Nils Hammar, online.
My great grandfather was a Swedish farmer, who ruined his back trying to support a hungry family of eleven. I believe he would have been disgraced if he saw me today, as I was struggling with a potato-patch close to our summer house. I had no idea where they were hiding.
This weekend an old friend and business partner is getting married, and I’m flying back to Sweden for three days of celebration. The occasion made me remember the startup we both were involved in setting up - Ljungskile Fasardrenovering. In English, I guess the name would translate to something like “Chesterfields Carpenters”. We specialized in painting and renovating old houses on the Swedish west-coast.
I learned two things from this experience. First of all, I realized that I’m completely retarded when it comes using my hands. I can’t even paint a simple wall without messing it up, or falling down, or getting abnormally tired. My business partners realized this even earlier than I did, so after 3 weeks we parted.
I also realized that there’s a huge demand for cheap professional services, which is far from being met by the current suppliers, at least on the west-coast of Sweden. These kind of business are safe bets for any entrepreneur (who likes to work REALLY hard) not only because of the untapped market, but also since you’re not up against Internet super stars from all over the world.
I attach the flyer we used to get our business. For one day, we drove around in my fathers Volvo, pushing these down any mailboxes we could find. We did say upfront that we used unqualified students as labour (=ourselves), but that didn’t stop people from contacting us. Ljungskile Fasadrenovering HB was booked for the whole summer, and made a healthy profit. I didn’t see much of it though, since I was chilling on the beach.
The last week my search engine ranking for glissers.com dropped dramatically. Very annoying, especially since I just started to experiment with banner ads on the site, and was starting to plan my retirement in the Caribbean.
I’ve spent some time researching WHY this might happen, and the only thing I can come up with is that I’m being penalized for selling advertising without telling Google.
When I was using Google Adwords, I didn’t have this problem - everything was just fine, as long as Google got their cut of the actions. So it seams Larry and Sergey have outsmarted me, again.
A few weeks ago I did an interview with a podcaster based in Colorado, USA. The interview happened at 11.30 pm on a Friday evening - not the best time to present yourself to a worldwide audience. And I did poorly, to say the least.
You don’t have to listen to the whole thing, but listen to the first minute. It’s funny: http://www.startupstoryradio.com/nils-hammer-co-founder-of-kindocom/
One of my colleagues commented the interview with: “Well at least now I don’t have to worry about doing a bad interview ever again…”
Lesson learned 
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