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Raja Foods Recalls Lead Tainted Indian Hair and Skin Products Used in Religious CeremoniesJan 17, 2008 | Parker Waichman LLP
Hair and skin products imported from India by Raja Foods LLC that contain high levels of lead have been recalled by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA said it is concerned that the defective products, which are used for religious purposes, could cause lead poisoning if they are accidently ingested. According to the FDA, the recalled Raja Food products pose no risk if they are used internally.
Raja Foods LLC of Skokie, Il is recalling its 3.5 oz. (100 g) packages of "SWAD BRAND: ABIL, GULAL, KANKU, KUM KUM," and "SWAD BRAND: LAGAN SAMAGRI KIT, and POOJA SAMAGRI KIT". The products were sold in Indian grocery stores in Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. They are meant to be applied to the hair and skin during religious ceremonies. However, the FDA said that confusing labeling on the product labels might lead some think that the products are meant to be eaten.
According to the FDA recall notice, the ABIL, GULAL, KANKU, and KUM KUM product is distributed in a 3.5 oz. (100 g) plastic bag with a front label stating "SWAD BEST TASTE IN TOWN SINDOOR", "FOR RECIPE IDEAS VISIT OUR WEBSITE : WWW.RAJAFOODS.COM", and "PRODUCT OF INDIA." The LAGAN SAMAGRI and POOJA SAMAGRI product is distributed in plastic bins with a front label stating "SWAD BEST TASTE IN TOWN POOJA SAMAGRI" SWAD BEST TASTE IN TOWN LAGAN SAMAGRI" The back label states "Imported and Distributed by: Raja Foods, 8110, N. St. Louis Avenue, Skokie, ILL 60076", and a sticker stating "NONEDIBLE".
The FDA has advised that consumers who have purchased any of these products to return them to the place of purchase for a full refund. Consumers with questions may contact the Raja Foods at 1-800-800-7923 x 2860.
Lead is a highly toxic substance, and can cause behavioral problems and learning disabilities. Lead exposure is especially dangerous for children under 6 because they are still growing, and their brains are developing. The symptoms of lead poisoning often mimic other illnesses. They include irritability; loss of appetite; weight loss; sluggishness; abdominal pain; vomiting; constipation and pallor from anemia. There are often no signs that a person has been exposed to lead, and a blood test is the only way to determine if someone is suffering from lead poisoning. Mild cases of lead poisoning are treated by ending the lead exposure and having the patient submit to follow-up blood tests. A treatment called Chelation Therapy is used when a person tests positive for high levels of lead in their blood.


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Growth Workshop in Paris with Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen currently works at Uber on acquiring users, and he organized a workshop in Paris on growth.
I went.
As a side-note, it was held in the Family HQ in Paris. The Family has a slightly zany cat-meme focused approach to decor and a cult-like feel to it. They have an excellent selection of books, which is a good sign. Peter Thiel in Zero to One advocates recruiting "a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company's mission". I think The Family is aiming to do that in Paris.
What is Growth and Where Does It Sit in the Organization?
These days, you'll find a lot of people donning the title of growth on Linkedin. I sure do.
Chen commented that you'll see three different types of growth people:
- Product-led growth teams
- Marketing-led growth teams
- Sales-led growth teams
But ultimately, most growth teams are product-led. You can tweak ad campaigns, update landing pages and write content, but you need to alter the product itself if you want to unlock growth.
Interestingly, Chen pointed out that there are only a handful of large-scale growth teams globally with more than 100 members, mainly at companies such as Pinterest, Uber, and Facebook.
In the rest of the world, growth teams tend to be a single 7 +-2 scrum team focused on growth.
There are only a handful of ways to grow exponentially
Chen argues that there are only a couple of ways to scale users or revenue to hundreds of millions:
- Paid acquisition: existing campaigns pay for a larger amount of future campaigns
- Virality: each existing user refers more than 1 new user
- SEO: users generate content that attracts more people that generate more content.
- Sales: each additional sales agent generates a multiple of the revenue of they are paid, so you can hire even more sales agents.
He also cites there being the occasional sui generis way that will help, such as a partnership with a massive company, but they are rare.
These four growth loops are self-reinforcing, so they can scale companies incredibly quickly if the conditions are right.
Growth Loop Micro-optimization is Critical
Marketing techniques of PR, content marketing, partnerships, and app store features only get you so far. They're great for bootstrapping your user base from zero to tens of thousands or even millions, but they aren't self-reinforcing loops. They are linear in terms of results.
Because systems such as referrals are self-reinforcing, relatively small changes in conversions can have an outsized impact when played out over multiple levels of referrals.
Product teams tend to focus on the onboarding, the referrals systems, and the landing pages once early in a startup's cycle and then they move on to more advanced features. The core product team will always want to focus on how to make a better and better product.
But you can end up in the product death spiral:
This is what I'm calling the Product Death Cycle pic.twitter.com/1XtPlViOl7
— David J Bland (@davidjbland) May 16, 2014
A great product doesn't necessarily distribute itself.
That's where the growth team comes in, focusing on endlessly optimizing each step in the chain, so you get the maximum amount of new users from each user.
It's hard to pull off – a moonshot in Chen's words – but the reward is exponential growth.
Growth Opportunities
Whereas new growth loops don't come along very often, new platforms and channels are constantly emerging.
There is a window of opportunity with many of these channels before they close again. Facebook allowed many game developers to grow almost overnight into billion dollar companies such as Zynga. Facebook clamped down on games such as Farmersville, but Zynga still has a valuation of roughly 3 billion dollars as of today (although some argue that Zynga is more of a REIT with a game business on the side).
It's all well and good to talk about past successful channels such as Facebook, but what about the future? What are the platforms and channels that show growth potential today?
Chen pointed out two platforms that both have more than a billion users each, today:
- Chrome
- Android
Chrome has won the browser. Mozilla's former CTO admits as much.
Grammarly recently raised 110 million dollars as essentially a Chrome extension. One of the investors, Jules Maltz, stated that the company is growing faster than anything they normally see in San Francisco.
Personally, I love Grammarly, because it sits in the background when I'm writing in Messager, Gmail or WordPress, giving me value when I (frequently) mistype something.
Particularly for B2B SaaS companies browser extensions can be a powerful way to embed your product into the day-to-day of your user work.
Android has a remarkable level of penetration across devices from high-end to very basic devices. Whereas Apple tightly controls what you can do with iOS apps, you have much more free reign to build apps on Android that are deeply integrated into the underlying operating system.
Product Design and Growth
One topic that was touched on that's particularly interesting to me is how the growth team impacts the product design.
When you're constantly testing out new ideas in your product, you can run the risk of turning it into Las Vegas at night.
For example, Facebook's current efforts to add "stories" to all its products feels in some cases quite disconnected from the rest of the product. In Whats App it feels to me that they've just slapped Stories into the product:
In many cases, Chen says, this is unavoidable when you are trying to grow a product exponentially. When I think of beautifully crafted products that shine with perfection, I'm generally thinking of products that have been around for a long time and have reached the plateau of productivity: Porsche cars, Rolex Watches, Italian suits.
However, one interesting idea I heard was the idea of designing your product to bemore modular so you can test individual aspects.
The example Chen gave was Amazon:
Each band of recommendations is separate, allowing Amazon to test different ideas for recommendations against each other thanks to the design flexibility.
Oh, and when I was in Paris I had a falafel in L'As du Fallafel. Highly recommended!
Pricing for SaaS products
You can grow your SaaS business in three ways:
1. get more customers;
2. get customers to stay longer; or
3. get customers to pay more.
I believe that the last one, pricing, is an underrated lever of growth. We tend to focus on acquisition and, to a lesser extent, retention.
But get pricing right, and you'll grow revenue and even increase customer satisfaction.
Pricing is a function of your marketing, meaning it reflects your product, your value proposition and your positioning. Your pricing sets the stage for the rest of your strategy.
I've worked at several SaaS companies over the years, and I've tested both terrible approaches to pricing and other approaches that worked really well.
Here, we'll take a journey through the process of optimizing the price of your SaaS product.
Finding Your Price
Software is not about figuring out the cost of manufacturing the software, slapping on your margin and coming out with your price.
The whole point of getting into software is that you may start with a very low or negative margins, but over time your gross margin can increase to fantastical levels as you get more and more customers.
So, you focus instead on the value that the software provides, and you set the price accordingly.
The result of this is that your price comes from your customers, not from a spreadsheet.
You can talk to them, you can read their emails and you can go through customer support requests.
Their language, the words they use and how they describe your service will give you an idea of how they see you in terms of pricing.
For example a customer left this review of Planio on Trustpilot:
As you can see, this person certainly sees Planio as more than reasonable, describing it as "super cheap". That's an indicator that the pricing of Planio is low for this particular customer.
And what if you don't have many customers yet? Well, Steli at Close.io tells a story on his website about how he found the "right" price for a new product while talking to new prospects.
When the person would ask about the price, he'd give them a price that was 5% higher than he'd quoted to the previous person.
Once he got to the stage where 20% of the customers were balking at the price, he felt he had reached an optimum level of pricing.
The Optimized Pricing Action Plan
You'll read that pricing is a process. That pricing is something that you won't get right the first time. That you just have to test.
Well, that's true and it's also pretty vague. Especially so if you're the one responsible for doing something about your pricing.
It's tough to tell the entire company that the hundreds of angry Tweets, emails and phone calls about your new pricing is just the "result of a test".
So, where do you start and what, exactly, should you do?
Step 1: Gather Existing Data on Pricing
First off, if you have customers, I'd look at what they are saying in support tickets, emails or on review sites. That's your first source of data on how they're talking about your pricing.
They'll give hints about where they put on you in terms of price and value.
If you don't have any customers, I'd start looking at the same data for your nearest competitors.
This is the most basic step, however, and I think most people do this step.
Step 2: Set Up Calls with at least 10 Customers
It's always amazing how little people talk to users and customers, despite that being a core part of the job of product managers, product designers and product marketers.
In my experience, people often get into the software business in the hope that they'll avoid talking to customers.
However, the best software-as-a-service businesses talk relentless to customers in the stage from 0 – 1 million in ARR. The reason is that you need a rock solid understanding of your customers if you want to scale to 10, 20 or even 100 million.
It starts with talking to them on the phone. Talking to 10 people can lead to talking to even more. I went into detail on how you can go about this on a guest post over on GrowandConvert.com.
Step 3: Ask Them Questions about Pricing and Value
Usually, product designers and UX researchers use customer interviews to figure out how customers think and behave.
What never occurred to me until recently was that you can also use these calls to figure out what they think about your pricing.
Obviously, you can't ask them straight up: what's the most you'd actually pay for this software?
But you can ask questions that will reveal how they value your product.
On a webinar by PriceIntelligently.com, they gave me these three questions for pricing:
- At what price point would our product become expensive, but you'd still consider buying it?
- At what price point would our product become good value?
- At what price point would our product become so cheap that you'd start to question the quality of it?
Step 4: Change Your Existing Pricing
At this stage, you've gathered some data on your customers. You've learned some nuances on how they think about your pricing. And you've decided to change your pricing.
You can change your pricing in a variety of ways:
- Simply increase the price of your existing plans;
- change the amount of the core value metric each plan gets – i.e. the cheapest plan gets less seats;
- change your core value metric for your product – i.e. change from number of seats to number of projects for a project management app.
So, there's more than one way of changing your pricing. It's not just about increasing the dollar amount.
For example, at Planio, we changed the amount of users and the projects you get in each plan, rather than the amount charged.
Step 5: The Power of Grandfathering Your Existing Customers.
Grandfathering means that you don't impose your new pricing on your existing customers. They get to stay on the old plan, often indefinitely, until they want to upgrade.
This drastically reduces the risks of trying out a new pricing model.
You'll avoid a backlash from your customer base. In fact, in my experience, you'll get emails from existing customers thanking you for letting them keep their old plans.
You'll also reduce the risk if your new pricing model turns out to be disastrous. Imagine if you introduce a new core value metric, and you find out that your customers are behaving very different to what you expected – perhaps in a way that reduces, not increases, revenue.
You'll be able to 'reverse' your pricing change with only a few months of customers on the failed pricing model, rather than your entire customer base.
Pricing as the Underutilized Tool
Much of the SaaS case studies online focus on acquisition of new customers.
I think this makes sense, because the wider audience is interested in starting a SaaS company. Not very many people actually have a SaaS product that has enough traction to start optimizing the pricing.
At the same time, if you're in the lucky position of having a successful SaaS product, you'll find that pricing will be a place where you get outsized returns.
In a webinar for Kissmetrics, Lars Lofgren mentions a case study involving a company called Bidsketch where they doubled average revenue per account via a new pricing model.
Amy Hoy tells about how she's increased the price of her time tracking app four or five times with revenue going up every time.
So, once you've gotten to a certain point in your SaaS business, say 500 customers, I think it makes sense to start putting time into optimizing your pricing.
And I'd like to help you do that. If you click below, I'll send you my top 10 SaaS pricing Resources I use.
The "Market-Marketing" Fit
New startups or small bootstrapped companies find marketing excruciating.
I've talked to founders who've built an entire product, but they're stumped at getting the first 100 paying customers.
Jason Lemkin at SaaStr comments that the first 10 unaffiliated paying customers is hardest thing you'll do with as a software company.
The reason is that if you can get 10, you can get 100 and you can get to 1,000. The first 10 will be similar to the thousandth customer.
But back to our frustrated founders.
I often get the feeling that they're exhausted by marketing.
They spend a week writing a blog post, only to see a few people read it.
They spend hours of precious dev time integrating with another app only to see a handful of new sign ups.
They create an affiliate program, but they haven't gotten a single sale via the affiliates.
It just all feels very… tough. You're putting in countless hours, and you could just put that time into the product, and surely the customer will come.
I think there is a concept that nascent businesses should bear in mind.
I'm calling it the "Market-Marketing fit".
The basic idea is that for each new SaaS product there will be a certain approach to marketing a product that will win.
The fit will be more precise than merely channels such as blogging or affiliate marketing or inside sales.
And your early efforts at marketing should be focused on zeroing in on your market-marketing fit.
I'll give you a few examples based on bootstrapped businesses around the web. I choose them because 1) they're fairly relatable and 2) they're quite open.
Big companies such as AirBnB don't actually reveal how they grew. For example, I've heard that AirBnB grew in Europe via the brute force efforts of massive inside sales teams. But in most write ups of AirBnB's success you'd think it was all down to some growth hack based on data analysis.
Note: this is just me observing from the outside. I know nothing of what actually goes on at these companies.
Baremetrics is an analytics product for SaaS businesses using Stripe.
And the founder came up with an ingenious method of generating a flow of qualified prospects to Baremetric's site.
Imagine you're the CEO of a SaaS company.
You love seeing the key metrics for other SaaS companies, and Josh Pigford provided an open view of Baremetrics for Baremetrics itself.
I don't even run a SaaS company, and I found it fascinating.
In addition, I imagine that showing these metrics for the world to see meant that Josh Pigford had to spend less time in the early days giving demonstrations.
ConvertKit started out targeting authors. The problem is that author are generally terrible at marketing, so they don't have big email lists (if they have one at all).
ConvertKit adjusted their positioning to professional bloggers and they used inside sale tactics to get those bloggers on board.
The benefit was that professional bloggers have huge email lists and they LOVE affiliate marketing, so ConvertKit could, in turn, offer them 30% of recurring revenue for new customers.
Nathan Barry got bloggers such as Leo Babauta from Zen Habits and Pat Flynn onboard as ConvertKit customers. There's a big difference between landing a big customer who requires a confidentiality clause and landing a professional blogger who's favourite thing to do is writing about whatever new software she's using.
Those early customers probably had a very high virality coefficient – way above 1.
What I mean is that landing 1 big professional blogger as a customer potentially gets ConvertKit hundreds of new customers via affiliate and word-of-mouth sales, because that professional tells her list of 50,000 subscribers about ConvertKit.
When you land one big customer that doesn't broadcast to a large audience for a living, your amount of new customers might be zero or close to that.
Bingo Card Creator
Patrick McKenzie came to Hacker News fame as a software developer trapped as a salaryman in a Japanese MegaCorp who found freedom via a bingo card creator.
I imagine they'll make a movie about him one day.
Now, one of his marketing tactics takes a leaf out of the travel industry book.
Try this: type in "flights from #{insert any small town} and Rome" into Google. You'll get a wall of results from travel companies even if that small town doesn't have an airport.
The travel companies generate millions of landing pages around every conceivable combination of towns. It's all done without human interaction, so Google likes it less and less these days, because the value to people is often low.
Patrick adopted and improved on this tactic for Bingo Cards. He had writers create articles for 10-30 dollars for keywords around "Christmas Bingo Cards" via a custom CMS built for this purpose.
He found that he could put money into these pages and get revenue in return in a similar manner to Google Adwords or paid advertising.
Now, the reason why he was probably successful was that at the time Google didn't look down on such content as much and, secondly, Google didn't have much other content around Christmas bingo cards to offer, so his content was the best.
Because he used writers meant that the content was probably much better than the travel industry's automatically generated content.
If you have a niche market a wide variety of search keywords ("educational bingo cards", "christmas bingo cards") clustered around a common solution ("The Bingo Card Creator"), then this approach still works, particularly if the content is good enough to solve your target audience's problem.
Buffer is a great example of a company using content marketing as a tool to drive to 6 million/year in recurring revenue.
There's is a couple things about Buffer's success, however.
First off, content was in their founder's DNA. Joel wrote about taking the first steps towards creating Buffer. He wrote about every step along the way. They constantly took challenges such as figuring out what to pay people and turned those challenges into content pieces. The most famous example is their salary spreadsheet that listed the salary of everyone in the company as part of "radical transparency". It's hard to achieve Buffer-like levels of success with content marketing if the founder team aren't hardcore about writing and publishing content themselves.
Cheap customer acquisition for a company in its beginning from content marketing isn't something that you can just strap on with a few interns or outsource to an agency.
Buffer's price point of 10 dollars/month means that the only way to survive was to have super cheap acquisition costs. Buffer simply wouldn't exist if they didn't have that channel. Another competition called MeetEdgar comes in with a starting price point of 50 dollars a month, and they rocketed past 100k in MMR in record time. According to their founder Laura Roeder, they've been acquiring a lot of customers via Facebook ads. Admittedly, Laura Roeder also had a ready-to-go marketing channel in the form of her huge email list for her newsletter "Get the Dash".
Still, I think it's a good example of how having a premium price point allows you to more flexibility in acquiring customers.
Okay – that's a few examples of the "market-marketing" fit in action.
I think it's helpful to dig deeper than just the standard approach of thinking in terms of "blogging".
You have to think in terms of what specific types of posts are going to be a good fit for your business.
If you have a new technology idea in AdTech that you want to ultimately sell to one of the big AdTech players, it might make sense to write high level thought piece articles or get some industry leaders in on your blog.
On the other hand, if you're sell a 10 dollar/month social media tool, you'll need meaty, practical "how-to" guides that social media managers will want to share with their fellow social media managers.
They'll care far less about the state of social media in 10 years from some industry prophet.
And it's entirely possible that you won't find an approach to content marketing that works in your business. That's fine, because you can focus on what does work – be that inside sales, Google AdWords or partnerships.
The key is to find that fit as fast as possible.
What I learned validating my first product idea on an email list of 268 people while living in Paris
Last summer I was living in a tiny, 16-square meter apartment in Paris near Strasbourg-Saint Denis. The weather in July was HOT. I'd stick my chair on the desk and work at a makeshift standing desk with the window open.
As inner-city Paris goes, Strasbourg-Saint Denis is pretty damn ghetto, so all sorts of streets noises wafted up to us on the 5th floor.
And, amongst the prostitutes and street hustlers, my girlfriend and I validated a business idea we had.
I think this account will be valuable to someone who wants to develop and ship a first product. That said, I'd use the same exact techniques if I was working for a SaaS company.
Ready? Here's how it went down.
My girlfriend had a blog with about 4,000 monthly visits and an email list of about 250 people.
That's frickin' miniscule!
Your grandmother's knitting blog probably does better than that.
My initial reaction was, "Wait until your email list gets to 3,000 people, and then we can start thinking about doing something with it".
And then I thought about.
Based on human psychology, she'd be very unlikely to keep churning out blog posts, pitching guest posts and promoting her stuff online without seeing anything that looks like success.
And by success, I mean money (if that wasn't clear). I was living in a TINY apartment in Paris
So, we decided to think about selling an informational product. Now, you'll probably think that's pretty scammy and/or lame.
Fair enough. Here's my take: online video courses are pretty cheap to produce, so long as you have the necessary knowledge yourself, and they can deliver a lot of value to the students, assuming they learn a valuable new skill.
It's actually a fairly common path for many tech industry titans.
As Amy Hoy points out, 37signals' first product was an e-commerce search report for 79 dollars.
My takeaway is this: solving someone's problem should come first, not the tool you use to solve it, such as software, a video or an ebook.
So, an online course it was.
The few people on the list had written in saying they'd love to start their own little freelancing business.
Top tip: when people subscribe to your list, make sure the confirmation email invites them to email you. This will be a fantastic source of information on your audience.
We'd been freelancers for the last two years. We weren't rich, but we knew enough to help people go from zero to their first few paying clients.
And my girlfriend had done some one-on-one coaching with readers of the blog with great results.
So, let's recap:
We had a business idea: an online course on getting your first few clients as a freelancer, and we had a tiny audience of 268 people on an email list in MailChimp.
The next step was to put our pitch for our *non-existent* product in front of our list of 268 subscribers, and see what they thought.
I wrote an email that described what freelancing had allowed us to do: go snowboarding in the Alps on a Monday, go surfing in the afternoons in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean and so forth.
Put simply, I sold the dream.
Then, I said who this course was PERFECT for (and who it wasn't for). Obviously, it wasn't for anyone who'd already had some success at freelancing, and it wasn't for someone who wanted to create a product, for example.
I gave a high-level overview of what the course would entail, why they should follow it (and not another course).
Then, the call-to-action.
My call-to-action wasn't a fancy tracked-link back to a sales page kicking off a sales funnel.
Nope, it just asked them to click reply and say if they were interested (I even wrote what they had to write) and, optionally, to say why they wanted to freelance.
"Just reply "I'm interested"
A ghetto sales setup for an Irish guy living in Paris's finest ghetto. Perfect!
Are you interested in writing a sales email?
Here's the breakdown of the one I wrote:
- Sell a dream or make a promise.
- Say who this is for and who this is not for. The more you exclude, the better the included feel.
- State what the offer is about. What will they get specifically? (in this case it was 12 twenty minute videos).
- Give them an idea of how the experience will feel like: will they feel pampered like as the Four Seasons? Crushed like ants like at an introductory CrossFit WOD? In this case, they'd be focused on taking small, specific steps every week towards getting a paying client.
- Ask them for some sign of interest.
Are you worried that this will mean an overly long email?
The short and simple answer is don't worry about length; worry about making your email persuasive for the minority of people who will end up buying.
"Long emails won't get read by most people, just the ones that end up buying" – bastardized version of a quote of a Very Famous Direct Response Marketer.
Here's a screenshot from the campaign results in MailChimp:
And what happened next?
13 people said," YES I'm interested". Count me in.
The Three Emails Sales Series: When You Sell, Sell!
And so on we went on our business idea validation. It was time to find out if they'd be willing to pay the princely sum of 97 euro for this course.
So, I stood up at my desk, and I wrote three emails.
The first one was long and brutally honest. I said, listen, it's going to be tough to find your first few gigs, especially if you've never done this before and you're not a Ruby on Rails Dev or some wildly in-demand hipster.
But I asked this question: "Imagine yourself three months from now, 12 months from now, and you've successfully gotten your first couple of clients. How would you feel? Empowered?"
And what would happen if you didn't do it? What would have changed?
This technique is subtle and wide-spread. Sales people might refer to it as the puppy-dog trick:
"I can understand you're not sure about whether you want to buy this delightful puppy. Listen, here's what I'll do: I'll leave the puppy with you in two weeks, and if you don't want it when I come back, I'll take it off your hands".
Or put it this way, once you've thought about having something valuable in your life, it's tough to think about going back to life without that valuable thing: be it a fixie bike, a sweet apartment or, in this case, an online course that teaches you how to freelance.
The next part was to go into detail about what each video would offer. I wrote little snippets of the crispy benefits each video would offer.
Finally, I stacked up this course against the other options: hiring a coach for 2,000 euro +, going to business school and so forth.
Only at that point did I provide a link to the paypal page where people could pay, and I let them know that the link would expire at the end of the week.
The next two emails were short and to the point: here's the benefits to joining the course and here's the link. The last email went out on the day the course closed.
Out of the 13 people who said they were interested, 6 people decided to buy.
In total, my first product launch had brought in 582 euro or about 600 dollars.
Now, we just had to build the f**cking thing!
The 150 euro Product investment (or was it 4150 euro?)
As I said earlier, online courses are fairly easy to produce compared to a SaaS product or a physical product.
Here's the tools we used:
- Google docs for writing
- Camtasia for screen capture
- PowerPoint
- Wistia for video hosting (free up to 10 GB)
- Password-protected WordPress page template for delivering the course
- Samson Meteor Mic
- Sketch 3 for illustrations
- Mailchimp for sending out weekly emails
My girlfriend and I wrote out the script for each video, created a powerpoint presentation to go with it, and she'd go through the script and presentation while recording her screen using Camtasia.
Obviously, the big investment here was our time. Conservatively, I'd imagine we put in 200 hours in writing the scripts, creating the presentations, recording the screencasts, editing and uploading the videos.
Bill those hours out at just 20 euro an hour, and you're looking at 4,000 euro investment in time, alone.
And this brings us to what I think is an important point about validating and launching your first product idea: you really can't think in terms of a return on investment at this early stage.
I believe the value in having marketed, sold and created the first product outweighed the fact that we spent about 4150 euro, at a minimum, and brought in 582 euro maximum (assuming nobody refunded).
Truth be told, it was tough to ship a video, transcript, presentation and write up an email to send to the six students every week for 12 weeks. We were both working for a tech company in Berlin, and some days I'd have to come home after working all day and sit down to edit the video and upload it to Wistia.
But the fact that the students prepaid for the course and were impatiently awaiting the next "episode" meant that we felt 100% obligated to deliver each week.
In fact, one time we were at my parents house in Ireland, and we were trying to upload the video to Wistia on the crappy DSL line in the middle of the countryside, and one of the students sent an email demanding to know where her weekly video was!
The advantage of building the product in weekly intervals also meant that we could improve the product every week based on what we'd learned the week before.
My girlfriend got more confident speaking on the mic, and the powerpoint presentations were more and more polished.
How to Make Your Product Amazing for your First Customers
Now, when you launch an online course, it's easy to lose your students, as they often will interest, become bored and forget about you.
It's in your interest that your students succeed and get results from your course. Obviously, successful students are less likely to refund.
But honestly, that's not the main reason.
Fundamentally, you need people to get value from your product, be it SaaS, an online course or a funny t-shirt.
Call the "Time-to-Value" metric or your value proposition, if you want.
How did we make 100% sure that our first 6 students got value from the course?
Well, we put in time to make sure this was the best course it could be. My girlfriend had tested the framework in one-on-one coaching. She'd tweaking aspects to improve it, and she'd gotten great results for her students.
It wasn't some half-assed collection of ideas that she mumbled into the microphone.
But we also offered what the vast majority of online courses don't offer: personalized attention via email.
Every week we'd send out an email with the link to the latest course video, but then a few days later we'd follow up with an email asking how it had gone and asking them to send their homework back to us if they were comfortable with that.
And when they did send us an email, my girlfriend and I would sit around a table with coffee discussing how we'd approach their problem. We'd research on the internet to find different approaches, and we'd send back thoughtful advice.
The Minow's Advantage: You can be personal and thoughtful
That's an advantage you have when you're just starting out: you can really get inside your customers' problems and find solutions for them (even if it's not always exactly your problem).
And it pays off in the long term: Jason Lemkin at SaaSstr pointed out that your first customer may be or is likely to be just like your 1000th customer.
Therefore, if we sold this course 1,000 times, the 1000th customer would likely have the same problems, expectations and needs as this very first set of 6 customers.
The Most Terrifying Thing We Did: "Was it as good for you as it was for me?"
After three months, our first batch of customers had finished their course, and it was time to do something that terrified me: ask their feedback on their experience and areas we could improve on.
I really didn't want to do this. I didn't want to hear the truth! It's a pattern I've also seen in Series A startups: they often don't want to collect data because the truth might hurt, a lot!
The method of getting feedback was using a survey on Survey Monkey.
The approach I used for getting feedback was to look for qualitative feedback. I don't care whether it's "statistically significant". We're talking about a pool of six people here.
I just want, in their words, how they felt about the experience of taking the course, what they got from the course and how it could be improved.
Therefore, the questionnaire was four questions long, rather than 40 spread over 4 pages.
The result was that 3 people, or half of 'em, gave detailed, qualitative feedback, which I find much more useful than pages and pages of multiple choice answers.
What would I have done differently?
In hindsight, the product itself was far too big. It took 3 months of weekly work on it to ship the entire product. And my girlfriend already had a one-on-one coaching version of it that she could adapt.
Amy Hoy recommends that your first product should be a tiny product such as a short e-book or online course.
So, I'd do a 4-video course instead over 4 weeks.
Secondly, I'd make the course even more interactive. I think you can't spend enough time emailing and talking with your first few customers, so I'd set up Google hangouts with them on a weekly basis.
Depending on your situation, you could even make the course tinier still: Pat Maddox over at RubySteps had a 48-hour product challenge and he charged 11 dollars for his ebook. I bought it, and really enjoyed it!
After Validating the Product Idea, the Fun Just Begins!
We've since worked on the product even further. Being the nerd I am, I built a custom wordpress site with a sales page, checkout, payments via PayPal, logins for students, a link-up to an automated series of course emails via MailChimp once people signup and automatic drip-feeding of content.
That was all possible because I knew we had validated our product idea. I could invest more time in it. Recently, we re-opened the course on the new system with a price point at 497 euro or three times 197 euro, and we got 5 students for a total income of about 2,500 euro on a list that was 620 people.
That's almost four times the revenue the first time around, just by increasing the price and building a better delivery method.
I'm reasonably confident that we can now invest the time to grow the email list to 6,000 people and we'll have a business that could bring in 50,000 euro a year just within this one course opening twice a year.
And we'll help a boatload of people have fun in the process!
Let's Have a Chat!
If you've gotten this far, you've either had the patience of a monk, or you're really interested in making your first product.
I love talking to people who also want to make products.
So, if you have an idea you'd love to discuss, let's schedule a call here. We'll chat about your idea, how you could validate following a lean model and next steps. And you can tell me what's worked for you in the past. I think we'll both learn!
We might even become friends 🙂 Bear in mind that I'm in Europe, so if you're in the US, the morning will work better for the timezone difference.
I'm trying out Bookmore, as it makes finding a mutual time easier: Schedule a Call
Get Over "The Locked Room" Copywriting Fallacy
You're writing the copy for a startup website. You have a new idea, or your old idea is undergoing a bit of a pivot.
You need to explain your idea on your website.
You need copy. Snappy, persuasive copy that will make people want MORE.
More signups, more shares, more investors.
Your concept is great, so you want your website to drive home the concept of a bacon subscription service so nobody can deny its inherent, bacon-y goodness.
What do you do?
Why, open a Google doc, and start writing out the value prop of your bacon-as-a-service business.
"Succulent, thick slices of grass-reared bacon hand-delivered by men with mustaches and gentile manners every Friday in time for the weekend"
There it is in all its glory. A sentence that grabs what you do and puts it out there for the world.
But then some says that the men-with-mustaches gives the wrong vibe, and the sentence is far too long, anyway. People don't read on the web, DUH!
Now, you have go back and start writing again.
"Bacon-as-a-service. Home Delivery. Delicious."
Hurrray! It's short, snappy and everything copy should be.
Right? Time to publish!
Wait, what's wrong here?
The assumption that people don't read on the web.
That's just plain wrong.
People don't read things that don't speak deeply to them. When I use general, generic words to describe a highly specific THING, you aren't going to be interested.
But when you deeply understand your audience, when you know them better than they know themselves and when you know how they speak and think, you can write copy so targeted that they can't help but pay attention, clicks and cash.
Hell, if I saw that grass-fed bacon hand-delivered by hipsters was on the cards, I'd be sticking my credit card into Google so fast my French banque would be having a heart-attack.
But here's the rub: startups are generally characterized by not having a great understanding of your audience. You barely have any customers, and your own grasp on your own product is thin, at best. And you might change the entire concept radically overnight.
Something as simple as changing your "Go to Market" strategy might mean you're talking to a whole new audience.
Oh, and the usual time-frame for a website is, "Up by yesterday would be great, if you can stretch on it".
So, if you're in the position where you need to write copy fast, and you don't have the time or even ability to talk to existing or potential customers, mull over their words and generally soak up the vocab of your target audience, whadda ya do??
Cry? Yeah, go do that.
Here's a harsh truth for you. Your copy will probably suck.
No amount of hours of thinking about how to say the heading succinctly will make it better.
You don't have to be a great writer to write great copy. You just have to understand the hopes, fears and dreams of your target audience.
But if you need a website fast, you'd be best to write it fast, give it a fairly superficial edit to make sure it reflects your value proposition as you currently understand and put it live in a very simple (think: cheap) design.
Hell, keep the copy short if you want.
Now, your website is live. The big launch is DONE.
Just ship the fucking thing.
The real work can now begin. Listen, it takes time to convince your target audience to get on the phone for a chat, so you can start understanding them. Putting up a survey on your site will take some time as well to gather responses. Building up a picture of how they talk and think isn't going to happen overnight.
The software world gets this. They ship their minimum viable product. Something so small its value is almost nothing. And then they get over the fear of shipping, and they keep shipping every day, refining and expanding until it's a full-blown work of art.
You should do the same.
Ship your message, and refine it weekly.
That's how you write copy for your startup.
Now, you just have to convince the boss that this is a good idea. Start by sharing this article with the boss.
Losers have Goals. Winners have Systems.
I've been studying copywriting. Every evening, I sit down with a pot of Chamomile tea and write out an advertisement by hand for an hour. Yup, my life is all rock-star living.
A few days ago I was writing out a classic ad for a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. The ad starts with the story of two guys who had similar starts in life, both graduating from the same college and both starting in the same company. 40 years later, one was running the company while the other was a line manager. What made the difference? – reading the WSJ, apparently.
I beg to differ. The difference between extraordinarily effective people and most people is in their systems.
This is how a good system works: I hate to exercise. It's not my fault; it's in my DNA not to expend energy on pointless activities. So, instead, I just show up to CrossFit three times a week.
The good people over at CrossFit have come up with another system that is startling effective at getting people to work out really, really hard. In fact, they work out so hard that the most common criticism of CrossFit is that people injure themselves from working out too hard.
Why does this system work? For one, I don't have to think about anything. My job is to show up and do what I'm told. Contrast that to most gyms where you have to show up, figure out what you're going to do, then do it, hope you're doing it right and then wonder when you can stop.
The result is that most people get confused and just run for 30 minutes on the treadmill and never see any results.
The point of this is that CrossFit is a system, whereas messing around on the treadmill without a plan is not a system.
Once you start seeing your life in terms of systems, you have a set of tools to optimise and change your life.
You want to find a job? There's a system for that (and you probably aren't using it). You want to lose weight? There are millions of effective system for that. You want to become a juggler? There's a GREAT system for that!
You can simple select a system for the result you want and take advantage of YEARS of trial and error of others.
Unfortunately, humans don't seem to "get" systems very well at all. It's taken me years to truly appreciate systems. Before that, I just thought I'd have to "work harder" and "try to figure it out". The problem is the willpower is an exhaustible resource, and trial and error is a slow way for any one person to learn.
So, I've compiled a list of the systems I use, split out over different categories:
1. Health Systems
- Slow carb diet (loose fat, gain muscle, feel great)
- CrossFit (become your own hero!)
- Becoming a Supple Leopard (flexibility, good posture, increased strength)
2. Organisational Systems
- Google calendar (set reminders that are sent to your phone, plan reviews)
- Evernote (never forget an idea again)
- Dropbox (backup and internal file sharing)
- To-Do lists
- Check Lists
3. Communication Systems
- Gmail (set up with multiple email addresses)
- SMS alerts sent to iPhone when emails from important clients are received
- WordPress blog for networking, spreading ideas and keeping up contact
- Skype (I really want a better alternative!)
4. Finances Systems
5. Productivity Systems
- Accountability partner (my surrogate boss)
- The PomoDoro Technique
- Weekly reviews/plans
- Evening planning for following day
- The "Just Showing Up" system (for tough items, I'll count just showing up as a victory)
6. Wardrobe System
- I systematised my wardrobe so I can travel for extended periods with a 20 litre backpack that weighs about 7kg.
7. Meeting New People
- CouchSurfing MeetUps
- Natural networking
So, that's an overview of my more important systems that run my life. Not all systems work for everyone. But most people will benefit from implementing some of the above systems to make their life run more smoothly, achieve goals and not have to work so damn hard.
The secret for a more interesting life: take more risks
I've been trying to take more risks. It's why I gave up 2500 euro a month in income. That steady stream of cash was stopping me from pursuing other sources of income with any sense of urgency. It's also why I tried Karaoke for the first time last Saturday, singing a duet of "I've had the time of my life" with my brother-in-law. And it's why I'm spending three months looking after my awesome one-year-old nephew.
It's not longer just a question of your investments. Risk taking has become so important for everybody because there isn't much in the way of a roadmap for many careers. My friend Jon is a data journalist. That's a pretty new area, so he'll be part of figuring out what the career of a data journalist looks like. And to do that, he'll have to try different stuff.
But trying new stuff is tough. For a long time, I though about risks in terms of probability. Now, I realise that risk is really emotional for most people. The real reason I don't write for my blog is that I worry people will think I'm an idiot. For years I went to the gym and avoided the free weights because I didn't want to do something stupid like drop the weights and get kicked out the gym (Then I started CrossFit where dropping weights is what it's all about). My brother won't go to CrossFit because he's worried that he'll have to do pullups and he can't do pullups, so he'll look like a weakling, and so he doesn't go.
1. If you enjoy the process, it's probably a risk worth taking
One way to look at whether you should take a risk is whether you'll enjoy the whole experience of it. Jumping out of a plane is hardly going to be a great risk to take if you don't enjoy the experience at some level.
For example, I've been learning web development over the last few months. I find it fun to play around with code, so the risk that it won't pan out for me is reduced. At least I'll have spent some time geeking out on things I enjoy, even if I don't make a cent off it.
On the other hand, working in a job I hate for 40 years just to have a shot at a nice retirement seems a horrible risk to take because that's 40 years of misery.
2. It gets harder to take risk as you get older
I'm 25, I have zero commitments, debt or long-term contracts of any nature whatsoever. My income travels with me. I don't even rent a house. I sleep very well at night. I could join a band of roving gypies tomorrow.
But, looking around me, it's obvious that as I get older, the commitments start building up: cars, houses, boats and whatnot. It's also easier to live on beans and tuna fish when you're in your twenties. That's entirely normal. But when you get to your thirties and your friends are jetting around to different resorts, buying houses and new cars, it's harder to live like a monk.
Therefore, I'm trying to be far more aggressive with taking risks when I'm in my twenties, because I might not get the chance later on.
3. No matter what happens, you'll be happy as you always were
My biggest takeway from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness was that people who've suffered terrible loss – decades of wrongful imprisonment, political disgrace or paralysis – often view such experiences very positively. In the long-term their level of happiness rebounds to its previous level or even slightly higher.
Therefore, no matter how things turn out, you'll probably be stuck with your own personal level of happiness (which you can choose to influence).
So, that's how I look at risk taking.
Here's my mini-challenge: Try to take some small personal risk this week – think Karoke or dancing lessons rather than FOREX trading. I don't want to be responsible for any bankruptcies!
Why trying to get motivated may be a terrible idea (and systems are better)
The modern curse is wanting to do anything but that what you've set out to do. It's why PhDs never get done, masters are written at the last minute to scrape by and Facebook is an internet giant.
One of my favourite things is to practice different variations on introducing myself. Yup, I'm a bit of a weirdo. But the results are fascinating. Sometimes I tell people that I'm a legal translator. They'll usually start talking to someone else. Other times I'll say I run a legal translation business, and they'll be dying to know more.
But when I say I work for myself, the next question is always: is it hard to stay motivated?
And staying motivated is the key to excellence. People like Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, Geoff Colvin in Talent is Overrated or Cal Newport demonstrate that deliberate practice of your trade, professional or craft is how you become really good. It's not innate talent. You aren't born a great writer.
The top performers in any domain didn't get there entirely by chance or on the back of a natural talent. They got there by constantly working on their weaknesses, challenging themselves and taking their skills to the next level. It's very, very tough (which is why they often take naps in the afternoon).
Also, they often put in these tough hours over decades to get where they were. It wasn't just a few tough months of work to get to the top.
Therefore, understanding and cracking the code of motivation is one of the keys to developing unusually high levels of skill. And developing high levels of skill in areas makes life interesting, rewarding and fulfilling. So it's important.
I've struggled with not doing any work (and especially the work I was paid to do), even though I really wanted to do the work.
The answer most people come up with is to get inspired or get motivated. Preferably by reading some awesome pages of the internet. And then maybe listen to some great music. And finally make some coffee – before kicking ass and doing some WORK.
Unfortunately, that's a little like a sugar high – you quickly come crashing down again, because motivation comes in waves. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you do not.
A better approach is systems. Systems work when you're down, when you're up and in between. You don't have to rely on your finite willpower. You can trust the system instead. So, that's what I've been working on this year with a vengeance. I've tried a lot of things, but I now have a core set of processes that work quite well.
Most of this stuff below is very simple. I've known about them for years. But I did not do them, so I frequently felt entirely unmotivated and procrastinated like hell.
1. Plan and review on a regular basis – weekly/daily/hourly
A weekly basis works best for me. I look at the past week, measure what I did and assess how successful I was. I analyse failures to exactly what I'll do differently next week.
Sometimes the changes are tiny. I find it very hard to get up in the morning. But I find it very easy to listen to podcasts in bed. And when I listen to podcasts in bed, I can get up really early. So I'll make sure my headphones are beside the iPhone and I have a cool podcast downloaded. That's an example of how small the changes often are.
Then I'll plan the next week. The key, I've found, is to have tasks that can be done in 15-20 minutes. No longer. And the more precise I am on the details of doing it, the better. Therefore, l write down the page I have to start on or the link to a site I need to read.
2. Test to find your high productivity times and schedule high value work for these times
I've tested working at night. I can't. After 9pm, I'm done for the day. My main work times are in the early morning and in the early afternoon. If I really need to be focused, I'll throw a nap in between, because it's like getting a fresh start to the day.
I'll block these times for my hardest work such as translation, learning new skills or finding new clients.
3. Have an accountability partner
This part makes most people shake their heads, wondering if all is well in Tom's world. But almost everyone with a job has one: a boss. But when you work for yourself, either in business, studying or even personal hobbies, you need to somehow make yourself accountable.
It's quite powerful to tell someone what you plan to do and then have to check in with that person a week later and tell them how you did. I've found that picking your significant other is not the best approach, because it's far easier to rationalise why you did nothing to them than someone else.
4. Get Google Calendar to remind you of what you need to do
It's easy to start learning a language, get side-tracked and then forget about it and never do it again. Google Calendar allows you to schedule reminders that get sent to your phone by SMS. These days I get text messages at all hours telling me do anything from do physio to learn French or to plan something for the weekend. My brother even had Google calendar send him insults at 6:00 am in the morning, telling him to "wake up you lazy bastard".
Wrapping up, the system works like this: on Sunday evening I review my past week and plan the upcoming week incorporating the lessons learned from last week. Therefore, over time I get better a planning, so I'm more likely to do what I plan. This in turns breeds confidence in myself, which is important.
Then I pass on the review and the plan for the following week to my accountability partner, and I put reminders in Google calendar so I won't forget at the critical times.
Finally, I protect the most valuable times of the day for high level work.
And boom! no stress productivity.

subset: commoncrawl


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Napoleon XIV
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The pseudonym of US songwriter, performer and recording engineer Jerry Samuels, Napoleon XIV burst into the US/UK Top 10 in the summer of 1966 with the bizarre Theyre Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!. Although clearly a novelty song, its subject matter, mental illness (brought on by the loss of the singers dog), prompted a ban on many American radio stations. An attempted follow-up, Im In Love With My Little Red Tricycle failed to capture the publics imagination and Napoleons credibility was further dented when it was revealed that the performer undertaking personal appearances to promote the record was not Samuels but a certain Richard Stern. The presence of Napoleon imitator Kim Fowley hardly helped matters. An album based round the hit with lyrics by comedy writer Jim Lehrer was rushed out but in spite of such amusing titles as Photogenic, Schizophrenic You, The Nuts In My Family Tree...
Read the Full Biography of Napoleon XIV


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text: The Exterminatrix wiki last edited by leandro_rab on 08/28/16 07:39AM View full history OriginOubliette was raised in a greenhouse to promote rapid brain growth and longevity and was under the care of her father, a deranged man named Doctor Midas. When she was eight, Dr. Midas scarred her face in a duel to "make her stronger". He told her that it was deformed and from this day on she wore a leather mask when she was around other people. She was trained by her father to kill everything that ever tried to live. Over the years she hunted vampires, space monster, and Greek gods.Mayor Story ArcsMarvel BoyOubliette and her father listened from an apartment to the report on Noh-Varr from one of the scientists, who was running tests on Noh-Varr. Oubliette tried to identify Noh-Varr's weak points. One day after Noh-Varr had stopped Hexus, Oubliette arrived in a golden car in the alley where Noh-Varr was found by cops. When she told the cops Midas' military code they decided to leave. With her golden gun and a golden bullet Exterminatrix was ready to take out Noh-Varr.Noh-Varr escaped, but Exterminatrix followed him on her golden motorbike with built-on machine guns into New York's underground system. They fought through one trains and Noh-Varr kicked her off her bike after they left it. Exterminatrix tried to shoot him with her energy gun, but Noh-Varr avoided the shot and escaped again. Exterminatrix informed her father that Noh-Varr was heading his way and then continued to hunt Noh-Varr. She walked up a building with her vibranium soled boots and shoot at the wall beneath Noh-Varr's feet. He fell from the building and took on his way down Exterminatrix with him. While falling she was able to hold onto a flagpole while Noh-Varr fell with the flag into a bus after Exterminatrix shot him. On the ground Noh-Varr ran into a pack of Dr. Midas' agents. Exterminatrix cheered them on when they beat up Noh-Varr. Her father wanted to know if Noh-Varr was looking at her, but Exterminatrix didn't anyone would want to look at her scarred face. She took off her mask, but her father put it back on. Exterminatrix watched her father beat up Noh-Varr even more to learn the location of his cosmic ray engine. Exterminatrix shot Dr. Midas through the hand with her golden bullet before he could rip out the heart of Noh-Varr. She took Noh-Varr and fled with him into the sewer system.Exterminatrix brought Noh-Varr to his ship, the Marvel and stayed with him while the machines healed him. When Noh-Varr was conscious again she had a heated conversation with him, which ended with both pulling a gun on each other, but no shot was fired. Noh-Varr revealed his past to Exterminatrix, who was impressed by the robotic Helicoptera Rotors. In the end she understood why he acted so hostile after loosing everyone when her father shot down the Marvel. Noh-Varr gained Exterminatrix's trust and she showed him her face. She only had a small scar on her cheek and realized that her father had lied to her for all those years. Meanwhile Midas, his soldiers and SHIELD arrived and the Plex Intelligence revealed that the technology that led them to the ship was in Exterminatrix's mask. She denied being responsible and told Noh-Varr that she was used like everyone by her father. Once again she helped Noh-Varr to escape her father through the sewer system. She contacted Midas to tell him that she knew that she looked normal and that she would soon get him. Midas then sent a Mindless One after his daughter and Noh-Varr, which attacked them.The Mindless One killed many innocents from a subway before Noh-Varr and Exterminatrix stopped it. Exterminatrix cut off its head with a part of the railway and then returned with Noh-Varr to his ship where they fought Dr. Midas. Exterminatrix used the Mindless One's head to shoot her father through his chest. Another shot seemingly destroyed him (in reality he was transported to the Dark Dimension). Exterminatrix threw up after killing her father. Then SHIELD entered the ship and caught Noh-Varr and the Plex Intelligence. Exterminatrix escaped and began what she called a Cosmic Jihad. She destroyed a Disney World and threatened on TV to ruin the holidays for every child in the world until Noh-Varr was released. The president watched the news with concern and was told that SHIELD had sent hunter-destroyed telepaths after her.Civil War Damage Report (2007)At some point Exterminatrix was caught and incarcerated at the Raft. Tony Stark listed her on his list of interesting loose ends as an enemy of the Superhero Registration Act.It was revealed in Ms. Marvel #18 that Puppet Master sent mind-controlled Chilean soldiers to the Raft to kidnap Exterminatrix for his collection of women, but they failed. Exterminatrix is not shown in this issue, but it is said that she is kept 'pumped full of sedatives' since her incarceration and not capable of speaking to Ms. Marvel and her allies.Powers & AbilitiesShe was trained in hand-to-hand combat and the use of ordinary guns and more sophisticated weapons. Her arsenal included an unspecified energy weapon, a golden revolver and a motorbike with built-on machine guns. Due to her training she was very athletic and able to always use her surrounding to her advantage. She wore boots with Vibranium soles that enabled her to walk up walls. Her father secretly built Skrull adapto-circuitry, which constantly mutated to evade detection, into her leather mask. Other MediaGamesMarvel: War of HeroesMarvel: War of HeroesExterminatrix appears in several cards in the mobile card game Marvel: War of Heroes. Her cards are:[Unmasked] Exterminatrix


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As the Canary Islands are located off the north-western coast of Africa, Gran Canaria is blessed with year-round warmth and sunshine. So no matter what time of year you choose to go, you know that you're going to have lovely weather for whatever activities you choose to do, even if it's just basking in the sun on the beach. August is the hottest month, with average temperatures of 24˚C and January is the coolest month, with the average temperature only dropping slightly to 18˚C.


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I would like start an LCC in Massachusetts. I am studying Entrepreneurship as an undergrad, and I considering an online retail store.
I am not going to invest 1 Million Dollar, so I will not be eligible for a greencard.
I am also not going to work for the business, I will be hiring my cousin who is an American citizen, and my sister who is a green-card holder.
I heard different things from many people some say I can do it some say I cannot do it.
Can start it and own it 100% or do I have to cofound it with my sister?
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Yes, but you can perform zero work for it whether paid or unpaid.
You should retain an experienced immigration lawyer to review all the facts, advise you, and handle the case. You can find one through http://www.ailalawyer.com.
J Charles Ferrari Eng & Nishimura 213.622.2255 The statement above is general in nature and does not constitute legal advice, as not all the facts are known. You should retain an attorney to review all the facts specific to your case in order to receive advise specific to your case. The statement above does not create an attorney/client relationship. Answers on Avvo can only be general ones, as specific answers would require knowledge of all the facts. As such, they may or may not apply to the question.Ask a similar question
I agree with my colleagues. You can own a LLC and have employees but you can not work for it unless you have work authorization.
Alexus P. Sham email@example.com (917) 498-9009. The above information is only general in nature and does not constitute legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship.Ask a similar question
I very much respect people like you with spirit of entrepreneurship. Your plan is legally permissible: you can own a LLC, and have your sister and cousin work.
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Monday, June 24, 2013 |
With summer music festival season upon us, many great artists are hitting the road. Part of their preparation for such treks is coming up with methods to while away the many hours of travel and waiting to get on stage. Among the best distractions is a good book, so we're catching up with musicians to see what titles inspire or excite them.
Canada boasts few young artists with as much international appeal and recognition as Feist. The Juno- and Polaris Music Prize-winning artist has been a guest on Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live and her latest album, Metals, is among her most acclaimed to date. Beginning June 28, Feist has select tour dates in Canada and the U.S. this summer. Here she provides a glimpse into her recent literary fixations.
What book are you currently reading?
I started reading The Sisters Brothers [by Patrick deWitt] last night as I was dozing off and ended up staying up until the shocking orange of the sunrise stung my eyes, which sort of felt like a scene from the book. Every time my eyes would start to cross and I'd attempt to put it down, I'd fall into a half sleep and dreams would gather like a fog from all the gruesome imagery I'd just ingested. I'd have to turn the light on in half certainty there was a horse's eye on my pillow, or that the back of my head had just caved in. It's a classic page-turner and I've promised to finish it by tonight to pass it on to the next person waiting in line.
What book are you hoping to read next/on tour?
The next book I have on deck is The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I read Middlesex last year and want to dive back into a book made by that calibre of mind.
What book helped make a past tour more enjoyable?
I have a problem that I read as if I'm eating popcorn; I concentrate on it while not thinking about it, time passes and it's as if it never happened. I can't honestly think of what I read last year, but I always have a book in my bag. I've begun to feel that my mind has no true equilibrium unless I'm living a parallel life inside some book, and on tour there are plenty of places to want to ignore and transport beyond. I vaguely feel I read some really good ones, but since I'm travelling now and don't have my bookshelf handy to refer to, I can't rightly say.


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My boyfriend is currently serving the last 9 months of a 6 year sentence for vehicular man slaughter and leaving the scene of an accident. At the end of his sentence, he receives 10 years of probation. He is scheduled to return to Lee County, Florida, where his parents live. He is currently in a work release program in Broward County, Florida. What is the procedure for him to have his probation transferred so he can continue to live in Broward county? He has a job here and will be able to live with me.
His probation officer should be able to help him get it transferred. It may have to be approved by the court.
My standard disclaimer: I am not offering legal advice, assume I do not know the law in your state and that I am just making suggestions for starting points for when you do speak with an attorney. Do NOT rely on anything I write and contact a lawyer in your area immediately after reading my posting.Ask a similar question
When he gets out, he is going to tell them where he lives. Probaion will set it up so he can do his probation there. It is a simple matter and all he needs to do is talk to the probation officer.Ask a similar question
If he is in a Work Release program, he should have a probation officer assigned to him already. As such, he just needs to let his PO know where he will be living so the PO can verify the residence.
In the rare instance that he cannot just start his probation in Lee County, he should be able to get travel permits to allow him to travel to Lee County until the probation is fully transferred.
Richard E. Hornsby
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Integrated assistance for safer homes and stronger communities
The year 2015 saw Pakistan coping with floods caused by torrential rains during the summer and a devastating earthquake of 7.5 magnitude hitting the Northern parts of the country. Additionally, Pakistan has been grappling with the issue of displaced people from its tribal region bordering Afghanistan due to law enforcement operations going on in the region since 2008. Against this backdrop of recurring natural and man-made disasters, ACTED's goal in Pakistan in 2015 was to provide an integrated humanitarian approach. The goal was to respond to the basic needs of affected communities by scaling up direct life-saving interventions in the troubled areas.
Providing Emergency Relief and Early Recovery to People Affected by Natural Disasters
In July 2015, glacial lake outburst floods in the mountainous Chitral district caused immense damage to life, property and infrastructure. During the same month, heavy monsoon rains led to the overflow of the Indus River in Sindh, affecting nearly 1.5 million individuals. On 26th October, a powerful earthquake struck Northern Pakistan, leading to the destruction of over 23,000 houses in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas. ACTED mobilised its emergency response teams, calling upon the organization's integrated model for multi-sectoral emergency response and ensured the provision of critical shelter equipment and Non-Food Items to nearly 8,000 families across the country.
Integrated Humanitarian and Recovery Approach for displaced people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (KP / FATA)
In 2015, Pakistan accounted for almost 50% of the entire South Asia region's internally displaced people (IDP), with approximately 1.55 million persons displaced. Aimed at alleviating the impact of displacements in the region, ACTED successfully implemented multi-sectoral interventions, focussing on the provision of much needed shelter, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and food security support through a variety of cash-based modalities. ACTED also undertook a detailed market assessment to identify viable, marketable and employable technical skills with dual-validity (during displacement and upon return to areas of origin) which could provide potential employment opportunities to IDPs within different formal and informal economies.
Conducting Research and Development Programmes
ACTED's Research & Development (R&D) Unit in Pakistan has been a key window into development funding, focusing particularly on education, financial inclusion, renewable energies and emergency best-practices. The past year ACTED took on nearly half a dozen research projects focussed both on the humanitarian and development spheres. With the country having the third largest caseload (3.3 million) of acutely under-nourished children in the world, ACTED specifically focussed on two research studies designed as a response to the ongoing nutritional crises in North Sindh. These studies assessed the impact of shelter interventions and its interdependencies with WASH and FSL on the nutritional status of families. The R&D Unit also initiated a project to analyze the outcome of relief activities in the context of drought and nutrition emergency.
Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience
ACTED is strategically positioned to respond to any natural disasters in the upcoming year as well as to any developments pertaining to the complex emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas. 2016 will also mark the rollout of ACTED's third multi-year project: over a five year period and through the 'Empowering Change' Resilience Model, the CAWI Consortium - comprising of Concern Worldwide, ACTED, Welthungerhilfe and International Rescue Committee (IRC) - will build resilience in Pakistan through protecting and strengthening community capacity. With a strong positioning in the emergency and humanitarian sphere, ACTED will endeavour to expand its longer-term development actions in the upcoming year.
Linking Solar Panel Technician Graduates to the Work Market
In 2015, ACTED's successful Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) project, implemented in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), came to a close. Through this intervention, ACTED linked marginalized youth with employers, trade unions, and microfinance institutions, strengthening capacities for income-generation. ACTED is particularly proud of the training provided to solar panel technicians and the development of an accredited solar panel curriculum and trainee manual in partnership with TUSDEC, which benefitted over 1,000 graduates across the target areas. To ensure market linkages and optimize job entry opportunities, ACTED also engaged in two public-private partnerships, and has linked its Sindhi graduates with two interested private solar companies.
Pakistan 2005-2014: ten years of assistance to the people of Pakistan
ACTED has been present in Pakistan since 1993, when it registered its first office in Peshawar. Since then, ACTED has become a leading relief and development aid provider in Pakistan, implementing a wide range of programmes focusing on: 1) disaster preparedness & emergency response; 2) shelter; 3) infrastructure rehabilitation & construction; 4) sustainable energy development, 5) livelihoods support, 6) agriculture development; 7) education & vocational training; 8) water, sanitation & hygiene. In addition, ACTED has been providing monitoring & evaluation and information management services to a wide range of stakeholders in Pakistan – in particular PDMA, ERRA and PMD - to contribute to improving humanitarian coordination and effectiveness.
Read the full report on ACTED's 10 years of activities in Pakistan here:
Related web pages
Innovative solutions in Pakistan: Low maintenance water pumps factsheet
Partners in 2015
DAI Europe Ltd, Department for International Development (DFID) – United Kingdom, European Commission Humanitarian Aid & Civil Protection (ECHO), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), International Rescue Committee (IRC), Mannheim University, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), PATH, United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), United Parcel Service (UPS), World Food Programme (WFP)


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When: Sun., July 25, 12 p.m. 2010
Enjoy more rock, punk, metal, noise and jazz bands during the second day of [Static]Fest 2010, which features sets by Oakland, Calif.'s Shortchanged, Kansas City, Kan.'s Stonehaven, and locals like TSMF, and begins at noon at the Four Star Bar in Ravalli, 26756 Hwy. 93. $5 or 5 cans of food per day. The event doubles as a fundraiser for the St. Ignatius and Missoula food banks. Visit staticfest.blogspot.com for a complete list of bands.
Price: $5 or 5 cans of food per day


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S8 two piece low voltage PVC mounting stake. 1.4 inch diameter x 15 inches long with threaded .50 inch NPS removable cap. Boxed twelve per carton.
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Drift into a warm afternoon among the magnolia trees. Magnolia blossom body lotion nurtures skin and lifts your senses. The luxurious formula features natural oils, shea butter and antioxidants to help moisturize, soothe and protect skin. Magnolia blossom body lotion wraps you in a pretty floral scent, leaving skin feeling soft and delicately scented for a lovely experience.
Safety Information
for external use only. use only as directed. avoid contact with eyes. discontinue use if irritation occurs. keep out of reach of children unless under adult supervision.
aqua/water/eau, macadamia ternifolia seed oil, isocetyl stearoyl stearate, caprylic/capric triglyceride, glycerin, dimethicone, olea europaea (olive) fruit oil, cetearyl alcohol, cetearyl glucoside, cetyl alcohol, stearyl alcohol, butyrospermum parkii (shea) butter, parfum/fragrance, stearic acid, tocopheryl acetate, acrylates/c10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, tris (tetramethylhydroxypiperidinol) citrate, pentaerythrityl tetra-di-t-butyl hydroxyhydrocinnamate, xanthan gum, sodium hydroxide, ci
apply a generous amount to skin with fingertips, and massage in gently with a soothing, circular motion.
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text: About Gastar Exploration Gastar Exploration Ltd. is an independent company engaged in the exploration, development and production of natural gas and oil in the United States. Gastar's principal business activities include the identification, acquisition, and subsequent exploration and development of natural gas and oil properties with an emphasis on unconventional reserves, such as shale resource plays. Gastar is currently pursuing the development of liquids-rich natural gas in the Marcellus Shale in the Appalachia area of West Virginia and, to a lesser extent, central and southwestern Pennsylvania. Gastar also holds prospective acreage in the deep Bossier play in the Hilltop area of East Texas and in the Mid-Continent area of the United States. For more information, visit Gastar's website at www.gastar.com .Safe Harbor Statement and Disclaimer This news release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934, as amended. A statement identified by the words "expects," "projects," "plans," and certain of the other foregoing statements may be deemed forward-looking statements. Although Gastar believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, these statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual future activities and results to be materially different from those suggested or described in this news release. Actual well costs, EURs and internal rates of return on future drilled Marcellus wells may vary from the hypothetical Marcellus well results and returns set forth in this news release based on current well costs, average well EUR and type curve and NYMEX forward pricing. Contacts: Gastar Exploration Ltd. J. Russell Porter, Chief Executive Officer 713-739-1800 / firstname.lastname@example.com Investor Relations Counsel: Lisa Elliott / Anne Pearson DRG&L: 713-529-6600 email@example.com / email@example.com SOURCE Gastar Exploration Ltd.