FunAdvice on Entrepreneurship: Jeremy Goodrich

Darren Rowse closed his interview saying, “Baby steps first.”

It was interesting to learn that the famous Mr. ProBlogger started as a humble amateur geek. Of course, we all start from zero, but when we see someone successful, we often forget that. His advice was quite common sense, but I think that is the whole point. Don’t wait for the big secret to reveal itself to you. Get started, even on a small scale. (Photo by leefotos)

This week, there was a comment that I had to delete because it was rude not just to me but to one of the interview guests of the series. It claimed that I better interview “real entrepreneurs” Not sure what she means – I have not interviewed Bill Gates yet, but my guests are those who have built profitable businesses that resonate with who they are. (It is an honor system – I ask, and I trust the interviewees’ response.)

So we continue this Interview With Successful Entrepreneurs series to hear from a young man who has started a bunch of online businesses – some successful and some not. Jeremy Goodrich runs FunAdvice, a popular online Q&A community, and SEO consultation company Asenyo.

1. Tell us a bit about your business and why you started it.

Asenyo.com is a boutique SEO consulting company I co-founded with my wife & business parter of the last eight years. I say eight because it’s been that long since we started our first business in college together and over the years, we’ve sold two of them.

Today, we are profitable and successful in our SEO consulting business, last year, clients of ours were acquired for more than $500 million, which was truly exceptional. In our spare time, we’re nurturing FunAdvice.com, which we’re going to transition to eventually to further reduce our working hours & focus more on living life, rather than working, even if it’s working for ourselves.

The main reason I started FunAdvice was I wanted a community site. Back in 2003, my business partner, Ericson Smith & I, had been working together for a few years, however, we’d never tried a community based site. So given our mutual experience having fun on community sites like WebmasterWorld and Slashdot.org, we put one together.

FunAdvice initially focused on relationship advice – the first five categories were love, sex, marriage, relationships, and dating. We thought that, as relationships are an issue that we all have to deal with in our lives, it made sense to us to focus in on that narrow field. Eventually, we realized our mistake, as people want to be able to ask questions in various aspects of their lives at the one site they frequent. So we now have wide range of categories.

2. What were the three biggest challenges when you were starting off as a new entrepreneur?

The biggest one for me personally was developing the confidence in my skills to push hard enough to bring the business together. In the first few businesses I helped start after an initial success, I’d get shy about looking for new business, which is key to growth. And as a result of my shyness, I didn’t network enough nor ask colleagues enough for assistance on how I should put things together, which would have helped a great deal. For example, my first consulting company imploded in 2001 less than three months after I started it, directly as a result of not constantly being on the lookout for new sales, and being shy about getting referrals.

Second to that, I’d say experience. Some people seem to have a knack for doing it right the first time, and for me, every business I’ve started has taught me unique things. In many ways, starting different businesses to solve different problems has helped me hone and refine an approach to growing an idea into a business which is difficult for a lot of people I talk to that haven’t made the leap to striking out on their own.

Time management has also been an issue for me, while it’s gotten better over the years, I never believe I’m using my time online, at work or doing business as efficiently and as effectively as possible. For example, when I first started out full time on my latest business, I was working sixty plus hours a week, as was my wife & business partner, Widhadh. However, now between us our schedule has shrunk to forty hours a week, each, which is much more tolerable. It’s not that we’re getting less done, it’s that we’re making better use of the time we spend on business tasks. In the next year, I hope to get done what I do now in thirty hours a week.

3. And how did you work through these challenges?

My own personal self confidence improved through a lot of speaking, networking and continued outreach. At my last full time job in 2005, I setup as part of my job several speaking engagements for other staff members to attend. Developing and hosting a talk on my area of expertise wasn’t a requirement for my position, however, it helped a lot with building my confidence to help reach out to people. Since then as a consultant in my company, I’ve been consistently training client staff, holding training sessions and doing more to manage my contacts through email and phone calls. Your network is your biggest asset and anything you can do to increase that network adds to your bottom line as an entrepreneur.

In terms of experience, starting eight different internet businesses has taught me a lot. The form filing of setting up the company through to employee, contractor and IP related issues, nothing helps to get you a well rounded education like walking through the various processes yourself. While I don’t consider myself an expert in building a business, I am confident that I know bits and pieces of most of the common business processes by way of doing. The second thing I’ve done is read a lot. First I read tons of classic marketing books, PR books, presentation books and now I read more management, leadership and varied theme business books to broaden my knowledge base. Even if the case studies in most works aren’t internet companies, there is still a lot to learn that can be directly applied to your online venture.

To get better at time management, I’ve started to segment out my work day into different buckets, generally started to “take the evening off” as in, work till 5 and not return to the computer, and switched to a Mac portable, as well as bought an iPhone. It’s the first PDA I’ve really gotten mileage out of, and the Mac just seems to work better, faster, than my two year old XP machine. Scheduling meetings and “work” on a calendar is also very helpful. By allotting time in advance to various tasks, I can see how my week is going very clearly, and it forces me to schedule things further out, rather than add “just one” extra meeting to an already full work week.

4. What is the best part of being an entrepreneur for you?

The best part of being an entrepreneur for me is knowing the work you do is fulfilling a dream you had and seeing the changes in people’s lives. Making money is nice but I think that creating a business has inherent obligations such as community development, social activism and generally making a positive impact on society as a whole. Too often, I think businesses are excited about making a profit with little or not thought to their social obligations such as leaving the world a better place than that which they found. To me, it’s the chance to both succeed in financial terms and social terms which embodies the entrepreneurial spirit.

5. Any advice for people who dream to have their own business and yet find it hard to make the leap?

If you can, start small and do it part time while you still have a day job. Yes, I know, it’s hard and time consuming to do it that way, however if it’s an exciting opportunity to you then it should be possible to find the time to get things started. Even if you only work on it three to five hours a week, you can get things rolling enough before you take the full time plunge to make sure that the idea is solid, you know what you’re going to do in the market, you know where to start, and you have a three to six month plan.

I’m personally not a fan of formal business plans or mission statements, however it is useful to know what you’re going to spend your time on daily before you take the plunge. That way if you do get things up and running, you’re not scared of the unknown and it is a routine from day one.

Also have in mind goals, milestones and a basic cash flow plan, so you know what targets you have to hit in sales to stay in business, which is ultimately how you have the runway to hit the product or service milestones that you make.

My takeaway

I think once you start your own business, you get in the flow of things, and starting the next is not that much of a wonder. Yet starting eight businesses is amazing, and I admire his courage and energy.

It’s a lot to compete against big bro sites like Yahoo Answers. I checked FunAdvice, and seems like he carved out a niche and a nice friendly atmosphere that are attractive to many.

My best wishes to Jeremy. (Considering his age, I can’t help wondering how many more businesses he will be starting in this life . . .)