Yay

Yep I’m still here. Long story short: after uni finished I moved back in with the family on the coast and after a few weeks they decided that they were going to cancel our Net connection because they couldn’t afford it and because my younger brother and I were spending too much time sitting in front of our computers. So that was annoying.

A few more weeks later I moved into a new house back up in Wollongong with some mates and also managed to land Centrelink payments. So now I’m getting some very nice money from the government to study, which is an awesome base as I can now focus on building a business/es for the long-run without the stress of trying to magically grow money from nothing.

However we signed up with this 24mbps plan through www.letsgo.com.au which looked pretty good. The reviews I found said their customer support was horrible, there was about a 3 week signup waiting period and also the speeds and pings were slow. But for the price it was awesome. But… it ended up taking 77 days to get connected after a bunch of issues popped up. Finally got connected up yesterday!

And so I just finished sorting through about 1000 emails, most of which were SPAM. So if you sent me an email that I haven’t yet replied to, please send it again.

Now, business stuff…

Haven’t been doing terribly much sadly. pixTower I gave up on a while back and have been meaning to try and sell it on eBay or somewhere but haven’t got around to it yet. With YEBlogger I have no idea what’s happening there. The site and many other sites Daniel/akula runs have been down for a long time and I didn’t get a reply from him the last time I sent an email and PM. I’m still keen on working on that site as there is still a lot of very cool things that could be done with it. Though we were having trouble finding more YE bloggers to add to the database and so we were planning to include other “entrepreneur” bloggers. Plus we weren’t making any money from it which was a bit of a downer.

The near-future…

I’m STILL (yes I know) working on DropBuy.com.au and hope to have that working in it’s very basic form within the next week or two. The last thing I was doing for that was looking for some wholesalers/dropshippers of books, but found that rather than the industry having a few large wholesalers, it’s actually made up of all these small distributors you have to individually signup with to access a wide range of titles.

I’ve also got a niched, digg-like idea in the works which I also hope to have out soon.

Overall I think (hope) I’ve now moved past the typical stage of an aspiring young entrepreneurs’ life where they try all sorts of small, poorly-thought-out business ideas - mainly websites in my case. I’m now all about focusing on just a few big, but low-risk (at this stage) ideas and really putting a lot of effort into making them long-term successes.

Oh, I’ve also succumbed to the masses and actually half-created a Facebook profile (I also have a Studentface.com.au profile too) so feel free to search and add me as a friend.

Nathan Waters
Keeping It Real.

Last weekend I took some time away from the computer to get stuck into some physical work! … OMG, yes that thing that involves movement and use of muscles other than the keyboard-typing fingers and mouse-moving wrist. (yes currently my entire body is aching)

Actually myself and a few other friends were helping a mates parents strip out their shop as they were closing down their business. They ran a electronics/hi-fi business franchise called “Leading Edge”. Tis a long story but originally they were a “Dick Smith Electronics” franchise and had built up a large amount of goodwill around the town. But DSE treated them badly so they switched over to Leading Edge.

Things were going well until a large shopping centre opened up in the middle of town and as luck would have it, a big, new DSE opened up there too within a mere 20 metres of Leading Edge which was across the street. The shopping centre has managed to soak up the traffic, killing the majority of the rest of the town.

Anyways we spent the weekend unscrewing fittings and knocking things out and carrying them away. It was actually pretty fun!

But what it made me realise again is that I hope I manage to stay away from physical, “brick & mortar” businesses for the majority of my entrepreneurial life (except maybe a service-based business). Some people obviously prefer having a physical business where you can interact with customers and don’t have to sit in front of a computer all day.

But I’ll go through the points of why I don’t like the idea of it:

• 9-5 is hectic enough… but that is just for an employee. When you’re the employer, the business owner running everything, that time changes to a 7-7 schedule and that could include weekends as well!
• Stock. Think of how much capital you need to first get the stock, then think of how you’re going to store it, track it, display it, price it, sell it and worst of all, what if you can’t sell it? There was a lot of stock that remained un-sold after they had a large, almost at-cost sale at Leading Edge.
• Expansion. How many brick & mortar businesses do you see turning over millions of dollars each year? … I know there are a lot, but when you look at how many aren’t, it becomes a little saddening. To expand your business you basically need to franchise out and open up a new shop in a new location, which is a logistical issue and an expensive move. I tend to figure that when you open a shop in a town you are immediately limited in the amount of revenue and profits you can achieve from that shop. There is only a certain amount/population that might buy goods from you in that location and the only instance where people will travel 10, 20km is if they’re after something unique or if prices are cheap enough to travel the distance.
• It’s expensive. When you look at all the overheads of offline businesses such as rent, wages and stock to name a few… it is very pricey to not only startup, but it’s pricey just to keep it running.

You take an online business and these tend not to be issues in a lot of cases. If you’re lucky you can work just a few hours per day when you want to, you can use drop-shipping services or you may not even need stock, expanding doesn’t necessarily require a large amount of money as you basically just need to market to a wider audience using your existing website and startup/running costs are very, very low.

Heck, even when you go bust the offline business bites harder than the online one. A majority of online businesses can be run with little costs, but if you do need to close-up it’s just a matter of taking down the website, sending out a mass notification mailout to your customers and perhaps selling the site/domain. If an offline business goes under, you have un-sold stock to worry about selling, you have customers you need to notify, you have lay-bys you need to fulfil, you have shop fittings and office furniture to remove, rent contracts to get out of etc etc.

So that’s my opinion… I’d love to hear yours, post a comment!

Dugg this post? Why not digg it?

Update: There’s also an interesting discussion on the YGG Forums following on from what I’ve said here.

Nathan Waters
“Hosting & Internet” over “Brick & Mortar”

Ouch. Saturday night, didn’t feel like going out. So I just spent at least the last 9 hours going through the 258 young entrepreneur blogs in the YE Blogger network, and manually searching for author and email details, adding those into the lazybase database and then adding the email to the newsletter system.

And being a poor uni student my snacks consisted of slices of bread and butter, 2 bottles of beer and water. Wow, that sounds worse than it actually was… I did listen to music through iTunes on shuffle the whole time

But anyways, it was a necessary thing to do as I had to get these emails into the system so we can actually notify most of these blogs that: a) they’re in the YE Blogger network, b) here’s the benefits it can bring, and, c) could you please add a backlink to the site using either the widget, logo or chickmarklet (coming soon).

A large motivation for me doing this long stretch of work (which I tend to do quite often for various things) was not only from Daniel’s friendly reminders to get onto things but also that the site actually went below the Alexa 100K ranking and hit a 67K rank a couple of days ago. So of course our traffic and pageviews are pretty juicy figures. This got me thinking… I am actually yet to see any blog with our widget and have only seen a few blogs with a logo backlink to YE Blogger. I was also aware that we only had 100 emails in the newsletter system and had sent out only one quick newsletter so far. We now have close to 200 emails in the system, so if we can manage to have those bloggers provide a backlink to the network then traffic should increase dramatically!

Hopefully with v2.0 features and feedback from bloggers and users we can create/update features such as the widget so that bloggers will find great value in using it/them.

You: “How much are you making?!”
Me: “Nothing atm lol”

Despite the high number of pageviews, we haven’t been receiving many clicks which I figure is because the majority of our visitors are young entrepreneurs (what a surprise!) and they tend to be very familiar with ads/adsense and so just don’t click them. We’re working on a few other revenue models which should alleviate this problem and make the long hours worth the work.

Nathan Waters
My wrist sounds like a concrete mixer

“Drop Buy Now Official” was the original post title, but then I started rambling about the steps of registering a business

After a couple of enquiry calls, some changing of details online, a trip down to the local Fair Trading Office and $137 later… “Drop Buy” is now an officially registered business name! You can checkout a scan of the business certificate here… apparently an important document which I didn’t realise the first time around (don’t fold it!! lol). And you can checkout my registration details here.

Once I’d worked out whether or not I could just change all my details online, it turned out that I just had to register a new business name and I just went online and changed a few details for my ABN and GST registrations.

Australian business registrations work a little odd…

1) Registering for an ABN (Australian Business Number) is free and done through the Australian Business Registrar (ABR)
2) Registering for GST (Goods & Services Tax) is free and only mandatory for businesses with a turnover of $50k or more, but it’s beneficial to register before that stage as well. You can register for that through the Australian Taxation Office (ATO)
3) And finally to register a business name, you must go through the NSW Office of Fair Trading or the equivalent for your state if you live outside of NSW. This is the only process that can’t be done online (either done by mail, or going to a Fair Trading office) and costs $137 which registers the business name for 3 years.

Confused yet? … and this is only to register as a sole trader (me) or partnership etc.

This time around I actually found the process quick and easy… I guess it helps when you’ve done it before and already have an ABN and registered for GST

I remember when I first started blueyeT systems, which can now sort of be considered Drop Buy beta v0.1, it was a very complicated task and I wasted many months trying to workout what I had to do in terms of legally registering an ABN, business name, GST and all the other unnecessarily complicated taxation stuff.

There wasn’t and still isn’t a simple guide for young people on how to completely get a business started, especially in regards to tax and legal requirements. I still feel a little in the dark on properly accounting for taxation and GST. When I feel confident about the whole thing, I might create some quick guides to help Aussie YEs out.

I think if I had parents who knew about the whole thing it would have been much easier, but nevertheless I haven’t been sued or fined by anyone yet and make sure I keep my records… so I guess that’s a good sign

So…

Drop Buy checklist in a good order of how to startup a business these days:

• [done*] Quick competition and consumer check (target-market surveys, undercover spying on competition weaknesses etc)
• [done ] Domain Name: www.DropBuy.com.au and hosting
• [done*] ABN
• [done ] Business Name: Drop Buy
• [done*] GST
• [done*] Wholesaler/s… although you might want to double-check prices right at the beginning to see if you can compete with competitors. Currently I only have wholesalers for computer and gaming supplies, so I will start searching for others as I expand the Drop Buy catalog.

* Already done/established/known from previous business, blueyeT systems

• [to-do] Business logo and website design/template… To start with the website will simply be a form to submit a quote until I can build-up enough resources to pay for a completely customised ecommerce package. So I think I will just put up a $150-$200 project on the sitepoint forums for a logo, letterhead, website template etc.
• [to-do] Open a business bank account. Although I might actually put this off for a little while until orders start kicking in regularly. For blueyeT systems I just used my personal account since business was pretty irregular and so I figured the benefits (which were not terribly much) weren’t worth the extra $10 per month.
• [to-do] Advertising… Initially I will target Uni students for a few reasons. One being that I know uni students basically want cheaper prices which I can definitely offer. Another being that advertising should be cheap and easy as I can simply print-off a few flyers myself and put them up around the campus and University itself. And finally, I think that uni students know and have contact with a lot more people than most of the other demographics.

So hopefully if they like the price, service and products it is possible that they could tell 50+ people about it. As you know word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing and getting the word out there about your business, in fact it was all that blueyeT systems ran on since I put off advertising due to time restraints with the final years of high school.

Anything I’ve missed, any tips or advice… please let me know.

Nathan Waters
Drop Buy Owner/Manager/CEO/[insert position]

Just got back up here (Wollongong) on Sunday after a 2 week hibernation back ‘home’ in Moruya.

I live on-campus which you may or may not already know. But this session they shut-down a whole section of the campus as they didn’t have enough new enrolments to fill units (as a lot of Americans stay here for the first session and then go back for the second).

So for 3 hours solid on Sunday I was moving to a new room, which in a way is good but it kind of sucks since I had an awesome ground-floor location. I used to be really close to the laundry, bike shed and the dining hall, plus my room let in very little light which was awesome for laziness, sleeping-in etc.

Oh, and of course it happened to be my 19th birthday when I had to drive 3 hours and move rooms… fun!?

Now I’m on the second floor of another building in a unit of 5 people (inc myself), and they’re all pretty cool except that the doors automatically close so I haven’t really seen much of them so far. Something about my new room that could become painful when the weather starts warming up is that directly beneath my window are 6 hot water heaters. Plus the window is facing north which ads to the heat and also means I can’t manage to sleep-in past 10.30am (which is a lot earlier than my 2-3pm sleep-ins).

This session I’ve decided I’ve had enough of Computer Engineering and so now I’m just doing Commerce. The subjects seem fairly interesting: Marketing Principles, Introduction to Management, Quantitative Methods I and Introductory Microeconomics. But what’s even better is my timetable for this session…

I have 14 hours a week, compared to the 22+ hours a week for Comp Engineering last session. And the earliest time I start is 9.30am and the latest finish is 3.30pm. Plus I have Tuesdays off.

It might not sound much to some lucky students who manage to have 5-day weekends, but it’s a massive decrease in hours from last session which should help give me more time to focus on my business/es.

I’ve give an update on what’s happening with DropBuy (my revamped computer business) and with YE Blogger soon.

Nathan Waters
U–N–I