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However, what happened is that freelancers and contractors adopted our site quickly as a place to get new business.  It is nice to have all these users, but they want us to make them more money. Easier said than done. Everyone wants something for nothing. Make me some money. I’ll give you $5 if you give me $10 back. That’s good business practice, but it’s extremely difficult to achieve which is why most businesses fail. It hard enough to do that for your own business. To try to do it for thousands of other businesses is even more difficult. Some companies succeed at it, but most fail.

So we put out two surveys. You can view them here: www.skillwho.com/survey.aspx and www.skillwho.com/survey2.aspx. The results were clear. Our users want more leads, but most of them can’t afford to pay for them. Our users want a free website that sends them regular business. Well, if Craigslist, one of the worlds largest websites isn’t able to meet that need, how can 2 guys working part time achieve that? It’s a tough problem.

One of the things that I’m good at personally is marketing, particularly online. I can take someone’s service and present it in a way that is simple and compelling to potential customers. For example, small businesses often list what they do, without effectively communicating the benefit, which is all people care about.  So let’s take a guy that does websites. He may list the features of his service like hosting, copywriting, graphic design, CSS, HTML, etc. But most people need websites to  make money. This website designer would get a lot more customers if his primary message was: websites that increase sales and generate more customers. Sounds simple and obvious, but most business owners miss that crucial twist: attaching features with benefits.

I think we could use our skills to help small businesses, freelancers, and contractors get more customers, not just from SkillWho.com, but from the web and community at large. But we can’t do it for free. There would need to be fees associated with the services. Challenge according to our survey results: People 1. are skeptical of everything 2. don’t believe they could afford it even if they wanted it 3. want it free.

Although 14% of our users did say they’d be willing to pay for such services. If we could get 25% of them on a monthly service, that would be a good start. Once they start seeing results, more customers, others would jump on board.

If we become a marketing services company instead of a community, it completely changes our business model. And it’s not what I originally intended the site to be. We’d still keep the community up, but it would be secondary to the marketing services. The other option is to continue with the features I originally intended the have and hope the community adopts it. That’s probably  more speculative though. Only about 8% of our users had any interest in talent contests with prizes. The rest just wanted leads for free. I am seriously considering trying the marketing services model. It’s a lot of work to get something like that up and running though. We would need to be absolutely certain that it would be profitable for us and our customers. We’re working on the details of the plan right now.  More to come.

It also includes a better logo. It was an interesting exercise to test various logos with focus groups of friends and family. Out of about 10 different logo designs, almost all of them received equal votes. There was little consensus, almost as if a logo is just personal preference. After lots of discussion people started to revise their votes and they centered on the logo we ended up going with.

We plan to launch some new features soon (as always). In the meantime, if you have any videos or images of your skills to upload to the site, we now have a great community feature called “Talent Show” for you to showcase your skills and pursue your passions.

Exciting news! (Well, for us at least). SkillWho.com is now more valuable and entertaining than ever. Now members can upload videos of their skills and talents. Also, in the talent show section of the site, members can view, vote, and comment on the skills of other members. Soon we’ll be having competitions as well.

To upload a video, from the MySkillWho page after logging in, click the “Manage Media” link on the left had side. Then select “Upload Video.” You’ll need to have skills in your profile to upload a video.

More features using multimedia will be coming soon too! Can’t tell you exact what though. It’s top secret.

That doesn’t mean that we need to abandon all hope though. We can always work full or part time at our regular jobs and pursue our passions on the side. One of the benefits of SkillWho is that it is an outlet for people to showcase their skills, talents, and passions. Sometimes we can make a little extra money on the side from our passions. Sometimes it’s just something we enjoy. SkillWho was designed to enable people to market those skills or just share them with the community. It’s also a place for people to meet others with a complementary skill or one they are seeking for a specific project.

My greatest personal passion is music (closely followed by surfing, travel, and Sunday afternoon naps with my wife and bulldog on the couch). I play guitar, piano, bass, and drums. I write and record songs. I don’t have time for a band though, although I did produce an album on my own (see mendism.com). I’m also an avid world traveler. Been to over 20 countries and lived on 3 continents. I’ve never really made any money with these passions though, but I still find them fulfilling. Luckily, I actually also enjoy building websites, online marketing, and business start ups. I find it exciting and a great outlet for creativity. So that’s what brings home the bacon for me. The purpose of my sharing my personal passions is just to show an example of how it can work so you know that I’m not just preaching without having practiced.

Best Ways to Pursue Our Passions?

1. Just do it and start today! Don’t procrastinate until a later time in life. The “perfect time” may never come.  Make now the perfect time.

2. Start by writing out your goals and a plan on what to do. Maybe do some online research on what others are doing in that field.

3. Make a website. Doesn’t sound that important in the beginning stages, but there’s something about making a website that makes your pursuit official. It’s like opening a store front. And it’s a concrete reminder of your goal.

4. Tell your friends, family, and colleagues what you’re up to. You’ll get lots of support from your friends who will be excited for you and they’ll cheer you along.

5. Have a launch party. Whatever you’re doing, celebrate the start of your journey.

6. Work on it every day, even if it’s just for 5-10 minutes.

7. Persist until your goals are achieved.

8. Regularly update your written plans and goals.

9. Fail a lot. The most successful people are those that have failed the most. They swing hard at the most pitches and every once in a while they knock it out of the park. Embrace setbacks as steps forward in your wisdom and your journey. Learn from them and adjust.

10. Have fun. If you’re not having fun, then what’s the point?

These are just my personal opinions on pursuing our passions. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to some people.

-Aaron Mendes, CEO SkillWho.com

Took us a few months to move the site because neither one of us knows a lot about setting up servers and hardware firewalls. Ran into lots of headaches so we finally hired someone to set up the hardware firewall and multiple IPs for us. Cost us $130. Money lost by not doing that in the first place? $750. Lesson learned.

Now it’s on to implementing video uploading, sharing, and viewing for our users.

My business partner, Paul, has the same “glamorous” life, such as cleaning out databases, re-installing SQL Manager when it crashes, and analyzing dozens of daily error reports. Paul also reads and responds to customer service emails. Did I mention he programmed the entire site himself?

Between the two of us we’re programming, design, customer service, accounting, operations, sales, and marketing for our site www.skillwho.com. We can’t afford to have people do all these things for us. Not in the beginning at least. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, started building computers in a garage. Sergey and Larry from Google started in their college dorms.

I believe that one of the greatest parts of being successful is looking back on the path and story that got us to where we are now. If it was handed to us on a silver platter then it’s not as interesting or as fulfilling as building a billion dollar empire from a garage.

I’d like to be able to spend more time on business strategy, but little things seem to take up a lot of my “CEO” time. For example, we’re trying to move from an outsourced server to our own servers in a data center. Guess who has to back up and FTP 30 GB of data from the old server to the new one? That’s right, the CEO. Takes hours and hours. Could I pay someone else $10 per hour to do it? Sure. Do I trust them with server passwords and access to 2 years of programing and customer data for 35,000 members? Nope. I’d rather do it myself than take the risk. Once we have some employees with established trustworthiness, then I’ll let them move 50,000 files from one place to the next.

Something that I life has pounded into me is that success takes time and I must be patient. Paul and I both still have full time jobs, so we can only work on the site 5-10 hours each per week. More than half of that is day-to-day operations. So we’re only left with 2-3 hours per week for programming, product development, and marketing.

It’s been about 2 years since we started the business and it’s been live for about 1 year. Had we been able to focus full time, we’d probably be 5-10 bigger than we are now. Why don’t we just raise investment capital? Well, that’s another blog.

I should mention though, that founding a start up is also fun, challenging, exciting, and fulfilling. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. You get to build something from scratch that’s all yours. It’s like working on your own house instead of that of someone else, or holding your own child instead of a stranger’s.

• SkillWho (www.skillwho.com) was started to enable people to share and find skills and talents within their social network (did I mention it’s all free?). For example, if I was looking for a piano player for my band, the first place I’d look would be friends, then their friends, then I’d look online. Same with an accountant, contractor, doctor, etc. It’s all about referrals from someone we can trust. SkillWho.com exists to make that easier.
• SkillWho enables members to create a profile that lists their bio, skills, connections, media, and other info. Members can view the skills and talents of their social network and share their own. There are also various community tools for networking, socializing, meeting others, and sharing/viewing  displays of others’ talents.
• Paul, my business partner, and I started the site in spring of 2007. We spent 9 months developing, then launched the beta site in May of 2008. We’re still in “beta” until some important features are released.
• In our first few months 10,000 users joined the site and now we’re at about 35,000 users. Our site averages about 500,000 pageviews per month, which we have plans to grow 10-fold within 6-12 months. We’re self-funded and cashflow positive, although Paul and I don’t take salaries yet.
• Some primary features of our site include:
  • Social Networking
  • Groups
  • Discussion Forums
  • “Talent Show” where users can share, view, and rate videos and images of talented members (coming next month).
  • Online Profiles with Members’ Skills, Bio, and Media (images / videos) of their skills, their network
  • Members can recommend other members for their skills
  • Job Board where members can find jobs in their local area (coming this month)
  • Other top-secret features we can’t talk about until we’re further along; don’t want our competitors to catch wind
• We’re currently in the process of moving our site to our own servers because we like having the control. Cloud hosting is all the rage, but I’m not impressed. Dedicated servers are still faster than clouds and speed to me is more important than rapid scalability. I don’t expect to become Facebook overnight.
• Our primary goal is making the site more valuable and entertaining for visitors. We also have some viral growth strategies up our sleeves, so keep your eye out for updates!