bGreen: Thoughts On Green

bGreen TV, Episode #7 - Factory Tour

Here is quick tour of the factory in Medford, MA that is handling the majority of the fabrication for the bGreen Mobile Showroom and will be doing most of the wood-based fabrication for our bGreen Building projects.  It’s not every day that you get to see exactly where your FSC cabinets will be made or your where Plyboo counter tops shaped and cut to size.



This shop has an amazing amount of technology and machinery, enabling them to work quickly and efficiently on nearly any size project.  We’re happy to provide you this brief glimpse behind the factory doors.  Oh, and it’s REALLY loud in there, so we’ve added some soothing music to try to disguise the noise.  Enjoy!







Can’t see the video or prefer to watch in HD?  Click this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_hSSRXBEKU

Boston Design Center

We visited the Boston Design Center on Friday.  The Boston Design Center (BDC) is a huge building in South Boston that houses over 75 showrooms for a variety of building and design resources.  There are tile showrooms, furniture showrooms, kitchen showrooms, office furniture showrooms, and even a sports marketing agency.  It’s really an awesome place…if you can get in.



Conceptually, we LOVE the concept.  Get all these awesome products and design showcases under one roof and let the public have at it.  You can browse a variety of products and design styles under one roof.  It’s a great place, except the public is very rarely allowed to visit.  We do not love this.  If you’re a member of the public, the only way to get in is to be accompanied by someone affiliated with the BDC, work with a designer, or sign up for an expensive membership.  This doesn’t work for most folks.  In our experience, the majority of people working on their homes do not work with designers.  If you’re an industry professional, you can get it in, but you need to have already established three accounts at the design center.  Clearly this method has been successful, as there are similar design centers in most major cities and the target audience for the BDC is obviously designers and architects.  We just wish there was a way to expose the public to these amazing showrooms more easily.



What we’re doing with the bGreen Mobile Showroom certainly borrows from the concepts put forth by the design centers.  We’re getting a variety of products under one roof.  Flooring, cabinetry, lighting, etc.  Only in our case, we want the public to see it just as much as we want design professionals to see it.  Read more about the bGreen Mobile Showroom here.

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.

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?

Hacked!

I woke up this morning to the following email:

From: Barry 7:37 AM

(no subject)

Were you up all night tweeting?
—-
Sent from my iPhone

No, of course I wasn’t.  Any good entrepreneur knows that you needs at least 9 hours of beauty sleep, so I most certainly was not interfering with that by tweeting at all hours of the night.  However, I was curious as to what he was referring to, so I fired up the old iPhone, loaded up TwitterFon, and sure enough, there were a few tweets from @bgreenstore throughout the night.  Hmmm, that’s odd.

• Green Building Products http://bte.tc/aWb #RTW about 1 hour ago from web


• Who the hell wants to hear actors talk -Harry Morris Warner #quote about 2 hours ago from web


• SmartyPig Decreases Interest Rate to 2.01% APY http://bte.tc/axk #RTW about 4 hours ago from web


• Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. -Natalie Goldberg #quoteabout 5 hours ago from web


• How To Become A Green Shopper http://bte.tc/dTw #RTW about 9 hours ago from web


• Is A Greener Product Green Enough? Our Greenwashing Series Wrap-Up http://bte.tc/agW #RTW about 9 hours ago from web

Yeah, so that’s a bit strange.  A couple of those tweets could be confused for ours, but quoting people?  That’s not really our thing.  They funny thing is that one of those quotes got re-tweeted a couple times.  Thanks, I guess?

So by my estimation, there are four possible scenarios that could have led to those tweets:

1. Some people sleep walk, maybe one of us sleep tweets.  Not likely.


2. Maybe those crazy lawyers duped us, and we really have a third business partner that we didn’t know about.  And he/she decided now would be a good time to reveal him/herself.  Possible, but not likely.
   


3. The ghost of Po Po Potanipo suddenly took up tweeting instead of haunting camper’s bunks.  Maybe, but we’re not sure he has thumbs.
   


4. Someone hacked our account.  Most likely scenario.

Wow, someone actually took the time to hack our account!  How Cool!  Yes, I know this should piss us off, but it really is pretty cool.  I picture a dude in a room with 20 computers, wires running everywhere, odd lighting, and fingers moving furiously over the keyboards.  Maybe there’s even an Angelia Jolie type character right over his shoulder.  Something right out of the movie “Hackers.” Sadly, this probably isn’t the case, and it’s probably some old gross dude living in his mom’s basement with nothing better to do that try and hack a budding entrepreneur’s twitter feed.  Needless to say, we’ve changed our password, and made it ultra cryptic this time.  Got to protect what’s ours.  Lesson learned.

You said what? Getting Schooled in Website Development

I wrote the below post a few days before our website launch but never posted it. We got busy trying to get the actual site up. In all we are really happy with how it turned out but we still have some work to do.  We look forward to the comments and feedback now that we are officially out there.
———
We are days away from our initial website launch and, as we put the finishing touches on the site, I can’t help but reflect on the decisions we’ve made that have gotten us to this point.

Like many new small businesses, we have accepted free help when available. One individual who’s been a huge support to us is my brother Stephen, our website developer. Quick shout out - check him out here: Greenstein Consulting. He’ll create a killer website for you and, at no extra charge, tell you you’re stupid. Oh, I kid. That’s special treatment only brothers get.

Starting off, we had some very clear items we wanted to incorporate into our website. Being avid users of social media, we were insistent on our site incorporating as much social media as possible. And we’ve done just that. One social media item we are not sure how to utilize, though, is Facebook. It’s easy to use for a personal account, but man they make it a pain to set up for a business. We’d write the whole thing off if they didn’t have so many subscribers.

In our past lives, we both have had experience building websites, either writing the HTML code or working on a design with a developer. With that experience behind us, we thought creating our own website would be a piece of cake. Not exactly. We certainly had the knowledge in terms of what general things to include but here’s where we got schooled big time: the back-end of the website. Basically, what’s under the hood…what makes our website work. We finally had the website to a point where we thought it was good to go only to find out that we hadn’t made sure it was put in a code that would give us the flexibility we need for the future. We need .php and have .html. What is that you ask?  Everyone tells us something different. What the hell does php stand for? According to php.net, “PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.” I know what you’re thinking - that clears things up. Needless to say we still have some learning to do, but what we have gathered is that php will allow us to have a dynamic website and just plain html makes our site static. Static = bad, dynamic = good.

Now, it’s easy to sit back and say “why didn’t your web developer advise you on this?” Fair question and to some extent a good point. However, as a small business owner you should NEVER fully trust a task to your vendor. At the end of the day, it is your job to know every aspect of what you are getting yourself into. We should have done the research to know what type of website we needed.

So, yes we got schooled. Our website has been delayed a few weeks and, once it’s launched, we will have to fix some stuff behind the scenes. As stressful as this has been overall, it’s good that it happened. I’d rather learn this lesson now than later, when serious time and money have been invested in the job.

At the end of the day, our website is going to be awesome and Stephen has been a huge help, but in the interest of full disclosure, these are some of the hiccups we’ve encountered along the way.

Getting Schooled in SEO

While we acknowledge that SEO is a hot topic and is totally necessary, we also acknowledge that we know very little about it.  We think the goal of any site is to be at the top of the Google food chain.  Currently, we’re not even on the plate for consideration.  So, continuing with our “Getting Schooled” series, below is a conversation we had today with Mike Gerstenblatt.  Mike is helping us along with this project and a few others related our existence on the Interweb.

bGreen: Opening this up for discussion.  What can we do in the short-term to get our SEO going?  Currently when you google “bgreen” we don’t come up.  Let’s figure out how to change this.

Mike: Well google page rank is determined by many things, but I think the most important is inbound links, proper use of keywords, and properly structured pages (including H1s and images with titles, alt tags, etc)

First, I think the site should be optimized to follow the guidelines established in Google’s SEO Starter Guide.

Second, you need to organically build up inbound links. That is, find ways to get other sites to link to bgreenlifestyle.com. Use twitter, facebook, yelp, blogs, whatever. This is obviously harder and takes more time. I’m not sure if there’s an established methodology to get this done, but I think it begins with great, dynamic content that people will want to link to.  (Speaking of which, I think you need to move your wordpress blog so that its under your own domain {so its blog.bgreenlifestyle.com not bgreenstore.wordpress.com} or at least link to your main site from the blog in the meantime.)

Lastly, you need to identify relevant and popular search terms and modify your content appropriately. For example, if people are searching for ‘Boston green stores’.  Have “Boston green stores” somewhere on the site.

SEO isn’t that hard, it just takes an investment of time.

So this is what we’ll be working on in the coming days, weeks, and months.  Hopefully with Mike’s help, we’ll soon be at the top of the SEO world.  Stay tuned.

Getting Schooled in Company Filings

Today was supposed to be a day of celebration.  A day that we hoped we’d look at 20 years down the road and think “Man, what a day!  Imagine that’s when it all started.”  Today was the day that we were finally formally forming our company.  After a couple months of legal work, some back and forth between us, the lawyers, our accountants, and about twenty other people, we had our operating agreement hammered out, a check in hand, and we were headed to the Secretary of State’s office to file.

We arrived, docs in hand, ready to file.  However, there was a slight SNAFU.  The name we had hoped to use was kind of, sort of, not really already in use.  However, as our lawyers told us a month ago “a corporate name may not be the same as, or so similar  as to be likely to be mistaken for THE NAME of any other existing corporation or other entity authorized to transact business in the Commonwealth or any reserved name.”  You’d think that Massachusetts is filled with educated consumers who are not easily confused.  This is the home of Harvard, MIT, and 100 other schools.  Arguably one of the most educated places in the world.  Well, I’m here to tell you that the Secretary of State’s Office does not think this is the case.  Apparently our name was too similar to another company name that operates in an entirely different line of work.  In our opinion, there would be NO confusion or case of mistaken identity.  In fact, a quick Google search of the other company returns nothing.  No website, no business description, no nothing.  The only was to find out what line of work they are in was to search for their state filing docs, and find out that they are in the business of loyalty programs.  This is a far cry from selling green and eco-friendly lifestyle and building products.

Unfortunately, there’s no convincing the Secretary of State on this one.  We’re flat out of luck.  I could go on and on how one is an “inc” and one is a “llc.”  Or one spells their name with a “B - E” and not just a “B.”  The businesses don’t overlap.  Etc. Etc.  However, there’s no sense in dwelling on it.  Fortunately, we have a Plan B, and if the Office didn’t close at 4, we’d have already put it in place.  Tomorrow morning we head back to the Sec of State’s office to make this thing legit.  Stay tuned.

Getting Schooled in PR

This is the first post in a series titled “Getting Schooled.”  We’ll feature some of the lessons we’re learning as we build bGreen from scratch.  This first post deals with our foray into the world of PR.  Something we admittedly know very little about.  This is a brief instant message conversation we had with our PR guy, Brian Kramer, about the inner workings of PR for bGreen.  We’re trying to attract interest in bGreen by taking the approach of “watch these guys start a business, follow the steps they’re taking, and figure out what they’re doing right and wrong.”  Brian is helping us present this aspect of bGreen.

________________________________


Kramer: FYI, that entrepreneur freelancer just asked for green companies via twitter but I found out it’s an ROI story

bGreen: interesting

Kramer: not quite appropriate

bGreen: no, but maybe that’s his current niche

Kramer: my thoughts are that it’s not quite your area of expertise and I’d hate to burn bridges on this one…plus now it puts my previous email, which he alluded to, back up on the forefront.  it is very, very, very okay to not participate in an interview if it’s not 100% appropriate.  plus, I’m not 100% that this is for Entrepreneur

bGreen: so what’s the move?

Kramer: i just passed on it.  in the long run it makes you guys look that much more media-credible and it makes it so you’re not “media whores”

bGreen: re: now it puts my previous email, which he alluded to, back up on the forefront how so?

Kramer: because he gets toooons of emails.  barely got a chance to read mine and now he knows that I was referring to a green company and I resent it to him so he’ll reread it this is what I was trying to tell you, these reporters are inundated with hundreds and hundreds of emails/story ideas every day so, it’s hard to stand out without being a pain in the ass to them

bGreen: this the dude? ‘freelancer: Do any “green” companies follow me? Slight chance I might be able to use you in an article I’m writing.’

Kramer: yup.  he does a ton of freelance, is a good writer, and he and I have a good rapport

bGreen: cool.  do you have 5 minutes?

Kramer: sure

bGreen: ok, so explain to me how this works… he puts up a post like that, which is right off the bat a great thing. you dig around, figure out it’s a ROI story.  do you get in touch and tell him “hey, got a green company, but not right for this article?”

Kramer: sort of.  I see that he tweets that, I call him up from the database of reporters that I have here at work, and basically ask him why/what he needs a green company for.  he knows me, he knows that I won’t bs him.  so, he tells me exactly why.  I can then say, “Yup, these guys can talk about it” or, “nope, they can’t” or, “maybe they can, let me check in with their experience here.”  more than half of PR is just paying attention to the right people

bGreen: very cool.  so basically you say “my guys don’t know anything about ROI because 1) they have no I and 2)  certainly no ROI” but here’s my pitch for them

Kramer: sort of, but not too far off.  I basically called up your biz partner, JUST to make sure.  he said, nope you guys can’t talk about it.  so I called back the freelancer, and said that they can’t, but that these were the guys that I emailed him about from my gmail acct.  he’s on deadline now, but he’ll read the resent email.

Kramer:  I am a middleman; no two ways about it…I connect businesses with reporters.