Februari 17, 2017
yaro: hello, this is yaro starak and welcometo the entrepreneurs-journey podcast. online with me right now is barnaby andersun,who is a long-time friend of mine, a fellow entrepreneur who i've connected withhere and there for many years for all kinds of different reasons not just business. barnabyis an avid meditation expert. i don't know if you can be an expert on meditation, i guessyou can. but barnaby does a lot of it and we can perhaps touch on that at some point.as well as having had his own business and selling it and starting up a couple ofinteresting start-ups at the moment too. we are going to talk about this entire storybehind barnaby and hopefully we can learn a lot. so barnaby, thank you for joining me.barnaby: wow. it's great to be here and the
entire story, that sounds quite formidable.i'm sure we'll have some fun. yaro: dauting, yes. barnaby, you are an aussie,i believe, from... barnaby: yes.yaro: born and raised. want more great free interviews like this?visit entrepreneurs-journey.com for articles, downloadable podcasts, videos and more tohelp you start an internet business...www.entrepreneurs-journey.com barnaby: yes i was born, brought up in sydneyin the blue mountains, that's where i spent my childhood. and then my adolescencewas down in geelong, near melbourne, moved up to brisbane in '95. basically, imoved here the month that the world wide
web pretty much started. that's when thingsstarted to reallytake off for me on the business front.yaro: how old were you then? barnaby: in '95, i was 24. i just startedmy family. my daughter was on her way so it was a massive time of change. i've alreadybeen working in the tech industry for about two years in sydney for a very small softwarecompany doing design and technical writing.there was no internet, although there was nothing that anybody... compuserv was thething that we were into back then, so it was a very different time.yaro: your background then. did you study design and these technical subjects in auniversity degree or technical qualification
after high school? how did you get into it?barnaby: i had no technical qualifications whatsoever. i always came from an artisticbackground. while i was young, like in 1979, i represented australia in the year of thechild as a young artist. you can say that art and design were sort of part of my skills,as was actually acting and writing. those wereall things that i was very passionate about as a teenager.i guess computers always interested me. while i was at uni, i did an arts degree likephilosophy and comparative religion and that stuff, but i soon realized that was notreally going to go anywhere. i dropped out of uni after being there a couple of years.i
must have been quite ambitious because i thoughti was just hanging out with people who were just drifting by.i quickly got a job at a software company. yaro: why did they hire you if you didn'thave any qualifications? barnaby: i was just quite persistent. i musthave impressed them somehow. i was 21 and i just showed up. yes, it was bizarrebecause he'd been used to hiring people with full-on programming experience. i think hewas just looking for somebody who could do technical writing, and i had no experiencewith that either. i just told them i could do it.he gave me that opportunity. i wrote, and he kept me on for a couple of years so i musthave done a reasonable job.
yaro: you learned on the job basically.barnaby: what was that, yaro? yaro: you learned on the job say, technicalwriting and design, which possibly would be photoshop back then as well or somethinglike that, adobe indesign, i don't know? barnaby: he was actually a mac programmer.seriously, we were working on those classic ses, i think they were called? likethe small all-in-one piece ones. this was theearly 90s. it was a very strange time. yaro: okay, so that was your doorway intothe world of technology anyway, in terms of actually getting money from it.barnaby: yes. eventually, things really changed for me when i moved to brisbane.i've never been to brisbane in my life. it
was quite a strange thing to move here, whichis where i've been living for the last 17 odd years. i quickly found a job in a, basicallylike a hardware shop selling computers. i've never done sales before. i really likedit though. people i was working with, they were professional. basically, i was quiteterrified, but there was this magical day where iwent downstairs to the [0:04:34.2]. there were all these magazines. i take oneof the magazines and one of them had on the front cover, "the world wide web is coming,"or something like that. i just had no idea what that meant. this was february of'95 and i was like "what is this?" and it said"internet."
this is a strange thing for you and i to eventry to think of. i didn't understand what those words meant. i've been working in thetech industry for two or three years and i was reading this word, "internet." it wasappearing all over the place, and i was like, "what does this even mean?"i bought the magazine and took it upstairs where i was working. i was flipping throughit, trying to understand what it was talking about.at the back was an ad that said, "website design by" this company called "firehorse."i thought, "wow, what are they talking about?"i gave these guys a call and they said they were giving a business presentation thatnight [0:05:26.3]. i just went along. i just
thought, "well, this sounds really interesting."i went along that evening and true enough theygave a presentation. they actually were a bunch of hippies. they were very strangeguys. they were forming probably pretty much maybe even the first web design companyin australia. i was so entranced in what they were doingthat they took me back to their place that evening. no joke, they were a bunch of dope-smokinghippies who spent most of their time living in their teepees. yes, no kidding.they were living in this strange house in brisbane. i was peering through all the smokeand coughing and stuttering as they were showing me netscape 0.93b. i was just soblown away. i was like, "far out! this is
amazing." you can actually put up a page onlineand you can show the world. they gave me the very rudimentaries of htmlthat night and started teaching myself. that's what i did. i quit my job the nextweek. yaro: wow. barnaby, i don't know if you haveany downloads going. the skype connection's a little bit lagging. if youcould have a quick look if you've got anything thatmight be slowing you down while we continue. barnaby: okay.yaro: it's pretty good though. i'm just getting a little bit of skipping in your voice. itcould just be me. to continue the story... okay, you've discoveredthe internet thanks to a bunch of
hippies, which is a very lovely dichotomythere. people not typically known for technology introduced you to the internet.now how does that lead into you i guess becoming an entrepreneur and actuallystarting your own business? barnaby: i worked with them for about sixmonths, but they were not really business guys. they were all over the place. i wasa bit like a contractor as i found my feat withbuilding websites. basically, i formed a partnership with anotherguy who set up a small, head of design studio and i basically was like a partnerin that, so it wasn't quite still my own business. i was basically running that new department.i had a share in it. but that was the way
itworked. in '95, it was too early. people weren't reallyinterested in websites, businesses weren't. that basically fell apart because there justwasn't enough there. i went out the next year on my own. i startedalive online, which was the company i ran for the next decade or more. that was a webdesign firm. it was based around finding clients and signing them websites and doingonline marketing and all that. i built that up from just myself. eventually,i sold that about a dozen years later. there were probably ten staff and we had hundredsof clients around the world. yaro: all right, you're skipping a bunch ofstuff i have to ask you about this business.
barnaby: yes.yaro: alive online, it's starting as an i'm assuming as sort of a website design maybehosting kind of company. i'm assuming you've also just had your first child around thistime as well because you are leaving the consistent income of a reliable job to do yourown thing. i guess you were already contracting so you had a feel for what that's like.is there concerns that this business is not going to work? do you have savings built up?do you have a deadline for how quickly you need to start making money from it? howdid that play out? barnaby: in 1995, i was working at the hardwaresales computer place. that was obviously, i had a consistent income there,but i left that for no income to go and do
thiscontracting work for this web design firm because it was too exciting. but that becamemore and more... it was basically falling part.when i formed that partnership with that guy, yes, that was a consistent income. hebasically was bankrolling it. he paid me a weekly wage. my job was to build up thedepartment and get clients. when that ran of steam, i left that. i had no other income.i just chose to step out there. i thought, "well,i could win clients." he basically lost confidence with it, andi felt i could make this thing work. yes, we had ababy. mia's her name. that was in april of
'96. she would have been six months old.yes, i just stepped out there. i had no savings, nothing. when you're young and foolish,but i've pretty much always thought like that since then. "i can make this work. i don'tcare what the obstacles are." i guess i just had some confidence.yaro: tell us about these first few years then. the confidence, was it warranted? didyou have clients? did you make enough money to feed your baby, pay your rent?barnaby: i wasn't completely stupid. there was some strategy there. while i wasworking with building up that design firm, i've made an alliance with brisbane's largestisp at the time, powerup head. powerup head, they were an amazing company. theywere just growing in huge leaps and bounds.
while i was doing that website design stuff,i was hosting all the clients with them. this is, in the day basically, web hostingis so small at this point. it isn't even really whatwe would think about today in a completely separate industry. back then, it was likethis small add-on feature that isps were running.that whole deal was about connecting people up. i would go out there and i wouldvisit them. when i left the partnership, i went out there and saw them and said, "look,i'm going to be doing this full-on." they said, "we will just send you leads." i said,"great!" that's basically how things kicked off becausei was like, i'm pretty sure these guys are
going to have leads. it was through my relationshipwith them. it built up another company. there were leads coming through,and i'd go out to networking events like go to business breakfasts.eventually, i actually moved myself, actually into their organization. i said to them, "giveme a little desk and i'll run everything from in here." but that was a couple of years later.that relationship with those guys ran like '96, '97, '98, sort of '99, where it stoppedworking was basically when they actually really vamped up the web hosting. they wentfrom being purely an isp with a bit of web hosting into becoming webcentral,australia's largest web hosting company. there were just so many opportunities there.when i think about things, it was like i was
constantly at the birth of a massive industryand i didn't take the opportunity. yaro: you must be frustrated.barnaby: yes, there were so many opportun-- the number of times where i could haveliterally made many, many millions were just extraordinary. those guys who ranpowerup and turned it into webcentral, when they sold it for $40 million, i was therewith them in those early meetings when we were just talking about what this thing couldbe and do, and i couldn't actually see it. i don't think that they could even quite seeit. but they could see something.let's put it this way, if i've really seen where things were going to go, i could'vemoved
those meetings in different ways. it was justvery interesting that i was still, not just naive but i was really, i guess my thinkingwas still way limited. yaro: i mean the power of hindsight, it'slike that. you'd want to tell a story about, "oh iwish i did that idea, like i had the idea for ebay before ebay did, but i just didn'tdo it," that sort of thing.but, you obviously had a business that did give you a living and it continued to grow.it sounds like it was just you sitting in anoffice for quite a number of years though as theonly employee, or the only worker for your
company. is that right?barnaby: yes, it was. that was the tough part. i was really focused on getting clientsand doing the work. as i said i was coming from an artistic background. how thingslooked were really important to me. i was really focused on doing a good job for clientsmaking them a website that looked great and just getting the next client.it wasn't until i probably started going to more seminars like in '99, 2000, i startedgetting exposed to a lot of other business concepts, like about leverage and scalability.i started to look at things from quite a differentangle. that's what opened up my eyes to, "wow, do i really want to keep on doing thisjust me?" i hadn't figured out how i could
make changes in the area.yaro: which is a very common question. this is something that would be great for youto answer now, barnaby. a lot of people are good consultants, or people who aremaking money doing some sort of creative job, whether it is building a website, doingdesktop publishing, writing e-mail marketing campaigns or people acting as contractors,freelance writing even. those are all good paying contract jobs, but they're not reallybusinesses. it's a common desire, especially after twoor three years of doing this, when you realize your income potential is capped because youget paid by the job or paid by the hour. you don't have the leverage or the scalabilitythere as a solo entrepreneur in this case.
you have to transition from that to hiringa first person, hiring more people, getting moreclients and juggling all of that while maintaining the cash flow of what you're currentlydoing. it sounds like you've managed to do that, so could you explain how?barnaby: okay. well, it was quite a process. this whole thing went on for many years.to really go into this, there are some tricky parts. sort of around that turn of themillennium, i had one very large client, a one really big job, but things didn't go wellwith it. they had a change of management, and therewere just all these problems, basically. i got really burnt, so i basically decidedto step away. i took a step back, probably
for acouple of years. there i was, building up this web design business, and i've beenaround webcentral getting built. and then i was like, "this is actually pretty painful.some of these web clients can go south, not even for any fault of my own."i stepped back and just did some pure consulting for a couple of years. as in i took acontract. do you really want to hear some of these really crazy stories, yaro?yaro: you can't say that without giving us at least one, barnaby.barnaby: things got pretty low because i've used up my capital. i took a job amongstall that. i took a job at a multimedia training firm. they're one of the e-commercestrategists. i went in there and just told
them what i could do and they hired me.the salary wasn't great. it was probably 50k, 60k, something like that. i just had somany commitments. basically, what i'm saying is that i stayed there probably for maybetwo months. i walked in one day to the manager and said, "i just can't do this anymore. ihave to leave because you're not paying me enough."they couldn't afford to pay me anymore, they said, so i just walked out not to anythingelse. it was just, i just chose to leave there with the presumption that i would be ableto go and get more money. the opportunity costwas too high by staying there and spending my eight hours everyday in that office.i left there even though i had my family.
my daughter was five, or so.i started looking for another contract, and i found some [0:17:28.5]. they had this e-mailmarketing system where they wanted to send out e-mails that would be [0:17:37.9].they told me that they want to have this full-on java script programmer, two of themactually. and they said to me, "can you do this?" i said to them, "no." and they said,"well we think you can. can you start on monday?" yaro: barnaby, you need to do a product onhow to get jobs you shouldn't get because that sounds like the consistent thing herein your story so far. barnaby: it was just amazing to be in an interviewand to tell them i couldn't do it, and they said they thought i could. anyway, soi start on monday and i was terrified. full-on
java script programmer, to make these e-mailsthat people would get and have all these dots and images flying across the screen.i started pumping them out, and they were soimpressed. i was blown away that i could do it. theni needed more people. then, i hit upon this idea while i was in there. i thought, "hangon. they're having trouble finding people. why don't i see if i can find people?"i started putting ads in the paper. on my lunch breaks, i'd go out there and interviewsomebody and ask them, "do you want this job?" and they'd say yes, and i'd say, "howmuch money do you want per hour?" and they'd say, "thirty dollars." i'd say, "you know,give me your phone number and i'll get back
to you." i'd walk back into my office, i'dgo to my manager and say, "hey, you wanted aprogrammer?" "yes.""how much do you want to pay them?" "fifty bucks an hour."i just became the middleman. i probably brought in about six to eight programmerswhile i was there for that next year. that just made me awesome cash. it was a greatjob. yaro: it's bizarre, you became a recruiterwithin a company you were working for where they decided you were good enough whenyou said you weren't. barnaby: exactly, yes.yaro: okay.
barnaby: what was amazing was that day wheni got the job. it was a friday. you could tell that i've sort of gained by thescrape of my teeth. that afternoon, the rent wasoverdue by a month, and the car payments, well they were going to come andrepossess the car. it was a friday. i went for the job interview, and they said to me,"we want you." and i said, "i can't do this,"fully knowing that everything was going so badlyif i didn't take this particular opportunity. what was amazing was it was like everything[0:19:49.0]. it went from being really dark to just going really well, and actually bysaying the truth as well. i didn't have to
lie, andit just brought all these amazing opportunities where i hired all these people. some ofthem are still my friends today. i've made some great connections there. some of thepeople i hired, they were fabulous, they were amazing.it was just amazing to see the power... i guess that was my first true experience ofleverage, where i went, "hang on. i can be sitting here, and show that paying me 50bucks, i've got six people here and every hour that they worked, i'm getting 20 bucks.i just managed all the invoices and everything.then the dot com bust happened big time, and the company just exploded, or implodedrather.
i remember that day, we were there when everybodywas just running around and i was one of them. we were saying, "come on, whatcoat could we grab? what could we take from this thing, this carcass that is fallingapart." yaro: wow.barnaby: we were sort of looking at the service and the guys were coming in to try topull it apart. i mean, seriously, it was the end of 2000 and things were just falling apart.that was an interesting experience. yaro: okay. you still haven't answered thequestion though. how did you transition, because you went down before you went backup, judging by the story. barnaby: i've gone down and up quite a fewtimes, yaro.
yaro: and yes, we'd love to cover every singleone, barnaby, but let's try and answer that question because i know a lot of peopleare in that situation there. a publicity expert now, or a writer now or even a blogger nowand they get okay money but they just want to turn this into something bigger and getsome employees and that transition is so hard. tell us when that worked for you.barnaby: i guess, getting that extra bit of cash behind me from from that, and thenexperiencing that power, "i've got leverage of hiring people," it really shifted my focus.i basically then decided that web design wassomething i could do and i could do it well again, but now i want to fold into web hosting.i realized i had to have a component that
was going to be residual. the residual incomecomponent became really important to me. just as i'd had with the recruitment system, ithought, well, i need to basically have a foundation where each client that comes inare paying a certain monthly fee.that was the new system i then implemented. that gave me basically the basis forthem to start hiring staff. i went from it being just me to hiring other people and havinga web hosting system that i was getting theresidual income from. yaro: that's a pretty important point, comeup with a cash flow system that is sustainable rather than just doing one-offcontract jobs where you don't know if the
money will continue to come. that sounds likeit worked for you. barnaby: yes, it did. it worked for a fewyears. that was the basis of the whole program. it went from it being purely me doingthe website design to having the hosting, employing support staff and getting 50 clients,a hundred clients paying that monthly fee and building it up. then having one staff,two staff, three staff, learning all about managing them.after doing that for a couple of years, then getting some investment in there to then startexpanding that further and having a new office premises. that's how i... i just kept onramping things up, basically. yaro: maybe you can tell us about investment,barnaby. why did you decide to get
investment?barnaby: it was more like i had a friend and he was watching was i doing and he feltthat he wanted to get into that space. he said, "let's expand this." at that time, imust admit i was like, "i think we could probablydo things even more interesting than just website design," but we decided to focus onthat. he wanted to get in there and start havinga new opportunity in that particular area oftechnology. he'd run other businesses that were quite different. i moved my office overto where he was. he was somebody who was very experienced in business. that's howit certainly worked for me. he had a few decades
of it. i guess i was looking for him forguidance really. i was like, "well okay, i don't just wantan investment here. i'm wanting someone to helpme, lead me the way through this tricky part of employing people. so, we hired all thesepeople. i started speaking, actually. at that point, all these [0:24:35.4] open where istarted speaking around australia and internationally. i think, at some point around here, i metyou. yaro: yes.barnaby: before then or sometime around this area. i think we probably met up in2005, 2006, something like that. you see me actually from this point on where i'mspeaking and ramping things up with alive
online.yaro: yes. and as i talk to you, barnaby, as you went through this process, it did seemlike there was two forces at play. your need to keep a business running on a model thathas been proven, which is the hosting and the design, and that's a cash cow sort ofthing. it keeps the bills paid. it keeps the staff paid.your own personal motivation to do something much different. and you're kind of overthe industry. you've been in it for ten years already almost there. you were trying toreconcile that. i noticed i think obviously you have sold that business so you've nowmoved on to projects, and it sounds like you're much more passionate about.can you explain how, and this is as equally
an interesting question, when a personrealizes that he no longer want to be in the business they're in and they want to try otherthings, how can you go about that? now that you've had the experience, would yourecommend trying a clean break and selling the business or setting up some sort of unitwithin the existing business like, for example, you started doing selling from a stage,which wasn't exactly what you were doing prior to that. it gave you, i guess, anothercreative outlet, which was different. can you talk about which is the best way to explorewhen you are kind of over your existing business and want to change.barnaby: to be honest, i really struggled with that. one of the mentors i had inbusiness, he said this line to me. i've never
forgotten, and i've found it really helpfulin helping guide the things i do today. and thatwas, "make sure you put your letter up against the right wall so when you get tothe top, you realize that you are actually in theright place you want to be." i've never really understood that before.i've never really thought through what my lifewould be like if i actually had a successful web hosting web design business. becausethe more clients i got, for me personally, undoubtedly, there's a lot of people in theworld who can run those businesses really well.i wasn't one of them, in terms of having a
whole team of support staff answering technicalquestions. it just wasn't me. it took me a few years to realize that. bythe time i realized it, i had so many clients ididn't know how to get out of it. it was really tricky. the more clients i got, the biggerit became, the more difficult it was, and i justgot really stressed. i won't say really stressed. if there's anybody out there listeningto this who is in the business that they don't like and they don't know how to getout of, i've been there. it's really painful. that wasn't the onlything. i had a bunch of things that weren't workingat that point. it's these waves of building
something up and then finding that, "hangon. this isn't really me," and "how do we getout of here?" it's not like a job you can quit.you've got all these clients you're responsible to and all these staff that you have allthese obligations to and this rent to pay and insurances. the list just goes on andon and on.i truly probably spent a couple of years i didn't know what to do. i didn't know howto get out of it. thankfully, i had somebody elsecome in, and they were helping me manage things in that business from a friend pointof view. they helped me get some new staff
on board, one person in particular, who becamean expert at managing all the clients. he became my manager, my ceo, so i realizedthat i needed to have someone like that step in and look after everything, which helpedme step back and eased up a lot of my stress. i just had no opportunity really tothink creatively in that space. you could probably tell that the things that reallydrive me are creative thinking, design, new ideas.and here i was just managing all these people's technical issues. everything from aservice that goes down, e-mail that goes down, websites, all these things. they werecreative elements too, but it was very stressful. it was only when it dawned on me... actually,i met up with one of the guys that i used
toknow. i did a bit of consulting for him once, in his web design firm. i caught with himat a party. this is really when i was at my wits'end. i was like, "what am i going to do?" ihaven't seen him for probably four or five years. the last time i saw him he was thisweedy, thin, pale, geeky guy and i saw him at this party and he was all buffed up andsmiling. he looked totally different. and i said, "whathave you done?" and he said, "i got out of the tech industry." he was doing a completelydifferent business. and i said to him, "how did you do that? i'm in the same spaceas you. how can i get out of this?" and he
said, "well, i sold it to my manager!" andi was like, "wow," so i just went back and didthe same thing. yaro: that easy, huh?barnaby: obviously that stuff isn't really that easy, but i was able to pull it off.i was able to go through with the deal, i was ableto show... yes, he was an amazing guy. he was running things really well. he turnedthings around in a lot of departments. he started to put up his own team. he raisedthe investment capital himself. by no means, i had a lot of advice i had toput out at this point because i wasn't really enjoying that particular business. some areasweren't working, some were. i didn't
come out of it like a millionaire or anythingeven close to that. i was able to just get outof that business. yaro: yes, and its nice to point that out.i've interviewed people who've sold a website for $300 thousand, or people who've sold theirbusinesses for multimillions, and some people are still in the same businesses. ithink this is a great example where just getting yourself out of something almost because it'san emotional release than anything else, not about the money, just so you can createthe space to do something when you well and truly are over of what you're currentlydoing. can we just touch a little bit on how thatdeal went down? whatever you're comfortable
sharing with, barnaby, because i'm sure thereare some of you right now who are going, "wait a second, i've got a manager," or "i'vegot someone who's heavily involved in my company but they're an employee. maybe theycould buy it." how is the best way of going about beginning that discussion andclosing the deal? barnaby: i just brought it up. he was doingsuch a good job. he was really being responsible for the business. he really caredabout it. he was a really great guy. he had great ethics. i knew that he cared about theclients and he was young. he had a lot of energy. he was very driven. he was very ambitious.i thought, "wow, he's probably got what it would take."but, at the same time he was afraid. well,
maybe not afraid, it's not right. but, hehaven't ever done his own business before. he hada degree. he'd been brought up in a very... he's done everything very properly. i couldsee that there was an entrepreneur in him but it needed to be unleashed, if you knowwhat i mean. i don't think he was going to go out therenecessarily and just start something himself. ifelt like, "well, here's the opportunity." i presented it to him like that, and he basicallysaid to me he waiting for me to say something. he must have had some sense of howthings were going to go. i just presented the deal, we negotiated terms about themoney. we got legal contracts together. we
just did everything right. i signed everythingover to him. yaro: that was what year?barnaby: that was in the beginning of 2010. the deal was done and finalized in april.yaro: okay, so you're a free man in terms of not having any responsibilities in thebusiness. i'm assuming that you've at least covered your debts. like you said you didn'tbecome a millionaire but you've broken away financially from it, so you're stable.barnaby: yes. yaro: how did that feel?barnaby: it was amazing. we're not going to go too much into this but i'd also beenthrough, at that same time, a number of those sort of endings on a very personal frontas well. my marriage had ended and i've had
quite a lot of things happening in thatprevious 18 months or so. it wasn't just the end of my running that company which i'vebeen running. it was april 2010, and i began in april 1996. i ran that for about 15 years.my marriage had gone for about that long as well.there was this complete change in my life. i was like, "okay, all these things that ifelt weren't working." it was just me there, andi was able to look at things with a fresh eye. iguess i was quite stunned. i realized i just needed some time out where i'd just beengoing at things so hard for so many years. i wanted to have the space to think up newideas, but i also recognized that i probably
just didn't have the fuel inside me to dothat. it was probably important that i just takesome time out. that's what i did for the rest ofthe year. yaro: what did you do? this is when the meditationcomes into it? barnaby: yes, i probably did more of that.actually, all through all those years i'd always probably gone to india for about atleast one or two months every year. because of my drive to take time out to go meditate,that was also one of the elements for running these businesses because the kindof lifestyle i wanted to lead wasn't one that icould fit into somebody else's nine-to-five
job.i had to be somebody who was doing things my way. when i took that year off, i spentmore time with my daughter. she was now a teenager and i was raising her. i took uphip-hop dancing. i joined the theater company and did some improv theater. just sataround reading. a few times i did a little bit of consulting. little things here andthere. you could probably say i've been burnt out.i just thought i need to recuperate before itake on anything else. yaro: okay, bring us up to date then. that'sonly two years ago as we record this. what have you been doing since then?barnaby: i became very fascinated, after all
of that, with crowdsourcing. i guess i wasalways interested in the power of the crowd; not just social networks but what peoplecould do collectively together. i came up with an idea, which i worked on all through2011, of a crowd-funding website, but in the green space.in that time off i came up with a list of criteria of what would be my rules for doingbusiness from this point on. there had to be things like it had to be fun. it had tobe something that would make a difference tosociety. it had to be something that would have leverage. had to be something that wouldbe endlessly scalable. i had 17 rules that i was going to follow from this pointon whenever i would assess a business, and
ifit didn't fit these, i wasn't going to do it.yes, and so i wanted to set up a website that was going to help people in the green andecological space, to raising funds for their projects. i had a few friends who helped mewith setting it up. i spent a year working on the code and the project. i hired peoplefor that. that's a website that is still being...it's working now but it needs more projects inthere, so that's something we've been working on. at the same time, while i committedmyself to that project, another project was born out of it.i invented the brand for that project, which
is called the green crowd. the greencrowd is the world's only crowd-funding eco-green website. how i invented to brand forit was again, i wanted to go to the crowd. i thought, "well, i want to actually get thecommunity involved in actually naming this and branding it." i was looking on the net.nobody else was doing that style of branding. people would go and see a brandingconsultant and they would pay them $30,000 and they pull a name out of the air andsay that's what you should call it. that depends on all the internal focus groups.i've got a lot of creativity there. i basically invented this system of going to specifictarget markets and running in-depth surveys across hundreds of people or more, and creatinga name. i did that with the green
crowd.i was working with other consultants in the trademark space and they were saying whati was doing was really interesting and i had other clients who wanted to do that. and iwas like, "wow, maybe i could actually get some clients through this method and helpfund the other projects i'm doing." that became what basically is called brandaloud. brand aloud is my new branding venture. it uses branding through a crowdsourcingmethod. i'd have clients through that. that's what i've been doing for this last18 months. yaro: just to clarify, that's not just simply,"here's the logo and having the crowd choose which one they think is best." howexactly does it work?
barnaby: through my background of keywordresearch, seo, i'm very much into looking at where are the numbers, where arepeople looking. what are they typing in, where is the trends? working with the clientor whatever the project is, it's coming up with all the words that they think peopleare using, coming up with whatever names they've got. we can brainstorm those, andthere's usually quite a list. then i go away and further brainstorm that and go throughall these other bases i've got access to. this is a typical model where, that's whati did with the green crowd, i'll come up with about five thousand names for it. and theni'll whittle it down to about 500 and have people voting on that. from that i take downit to a hundred, the top hundred names that
people are voting on. and from there we justkeep whittling it down to about seven different levels. you get like a top 50 ortop 20 or top ten, down to a top two, and thentop winning name. at the same time, we're making sure that the trademarks areavailable, or there's at least a good chance that they could get registered, if the dotcom is available. we do all these checks, andthen there's this winning name. we do the same process with logos. the actualpeople that we are willing to target are the ones who actually come up with a nameand the whole design, which means that it's got a much better chance of actually connectingwith the audience when it's launched.
for a number of projects that have been running,including brand aloud and the green crowd, and one of the smaller one i'm aboutto launch, i've used that process. some of the clients i've been working with, they'vejust been thrilled because we've come up with names that they would just never have thoughtof. they had their own ideas, it was funny but very often the ideas that they havethe target market doesn't actually like. it's quite something for the owner to grapple withthat because here i am, saying to them, well, they're actually paying for me to tellthem off that their name is no good and that this name over here is the one that the peoplethey want to sell to actually like more than that one.yaro: to clarify this, it's like you do a
massive keyword generation as you wouldalways do for search engine optimization to generate just hundreds and thousands ofpossible names and start whittling them down and then once you get to a small-enoughselection, you get actual human beings to say which one they like the best.now you said it's the target market that you can go to. does that limit what sort ofindustries you can service? how do you find enough people to survey regardingwhatever industry a person might be coming to you asking for research data?barnaby: i can research almost anything now. we've got a list of over two millionpeople across nearly every demographic. we usually pay them, so we pay people to dothe surveys and do the interviews, which means
i can turn things out very quickly.let's say you had a brand, and you felt intuitively that it was going to be aimed atwomen in their 30s and 40s, then, basically, i can go off with that demographic. one ofthe clients we've had recently, they were willing to go after the tradies. it was aconstruction industry. we have been after just people working in the constructionindustry. it was a specific building product. your opinion and my opinion meant nothingfor that product, it was these guys who work in that field everyday. we worked withthem, and they picked the name. yaro: okay, that sounds very appealing. iknow when i hear that story, it sounds like agreat way to choose a brand. more than just
a logo and everything, what yourcompany's going to be called and what's it going to look like, plus the fact that youcan trademark it and get the dot com. so it'slike a nice, i guess start in your business, something you should do, just part of theprocess and takes away a lot of the guesswork because you're letting your targetmarket decide what works. great idea, barnaby.how can we find out more about that? barnaby: that one, if you go to brandaloud.com.yaro: spell that? barnaby: that's a-l-o-u-d, brandaloud.com.yes, that's been running for probably almost a year now. it's really exciting becausei love the creativity in there. i also like
thevalidity of it. i like to do things where there's actually some basis, because you knowanybody can call something whatever they like. but what's the chance of that reallyworking? i'm really interested in looking at thingsfrom a scientific point of view. for many, manyyears, in the whole time i've been running all these businesses, i've been comingacross the top branding experts in the city, and the tens, the thousands that theycharge, and i know how they do it. they sit around and they think up names, and theypick one that they like. and they say to the client, "here's the name." but really, whatevidence would they have to back it up? that
always bothered me a little bit. i've puttogether a system which can actually put some scientific data.yaro: even if these large branding companies that, say, they are doing a lot of focusgroups and a lot of market research, 30 thousand dollars is out of reach for most smallbusinesses. you can get a similar kind of research done by using the wonderful scaleof the internet to send out surveys and collectthat data for much less money. it is a nice option for those who don't havethe... it's in between the, "you're not going tospend 30 grand like coke or whatever." well, they probably spend more than that.whatever it is. you're not guessing by, for
example, going to 99 designs and just puttingup a brief and just choosing the one you like best.barnaby: yes. yaro: it's in between that. you're spendinga little bit more than 99 designs but you're getting some research behind the decisionto what logo you use. anyway, barnaby, great idea, brandaloud.com. thegreencrowd.com,was that the other? barnaby: yes, that's the other one.yaro: it's "the" in that? barnaby: yes.yaro: the green crowd. barnaby: i'm negotiating with somebody toget the other one at the moment. yaro: those are great two urls they can checkout your work.
now, it's a good time i think to wrap up theinterview. first of all, thank you for sharing some of the personal stuff with the storyof selling your business and starting it, and theroller coaster ride you've certainly had going up and down with the different projects andseeing people around you in different businesses as the internet grew up too. it musthave been terribly difficult as an entrepreneur willing to not jump ship every two secondswith all the stuff going around you. can we end the interview, barnaby, perhapsjust thinking about a person who was in your situation, maybe has had a successfulcompany but really they want to jump on something different right now. i know you'vegiven some advice in that regard, sell to
your manager, for example. but i think peoplereally are afraid of doing this, and they are also extremely stressed. it's hard tomake decisions when you are stressed. you're walking into your coffee shop everyday andmaking sure your staff are getting paid and your customers are getting their coffees andall these things when really what you want to do is come up with some design or fashionand sell it online and you just don't have time to do it. you have to run your coffeeshop or something that like. or, even you're in some kind of online businessand you want to move to a different online business. whatever the case may be,you sound like a person who is really good at transitions and dealing with the ambiguitybehind leaving something and starting
something else. even now with your currentprojects, they're just in start-up mode as iunderstand it. you're facing a lot of ambiguity there. you're good at this. you're good atfacing that fear and doing it anyway. can you give people... how do you do that, howdo you become like barnaby and become that fearless?barnaby: i don't know if this is really going to help anybody because, as you said i'vebeen there, and i know how hard and terrifying it can be. people are stuck in so manydifferent areas of their lives. people could be stuck in a relationship, or they can bestuck in a job or they can be stuck in a business. they can be stuck in any number ofthings and usually it's about the fear.
they want something new. they want to go anddo something new but they're afraid of failing. they're afraid that if they giveup what they've got, that they'll fail. that keepsthem where they are. but every day that they stay where they are, they're sort of dyinginside. they keep looking at other people, and they keep fantasizing about, "well, whatthat person's got over there. i don't have that. why can't i have the life that i wouldlove." they fall on these ideas, and that could consume them for years. we've only gotso many years to live. when i really realized all this, in a wayall i can say is that you kind of just have to letthings fall if they have to. sometimes there's
no other option than to let it all collapseto get out.one of my friends, he said to me, "barnaby, there's no neat way for you to do this." iguess that really started to affect me. i keep looking for the easy solution, i keeplooking for the neat solution here and there isn'tone. the more i've realized that, the more i'vebeen less afraid to step up and take action inthese areas where often, very often or all the time, there is no smooth easy way to dosomething. but if i don't take some action, i'm going to be stuck in staying where i havebeen for years. that's just become more and
more untenable to me. it's like, "wow. i'malive, i've got this life." it's precious, and it's too short for me to be spending itworrying and just having an awful time.sure, if you've got lots of responsibilities, i'm not telling you to just throw cautionto the wind. i understand. i'm also somebody who--i've had a family. i've raised a child. she's a teenager now. she's doing year 12. i'vehad staff, i've had businesses. i've all these things. i also know that sometimes you justcan't be careful. sometimes, if you stay too careful, you stay stuck. sometimes there isnothing else to do other than to take what appears to be the most terrifying and crazyrisk. for me, i'm really glad that i've taken
those every step of the way.yaro: fantastic, barnaby. that's a lovely way to end this interview. thank you forsharing your story. again, if you want to find out more about barnaby, you've gotbrandaloud.com and thegreencrowd.com. you can check out his current projectsthere. barnaby, thank you.
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