I want to let you into a little secret. When I was younger I had a dream that every time I went to Alton Towers, the UK’s biggest theme park, I imagined that one day I would have enough money that I could shut down the theme park for the day, for myself and my for friends.
I would literally walk around Alton Towers imagining what it would feel like to have the place shut down just for me. I would imagine how my friends would think I was so awesome that I could afford to close the park and invite a select few. I envisaged that my friends would look up to me, respect me and would be impressed. I wanted to have Alton Towers shut down for me and my friends for the day, in the same way that Michael Jackson did.
I often had a number of day dreams of this nature including driving into my secondary school playground in an expensive convertible sticking a metaphorical two fingers up at the kids at school who used to bully me. It sounds pretty dumb, huh? It sounds like a typical childhood dream, doesn’t it?
But it is not so dumb, it’s a sense of belonging and respect is a natural human desire. These dreams continued as I got older. I wanted fame, status and profile. I wanted to be known for being somebody. I wanted people to look up to me and respect me. This desire for profile was deeply rooted in the fact that, as a kid, I had bad acne, I was crap at football and I was bullied. I set about working damn hard to become a ‘somebody’ just so that I could prove these people wrong.
However, this deep down desire to prove myself started to become the foundation upon which I made every decision. I created Tribewanted in order to improve my status, in my own mind. I launched thenerve.tv and Rock Control in order to achieve fame and bring in the money. The very foundation on which I based my decisions was wrong. My foundation was to gain a profile so that I could have money and status in order to prove myself to the shadows of the bullies in my mind, who had moved on in their own lives. This was very wrong.
When you make business decisions, or even life decisions, based upon a wrong foundation you make the wrong choices which ultimately becomes destructive. My desire to still prove myself, even today, resulted in me making bad decisions with thenerve.tv and Rock Control – I did not focus on clear revenue streams, I made decisions to increase my profile rather than focus on the success of the specific business at hand.
It is only recently that I have spent time thinking about these dreams as a child, this desire to beat the bullies and the subsequent wrong foundation. Once you are aware that something is wrong in your life, as soon as it comes to light then this is the first step to start dealing with it, of breaking down the foundation and starting again.
Once my desire to increase my profile, for all the wrong reasons is stripped away it is exchanged for something else that provides a deeper, stronger foundation. The desire to achieve my dreams is now based upon a passion to reach my potential. I truly believe that we live life, once and as a consequence we should discover our reason for being and pursue it with a relentless passion.
I am damn excited. I know that I have the potential to do some awesome stuff and I am on this one exciting journey to improve, to learn, to grow and as a result I will achieve something exciting, whatever it is. As I work towards my goals I make decisions, not one whether I can increase my profile, but based on working towards my potential.
It’s exciting stuff.
What are you chasing? If you have any comments on this blog please leave them before or contact me.
Last week I wrote a blog entitled, What happened to thenerve.tv? which was Part 1 of an attempt to explain what has happened to an idea that I had been working on for some time. In Part 1 I explained that there had been some distance between two projects that I have worked on and I wanted to offer a reflection as to what had gone wrong in the hope of passing on some experience to other entrepreneurs. In Part 2 I want to share some learning experiences from a project that I have been working on called Rock Control (formerly known as VIP Band Manager).
Rock Control is an idea that I love, if I do say so myself. In essence, Rock Control was the concept that enabled the public to form and manage a band from scratch – from viewing auditions to decide who should be in the band, to choosing a song, developing a style and making all the major decisions to release one song into the charts around the world in order to see how well the band would do. The whole project was to be developed online and viewed as an online TV show (with the hope of getting an actual TV show out of it at the end).
Rock Control was a neat idea, we managed to get some seed investment, a place of the Difference Engine and even a flattering blog from Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi who explained that Rock Control “had the potential to become one of the most interactive TV shows to date”. Rock Control was launched as a website that enabled individuals to upload their audition with the social media sharing facilities for them to encourage their friends and relatives to vote for them. In a period of 6 months we have over 500+ auditions and over 6,000 people who had registered, which were incredible figures for a project launched with little financial support.
The key learning point from Rock Control is that a good idea needs to have a sound financial revenue stream before it can become a successful idea. Rock Control was launched and it was our hope that the momentum that we had gained would lead to investment and we had a pretty good shot at pitching the idea to some really good potential investors who each thought that the project was a great idea, we even had offers of investment, but, only on the condition of the agreement of the TV show which is something that we were pitching for but was not something that we could guarantee. Eventually, in order to get to the next stage we needed investment and we just did not have the money to take it to the next level.
Rock Control was a great idea which caught the imagination of a significant number of people. Nevertheless, we needed money in order to make it work. The experience of Rock Control has made me realise that in the future whenever I have a ‘great idea’ I need to find a firm, solid revenue stream for that idea, before launch, in order to make is a successful viable business. This is clearly a significant lesson for anyone wanting to launch a business.
Rock Control is not an idea that is dead in the water and it is still being pitched to various people, one day I hope to revive the idea and turn it into a success… we will see! For now I am working on another idea that has a very clear revenue stream and more on that to come soon.
It was an incredible moment, this afternoon, when I, along with millions of others watched the Atlantis Spaceship launch into space live on UStream. It was a seriously humbling moment to see technology, science and all techy things that I don’t understand come together so that I could sit in the comfort of my living room and watch the images below unfold.
The incredible images went out live on: www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv
I have been involved in launching two businesses, thenerve.tv and Rock Control, each of which had high hopes, dreams and intentions but both just simply didn’t work out. I now feel that I have some distance from these ideas in order to accurately reflect on why they did not work out in the hope that others who have a “big dream idea” can learn from my mistakes and turn their dreams into a successful reality. I will write this blog in two parts and will focus on thenerve.tv in this first blog post.
Firstly, it is important to provide a context. At the end of 2005 I conceived the idea for Tribewanted, which had a simple premise. A 200 acre island was leased in Fiji, an island that had nothing on it, and a website was launched that enabled the public to decide what they wanted to take place on the island. Paying visitors could then visit the island and help build and get involved in what was decided online. Now remember, this was pre-success of Facebook and slowly but surely the projects media profile started to gain momentum with highlights including a feature on Good Morning America, the Today Show and on the front page of the National Geographic. Tribewanted was also filmed for 18 months and became a Five part prime time BBC2 documentary. Tribewanted won a number of awards including beating MySpace to win ‘Best Social Network’ at the Broadcast Digital Media Awards.
Tribewanted gained a lot of media attention which enabled it do do well, however, it was the success of this first business and the media surrounding it which gave me an unrealistic expectation of how to hard it is to actually build a business!
thenerve.tv: After the success of Tribewanted and, as a consequence, a number of awards later I then had the idea for a crowd-sourced TV production company. The basic premise was that if I, an ordinary member of the British public had an idea which became a prime time BBC2 show then there would be other members of the public who would have equally successful good ideas also. The plan was for me to source these ideas and pitch them to relevant to production companies/broadcasters, with the intention of a 50/50 revenue split upon success.
Just to add, straight away, that thenerve.tv was launched just before we hit a global recession which clearly didn’t help. However, there were still flaws in this idea which, in hindsight, irrespective of a recession, I still do not think would have led to it’s success. The main flaws in this idea, which I hope will bring some learning points to all entrepreneurs are:
1) Great ideas do not equal great TV shows (great ideas do not equal great businesses).
Heaps of people sit at home watching TV shouting at the screen and telling anyone who listens that they have better ideas than the “rubbish that we see on TV”. This was exactly the premise of thenerve.tv, however, in the same way that millions of people are glued to the X Factor in order to watch the bad auditions I received 100′s of ideas for TV shows that were just not that good and so the actual number of ideas that could be pitched to TV channels were few and far between.
A number of people who had got in touch with me, regarding their ideas, had been trying to get their TV show idea off the ground for some time and in some ways I think I had perhaps offered this false hope of connecting these people with industry insiders. The introduction and connection between the two did not happen because there was a small number of good ideas that we could pitch.
2) One success does not equal a wealth of experience.
The success of Tribewanted was big, at the height of the media interest we were conducting media interviews in the UK, then America would wake up and we were interviewed on radio programmes and then Australia would wake up and we would do it all over again. Non-stop media interviews throughout the day. Tribewanted went on to win a number of awards and I, myself, won a number of awards including a Channel 4 4Talent award from the British broadcaster. I had always wanted to get into TV and for some crazy reason, in the midst of the hype, I thought that one fluke prime time TV show resulted in experience in TV development, it didn’t!
I went on a one man crusade to find the award winning TV show ideas from the every day man in order to pitch these ideas to TV broadcasters and time and time again I hit the same brick wall – a lack of experience. TV Broadcasters are looking for the biggest forward thinking ideas that will generate an audience of millions and, more importantly, will become a TV format that could be franchised Globally – think Deal or No Deal or X Factor.
I am told that for every 100 ideas concieved (from talented and experienced TV development executives) may result in one successful TV show, the success rate is few and far between even for the professionals. My experience was limited, even if there was a nugget of good idea in one of the TV shows pitched to me it is a pure skill to craft that gem of an idea into something that would catch the eye of a TV commissioner. I just did not have this skill.
3) A serious lack of contacts
Tribewanted did open a number of doors for me and enabled me to go and meet with Heads of Departments of all the main TV channels in the UK. The success of Tribewanted resulted in an intrigue and industry TV Execs are genuinely interested to hear what is out there. However, it is people with the experience PLUS the contacts that truly make a TV show happen. TV production companies wine and dine broadcasters like crazy, they take them out for meals and they attend all the events where they will be seen, just like anyone would do to get ahead of the game in any other industry. Whilst there was intrigue in what I had achieved I did not have the depth of relationship with contacts in order to convince them that an idea that I was sitting on would become TV gold.
Good idea + experience + contacts = a great TV show, and, better still, an intentionally sold format.
In the midst of a global economic crisis the whole TV industry shut down with little TV programmes being commissioned. The commissions that were successful came from talented and experienced TV production companies with a whole heap of experience behind them, not from the man at home shouting at the TV screen.
I am not saying that never again will a member of the public will come up with the idea for a TV show but the reality is that if you have something that you are passionate about you go and knock on doors. If you have an idea for a TV show go and find a production company that are making similar TV shows and ask them for a meeting, they will listen to you and be honest with you about your idea.
In essence, as a business proposition, there is a lot of money and resources put into the development of TV shows and the limited money that I had was being burnt up pretty quickly to the point were it could just not survive any longer. One last point of experience with thenerve.tv was that, a few months after launching, I realised that it was just not going to happen, that a good idea did not equal a good business. I tried every way possible to make the business a success, to join forces with other production companies or agencies (which there were some really good meetings regarding). However, the reality is that in the climate that we were in no-one wanted to put money into an unknown. I paid out a significant amount of money to try and keep thenerve.tv afloat and was almost scared to shut it down because I did not want to let people down. If you know your business is over, as soon as you know, wind it down and don’t throw good money after bad.
If you have an idea, go for it, but go for it in a measured way and do not sell your house, your children and your soul. When we chase ideas there is a respect that people give you and my experience of thenerve.tv was not all bad. It was because of thenerve that I was offered a job in development for online TV programmes at Endemol, one of the biggest TV production companies in the world which took me on my next adventure.
I am learning so much about my own projects that have failed and, other businesses that have not worked out so well. When you are passionate about a belief that there is something that you want to achieve you don’t give up, you take all these experiences, mold them together and channel them in the direction of success. I will launch another start up, in fact, I am working on something right now.
I hope that this blog has given you some insight and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to email me.
My favourite thing to do on Twitter is to enter the search term #startup as anyone and everyone who is discussing their startup or a startup that they are fond of, on Twitter will pop into your stream. I was doing this little search last night and came across Housefed – which I think is pretty awesome!
Housefed is a website that enables you to get a home cooked food, anywhere! In the same way that Airbnb allows the public to offer their room for an amount of money, to gain that homely feel whilst travelling, Housefed lets you have a home cooked meal on the road.
If you are a host, you state on the site where you live and what home cooked food you are offering. If you are on your travels and are sick of hitting restaurants then you log on, search through the ‘home cook chefs’, pick your favourite dish, make a booking and turn up at their house and enjoy your meal.
This is a pretty simple idea and I certainly would use it on the road. What I love about this idea is that it really enables you to experience the food or a new area rather than simply going to a restaurant. This site gives you a real opportunity to ‘go local’ and, whilst you are eating learn and share in the culture of those who you are visiting.
Housefed is not just about having a meal, it is a whole learning experience. Although this concept is in it’s early stages I really do think that it has the ability and opportunity to do well, keep an eye on it, certainly one to watch!