…so all you people who kept sending me invitations (yes, you know who you are!) can add me to your list. I’m erica at simpli dot biz on there if you want to invite me into your network. 🙂

Though Simpli gets a fair amount of business from referrals, I thought April would be a good month to experiment with various online advertising methods. My goal was to find the most cost-effective advertising out there. Since web hosting companies advertise pretty much everywhere, I’d like to tackle new areas where other hosts may not have saturated the available space.

I knew that press releases are one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising, so I wrote up a press release advertising the opening of 10for10.com and its tagline, “Host up to 10 websites for $10/month.” I submitted it first to HostingTech.com, which a lot of other sites (including WebHostingTalk.com) syndicate. After about 48 hours, HostingTech pushed the press release live and it also appeared on WebHostingTalk. So far, we’ve gotten just over 100 visitors from it. No signups, but the visibility can’t hurt.

TheWHIR.com called today to seek permission to syndicate the press release from HostingTech, which I gladly approved. I also found the media contacts for TopHosts.com’s press section and got my press release submitted there (on the front page, no less!) It’s too early to see stats from those last two, but I fully expect them to bring at least 200 more visitors to 10for10. Cost to post all those press releases? Free… it just required diligence on my part. Press releases are definitely a no-brainer for good publicity.

Another low-cost advertising option is writing news articles. Since I love writing, this is something I definitely want to do. This could actually be a net positive in terms of cash flow to Simpli (or me), as most companies pay for good articles. I’m thinking about this now and may write an article and submit it to websites in the next few weeks.

I’ve so far managed to avoid hosting directories and the like, though I fear that if we seek a large amount of growth, we’ll have to go to them. To get around this, one of the things I’d like to do is create my own hosting resource website. Obviously, it would have to target a specific niche market, as the “hosting directory” market is almost as saturated as the web hosting industry itself. I’d place my first priority on writing articles and my second priority on this; I’d hope it would eventually showcase my articles as well as others’.

I also want to let you guys know about a special we’ve been quietly running for the past week: Dedicated Pentium 3 Servers for $69/month. There are only a few servers available, and I expect them to sell out within the next couple weeks, so get in now if you’re interested in having root access on your own server for $69/month. There is a $1 first month special if you wish to pay quarterly. That makes these $139 for the first quarter. It’s a bargain. 🙂

We’ll be introducing some 10Mbit unmetered specials within the next week, so be on the lookout for that, as well!

So some of you have just read my previous blog entry and are wondering to yourselves, “Why in the world would Erica want to get into the T-shirt printing business?” There are several reasons, detailed below:

1) My biggest concern about my personal finances right now is making sure I don’t have all my eggs in one basket. To that end, I put aside some money this year to invest. (I also have an IRA that is slowly gaining funds, but for obvious reasons, cannot rely on that in a pinch.) In case Simpli goes under at some point (which is about 0.000001% likely, but still possible in some really far-out scenarios), I want to have some money stockpiled somewhere else (preferably in another business or two) so I can survive. I invested in a friend’s business earlier this year, and the T-shirt business is my second investment of 2005.

2) As far as investments are concerned, I can’t argue with $3000 for 50% of a business in which many companies legitimately make several million dollars a year. Okay, so I don’t expect our T-shirt business to be a multi-billion dollar business, but I figure if I can make enough to pay my rent ($1550/month), I’ll be doing pretty well.

3) I don’t want to take too much of a salary from Simpli at this point. Every dollar I don’t take for personal needs is a dollar that can be reinvested in Simpli to make it even more profitable. Plus, Simpli benefits from getting spiffy T-shirts at cost. (Guess what we’ll be giving away as freebies to new customers? Anyone care to guess?) 😉

4) Regarding FK’s comment “saturated/unprofitable” regarding the T-shirt industry (I swear I’m not picking on you, FK, as others have the same question on their mind.) I have two points to make about this: 1) That’s what everyone says about web hosting, too, and Simpli has been a great success there; and 2) we will have a steady customer base of frats and sororities if nothing else. I also plan to target non-profits, as well as print up some T-shirts of my own that I’ve already sketched out. Once we hire labor to do the work instead of doing it ourselves, it will become quite a profitable business. Most companies’ margins are well over 50%. Right now, we’re doing it ourselves to learn it. Soon, we’ll hire someone else to do it for $8-$10 an hour. Then it’ll be a much easier task.

It’s worth noting that the T-shirt business is certainly not an expansion or add-on to Simpli. It’s a wholly separate business, and will have a different corporation name (Twisted Tees is the working name until we file paperwork), different bank accounts, etc. I’ve talked previously about splitting Simpli into two divisions and will add separate blog entries for those two companies once I’m ready to post them on here. 🙂 Twisted Tees is, right now, a weekend/side project for some extra money that could turn into some fairly nice recurring income. We shall see!

Wow. That’s all I have to say about this weekend. Not necessarily “wow” in a good way… just… wow.

Let me start from the beginning. N decided a couple months ago that he wanted to start a T-shirt screen printing business. I volunteered to be his investor and partner in exchange for 50% of the new business. He is the salesperson and general “plant manager”, and I handle vendor relations, accounting, and marketing.

Well, being the excellent salesperson that he is, N went out a few weeks ago and got our first order: an order for a fraternity that he belonged to while he was in college. The shirts were due yesterday (Sunday) night for rush today.

As soon as he signed the order, I started ordering parts. I found a “COMPLETE T-SHIRT BUSINESS!!!!1111” on eBay for $2495.95. After corresponding with the seller, Steve, who promised me that this was the be-all, end-all of T-shirt business kits (including the press, dryer, and everything else we would need), I purchased it.

I paid with a check drawn off one of my credit card accounts since they were offering a low interest rate for purchases if you used the checks. Unfortunately, Steve, having been burned in the past with checks, needed to hold it for 10 days to make sure it cleared. I understood the policy, but also understood that we definitely weren’t going to get the machines in time with 10 days for the check to clear plus 7 days for ground shipping from the east coast to California. I asked Steve for another option, and finally he decided to charge another credit card of mine and reverse the charge after the check cleared. After doing that, he shipped the equipment, along with an instruction manual on how to use it.

The equipment was shipped UPS and arrived in Simpli’s office (where we had decided to set it up) on Thursday. N went to work setting up the equipment. We quickly noticed that the instruction manual and video was missing. I placed a call to Steve, who said it had been shipped separately via USPS. Thursday and Friday passed, and we had everything (including our T-shirts, which I had ordered from another vendor) except that darn instruction manual.

Saturday morning, we realized we had a problem. We had several machines and absolutely no idea how to use them. Since neither N nor I had ever even seen T-shirts printed, we were flying completely blind.

The how-tos on the Internet were maddeningly sparse. (Business idea: Someone needs to make a downloadable/purchasable e-book or video that shows this sort of stuff for a nominal fee.) Most had text or pictures (not both), or showed a slightly different way of doing things.

We spent most of Saturday trying to get the emulsion on the screen (which is the first step in the T-shirt printing business.) After quickly going through 2 screens and an entire bottle of emulsion, we found another how-to and realized we were doing it completely wrong. Not only that, but we’d just used all of the emulsion we had.

It was Saturday at 5:50PM when we realized this. We knew we had to find a local store that sold photo emulsion. After digging around on the Internet, I found that Utrecht, a local art supply store, had it. I called their Berkeley store. They had 3 emulsion kits in stock, and they were still open. The problem? It was 6PM, they closed at 7, and they were an hour north of San Jose.

We raced out of the office, jumped into the car, and motored it to Berkeley. The clock hit 7PM just as I was crossing the Oakland/Berkeley border on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. We called the store again and begged for mercy. Finally, at 7:05, we arrived. They unlocked the door for us and were good sports about the whole thing. We bought two emulsion kits ($40) and jumped back in the car.

I knew then it was going to be a late night, but we still needed more supplies, so we stopped at Lowe’s in Fremont on the way home. We bought a few more supplies and headed back to start what was going to be a very long night.

We got the emulsion on correctly and got the screens “burned” on Saturday night. We made so many more mistakes that I’m not even going to go into details here, but at 2AM, we had finally gotten to the last stage in T-shirt printing — squeegeeing the ink onto the shirt. (Thank God our client only wanted a single color, as all the colors must be done separately.) Of course, the ink did not go onto the shirt properly, so we called it a night and went home.

This morning, we grabbled lunch and got into the office around noon. Both of us were grumpy and tired. We scrapped everything we had done Saturday night, cleaned the screens, and started over. We got the emulsion on correctly (after starting into our third and final bottle of emulsion), and several hours later, were ready to print again. During that time, we figured out what we had done wrong previously on the printing stage, and at about 10PM, we finally printed our first shirt.

I remember that moment well — we pulled the press up, and there was a perfect T-shirt print. We stared at it unbelievingly for a few minutes. We then realized we had actually printed a T-shirt, and celebrated with loud shouts and cheers.

After that, it was just manual labor… we printed the front of the 70 shirts the fraternity had ordered, then dried them, then printed the back and dried that. It was 4AM when we finally had folded all the T-shirts and stuck them into a box to be delivered to the frat. (We’d called them and asked for an extension to this morning.) We went to bed exhausted but proud. We’d completed our order!

We made about $300 on the sale after accounting for the T-shirt cost. Of course, we are still out some $2700 or so on supplies. But now that we know how to do the T-shirts properly, it should go a lot faster. Steve told us that a run of 70 T-shirts shouldn’t take longer than a couple hours to go through once we knew what we were doing. For 2-3 hours of work, a $300 profit wouldn’t be bad at all (and will make this company a great weekend/side project!)

All told, we spent 30 hours this weekend bumping into walls and “flying blind” until all of the T-shirts were successfully printed. It is indeed a miracle that we pulled the whole thing off by piecing together how-tos on the Internet. This is one of the most satisfying checks I will ever receive.

UPDATE: Brandon just told me that the instruction manual and video finally arrived. Doh!

One of the reasons I started the thread (edit: read my previous blog post first) was to expose some of the myths that float around in the IT world and are perpetuated by men who (unfortunately) have no real idea why there aren’t any women in their field, and make guesses that aren’t based on any reality. I have heard countless times things like “Women just aren’t good at math”, “Women aren’t risk-takers”, “Women shy away from leadership and men don’t”, etc. It’s shocking how little some people in our field know about women’s real motivations and why they aren’t in IT.

Here’s what I can tell you. I know a pretty diverse group of women, some of whom are quite brilliant, but very few of whom have actually stuck it out in IT. Why? As best I can tell, each of them have had so many bad experiences with the men in IT that they’ve given up on it. Every woman I know who has computers or math as even a passing interest has stories of male teachers, male counterparts, or male bosses tell them some form of “Women can’t cut it in this industry.” The IT industry tends to attract men who prefer computers to socialization. This is where I believe that differences between men and women come in. Now, you can argue whether these differences are built-in or societal (I happen to believe it’s 90%+ societal). Here’s what I’ve seen:

1) I really think the key is the different way males and females in our society are motivated. Female role models motivate by building everyone up and encouraging them to work as a team. Male role models motivate by singling out the “weakest link” and (often) putting that person on display in front of the others as an example of what not to do. When a man in our society is told he isn’t good enough, he considers this a challenge to his ego and strives to do better. Women tend to internalize this and get frustrated about it; they avoid the conflict and either do something else or work with other people who are going to be more supportive. Many males, especially in the tech industry, use the words “You aren’t good enough” as a motivator without understanding that it doesn’t motivate most women. This goes along with the fact that women in our society have much lower self-confidence than men; did you know that 1 in 5 women are on anti-depressants?

2) Women tend to want to work with other people. I have heard a lot of women say “I don’t want to work in the computer industry because it involves sitting in front of a computer all day, and I’d rather be out there with people.” I have also heard this same statement from numerous men, but I think this is a larger influencing decision on women.

While males can generally work with a female leader (though they may criticize her for not being assertive or authoritative in the way they consider to be a leader), women will not work well with a traditionally dominant male leader, and if a woman happens to be singled out, she will generally try to “blend in” in her ideal of having everyone work as a solid, cohesive team.

I have read numerous books that say similar things, including one interesting study about women who win awards. Men who win awards will claim it for themselves (single person mentality) and thank everyone else as an afterthought, while women will make sure to carefully thank everyone on their team and often say things like “I couldn’t have done this without them!”

What can we do to change this? 1) Educate male teachers and role models on how women are motivated and teach them how motivating as a team can benefit all of their students/workers; and 2) Encourage more female role models in the IT industry. I’d like to expand on these two things in the future once I talk to more women and get specific ideas.

If any of you have comments on why you think there are so few women in IT, now is the time to make them. 🙂