DrankBank.com Blog

Learning from Charlie Hoehn

2009-04-08T13:52:00.004-04:00

Here, Charlie Hoehn video blogs about surprise marketing.

In our last post, I wrote about a tactic DrankBank used that I thought would surprise people. I cut out pieces of paper with our URL (www.drankbank.com) written on them and taped them to all the monitors in the four biggest computer labs at the University of Michigan. First of all, I thought this was a clever form of surprise marketing. I hadn't seen anybody else ever try it and it certainly wasn't a standard way to get people to your site. I also thought the second large advantage to this plan, was that people who would see it were already sitting down at a computer. I figured that a person was more likely to go to DrankBank if they read or heard about my website when they were already sitting at a computer, than when they were not sitting at a computer.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the way this worked. As I said in my last post, we doubled the amount of direct traffic we got even though some of my little stickers got torn down. A few people even commented to me in person that they thought it was ingenious and/or clever.

However, it was another tactic I used that many more people have commented on. Over the last week, many people have mentioned that they went into a bathroom around campus, and they saw DrankBank.com written on the stalls, right next to confessions, poems, jokes, and other things that people like to graffiti.

I don't know if graffiti-ing bathrooms got more users to my website than taping stickers to public computer monitors, but for the small sample I've received feedback from, writing on bathroom stalls was much more remarkable.

What we’ve been up to…

2009-04-03T12:41:00.003-04:00

For the last few days, DrankBank has been focusing on its marketing efforts. We have a tiny marketing budget but still think we can do a good job. We're relying on word-of-mouth marketing to get new people to our web site, and we think this will be advantageous for us. If the content DrankBank provides is remarkable enough for people to tell their friends about it, we will be successful. On the other hand, if we just buy a ton of advertising space, we might get a lot of traffic to our site at once, but it may or may not be sustainable.

So as I said, we're focusing on providing great content and encouraging all of our early users to tell their friends about DrankBank. We're also trying to make the actual act of marketing the website remarkable in itself. What I mean by this is we're trying to market the site in ways people haven't seen before, or in ways that the actual medium we market through is worth talking about. To do this, we've been advertising DrankBank in some creative and subtle places to drive people to our site.

One of our creative marketing tactics is as follows: I printed out about 300 little copies of DrankBank's web URL (www.drankbank.com). Then I went to the four most popular computer labs at the University of Michigan and I taped our web address to the frame of the monitor of every computer in these labs. A couple days later, many of the tags are still there and we saw a 100% increase in the direct traffic (meaning people who just opened their browser and typed in DrankBank.com) to our web site.

Earlier I mentioned asking our users to tell their friends about DrankBank. I ask everyone I know who uses DrankBank for one simple request—to update their facebook status or twitter account to http://www.drankbank.com . Over the last month, we've had about 60 people change their status, and this has singlehandedly driven as many as 200 users per day to our site.

If you use DrankBank and haven't updated your status, please update it for us. Do it as frequently as you feel comfortable, whether that's once a day or once a week. The more you do it, the more times it will come up on people's news feeds and the more DrankBank will grow.

But I Don’t Have Any Money?

2009-03-31T14:30:00.003-04:00

Talking to other aspiring entrepreneurs who have not launched a company yet, one of the most popular questions I get is, "How did you get the money for this?"

Of course, they're not really interested in how I raised the money for my own company, but for how they can raise money for their own company. The first thing we had to do to gain any sort of credibility was write a business plan.

Writing a business plan opened up a lot doors for us. We were able to make serious pitches to Angel Investors. We applied to various business plan competitions. And we also applied to summer programs that pay you to work on your start up. All of these avenues are great ways to raise money, but we needed a business plan first.

I'm not going to lie to you. There are other great ideas at these competitions, so prepare yourself. Practice your elevator pitch, have a clear vision for who your customer is, how you will make money, and how you will implement your operations.

DrankBank fumbled with our business plan the first time we wrote ours. It was rushed, vague, and incomplete. The major mistake we made was writing the plan for the competition, instead of writing it for ourselves. We just wanted to get something down on paper so that we were eligible. If I had to do it again, I would start earlier, and I would focus on writing it to truly define our own vision. I would write it to examine if there actually is a market for my product. I would write it to do research on whether our revenue streams will be strong enough to support our company. I would not write it to just get words down on paper and hopefully impress some judge.

The second thing I would do differently is look for personal advice from key faculty at my university. When I first started writing the business plan, I didn't look for faculty to help me. I did not have connections to any faculty that I thought would be willing to help. I didn't even think there were any faculty that would want to help us in the first place.

For later drafts of our business plan, we reached out to the resources that our university provided for us. No matter how small, there are usually some resources for entrepreneurship if you're in college right now. By asking these people for help, you are networking very effectively. Most of the time, you are working alongside successful entrepreneurs who have now dedicated their time to mentoring new entrepreneurs. As you work with them, hopefully they will see the passion and innovation you have, and maybe they will put you in touch with the right people or be willing to help you again in the future.

Amar

Conception of DrankBank.com

2009-03-29T12:50:00.003-04:00

Lex and I turned 21 pretty close to each other, so we started going to the bars together as soon as we could. At first, we were dropping $30+ a night on each of our bar tabs, and we quickly realized that this was not feasible on a college student's budget.

We looked for a website dedicated to information about drink specials. It was such a simple concept, but we quickly found out that no one had done it successfully on any sort of national scale. Right then and there a business idea was created. But an idea was only the very beginning.

The first thing we had to do was write a business plan. Next, we needed to raise money, develop a website, collect information from bars about their drink specials, and then we had to market ourselves so people would come to and stay at our site.

I'm saving all the details of the various phases of our business for later posts where I will go into more detail about all of them. Right now, I want to start on the first step for us--creating a concept.

To come up with a concept, Lex and I examined our daily lives, asked ourselves what product or utility would be useful, cool, or make our day to day lives easier, and then we went out and tried to build it. In my experience, this is the best way for a person to come up with ideas for a venture. Look for a product that you wish you had, and if it doesn't exist, then go out and try to create it.

For me, coming up with an idea is also a pretty passive process. I could be reading Seth Godin's blog, have the TV on in the background, be G-Chatting with a friend, and I'll simply let my mind wander. I have pretty bad ADHD so I will get inspired by random things that seemingly have no connection at all. But, it works for me, and I encourage you to come up with your own process for formulating ideas.

I want to clarify that I'm not saying hard-core brain storming sessions are bad; they're just not for me. I AM saying that almost all businesses have to fill a need. And I find it easier to come up with a business idea if you look into your own life and your own needs for inspiration.

By looking to your own needs for a concept, not only is it easier to come up with an idea, but it's easier to both prototype and market your business/product.

As model customers, you and your friends/colleagues can supply constant feedback to the product development process, and thus make it easier. By inventing a product for yourself, it's easier to anticipate what customers want, it's easier to test and iterate different versions of your produce, and it will be easier to market your product.

The concept of a business is very important, but it's only the first step. After you create a viable business idea come the really hard parts, which I will talk about in my next few posts.

First Blog Post

2009-03-28T14:13:00.001-04:00

Welcome to the Official Blog of DrankBank.com.

My name is Amar Anand. Lex Cooke and I are the two co-founders of http://www.drankbank.com.

DrankBank is a website the lists information about the best happy hours and drink specials in cities across the United States. DrankBank is also a wiki in that people can add and edit information on the web site. The more people that use it, the better it becomes; kind of like wikipedia, but for drinking.

This blog will be used for a variety of things including (but not limited to):

-Updating our users about current and future changes to DrankBank.com
-Documenting our successes and failures as Lex and I start our first venture.
-Advice for young entrepreneurs in (or just out of) college

I hope you enjoy it.

Amar