Many Bad Business Ideas Part 2: Musical Webs
Date Posted: September 29th, 2010
This is Part 2 of the Many Bad Business Ideas Series. See Part 1 for background info.
Web Design Consultant
Around the same time as I was working on BlowThyHorn, I thought about being a web design consultant. It seemed like a good idea because:
- I’ve been playing with web design since I was in high school.
- I knew of a lot of sites I could improve. I’m always amazed at the number of sites I run across that have poor designs.
- I had a strategy.
- Offer to redesign the website of a few local companies
- Ask the first few to pay me in referrals.
- Build up my business from there.
- I thought I could build a web consulting business faster than BlowThyHorn. This was way more straight forward than building a blog for a tiny niche.
A friend of mine has a small business and I offered to redesign his website for him. I worked on it for a few weeks and it soon became clear to me that something wasn’t working. I ended up quitting because:
- Too much learning. I’d have to learn how to make themes for all different kinds of content management systems. I didn’t find that very fun.
- I wasn’t happy with what I was producing. Graphic design hasn’t been one of my strengths, and it’s not something I want to develop.
- It just wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. The point of this was to be doing something I’m interested in.
So… no web design consulting for me.
Piano/Music Teacher
This was another idea I was tossing around during the BlowThyHorn phase. It seemed like a good idea because:
- I have a lot of music experience I’ve been playing music of some kind or another since I was six years old. I had piano instruction for about 10 years. I was confident I could teach kids the basics of music.
- I had ideas on how to do it better. For instance, with my classical piano lessons I never really understood the importance of rhythm. Even if I didn’t pay attention to it at all, the music I was playing still sounded alright to my ears. Then I started playing dance music and my outlook on rhythm totally changed. Rhythm is essential to dance music because dancers rely on it to know when to step, so I quickly learned to make it a priority. The amazing thing, though, was that I started to realize that paying attention to rhythm in my solo playing made it sound better. (Crazy!) If I was teaching piano music I’d get my students to play dance music early on, so they’d get this idea. It really shouldn’t have taken me 12 or so years to understand that.
- I knew how to get started.
- Talk to the people I know who might want to have their kids get piano lessons
- Offer to give some introductory lessons for free
- Negotiate rates. Ask for referrals.
- Build from there.
- I have support. Both Aaron’s mom and step-mom are piano teachers. My piano teacher is still available to talk to. Right there I have three people I can call if I have questions.
This never got past the drawing board stage because:
- Too constricting. Again I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tie myself to Ann Arbor. I didn’t like the idea of not being able to take a month-long break on a whim. I didn’t like the idea of my evenings being eaten by music lessons.
- I’d feel uncomfortable charging much for lessons. Why hello there mental block.
- A lot of prep work. I’d need to spend some time solidifying my ideas, putting together materials, etc. At the time I really wanted something I could just jump in and do.
- Not important enough. This was the same problem I had with the other music focused businesses. How much value would I be providing to society by being a piano teacher? When I thought about it, the answer was, “Not enough.”
Unsurprisingly the big problem here was the “too constricting” part and the “not enough value” part. Now that I’m looking at this one again, I’m feeling warmer toward it. Maybe I’ll revive it when I revive BlowThyHorn. Selling my own music teaching materials could be a nice income stream. We’ll see.
Next week’s post will be on two tech-focused ideas that never came to be.
