There are two lemonade stands.  The first has a couple kids giving you some warm lemon koolaid and charge you a buck for it.  The second stand is much better.

The other stand is different. The lemonade is free, but there’s a big tip jar. When you pull up, the owner of the stand beams as only a proud eleven year old girl can beam. She takes her time and reaches into a pail filled with ice and lemons. She pulls out a lemon. Slices it. Then she squeezes it with a clever little hand juicer.

You will have to check out the article at Seth Godin’s blog, “The lesson from two lemonaid stands”

One stand focuses on a real quality product, while the other goes for a quantity.  Considering how much time I spent with my kool-aid stands when I was a kid, it’s interesting to think about what if this was the business model.  My friend and I were very good at driving quantity, but looking back on it we could have done more.

Even if we didn’t adopt the free/tipped model, there were certainly improvements that could have been made.  It is weird to think about just how many things were done wrong in our many campaigns.  For example, why were we advertising our low price and then lowering it?  Does anybody really care if your koolaid is twenty cents or ten cents?  If they are going to stop, then they will stop.

Oh well, it doesn’t do any good to point out flaws in a 9 year old’s business plan from years ago.  Kids are trying to make some money, not get a masters in marketing.  Something about the innocence of the whole thing really does help to sell a lot of that sugary water.

I just wanted to share this video with you.  This man runs a store called Soda Pop Stop.  All they sell is carbonated soda of different types. Colas and Rootbeers of course, but then cucumber soda? Rose pedal and coffee sodas?  He’s got them!

Plenty of variety in the sodas.  Plenty of passion in the entrepreneur.

http://www.sodapopstop.com

Birthday cards are expensive. There’s no question about it.

The problem is that a fancy card doesn’t hold a whole lot of value for the person receiving the card – especially if that person is a child.  Every year, we’ll spend a couple of dollars to buy kids a card.  Why not make them a simple little card and put the $3 you would have paid for a commercial card into the envelope instead?  

I know that $3 doesn’t seem like much for an adult.  But to a kid, money is money.  They can do a lot with $3 that they can’t do with a card, especially if everyone who usually buys them a birthday card hands them a handmade card and $3 instead.

It’s just something to think about.

During the first meeting, I learned that I was talking to a sort of affiliate marketer.  I also learned that there was a startup fee, as well as a monthly fee for the program.  Once you are in the system, you can make money in two ways.

First, by selling stuff and collecting an affiliate fee.  Secondly, you can recruit others to sell the junk and collect a referral fee.  And it’s only going to cost you a set up fee of $126 and a monthly fee of $50 to keep your website running.  I don’t know about you, but this has bad idea written all over it.  Especially when I got to the second meeting.

This time there were two people involved in selling me this system.  The same person from the previous meeting, and someone higher up the food chain came to talk to me.

They began talking, and half an hour later they were repeating themselves profusely; however, their circumlocutory speech was not the real issue.  They mentioned that setting up your business, and getting sales would pay for itself in the first month.  “Okay,” I asked, “So how do you get sales on your site?”

The two looked at each other, then at me before saying, “Well, how would YOU get sales?”

I mentioned I would find some relevant keywords and bid on them in Google Adwords to direct people to my targeted pages.

The two looked at each other, then at me.  They had no idea what I was talking about.  So I asked again what they did.

The way they get products sold from their site is to buy it themselves.  Now at 10% to 50% commission that means they are buying somewhere between $100 and $500 on their sites each month.  All this was to gain some sort of PV (or Point Value in their strange little world) witch somehow gets transformed into cash back.

The money with this is made of course once you get enough noobs under you to buy their own products.  Then you will get a small chunk of change from their sales.

I asked to see the backend of one of their sites.  I wanted to take a look at how much control the pupetmasters gave them.  But of course this must lead up to another meeting!  So I’ll let you know what happens if this meeting ever does.

I feel bad for all of the people who drink the koolaid without knowing what they are getting themselves into.  Which sounds like a lot of people are doing with their ‘pie in the sky’ wishful thinking.

The environment and culture set up by Thomas Edison in his labs and Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin might be strikingly similar in many ways.

So how does “The Wizard of Menlo Park” (New Jersey) compare to a couple guys who’s company’s Menlo Park location was clear across the country and a hundred years later? (For a short time in ‘98-’99 Google’s office was located in Menlo Park California) We can take a look at the objectives, practices, and general attitudes of both of these companies to find the answers.

Edison and the others at his lab created inventions and then set up companies to profit off of them. If you take a look at Google Labs, they are doing something similar with their own twist. Google has their Adwords and Adsense that they are able to leverage into many of their products, giving a revenue stream to that product. At Google, all employees are given an amount of time where it is required to work on their own projects. Every now and then we can see the larger and more developed of these projects and ideas appear at Google Labs.

The culture that was found with Thomas Edison’s workers ‘the boys’ allowed a lot of flexibility to move around from project to project. If one project was getting nowhere, you could simply open up a different notebook and jump into a whole new problem and pick up from where someone else was stumped. I can’t quite say for sure how much freedom Google gives to employees in moving around like this, but within the company sharing ideas, collaborating and otherwise transferring knowledge is highly encouraged.

Both Edison and Google place a high value on constant experimentation, testing, and improving everything; however there is a bit of cultural variance in how it was to be approached. If you wanted to go into Thomas Edison’s lab and experiment, you were welcome to. The only thing that was really required of you was to pay for the materials that you used and to clean up after yourself. Getting to know the other inventors and getting their input was an added perk.

When it comes to Google, in order to play around in their labs, you simply need to click on a link. All around the you can run tests and investigate all kinds of things online for free. If you want to go even further, you can put together programs and applications fairly easily that interact with their online software. If you don’t know how to program, with a quick search, they could help you out with that too.

Now it doesn’t really seam that the General Electric company that we know today still follows these ideas, but at one time back when it was called Edison General Electric, it was much closer to how Google operates a century later. It’s certainly not a coincidence that both GE and Google are so strong now when they both had such great beginnings. I think it’s fair to say that with Google being only a little more than a decade old, they haven’t quite written all of their beginnings yet.