Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

It took some time for me to pick this up but Heiko’s post about the Tropical Islands near Berlin could be the perfect blogger meeting point. I mean you can go swim, sit on the beach, or have a beach party. And on top of that you have free Wi-Fi!!! The only problem is that there are no hotels in the place, which means you have to leave the place. With this drawback the idea doesn’t sound so wonderful anymore, even though good weather would be certain. So people to The Tropical Island, please put a hotel in the place
Source: Tropical Islands Brand by Heiko Hebig.

Six Apart is moving to new offices in San Francisco from San Mateo to hire more talent and get the space they need. As of this article they plan to add 60 more people in the next year and a half. As this year ends I will try to think out loud a bit about a company that truely interests me.

They pulled in some $2 million in 2004 and might make some thing like $5 million next year as of the article. I presume those numbers to be off a little bit though especially as Berkowitz says they are close to break even. In one of my latest posts about Six Apart I linked to an article where they stated their employee numbers as around 50. I presume in the new article, the 40 people cited there are USA only, meaning that a further 20+ are added by Europe and Japan, which again fits with the new article. All in all they then have 60 employees. To go a little lower (than last time) in employee costs I will take $7000 average per month. This means that they had costs of $420.000 in December per employee. For the cash flow positive bit, I would like to point out that most people will pay their blogs for a year and the people that started on TypePad are renewing their first time and we are going into a part of the cycle where they have new yearly subscriptions and yearly renewals each month. Kick ass. A fairly predictable business model. If they really have something like $500.000 in costs per month, they need 5000 sign-ups or renewals per month at a $100 average. Very much possible if you ask me.

Let’s look at it from another point of view. At an average of $10 per month per blogger hosting her blog(s) they need something like 50.000 blogs to cover their costs if don’t have a lot of extra costs. I said 50.000 last time and now it also fits with their CEOs idea of $5 million plus (because the $2 million comes from Mena and he just said +150%, so I am not sure he means $5 million, I think he means more :)) in revenue next year. But now look behind these numbers. In January they need 50.000 blogs, but they actually just need 5000 yearly payers. If we presume they have 1500 that renew, they only need 3500 new ones, putting this at just a little over 100 a day. As you see, I am presuming no more growth, because with this calculation they will have the same numbers in december of 2005. But then comes the kick, as in the following year, if 20% don’t renew, they have 4000 people renewing in January 2006, and another 3500 new ones and voila, 7500 accounts, hence almost $8-9 million.

All this doesn’t factor in MovableType or revenue share deals with co-branded blogs. Cool ey? And hey, I am even happily paying them for my Pro account. Great stuff.

I read this ages ago, I think via one of Cal Evans’ articles. I highly suggest reading Nerd Herding by the way. Now Markus Breuer pointed me to a very nice graphical representation of the idea.

Source: CreativeBits: Lessons Clients Need to Learn

This one is really true to a very good degree. It’s interesting to think about this in the light of outsourcing though, moving parts of your company somewhere else, focusing on what you really do well. If you move software development to India for example, it would likely be cheaper than in germany, and possibly even faster due to more people coding. The above image would then say that it will be worse quality. What about outsourcing your development to some eastern countries, at least to a big part. Many seem to be doing really well with it.

Of course you can agrue that I am turning different knobs here as I am changing the price for the same thing, but this is what you might have to think about. If you want it as fast as you get it now, at the same quality, then you will need to change the price you get it at or it will become more expensive. Sounds contractictory when first thinking about it, but the idea is that instead of hireing 10 more people internally, you hire them somewhere where the same quality is cheaper. You have transaction costs associated with this though which means it only works for larger projects.

This is one of the books that has been on my shelf for a long time now, unfinished, as I just do not have the head free enough to read it. I do love the book though. What I love most about it is the introduction by Laurence Freeman OSB, a Benedictine monk and Spiritual guide of the World Community for Christian Meditation. His words are amazing and he gave me a new viewpoint on relgion. This is not to downplay the real part of the book but these 60 pages are wonderful to read and amazingly insightful.

The rest is really a Bible reading of the Dalai Lama, his comments as well as some questions and answers sessions. As I mentioned above, I have not finished reading it yet, mainly because you can’t just read this. It makes you think, it makes your mind move to interesting places and you tend to get caught up in it. This is not a book to take lightly and you need to give it the time it deserves. I didn’t and still don’t have that time at this moment.

If you are interested in religion, especially christianity, thinking about other religions, than this is something for you. It will show how very similar the different religions really are. The german version I have is entitled Dalai Lama: Das Herz aller Religionen ist eins. Die Lehre Jesu aus buddhistischer Sicht.

I am not sure how I got this book anymore, and it sure was fitting a bit to the style of writing I like. The problem is that the story was too weird and actually too little. You didn’t want to read it to know what would happen next, but more or less only because you wanted it to end. It has some good twists and some wonderful character plays but the twists just don’t make you go “WOW”. If you are into Gods this should be interesting, but if you are not you might miss some of the deeper meaning behind what some of the characters do. This is likely also why I didn’t get too much out of this one. Oh, so he is Odin. Ok, he has 20 other names. Ok. Let’s go on please.

In short, a special book, with much insight, little story and a very good writing style. Keep an eye on the author.