“Maverick Business Adventures” – A startup Journal
Monday, August 13th, 2007Want to see a brand new start-up built from the ground up? Keep reading and I’ll be exposing it all…
After posting and mentioning my idea for “Maverick Business Adventures” I got really excited by it again. I went back and looked at my idea journal and I’ve been kicking this around since 2005! (Ugh!)
So now I’m going to REALLY do something about it…
I’m going to publicly (right here) state that I’m going to start-up this business by January 2008 or sooner. You’ll get a front-row seat for the successes, failures and everything else that happens along the way. But in order for me to spill the beans about my business plan, confidential mindmaps and other stuff I’d normally keep close to the vest – I have a proposition for you.
If you’ll help by chiming in with your opinions and take an active role in “jointly” creating this project – I’ll share it all with you.
Deal?
Okay cool…
The first thing I typically do when I get a project idea is whip out a piece of paper and start creating a Mind Map. I just start brainstorming what’s in the project, how it’ll happen, who will do it, the pieces of it, etc.
Here’s what I have on my first one:
If you open it up, you can see I have a couple questions up in the air about how to charge for possible memberships, staffing issues, dealing with the adventure outfitters, hiring/bringing in “marquee” speakers, bringing in recurring revenue (which is important) and so on. But this is just the first incarnation. (Comments are definitely welcome – what do you think I should add, take-away, etc?)
Next, I decided to create a survey to find out from my list if this is something they might be interested in. I’m going to be mailing some of the list this week to get results. But do me a favor and take this quick 7-question survey while you’re checking it out.
For some reason a project seems to get more exciting to me when I have a cool logo or design attached to it. Now this is an optional step and if you were on a shoestring budget I might not even recommend it. Check out the contest I have running here for a logo.
You can see some of my comments and the 3 I’m most partial to so far are these – let me know what you think.
Logo Option #1
Logo Option #2
Logo Option #3
(Side note: Sitepoint contests are an awesome resource if you want pretty much anything from a website to a logo designed. You put out a contest and artists will compete for the prize. The coolest part is you see completed work not hope for something that will fit.)
Another aspect I’ve been playing with is a tagline (now this is totally optional for a direct response company) but I thought it might be cool here.
Here are a couple I’ve thought of…
“The New MBA” (Actually my friend and fellow adventure-lover Cindy Cashman came up with this one)
“The Fun MBA!”
“More fun! More profits!”
“Crazy Fun! Crazy Profits!”
I’m sure you can do better. Let me know if you got one.
My goal is have the first trip going in the first part of 2008 and you’ll see how it develops since I’ve made this commitment pretty public.
And I’ll be giving away Internet Lifestyle caps for the most useful post and for the best tagline help. And if you are want to help out in some way and join the “Maverick Business Adventures” TEAM I’d love to hear from you.
