Announcement

Today we were all gathered up into the ball room at a local hotel and were told that our facility will be shut down by the end of the year. People would be "exited" in stages. 90 leaving at the end of March, and then roughly 40 at the end of every quarter. Approximately 60 others from the semiconductor business would end up moving to another facility and several others got offers for relocation. My date ended up being the end of June. All in all a sad day, but glad to know for certain what was going to happen.

The Chippery

About a year and a half ago, I saw a two minute spot on a company called The Chippery on Food Network that I thought was fantastic. These guys came up with a machine that you could throw a potato in one end and get potato chips at the other. Brilliant! I wanted one! I thought it was a great concept for malls.

Since I first saw this blurb, I told everybody I knew that was interested in franchises and those types of things. Nobody really ended up pursuing it so I decided it was worth a call. I called them up and started speaking with Chris Smith - co-founder. Chris agreed to send me some information and we would hook up for another call within a week or so.

Full Timer

I should mention that I work for Motorola's Personal Communications Sector. I've been there since December 6, 1999. Lately, we've been hearing stronger rumors that the facility I'm in will be closing soon. I've lived under that threat since late 2000. The only Motorola that I know is the one that has been laying off people every quarter since the bubble burst. The rumors were stronger and were being confirmed all over.

My wife has always been very supportive of all my side projects. She's always had a very tight grip on the purse strings, but she understood that it takes a certain amount of investment to make anything work. We've been talking and planning our contingency plan for a long time. She had not worked full time since she was about seven months pregnant with Stephanie, our daughter. Now she was three months away from the birth of our second child, Danny. We planned on having me stay at home to take care of the kids (if I was laid off at least three months after Danny's birth) and have her go back to work full time.

Yesterday, I left her watching The Thomas Crown Affair (her favorite movie of all time) to get coffee for us. When I got back, she said we had to take more risks! We were still young and we've built up everything we have in a very short amount of time. If we took a risk and failed then we would be able to rebuild quickly. If we didn't do it now, we wouldn't do it at all! WOW! She said that she wanted me to figure out something to try and we would be in it all the way. How fricking envigorating! That was one of the best motivational moments of our lives.

Marketing, Meanwhile...

As expected, Dr. X and Mr. Y were unfortunately not grasping the importance of marketing for our (or any) site. Mr. Y was put in charge of coming up with a marketing plan and he decided to read up on improving google placement. I insisted that something else be done because it would surely take some time to get traction in google. The response was to run a campaign on what they considered a critical site for anyone doing any sort of technical analysis on stocks or options research. We would end up running a four month campaign on Big Charts that would cost us just over $10K. By this time, my investment in the company was limited to $2K plus some small monthly payments to our hosting company. We really had no concrete understanding of who the target audience was, why they would register (let alone subscribe after the two week period) or what the competition was doing.

Besides coming up with the plan, I had some difficulty getting the guys to author the content for the site. Our strategy was to educate those that didn't know much about covered call investing so we needed articles that explained how it all worked. Eventually, Dr. X and Mr. Y drafted a dozen or so articles that we posted on the site.