When I was younger, I jumped on these ideas. My first year freelancing was spent half freelancing, and half developing budding business ideas, searching for that one money-maker; my bread and butter that would alleviate my bank account for my families life, and hopefully generations to come. Fast-forward 5 years and I’ve learned that not all business ideas are created equal. With that in mind, there are a few things I’m looking for when listening to an entrepreneur’s elevator pitch:

• Who is our target demographic?
• What need/gap in the market are filling?
• What’s our 1 year projection? What’s our 5 year projection?
• How are we going to market ourselves?
• What is my role? What is your role?
• What’s our exit strategy?

Who is our target demographic?

If you can’t tell me to a tee who the target demographic is, then I’m not interested. Describe the person. Where do they live? Who are their friends? What do they do on weekends? What are their hobbies? How tall? Hair colour? Marital status? … Get the picture? I want to know what cologne the guy wears. This way when we’re trying to approach single 15-25 year old males who enjoy rock climbing, we know where to start.

What need/gap in the market are filling?

Has anyone else done this already and is it already being done better than we can do, knowing our first few years will most likely be bootstrapped? I’m not interested in making a search engine for students if I think Google’s search algorithm will fair better than our nice colour scheme. Where has the competition succeeded? Where have they failed? Is there still a market available to corner? Perhaps a niche or micro niche? What are the statistics of that market?

What’s our 1 year projection? What’s our 5 year projection?

I don’t need to own a yacht and have endorsements out the ass in a year, but I need to know that you have thought realistically about our future; my future.

When will this be profitable, how profitable, and how will we get there. What are projected roadblocks and how are we going to deal with them knowing that dumping money into it may not be a feasible solution.

How are we going to market ourselves?

Where’s our advertising going? How much will it cost? Do you have prior knowledge of this advertising working for people in our situation? How do we differ from others trying to mimic our ideas? What are some rough landmarks you have in mind, if any?

What is my role? What is your role?

How much work am I doing, and how much work are you doing; plain and simple. Who’s in charge of what and is there anyone else in the deal, how are earnings going to be split accordingly.

What’s our exit strategy?

This is almost a follow up if all other questions have been asked… Supposing we get into the idea and decide to part ways, what’s a fair way of handling work that has been done thus far? Who gets what, and how is it decided?

Conclusion

The bottom line is if you can’t answer a few basic business questions, then your not pitching a business idea, you’re pitching a fantasy. Have you ever seen Dragon’s Den? In our case, you’re my Dragon, and I’m yours… Get your business idea in order and I’ll bring what I can to the table.

• Punta del Diablo – Small hippie/surfer town. Far east. Nice beaches, friendly people.
• Punta del Este – Tourist hot spot.
• Montevideo – The country capital city. Population: 1.4m. Of interest? Capital city, and home of friend-of-a-friend graffiti artist.
• Colonia – Landing port from Buenos Aires. Often used to renew one’s 90 day traveling visa in Argentina.

And here was our basic plan:

• Day 1 – Rent a car. Drive to Punta del Diablo.
• Day 2 – Spend day in Punta del Diablo, in the evening drive to Punta del Este.
• Day 3 – Spend day in Punta del Este, in the evening drive to Montevideo.
• Day 4 – Spend day and evening in Montevideo.
• Day 5 – Spend day driving to Colonia, return car, see Colonia. In the evening, ferry home. Sleep.

Day 0 – The Wake Up

Surprisingly, I slept the night before. Those who know me know that I don’t sleep much at the best of times, so naturally when excited about a trip I go into anxiety mode and never sleep. I awoke, showered, packed the last few things into my bag and at 7:45am, Estibi and I packed ourselves into a taxi with bags on back, and headed towards the ferry terminal.

Day 1 – The long drive competition

We arrived in Uruguay with no troubles getting through security (it’s a fairly normal thing for people to do day/weekend trips in Uruguay). First thing to tackle was food. Generally speaking the food in Uruguay parallels that of Argentina. Lots of pizza, beef, wine, and empanadas… what’s that? Wine’s not food? Poppycock! We sat down streetside to take in the scene. Estibi ordered some sort of meatbomb, and I had a ravioli with cream sauce. The food was alright, the highlight of the meal was watching a short man ride up and down the street slowly on his small motorcycle absolutely blasting directions to a party in town that evening. While an unorthodox approach to party marketing, it’s a quite popular way to put word on the streets (sorry, can’t help a nice pun) in Uruguay.

After eating we got right onto our next task which was to rent a car… Before long I was sat in our Charcoal coloured Volkswagen Golf (Gol, down here) and we were off to the races. Estibi was enamoured by the idea of driving so I took shotgun and we off we sped.

Within 15 minutes, Estibi had passed a truck on a double solid while merging onto the highway and we were pulled over, facing our first Uruguayian traffic ticket, for $1200 USD. The real beauty, or sad truth in a ticket that ridiculously over-priced is that no one is intended to ever have to pay it. $80 pesos ($20 CAD) later — in the pits of greed and political frailty — a family’s meal was earned in the form of a simple hand to hand transaction.

The car rental agency had told us it would be a 6 hour drive, and at the time he didn’t realize we meant to cross the entire country (I assume thinking no one would be that crazy) and since we hadn’t realized he meant to the next closest town, we stuck on the highway as best we could (which meant constant exits and merges) and stayed true to our plan of making it all the way across. 9 hours later, around 1:15am I was behind the wheel, we were fucken lost with no idea where the fuck we were, and wherever it was was way the fuck away from where we wanted to be. I was hungry and grumpy, Estibi wanted to find somewhere to sleep and I wanted to continue on… but we were lost and so couldn’t do either. We pulled into a gas station and asked a pump attendant:

1. where we were supposed to be, and…
2. where we actually were.

His answer was, less than ideal to say the least and the conversation that followed was unnerving to say the least, if not the oldest one in the book. Apparently, we were way the fuck off track and had a long ass ride back where we came from, “… or [wait for it] you can take the shortcut about 3 kilometres up the road, which is an 11km backroad.” — Now, I’m not the most suspicious of men, but it’s 1am. I know an obvious starting to a kidnap-murder-massacre horror movie when I hear one, and I was not interested would not have been interested had it not been for the situation at hand. Three kilometres down the road I made the left hand turn, and without a car in either direction to see my signal, we disappeared into unpaved darkness, silent to the rest of the World.

We were 5 kilometres into an ever-inclining dirt road, slowly working our way up from the sea’s Coast back to the highway when it happened, Estibi shouted, “Oh my God! Look at the stars!” and when I did, we stopped the car and got out. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful skies in my day, growing up a bit further West than Vancouver in a small, light-pollution free Canadian town, but this sky had something about it that made it an everlasting memory. It may not have been only the stars, but the fact that I was freely traveling through Uruguay, on a backroad, day one of a five day vacation, staring at a wide open sky, absolutely littered with stars, living off my passions. I was swept up in how breathtaking all of it was… I guess I should mention that there was a meteor shower of sorts, so shooting stars were out in full effect. If there’s one thing I can take from the experience it’s that life’s too short to spend doing things you don’t like… stop all that nonsense.

When we finally did make it all the way out to Punta del Diablo, we had driven completely across Uruguay in a little over 13 hours. We tucked in (separate beds, don’t get any ideas you filthy brats — I know what you were thinking) at the only open hotel — I slept like a baby.

Day 2 – Tube socks & flip flops

10:00AM — We awoke and walked our way down to Punta del Diablo, known to be a small surf town. We arrived in the low season (heading into Winter) and not a single place was open. Instead we walked around the beachfront, waded in the shallow parts — the water wasn’t too cold — before long we were off to Punta del Esta after grabbing a quick 2L bottle of water. Punta del Diablo was great, but without anything open, and nobody around, it’s really a quiet place. Definitely great for a morning but, there’s a lot of the World to see!

From here I’ll catch you up to date with photos taken this far… The first one is from the night drive out to Punta del Diablo, an hour or so before we got lost, and the rest of this set is the morning we spent there.

While I firmly believe in immersing oneself in local culture, I think it’s necessary to at least see what the fuss is about in tourist locale. Relating to my first travel-trip to Indonesia, while my favourite moments were off the beaten path, some very memorable ones were right there along with tube socks jammed into flip-flops.

We arrived in Punta del Este in the early afternoon — a small but nice town where tourism is the name of the game. At one point I was contemplating filming one beach, then running across town (8 blocks) and showing the beach on the other side all in one camera take but the sun was on it’s way down and so the idea was canned. The town is not very wide but quite long. Estibi wanted to visit the house of a hero of hers, so we parted ways for the day and I got some work done. It wasn’t without visiting what I found one of the coolest art projects I’ve seen… Granted it’s a little weathered, and there’s plenty of exposed concrete.

Day 3 – To purchase Aerosol

Of all the things to do in Uruguay, the one that excited me the most was the chance to meet up with a Spanish friend of a Venezuelan friend of mine, Javier. I don’t really speak Spanish if we want to get down to it. I can make small talk, order food, get prices, and tell someone where to stick an indeterminate ‘it’ for when shit gets heated but communication is less than ideal, most certainly. The one language Javier and I both speak fluently is aerosol. Javier said while I was in Montevideo to call him because he wanted to go out painting and knew of a wall which would was fine to paint.

The trek to Montevideo was long, and at 7pm we got car-jammed in a storm of Uruguayan football fans, after a match. We didn’t end up getting anything productive done; the highlight of the day was finding ourselves in a great hostel which showcased a eco-friendly cabin on the roof running completely off of Solar paneling. Okay, the stove ran on natural gas. The hostel had local made dulce de leche (which North American’s call caramel, but prepared differently and has an admittedly different texture and taste), jams, marmalades, and fruit. I thought that was pretty cool, and felt like we made a good choice to stay there, truly supporting local business.

Day 4 – Rattle rattle, tsss, tssssss…..

I bought paint in the morning and in the afternoon met up with Javier and his friends. We spent the day hanging out and getting to know each other, telling stories and by night’s end, around 9pm we had repainted a wall that had been burnt and tagged with swastika’s.

This had been turning into a pretty fun trip! Again, I slept like a baby.

Day 5 – The show’s over, folks

On our way back through to Buenos Aires we returned the car and walked around Colonia, taking photos. Most of the coolest photos of my trip were from here. A place I was really happy to have had a chance to explore. The cobbled streets were great, there was lots of greenery, good food and a really laid back atmosphere. I’m saving you details and will instead post a multitude of photos, first from Montevideo and starting with the car, sights in Colonia. I hope you’ve enjoyed this long winded, long overdue blog post. Thanks for making it all the way to the bottom. I’ve promised myself I’ll keep them shorter herein.

I woke up March 21, 2010 excited to go to the BOCA JR’s v. RIVER PLATE football match and had had trouble sleeping the night before. It has been hailed as one of the biggest football match-ups in the World and Argentina as a whole has a far reaching reputation as having wild fans — I can attest to that having been there.

The day was gloomy and overcast skies loomed overhead daring the wrong person to take the slightest step from under their awning shelter. As luck wouldn’t have it, apparently that wrong person happened to stand in line with us for this particular football match. Release the hounds! We got pissed on (figuratively, but keep reading). We waited outside the stadium for two hours, inching forward in what seemed to be a never ending line. I worried whether the progress we were making was more because people were getting sick of being rained on and resorting to cuddling under others’ umbrellas, or actual movement; in the end I realized it was more the umbrella’s because as we got closer, the line free’d up — we were jogging by policemen and security to free ourselves from this god-forsaken torrential downpour. They didn’t seem to care, to be honest.

As we neared the entrance the line slowed, we got out our tickets — now nothing but blank cardboard cards due to the ink washing off in the rain — and handed them to the doormen. We were pat down to make sure we weren’t carrying anything lethal, such as a knife, gun, lighter, or belt (I told you they got crazy!)

Inside, the group of foreigners who had purchased their extremely over-priced tickets rung out their socks, shirts, and shoes (I shit you not) and made our way up to our seats. I use the term ‘seats’ quite loosely as we were in the Home team section which is standing only. Our guide took off, leaving us to fend for ourselves in what is known to be one of the rowdiest sections of any football team in existence; no problema.

We slinked our way down through the crowd of fans each of whom gave us increasingly dirty sneers. Leaning on shoulders, stepping on hands, feet, purses, and children, we found ourselves in what I guess would be considered a comfortable area. There was zero room between us and the people beside us. I felt a little bad for impeding their experience by crushing them into each other on either side, but realized soon after we were still only a third as cramped as we would be. An intimate section, one might say.

So here I am, in the stadium, at the World renowned Boca Junior v. River plate game. They let the fans in two hours before the match, not only so that atmosphere can build but also so they can allow the home team fans & away team fans enough time between them to enter the Stadium without encountering each other. A far cry from my Vancouver Canucks teams where most people sit down half way into the first period; I used to think we Canadians were proud fans of our sport; Argentines put us to shame on oh so many levels. The hardcore home team fans are situated at either end of the stadium, the away team are stood directly above us on one end of the pitch, upper deck.

Hours of chanting ensued, our end screaming to the opposing end — and them screaming back at us — riling restless spirits of football fans here to watch their respective teams play their hearts out. Football in Argentina is larger than a sport, truly & literally larger than any one fan’s life. The chanting quickly turned into a shouting match between the home fans situated below our section, and the away fans sat (and I use this term loosely) above us. Some fans took quite seriously to this shouting match, and ended up missing the game because they were so intent on the impossible task of shutting their opposition.

Soon, lighters began flying to and fro. I didn’t see any casualties but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few. Lighters snowballed into any small rocks, half full bottles of water, and then into what I found a weird choice of weapon (but effective nonetheless): the away fans were dropping shopping bags tied full of water onto the heads of the home fans. They would land upon a mesh overhanging, or if lobbed far enough beyond and on peoples heads. They landed with deep thuds that you could feel when you saw impact. These were unlike any water balloon I’d seen, using weight as a weapon, on top of the liquid — wait a second… They’re not full of water, but a yellowy, orange liquid.. what is th… uh oh… Over the course of 2 hours, 20 or 30 bags: thud, thud, thud…. splash, splash, splash. I’ll spare you the details, suffice to say the whole section smelled like urine when the winds changed. I assumed this would be the extent of warfare extremities, but as always in life, years of having nothing obvious at your fingertips provides plenty of time for creativity. Cracks in the concrete allowed for us to be pee’d on, rolls of adding machine paper were used not only as thrown streamers but as weapons as well. Large (and I mean m-80, take yer-fucken-fingers-off large) firecrackers were thrown between the two sections and my favourite, shooting flare guns at each other… Damn, these dudes are RUTHLESS. Note to self: any time you’re shooting flare guns into the stands at grandma’s, children, women, and fellow lovers of sport, you are officially too competitive.

Eventually, the players took to the pitch. I’m going to save you the reading (this post has turned into a monster not only to read, but to write, and to manage/edit), and just show you the video. The sound cuts in and out as I nearly drop my camera, or have it bumped out of my hand. Everyone was hopping up and down and the sound was DEAFENING… The first people to run out are River Plate, the away team. You’ll know when Boca hits the pitch:

The sad part about the whole experience wasn’t the peeing on each other, the long hours of waiting in the rain, losing my second iPhone to water-damage, losing my ticket, or the fact that the game ended only ten minutes into play (rightfully so, the game was dangerous with the ball hitting puddles and people tripping over not only the ball but each other) — but that I never got to experience the cheer of a Boca Junior goal. The day ended in drunken haziness which I’ll spare you (I have parents that read this, you know!)… It’s a small slice of my Buenos Aires experience, but hopefully you survived reading this far and enjoyed what you read. Speak soon!

In a similar vein, today I asked myself the question (and for the record this is a question I ask myself outside of work too but in this case I was speaking on professional terms):

“If you could work on anything in the World, what would you work on?”

I came up with the answers WordPress theme development and ActionScript development. Of all careers options I want to be doing web development and of all web development options I want to be doing WordPress theming & ActionScript. Defined. Simple.

The interesting thing is that this isn’t anything new. I’ve always known that I like these types of projects more I’ve just never put it into a question where I answer for myself “what’s the best case scenario here?” and been able to define it to myself. In other words while I’ve always known, I’ve never actually cognitively thought about it. This change of approach to looking at projects has had many offshoot advancements in terms of my freelance direction. What does it all mean — big picture?

Well, aside from now knowing where I want to pick my projects I’ve also been able to define niche advertising markets for myself, further branding, a new email signature, a new approach when quoting projects, and I’m sure a ton more once I delve deeper into what it is I want to be doing while focusing more and more on those two areas!

What a rush! Ask yourself, “What would I be doing if I could be doing anything?” and if the answer is different than what you’re doing now (it almost invariably will be) then make the change. Life is short, spend it being happy.

There are people making it better and people making it worse.

To me, BA Expats (marketed: Buenos Aires Expats – Online Community of Expatriates and guide to living in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is one of those who moves the Internet backwards.

By disallowing members of their forum community to post certain keywords (like their investors competitor names) they withhold information from the community. How can you be a “Buenos Aires Expats guide to living in Buenos Aires” when you don’t even allow the people who live here to share their experiences with each other openly? Stop lying.

I asked about it on the forums and how did they react? Well naturally, they canceled my account. Lame.

I’m all for capitalism, but moreso than anything, when you run a website with an online community you must be open to the communities discussion, allowing free-flow of information. These are the members that make up your community. If you want to tout your business and not allow others to do so then that’s one thing, but if you’re not allowing the actual community to share with others their experiences… Then to me you’re not helping, you’re hindering.

Now that I’m situated in my (at least semi-permanent) house in Buenos Aires, the time is officially upon us — I’ve made the switch to finding freelance work. I started by emailing some of my previous employers as well as submitting offers on choice Craigslist ads that suit my development style or strengths.

So far so good! I’ve lined up a couple smaller projects which will pay rent for the next month; sweet! Coupled with my savings, I’m excited at how positive the response has been this early into the full-time freelance gig.

Continuing forward once these projects are completed I will email the second half of my previous employers/clients list to see if they have any odds or ends they’d like fixed, also mentioning that I’m accepting new projects; tweeting all the while.

Be a pal and pass on the word that you know of a spectacular, well experienced front-end developer with plenty of WordPress knowledge, an attention to detail, and a good work ethic, won’t you?

Either way, time has been ticking and I figured it’s high time I let you in on a few of the things I’ve taken note of when it comes to BsAs. Firstly, they were not kidding… Argentina is incredible in a lot of ways. Beef, Wine, Women, Pizza, and Ice Cream are but a few of the highlights… I’m still waiting to get to a Tango show but I’d be willing to bet that will be amazing as well.

Culture shock was predictably less intense in Argentina in comparison to Indonesia; the country is quite a bit wealthier over-all. For reference I’d say that an Argentine ghetto is similar economically to the whole of Indonesia, though plagued with much worse drug use from what I’ve heard and seen (my first-hand experience is extremely limited due to the safety hazards of Buenos Aires ghettos — I’m playing the safe & secure card)

I’ve relocated from a lovely little hostel to a small barrio (neighbourhood) called Palermo Soho (For you Google Maps users/abusers: http://tinyurl.com/hort-in-ba) which is definitely upscale in comparison to most of the City, surrounded by lots of fashion shops, bars, etc. I chose it because most of the friends I’ve made live here, as well as there being a good nightlife scene and it being a “younger” part of town in terms of habitants. Truly a nice area and somewhere most anyone would be happy to stay, I’d wager.

I moved in on March 1st so as of this posting I’ve been here three days, and so far so good. The landlord and his girlfriend are nice people who have allowed us to stay out of the way for the most part. Who’s us? Before moving down here I was perusing Expat forums and made a few friends ahead of time to make sure that I could hit the ground bars running, and so one of those friends and I live together here in perpendicular doorways to each other. Estibaliz and I have become good friends, and seeing she’s from Mexico, I’ve had a leg up on the competition when it comes to getting around the city, what with her being fluent in Spanish and all. We have the entire bottom floor to ourselves, a connecting staircase to the second floor where a kitchen is shared, and from there one more balcony connects us to a huge patio — life is good.

More to come; specifically on Wine, Beef, and Pizza.

Thankfully, the above is a false statement. That’s what could happen to me — and you — since the chances are pretty good that you don’t consistently back-up.

When I worked at a computer repair company the story was always the same, “I’ve lost my work, and no I did not have backup. I will pay and and everything to have my data back.” More often than not, I would have to send them to a data recovery house, and I wouldn’t hear back from them — I can only assume they got their data back and carried on with life without making backups.

It was such a consistently recurring event that I became completely desensitized to it. What shocked me was the fact that a business would exist without making regular backups.

To me, it’s simple, “If you are running a business and not making backups, you are flat-out stupid.”

Tonight, I doubled my Hard Drive space strictly to keep a mirror of my working files. This is important for any business, freelancer, or professional worker and I’ll be damned I’ve I turn into one of those sad souls crying to the computer guy who couldn’t give a shit less, ’cause I’m that stupid business owner.

Viva la backups!

Working a traditional ‘job’

You work to pay bills, buy food, and entertain yourself. You put in 8 hours (or in our industry many more), you go home, you eat, work, sleep, roll-over, hit snooze, eat, work, sleep, roll ov…, ad nauseam. Enter freelance…

Working as a freelancer, self-employed

You are in charge of all advertising, bills, taxes, receipts, invoices, payments, work, and deadlines. Sounds like a lot? It is, but luckily tools have been made available to us to make these tasks easier.

Companies like 37signals create tools for project management, and companies like FreshBooks create software for receipts, invoicing, tracking payments. (there are others but these are the ones I endorse on my own faith, without incentives)

As far as I know, most freelancers work within the arts sector. I am a web designer, but work alongside (and with) many freelancers who specialize in copywriting, web design, flash development, business development and marketing.

I rely on these people, colleagues, dare I say… friends, to get me where I and my clients need to go. I spend enough time editing my blog posts and don’t need to spend more time editing client copy — I have friends who can do it better so I utilize them and focus on what I’m good at: Flash, and Web Design/Development.

Outsourcing is the age old, extremely effective way of lightening work load, and in the realm of Freelance work where most of your work is generated through word-of-mouth, it’s only smart business to pass work that can be passed.

What do you do daily that isn’t your favourite thing to do? Are there any options to have someone else do that for you? It may cost you a bit of money, but what is your time worth? Could you be using that time to do something more productive, profitable, or enjoyable? What are those worth?

This change of thinking proves monumental in the switch from employee to freelancer — think differently, you’re now a business.

My solution? Stop thinking. There’s no need to explain yourself, there’s no need to gather your thoughts, there’s no need to do anything but begin towards the end goal…

Start writing.

The benefits of bypassing all the pre-emptive organization of thoughts? Ten fold:

• You actually have something to show
• You force your mind to think creatively
• You force your mind to create internal discussion
• You research ideas which spark other thoughts
• Your research finds other blog posts on similar subjects, meaning networking opporunities

We know the benefits of having something to show, and the benefits of creative thinking sparks internal discussion, thinking of new ideas, new topics, and often leads you on a Google quest for further information which also drums up new ideas.

From this post I’ve drafted ideas on the Top 5 slept on free Freelance Tools, and Dealing with Limited Connectivity. Found this blog because you’re stuck? Writers block? Go blog something; you already have all the tools and brainpower you need to put that next blog post out — just do it.