Fanminder Blog

What a difference 18 years makes in how businesses are run today. Let me share.

As readers of this blog and our FanMinder newsletter know, I started a college sportswear business, MAP Clothing, out of my dorm room in my freshman year at SUNY Albany, 1985.

It grew fast and helped put me through college, until I was finally known as the “t-shirt guy” all the students bought their “rags” from. When I graduated I opened up a full-blown store, Campus Rags, and ran it until I ran out of money about 3 years later. DOH!

Here’s a photo of the work I did every day.

What’s interesting about this pic other than my already receding hairline? Take a look at how rooted my clothing store is in stuff. There’s razor sharp dies that cut out fabric that’s sent through the roller to glue onto the clothing with the heat press in the foregroound.

Dozens of fabrics for people to choose from, plywood blocks of metal and foam, and repetitive processes to take raw materials and turn them into finished goods – fraternity and sorority clothing.

Ah, the good ol’ days. Today, I’m running a service business: FanMinder. True, the analogy isn’t perfect but stay with me. Fast forward 18 years and here’s the work I do every day with FanMinder:

This time, the finished product isn’t one of 14,000 SKUs of sweatshirts, t-shirts, tanktops or tchotckes. It’s an online service with 14,000 possible uses. My day now consists of sketching out features in MS word, drawing user interfaces in powerpoint (yes, ppt for UI), and bug testing using two other online applications.

And that’s just for designing the product. There’s sitting on call after call using my Vonage VOIP phone (not too reliable unfortunately) and iPhone, surfing the web for lord knows what information (no web in 85), checking email (no email either), and using Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn to recruit team members and get the word out.

In 1991, my day was filled with student customers face to face in my store who I knew by name and employees sewing letter onto sweatshirts in the back office manufacturing plant. I sold our clothing door-door on campus, drove to Binghamton and Oneonta to sell in their campus centers, and was a daily fixture at my local screen printer.

In 2009, my day is filled with…physical solitude. Four months into the business, and the FanMinder team has never met in person since team members live in Canada, the East Bay, Mountain View, and Austin Texas. We will find our customers across the country, not the state, and I won’t be driving my awesome beat-up 1981 Toyota to meet them. Instead, we’ll be using Google AdWords to source customers who land on webpages and go through online set-up. I’ll probably never meet 99% of them face-face.

Why am I writing all this? Well, I think I’m a bit wistful for more human contact! Man can only take staring at a computer screen for so long (even if it is a gorgeous 24″ iMac.) And I’m so sick of all of us trying to speak on a conference call at the same time.

Yet it feels we’ve come so far. This is the “service economy.” Of course I could have elected to open a store, but why? My business is starting on shoestring, doesn’t need invoices, vendors, a storefront, overhead, raw materials, or a warehouse. It now has the potential for national scope on day one. I guess I’m choosing growth over whatever melancholy longings I think I have for olden days. Probably a smart move

But I think the other learning, one for a later post, is how to keep all that olden time wonderful human connection as the machines take over. How can FanMinder replicate and reimagine the personalized service I gave as the sole proprietor, but using the latest tools of the day? How does a dispersed group of team members stay as close as if working in the same 20 X 20 office? Let me think more about it…and drop me a line with some answers.