bGreen: Thoughts On Green

Boom! Boston.com video and article!

We have been featured in Boston.com’s Innovation Economy section.  We visited Scott Kirsner, technology and innovation writer for boston.com, earlier this week to show off the bGreen Mobile Showroom.  Full article and video here.

BostonEco TweetUp

We’re going to be at the BostonEco TweetUp Wednesday. Are you? We have attended all of the BostonEco TweetUps and highly recommend you do too! It’s a great chance to check out a new Boston venue and connect with eco minded people. In fact, it was at a BostonEco TweetUp that we found our Mobile Showroom. So come by and maybe you’ll leave with a 27ft truck…



To sign up click here



For more information on the event click here



Where: Cafeteria Boston

279a Newbury Street

Boston, MA 02116



When: Wednesday April 28th



Why: Stop asking so many questions

Some Thoughts on Tax Refunds

We were mentioned in an article on AOL’s WalletPop today, written by Kelly Phillips Erb.  Kelly was inquiring about what people are planning to do with their tax refunds.  Of course, we’re planning something green.  Give the article a read to find out exactly what’s in store.

How will you spend your tax refund? We’ve got some ideas

Jeffrey Cutler

So I decided to take a break from Chatrouletting and write the post I promised on our meeting a few weeks ago with a young entrepreneur who is a friend of a friend. Our good friend Brian Kramer, who handles the PR responsibilities for bGreen, works at Fama PR, a high-tech public relations firm in Cambridge, MA. Brian works with Jeffrey Cutler, who serves as Director of New Media at Fama. Brian hooked us up with Jeff, and we got together a few weeks ago to talk bGreen, entrepreneurship, and business. The meeting was great (although my buffalo chicken fingers left a little to be desired).



A little bit about Jeff. Jeff was part of the original team at Going.com, which was acquired by AOL a short time ago. If you read the reports (which we have), they were bought for something around $10 million, after a VC investment of around $5 million. Whether it’s true or not, we have no idea. But Jeff is out and about pursing a ton of different opportunities, and that’s what we were really interested in. Jeff has expertise in sales, marketing, SEO, web design, new media, etc etc etc. The list goes on, but needless to say, he’s got a ton of experience, and we’re always grateful to anyone who will talk to us. You can read more about Jeff at his website JeffreyCutler.com.



So we wanted to meet with Jeff basically just to pick his brain. We wanted to learn his thoughts on SEO, our website, and our business concept. It’s was pretty eye opening, and a lot of what we’ve been working on the past couple weeks has been based on our meeting with Jeff. Our website re-design, which was coming at some point anyway, was really sparked by Jeff’s comments. He pointed out several elements we were missing that we’ve since incorporated into our site. Search, professionalism, and security were key topics of our discussion. You can see this reflected in our site, with a new design, prominently featured search, and security features displayed, like our Network Solutions SSL certification. Jeff has knowledge about what online shoppers are looking for, and we wanted to make sure our customers have a simple and secure shopping experience.



There’s a lot of back-end work happening with our website that our customers will never see. However, we want to make sure that if you Google “klean kanteen” or “eco friendly trash bags” bGreen is one of the top results. We’re making changes to our site to ensure this happens. Jeff runs a website, allwhitekicks.com, that has some great technology and SEO built in, and we’ve been taking some cues from his site to help with ours.



Finally, one of the main suggestions Jeff made was to just get out there and sell. Sell, sell, sell. Promote bGreen like crazy. We’re doing this, and are about to ramp up our efforts around town. With our bGreen Mobile Showroom, Square, and plenty of events coming up this Spring, we’re certain bGreen will become the leader in green and eco friendly products in Boston and on the web.

Vilna Shul - Vilna Speakers Annual VC Panel

Last night we attended the Vila Speakers Annual VC Panel at the Vilna Shul, located in Boston’s historic Beacon Hill.  It was a great event, in a great location.



Regardless of whether or not you’re Jewish, the Vilna Shul is worth having a look at.  Originally built in the 1910’s, the building is currently raising funds for a complete restoration.  They’ve already done lots of work, including uncovering parts of the original paint job.  It’s really amazing to see this building located smack in the middle of Beacon Hill.  Take the time to visit this landmark, you will not be disappointed.



The event last night featured a panel of prominent VCs from Boston, moderated by Howard Anderson, Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Business.  The VCs in attendance were:

• Elliot Katzman of Commonwealth Capital Ventures



• Jeff Fagnan of Atlas Ventures



• Jonathan Seelig of Globespan Partners



• Eric Paley of Founder Collective

This was a really dynamic and interesting group, and Howard did a wonderful job of moderating.



The dominant conversation was discussing East vs. West.  It seemed every topic somehow got back to the East Coast VC vs. West Coast VC.  Not sure this was intended, but that’s the way it went. There is definitely some passion involved with this topic, and it was clear the panel all had strong views on the topic.



The other topic discussed several times was how important it is to become part of the VC network.  As Jon Seelig said, it’s all about working with people you know and trust.  Network, network, network.  We’ve only been to a few of these events, but already we are seeing the same faces, and hopefully we’re getting recognized too.



The best line of the night was this:

Venture Capital is like sex.  When it’s good, it’s REALLY good.  And when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

So what’s our goal with going to these events?  Really it’s just to meet people in the Boston community.  We want to meet other entrepreneurs, and meet people who are funding these projects.  We’re not actively looking for any funding, and don’t really think we’re a VC backed style business.  But the great thing about being an entrepreneur is you never know when that might change.

2009 bGreen Year in Review

Back when we were young whippersnapeprs spending summers in Brookline, NH, Barry used to do a Week in Review for all the staff.  Well, it seems fitting that we do a quick Year in Review for bGreen.  Without further adieu…

• Just under a year ago bGreen was nothing more than a figment of our imagination.  Over a few beers and a few burgers, we hatched the idea for a company made it easy to go green.



• We actually had a name before the company even existed.  bGreen.  Be Green.  Barry GREENstein.  It seemed to work.  Now we just had to build a business around what we thought to be a clever name.



• Again, before the company even existed, we took a trip to LA to see what the green movement was like out there.  It really blew us away, we met a ton of cool people, like the guys from The Green Hive and The Green Life. Aside from making us totally pissed about living in Boston and not California, the trip made us shift gears and come up with the bGreen online store.



• In June, we hired a team of lawyers from the VC Ready Law Group to hammer out our business details.  What they (and we) thought we be a straight forward agreement turned into a month long ordeal.  I think it worked out well for everyone.



• In July, we officially became bGreen Group LLC.  We had our funding in place, our legal details hammered out, and now we just had to do something.



• We spent the next several months developing a website, developing an online store, scrapping a business plan or two, tweeting our little hearts out, and trying to spread the word about bGreen.  We learned some valuable lessons during this time, and make our fair share of mistakes.  But as the great Bob Ross used to say, “We don’t make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.”



• The Fall months brought us quite a bit of good times.  We launched our website, lined up all our inventory, launched our online store, made our first sales (thanks moms!), networked like crazy, had a few people tell us our idea was lousy, and had a few more people tell us our idea was awesome.  We’re leaning towards the awesome side.



• We took a trip to Arizona in Novemeber to attend GreenBuild.  Again, we met a bunch of people, saw that there’s really something behind the green movement, and solidified our plans for moving bGreen to the next level.



• December’s been interesting.  We launched the bGreen Weekly Deal.  Each week we’re selling one green & eco friendly product at a deep discount, with the hope of helping people go green quickly.  We love the models setup by companies like Woot and Steep & Cheap, so we figured why not have a green one of those.



• But the biggest thing December brought us was our entry into 2010.  We have the most exciting aspect of bGreen in place.  In the tech and VC world there’s a term a lot of people use for crazy new stuff.  Disruptive.  Changing the way people thing about certain things and changing the way we do business.  We think the next phase of bGreen is disruptive, and we look forward to sharing that with you in the near future.

Thanks for all your support, Happy New Year, and we wish you continued success in 2010.



-Barry & Lee

Quick Thoughts on Google AdWords

As part of our marketing plan we’ve been experimenting with Google AdWords. While we’ve only been at this for about two weeks, I would classify the results thus far as “crash & burn.”



Some quick statistics, since 11/23/09:



Clicks: 428 - good

Impressions: 190,000 - awesome

Click Through Rate: 0.23% - poor

Cost Per Click (CPC): $1.04 - seems average for a hot industry

Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): $2.35 - seems high

TOTAL SALES: $0 - Crash & Burn



[caption id=”attachment_257” align=”alignnone” width=”300” caption=”bGreen Google AdWords Statistics”][/caption]



We’ve slowly scaled down our daily cost, from $40 to $25 to $5. We’re at $5/day now, while we try and learn about what we can do to increase our Click Through Rate, and most importantly, our Conversion to Sales rate. It’s a shame that our initial campaign hasn’t worked, but we’re determined to make our PPC and SEO strategies work.  Suggestions?

Launch….not

So you may have noticed that we were lacking posts titled “T Minus 1 day to Launch” and “Launch.”  Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we just couldn’t get a fully functional, decent looking, non-embarrassing store out the door by Saturday night.  You may have seen our tweet:

Followed by this tweet:

Followed by this tweet:

That was posted after we called it quits on the scheduled launch.  It really had nothing to do with a Halloween party.  The decision to bag the Saturday launch was actually made late Thursday night, after finishing up a 17 hour day.  According to my research, even NASA only launches the Shuttle on time less than 40% of the time.  So, I figure if the world’s smartest minds can’t launch on time, how could we, admittedly not two of the world’s smartest minds, launch our website on time?  Seems like that would just be disrespectful to NASA.



Needless to say we are working hard to get the store launched and live.  We’re working with our entire team and partners to make sure this happens soon.  Virtually round the clock.  When, you ask?  Well, we’re done making predictions.  Oh, and Philles in 7!

T Minus 2 Days to Launch

Woke up this morning, and thought “no way in hell.”  There’s just too much to to do to get the store done by Saturday.  Granted, technically Saturday lasts until 11:59:59 PM.  But we’ll see.  I’m really hesitant to launch the store, even a small, intimate launch, if it’s not nearly perfect.  I guess there’s always the launch first and ask questions later mantra.  Better to get a product out there that’s 99% of the way done and spend the next few days/weeks fixing that last 1%.  We shall see.



Yesterday we made some progress.  We began loading our products into our e-commerce server.  Pretty cool to see the site with more than just a couple test products up there.  (Sneak peak: http://twitpic.com/ncasz) We have a lot to do re: the products.  We need to work on descriptions and images.  We need to make sure everything is in the correct category.  It’s daunting, and we’re only talking like 25 or 30 products to start out.



We also attended the Boston EcoTweetup last night at OM in Cambridge, MA.  Really great place, and a great crowd.  Cool to see the robust green community in Boston, and we’ll be looking for their support when we launch our store to the public.  We met a ton of people and made a few good connections.  We may have even found a major part of bGreen’s Super Secret Phase II, so that’s cool.  Also met the elusive @BostonTweet.  Amazing this is the first time we’ve run into each other, but it was good to finally connect.



Until tomorrow…

T Minus 3 Days to Launch

There was a time yesterday, just after we thought we managed to delete all the work our developer had done, that we thought a launch on Saturday would be impossible.  Fortunately for us, we did not in fact delete said work, we just managed to hide for a short while.  It was a bit touch and go.



We actually got a bunch accomplished yesterday.  We setup the domain for our store, no small feat in itself.  We’re tech savy, but not tech guys.  The store address will be http://shop.bgreenlifestyle.com.  Don’t bother checking the link yet.  There’s nothing there and it’s password protected.  Don’t want prying eyes getting a look at our new baby until it’s fully done.



We started uploading all our product info to our Network Solutions site.  We got approved for our Merchant Account, which is critical, otherwise we’d be giving away our products.  We came up with a launch plan for Saturday.  Twenty five people or so, mostly family and a few friends, will get our super secret password to visit the store and put it through it’s paces.  They’ll be more forgiving if we screw something up along the way, which we’re certain we will.  We’re only going to offer a limited number of products, say 30, and make sure we really nail the whole process before adding more people and products.  We’ll call it the beta launch.



We also met with Brian Kramer, our PR guy, at the Roadhouse in Brookline, MA.  Good venue, good food (loved the nachos), and the Celtics were on TV.  Good stuff.  Brian has been gracious enough to help us along with our launch for the promise of future riches. We hammered out a plan to try and get our story in some of the local papers and hopefully get featured online in a few venues.  More on this later, and I’m going to try and persuade BK to write up a blog post about his PR efforts.



Another busy day ahead, and we’ll be sure to share our progress with you tomorrow.  Stay tuned.