WorkHappy.net and how this blind squirrel found a nut.
August 26, 2005 at 09:50 AM
So I launched WorkHappy.net 2 months ago. I had high hopes, and, like any entrepreneur, slightly unrealistic expectations. And this time, to my surprise, I did something right. WorkHappy.net has been a hit.
In the last 45 days I've gone from 50 RSS subscribers to 1000. Evan Williams (pioneer blogger, the guy that founded Blogger and sold it to Google for a zillion dollars) called WorkHappy.net his "new favorite blog."
I also got link love from the super stars over at 37Signals and a whole host of other like-minded folks.
Paul Scrivens over at 9 Rules contacted me and invited me to be a part of his spiffy, growing blogging network/empire. (Which I accepted incidentally, Paul actually personifies what WorkHappy.net is all about).
All of those things sorta blew my mind. (Although I have to say that hearing about WorkHappy in a podcast was extra wild.)
In the first 30 days I gained more subscribers to WorkHappy.net than I've gained in 2 years here at the Frog Blog.
So I've learned a few lessons in my vast experience of 2 months that I can share:
- Specialize. What I've learned, and what I already knew because of my own habits, is that people are all over tightly focused sights. Engadget and Gizmodo for example.
- Do what you know. IOW, stick with a topic you care passionately about, and that you're constantly learning about so that you can remain engaged, informed and relevant. Otherwise it's just too hard and you'll run out of steam.
- Do a good, simple job. There's such a dearth of this, it's not hard to surge ahead.
- Capitalize on other hype. I scheduled to post my interview with Josh Williams right as he launched Blinksale and got a fair bit of residual hype sending traffic my way. Lots of companies, products, ideas gain hype, capitalize on those.
- Do something fun to keep you motivated enough to actually follow through.
- Engage the community - soliciting community reviews has been awesome. I've learned about all sorts of nifty new stuff I didn't know was out there, and so have my readers.
- Make something good. All the traffic would have amounted to a fizzle if there wasn't something worth subscribing to.
Couldn't happen to a nicer or smarter guy. Congrats!
Posted by: Russ Lipton | August 26, 2005 at 11:22 AM
Thanks Russ!
Posted by: Carson McComas | August 26, 2005 at 11:27 AM
Nice going Carson! So how about telling us how you put it all together (planning, time-scales, design, development, etc...), we all like a good bit of motivational reading!
Again congratulations.
Posted by: David Crowther | August 27, 2005 at 05:18 AM
Congratulations, Carson! Thanks for building this tool and for sharing some of the lessons you've learned.
Keep up the good work!
Posted by: chuck | August 28, 2005 at 01:00 PM
Hi David: I'd be happy to share more, let me know any specific questions you have and I'm happy to answer. I'll try to think of some more nuts-and-bolts stuff to address the ideas you mention here.
Thanks for the encouragement Chuck.
Posted by: Carson McComas | August 29, 2005 at 08:52 AM
Hi Carson,
A few questions off the top of my head:
1. I think many of us dream of 'doing a project on the side' of our normal day job. How did you find this experience?
2. How long did the project take (total time frame and actual hours slaving away)?
3. Did you outsource much of the work?
4. Any tools or resources you found invaluable during the project?
5. That's a lovely shirt your wearing, where can I get one like it?
Thanks again for sharing your experence...
Posted by: David Crowther | August 29, 2005 at 02:09 PM
Hey David, thanks -- here goes:
Note that being self-employed is only a few letters away from being unemployed, and often not much different. So I have lots of "side jobs" going at any given time, hopeful that any one of them will gain me something.
WorkHappy.net was something I decided to do one day after brewing a blog post for this blog about some of the tools I find useful as an entrepreneur. As I thought more about it, I thought I could write several posts about it, then I thought: why not devote a whole blog to it! It was one of many hair-brained ideas I have, but I thought it would be something I can crank out fairly easily and quickly, and I did.
Because I use TypePad, making another blog is quite easy. I then developed the whole posting/submitting engine as a little asp.net web application. I developed it to spit out the XHTML formatting for the review posts on WorkHappy (with the red text heading, star ratings, etc). The whole project, site design, web app, blog setup, etc. took me about a month is all. I worked pretty consistently on it, and had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted to do with it.
I didn't outsource any of the work, fortunately those are all skills I possess (that's part of what attracted me to doing it). And the tool I found invaluable was TypePad which makes making and managing blogs super easy.
The real lesson I learned was how, even in what feels like a saturated blog world, there's room for tightly focused, high quality blogs. I mean, if *I've* gathered an audience...
Posted by: Carson McComas | August 29, 2005 at 10:00 PM