Bam Azizi

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Executive Decision Making

bam — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:20:34 -0400

Every business in any industry depends on the ability of it's managing team to be able to make decisive and crucial decisions but there comes a time where a true leader has to put his/her feet down and make THE Final decision. The creative and innovative cycle of any product or service is never ending. You can always come up with a better idea, perfection is at infinite.

Executive Decision making is a quality true leaders are born with. It's the ability to say enough is enough lets make something happen with what we've got or else we're going to lose our chance.

The lack of Executive decision making is truly evident in web startups. They never run out of creative ideas to do with their web sites but what they mostly end up with is not just lost chances but totally wrong products for the wrong target market.

Tell if you've done this before:

You come up with an idea that a small team around you (or a few of your friends) label it "brilliant". You spend countless hours mapping all your ideas together. You start the development process but every other week another new idea hits you and with all excitement you add it to your production queue and push off the launch date by a few more weeks. It's been a year since you started, you were suppose to launch by now but because of all the things you've added you'd need another 6 months to develop. meanwhile you're on sites like mashable and techcrunch and they have just announced a site that is doing exactly what you originally thought of doing. you start crying. you keep telling youmeanwhile most of the blogs can't seem to get enough of the competitor site even though you think their glass is half empty.

Another year passes and you're site is finally done and you're ready to launch but you no longer have just one competitor but 4 other sites have joined the niche market. you contact all of the big blogs and any PR source you can get your hands on but they turn you down and label you as "Just another [blank]", you tell your self i came up with the idea first a little under 2 years ago but now it's prime time is long over, there are enough competitors dominating the market that no matter how much publicity you even get it won't help your cause.

you've wasted 2 years of your life, you've missed yet another opportunity wave and now you've have to go through the innovation process all over again for a totally new and unique idea. The question is "are you going to learn from your bitter experience?"

if this has not happened to you still the same type of question still applies. Are you going to learn from the mistakes many sites are making today?

Executive Decision Making is all about optimizing your opportunities instead of wasting them. It involves sacrifice, it's a hard and risky decision but at least you won't waste 2 years of your life and wonder about it after.r self this site only has half of the features you're going to have.

We do so many things wrong! Why is that?

bam — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:06:06 -0400

First off, sorry for my sudden absence for couple of weeks, normally this time of the year is the craziest for me due to the nature of my businesses. I don't know why the smell of summer has this effect on people and businesses, but you won't find me complaining.
what's interesting about the societies, businesses, and people is that it's a lot easier to patch things up with temporary solutions that more problems than they fix. I seem to be noticing these flaws a lot more than i used to. I was a designer once so i know i still have the open eye to spot the little weird stuff but some of things i see are so obvious that i don't know why they haven't been fixed yet. read on and i'll let you in on some of them...

So far this year i'm finding my self fixing things more than i invent. I've always been a thinker, that's what i do best. You tell me your problems that no one seem to be able to fix and i'll give you several solution you never thought were possible. I invent solutions!

For the last few week, however, i've been working on several project in need of fixing. Not knowing anything in regards to the nature of these projects required a lot of extra work. The more i found out about these helpless projects the more i realized i might not be able to handle the load. They are all too different and located at different location, managed by totally different types of people and not to mention all vary in terms of budgets and forecasting goals.

But without getting into too much details (NDA Agreements) lets talk about the obvious problems i've encountered.

1) Gas problems, since it's very popular these days: cars use gas, a lot!! they have combustion engines with pistons that go up and down, burn fuel to propel the motion so that the car can move. but the technology is not all that different from 100 years ago, sure they've got smaller and more efficient but are you telling me there is no other way for the engine to work on gas? forget about electric cars for this topic, for now.

2) Most people are not leaders, they just don't have it in them yet they insist on being leaders simply because they've got the ambitions for it. Most of these leader-wanna-be's start their own online business you can guest where their business ends. now do tell or even help these people realize the true problems they have.

3) %99.999 of all newly launched web sites (blogs, web 2.0, web infinity...) fail, actually they never get any where even if you don't like to admit you've failed, but if you look deep enough you can figure why you're going to fail, but you never take note of that as something to avoid or to make sure to include. I can tell if a website is going to fail or succeed within 5 min of hearing about it or within 30sec of looking at it!

4) Add yours here...

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Balance of Optimism and Pessimism

bam — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:56:51 -0400

I don't care what people say but being optimistic at all times is the worst thing you can be. If you are optimistic at all times then you are in a state of fully daydreaming. In your mind the underdog always wins; web site traffic pours like thunderstorm; money grows on trees; and stock market always goes up and so on...

At the same time being Pessimistic at all times is equally worse. In your mind you have the worst luck; you can never win; there are too many other people better than you; everything you try to do the opposite happens. People who are pessimistic at all times tend to not do anything at all because they say to themselves "if i'm going to fail then why bother trying!" and my answer is always "but if you don't try, you never know!".

Here is where the balance comes in, both optimists and pessimists are only right about half of the things and in the real business world they fully compliment one another. since examples are the best way to convey a message here are a few of them:

1)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have a web 2.0 idea and when we make it and launch it, within 1 year we'll be like google"

PESSIMIST Would say
"We can never beat or match google so why bother"

BALANCE of the two results:
"It's hard to beat google, but we still have a chance to make good grounds, and what if we never get the traffic we need to make decent money so what do we have to do? lets plan this to the smallest detail"

2)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have an idea and millions of people would want it"

PESSIMIST Would say
"it's a stupid idea because nobody would want it"

BALANCE of the two results:
"What would make a million people want it? and what do we need to consider if nobody wants it? Either way lets put our target getting a 1,000 customers first then we can worry about the next 10,000 and the next 100,000 and eventual million target"

What is the BALANCE?

Balance allows you to see things in perspective, like seeing both sides of the coin, it helps you plan for the best and the worst. Knowing about the worst things allows you to be prepared in case they happen, also knowing there even worse things that could happen also gives you enough motivation to be optimistic about even the little gains. Balance allows you appreciate you gains, your efforts and your life. It's helps you avoid pitfalls and makes every mistake a step closer the ultimate success.

So go ahead and be pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. It's only good for you!

i love problems, and so should you!

bam — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:00:28 -0400

Ever wonder what this world would be like if it was all peaceful, and perfect. No wars, no chaos, no tension and no racism. I personally would never want to live in that world. It's boring, it's static, nothing interesting ever happens.

To me any type of chaos is an opportunity where we can exceed the beyond traditions and challenge the status quo. With chaos comes innovation, solutions and different wants and needs. People are no longer in the same level, they each live for a different purpose with a different perspective on life. In business and commerce there is an entire philosophy around Chaos Theory where financiers leverage off other's misfortune. Now i ask you "can you feel the chaos? are you going to do something about it?

Every meeting i go to, every pitch i hear, and every person i meet talking about their dreams of making it big online, i constantly ask myself, there are so many opportunities out there yet why are people stuck on the same type of ideas? why is it that they cannot see the silver lining with chaos? that's where the gold is!!

Internet is a big mess, nobody can organize it; it's not user friendly; we're still stuck on the stone age HTML output; as soon as one site becomes a little popular all of a sudden 100 others just like it pop out of every corner you can imagine; we read tons of news sites yet don't know who is telling the truth or what side they are on; trendy ideas come and go but the ones that make it mainstream are probably the crappiest of them all; and last but not least we've given the power of influence to a bunch of people who can't decide what clothes to wear ( Arrington, Scoble, Zukerberg, Rose,...) let alone tell us what we should follow or do on Internet. How we got here doesn't really matter, where are we going next is the question you should be asking your self.

The opportunities are all around you, find a chaotic space and make it even more chaotic this seems to be the secret to making a very popular website.

But seriously, find a problem and give it your 2 cents trying to fix it. Do NOT go after ideas that everybody else is also thinking about, no, just find a simple and easy idea and develop it, launch it and promote it. If one idea didn't work then try another one, you might go through 10, 15, 50 or 100 ideas before one really blows up, so keep trying to solve problems. Don't try to make money, money should always be just a side effect.

Solve people's problems first and they will happily give you all the money you can fit into your pockets!

Arrived at a Cross Road

bam — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:25:09 -0400

This week was a crazy one to say the leat. I found out that i've been black listed on twitter because i have too many friends and following even more people which is not ok by a small group of unknown geeks. What's even crazier is the fact that i've become even more popular because i disliked the spam label the black listing people gave me so i went on a ranting. I've been receiving twitter messages, private messages, emails and etc... reacting to my "rantings"

So here i am at a cross road. till now i've been writing about some intelligent and informative articles in which a lot thinking and research goes into and while the readership is growing at a slow pace but the reaction is simply none existent. On the other hand i start talking my heart out by rating about a silly twitter issue and i get not only a lot readership but also a great deal conversation and reaction.

My dilema is i wanted to turn this site into a very smart and resourceful site, but i also wanted to grow the traffic to beyond 100k hits per month by end of July.

I'm going to do some deep thinking this weekend. I have to figure out a way to do both. I simply do not want to lose the respect of the people who have been following me to date and would like to keep them around for many years to come.

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Art of Time Management

bam — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:31:31 -0400

You know the Cliche "Time is Money", now a days seconds are even more money. Regardless of who you are or where live there is only 24 hours per day. The art of time is about putting every hour, minute and second into productive work. So lets do it...

Due to Health lets give our bodies a 5 hour sleep period. That's right 5 hours, you are young and can do this, unless you're not then you can sleep for 6-7 hours max. The point here is that sleep is a good thing, it refreshes your body and with no activity your brain power can rest. It is important to have a great sleep while you sleep because of have i have in store for you.

So we are left with only 19 hours now, so much for 24 hours of productivity! Lets make this 19 hours really work for you. Before you jump into filling up you daily schedule with lots of tasks lets take a step backwards. Look back to the past week or so, what are the most important things you need to for the FUTURE. If you have immediate tasks and responsibilities coming up then they take the higher priority so make a list of them. Now, try to come up with a LONG list of everything you think you should be doing for today. A long list is a very detailed list in case you didn't know. Divide each task into smaller elements, for example, if you are going to write a blog post then dividing it into little tasks mean counting research, inspiration, draft write up, image creation, factualization, link baiting, to finalizing draft and publishing it. Knowing the little details allow you to dedicate a certain amount of time to each task this way if you thought writing a post would only take an hour would not end costing you 2 hours on researching alone. Keep doing this for all the tasks you have to do for the day.

Listing all the stuff in your time sheet is not enough, you have to actually stick to it and perform each of them to the second, so if you assigned yourself with 20 minutes of research as soon as your 20 minutes are up stop the research and move on to the next task. Don't worry if your research sucks, you don't expect to become extremely efficient in just one day did you???

Practice makes perfect! The first a few days are going to be rough but after that your brain and positive energy adjust themselves to your new routine. The trick is not to go back to the old you, it's like quitting smoking for 2 days but picking it up again, you won't live cancer free because of those 2 days.

When your level of efficiency picks up you'll realize that before you were spending 2 hours on research like tasks that were getting you no where to now that you can do resulting research in just 15 minutes. Now just imagine with your new level of efficiency if you had 2 hours to do tasks you normally do in 15 minutes, imagine the glorious results. This is actually how quality and innovation happens. You can apply this to almost any task you can imagine. I personally even analyze my driving, shopping, online surfing, books and magazine readings and everything else you can imagine.

I only started to really care about my time since mid last year and it has done wonders for me in terms of my performance at work, my side projects and running multiple sites and managing couple of web projects. Without managing my time i would have never been able to take care of 2 projects let alone the things i do now!

Time Management is one of those important elements that contribute to any type of success. Manage your time effectively and efficiently and you'll be managing a huge bank account!!!

here are some great resources for managing time that would help you get going:

BOOK - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

BOOK - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

BOOK - Time Management for the Creative Person

SITE - Mind Tools - Time Management

ESSAY - First Things First < Very important Essay

SITE - Time Scheduling and Time Management for dyslexic students

Software - ToDoList or something similar

SECRETS to SUCCESS SERIES - Money Talks & Walks

bam — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:42:37 -0400

It is obvious that business is about managing money. You'd be surprised to know that majority of Online Businesses, web developers, designers, advertisers and bloggers cannot manage money. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why web 2.0 sites go after funding the VC firms look into management and want to see a manager with at least MBA running things.

Managing money is about what you can, cannot and should not buy. Just because you have money doesn't mean that you should spend right away. Sometimes the biggest mistake a starup makes revolves around spending money at the wrong time towards the wrong thing.

Managing Money is about being smart and thoughtful with money, here are a few ways to be smarter with money

Expenses

No matter who you are or what you do you've got expenses whether you like it or not. Being smart with money would allow you to analyze your expenses, take out the unnecessary ones or bargain for better deals. For example, there are hundreds of options for having a cell phone plan, but researching a little about you talking habits allows you select the most appropriate plan that over time saves you money. You can apply this to cars payments, office lease, Internet and tv bills, computers equipment, starbucks coffee, lunch and dinner.

Employees

If you are working on your own then you are your own employee and not your own boss. If you are in the online business and you're making money then the chances are that there multiple employees working in that company. Most startups, as soon as they come in contact with money they go crazy with hiring thinking that the same money they're making this is going to continue to next year and year after that. Not so fast, in the online work you can be on top one months and at the bottom by years end. Never estimate or speculate when it comes to online. Keep you team small, and hold on tight to your money.

Hosting

Hosting can be very cheap or very expensive, but did you know that it doesn't matter what kind of hosting you start with for as long as it is flexible enough to grow as you grow. If you have a blog, or thinking of starting one, think for a second what is your blog going to be, if it's a hobby blog then a cheap shared hosting with $5-10/month hosting is good enough, but if you intend to really promote the site and make a bit of income on the side while holding your day job then stay away from shared hosting and go with a small Virtual Server for $30-50/month and as the traffic to your site grow so can your server resources this way you don't have to spend more that you need.

I know a few startups that before they even had a decent application on their hand they were going around shopping for servers and co-location options. As a startup stick with small, go with a small Virtual Server, this way if you hit big you can easily upgrade to fully dedicated servers and multi server with load balancing options but don't blow the money you don't have right from the get go, what if you're doesn't pick up at all, all that money wasted!!!

Marketing

Every business, website or blogs needs to be marketed otherwise how would people find out about it. But did you know that in this day and age the most effective marketing doesn't actually cost a penny? all it costs it time! in the next article i will be talking a great deal about this.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but what about creativity?

bam — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:05:41 -0400

As a designer i was trained to look past the beauty and aesthetics of any given project but for me to believe that beauty has nothing to with the attention and respect a design gets would require the entire world to be educated to look past beauty as well. For as long as people/businesses believe beauty and aesthetics equal to quality and performance who am i to go against the tide, yet i still do it because i BELIEVE!!!

I was reading couple design magazines the other day, Communication Arts and Print Magazine, each month they select a series of project dubbed as "creative and inspiring" and showcase them in their magazines. I enjoy looking at them and depending on the type of projects i have i may even get inspired by them but i couldn't help notice that from a functional and real creativity point of view almost all of the featured projects where severely flawed. Nothing is perfect in this world and i'm the first to admit that but these magazine are the primal voice in advocating real creativity yet many of the featured projects are based on beauty.

The best type of design is when you don't notice it at all!

Our biggest problem is that we don't really know what the definition of CREATIVITY is, and we can't help but to confuse it with beauty. I follow 15 web design and CSS gallery sites among hundreds of other feeds in my RSSFeed, each day i get a list of some 50 sites that are chosen by the editors of the site based on their beauty, most of them are not functional and if you look a bit deeper into their HTML code you'll also realize that everything is disgustingly put together and there is no more room for flexibility and expansion. What these gallery sites don't realize is that they are influencers and the new designs they publish inspires many other ones. In calculation if 9 out of 10 sites showcased is beauty without creativity and functionality and those 9 inspire another 20 sites to be the same then you do the math, that's right it's no wonder why this Internet is so chaotic, nobody can organize it, nobody can categorize it, nobody can help but to make it even worse than what it is now!

To me beauty is when i look at a site and say "hmmm, that's nice but how do i find the information pages" but a creative site to is when i say "i'm glad i found this useful site, lets bookmark it!"

a creative site can be very beautiful, sometimes the simplest sites that have no graphics or images are more beautiful than the ones packed with color, texture and images. It's how you use design to help people find the right material that ultimately makes you creative. Unfortunately we are creative so that people can notice our designs first, everything else is secondary!

These are the sites that keep advocating beauty for blogs rather creativity:

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://performancing.com/
http://www.copyblogger.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://cssmania.com/
http://cssremix.com
http://www.webcreme.com/

How to make a Sticky Brand Name?

bam — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:45:32 -0400

We use names to identify with People, object and subjects. Brands names are basically the names that have become popular. To come up with is rather simple, if you want to name a baby all you have to do is to go to a baby names website and pick the one you like best, but making brand names are not only tough in practice but even tougher from a scientific point of view. Brand names are in fact scientifically made, coincidentally or not.

The Logical Definition of Brand Names:

Brand Name = Name + Brand Positioning + Strategy + Marketing

Naming:

No matter what your business is everybody needs to identify you some how. But just having a name is not enough, your name should be easy to read and understand; it also has to be memorable and friendly.

Unique names tend to be special since they are new words people have never heard before and any sort of definition you give to it has the tendency to stick. The biggest problem however is unique names tend to be easy to forget unless you have the resources and money to keep repeating it until it becomes a part of natural language. It's hard to come up with unique names, you can mash up a few alphabets together but names also have to make sense. Web 2.0 sites have exhausted the idea that a misspelled word is still a unique name, in my opinion if there is a spelling error in a name it just shows the dumbness of its creators. Flickr was a clever name because it was among the first but every other similar name that came after was really dumb and since the idea was no longer unique and clever it lost its appeal.

How to find a good name?

To find a good name first make a list of keywords. By keywords i mean words that mean want your name is trying to represent. Categorize each keyword into definition groups, so if you have a whole bunch of keywords but 5-6 of them basically mean "inventive" then create a group called "inventive" and put all the keywords associated with that meaning under that group. Next find as many COOL words that are also synonymous with "Inventive" by looking into thesaurus part of dictionary, also don't forget to look into other languages to find cool translations.

When you have lots of words that seem to be cool enough start the word play. Playing with words involves mixing up words that are in the same category or in the contrasting category, manipulating words, cutting words into pieces and matching them with other pieces from other words. The list goes on. The goal is to come up with at least 50 new words.

To make sure your new names are easy to read try to read them out loud your self and ask others to read it out loud as well. If you find that you have to correct others in pronunciation then there is something wrong with that name. Forget fixing up words at this point. you have lots of names to go through. The words that pass the "read" test move on to "understandable" test.

To see if your new name is understandable, ask people to see if they can guess what the each word suppose to mean. Better yet, ask them what is the first thing that comes into their mind. Narrow the list down to those words that convey the some what original meaning.

You list should be very short by now, i'm guessing we are down to about 5 to 10 from 50. You next goal should be to narrow it down to 3. Sometimes it's a matter of taste or a hunch, no matter how you decide to narrow down the list the important thing is that you as the new owner of the name can totally relate to them name.

When you have you top 3, it's time to do some more research. If your name is going to be a global player then it has to have safe meanings in all of the popular markets. I have my own way which is a proprietary way used in the industry and i can't disclose it yet, i can't bite the hand that is feeding me. But i will give you an example, There is a clothing company in Canada and it's called ROOTS, when the Olympics was held in Australia, ROOTS was the clothing sponsor for the Canadian Team, Little did they know in Australia ROOTS means having sex. The ROOTS name was ridiculed all over the world, it was a disaster for the brand name because it was opening locations in Europe and Australia and after what was thought to be a great investment ended up forcing the company to abandon its plans and invest in only North America.

Back to conclusion, After you've done your research on all your top 3 names then now is the time to pick one. But before you pick that 1 special name consider the following:

make sure .com domain of that name is available
finalize any changes to the alphabetical structure of the name
search the trade marks database to make sure the name is available
search google to see if anybody else is using the name and what are they using it for
make sure the name has a clean, safe and trusting meaning

Now you have a name, good luck!

Brand Name = Name + Brand Positioning + Strategy + Marketing

How to become strategic

bam — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:51:30 -0400

Your success in anything you'd like to do is dependent on strategy. Strategy is not about the end result, nor is it about goals or targets. Strategy is basically about HOW you're going to get results, WHAT you need to do, and also WHEN, WHERE, WHY of everything, and last but not least WHO are you really doing it for?

So lets make it quick and sweet:

Create a road map of getting to your results first
Find the shortest distance between each step
Seek helpful link, resources and connections to help you achieve results for every little step
Measure Everything, if you don't know how your strategy is working out you won't know how to improve
Measure Twice, Cut once! don't just deploy an idea as strategy consider the pros and cons and readjust the idea then turn it into a strategic move
Listen to people, blogs, media and everything else! you don't have to act on everything they say but they can give you some great ideas
Changing strategy or approach is not a weakness so if you face road blocks then it would be a better idea to change the strategy for that process
If facts don't fit the theory, chance facts! Albert Einstein

Strategy is about clarity; it's about confidence and risk taking. To give you an idea, every time i'm driving around in Toronto, which is full of traffic, i set a strategy for my self on how i'm going to get to where i want to go in the shortest and most efficient amount of time. I basically have memorized the map of Toronto and i can visually imagine it, since i don't have a navigation system. I've done this practice so many times that now a days i do them automatically without thinking, it has become naturally apart of me.

I know the concept of strategizing for every little thing in your life is not only hard but agonizing but after a while when you get comfortable with it you'd wonder how you lived without it.

Now, as my job i have to be on top of strategy. I'm constantly doing consulting jobs for web project, businesses where some have funding and most don't, if i screw up somewhere along the development rout the whole project could go up the flames. I wasn't like this all my life, in fact when i was a teenager i could not understand the concept of time management, planning, consistency, and organization. I was a total mess, but something changed and i discovered new joys of life which were Communication Design, Branding and Strategy and they changed me forever.

Let me know your own thoughts, or if you are strategic in a different way!