The faltering economy, tanking retail sales and a real estate market rife with foreclosures didn’t keep Ritsuko Miyazaki from launching a ceramic art store.

“I know some people would think now is not a good time. But you never know. Tomorrow may get even worse, and this is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” said Ms. Miyazaki, owner of Clay Mix in Fresno. “So why not now?”

Experts generally agree. Despite a tough economic climate, starting a business now has advantages for entrepreneurs with solid business plans and adequate financing.

“These tough times really force people to practice good business behaviours,” said Melissa Chang, founder of Massachusetts-based Pure Incubation, a business consulting firm. “It helps you persevere and understand that difficult times happen.”

There’s nothing particularly new in this article that I haven’t covered in past posts, it’s just nice to see another bit of press affirming that startup businesses can be successful in a period of economic turmoil.

In related news, this month’s revenue picture is shaping up to be even better than the last. It would seem that my motivation and performance in the business lately has been inversely proportionate to the shape of the economy.

Here’s the chart of total revenue versus goals:

Thanks to August and September’s dismal performance, we’re currently way behind where we had hoped to be goal-wise. However, October was the best month yet, and as I stated earlier, much of October’s revenue came from the establishment of some long-term deals that will continue to bring in good money every month.

Here’s the breakdown of where the money came from:

I have simplified the breakdown chart to show just the basic categories of revenue: direct ad sales, advertising programs (such as Google AdSense or Microsoft AdCenter), sales / donations (Sound Housing Quarterly subscriptions will go here), and contract work (which there was none of in October).

I’m pretty pleased with last month’s mix. The biggest room for improvement is on the sales slice of the pie, which we hope to grow as subscriptions to the Quarterly begin to come in more regularly. Promoting that will actually be one of the biggest goals in the coming month.

So while August and September were lousy, October brought new hope to the prospect of continuing on the path of self-employment. Things are looking up, which is a great motivation to work all the harder and push them even further toward the success I desire.

With this new quarterly report I am taking the experience and insights that I have learned from Seattle Bubble and packaging them into a more user-friendly, compact format than the Seattle Bubble daily news format.

Sound Housing Quarterly marks Thatch Mound’s first foray into direct consumer sales, a new source of revenue for the company. I expect it to take a while to get rolling, but since the only comparable report in the area—The Central Puget Sound Real Estate Research Report—costs twice as much and publishes half as often, I think there’s a lot of good potential for building a subscriber base here.

First up, let’s take a look at the total revenue versus goals:

There are no two ways about it, August and September were really lousy months in the money-making department. The root of the problem is that despite my big plans, I really didn’t take the initiative and get things rolling to the degree that I should have.

Fortunately, this month has been far different, but I’m saving that for another post.

Here’s the breakdown of where the (small amount of) money came from in August and September:

The big increase in the purple “Direct Ads” chunk was a nice addition in September of another regular monthly advertiser. Other than that, there weren’t many bright spots in these months.

Thankfully, there is lots of good news on the horizon.

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.

When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I’m not claiming it’s a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn’t matter much either way.

If we’ve learned one thing from funding so many startups, it’s that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it’s rounding error compared to the founders.
…
Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible.

Obviously I found this article to be pretty encouraging, since a lot of what the author is saying is similar to my own thoughts on the matter that I shared back in February.

Speaking of February’s post, now seems like a good time for an update on my former employer, about which I said the following:

First off, sure, self-employment is risky in a recession, but so is a “normal” job. During the last downturn, my previous employer laid off hundreds of people, and things were going so poorly that many of those who kept their jobs were concerned about the company going bankrupt. Although my job function was electrical engineering, my employer was a manufacturer, and historically manufacturers are some of the hardest-hit businesses in a downturn. Granted, one would hope that they learned their lesson in 2001, but there’s no guarantee.

Well, Genie has now been through two rounds of layoffs this year, and last week’s cuts included a number of engineers among the 500 who lost their jobs—even some in my former group.  Meanwhile, the parent company’s stock has fallen over 80% in the past year, compared to a 45% decline in the S&P 500 (which they are a part of).

So what’s the point of all this?  I guess I’m just saying that when times get tough like they are now, I feel that being “in control” of my own employment actually puts me in a better position than working for “the man” would.  When I’m working for myself my efforts have a direct affect on the success of the business, and that’s the best motivation I can think of to work all the harder to grow the company through a tough economy.

First up, let’s take a look at the total revenue versus goals:

Looks like we’ve hit a bit of a wall, with July revenue coming in right around June’s unfortunately low level. This calls for evasive action. More on that below.

Here’s the breakdown of where the money came from:

This is generally a good breakdown, now we just need to get the volume of every piece to be bigger. Lots bigger.

The revenue shortfall is not nearly as bad as it seems when you measure up the total six-month goal with actual revenue:

You can see that up until July, we were actually still exceeding the overall goal.

With the apparent stagnation in mind, we sat down and mapped out some (hopefully realistic) goals for the next three months, as well as specific methods for achieving those goals. I’ll be sharing those in the coming days.

What about an update on the specific goals I listed last month?

1. Quarterly Newsletter by July 15. - fail
2. Photography website by July 15. - fail
3. Three new advertisers to Seattle Bubble by July 31. - fail
4. One advertiser to The Naked Loon by July 31. - fail
5. Merchandise shop by July 31. - fail

Yup, I failed to complete even one of them. A heaping helping if failure—yum!

I made good progress on the newsletter, but found that deciding what goes into the first one is taking longer than I had hoped. Once I get it launched, future editions will take much less time, since I’ll just be filling out a template.

New advertisers were signed up, but not as many as I had hoped. I may have to invoke the dreaded “cold call” to really begin improving performance there.

I only did a minimal amount of work on the merchandise shop, but part of that work was to assess the money-making potential, which was determined to be quite low, so that’s been pushed down to a lower priority.

As far as goals for August, I’ve got more to say about that than I care to cram into this post, so come back later this week for updates on that front.

We’d appreciate your opinions on these following names. Please vote for which one you like best. If you think you have a better one, we welcome your suggestions!

Here’s our criteria for a name: it needs to be creative, short & memorable; with no specific references to real estate or photography. Although, it does need to sound nice with the words photography and design (for example, having something like “Photo” “Design” or “Studios” appended to the name).

The Naked Loon pokes online fun at Seattle
If you’re a germophobe, a naked cyclist or a burned-out dot-commer, you’re on The Naked Loon target list.

Prepare to be mocked.

Tim Ellis, a Kenmore Internet entrepreneur, brainstormed his travesty hit list of people, places and stereotypes before launching his online satirical newspaper The Naked Loon. Think The Onion, but hyper-local and less crude.

Now if only there were a simple, reliable way to turn media attention into dollars in my pocket.

I’d like to extend special thanks to Noelene Clark for taking the initiative to contact me and for penning and excellent piece. Thanks, Noelene!

Here’s my favorite (available here—at the moment):

Click to Enlarge

Awesome. The Naked Loon at the top of the heap of over a thousand stories.

Update: This one is pretty sweet, too (search link). 6-year-old me on Google News = Pure Awesome.

First up, the total revenue versus goals:

See the purple bar over June? See how it’s not only lower than May, but also lower than April? Yeah, that’s not good.

Here’s the breakdown of where the money came from:

Nothing particularly noteworthy about the mix here, other than to point out that the fundraising drive carried over into June with moderate success, but clearly still not enough to make up for my apparent total laziness on the business side of things.

July will bring some interesting changes, as my wife Jeni will be getting in on the business. With her training in visual art, photography, and interior design, and my experience and contacts in the local real estate market, we realized that real estate photography would be a perfect fit. I’ll be assisting her with my real estate knowledge and also by setting up a website to sell her services.

In order to help me get things moving, allow me to lay out some very specific goals for the month of July.

1. Launch the Seattle Bubble Quarterly Newsletter by July 15.
2. Set up a basic website for Jeni’s photography by July 15.
3. Sign up at least three new advertisers to Seattle Bubble by July 31.
4. Sign up at least one advertiser to The Naked Loon by July 31.
5. Open merchandise shop for Seattle Bubble & The Naked Loon by July 31.

I’ve also got some major improvements in the works for Seattle Bubble, as well as a couple of entirely new ideas that I think have great potential, so I’ll be sure to post updates here as things progress. Hopefully I’ll get back on track in July.