Entries this day: mr_labs_ad

mr labs ad

Tuesday 20 October 1998

Finally the MR Laboratories Advertising Department has gotten off their duff and begun the first teeny steps into advertising.

For all you new readers, MR Labs is my new website design company. I personally am the President, Treasurer, Secretary, Supreme Ultimate God of the Whole Universe, and Janitor. Marcel, my homie, is simply the Super Ultimate God of the Whole Universe and the Bean Counter.

Anyway, I am also the Advertising Department of MR Laboratories and I have a problem: fear.

I am afraid of rejection I may face by putting myself "out there."

"HI. I design websites."

"That's nice."

Or worse yet:

"HI. I design websites."

"Who cares? What makes you think you can do it any better than anyone else? What are your rates? Who is your competition? What makes your product better than theirs? Why would I need a website anyway????"

"Um, I don't know," and I go shrivel up in a corner and die.

But I've got to do this. If I don't advertise, I'll have to grovel back to a JOB, and have a boss other than myself, and have to wear frikkin' shoes for goodness sakes!

UN-AC-CEPTABLE!!!

I have to do my own business thing just to see if I can do it! This is like the next obvious step in my life quest for freedom or something. Yeah - freedom to keep track of my whole business.. am I crazy??

I dunno.

So ANYway, I made my first phone call today to a company that puts ads on the back of register receipts at local grocery stores and stuff. He gave me a price: $1575 for 2 stores for 12 weeks at ~25,000 customers per week per store and like 500,000 ads sprinkled over the whole mix.

I told him "website design" and "just getting started" and smiled and he was all, "okay $1050. $1000 if you pay up front."

So I called Marcel, head of MR Laboratories Bean Counting Department. The conversation went like this:

"Dude?"

"Dude!"

"Dude."

"Dude?"

"$1050 / $50/client = 20 clients. 20 clients / 500000 ads = 0.004%."

"Dude!"

So I'm going to call the guy back to get a sense of what percentage of ads gather phone calls and if it's bigger than 0.01% then I'm going for it.

The ad will feature Marty and Rad, exclaiming happily, "we can do it, dude!"

My Fear asks, "what if it's 0.1%? What if it's 1.0%? What will you do when you can't handle the workload?"

Dude. I'll call Marcel.