searches. The odd things is, as soon as I did this I got to no.1 for google.co.uk but went down the rankings in google.com. Odd... Things seem to have returned to normal now though.
Getting about 250 clicks per month, 70% of that traffic comes from search engines. SEO Score! Market Size fail!
I now rank higher than the un.org site for my SEO phrase - somehow I thought I would never take no1 away from that site, but I now know the big guys can be removed from their throne. Amazon and Wikipedia, make way for Nik and his cheesy SEO tactics. (I wonder if I'll now rank for "cheesy SEO")

My question, to anyone willing to answer this is...

"How important is the domain name? If I find a market that can be SEOd (good traffic, little competition) should I pursue it even if I can't get a good domain name for the keyword? Also, I have been reading something about the new Google algorithm liking brands... does this mean its now easier to build a www.brandname.com and optimise it for a different set of keywords?"

Its clear that Diamonds In Africa is a success while Poker Amateur was not. I now know there are many reasons for this but my advice to anyone doing the 30DC is: Think of it as rough guide, not an Internet marketing bible... but as far as rough guides go... the 30DC is pretty damn good.

PPC - The 10 Golden Lists

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 16:58:00 +0000

The second entry to the 10 Golden Lists is on pay-per-click (PPC), on average the most effective and widely used type of advertising on the Internet. I have only recently started using PPC and am definitely a newbie. I will add to this post as I acquaint myself and test out the different platforms.

The most widely used PPC platform is Google's AdWords but for a holistic approach to the topic, I have divided PPC into three categories:

Search Engines - Google, Yahoo, Bing
Social Networks - Facebook, LinkedIn
Content-related - potentially any website on the Internet

As it remains the most important, lets start with the key things to remember about Adwords:

the listings in the red boxes are the one people pay for

Three things decide how good your AdWords campaign is:

(a) Competition: A far greater number of companies will want to have their advert appear when someone searches for a short-tail keyword like "hotel" - just because its a very popular search term. Because AdWords is based on the principles of an auction, the cost to be number one in Google's search results for "hotel" will be much higher than "luxury hotel in Manchester", because competition for short-tail keywords is far greater than for long-tail keywords (like the one above). Google has a keyword research tool which can help you find long-tail keywords.
(b) Quality Score (QS): This is a measure Google uses to decide how good and relevant your advert is for the keyword(s) searches you would like for it to show. The most important factor affecting quality score is the historical click-through-rate (CTR). This makes sense now that I've done a bit of PPC marketing. What better indication of an ad's relevance to the search than how many people click on it. The problem with this is the catch-22 of how to you increase your CTR if your QS is low and you're low in the results - therefore not being able to get a high CTR?

The official info on Quality Score can be found on Wikipedia.

Both 'competition' and 'QS' establish your cost-per-click (CPC), which is the average amount it costs you every time someone clicks on an advert to your site. Obviously you want to get your CPC to be as low as possible and to do this you need to find keywords that DECREASE the competition. To INCREASE your quality score you need to create well-written ads which point to a landing page that is relevant and uses the ad's keywords. Here's a bit more about how to do the latter:

10 ways to increase your AdWords quality score (thanks to RedFlyMarketing):

Split keywords into smaller, more targeted ad groups. Used the in-built keyword grouper tool in the AdWords editor to group keywords into 15 groups of 20 related keywords.
Create relevant ad copy for each group. Create an ad creative for each keyword group using the common grouping keywords.
Optimize Creatives. Keep changing the ad copy, be creative in use of verbs, adjectives and structure; then test to see which ones work best to increase the CTR
Experiment With Matching Options. Check to see if you get a higher QS and lower CPC by using the the 'broad', 'exact' or 'phrase' match for your keyword.
Link Building And SEO. Deep linking on your site using the highest performing keywords (Volume & Conversion Rate). This also helps with the organic SEO campaign. Submit a Google sitemap, make the site semantically coded and correct any navigational issues.
Implement Keywords. For each page implement most of the keywords into the copy.
Split Test Landing Page. I think this refers to A-B testing where you send different adverts to different pages to see where the highest conversion was achieved and then eliminating poor performing pages/ads.
Meta Tags. Add the best performing keywords to the meta tags on each page. Also use the exact ad copy from the best performing ads in the meta description. Use the best performing and most descriptive keyword as the title tag.
Essential Site Pages. Link the site's privacy policy in the navigation (header or footer). Also add an informative “about us” page, a “terms and conditions” page and a newsletter page if you do not already have them.
Make Sure Google Thinks You’re Relevant. Use the Site-Related Keywords tool to make sure that Google thinks the landing page is related to the keywords being targeted.

However, after doing all this, the only number or metric you really care about is Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA). This is how much it costs you, on average, to make a sale using AdWords. Even if you have a 10/10 QS, using keywords which have little or no competition, if people are not buying enough on your site to cover the cost of using AdWords, then PPC is not a viable option (and perhaps think about whether your business is viable as well)

To decrease the CPA you need to test, a lot. Change things on your site, sometimes being subtle, other times with major changes, and observe if they affect your CPA.

E.g. Heat tests to see where people move the mouse on your site, A-B testing and so on.

(c) CONVERSION: this is another topic for the 10 Golden Lists altogether as it applies not only to adverts coming from AdWords or any other PPC channel; increasing your site's conversion is key to success regardless of where the traffic to your site is coming from.

Bing and Yahoo, I have yet to use, but I am sure the subtleties between each one in terms of how they work, are small. Will update this section once I use them or learn more.

In recent times Facebook and LinkedIn have also developed an interesting and unique PPC advertising platform. Interesting because unlike search engines, where relevant ads show based on the phrase searched for, Facebook allows you to target people (500 million or so) based on demographic data. This data includes, A LOT:

age
gender
relationship status
place of work
interests
location
place of study
...and several others

I have used Facebook (although not LinkedIn) and would recommend the following strategy:

Decide on your target market - or even better several different ones so you can test each one.
Create a Facebook page for your brand - unfortunately studies have shown that conversions on your site for clicks coming from Facebook ads is low, so your CPA might be too large to justify Facebook PPC. However, clicks to an internal Facebook page are cheaper and help you to build a community to which you can hope to sell in the long term.
Change your ads often, especially your images. Research has shown that because with Facebook PPC you target a specific group of people, they tend to subconsciously (and consciously) see your advert quite often. People then start to resent or just ignore your ad.
Be creative, you know a lot about the people you are targeting, giving you a unique opportunity to surprise them.
Test, test and a little more testing. Facebook ads are new and the platform is still widely regarded to be inferior to Google for measures such as CTR and CPA. However, Facebook is hiring loads of awesome engineers and it wont be long before they improve the service offering, so being an early adopter could mean that you get to use it while CPCs are still low (like the good old days at Google).

The final place where PPC ads can be show is on any website that has used a service like Google's AdSense to display ads. These adverts are only shown where there is content relevant to the ad, but I do not know that much about this just yet to suggest a strategy.

PPC is easy to set up, measurable, works well for short promotions or to steal traffic from competitors who rank well for certain searches. So it should definitely be a part of your digital marketing arsenal.

As a final thought, while Google is clearly the market-leader in PPC, if you are targetting an emerging economy or countries such as Russia or China, you might want to consider each country's own search giant (Baidu in China and Yandex for Russia)

Case Study Competition in Seattle

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:55:00 +0000

This post is well overdue, and that is surprising because my experience in Seattle this April with Marc, Mili and Richard (three people who have since become good friends) was one of my best experiences while at university.

The story goes back more than a year ago when after an assessment centre selection process, the four of us were fortunate enough to be chosen for the team that would represent the Manchester Business School in Seattle for the Global Business Case Competition.

We endured an entire semester of having our Wednesday afternoons dedicated to training with two of MBS's top lecturers (Paul Cousins and Brian Squire). Training included analysing case studies, watching videos of other competitions, and presenting, presenting, presenting - so much of it that today I can proudly say I actually enjoy it. I still get the adrenalin and the nerves before presenting but I channel them in the same way people do when sitting on a roller coaster or just before a bungee jump - you know it's scary but you love it!

The time-pressure of having to produce a twenty-minute presentation, sometimes in three or four hours, was at first a little too much for us to handle. Working as a team was a nightmare. Marc and I would shout at each other, Mili would question every suggestion we made and poor Richard barely managed to get a word in. Six months later we were still doing all these things, but we had also learnt some valuable lessons about team work, which, had we been a little luckier, could have even won us the trophy. So here goes:

People don't really change or completely overcome their weaknesses - but as humans we are extremely good at adapting to other people's peculiarities and I think that is how we ended up working well together in the end.
First impressions matter but should be readily abandoned as you find out more about the people you work with.
Know your team members' (and your own) strengths and spend 90% of your time utilising those, and only 10% trying to improve their weaknesses.
Always drink with your team - to the point where each of you has an embarrassing story to laugh about the next day. Knowing the social side of your team makes them much easier to work with and even be friends with.

Our training also made us research so many different industries and companies that by now, I think we are all fairly competent at having an opinion or decent conversation about:

Bulmers and the cider market
Disney and the animated movie industry
Tesco and supermarkets in the UK
The low cost airline industry - especially in India
Los Angeles Times and the struggling press industry
Boeing, Airbus and aviation in general - our case in Seattle (slides here, executive summary here)

Then there are the personal lessons, of which there are so many I don't think one blog post will suffice, so I'm going to keep it short and practical, with the hope that future teams may find some useful.

Use Doodle for scheduling team meetings - works like a charm.
Use your slides to support what you are saying - they are an aid. If they have everything on them people will stop listening to you while they read, or give up altogether.
When it comes to presenting, Paul had us repeating the same line a hundred times, presenting another team's slides, he would sometimes clap through our entire presentation to pace us and made us read 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' in an empty lecture theatre to get our emphasis right. But other than that we also learned to:

Speak slowly! I always used to think I was talking slower than I actually was, so its OK to slow down, because trust me, once you see yourself on video, you will realise how nervous talking fast makes you look.
Use pauses to cement a point you have made or to make the audience think about a question you have asked - but it also helps you gather your thoughts.
Watch as many YouTube videos of good presenters as possible and make notes on what they do well - Steve Jobs is a good start.

Use SlideShare to get ideas for slide design - this "you suck at PowerPoint presentation" is a good start.
Make a slide just after your conclusion which has an index of your back-up slides (hyperlinked) so you can easily navigate through them during your Q&A. A logo or symbol on each slide is a good way to link back to the index page as well.
The only part of your presentation worth learning off by heart is the beginning and the end - to make sure you go in and out with a well-prepared BANG... everything else should be rehearsed in such a way that makes you comfortable enough with the content to be able to express it in different ways. This helps if you are under pressure for time or if you forget something, you are flexible to move on without anyone noticing.

Seattle has so many amazing memories. The extra week of "holiday" we got because of the ash cloud was one of the best ever. Another post recalling some of the most legendary moments is going to follow soon...

Additions from the other team members:

Have someone in your team create (what Marc calls) a sheet of lies. This is a very controversial, dubious and yet very effective Exel file that can somehow produce any profit or NPV you require.

Here's an example to illustrate this: After several hours of hard work, Marc tells me we can achieve a $5 million NPV. Disappointed I say: "Can't we somehow have an NPV of $1 billion?"; to which Marc replies: "Nik, I can make you any number you want!".

The sheet of lies was born. The inventor now works in investment banking and to protect his identity, the alias Marc has been used. :P

The Dummies Guide to Ryanair

noreply@blogger.com (Nikolay Piryankov) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:40:00 +0000

Ryanair are great, I love them!

On my 50th low cost flight (sitting on the plane, counting my fingers), I couldn't help but notice all those little things that if you do NOT know about, flying with Ryanair can be a right disaster.

The way I see it, sometimes in life if you do not have enough money, you have to trade some comfort for pleasure. We watch free TV even though we are bombarded with adverts. Similarly Ryanair is like a cheap cinema ticket to a fantastic show, anywhere in Europe, but before the show begins we need to sit through the ads.

So how do you go through the process with as little anger (and cost) as possible?

Lets start with pre-flight:

Dont search for bargains on their site, use SkyScanner to quickly see when the cheapest fares are in the month you wish to travel.
If you are a frequent flyer it is worth having a Prepaid Mastercard because it saves you (as the Visa Electron used to in the past) £10 per person per return flight. Vaivara and I travel approximately 10-15 times a year, so it saves us almost £300.
Always remember to do your online check-in and take your ticket with you - if you forget to and plan to do it at the airport, those slimy Irish folk at the Ryanair desk will ask you for £40.
Pack some lunch - food and drinks are ludicrously expensive on the flight and you will get hungry.
Take an empty water bottle - (Thanks Tom) Obviously you can't take a full one past security but an empty one can always be filled once inside, saving you up to £4 each way.
Not all airports do but some Ryanair flights will have your handluggage weighed and if it is 10.1kg and there is nothing more you can take out, you will have to pay for it to be checked in. BANG, another £35.
One hand luggage means, one hand luggage - so don't even think about hand-bags, laptops, bottles, duty free stuff or anything else really being outside.

Then at the airport:

There's only one major thing to say here and that is - if you haven't flow with Ryanair before dont risk taking too much luggage the first time before you know if your bag fits in their size check (which is smaller than that of all other airlines by the way). If it doesn't you will have to check it in and pay £35.

And finally on the plane:

Try to get on quickly and sit either right at the front or move quickly to the middle because other than at those two sections, you will feel the pain after 2 hours becuause clearly those who put the seats so close together knew they would never have to sit in them.
Don't forget to clap with the rest of the relieved Eastern Europeans when you hear the cheesy jingle and then roll your eyes when they tell you Ryanair is Europe's no.1 airline because it is always on time - well of course they are always on time; they schedule a standard 2 hour journey as a 3 hour one (which makes planning a nightmare because you never know exactly how long it will take).

Love 'em or hate 'em though, Ryanair still rock! I have never had any major issues, all the ones above were lessons I either learned lightly or have seen others learn the hard way.

Any more suggestions, please let me know.