My good friends Andy and Landon Swan have taken MyTrade.com through the ‘exit door’ as Fred Wilson likes to say. Investools (NASD – SWIM ) is the buyer . They made Wallstrip look long-term with a 4 month funding to exit.
I could not be happier… and not just because I was an angel investor with Roger , my fund and other friends. It validates what we all work so hard to do in the financial blogging community…learn, share ideas, share information, make money or in some cases lose less.
First of all, the new site and tools rock!. Here is a helpful video . Investools is providing the capital and resources to get all of Andy, Landon and even some of my financial community ideas to market. I am loving the sharing features and integration with ThinkorSwim online brokerage services (a division of Investools), but I am not going to go through all the features in this post. Too many. I will start posting on them throughout the week as will Andy on his blog.
When Wallstrip was just an idea in my head, I was flying around meeting financial bloggers out east. My first stop was Atlanta to meet TraderMike . My second stop was Kentucky to meet Andy and Landon. It was August 2006 and here is what I wrote . Landon is 6″10 and when I first met him he had a black eye. I asked him if the other guy was dead! Instant friends and bodyguards. We played 18 holes and I pitched them on Wallstrip while they pitched me on MyTrade. They backed me all the way and I backed them.
Of course they made a ‘How We Started Video’, with some great cameos. Check out the return of the wonderful Lindsay Campbell (more ‘STRIP’, less WALL in this one).
I just passed two years of blogging and have never felt more rejuvenated. YET, there seems to be a thread going around that blogging is dead. Ya right.
Facebook is getting all the attention these days mostly deserved. For me, Facebook has become more of a grind. Maybe it’s due to all the busy work I have made for myself, accounting at year end and stock market but I have no time for Facebook. I just got three friend Facebook requests and if one had not been from my sweet niece in Toronto, I would never have headed over to Facebook this weekend at all.
Me? I prefer my brand to be a “global microbrand”. It’s easy and it’s flexible. It’s not tied down to one geographical locale, which I’ve always found to be financially unreliable. So business is a bit slow around here in England. No matter. I’ll head over to Redmond, Washington, and do a gig for Microsoft if I have to. New York? Sure. Houston? If they pay me enough.
So that’s why I have a blog, I suppose. I like the control. I write something, I post it, it gets read, hopefully good things happen as a result, somewhere on this small blue planet of ours. Unlike a book or a movie or a TV commercial, there’s no waiting around for somebody else to greenlight it. The only light is the greenlight.
Sure, I hear you saying, “But the scale is so small.” I don’t know about that. At last count [and this was a couple of years ago] the “How To Be Creative” page had been downloaded a quarter of a million times. And Lord knows how many copies of the “ChangeThis” PDF version were printed out and circulated. Most hardbacks are lucky if they sell three thousand copies. Granted, movies get seen by a lot of people, but only for a week or two.Then they leave the cinema and are mostly consigned to a lonely life on the DVD rack. And they’re expensive and take years to make. They have a lot, I mean A LOT of downtime. Whereas a blog is constantly working, constantly growing. I like that.
I guess my point is, if you’re one of these people considering giving up on blogging in exchange for paying more attention to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, or whatever they throw at us mere mortals, bear in mind you are giving up on something rather unique and wonderful. But I would say that.
Pretty awesome and sums up why I do what I do here every day and over at Wallstrip. Blogging has made me smarter, increased my social leverage a bazillion fold and been a rather humbling experience at times. Oh and I feel like I have earned it all . I don’t get that feeling on Facebook.
Lot’s of people, too many, give up blogging for all it’s overwhelming features and pure heaviness. That’s one of the reasons that Twitter makes so much sense. Bit, Twitter is too light a tool. Tumblr.com may be just right for most, especially for us financial bloggers.
Seriously, we are just tapping the surface. With my old friend/troublemaker and loose cannon Chartreuse back blogging, I am more confident in the future of the biz, despite his ripping on us at Wallstrip .
Off the top of my head, I still say we are in the first inning of web content and new media. Nobody has ‘THE’ answer…AND THATS GOOD! Obviously I am happy that CBS thinks we do .
Elsewhere, Henry Blodget has recreated himself as a web/tech/east coast TechCrunch meets Valleywag , but better website and real experience along with his co-founders of Doubleclick fame. I like it. Personally, I want my info from that team, not just the West coast. Check it out. I am reading it daily now along with Dealbreaker.
Tons of ways that people are changing the way I read and consume and how we share information. Quit bitching and join in the revolution with something other than nasty comments.
WOOPS – One last point. I think it really makes sense for great businesses that already have a community to add a daily or weekly interactive video component. It is much safer and smarter than doing what we did at Wallstrip if you want to start from scratch. Cheaper and deeper and better than PR firm if done well. At GolfNow.tv, the trivia show is loved by it’s sponsors and golf community and that helps. Today they are celebrating their 150th show which may mean nothing to the web in general, but much to the community of GolfNow. Zillow, Expedia, Yelp – are you listening?
My mom’s in town from Toronto. My niece and nephew are with her as well visiting. Max and Rachel love this as do I.
I wake up to congrats from my blogger/friends via email on the WEBX deal (who needs CNBC). I have made some absolutley incredible friends blogging and through my ventures the last 12 months. It is astounding.
I walk to work. It is 70 degrees and perfectly sunny. The ambien haze makes everything seem Star Trekky.
Andy Monfried flew through town on the way back home from San Fran and got to meet and catch up face to face. We met through the blogosphere. He has an incredible startup . He could sell sand in the Sahara so having a cool product is just icing .
At lunch, I had the coolest small world thing happen. My friend Rick Segal (blog friend) who lives in Toronto emailed me that he was in town for the day. I met him for lunch and he was sitting with his brother Howard (obviously a stud). Turns out Howard and I are on the synagoue board together and friends, yet I never put it together. Nor did Howard or Rick until this morning.
Played catch with Max. Rachel let me kiss her (she wiped it off).
Finally a date night for Ellen and I. Our house was ravaged for 4 weeks by some flu bug that the US governement has cooked up to test on us…but I digress.
He is wrong if he is referring about YouTube ($1.6 billion – despite any legal anxiety – is cheap)and he is , and sounds like sour grapes, and right about most of the rest of the blog and internet deals.
Robert Scoble is taking the other side of Bill’s bet and my money is with Bill (no offense Robert). It’s great that Robert is part of a start-up and raised so much money, but that space is so cowded and so underfunded for what ultimately would be required to win/if their is even to be a winner. So much noise and so much poorly spent venture money in podcasting and blogging that the odds of survival are low.
Just last Friday, Fred Wilson also mentioned the word “bubble” in his interview on wallstrip.
. Thanks Tim for reaching out and asking…and paying. 
