I'm Ryan Waggoner, web architect,
entrepreneur, dork. I build things.

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Peter Shankman and HelpAReporterOut (HARO) Just Sent Me a Cease-and-Desist Letter

02.26.10 Posted in Entrepreneurship, News, Personal, Posts by Ryan W.

Backstory: A couple weeks ago, I launched a site called PRManna.com, to help startups and small businesses connect with reporters and other journalists who are looking for experts and sources for stories. The launch was well received, got picked up on ReadWriteWeb, and people have been using the site for the last couple weeks. I was originally inspired by Peter Shankman’s HelpAReporterOut (HARO) service, and I mentioned that on the about page. However, his service was a simple mailing list, nothing more, and I thought the idea could be improved upon substantially, so I did.

Today, I got a cease-and-desist letter from Mr. Shankman’s law firm. It’s basically four pages of legal bullshit, but the gist of what they’re claiming is this:

  • I stole his idea (bullshit, his service was a mailing list when I built PRManna, and there are tons of sites for this purpose)
  • I used his name without permission (true, as I wanted to give credit to him for the inspiration to create something better than a simple mailing list. Clearly a big mistake on my part.)
  • I “blatantly” copied the “look and feel” of the HelpAReporter.com website (this is more of an insult to them if true, as PRManna has lame design / usability)

And as a result of the above, they’re demanding that I:

  • Remove any mention of Peter Shankman, HelpAReporterOut, HARO, etc. from all my sites (happily done, except for this blog post)
  • Stop using PRManna, PRManna.com, etc.
  • Transfer ownership of PRManna.com to Peter Shankman’s company :)

I’m still debating my options…let me know if you have any suggestions. Let me know if you want to see the actual letter and I’ll post a link. I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed that Peter decided to be such a jackass about this. If he had bothered to write me an email, I would have gladly removed his name and never mentioned this to anyone.

Hey Peter, if you’re reading this, I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of the Streisand Effect, but if not, you might want to see if you can find an expert source who can explain it to you. If you’d like a place to post a request, you can check out http://PRManna.com.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the full content of the letter. [PDF]

UPDATE 2: I just wanted to say thank you so much to all of you out there who have blogged, tweeted, and left comments with your support. I’ve received tons of emails and tweets from people encouraging me and asking how they can help. I’m so grateful to work in such a supportive industry, and if you want to help, please check out PRManna and let me know what I can do to improve it. I really just want to create something useful that helps people do great things, and I’d love your help.

UPDATE 3: I’ve also seen a few blog posts commenting on how similar the PRManna homepage is to the HARO homepage. I personally don’t think that’s the case, but regardless of my opinion, what I can tell you is that the PRManna homepage was designed more than 10 months before HARO did their relaunch in early 2010. In fact, here’s a screenshot that was posted publicly to Skitch on March 5th, 2009:

http://skitch.com/ryanwaggoner/b821j/prmanna.com-home

I’ve got plenty of other code, screenshots, and other bits of proof that I built this service a year before HARO decided to launch what they’ve got today.

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If You’re Passionate About Something, You Can Make a Living From It Online

02.23.10 Posted in Entrepreneurship, Posts, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

There’s a saying that in China, if you’re one-in-a-million, that means there’s more than a thousand people just like you. The same is true of the Internet, and I’ve come to realize that if you’re truly passionate about something (anything), that almost certainly means that there are enough people out there who are also passionate about it that you can make a living from it. You might not make a billion dollars, but you can almost certainly make a good living.

Gary Vaynerchuk touches on this concept in “Crush It”, but it kind of sunk in for me tonight while watching “Terminator Salvation”. During the first 20 minutes or so, Christian Bale is sporting this really interesting leather jacket. I bought an amazing leather jacket last year and now I’m hooked, so I spent a few minutes trying to find the manufacturer of the jacket in the film.

That’s when I found this.

Yes, that’s right. It’s an entire forum dedicated solely to jackets found in movies. There are more than 1400 registered users and they’ve posted almost 30,000 posts. So pretty active.

Here’s another example. That’s right, it’s a forum just for Christian pipe smokers, and there are hundreds of thousands of posts.

Now, I don’t know how much money these sites are making, but that’s not really the point. If you have thousands of very active forum members, you probably have 10x that many lurkers and occasional readers, not to mention all the search traffic you’re likely to be getting. That’s a large audience, and with some hustle and creativity and just living out your passion for the topic, I’m convinced you could make a good living in these niches.

In fact, you might be better off in a tiny niche that seems like it’s too small to be viable, because it’s likely under the radar for almost everyone else, except your audience. So the next time you find yourself thinking about how much you love polka-dotted socks made in Middle-Eastern countries, or Middle-Eastern country music singers who wear polka-dotted socks, think about starting a blog on the topic. You never know where it might go.

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Geek Gets Fit: A Data-Driven Approach to Fitness

02.01.10 Posted in Goals, Personal, Posts, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

Seven or eight years ago, I could run a six minute mile (or run six miles), do 100 pushups in two minutes, and swim a mile without being out of breath. That was then. In the intervening period, I’ve conceded ground to age, gravity, and entropy. I’ve always worked out to some degree, but for the last few years in particular, my heart just hasn’t been in it. I run 1-2 miles several times per week and I occasionally hit the gym for some weights, but I don’t really focus on it. I sort of always have this picture in my mind of how fit I’ll be when I really get my act together and do start focusing on it. Well, that time has come. Read More…

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Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk

01.18.10 Posted in Blogging, Development, Entrepreneurship, Finances, Goals, Inspiration, Misc, Personal, Posts, Reviews, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

I recently read Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk and I enjoyed it enough that I thought I’d post a short review.

For those of you who don’t know, Gary is a very successful entrepreneur who has really pushed the limits of social media and proven that you can build a powerful brand in a short period of time with nothing more than hustle and imagination. Gary started his social media empire with Wine Library TV, an online video show about wine that helped grow his family’s retail wine and liquor store into the beginnings of an empire that does tens of millions per year in revenue. Nearly 100,000 people watch the show. He later expanded into blogging and videos on social media and personal branding. He has hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook and nearly a million followers on Twitter. Impressive, to say the least.

Crush It! is the first book of a 10-book deal that Gary signed with HarperStudio and covers how to get started with social media and personal branding, no matter what your interests are. It’s a short read, maybe an evening or two, and it’s more motivational and strategic than tactical, though there’s definitely some practical advice. The three primary points of the book are:

  • Find your passion and talk about it, relentlessly
  • Build an audience, which may take time
  • Be yourself

Gary’s primary point in the book is that social media has broken down the traditional barriers to building an audience so that now anyone can make an income off their passion, no matter what it is. This claim seems dubious, but he illustrates it with the example of worms. Say you love worms more than anything…you could do a blog and podcast about worms, and you could do so from several angles: fishing, the study of worms, worm farms, whatever. His point is that you by being passionate and authentic and creating an audience of other worm-lovers out there (and they are out there), you can make a good living off of it.

I tend to agree with him, partly because I’ve seen an awful lot of bloggers making a lot of money over the last few years writing about tiny niche topics, and partly because there are more than a billion people online and more joining everyday, and it just stands to reason that for almost anything you can possibly be passionate about, there’s a market-size group of people out there who care about it too.

Gary talks about how Wine Library TV only had five viewers when he started, but he just kept creating good content and engaging whatever fans he had, and today you can see the results. Another of his big points is that you may have to spend years working at it to really build the audience you’ll need to live off your passion. This might sound like a long time, but if you’re doing it because you love it and you’re having fun, does it matter?

One of the points he comes back to most often is the idea of just being yourself. Users can smell people being fake from a mile away, so the only way to build a valuable audience is to be honest and authentic. The only real question I had that the book didn’t answer was: what if you’re not the type of person who a) has a passion, or b) enjoys developing an online personal brand. However, I don’t fall under either of those categories, so I enjoyed the book. However, if you’re not really into Twitter or Facebook or blogging or online video or whatever, then maybe the book won’t appeal to you like it did to me.

The book has inspired me in several ways: first, I’ve renewed my efforts to stay engaged in the current communities that I participate in. Second, I’m going to be revamping my personal brand and making this site simpler and more expressive this year. Finally, I’m going to relaunch Bounteo.com, a site I started almost three years ago to talk about personal finance, investing, career development, and entrepreneurship, all from the perspective of young adults in the 20-35 age bracket. Unfortunately, I let the site languish and haven’t done anything with it for the last 18 months or so, which I really regret. I wonder what it could be right now if I had really focused on it. Maybe more like this. However, there’s no time like the present to turn things around, so stay tuned.

And buy this book.

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Where do I go from here?

06.19.09 Posted in Blogging, Personal, Posts by Ryan W.

I’m having a crisis with my blog. I clearly need a redesign and some overall polish, but I’m unsure of what I really want to do with it beyond that. I’d like to rearrange some things so that it’d be a minor source of income, but I guess I’m not sure what I really want to talk about here. I’m torn between talking about whatever strikes my fancy, like I do now, or focusing more on a particular area or interest, like technology entrepreneurship or real estate investing. If you’ve been a reader for awhile and there’s anything in particular that you’ve enjoyed reading on here, please post a comment and let me know what you want to hear more/less of. Thanks!

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Trapped

06.18.09 Posted in Future, Inspiration, Posts, Science, Technology by Ryan W.

When I read articles that discuss the vastness of the cosmos and the trillions upon trillions of stars that inhabit our universe, and the likelihood that there are perhaps billions of inhabited planets out there teeming with life, the emotion I feel most is not awe, but a deep sadness for all that we’ll never know or understand about the universe. Many of these galaxies are tens of billions of light years away, so unless there’s some pretty impressive loopholes in the laws of physics as we understand them today, we as a species will never know what lies beyond the tiniest fraction of our little corner of the universe.

And that’s depressing.

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For bigger things

06.11.09 Posted in Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Personal, Posts by Ryan W.

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain’t my American dream

“American Dream” by Switchfoot

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Introducing MightyReach – All your web analytics and social media stats on one page

05.25.09 Posted in Entrepreneurship, Posts, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

Note: This is a repost of a blog post on the MightyBrand blog…thought it might be useful to some folks over here.

Short version: we’re launching a new web application called MightyReach that lets you create a customized dashboard of all your web and social media stats. Check it out and sign up to be notified when it launches!

Longer explanation:

We’ve had a blast working on MightyBrand over the last few months and we’ve got a new set of features that we’re going to be launching soon that we wanted to share. The idea is that we’ll be allowing you to create a customized dashboard where you can view all your web analytics and social media stats in one place. You can track visitors to your website, subscribers to your RSS feeds, followers on Twitter, views of your videos, etc. The best part is that we’re integrating with all the 3rd-party services that you already use, so you don’t need to change anything to use our solution.

While we were working on this, we realized that there’s a lot of people out there who might want this stats dashboard in a standalone app, so we decided to launch it as a new web application. It’s still in progress, but if you head over to MightyReach.com, you can get a feel for what we’re working on and sign up to be notified when we start opening up the beta program. And as always, we’d love to hear what you think about the idea and how we can make it better.

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MightyBrand in 60 seconds

05.10.09 Posted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Posts, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

It’s recently come to my attention that in the excitement of the last five months, I’ve neglected to really talk about MightyBrand, my startup, and what’s going on with it. So here’s a brief overview for those of you that are curious.

In mid-2006, Ben Lew, Ben Rasmusen, and myself all started working on a social network aggregator called BlueSwarm. The idea was to allow you to easily see what your friends were doing across all the different social networks. We launched it in July 2007 and got some decent feedback, but we weren’t sure how we were going to monetize it, so we started thinking about different ways to use the technology.

In April of 2008, we got the idea to build a social media monitoring service for brands. We started coding in May of 2008, using a lot of the existing code from BlueSwarm. We kept the name BlueSwarm and launched our prototype in September 2008. For the next few months, we gathered feedback from our alpha users, tweaked our business model, built out a slew of new features, and renamed the company to MightyBrand.

We launched as MightyBrand on Jan. 22nd, 2009. Since then, we’ve worked on MightyBrand full-time, helping companies and individuals learn how to build strong brands online using social media. If you’d like to know more, check out the MightyBrand blog and follow us on Twitter.

The last five months have been challenging and exhilarating and I’m gathering enough blog post material to get me through the next ten years. I’ll post some of my lessons learned later, but in the meantime, if you have any questions, please post them in the comments…I’d love to hear from you!

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GovFresh – All the government’s social media feeds in one place

05.10.09 Posted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Politics, Posts, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

A little over a week ago, my good friend Luke Fretwell stopped by my office to chat about this idea that he had to aggregate all the feeds from the social media accounts of the US Government in one place. Various arms of the federal government have been signing up for things like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube at a rapid pace. Luke thought it would be cool to be able to follow all of those feeds from the same place. Intrigued, we sat down for a couple hours and put together GovFresh.com as an early prototype. We’re using Wordpress as a framework for FriendFeed widgets, so it’s pretty light on features right now, but you can already see the potential. We spent the last week tweaking things here and there, but mostly just mentioning it to a few people on Twitter and what-not. Since then, our traffic has almost doubled every day and we’re trying to figure out what to do next (cast your votes here). I have to say, even I’m surprised at how quickly this is catching on, especially given how simple it is and how little time we put into it. Much of the credit goes to Luke for the excellent design and for seeding it to the right people on Twitter, but the moral of the story is the same: if you want to start something, don’t wait for permission or put together a committee, just do it. I’m excited to see what comes from this and I’d love to hear what you think. Tell me in the comments.

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