Friday, December 31, 2010

What I shipped in 2010, Seth Godin style

I worked my tail off in 2010. Not that much different than any other year - I work hard all the time! It was an incredibly busy and phenomenal year for my business yet at the end of it looking back it's hard to remember what was accomplished beyond numbers and impressive stats. I was reading Seth Godin’s blog post challenging people to make a list and post what they ‘shipped’ in 2010. ‘Shipped’ according to Seth is accomplishing something or launching a project that scares you, whether it was a hit or not.

Seth says “it's actually difficult to publish a list like this... maybe that's another reason we hesitate to ship, because we don't want to tout too much. Your turn to post a list somewhere... You'll probably be surprised at how much you accomplished last year. Go ahead and share with your friends, colleagues or the web... don't be shy.”

Alright Seth – off the top of my head here’s some of what shipped in 2010.
  • Hired and trained 26 additional employees on our staff
  • Fired 3
  • Two news appearances on KUTV (1) (2)
  • BabySteals.com 2nd anniversary (we party so hard online at Steal Network for anniversaries; so they’re quite the project to pull off)
  • Enough live video chats on our ustream channel to result in 12,750 viewers
  • Helped my beautiful friend Dunia raise $2,600 for a fan Jess B. to buy a gravestone for her baby. The story in her words part 1 and part 2
  • Traveled around Canada for a 4 day “Operation we send joy” tour, crashing a BabySteals.com “meetup” and surprising fans by hand delivering orders to their door
  • Spoke at 2 Conferences
  • Completely changed backend systems for our websites to a custom interface (don't fool yourself- this was Rett & Marco)
  • Attended 6 Industry tradeshows including CHA, OR (twice), Kidshow, Magic and ABC

Seth says “I didn't do all this myself... far from it.” And neither did I. Thanks to a truly unbelievable business partner (Rett) and a great staff that help make these projects come to fruition.

Here's to a successful 2011 - luckily I've already started on many things that will 'ship' soon! And as Seth says...GO make something happen!

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Christmas, Disney style

Last Wednesday night I was lamenting about how great it would be to see Disneyland at Christmas. We never have. Three days later we were all on a flight to LA for a 3-day Disney weekend! Yeah, we were there for 5 days over Spring Break, but that's ok. I'll have to put up the photos later. But we had a blast! Oh and...we came home with annual passes :). Yes we live in Utah. Again, that's ok.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

we're legit


let me just say it's surreal driving down the freeway at night, looking over and thinking, "hey that logo is pretty legit". then realizing, "holy crap- that's mine".