Curbly’s Founder Tells Me To Stop Ignoring Lifestyle Businesses

How do you build a business that gets over a million page views per month and still get home in time to hang out with your two-year-old daughter?

I really wanted today’s guest, Bruno Bornsztein, to tell me that he was swinging for the $50 billion dollar fence with his company Curbly. But he just wouldn’t do it. Instead, he’s here to make the argument for lifestyle entrepreneurship against my will, but it’s an argument you don’t want to miss.

Bruno Bornsztein

Bruno Bornsztein

Curbly

Bruno Bornsztein is a web publisher; he programs, writes, edits, designs, photographs, and makes videos. His company, Curbly, LLC, runs several niche blogs that make money from advertising and sponsorships. His open source community building platform, CommunityEngine, is used on hundreds of Web sites around the world.

When he’s not making things on his computer, he’s tackling real-world home improvement projects, playing tennis, or swinging at the park with his two-year-old daughter.

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Before we get started, tell me if you have this problem. You’ve got a great product, but you’re not getting people to even try it, let alone buy it. Well, the problem is probably that you’ve got too much text on your site. But check out what these startups have done. Here’s Snap Engage. They’ve got a video explaining their product right underneath the free trial button. Here is Send Grid, right next to the get started button is a video explaining the product. Video, much more than text helps people understand what you’ve created and convince them to try and buy it.

And a company I recommend that you turn to for this is Revolution Productions, the same company that did those startups and many other videos. Revolution Productions, and when you go to their site, Revolution-Productions.com, and contact them. I want you to talk directly to the founder, Anish Patel. Tell them I sent you. They’ll take great care of you, and make sure you have a good video that convinces people to buy your product.

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All right, I’ve talked too fast for too long. Let’s get right into the program.

Everyone, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. How do you build a business that gets over a million page views per month, and still get home in time to hang out with your two-year-old daughter? And, does that even matter?

Joining me is Bruno Bornsztein. He’s the founder of Curbly, a group of mixed blogs and community site. Bruno says his company won’t earn a $50 billion valuation anytime soon, and he’s not expecting to be on the cover of Time Magazine, but his business is giving him a good lifestyle. I’ve invited him here to talk about it. Bruno, welcome.

Bruno: Thanks, I’m glad to be here.

Andrew: I’m so used to reading emails from people who say, my business is on the way to being a $50 billion valuation, and I’m not used to having the word ‘won’t’ in front of that.

Bruno: No, I don’t think we’re going in that direction.

Andrew: So, I said earlier, does it even matter? The thing about lifestyle entrepreneurs, and the reason that I don’t tend to do interviews with lifestyle entrepreneurs on Mixergy is that if you’re building a business just for your life, then does the business really even matter? Don’t you want to leave a legacy through your business? Don’t you want to build something that’s so big that you feel like you gave it your all–or attempt to even?

Bruno: Yeah, I think you want to build something that’s really big and that you gave it your all. And for me, that thing starts with my family. That’s a big thing, building a family, having kids, being around for them, being involved in their lives, being involved in the life of your spouse, or your partner, or whatever. That’s a really big thing. And I feel like that perspective is getting lost a little bit these days. The big thing that you accomplish in your life doesn’t have to be an IPO or a startup that you sell. It’s what you’re actually doing in your life with the people that matter to you. And I think that the business that you build should be a part of that. It should be an integral part of that.

Andrew: Well, can it still be an integral part of it and swing for the $50 billion valuation or the cover of Time Magazine? Or, let’s not say that those two specific goals are the reason to be in business. But big goals, like leaving a big footprint on the Earth, changing the conversation, building something that’s so important that companies like, or the magazine like Time Magazine want to interview you about it and have you help their audiences understand the future. Because you’re building it. And, shouldn’t that be the point of building a business?

Bruno: Well, that’s certainly a legitimate point of building a business. And for some people, that’s a really good goal. I’m not making the argument that you shouldn’t try to do something important with your life, or that you shouldn’t have some, try to have some impact on the world around you. I guess, I’m making the argument that people should be more thoughtful about what that actually means to them either before or during when you go out and start trying to make that impact, to just stop and think about what that really means for you.

To me building a company, a business, a non-profit, a movement, or something that has a huge impact on the world around you, I mean that’s great if that’s what you want to do and that fits into your lifestyle, on the way it allows you to do the other things that are important to you. I equally I think is important, you know, smaller goals, or having a smaller impact in your local community, or with the people who are your friends and your family. I don’t think one thing necessarily diminishes the other.

I think it’s a question of people sitting down and realizing there are other options out there and just because you’re working online or doing something with computers that doesn’t mean that the path for you is to raise money and have a huge successful $1 million, $10 million business.

Andrew: So, I’m wondering where you see yourself 20 years from now? I know when I think of where’s Mixergy going 20 years from now, I imagine a certain impact on the world, I imagine a certain size — maybe I don’t have a monetary value on the business anymore, but I do have a goal of bringing in a lot of money from the business. What about you, what’s your vision ten, 20 years from now?

Bruno: That’s a really good question. I actually get asked that a lot, mainly by my parents I feel like. I don’t really tend to think 20 years from now. I think two years from now, or maybe five years from now, or now. I guess that’s kind of what I’m getting at, for me I’m thinking where do I want to be right now. I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about this, but just before I came here I just took a shower, I was just playing tennis for an hour with my mom at the local tennis courts, this morning I spent 45 minutes playing with my daughter before I took her to daycare, and when I get off the phone with you I’ll probably work for a little while and then go pick up her up at daycare again by 3:30. That’s where I want to be right now. I hope in 20 years I’m there too.

I feel there are people who work for a long time to get it to a point where they feel like they can spend time with their kids, and they can play tennis in the middle of the day, and work on something that they think is interesting, not have a boss breathing down their throat. I’m really fortunate, I think and happy, that I’m kind of in that position now, or I feel like I’ve gotten there, so that’s more what I think.

In terms of CURBLY, obviously I hope that things I do keep growing and getting better. I want to be able to spend more of my time doing things like contributing to my community, rather than things that are just directly from my own benefit, like my business, but I just kind of feel like things will organically go in the direction that I want them to go.

Andrew: Interesting. I have such a hard time allowing things to organically go somewhere. I want everything to go exactly where I want it to go or else I’m not happy with it, or else I just can’t sit still.

Bruno: Yes. I think that’s so true and I have that too. Actually when I was thinking about this conversation, I was thinking it’s a little bit, sometimes I think of myself a little bit like a gardener. If you were growing a garden, you can’t force your tomatoes to grow faster than they want to grow. You can fertilize them or whatever, but like a plant’s only going to grow at a certain speed and I feel like that’s a struggle that I have and probably a lot of people have, is you just don’t have the patience. You want your business to be big, right now. You want to have this many visitors, or this much money, or traffic now or in a month.

Goal setting I think contributes to that sometimes, goal setting can be good, but it can also be really bad because you’re saying well, we’re going, I’m going to shoot for this goal or that goal, rather than responding more organically to how things are going and I guess going with the flow in a sense, as opposed to trying to force everything to conform to your expectations or your goals for how things should be.

Andrew: All right. I want to understand how you got here. What did you do to build your business to a point where, I think the intro that I originally wrote for this — and I was clearly reading my intro when we started the interview here, it said, it was originally going to say that you have 700,000 page views per month, because that’s what you had earlier in the year when we scheduled this interview. A few months later your at a million page views so you’re clearly growing your business. Your doing well enough that your funding this tennis, and hang out with your daughter lifestyle from the business 100% right?

Bruno: I promised I would not talk about the tennis and then I did and now I’m paying for that.

Andrew: Why would you not want to talk about the tennis?

Bruno: Well I guess what I sort of want to avoid like, getting to this whole thing of, Oh, my life’s so amazing, and I play tennis in the middle of the day and take naps, and do whatever I want. I never work. I don’t want to give that impression, because it’s just not true. I’m trying to give a clearer idea of what my lifestyle, sort of work life, balance is like, which is that I do work hard. But I also focus on my priorities, and one of my priorities is being fit and playing tennis, and see my kids. So, that’s why I said that.

Andrew: All right, let’s balance out the picture, then. And we’ll get to how you got here in a moment. But you just told us the fun part, and you told us about the lifestyle part. Tell us about the work part. What does that look like? What’s a typical day like?

Bruno: So, I wake up whenever my daughter wakes up, which is anywhere between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. And I’ll usually hang out with her for a while. I check email right away. I’ll bring her to work, or to daycare in the morning, and I’ll come back home, work for awhile. I usually try to play tennis, or do something active, at least once a day for about an hour, and that’s usually around the middle of the day. And often, I’ll try to nap. I think it’s really important to sleep, especially when you have a kid. And then, I’ll work again in the afternoon, probably for like 1:00 to 3:00, or 4:00, and then I’ll go pick her up at daycare.

The reasons for that scheduling is partly, I just feel like I’m not as productive in the middle of the day. You know, somewhere around 11:00, part of my brain turns off, and I find myself switching tabs and just flipping from Facebook to Twitter, and Gmail. So, as soon as I start doing that I realize, wait a second. I better go run around for awhile. And then, I feel like, around 1:00, 1:30 everything kind of kicks back in, and I’m able to work again. I guess it’s my life rhythm.

Then, I work for awhile, and the other thing is, my wife and I kind of made a conscious choice that we don’t want to leave our daughter in daycare from, you know, 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. everyday. We have her in daycare three days a week, from about 8:00 to 3:30 or 4:00, and I feel like that’s good for her; it’s not too long. So, when I pick her up I come home, and usually don’t work again until after dinner.

Then I’ll do a little more work after my daughter’s asleep, or after dinner, whatever. I’ll do a couple more hours of work. I have a really not unusual, but unscheduled work style. You know, sometimes I work on Saturday mornings, if the site goes down or something happens on a Sunday at 11:00, I have to take care of it. That’s a little bit of the balance against playing tennis in the middle of the day, that I have to work whenever something needs attention, I have to do it.

Andrew: You know, I’ve got to tell you. Sometimes I hate that about entrepreneurship. I wish that it I could fit it within a certain period of time, and not touch it on the weekend; that I could just completely disconnect, and if the site goes down, or there’s some other issue that somebody else can deal with, because I’m in disconnect mode, or I’m in a reading a book mode. I don’t like the idea that at any moment the work can come and pull me back in.

Bruno: Yeah, and I’ll tell you a good story about that. It was four years ago that I got married, and went on a honeymoon with my wife to Europe. We were in, like, France or Italy, or something, when the ad server for Curbly went down. And I found out about it two hours later, and I had to take care of it. We had to find an Internet cafe somewhere. And this is on my honeymoon. I had to go and try to figure out what’s going on, boot it, figure it out, and fix it, because I can’t have that server down for 24 hours, because it’ll cost me bunch of money. And, yeah, you know, that’s a trade off. I don’t like it, and I try to mitigate it to a certain extent, but it’s just a trade off, you know, the same way I don’t like commuting, so I don’t commute. And if you work somewhere where you can just leave your work behind at 5:00 p.m., you know, on the other hand, you have to commute there, and there are also trade-offs there. So, I just feel like it’s one of those things that you kind of have to decide if it’s worth it to you.

Andrew: OK, let’s figure out how you got here. You launch a business 2006, right?

Bruno: Yeah.

Andrew: The original idea was?

Bruno: The original idea was going to be like a social network for people who were into home improvement, interior design, and decor.

Andrew: OK.

Bruno: I had worked as a web developer for a long time. I’d worked on building a big social network for an ad agency here in Minneapolis. So, I kind of knew it was something I knew how to do, building social networks and things like that. So, a friend and I decided that we would try this. Over the years it evolved away from the social network concept, and has become more of just a blog, a publishing site, although it still retains some of the community kind of features that you might expect. But, at this point, every blog has those sorts of features. All that stuff has sort of come along in the last five years, to the point where it’s pretty difficult these days to distinguish between and social network and a blog, in a lot of cases.

Andrew: Well, with social networks there’s more interaction between the people who are on the site versus a blog, which is still very top down, you know, the writer produces and everyone else gets to respond to it.

Bruno: Right. In Curbly’s case, members can contribute blog posts, in that section of the site. So there is a little bit higher level that I think is kind of a hold over from the original idea.

Andrew: So, was the original idea to create almost a MySpace for your community?

Bruno: Yeah.

Andrew: It was?

Bruno: It was like, to do a Facebook for people who are crazy about their house, who like to decorate, and make things, and fix their house, and things like that. Over the years, we’ve had different features that I guess would exemplify that, like we had a project planning feature at one point, where you could put in like all the house remodeling projects you wanted to do for the year, and plan them, and schedule, and so on. That stuff has kind of died off, as I’ve found that perusing content and selling ads against it has just worked better for me.

Andrew: OK. So, let’s see. You had this idea for the social network. What’s the first version of the site? What did it have?

Bruno: The first version had like a blog functionality, user profiles, friend requests, and something we still have, called Clippings, which allows . . . it’s a little bit like Pinterest, of a few years ago. I don’t know if you know what Pinterest is, but it’s like an image bookmarking service right now, that’s really blowing up. It’s pretty popular right now, among DIY creative decor fashion-type audiences. So, that’s what this clipping feature was. It allowed you to go to any website and choose an image, save it into Curbly, under your profile. That version of the site took, I think, four weeks to build.

Andrew: By you?

Bruno: Me, and this friend of mine, that started the site with me.

Andrew: OK. And you guys are co-founders?

Bruno: Yeah, he actually dropped out, you know. I don’t know if I want to say ‘dropped out’, but he stopped working on the project after about half a year, and moved onto other stuff.

Andrew: OK. So the idea was, I could see, maybe, an interesting chair, or maybe an interesting frig online. I would clip it, and then I would talk about it with Olivia, my wife. Maybe I’d talk about it with my Mom, maybe a friend, who has a good eye for design. We’d all be talking, and I’d pick the one that I wanted, and others, I guess, would listen in on the conversation. And then, based on how my family felt about this one item, they would either buy it or . . .

Bruno: Yeah, that would be one case. Another would just be, you’re redecorating your living room, and you just want some ideas, so you go to Curbly.com/clippings/blue and see everything that people have put that’s blue. You’d see a blue chair, blue lighting fixtures, and whatever.

Andrew: I see.

Bruno: That would help you find visual inspiration for the kinds of things that you want to do.

Andrew: And, Bruno, in four weeks you were able to build a site that enabled people to have those kinds of conversations. Clipping is fairly easy. But conversation seems like a really intense process to build into a site, and then also to enable other people to find what those conversations were about, seems even harder. No?

Bruno: No. We were two pretty experienced web developers. We had worked on a couple big sites, and we had some money saved up, so we were working for four weeks pretty much full time, you know, two guys. We were ruthless about cutting out things that didn’t matter.

Andrew: For example?

Bruno: Oh, that’s a long time ago. It’s hard to remember. You know, like we didn’t do private messaging in the first month between users. We just decided it wasn’t important. We didn’t spend a lot of back and forth time on design, you know. We worked with a freelance designer and just came up with a couple designs and went with it. It was a very lean sort of process, which I know your readers are familiar with. So, yeah, we set ourselves a date, November 13th, and we put it out there. We told our friends, and we stuck to that.

Andrew: You said, November 13th we’re going to be up and running. Everybody come check it out. And you had to hit that deadline.

Bruno: Yeah. And we told friends, and stuff, it was going to be up. I always think launches are so funny with a rev product, anyway, because nobody knows, for the most part, everyone worries about launching on day one, but like, only if you’re lucky is anybody going to show up on day one. I mean, if you’ve done some work, and marketed it, people will show up. So, I think people worry a little bit too much about launch, ‘cuz it’s not postponing for any minor details. We just went ahead and put it out there, and worried about fixing. We had like never tested it in IE before the first day, when somebody showed up and said, hey, this doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. And we fixed it. So, it was fine.

Andrew: All right. Hey, let’s put your Skype on ‘Do not disturb’ mode, so when people come online they won’t make that noise. What is that noise, by the way, that Skype has? It’s like a drop of water hitting a pool or something. I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re aiming for. OK. So I understand what the first version looked like. I understand how you got the first few users. But what was your vision for getting users beyond the friends and family who are going to naturally come to your site? Where did you think your audience would come from?

Bruno: I wish I could say that we had a vision for it or that we had planned for it, but really we did not plan for it. I mean, we did not do a whole lot of planning about that. We just kind of put it out there and decided to start dealing with it. I can tell you what tactics worked really well, but it wouldn’t be true to say that we had planned out these things in advance or that we had done a lot of research about it. We were improvising and I’m not embarrassed to admit that. I think that that’s how a lot of people do it. Tactics that worked really well for us…

Andrew: Actually, let’s hold off on tactics. I want to go through with the narrative, but I did write down tactics so that we can come back and learn from what you learned eventually. But I want to understand your mindset, at this point. See, in school, I took business classes where they’d teach us how to write a business plan, how to think about the future, how to model different financial scenarios or even when I read about them privately in the stack of books that I’ve got here and have read for years, they say start with the goal in mind or start with the end in mind and plan towards that and so on.

I’m seeing in many of my interviews that entrepreneurs don’t have that, that they just kind of start. Now, is it an intentional fight against that or is this because this is kind of a part time hobby that you could afford not to think that way? Why? Why not come up with a plan? I’m not doubting you and I don’t want you to fight against it. I just want to understand your mindset.

Bruno: Sure. I think there are a lot of good reasons why not to plan. There are probably a lot of good reasons why you should plan, too. I’m just not the person to be telling them to you. I’m sure there are a lot of other people who will speak on that better than me. I feel like what I do is a creative pursuit. By creative, I mean creative in the way that an artist is creative or a musician is creative.

You don’t sit down to paint a picture and have a complete image in your mind of what the picture is going to look like or to write a song and know what that is going to look like. I can speak to that because I’m a songwriter, too. I’m a musician and stuff. When you start writing a song, you write the first lyric and then you write the second lyric, then you think about what you want to say and you write the third lyric. I think if you asked musicians, “What were you trying to do when you wrote this song,” most of the time they wouldn’t say, “Oh, I had this whole story in mind and I just went about putting it out.”

I’m sure you’d find the same thing if you talked to novelists, anybody who is doing something creative. It’s a blank canvas. Painting is a blank canvas. You start going, then you take each stroke and suddenly, it starts taking shape. Entrepreneurship is like that in a lot of ways.

Andrew: How can you afford to think that way? Were you already engaged to your wife or had you met her and were planning on getting married at some point?

Bruno: Yeah, we had been dating for a long time. We weren’t engaged at that point.

Andrew: Practically speaking, how could you afford to think about the future without saying, “Where’s the money going to come out of every step that I take?” Especially, since I think you told me that you and the friend who helped you launch the business took time off. You were focused entirely on this.

Bruno: Sure. I think that’s a valid point that’s worth addressing. I’m not advocating recklessness or unreasonable risks. I mean, you have to reasonable as you’re doing these things. In my case, I had worked at a big PR position in a big corporation for a long time, then I had transitioned to doing freelance web development work. I had worked a job where I was making a good rate so I had saved up some money. I put myself in a position where I could afford, I guess, to be creative. I think that that’s worthwhile. I mean, if you’re thinking about doing something like this, try to get yourself in a place where you can do that.

Certainly, if you don’t have kids yet, now’s a good time. It’s harder to do, I think, once you have kids because there’s just more responsibility and weight associated with every decision. At the same time, I feel like there’s false comfort in planning. You can sit around planning, projecting numbers and projecting revenue and it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a guess. If it’s useful to you in terms of your planning, what tactics you want to execute or if helps you be productive, then that’s great. I don’t think it’s a safety net and I don’t think people should view planning as some failsafe that’s going to protect you from risk or anything. I does depend, to a certain degree, on your personality. My personality is one where I can live with ambiguity. I feel like I thrive, to a certain extent, in ambiguity and some people aren’t like that. So, I think it just depends on what kind of person you are.

Andrew: OK. So, if I’m understanding you right, you were thinking worse, actually. You tell me, worst case, you launch this thing, and you focus four weeks on it, and you maybe spend more months on this thing and you realize the site’s not going anywhere. Where would you have gone at that point?

Bruno: I probably would have gone back to contracting, I would imagine. Well, actually, that’s not . . . it wasn’t an either, or. And this is an example I wrote down, when I was thinking about this. After six months, the other person that I was doing this with decided that his heart wasn’t in it, and he wanted to other things. So he left. And at that point I faced kind of a critical junction, you know. Curbly was making less than $1000 a month at that point, it didn’t have hockey sticks, you know, style growth. I think a lot of people might have looked at that and said, ooh, this is not working out. And actually, they would have been right. At that point it wasn’t really wasn’t working that well.

So, I continued to do some contracting, and filling in the gaps, and it’s not like I just jumped off and stopped working altogether and worked on Curbly. I kept doing contracting for like another year, year and a half, picking up contract jobs and things on the side to fill in for the revenue that I wasn’t make through Curbly. But all the time I kind of had an eye towards how can I continue, you know, like watering my plant, tending my garden. But, certainly it helps to have skills that you can fall back on.

Andrew: OK. So, you launched the site. You told us what the first version looked like. Tell me about the early evolution of the site, before you hit it and it worked, but in those first six months, maybe. How did the site change?

Bruno: Pretty quickly it evolved away from user generated social networks style interaction. We found out, as I’m sure everybody who tried to build a social network in 2006 found out, that user generated content is difficult. Either users don’t generate a whole lot of content, or the content that they do generate is not that good. So pretty quickly, we figured out ways to generate content in other ways, and basically, that means paying people. So, yeah, that was probably the very important shift right away, from the beginning, which was that we started paying freelance writers to create content–right off the bat.

Andrew: Did you test beforehand, and realize that your own internal content was working?

Bruno: What do you think?

Andrew: I see that user generated content isn’t working, but I was wondering what gave you the hope that paying for content to bring in freelancers would be the answer?

Bruno: What gave me the hope? I didn’t really have hope. It was just something . . .

Andrew: You thought, hey, we can’t get content from users, let’s just create our own content.

Bruno: Yeah.

Andrew: OK.

Bruno: We started by saying, OK, well, maybe we can write the content ourselves. I have a background in journalism, too, so I know how to write. And I quickly realized I wasn’t going to be able to produce enough about that topic.

Andrew: But you did start by creating your own content?

Bruno: Yeah, you know, I’d write a little bit. I still, actually, can contribute some content to the site, not a ton.

Andrew: So, what happened when you created your own articles, were you finding that traffic was just coming from search engine optimization, or search engines? Were you finding that people were engaging? There was something about the articles that you created yourself that, I imagine, made you think, OK, this could work. If it’s good stuff, we can do something.

Bruno: I’ll tell you, the first article that we had that did really well was an article that was actually contributed by a user, but somebody not associated with Curbly, who created an article about how to create a photo wall out of wires and clips, and took nice pictures and photographed it, and wrote an article. And that article got a life hacker, and sent, I think we had like 50,000 visits in a day. And that was like the second week we were alive. So, it was pretty big at the time. So, yeah, there was definitely some reinforcement that what I was doing was not crazy, and that there was an audience for it out there. And that, obviously, is a great thing to have if you can get it.

Andrew: I see. And then you start bringing in writers. I’ve got to say too, if anyone is watching us and noticing that I’m drinking a lot of water and coffee, I’ve had this crazy back pain. I was actually on the floor, lying down for about 20 minutes before our conversation started, just trying to relax my back. I think the problem is that I switched my running shoes to the thin, barefoot style running shoes. And from what I’m hearing, there’s a transition period there, where things start to ache that you don’t expect. But, even with the backache, I ran into work this morning, took a shower across the street, came in here, and I think I’ve just made it a little bit worse. So, for some reason the water and the coffee are very comforting right now.

Bruno: OK.

Andrew: I’m holding onto them like they’re my mommy. You bring in writers. If you’re going to start paying writers, I imagine that you had a vision for where the revenue was going to come from. Where was the revenue going to come from?

Bruno: I think I knew right away it was going to have to be advertising. I didn’t have a lot of illusions about subscription content.

Andrew: You mean Google AdSense.

Bruno: At first it was AdSense. That was a big education for me, learning about that. Of all the things that I do for Curbly, selling ads is the thing I knew least about going into it. I knew how to program; I have a background in journalism; I did some graphic design. Those things I’m more comfortable with. Selling ads was something I knew almost nothing about.

I knew right away it would have to come from advertising. Started with AdWords and then just relentlessly explored other options. There’s tons of ad networks out there. Started pestering vertical ad networks, like ones that sell directly to home improvement, or DIY, or decor brands. Just figuring out what works and what didn’t work. Just trying to make money.

Andrew: Do you remember your first sales calls? What were they like?

Bruno: It’s just funny, because you don’t know what you’re doing. I remember one of the first times I sold an ad, that person said, “OK. Send me the ad IO.” I was like, “Sure. OK, I’ll do that.”

I hung up and I’m like, “What the hell is that?” I went online; it means “insertion order.” There’s just jargon that you have to learn.

Andrew: How did you make that first sale, if you didn’t know how to sell?

Bruno: I don’t know if it was the first one. There were a couple where people actually contacted me, which is really nice. You put you advertising on Curbly.com, and people contact you, and it’s amazing.

Andrew: You put it up on your website? It was a sponsorship link, or an “Advertise Here” link somewhere.

Bruno: There’s an advertising page, “email here if you want to advertise”. That’s nice.

I started cold emailing at people. “Hey, I’m from Curbly, and this is how many people we have, and why we’re great, and would you be interested in trying us?” That was another note I made today, persistence. If you’re going to try and do something – any style of entrepreneurship you take on, but in particular, this kind – be really persistent.

That’s something I learned in the ad sales process. Selling ads through AdSense, or a network, is really easy. You just put in some code, and hopefully you get some money, but it’s not that effective. Selling ads directly to advertisers is about building up relationships with people:emailing them, calling them, getting them to know who you are, to remember you, to think of you the next time they’re thinking about buying ads.

That whole process takes a lot of time; it takes a lot of persistence. You can’t just give up on somebody after the first phone call because they don’t call you back, or after the first time they tell you they’re not interested. You make a note and you call them back three months later, six months later.

I’ve found that sometimes it take four, five, six calls or emails over the course of a year. The next year, they think of you, when they’re going out to spend some money on advertising, or they want to do a giveaway or something. “Oh, hey, there’s Bruno from Curbly. I remember that. Let’s try them.”

In that sense, you can’t just give up.

Andrew: How did you, in the beginning, find the people who you pitched advertising to?

Bruno: You know your site is about home improvement. You do, for example, a lot of things about kitchens. You go to Google, and you type in “kitchens”, and you see who’s advertising. You think of every kitchen product manufacturer you can. You go to their website and you try to find a contact number.

Then you realize that they never list a real contact number, they list info@company.com, which is pretty useless. But you email them. You say, “Hey, I’m looking for the contact person who would handle online media buying for your company,” and hopefully you get a call back. A lot of times you don’t.

That’s one method. It’s just brutal, and it’s time-consuming, but I haven’t found a shortcut. If somebody has, I’d love to hear it.

Another one is to call agencies, to realize that for a lot of the big ad spends, the big national brands, usually the person who’s in charge of that decision is not in-house. It’s somebody who works at a PR agency, or an advertising agency. You have to start figuring out who those agencies are, who represents who, calling them.

Andrew: How do you figure that out?

Bruno: A lot of googling. A lot of times you can google press releases. Let’s say you have a company in mind, like Nike. You can go to Google and google “Nike PR agency of record” or “ad agency of record” and sometimes you’ll get a press release that says Martin Williams is now the agency of record. Then you have to find somebody over there, you have to call and figure out who’s actually on the account. It’s a pain staking kind of time consuming process; it’s not easy but …

Andrew: One more question before we continue with the story, six months in the guy you launch the business with say’s, ‘Hey I don’t want to work on this day to day, I’ve got other things I’d rather do.’ You’re not seeing fruits yet, you’re still months away from seeing real results from this business. Something that a lot of people who listen to our interviews ask is, ‘How do you know you’re not crazy? How do you know that this is worth pursuing, this business or a new product is worth pursuing?’ instead of or, how do you know that’s the truth and that the truth is not that you’re just nuts and being stubborn?

Bruno: It’s hard I mean I was reading your About page on Mixergy, about how you made a big pivot and decided your original approach wasn’t working and kind of reinvented the site and there are a lot of people who advocate that kind of kill your babies approach. If something’s not working pretty quickly just kill it and move onto another thing.

You don’t, you don’t know you’re not crazy, you don’t, there is no guarantee that what you’re doing is going to work. Like I said it takes a lot persistence, patience, knowing that eventually things can pay off and a certain amount of belief in yourself and faith in what you’re doing, but you don’t, you don’t know that.

Andrew: I hung on for too long, looking back on the previous versions of Mixergy, I hung on for too long when it just wasn’t working. I refused to give up because I believed that only persistence is the way to achieve a result. There wasn’t anything that said, ‘hey stop’.

Bruno: You have to have something inside, some inner gauge right?

Andrew: Yes.

Bruno: I mean you have to, this isn’t … this is why I say business planning, whatever, plans aren’t going to tell you answers to these questions, you have to figure out some kind of inner compass. For me …

Andrew: So why was your inner compass telling you, ‘keep going with this, this [??]

Bruno: Because I still felt like, and I’ll tell you I actually thought … I remember thinking this through, I still woke up every morning thinking about what I wanted to do on a curb way and (inaudible) excited about it. So me a big factor was can I wake up in the morning and I have like five things that I feel like working on today? Or where you’re actually waking up like, ‘Oh I really want to try that, I wonder if that’s going to help?’ I excited about making it better so I think that that’s a good sign if you still have that feeling like your excited about what you’re working on, you’re not depressed about it and despondent about it. I think for me that was a sign that I could keep going.

Andrew: 2007 the year after you launch Curbly you launch two other websites, Uncooped.com and Snappedballot.com, why add more properties?

Bruno: That’s a good question, I actually I’ve launched a bunch of other websites. If you go to Curbley.net you can see kind of all the other (inaudible)

Andrew: Are these the first two?

Bruno: I don’t remember the order. Uncooped came I think next, Snappedballot was kind of a side project. I have TennisMetro, another site I started, man-made which I started last year, man-made …

Andrew: Man Made DIY?

Bruno: Yes that site is actually our second most successful site now. I started a lot sort of side projects and I think I’ve taken a lot of flak for that and I’ve also questioned myself a lot for that. I think in my case it helps to kind of keep variety in what I’m working on and that kind of goes back a little bit your persistence question. Sometimes it helps when you’re not sure whether to keep going with one thing, to have other ideas that you’re working on.

I’m an advocate on having multiple things that you’re working on; it works for me because I just think I’m that kind of person. I know some people can only work on one thing at a time.

So yes why launch new things? I wanted, I had some new ideas that I wanted … spend some time other things occasionally to see if they worked.

Andrew: What was the other new idea, what was the first new idea that you said, ‘I have to jump on this’, this in Uncooped, what was that first idea that launched Uncooped?

Bruno: Uncooped was … at that point I had extracted the code base for Curbly into a platform called CommunityEngine, which is an open source, Ruby on Rails, platform for building sites like Curbly.

Andrew: CommunityEngine.org is where people can go read up on that?

Bruno: Yes it’s free, it’s MIT licensed, it’s a whole other ball of wax.

Andrew: OK.

Bruno: Yes I had extracted that code base and I had this platform there that I wanted to try out so I decided to try to build a new kind of niche blog, along the lines like Curbly but targeted at people who were interested in outdoor recreation, climbing and kayaking and things like that.

It was an experiment, it’s actually still going, I mean Uncooped is still running as a blog. It’s not a huge success but it’s not losing money either.

Andrew: Was the idea to say, ‘hey I now know how to hire writers, I know how to bring in advertisers, I know all this stuff that already works for me and Curbly can work with these other projects, I’m going to try one, that was it. OK.

Bruno: Yes and also I wanted it to be about something that I cared about. I didn’t want to do businessplanning.com or whatever, I was into climbing, I like being outside so I wanted it to be on a topic that I actually found interesting too. So, that was basically the idea. I wouldn’t say that it has failed, it hasn’t been a big success like I said, but it gets 20,000 page views per month or something, which is more than a lot of blogs and it still has a couple of paid freelance writers who write content for it. It just hasn’t taken off in the way that Curly has or [??] has.

Andrew: OK. So at what point do you feel like, hey this thing’s actually starting to take off now, I’ve got a real business here that can sustain me?

Bruno: After a couple of years, I realized I could basically stop doing contract web development work after I think sometime in 2008, I basically stopped doing contract web development work and that was cool. I like programming, but I just didn’t like having — it’s a free lancers dilemma is you only have so many hours in a day and your always tied into doing somebody else’s work basically. I gradually scaled back the number of projects I was doing until I finally wasn’t doing any freelance work. Then from that point on, I decided, I started funneling more and more of my energy into growing Curbly rather than just sustaining it. I was in the mode of, keeping things going so that Curbly could grow, so that I didn’t have to depend on it completely. Then after that point, I switched a little bit and started focusing on accelerating that a little bit.

Andrew: And what does accelerating mean, in the business?

Bruno: Well in my case, figuring out how to produce more content than what I was currently producing, so that means more writers. I brought on an almost full-time editor who is an independent contractor, but he now basically manages the whole editorial side of things for Curbly and [??]. Improving our coverage so literally improving the quality of the content that we were generating, which was something that I think made a big difference.

Andrew: How did you improve the quality of the content?

Bruno: Well, when you’re working with freelancers it helps to have guidelines that they can go by.

Andrew: You mean you have a document with guidelines?

Bruno: Yes. A document with guidelines, simple things from how to format a link to more conceptual things like, how to write a good title.

Andrew: Is that something we can show our audience? Do you feel comfortable showing this publicly?

Bruno: Sure I do.

Andrew: We don’t have to do it now, I’ll follow up afterwards and get that. OK, so you start to bring an editor in.

Bruno: Yes. I’ll give you another example so, bring an editor in or bring somebody in to help take a little bit of a load off of me on the editorial side. What that meant is that I needed to start learning how to sell ads, more than I had before. I have a mentor that I work with, a family friend who’s a successful real estate developer, who I meet with occasionally and we talk about these types of things, and gives me guidance.

At that point I was thinking maybe I should hire somebody, or even on a contract basis, to sell ads for me. He said to me, how can you outsource such a crucial part of what you’re doing? If you don’t actually know how to sell ads yourself, how can you justify letting somebody else do it for you? You’re making yourself obsolete in a way, you’re giving that editorial side to somebody else and the advertising side to somebody else that means that you’re not that important.

So I decided that I needed to figure out how to do it myself, before I brought in some, any help from the outside. An example of that is, my previous strategy for selling ads was a label and my Gmail inbox. I had a label called advertising, sometimes I would follow up with people, sometimes I would forget to follow up with people. There was just not a lot of, it just wasn’t very systematic. So after I brought in this guy to do the editorial, I spent a month, month-and-a half building a system that allows me to do ad sales in a much more systematic way.

I have, it’s basically a contacts database, it has all the contact I’ve ever used. I can email them directly from within the system, all the conversations are tracked, so I know when I’m emailing somebody at Nike or whoever it might be, I can look back and see what did I say to them four months ago when I emailed them, so that I can not sound like an idiot when I’m talking to them again. So, I put some effort into making my job easier, and just getting better and more effective at selling apps [or ads].

Andrew: Why did you decide to create your own, instead of using something like High Rise, from 37 Signals, or any of the other CRM programs that are available?

Bruno: I looked at some of the other CRMs, and didn’t quickly find one that I really felt like fit. And the other thing is, I kind of have to play to my strengths, a little bit, right? And my strength is that I’m a programmer at heart. I can develop things quickly. It’s easy for me to build web apps, especially if they’re just for internal use, ‘cuz I don’t have to polish them to a level, if it’s just for me. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect. And so, I feel like that’s playing to my strengths, rather than spending a bunch of money on something that somebody else built, or hiring another developer; where I can do it myself, then I have a system that’s tailor-made for me, that really works to my work style.

Another example of that is, now that I have this guy doing editing, and I’ve got five, six, seven writers, it was getting a little complicated to coordinate what everybody was working on. So, I built another system that allowed me to, you know, kind of a project collaboration system that has chat, has tasks, has a calendar so we have our editorial calendar all laid out. We all know what’s coming up the next month, and so on. Another good example of that is billing, you know. If you’ve got a blog where you’ve got ten writers, five writers, at the end of the month you have to, at least in our case, go through and look at every post they wrote, and how much are they getting paid for each one, and send them a summary of that. And that was a process that used to take me two hours, at the beginning of every month. So, as part of this new system, I build this thing in that would do most of that automatically. So, now we can do billing at the beginning of the month in less than half an hour.

Andrew: Wow. Can you say what you pay for articles?

Bruno: Yes, I can. It’s arranged between $5 and like $35 per article.

Andrew: OK. My voice just dropped. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m glad, actually, that I’ve got somebody here with a real story, and a real opinion, and a real set of experiences to share. If I was suffering like I am today, and I was talking with someone who needed to just . . . I know you listen to the interviews. You know that there are some people that I have to just really work on, I have to just keep pushing, come on, talk. You’re here to talk. It’s okay for you to talk. Today, thankfully, I don’t have to do that. Now, I wrote down, come back and ask Bruno about tactics. Tell me about some of the tactics that work.

Bruno: Creating original content. I mean, you’re going to hear it a million times, and I don’t want to sound like a broken record. I’m sure you’ll hear it on Copy Blogger, and they’ll do a better job of telling you than me, but creating original content is a very good marketing technique. I’ve spent very little on paid advertising, or Adwords, or Facebook ads. The most effective thing for us, in terms of increasing our traffic, has been just to generate good, unique content; think of something unique and write about it, or think of something that somebody else has already written about and do it better. Or, re-design it; add some nice graphics, whatever it is, package it up in some way that makes it just a little bit more valuable to the end user. That has been great for us. We’ve gotten on LifeHacker, and [Apartment] Therapy, and a bunch of other blogs that are bigger than we are, and have sent a lot of traffic our way.

Andrew: Bruno, when you write an article like that, how do you make sure that anybody notices it? Because I’m sure there are a lot of people in my audience who are thinking to themselves, hey, I’ve got a business and I’ve been told that if I blog and if I hire bloggers to create content, then traffic and customers will follow. But I’m not getting that. So, how are you different from them–from all those people who are creating sites and aren’t getting the traffic?

Bruno: Sorry, I lost you for a minute, but I think I caught the question.

Andrew: The connection was a little down, there, between sentences.

Bruno: The first thing is to tell people, and I’m surprised by the number of people who create something cool, then just sit there hoping somebody shows up.

Andrew: Tell about that. How do you do that? Who do you tell, and how do you do it?

Bruno: Well, I told you about this system that I built to contact advertisers; well, it’s really good at contacting other bloggers, too. So, I have also a database of all the contacts of all the other big blogs that are out there, and you know, that’s a hard thing to come up with, too. Because, you can send them an email to the general tips at Mixergy.com, or whatever, and who knows if it’s going to get read. So, it’s much better to have the person’s real email. So, I’ve got that system that I use whenever we write something that I think has a chance of getting picked up, or is cool. I’ll email 20, 30 people about it. And, some of them will pick it up and write about it, some of them won’t. But, it’s simple. You just tell people about it, and again, you build relationships with people, right? Maybe they won’t pick up the first article, but then they start to know who you are, they know that you’re not a spammer; they know that you’re a legitimate dude. And maybe the next time you send them something, they like, Oh, hey, that’s pretty cool, and they’ll post about it. So, yeah, I mean that’s a really simple straightforward thing to do.

Andrew: That kind of happened with us to. One of the things that I like about your approach with me was you just didn’t say, ‘Andrew, you should change all of your interviews to cover life style interviews or life style entrepreneurs,’ and a lot of people do. When they have their story and they want to be on Mixergy on other side, I imagine they do the same thing. They say, ‘You should change your site to suit stories like mine because my story is so good.’ I’m not changing my whole business and my whole model, my whole approach to life just because of you.

Bruno: I think something that was good for me and that I worked in PR for a little while, I think people should understand is that job, like if you’re trying to get somebody to write about you, link to you or interview you or whatever, you have to make their life easier. That’s what you need to do. Another good piece of advice is rather than thinking about how you can help yourself think about how you can help the other person. So, if you’re trying to contact [??] just put yourself in the mindset of that writer for that Blog, like, what can I do to make their job easier.

So, how do you put your email? Like, include a picture. I mean for God sakes don’t just send them a link that makes them have to click through to your . . .

Andrew: Include a picture of what?

Bruno: Like, let’s say that you have a project. Like you build an iPad remote control airplane or something cool like that. That’s awesome. Probably a lot of people think that that’s cool and you want to get on Life Hacker or make a whatever Blog, think about from their point of view what would make that easier for them. Like, send them an email with a headline and a link and short two sentence summary that they can cut and paste into their Blog and a picture. So, there’s less for them to do.

Andrew: I see. In that case you’ve just written an article for them. I read Life Hacker all the time. Essentially what it is is a picture, couple of sentences that are summaries of the post that they’re writing about and a link to that post. You just did it for them with the headline Blog.

Bruno: Yeah. You don’t want to be presumptuous or whatever and, like, do their job, but you’re just trying to make it easier for them. Give them the nut graph they say in journalism like that the golden nugget from the article they can use. Just try to think about how you can simplify things for them rather than just, like, what can I get from them out of this exchange.

Andrew: Yeah, here we go actually. Let see if the audience can pick up on how I stole directly from you. This is the email that you sent me back January 5th and it shows that it’s been a while, but we made this interview happen. It’s been a while because we scheduled it before. I was out sick that day and we rescheduled for now. So, here’s the email. You say, ‘Hi, Andrew. Your interview with Tom Rosi really resonated with me. I run Curbly LLC, link to it. A group of niche Blogs and community sites that bring in enough revenue to support me and one other person full time and so on.’

I’m looking right now on the screen. I see that email and I also see the intro that I gave here to you. The intro is basically copy and pasting your description of the company. Founder of Curbly, a group of niche Blogs and community sites. And then you say, ‘I don’t work Fridays and . . . ‘ Anyway, I stole a couple of things from that introduction email that you sent me and I used it in my introduction for this interview.

In that interview over there you said that you were looking for another person like me. Here’s how fit what you were looking for. Boom, it makes like so much easier.

Bruno: Yeah, I mean, you know, I’m not . . . I mean I like tooting, I won’t say that, I don’t want to toot my own horn. Just try to think about what you can do to simplify things. Like, I know you subscribe to this three sentence email thing. After your first email to me which was three sentences, I made a point of having my response to you be three sentences.

Andrew: That’s true actually. I’m seeing that now. I didn’t notice it.

Bruno: You know, just think about that stuff. Think about, like, first of all I’m assuming that you have a lot of email to go through when I’m emailing you, so, I’m trying to keep my email short, quick, to the point, well written, those are things you really have to do if you want people to pay attention to you.

Andrew: I’m looking here at the time and I want to make sure I squeeze this in as much as possible. I said to the audience that I’ll come back and give them more tactics. Give me more tactics, specifically, if you could, in the intro I said, ‘How do you build a business that gets over a million pay views?’ Give me some tactics for how to get that number of pay views.

Bruno: OK. So, I mean we’ve already talked about writing original content. You are not going to get it by just [??] other people stuff, obviously. So, you have to create original content. Another good tactic is to give stuff away. Create things that have value and give it away. An example of that is this year we created a series of cleaning cheat sheets. So, what these are are little, well designed kind of spiffy looking PDFs that are tips, checklist on how to clean, like, if you are cleaning your bathroom, do this, and do this, and whatever little tips. We packed this up into little PDFs and gave them all away in exchange for people signing up to our newsletter. That’s a simple thing, you are giving away something that took you a little extra time to create and you are getting something in exchange for it. So that’s another tactic.

Another very important one I think is a little bit undervalued is, get good at finding talent. And by that I mean if you are generating content, most likely you are not going to be able to do it all by yourself. So start getting good at figuring out who can do it for you and well. Read a lot of other blogs, and lot of times you can find somebody who is writing for their own personal blog or in a smaller blog that you have to be a little [??], hey, you know, this person has the potential, might be able to do stuff for us, for a cost that is both lower to me than like a professional would be, but also good for them, you know, because currently they are doing something where they are not getting paid or they are not getting paid very much and they might make more working for you.

Andrew: I see. How many what percentage of your writers come from putting ‘Help wanted’ ads versus going after writers who is writing for you, like, online.

Bruno: Like a hundred percent come from writers who is writing [??] …

Andrew: So you don’t go to Problog or dotnet and do a ‘Help wanted’ ad, you just look online to see who writes well, and you say. ‘Hey, why don’t you come and write for me?’

Bruno: I have nothing against Problog, you know, people who are professional bloggers, they are great writers. The problem is though that they have these expectations of about what they are going to make and in our case, you know, we don’t have enough revenue or traffic to be able to pay people as much as some other bigger sites. So, you know, for us it is about finding somebody who kind of fits in with what we are able to offer, I guess.

Andrew: OK.

Bruno: So almost all our people come from either original people who are members of Curbly, you know who like are members and meet us on Curbly who you know, sometimes somebody else sends in a tip and say, ‘Hey, I have got this cool project, would you feature on board on Curbly?’ and we will write back and be like, ‘Sure, are you interested in writing for Curbly?’ So that’s a good way or we do a lot of browsing other blogs and contacting other people constantly, you know, like, just getting in touch, asking them to guest blog and if they work out, you know, maybe bringing them on board.

Andrew: What other tactics do you have, to share?

Bruno: Now when I look at my list here, I wrote down, be stingy …

Andrew: OK.

Bruno: … I guess that’s a natural attribute of mine, which is either good or bad …

Andrew: How are you stingy, do you have an example?

Bruno: Sure. For example, I hired this person to be our Managing Editor, and a lot of people said, ‘Have you ever met him?’ and I said, ‘No, he was in Ohio.’ So I could have like, spent a bunch of money and got on a plane and gone out and met him, you know, and that seems pretty reasonable, if you are going to have somebody doing a lot of work for you, to actually meet him face to face. But you know in my case I just didn’t, that’s a good example being stingy. You have to figure out where you really want to spend your money. So remote working obviously is one really good way of saving money. I still work out of my home, I have considered to, you know, a few times working out of an office and just never decided that the value is there for me.

Andrew: OK.

Bruno: Another and I mean I have touched on this before, but another way of being stingy is play to your strengths. In my case, if you are a web developer, and you can build things for yourself quickly then that’s going to save you a lot of money. If you are a graphic designer or you can do video or whatever, you can save lot of money doing those things.

Andrew: OK. How about one more tactic?

Bruno: One more, let’s see, I am looking, looking, and looking …

Andrew: [laughs]

Bruno: … I had three written down. Let’s see, let me think.

Andrew: All right, don’t force it if it is not there. Actually coming into an interview is, it’s interesting that you made notes coming into this interview. Where did that come from? Most people feel like, hey, Andrew is going to ask me the questions, I know the answers because he is going to ask me about myself and my business. I will just show up on time with a good attitude and that’s the battle right there. Which is for the most part true, but it helps when you do some work before hand.

Bruno: Yeah. You know I mean I, this guess flies in the face of little bit of all this anti planning stuff that I was talking about. It is not like I sat down for an hour or two and made a big plan about what I wanted to talk to you about, but I wanted to say, and I looked through kind of what you had talked about to some other people and sort of try to get a feel for the kind of things that you are looking for, and then made some notes. You know, I think, the reason why to do that is pretty obvious, you don’t want to be wasting the other person’s time. You know, it’s not about just me looking good or making sure that I come off as this awesome person, but it’s about like you are taking your time to talk to me, and probably a lot of people are going to spend a while, you know, watching this interview and I don’t want to waste their time either, so, you know, try and make sure I have something interesting to talk about.

Andrew: Well, that is true, is a big help. I know there are a lot of people who are listening. I would like to hear their feedback. I am curious to know what you guys think about Bruno’s point of view on life style business, on the way that he thinks about planning about any event, come back and let me know. This is clearly an interview that is different from the others but one that I am especially glad to have on because it is different, and what I would like to hear is, from the audience what they think about it, and of course, always don’t just be in the audience, find a way to contact Bruno, say hello, thank him for doing this interview because I believe that the relationship you get with Bruno even if it just starts with a quick hello, is going to be much more valuable than anything you could have picked up in this interview, and this interview is really valuable. So Bruno, thanks for doing the interview.

Bruno: All right, thanks a lot.

Andrew: Thank you all for watching, and check out, when I say Curbly, it’s spelled curbly.com. Bye, bye.

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