It’s All About Me

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.

This is from the Kindo blog, but I post it here as well. This is by far the longest blog post I ever writtten.

“The family and friends that surrounds you during your first years in life make a big impact on who you become later in life. The same is true for a startup, which is why it’s so important to get the team right from the start.

So as we today announce funding from top European seed investors - including Saul and Robin Klein (The Accelerator Group), Stefan Glänzer (former chairman of Last.fm, founder of Ricardo), and ASI, a VC-firm set up by the founding engineers of Skype - I know we got off to a good start. When I worked with some of them at Skype, I was blown away by how good they were.

Kindo now has all the opportunities you can ask for to grow up and become what we set out to become - a global brand, focusing on the family and the family life.

It’s worth remembering why this is an exciting vision. When we set out building the business less than a year ago, we did it because we wanted to build something that helped us keep in touch with our families back home. We’re all avid users of other social networks, and used Facebook to stay in touch with our friends, and LinkedIn to keep track of our business contacts. But even though the family is the network that will stick with you for the longest, there were no good and dedicated social network for the family and relatives (at least that we could find). Tons of sites that could help me learn more about my ancestors, but I really want to learn more about the folks that are still around, my living family. So, we decided to build this site, because we wanted to use it.

Secondly, being entrepreneurs, we realized that there’s a real opportunity to build a real global business in this space. If you look out on the world of the web, you realize how many of the biggest sites out there that are social networks, in some kind of shape. Facebook and MySpace comes to mind immediately, but there are so many other local players (skyrock.com, vkontake.ru, netlog.com, etc) that aren’t spoken about in the press, with huge numbers of loyal users, growing rapidly. Social networking is here to stay, for the family, your business relations, or your family.

There are over 1,000,000,000 Internet users in the world today, all of them with a family or a family history to explore. So, this is not a niche product, for a niche audience - we’re building a global product, for a global audience. And since this audience doesn’t only speak English, we don’t either. We might be a small little toddler, but we’re already speaking 14 languages fluently. Imagine where we’ll be when we’re a teenager.”

I wrote earlier about the idea of home exchange for surfers. Now we’ve built the feature. So far my house is the only one listed, but we”ll get there

We’ve also re-done the front-page and changed navigation meny, hopefully easier to understand the site now, and it’s much better from SEO perspective. Lot’s of fun, let’s see what happens.

Over the last few months, Kindo has hired 5 students from a top European business school called ESCP-EAP. The school has campuses in 4 major European cities, and the students we’ve had from them have all been good. I was speaking at the school few weeks ago, and on Friday I went back again to participate as a judge in a competition.

Even with all this close interactions with the students and faculty staff, I haven’t been able to memorize the name of the school. Not once have I been able to correctly remember the weird combination “ESCP-EAP”. Instead I usually go “EPSA-EEP”, or “EEPC-EPA”, or “EPAC-EPP”, and just let people figures out what I mean.

But come on! This is a business school, who should teach students how to create and manage companies. Surely there must be a better name than ESPE-EPAE… sorry ESCP-EAP.

Pick your flavor:
www.kindo.com
www.kindo.co.uk
www.kindo.se
www.kindo.de
www.kindo.fr
www.kindo.es
www.kindo.it
www.kindo.com.br
www.kindo.co.za
www.kindo.co.nz
etc…

Emerge.se is writing about Kindo, and other similar companies. It’s a good analysis, worth reading (if you’re lucky enough to speak Swedish).

I’ve added text ads to Glissers, mostly because I wanted to learn more about how Google Adsense works. It took me 20 minutes to include the code on the site - amazingly easy to do. Here’s how it looks.

Yes, it hurts to sell out, but I have to put bread on the table.

Glissers has its own blog now - glissers.com/blog. One month ago I didn’t have a blog at all, now I have two.

Looking forward to putting this blog post in my Skype mood message. I’ll use Skype to promote a blog that promotes a blog that promotes a site that promotes surf accommodations. That can’t work, can it?

I added a link to this blog from my mood message in Skype. In 24 hours I got around 55 people visiting the site, only from my Skype contact list.

That’s almost 10% of all the people in my contact list, which is a high click-through rate by any industry standard.

It got me thinking: If someone paid me 2 USD per click, which is not an unrealistic number, I could make 100 USD / day. And move to Costa Rica and stop working.

There’s a big flaw here of course - few people would click on a regular ad. And even fewer people have 600 people in their contact list. But still, it’s interesting.