My plan was to have a quiet Sunday and I, in a way, did. I got up at 8 and then I still felt quite tired so I went back to bed, and I ended up actually sleeping in until 11:30.
I had a meeting with Nick Arnolds, who is an ex-executive who was Head of Marketing Asia at for Asia-Pacific region for Apple.
So, it was a horrible thing because I had him waiting for 30 minutes, and we were trying to hook up all week. He has a few ventures that he is looking at, and he wanted my help and advise in some of the areas of logistics, how to get things out of China, and so on.
And we had met earlier in the week when we had met at my e-commerce presentation, so I knew he was a great guy and it was just horrible, actually, that my sleep affected my meeting.
Nevertheless, it was great to catch up on sleep. I much, much, much needed that. We had a great lunch and turned into more of a working lunch. We went from almost 12:30 to 6PM. And we talked about many, many things, about RedStores.com, about what he’s doing, how I could be helping him in terms of just knowledge transfer and so on. No tangible dollars. We’re just talking on helping each other on a friendly way.
The opportunity I saw with him for what I’m doing now was for his help to assist me with a strategy for Germany. And him being a strategic player, opening up the Apple shops in China and so on, I thought this would be a really good bridge because he has a lot of retail experience and also the marketing experience.
And that was actually quite clear when we were talking in my German presentation last week, which was that the marketing part for him was really easy. He had a very broad reach in terms of reaching the New York Times, all the publicity and so on because he had done that for Apple. So a lot of contacts in the industry. So, yeah, we had a great discussion We setup a meeting for next Wednesday. I think four or five hours. And our plan is that I’m going to look at what he’s doing and he, how can I be of help to him.
And I also have asked for a few hours of his time to help for me, look at the details of my strategy for Germany, and then see if there’s a better way to plan that out. So I think, already he’s going to give me some ideas on Sunday. And I just wanted to further develop those and kind of go with that flow, quite kind of like what his way of thinking.
Beyond that, I guess I was looking at Casper’s DCF model and I’m just trying to think what the next steps on how to bring financing on board. I actually meet Mirko for a quick coffee on Sunday as well.
So one of the things that we both figured out is that our next challenge now is to basically be able to deliver on what we had built. And in that respect, basically it means that I need to bring on some people, at least two or three more vertical teams that are able to deploy websites in a hurry.
So the point being is that that just actually costs money and is not necessarily revenue-generating right from the beginning because we’re looking at a two or three runaway before some of it becomes +ive cash generating.
So I just need to model out the runway for three years and figure out how much of this stage, labor and so on, I would need to be able to go out and open up 60, 70 websites over the next three years.
Actually, I think the amount is quite small, which is maybe not great because if that amount was bigger, it’ll actually be easier to raise. And when you start looking for the smaller amounts left in a million, all of a sudden the VCs aren’t really interested.
That’s kind of an awkward place. I need about a million, I think. And the reason for that is that I want to have a 3 year runway ahead of me so I can start making strategic hiring decision and not so much tactical decisions.
I canceled dinner on a couple of guys. I was just tired. I needed some personal time, so I ended up actually going for a haircut and a pedicure. But during the pedicure , I ended up catching up on admin things. Just catching up on e-mails and so on. So that was quite nice and I was in bed at about 12. So it was supposed to be very private and personal day. It turned out to be more of a working day.
But, nevertheless, the work was not really work because it was a lot of fun.
I started using a new service for those days when I’m short of time to get the blogs done. You dictate into your iphone and then send it over for human translation. All of the above was dictated via http://voxie.com/