The Art and Science of Failure: Lessons from Nomies 2010

As we reflect on the past decade, it's clear that failure played a significant role in shaping the success of Nomies. The conference, which was initially conceived as an annual event, proved to be a monumental undertaking every year. Despite its popularity, Nomies faced numerous challenges, including financial constraints and logistical hurdles.

One of the most notable failures of Nomies was Gomex. Although it had shown great promise in 2009, it ultimately failed to deliver on its potential. The event's creator took responsibility for its shortcomings, acknowledging that the conference was not feasible with the limited resources they had at the time. However, despite these setbacks, the community surrounding Nomies persevered.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in reviving Gomex. The event's original creator is working to bring it back to life, but this time around, they are taking a more measured approach. With the benefit of hindsight and a newfound understanding of what went wrong in the past, they are better equipped to tackle the challenges that led to its initial failure.

The success of Nomies 2010 was largely due to the sense of community it fostered among attendees. Despite its numerous failures, the conference became an iconic event that people loved and wanted to attend again year after year. The creator of Nomies recognizes this phenomenon, acknowledging that "everything that went wrong with Gomex made it right." This paradoxical relationship between failure and success is a testament to the power of community and the human desire for connection.

Event producers often face similar challenges when planning large-scale events. The creator of Nomies shares their insights on what makes an event successful, citing the importance of finding the right partner or team to help bring the vision to life. However, they also caution against getting caught up in the hype surrounding an event, emphasizing the need for a clear plan and realistic expectations.

As we look ahead to future events, it's essential to learn from past mistakes. The creator of Nomies encourages anyone interested in attending or participating in their events to join online communities, such as the Nomies chat group on Google+, TeamSpeak, or Facebook. These platforms provide a space for discussion and collaboration, allowing attendees to share ideas and suggestions for improving future events.

In conclusion, failure played a significant role in shaping the success of Nomies 2010. The event's creator acknowledges the challenges they faced and shares valuable insights on what makes an event successful. By learning from past mistakes and embracing community-driven feedback, we can create more inclusive and engaging events that foster meaningful connections among attendees.

Nomies' creator recognizes their own limitations and vulnerabilities as a leader in this industry. They admit to having nightmares about certain events and express a willingness to learn from others. Their humility is refreshing, especially given the high level of stress and scrutiny involved in organizing large-scale events.

The return to Google+ Hangouts has been well received by the Nomies community. These bi-weekly sessions provide an opportunity for attendees to engage with each other in real-time, sharing their thoughts and ideas on various topics related to Nomies. The creator plans to continue this format, with some flexibility to accommodate changing schedules.

For those interested in attending or participating in future events, there are several ways to stay connected with the Nomies community. By circling the creator's Google+ account, attendees can join a growing network of like-minded individuals who share their passion for events and community-building. The event will also be broadcast on YouTube, providing an additional platform for discussion and feedback.

As we move forward into the future, it's essential to remember that failure is not only a natural part of growth but also an opportunity for learning and improvement. By embracing this mindset, we can create more inclusive and engaging events that foster meaningful connections among attendees.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthank you for watching liking commenting sharing and subscribing right now where have I failed let me count the ways so many places really uh so many times granted every time I do fail uh I try to learn from my mistakes to not repeat those failures there have been times I have repeated those failures but uh I'd like to believe that I've learned something from each one of those uh failures and uh you know you could ask me about any particular perspective uh you know that I've I've had over the years you know specifically in relation to small business and it's my hope at least with people who've registered on ns.com to be able to help guide them along uh the path to success by bringing up where I have failed and I realize that's like the uh the antithesis seemingly of a mastermind group why would you share your failures why wouldn't you share your successes uh to me it's it's it's a bigger potential learning experience when you've failed at something rather than when you succeeded at something because success can come uh accidentally it could come through luck it could come because you've planned for it uh but failures sometimes just throw you for a loop and and you always learn something from failures it's difficult to know what success feels like until you know what failure feels like and I've done my best not to view something that has been a failure as you know anything but a learning experience something for growth really because we only have so much time in the day we only have uh you know so much that we can do on our own and sacrifices are are are things that we certainly have to be mindful of you can never do everything as a you know a small business business owner I mean you can try but uh you may be limited your your growth potential could be limited if you're just relying on yourself to get one thing or another done especially if it's something that you do want to see happen you know over the years I I've definitely wanted to do certain things with the business and I tried and I would say it kind of worked but not really uh ultimately uh I've come back you know almost full circle to creating content much like I had done back in the mid 90s as the foundation for what I would consider my one of my bigger successes uh you know having hit failure after failure after failure but you know not accommodating those failures as failures so uh you know one of the first I would say time waste failures that I I ran into would have been uh when one subscriber suggested that I go out and put the lockr logo on a t-shirt not the the classic not the the Neo looking Chris pillo one but the classic lockr cartoon logo uh that I drew uh based on you know needing a logo for the website and I thought yeah why not well this is before you know putting a t-shirt or a mug together was easy I mean you had to go through you know branders and you know set up the whole process and and get inventory and sit on inventory and sell it and uh the tools it's it's difficult to believe but you had to roll your own back in the day it's it's not that way anymore uh there's such an amazing array of software Solutions off the shelf that you can just choose uh immediately and be up and running uh but after going through the whole riger roll and and getting lined up getting all the merchandise including bowling shirts and propeller beanies and all this uh we launched and sold a handful maybe the first day and then nothing and it was just having a 100,000 people you know who were subscribed to the newsletter I thought we'd sell more but unfortunately either the price was too high uh which we couldn't drop any lower or we would be out money or people just generally weren't interested so it was a good idea it's just that yeah no there's a reason why a lot of these t-shirts are kind of given away uh a lot of these products and merchandise are are just given because they're not really worth anything they're they're great marketing tactic but beyond that you're not really going to make a lot of money or I I go as far as to say most people will not make a lot of money in that kind of merchandizing especially in today's uh you know era of anybody being able to point click and build their own store and they could recreate the experience that that took you forever to create so I can't tell you how many weeks of time and effort went into doing something that ultimately did not pay off but uh lesson learned now when anybody tells me they want to buy my logo I I I say well yeah maybe soon but it's never going to happen again other than through one of those uh easy to set up uh online stores um you know I've I've had you know similar issues in the past where I believed that I had value to provide that I wasn't currently providing in being able to leverage my existing reach to more effectively offer something new uh I had uh this is a few years back after you know doing Locker Nome you know I was certainly still interested in publishing content but I also saw a pretty big wave coming with tags and I had an idea of aggregating all these tags on the one page and making it easier to search for tags across a variety of sites and um in doing that uh it was it worked but at the same time it didn't take off and it was it ended up being a Time resource drain again and I should have stuck to what I knew best so doing even something like n.com in this service uh is I would say a calculated risk it was something that I wanted to do for quite some time and I would say that based on the previous failures I've had on brand extensions and uh you know doing something more than what I'd done before it's probably been to this point a bigger success uh this particular subscription effort and I have every reason to believe it's it's going to continue to be successful uh largely because of the stage that uh I've been setting and knowing where to spend those resources wisely um and knowing that the customers have been coming to me almost from the very beginning and I've never really had a solution for them a scalable solution so I already knew that people were coming to ask these questions so being able to provide I guess a conduit to answer those questions was a big win huge win and uh so that is just based on my knowledge of what I've done in the past and what hasn't worked crossed over with what I know people wanted from me that is business intelligence or advice I mean every single day I get emails what should I do here what should I do there how can I do this how could I do that uh you know to this point I just push people off to you know General Forum or potentially even answer it in a a question on YouTube or you know on on one of the blogs or social media um but knowing that I already had customers was a big predictor for the what would be the success of nomies and considering that in a month's time we had about 350 people sign up and I really wasn't anticipating more than a 100 in the first month um I'd say we we are uh We've set the stage for growth um but it was only because I had uh potential paying customers that I knew that this idea could be successful uh it's it's not that you could guarantee any degree of success but certainly over the past things that I had tried to do with my name or my brand um I didn't know if I had customers and that's largely how and why they failed I took risks uh but I would say that most of them didn't pay off because of scalability reasons um this is a I guess a new effort for me um but it's largely based on knowledge that people want the information that I have to provide or the resources that are at my disposal um I can effectively leverage them and it worked it was calculated uh having those customers in hand and really that's what makes a business a business I mean you can take a Gamble and you say I want to try something but unless you know you got paying customers you may be wasting your time and that's what a lot of small businesses do they waste their time and they may build a great experience but having a great experience does not mean that you're going to be deemed quote unquote successful so you know I uh I continue to uh to make failures uh at every turn and and do my best to uh polish those failures into uh hopefully future successes so now that we've had a few people uh join the hangout here are there any questions from the audience the audience of registered nomies great question questions uh well you know it's it's that I think is overlooked by a lot of uh you know people who are looking to get in business for themselves uh a where are they going to find the customers B are the customers already coming to them and and see what do I do first uh and you know for instance with with nomies the experience has been largely positive the issues that we've run into have largely been sof software issues uh there's not I mean there's there's not a perfect software solution in terms of what we're trying to do but uh stumbling through software issues has been probably the biggest hurdle we've had with the experience to this point and we're you know continuously figuring out how to mitigate the problems that we run into sometimes it's a a problem of misconfiguration or a faulty setup uh you know one reason or another you know being able to get to those problems so they don't continue to be problems is probably the uh the the thing that I've spent the most amount of time on more than anything doing value ads that's that's easy it comes like secondhand to me you know or second hat sorry not secondhand it's firsthand second hat sorry I'm mixing metaphors again you want to talk about a mistake especially from an English major I'm not I can't do I shouldn't do that but I do any other failures you guys want to know about I'm an open book let's talk about fail see people they perceive failure they think something's been a failure when in fact it hasn't um some people would think that what I'm doing now is is is failure and I guess it's relative I I'm getting the bills paid uh I'm going in a positive direction and my customers are happy so if that's a failure Color Me Happy for being a failure uh I I think most people may believe it's failure when in fact it's just a a misconception I know that you can have like minor failures where you'll have some like a down spout and then you'll uh then you'll have success again did you ever have uh something like that with YouTube like have like a major failure with YouTube or something that you did uh and then you kind of brought yourself back up no not really I mean I I've I've much like with uh the regular content publishing on Locker Nome it's it's kind of ebbed and flowed over the years um I don't know it's it's difficult to say uh you know I I've I've taken a a different publishing schedule recently and while some people don't like it I know that it's it's ultimately been good for what we needed it to be good for um for a while you know we were publish this is a long time ago we used to do when I really got into YouTube it was like five videos a day and then maybe a year later it was like three videos or so a day and then it was down to about that and it continued to be that way really until a few months ago when we started doing the live broadcast and now it's I would say it's almost twice as much um you know four to eight videos a day um and experimenting with those those models uh you know has been interesting um some people would make the assertion that uh Chris you're you're failing on YouTube because you're getting fewer views per video uh but I'm getting an equal amount of views for every video and I'm able to stabilize and grow more importantly my goal was not to uh drive up more views per video uh my goal was to a produce more videos and B drive more traffic back to lock.com and we did that so some people would see it as a failure you fail because you're getting fewer views per video but that's not what I was going for uh I was going for more traffic to Locker num as part of the equation and that worked so it was a success and it continues to be a success and I'm you know always looking for ways to more better optimize the kind of flow that we can bring to locker.com content every day from YouTube and really kind of create that uh the circle with uh what we do every day um um it it's it's it's a perceived failure but it's absolutely not a failure and you could look at it that way but if you're meeting your goals it's not a failure most people have different would have different goals but that's their goals it's not my goal uh my goals tend to be uh completely different from others goals but every business has to work in a different way um the way that my business would succeed would not mean that somebody else do even doing the same thing could have the same degree of success for you know one reason or another well I'm glad you guys like hearing about my failures it's a it's a good thing um I think the bottom line is really and I I don't want to belabor the point when you see success you can you can try to match that success but you're going to be serving yourself and your business better better by learning where people have failed rather than where they succeeded because you don't want to make the same mistakes that someone else has made to think that you know you'd be any different uh the uh I guess a corollary would be you know imagine you're you're in you're in high school or maybe even right now uh you're you're dating someone and everyone tells you dude that that person cheats on everyone they date like what no I'll be different they're going to cheat on me and then you know at some point in the future inevitably they cheat on you you can't be shocked people warn you they let you know uh but you thought you were going to be different no no no very rarely very rarely would that work out to your benefit uh especially if the same p uh pitfalls were hit over and over and over again it's difficult to navigate those though because there are so many variables at play with business uh that uh it's something that you just you have to keep in mind um you know uh sometimes learning from where people have failed can keep you from making that same failure even if you just tweak the model just a tiny bit uh and do it slightly differently that could spell all the difference uh you know more resources putting the resources in in different buckets uh doing something slightly differently could could mean success where it spelled failure for uh somebody else so uh you know don't don't concentrate so much on other people's successes as much is wanting to learn from their failures because ultimately that will make your uh business a stronger business I have a question um how did you um how did your name come come to being my name like are you talking like a uh the locker Nome name how did you uh create it and um ah yes uh you want to talk about something that I've I've regret off and on for going with Locker Nome uh it's an old high school nickname that's all doesn't mean anything and uh you know I registered it after graduating from college back when I could have registered just about any.com for 70 bucks that's how much it cost and I could have owned probably any awesome domain name and uh yeah I went with Locker Nome because it meant something to me and I I try to make it mean something to everybody else and so yeah for better for worse you know it didn't i' never I you know I I never locked it into one Arena or another it's never been just about technology it's never been about General geeker it's just been lockr no and it is what you know I've made it uh and that's so I guess it's a good thing I mean there's times that I wish that I would have gone with something a bit more targeted in terms of the brand but on the other hand it stands out it still stands out so I appreciate having that brand flexibility at this point it'd be uh easier to reinvent Locker Nome because of that uh and I think that the future where the brand is headed is is is definitely it's still in in providing information and and creating content but uh I I think if I were to have broad sweeping brush Strokes it would be uh geekery not just specifically technology think anything where we can create content that is entertaining uh and informative and very useful very tangible uh that's that's the type of uh content that I I love reading and I love sharing you know uh bringing in the personal story into uh into the whole uh equation that so many people have not done uh it's easy to publish a howto but I I always steer towards where's the personality in this uh you know what what makes this enjoyable to read uh and if it's not enjoyable to read I don't expect people would um so I drive for that uh entertainment value as much as I do uh the informational value even down to the videos that I do very it's very rare that I'd upload a video that I did not find useful I at least want something if not useful then entertaining at least in my mind one of the two hopefully both at the same time uh but I don't believe in wasting people's time with a lot of those videos a lot of reasons why when I do these Hangouts that you know number one they're just for those whove registered on ns.com two they tend to be focused on small business efforts and business efforts uh and three you know hopefully information is relayed rather than just kind of babbling on and on incessantly that nobody would watch that again and again I hopefully you know with this topic on hand um and and you know even the question of where you get your nickname you could consider it a failure because I didn't focus it enough that someone could could look at it and know exactly what kind of content was being shared or what kind of what kind of service it was it was tremendously generic but I I I believe that's been just as successful as much as it's been a failure more successful than a failure well 15 years I guess and still floating you know being able to pay you know my bills and the bills of other people I would say is a I would say is a success but what is going on with geeks uh you mean like people who are Geeks no geeks.com ah okay so going back to failures um so I just heard a drastic decline of the advertisement of geek.com uh okay so let's see if I can set the stage correctly I was using at one point WordPress mu I was using it for quite some time and it was so unstable uh and I could not keep the website running and most of my ad revenues was were being driven through locker.com at that point well some not all and uh I I I needed a website up when chris. par.com or locker.com were down I'm like this is I I can't I can't do this like everything's down and no one's got a place to be so I uh on a whim went to ning and set up a network uh and then since most of what I was branding on on YouTube at that point was you know chris. pill.com this is me it's Chris Perillo come and hi my username is Locker Nome there was really a massive disconnection which today has been largely addressed um through some of our more recent efforts with the lockr Daily Report or tldr for short um so I set up geek. pr.com said oh it's you know it was it was a lot of fun it was cool uh you know ning in the beginning had an an amazing Suite of tools they didn't quite get community though um putting up a forum sure it's a forum but they even now after they were acquired by Glam still have no idea how to uh operate community on its own velocity so geks St pr.com existed uh and then uh at some point over the last year we had a company come to us and say Hey you know you've got you know a pretty good audience in a pretty good direction and pretty good content here how would you like to join us as a you know bigger Network and you know possibly be acquired and I was like oh that's interesting you know sure and they said well we don't really want to acquire you we want to acquire Locker the brand since it has you know such a big presence on YouTube and the website and this this this and so uh I realized I'm like crud so this community exists on geek. pr.com although geek. loom.com was redirecting to it we basically flipped them so it was geek. loom.com uh but then uh you know after launching locker.net because ning was kind of petering out and was not providing a lot of community velocity uh I used locker.net to to run osqa on and then funneled a lot of people to locker.net which is really addressing the primary needs of a lot of the community that is getting asking questions and getting them answered and that's exactly what the open source platform osqa can do that's still running on locker.net um it's a you know 990,000 answers 25,000 questions I mean it's pretty I mean it's I would say it's very healthy extremely healthy and and considering how much time that that I've been able to spend on it it's it's been a runaway success um but geek. Perillo geek. locker.com these the site after another thing that happened last year was Google made some changes uh largely known as Panda this is not after a creature but actually someone's last name uh and Panda knocked us for a Loop um and it was seen that using subdomains off of a primary domain could have been damaging so uh just recently I redirected uh geek. pill.com and geek. loom.com which still exists on ning to uh a temporary web domain which is I guess it's a permanent redirect but uh Geeks or I'm sorry geek with.com I just registered it like in five minutes I just needed a different domain to point it to so now all that content exists I mean I still have that but geek with.com uh is is the new domain for it and I would love to be able to potentially sell that to somebody else who wanted to kind of pick up the ball and run with it it's just right now ning had priced what they have completely out of the realm of what we could afford to do they won't I we've produced so much content there ning won't even support it it's crazy uh and and it's crazy expensive to to run uh and we we're not we're not getting anything from it at this point uh you know uh it's too expensive and so that it's a bad business decision for me to continue with it now someone else who's got the time who wants to start you know with that audience take you know I'd be more than willing to talk about someone else yeah fine take it uh ultimately what's going to happen with that audience if someone doesn't adopt that ning Network and take it from me uh now granted that's not going to be for free because it's took a lot of time and energy and a a lot of effort to get it going uh the uh granted a ning network with 30,000 members is is no is no small network uh certainly for any Community um what's going to happen is I'm probably going to migrate it uh or the plan is to migrate it to a different platform and take a completely different Direction with it so take the same membership and do something that we haven't done yet that I wanted to do for quite some time so I can't I don't want to tell you what we're going to do exactly but I'm taking that failure uh or okay not failure perceive failure or something that could have been more successful and turning it into something that I I believe can be successful uh I'm going to transform it into my dream of uh well and actually you could probably go back to YouTube and read or either watch it or read on my blog I don't remember if I did a video on it undo TV so uh I've had undo tv.com registered for years and undo. TV as well and it was my hope to be able to help people inside of our community the Greater Community not just the nomies community but people who follow me uh to be able to get more subscribers for one another and uh I think I figured out a way to do it on through YouTube through legal legitimate means organic subscriber growth based on people who are part of the greater lock acome Community uh so I'm going to take that construct and that the the Geeks uh memberships and and bring them over to undo TV and I think that everyone especially those who are producing content on YouTube is going to be thrilled about it and people even who love the content that we're producing on YouTube should be thrilled about it as well so I'm taking that pseudo failure and will be soon and over the course of the next few months turning that into something that is different that hasn't been seen yet and that will work very well and require very little work for uh anybody who would join and they would reap the benefits from it so I can't be any more descriptive than that other than looking at something that wasn't working as well as it could have or that it used to and try to make it work better and you know that's another thing I do with failures is try to make them less fail so that's that's the story with uh the the Network that will soon be no more that someone else may want to you know continue to to run but if they don't I'm going to shudder it so after the database has been migrated naturally and I've already sent out an email message to everybody telling them the situation I said look it's too expensive ning isn't developing they're not you they're not really helping in the areas that they could help uh so much about Community a lot of these Services could do a better job with it YouTube could do a better job with Community Google+ Twitter I mean any of these places could do a fantastically better job with Community even providing the tools like buddy press in inside of Wordpress I mean it's just it's an extension it's it's not there's no velocity inside it there's no uh you know you can't just add people and just expect Community to grow there are certain things that they could do better but that's a completely different topic building Community for a completely different day maybe we'll do that for next week's n hang out any other fail questions thank you no other fail questions really what was your biggest failure you know I've turned I've done my best to turn every failure into a success so my idea with got to be that's G a.be uh that turned into tag.com uh it made money in fact it made more money with the change that I made then I paid for its development um so I got more out of It ultimately than then then uh uh I lost so it was a failure in the sense that I tried something without having all the resources on hand uh it was a success and people who used it loved it I had I had the right idea uh but I just couldn't scale it and uh it was uh I still I I kept all those amazing unsolicited quotes I mean I was the idea was right but it's not the idea it's the implementation so after uh a few scaling issues and after the developer developer moved on to other projects um I made a couple of changes and was able to bring it to generate revenue on every click and that was I would say successful I mean because I didn't really have to do anything and it was residual Revenue uh but I would say that was probably my biggest failure right now uh tag Jag and all those old domains are are pointing to probably just a throwaway domain the the will you like this that I set up like in a weekend it was just kind of a stupid I wonder how many people would actually like this if I ask him will you like this and like it got like four 5,000 likes on Facebook which is insane um they did I mean I would consider that a success but I didn't put anything into it I I I've got all these old domains pointing there because I'm probably I you know that's not where I'm driving most my revenue and I don't also don't want them to be hurting me uh at least with the within the search engines in the SEO realm so again failure turned into success uh sometimes you can do that sometimes uh it's impossible to do but uh I don't think there's been a a failure that I haven't been able to mitigate so I find it very difficult to say what's my what what's been the biggest failure that I I'd have to think pretty hard about what was the biggest failure that I couldn't recoup uh costs from or or you can never you can never get back time um but uh that that was you know that was a pretty big one but I like I said it made money and so it wasn't a failure but it was a failure I I I I like looking at failures um but uh I I also have the mindset of of trying to turn them into a success esses questions speaking of the like the geek. pr geek. lock how about like help. loome what are you gonna do with that that's another good question uh help. locker.com now I'm a big fan of what they call co-brands and over the years I've I've launched a variety of co-brands and some of which have been you know I would say very successful help. locker.com would be one of them uh I set up um years ago uh I was still uh God so long ago I I it was offered to me the ability to host a set of private news groups like using the uset or like an nntp reader way back in the day the locker Nome news groups and there are some people who still hate me for having to shut those down uh but they were very popular for for Locker Nome and I was happy to have them problem was uh it was impossible to moderate uh and a lot of political not discussions just the politics of community it was difficult to moderate and manage so ultimately I can't even remember what predicated it but we shut him down people were really upset about it some people have never forgiven me um the uh uh we we then a few years later set up I can't remember which you know bullet and board software it was but we set up I think it was help. locker.com hosted it on our own but God it kept crashing and problem after problem after problem it just wasn't worth it I was like oh my God I can't I spend more time troubleshooting problems than I would be you know doing what I could do better than trying to troubleshoot problems we telling someone hey this needs to be fixed um so ultimately uh I set up a co-brand with another group where wherein they would be responsible for the hosting and the optimization and everything and we would basically split ad revenues uh and that's exactly what we've done over the years so help. locker.com still exists uh in fact it it recently underwent a somewhat of a facelift or a usability facelift um and and hopefully that uh has improved usability to to a large degree uh it's still there uh and I'm I've never done much promotions on it it's not that forms aren't awesome it's just I know a lot more people are using Facebook and Google+ and Twitter uh Andor locker.net these days so help. loom.com still exists uh but uh by and large it's uh it's not something that I'm I'm paying a lot of attention to or funneling a lot of traffic to but it will still exist uh other co-brands that I've done bla um a series of comics illustrated by Brad Fitzpatrick amazing illustrations um we're actually in the process of of putting those illustrations together in a compilation uh to redo is like an ebook or even an app on the iOS or or Android because they were they were amazing uh Comics uh so we're going to be transforming what's on bl.com uh and what worked in the beginning to what's something that at least could potentially drive more Revenue that than than has been driving now and at this point it hasn't been driving Revenue we drove most of the revenue through uh uh sponsorship with GoDaddy a lot of the original bla Comics had a little tagline in there uh from GoDaddy and I me it made money uh and uh that that ultimately was its success its downfall was that uh the model didn't scale but we uh uh we did get a lot of traffic for what our plan was and uh we executed on it well um and now it's time to kind of look at you know Reinventing what it is uh so by the time you know if you look at it today it may be different what's going to get uh applied to it over the the next few weeks or so uh turning bla.com more into a gateway to hey get the app we've got it in this app store if you if you like these Comics here's where you can get them Co brands are a big I love C brands Brands they can be dangerous though if your co-brand uh is not unique you're just like everybody else you know if I came to you and said I'm going to set up a partnership with you and we're going to do this together yeah that's cool but if I turn around and do that with 10 other people 100 other people there's nothing unique about our relationship anymore and uh that is not to me that's not a true co-brand uh you know true co-brand would have been something like coupons. loom.com where I worked with Todd Martini on creating a coupons database based on what he was publishing on Alex's coupons.com uh just using and leveraging loome brand and that was extremely successful uh ultimately now again going back to the the changes we've done with SEO much like geek. prillo and geek. loome well.com have been redirected to geek with.com uh coupons. loom.com is now permanent redirect to coupond deal promos.com which is not associated with Locker Nome at all anymore anymore we're kind of cleaning up a lot of that um so I think the uh uh uh you know the day an age of of of sharing coupons is kind of come and gone at least to this point it may change I'd rather right now try to negotiate valuable coupons for nomies uh then I would you know trying to provide them for uh the greater part of the internet um you know I'm driving nomies pretty hard and and doing spending a lot of my time making sure that it has the ability to grow and be successful and like I said it's it's it's exceeded my expectations by a massive massive degree but that doesn't mean that you know should a valuable idea for a co-brand come along I wouldn't take it i' i' I've had a lot of successes with co-brands combining my strengths with someone else's strengths uh to be able to come up with something we couldn't come up with independently on our own that makes a really good co-brand and I've been able to do what I do to make it successful and they've been able to do what they've do to make it successful and I've had it oh just a handful really I would say of very popular co-brands uh what I would consider Partnerships um over the years uh very very very successful um but those are very few and far between uh only if you can find the the right person to to partner with they they you know I I get opportunities that come up but unfortunately they're just not structured in a way that makes it worth doing for me at least any other questions these are good questions by the way on the subject of failures now I'm not saying that we're all failures I'm saying it's important to watch what other people where other people fail how they fail see I haven't I mean I can go into the the specifics but I I probably won't in this video but uh things to watch out for this is largely why you know I'm ready for something like nomies because when someone asks a question I can tell them hey dude don't do that you know because this or watch out for this because that might happen and give them that advice to save them so much time and headache um and and hopefully that advice resonates I um I I have another question M have you thought about um creating a um a secondary brand um um a secondary brand um that would be based uh like a it would be based on uh uh I'm trying to think um like a um another uh business Community but based on um like game developers or something like that you know um so i' I've inadvertently created a lot of Brands over time uh you know whether it was Locker gome gnome deck now gnomies uh Chris Perillo I would say is is is probably as much of a strong brand um and I would say those have been the strongest efforts i' I've done because I've I've created other things as well to to various degrees of of success and failure uh if I were to do something like that it would probably be a subset of gnomies uh not necessarily a completely completely independent brand if only to better Leverage What uh existing efforts existed um or I would do it as a potentially in conjunction with with somebody else um as kind of like a leader for it so there there would be I I would think like in terms of how I would make that successful today what I would probably do is identify someone who had the strengths of building community a business savvy uh in leadership to say hey why don't we create a and I'm just I'm just throwing something against the wall I'm not saying this is going to happen I'm just saying that if I were if I were to try to work it today here's how I would do it why don't we create a subdomain on nomies call it uh gamed development. nom.nom brand you be the leader and you get x% of the subscribers you know who come in specifically for that set of resources and uh that way Not only would I be able to address that part of of a community for a mastermind group uh but I'd also be able to benefit the whole and be able to give rise to another business opportunity for someone who says well Chris I have an idea what about what about creating a a Nomes Community for people who give Tech Support to people and as a business okay well then I got to identify buy a leader and then boom what about you know video bloggers you know sure okay then so I I'd be able to more effectively scale out the model that way by assigning different managers for each one of those types of of membership systems which would again come back and benefit the the Nomi brand as a whole creating a new brand at this point would be a tremendous challenge um because I don't necessarily have unlimited resources at my disposal and I'm building this a lot on my strengths uh the reason why it's Nomi really a long time ago something I did oh it was called Chris perlo's Brain Trust and it was $97 a month and it was definitely profitable it it worked very very well um but uh you know ultimately it was too I I didn't want to put myself at the center of it uh but a lot of people were turning to me as the center of it but you know I was trying to build up other people and so going with a generic name nomies kind of sounds fun like nomies what that's kind of H what is this uh it's got that factor going for it uh it's generic uh and so it could potentially grow that way I mean right now this is kind of a general business uh you know let's let's see what we can help people with with their business and it's working answering questions like that uh but if I were to go after targeted groups uh I would be thinking probably going more in that direction by being able to find managers for those subgroups the problem is making sure I've got what I need done and hand l so that I I would be able to scale to that point and be able to set up an infrastructure so that it could work and then then it basically I could create businesses for other people within the Nomi brand you know creating businesses for other businesses it's kind of this weird little thing it's not a ponzy scheme not at all there's real value in it and I'm big into that I'm big into to driving uh a lot more value uh than what I ask for in returns or what I ask for in terms of compensation and hopefully every n me here the registered nomies agree I totally agree okay you got you're making me sweat there isn't okay you weren't saying anything you're the only one who agrees I disagree oh I agree you liar crit of course C all right I I agree I agree guys making me sweat over here man I me quiet group uh you know it's it's difficult to to make everybody happy it is uh but ultimately I know what I have to offer and I know what people are asking for and I know I can give it so I I found a um I was just SE searching for uh nomies and I found this one website which is available it is spelled no I want to see it let's not talk about a website we don't own okay let's let's not go that direction although I did thanks to some many he told me uh Harold one of the people who's now a regular contributor on locker.com said that nomies was available GN mes so that currently redirects to ns.com um there's uh okay but yeah any other questions go ahead and wind down I didn't want to you know wax pathetic for too long here on a Sunday afternoon thank you everybody for uh you know joining oh gosh did you ever look up the Urban Dictionary definition of nomies no and I'm not going to our goal our goal is to domain forever and I I've I've been calling my subscribers nomies from 1996 on so that's what it means to me that's all that matters well Urban Dictionary oh boy what you need to do is you need to go in Urban Dictionary and redefine no me there you go small business owners who love driving value back to one another that's that's what nomies is okay who's gonna do it who's gonna update Urban Dictionary hello nobody nope it's easier to point in G than it is to make changes yes yeah do you know how hard it is to change something on Urban Dictionary no I've never done it before it takes forever bureaucracy I've heard it's possible but I've never done it yeah well that's what nomies means to me and you know what we own the do com so that's all that matters there you go any other questions before we wind this down I was wondering what's going on with numex ah thank you again for bringing up failures um you knew that was gonna come in at some point gome deex was an annual failure that was superseded by its success um it's on Hiatus it's been on Hiatus really since uh the last one I did 2010 uh we kind of did a couple of events last year in 2011 that you were profitable but weren't really what gomex was uh I'm in the process of negotiating the ability to bring gnomex back in its former glory uh and uh stay tuned for that uh but it it can't happen on I'm doing it on my own I can't off uh i' I I've been looking for that right partner to be able to do it an event company or something of the like and uh possibly have found that group and whether that'll work I don't know but it was it was the best and some of the best and worst times of my life very stressful I mean I'd have nightmares about that thing uh but it was wonderful I mean this sense of community that was uh evoked uh from that experience ongoing for a decade uh it was an amazing amazing amazing uh conference uh and I I think K still be an amazing conference but I'm not going to put myself on the line again like I've done in the past and that's where uh you know it's like I said it's on Hiatus so it was a failure but it succeeded uh it was a failure in the sense that we didn't have every resource we should have had but it was a success because people loved it uh and they didn't want it to die uh and they still don't want it to die and so I'm doing my best to make sure it doesn't necessarily die but I can't this is where I recognize that I would not be doing it any favors if I tried to do it again the way that we've done it in the past uh it was it was a Monumental undertaking every single year and since we weren't in an event development or or uh event uh management that's what I would say we we ran into failures because of that uh and a series of failures uh that it was it's just kind of weird like you know always hear two wrongs don't make it right well oddly enough everything that went wrong with gnome deck made it right so it was kind of like the stress that one went through I mean it was like that but at the end of the day you're just kind of like wow everyone had a good time and we made money so I guess it was fine but what you had to go through to to make something like that happen I do not envy any event producer and uh they we get it like event producer will look at each other like I know dude don't I trust me I know and they're like uh so uh I I have a kindred uh uh this uh kindred spirit in every one of the event producers out there especially those who have been to Nome deck or had been to Nome deck it it I'd like to believe it'll come back and I'm going to do everything in my power to make it come back but I'm also not you know anxious if the opportunity arises it arises if no other questions I'm going to go ahead and wind this down because I know that the the rewatchability decreases the longer something goes on and I definitely did want to keep it focused um you know granted I couldn't go in depth into a lot of the uh the responses but you know if you if you do have any more specific questions on one thing or another I'd be happy to expound upon them uh in any one of the the nomies uh chat groups whether it's IRC uh potentially TeamSpeak potentially a podcast one of our Wednesday webinars uh Google+ I guess kind of although Google+ is not a great group Tool other than through Hangouts um the Facebook group uh the LinkedIn group definitely the mailman discussion list we've got a lot of places to I guess discuss things related to what we want to talk about anyway if anybody else wants to join us for the next Google Plus hangout uh you you can uh we I'm trying to do this once a week uh trying won't always happen but once a week at Google+ hangout specifically with nomies uh to be broadcast uh on uh Google+ to my 764 th000 people who have circled me and then uh also this video will be recorded for posterity and and put on to our YouTube channel at youtube.com Locker Nome so everybody thanks for joining me and I now return you to your regularly scheduled weekend oh joy we'll see you laterthank you for watching liking commenting sharing and subscribing right now where have I failed let me count the ways so many places really uh so many times granted every time I do fail uh I try to learn from my mistakes to not repeat those failures there have been times I have repeated those failures but uh I'd like to believe that I've learned something from each one of those uh failures and uh you know you could ask me about any particular perspective uh you know that I've I've had over the years you know specifically in relation to small business and it's my hope at least with people who've registered on ns.com to be able to help guide them along uh the path to success by bringing up where I have failed and I realize that's like the uh the antithesis seemingly of a mastermind group why would you share your failures why wouldn't you share your successes uh to me it's it's it's a bigger potential learning experience when you've failed at something rather than when you succeeded at something because success can come uh accidentally it could come through luck it could come because you've planned for it uh but failures sometimes just throw you for a loop and and you always learn something from failures it's difficult to know what success feels like until you know what failure feels like and I've done my best not to view something that has been a failure as you know anything but a learning experience something for growth really because we only have so much time in the day we only have uh you know so much that we can do on our own and sacrifices are are are things that we certainly have to be mindful of you can never do everything as a you know a small business business owner I mean you can try but uh you may be limited your your growth potential could be limited if you're just relying on yourself to get one thing or another done especially if it's something that you do want to see happen you know over the years I I've definitely wanted to do certain things with the business and I tried and I would say it kind of worked but not really uh ultimately uh I've come back you know almost full circle to creating content much like I had done back in the mid 90s as the foundation for what I would consider my one of my bigger successes uh you know having hit failure after failure after failure but you know not accommodating those failures as failures so uh you know one of the first I would say time waste failures that I I ran into would have been uh when one subscriber suggested that I go out and put the lockr logo on a t-shirt not the the classic not the the Neo looking Chris pillo one but the classic lockr cartoon logo uh that I drew uh based on you know needing a logo for the website and I thought yeah why not well this is before you know putting a t-shirt or a mug together was easy I mean you had to go through you know branders and you know set up the whole process and and get inventory and sit on inventory and sell it and uh the tools it's it's difficult to believe but you had to roll your own back in the day it's it's not that way anymore uh there's such an amazing array of software Solutions off the shelf that you can just choose uh immediately and be up and running uh but after going through the whole riger roll and and getting lined up getting all the merchandise including bowling shirts and propeller beanies and all this uh we launched and sold a handful maybe the first day and then nothing and it was just having a 100,000 people you know who were subscribed to the newsletter I thought we'd sell more but unfortunately either the price was too high uh which we couldn't drop any lower or we would be out money or people just generally weren't interested so it was a good idea it's just that yeah no there's a reason why a lot of these t-shirts are kind of given away uh a lot of these products and merchandise are are just given because they're not really worth anything they're they're great marketing tactic but beyond that you're not really going to make a lot of money or I I go as far as to say most people will not make a lot of money in that kind of merchandizing especially in today's uh you know era of anybody being able to point click and build their own store and they could recreate the experience that that took you forever to create so I can't tell you how many weeks of time and effort went into doing something that ultimately did not pay off but uh lesson learned now when anybody tells me they want to buy my logo I I I say well yeah maybe soon but it's never going to happen again other than through one of those uh easy to set up uh online stores um you know I've I've had you know similar issues in the past where I believed that I had value to provide that I wasn't currently providing in being able to leverage my existing reach to more effectively offer something new uh I had uh this is a few years back after you know doing Locker Nome you know I was certainly still interested in publishing content but I also saw a pretty big wave coming with tags and I had an idea of aggregating all these tags on the one page and making it easier to search for tags across a variety of sites and um in doing that uh it was it worked but at the same time it didn't take off and it was it ended up being a Time resource drain again and I should have stuck to what I knew best so doing even something like n.com in this service uh is I would say a calculated risk it was something that I wanted to do for quite some time and I would say that based on the previous failures I've had on brand extensions and uh you know doing something more than what I'd done before it's probably been to this point a bigger success uh this particular subscription effort and I have every reason to believe it's it's going to continue to be successful uh largely because of the stage that uh I've been setting and knowing where to spend those resources wisely um and knowing that the customers have been coming to me almost from the very beginning and I've never really had a solution for them a scalable solution so I already knew that people were coming to ask these questions so being able to provide I guess a conduit to answer those questions was a big win huge win and uh so that is just based on my knowledge of what I've done in the past and what hasn't worked crossed over with what I know people wanted from me that is business intelligence or advice I mean every single day I get emails what should I do here what should I do there how can I do this how could I do that uh you know to this point I just push people off to you know General Forum or potentially even answer it in a a question on YouTube or you know on on one of the blogs or social media um but knowing that I already had customers was a big predictor for the what would be the success of nomies and considering that in a month's time we had about 350 people sign up and I really wasn't anticipating more than a 100 in the first month um I'd say we we are uh We've set the stage for growth um but it was only because I had uh potential paying customers that I knew that this idea could be successful uh it's it's not that you could guarantee any degree of success but certainly over the past things that I had tried to do with my name or my brand um I didn't know if I had customers and that's largely how and why they failed I took risks uh but I would say that most of them didn't pay off because of scalability reasons um this is a I guess a new effort for me um but it's largely based on knowledge that people want the information that I have to provide or the resources that are at my disposal um I can effectively leverage them and it worked it was calculated uh having those customers in hand and really that's what makes a business a business I mean you can take a Gamble and you say I want to try something but unless you know you got paying customers you may be wasting your time and that's what a lot of small businesses do they waste their time and they may build a great experience but having a great experience does not mean that you're going to be deemed quote unquote successful so you know I uh I continue to uh to make failures uh at every turn and and do my best to uh polish those failures into uh hopefully future successes so now that we've had a few people uh join the hangout here are there any questions from the audience the audience of registered nomies great question questions uh well you know it's it's that I think is overlooked by a lot of uh you know people who are looking to get in business for themselves uh a where are they going to find the customers B are the customers already coming to them and and see what do I do first uh and you know for instance with with nomies the experience has been largely positive the issues that we've run into have largely been sof software issues uh there's not I mean there's there's not a perfect software solution in terms of what we're trying to do but uh stumbling through software issues has been probably the biggest hurdle we've had with the experience to this point and we're you know continuously figuring out how to mitigate the problems that we run into sometimes it's a a problem of misconfiguration or a faulty setup uh you know one reason or another you know being able to get to those problems so they don't continue to be problems is probably the uh the the thing that I've spent the most amount of time on more than anything doing value ads that's that's easy it comes like secondhand to me you know or second hat sorry not secondhand it's firsthand second hat sorry I'm mixing metaphors again you want to talk about a mistake especially from an English major I'm not I can't do I shouldn't do that but I do any other failures you guys want to know about I'm an open book let's talk about fail see people they perceive failure they think something's been a failure when in fact it hasn't um some people would think that what I'm doing now is is is failure and I guess it's relative I I'm getting the bills paid uh I'm going in a positive direction and my customers are happy so if that's a failure Color Me Happy for being a failure uh I I think most people may believe it's failure when in fact it's just a a misconception I know that you can have like minor failures where you'll have some like a down spout and then you'll uh then you'll have success again did you ever have uh something like that with YouTube like have like a major failure with YouTube or something that you did uh and then you kind of brought yourself back up no not really I mean I I've I've much like with uh the regular content publishing on Locker Nome it's it's kind of ebbed and flowed over the years um I don't know it's it's difficult to say uh you know I I've I've taken a a different publishing schedule recently and while some people don't like it I know that it's it's ultimately been good for what we needed it to be good for um for a while you know we were publish this is a long time ago we used to do when I really got into YouTube it was like five videos a day and then maybe a year later it was like three videos or so a day and then it was down to about that and it continued to be that way really until a few months ago when we started doing the live broadcast and now it's I would say it's almost twice as much um you know four to eight videos a day um and experimenting with those those models uh you know has been interesting um some people would make the assertion that uh Chris you're you're failing on YouTube because you're getting fewer views per video uh but I'm getting an equal amount of views for every video and I'm able to stabilize and grow more importantly my goal was not to uh drive up more views per video uh my goal was to a produce more videos and B drive more traffic back to lock.com and we did that so some people would see it as a failure you fail because you're getting fewer views per video but that's not what I was going for uh I was going for more traffic to Locker num as part of the equation and that worked so it was a success and it continues to be a success and I'm you know always looking for ways to more better optimize the kind of flow that we can bring to locker.com content every day from YouTube and really kind of create that uh the circle with uh what we do every day um um it it's it's it's a perceived failure but it's absolutely not a failure and you could look at it that way but if you're meeting your goals it's not a failure most people have different would have different goals but that's their goals it's not my goal uh my goals tend to be uh completely different from others goals but every business has to work in a different way um the way that my business would succeed would not mean that somebody else do even doing the same thing could have the same degree of success for you know one reason or another well I'm glad you guys like hearing about my failures it's a it's a good thing um I think the bottom line is really and I I don't want to belabor the point when you see success you can you can try to match that success but you're going to be serving yourself and your business better better by learning where people have failed rather than where they succeeded because you don't want to make the same mistakes that someone else has made to think that you know you'd be any different uh the uh I guess a corollary would be you know imagine you're you're in you're in high school or maybe even right now uh you're you're dating someone and everyone tells you dude that that person cheats on everyone they date like what no I'll be different they're going to cheat on me and then you know at some point in the future inevitably they cheat on you you can't be shocked people warn you they let you know uh but you thought you were going to be different no no no very rarely very rarely would that work out to your benefit uh especially if the same p uh pitfalls were hit over and over and over again it's difficult to navigate those though because there are so many variables at play with business uh that uh it's something that you just you have to keep in mind um you know uh sometimes learning from where people have failed can keep you from making that same failure even if you just tweak the model just a tiny bit uh and do it slightly differently that could spell all the difference uh you know more resources putting the resources in in different buckets uh doing something slightly differently could could mean success where it spelled failure for uh somebody else so uh you know don't don't concentrate so much on other people's successes as much is wanting to learn from their failures because ultimately that will make your uh business a stronger business I have a question um how did you um how did your name come come to being my name like are you talking like a uh the locker Nome name how did you uh create it and um ah yes uh you want to talk about something that I've I've regret off and on for going with Locker Nome uh it's an old high school nickname that's all doesn't mean anything and uh you know I registered it after graduating from college back when I could have registered just about any.com for 70 bucks that's how much it cost and I could have owned probably any awesome domain name and uh yeah I went with Locker Nome because it meant something to me and I I try to make it mean something to everybody else and so yeah for better for worse you know it didn't i' never I you know I I never locked it into one Arena or another it's never been just about technology it's never been about General geeker it's just been lockr no and it is what you know I've made it uh and that's so I guess it's a good thing I mean there's times that I wish that I would have gone with something a bit more targeted in terms of the brand but on the other hand it stands out it still stands out so I appreciate having that brand flexibility at this point it'd be uh easier to reinvent Locker Nome because of that uh and I think that the future where the brand is headed is is is definitely it's still in in providing information and and creating content but uh I I think if I were to have broad sweeping brush Strokes it would be uh geekery not just specifically technology think anything where we can create content that is entertaining uh and informative and very useful very tangible uh that's that's the type of uh content that I I love reading and I love sharing you know uh bringing in the personal story into uh into the whole uh equation that so many people have not done uh it's easy to publish a howto but I I always steer towards where's the personality in this uh you know what what makes this enjoyable to read uh and if it's not enjoyable to read I don't expect people would um so I drive for that uh entertainment value as much as I do uh the informational value even down to the videos that I do very it's very rare that I'd upload a video that I did not find useful I at least want something if not useful then entertaining at least in my mind one of the two hopefully both at the same time uh but I don't believe in wasting people's time with a lot of those videos a lot of reasons why when I do these Hangouts that you know number one they're just for those whove registered on ns.com two they tend to be focused on small business efforts and business efforts uh and three you know hopefully information is relayed rather than just kind of babbling on and on incessantly that nobody would watch that again and again I hopefully you know with this topic on hand um and and you know even the question of where you get your nickname you could consider it a failure because I didn't focus it enough that someone could could look at it and know exactly what kind of content was being shared or what kind of what kind of service it was it was tremendously generic but I I I believe that's been just as successful as much as it's been a failure more successful than a failure well 15 years I guess and still floating you know being able to pay you know my bills and the bills of other people I would say is a I would say is a success but what is going on with geeks uh you mean like people who are Geeks no geeks.com ah okay so going back to failures um so I just heard a drastic decline of the advertisement of geek.com uh okay so let's see if I can set the stage correctly I was using at one point WordPress mu I was using it for quite some time and it was so unstable uh and I could not keep the website running and most of my ad revenues was were being driven through locker.com at that point well some not all and uh I I I needed a website up when chris. par.com or locker.com were down I'm like this is I I can't I can't do this like everything's down and no one's got a place to be so I uh on a whim went to ning and set up a network uh and then since most of what I was branding on on YouTube at that point was you know chris. pill.com this is me it's Chris Perillo come and hi my username is Locker Nome there was really a massive disconnection which today has been largely addressed um through some of our more recent efforts with the lockr Daily Report or tldr for short um so I set up geek. pr.com said oh it's you know it was it was a lot of fun it was cool uh you know ning in the beginning had an an amazing Suite of tools they didn't quite get community though um putting up a forum sure it's a forum but they even now after they were acquired by Glam still have no idea how to uh operate community on its own velocity so geks St pr.com existed uh and then uh at some point over the last year we had a company come to us and say Hey you know you've got you know a pretty good audience in a pretty good direction and pretty good content here how would you like to join us as a you know bigger Network and you know possibly be acquired and I was like oh that's interesting you know sure and they said well we don't really want to acquire you we want to acquire Locker the brand since it has you know such a big presence on YouTube and the website and this this this and so uh I realized I'm like crud so this community exists on geek. pr.com although geek. loom.com was redirecting to it we basically flipped them so it was geek. loom.com uh but then uh you know after launching locker.net because ning was kind of petering out and was not providing a lot of community velocity uh I used locker.net to to run osqa on and then funneled a lot of people to locker.net which is really addressing the primary needs of a lot of the community that is getting asking questions and getting them answered and that's exactly what the open source platform osqa can do that's still running on locker.net um it's a you know 990,000 answers 25,000 questions I mean it's pretty I mean it's I would say it's very healthy extremely healthy and and considering how much time that that I've been able to spend on it it's it's been a runaway success um but geek. Perillo geek. locker.com these the site after another thing that happened last year was Google made some changes uh largely known as Panda this is not after a creature but actually someone's last name uh and Panda knocked us for a Loop um and it was seen that using subdomains off of a primary domain could have been damaging so uh just recently I redirected uh geek. pill.com and geek. loom.com which still exists on ning to uh a temporary web domain which is I guess it's a permanent redirect but uh Geeks or I'm sorry geek with.com I just registered it like in five minutes I just needed a different domain to point it to so now all that content exists I mean I still have that but geek with.com uh is is the new domain for it and I would love to be able to potentially sell that to somebody else who wanted to kind of pick up the ball and run with it it's just right now ning had priced what they have completely out of the realm of what we could afford to do they won't I we've produced so much content there ning won't even support it it's crazy uh and and it's crazy expensive to to run uh and we we're not we're not getting anything from it at this point uh you know uh it's too expensive and so that it's a bad business decision for me to continue with it now someone else who's got the time who wants to start you know with that audience take you know I'd be more than willing to talk about someone else yeah fine take it uh ultimately what's going to happen with that audience if someone doesn't adopt that ning Network and take it from me uh now granted that's not going to be for free because it's took a lot of time and energy and a a lot of effort to get it going uh the uh granted a ning network with 30,000 members is is no is no small network uh certainly for any Community um what's going to happen is I'm probably going to migrate it uh or the plan is to migrate it to a different platform and take a completely different Direction with it so take the same membership and do something that we haven't done yet that I wanted to do for quite some time so I can't I don't want to tell you what we're going to do exactly but I'm taking that failure uh or okay not failure perceive failure or something that could have been more successful and turning it into something that I I believe can be successful uh I'm going to transform it into my dream of uh well and actually you could probably go back to YouTube and read or either watch it or read on my blog I don't remember if I did a video on it undo TV so uh I've had undo tv.com registered for years and undo. TV as well and it was my hope to be able to help people inside of our community the Greater Community not just the nomies community but people who follow me uh to be able to get more subscribers for one another and uh I think I figured out a way to do it on through YouTube through legal legitimate means organic subscriber growth based on people who are part of the greater lock acome Community uh so I'm going to take that construct and that the the Geeks uh memberships and and bring them over to undo TV and I think that everyone especially those who are producing content on YouTube is going to be thrilled about it and people even who love the content that we're producing on YouTube should be thrilled about it as well so I'm taking that pseudo failure and will be soon and over the course of the next few months turning that into something that is different that hasn't been seen yet and that will work very well and require very little work for uh anybody who would join and they would reap the benefits from it so I can't be any more descriptive than that other than looking at something that wasn't working as well as it could have or that it used to and try to make it work better and you know that's another thing I do with failures is try to make them less fail so that's that's the story with uh the the Network that will soon be no more that someone else may want to you know continue to to run but if they don't I'm going to shudder it so after the database has been migrated naturally and I've already sent out an email message to everybody telling them the situation I said look it's too expensive ning isn't developing they're not you they're not really helping in the areas that they could help uh so much about Community a lot of these Services could do a better job with it YouTube could do a better job with Community Google+ Twitter I mean any of these places could do a fantastically better job with Community even providing the tools like buddy press in inside of Wordpress I mean it's just it's an extension it's it's not there's no velocity inside it there's no uh you know you can't just add people and just expect Community to grow there are certain things that they could do better but that's a completely different topic building Community for a completely different day maybe we'll do that for next week's n hang out any other fail questions thank you no other fail questions really what was your biggest failure you know I've turned I've done my best to turn every failure into a success so my idea with got to be that's G a.be uh that turned into tag.com uh it made money in fact it made more money with the change that I made then I paid for its development um so I got more out of It ultimately than then then uh uh I lost so it was a failure in the sense that I tried something without having all the resources on hand uh it was a success and people who used it loved it I had I had the right idea uh but I just couldn't scale it and uh it was uh I still I I kept all those amazing unsolicited quotes I mean I was the idea was right but it's not the idea it's the implementation so after uh a few scaling issues and after the developer developer moved on to other projects um I made a couple of changes and was able to bring it to generate revenue on every click and that was I would say successful I mean because I didn't really have to do anything and it was residual Revenue uh but I would say that was probably my biggest failure right now uh tag Jag and all those old domains are are pointing to probably just a throwaway domain the the will you like this that I set up like in a weekend it was just kind of a stupid I wonder how many people would actually like this if I ask him will you like this and like it got like four 5,000 likes on Facebook which is insane um they did I mean I would consider that a success but I didn't put anything into it I I I've got all these old domains pointing there because I'm probably I you know that's not where I'm driving most my revenue and I don't also don't want them to be hurting me uh at least with the within the search engines in the SEO realm so again failure turned into success uh sometimes you can do that sometimes uh it's impossible to do but uh I don't think there's been a a failure that I haven't been able to mitigate so I find it very difficult to say what's my what what's been the biggest failure that I I'd have to think pretty hard about what was the biggest failure that I couldn't recoup uh costs from or or you can never you can never get back time um but uh that that was you know that was a pretty big one but I like I said it made money and so it wasn't a failure but it was a failure I I I I like looking at failures um but uh I I also have the mindset of of trying to turn them into a success esses questions speaking of the like the geek. pr geek. lock how about like help. loome what are you gonna do with that that's another good question uh help. locker.com now I'm a big fan of what they call co-brands and over the years I've I've launched a variety of co-brands and some of which have been you know I would say very successful help. locker.com would be one of them uh I set up um years ago uh I was still uh God so long ago I I it was offered to me the ability to host a set of private news groups like using the uset or like an nntp reader way back in the day the locker Nome news groups and there are some people who still hate me for having to shut those down uh but they were very popular for for Locker Nome and I was happy to have them problem was uh it was impossible to moderate uh and a lot of political not discussions just the politics of community it was difficult to moderate and manage so ultimately I can't even remember what predicated it but we shut him down people were really upset about it some people have never forgiven me um the uh uh we we then a few years later set up I can't remember which you know bullet and board software it was but we set up I think it was help. locker.com hosted it on our own but God it kept crashing and problem after problem after problem it just wasn't worth it I was like oh my God I can't I spend more time troubleshooting problems than I would be you know doing what I could do better than trying to troubleshoot problems we telling someone hey this needs to be fixed um so ultimately uh I set up a co-brand with another group where wherein they would be responsible for the hosting and the optimization and everything and we would basically split ad revenues uh and that's exactly what we've done over the years so help. locker.com still exists uh in fact it it recently underwent a somewhat of a facelift or a usability facelift um and and hopefully that uh has improved usability to to a large degree uh it's still there uh and I'm I've never done much promotions on it it's not that forms aren't awesome it's just I know a lot more people are using Facebook and Google+ and Twitter uh Andor locker.net these days so help. loom.com still exists uh but uh by and large it's uh it's not something that I'm I'm paying a lot of attention to or funneling a lot of traffic to but it will still exist uh other co-brands that I've done bla um a series of comics illustrated by Brad Fitzpatrick amazing illustrations um we're actually in the process of of putting those illustrations together in a compilation uh to redo is like an ebook or even an app on the iOS or or Android because they were they were amazing uh Comics uh so we're going to be transforming what's on bl.com uh and what worked in the beginning to what's something that at least could potentially drive more Revenue that than than has been driving now and at this point it hasn't been driving Revenue we drove most of the revenue through uh uh sponsorship with GoDaddy a lot of the original bla Comics had a little tagline in there uh from GoDaddy and I me it made money uh and uh that that ultimately was its success its downfall was that uh the model didn't scale but we uh uh we did get a lot of traffic for what our plan was and uh we executed on it well um and now it's time to kind of look at you know Reinventing what it is uh so by the time you know if you look at it today it may be different what's going to get uh applied to it over the the next few weeks or so uh turning bla.com more into a gateway to hey get the app we've got it in this app store if you if you like these Comics here's where you can get them Co brands are a big I love C brands Brands they can be dangerous though if your co-brand uh is not unique you're just like everybody else you know if I came to you and said I'm going to set up a partnership with you and we're going to do this together yeah that's cool but if I turn around and do that with 10 other people 100 other people there's nothing unique about our relationship anymore and uh that is not to me that's not a true co-brand uh you know true co-brand would have been something like coupons. loom.com where I worked with Todd Martini on creating a coupons database based on what he was publishing on Alex's coupons.com uh just using and leveraging loome brand and that was extremely successful uh ultimately now again going back to the the changes we've done with SEO much like geek. prillo and geek. loome well.com have been redirected to geek with.com uh coupons. loom.com is now permanent redirect to coupond deal promos.com which is not associated with Locker Nome at all anymore anymore we're kind of cleaning up a lot of that um so I think the uh uh uh you know the day an age of of of sharing coupons is kind of come and gone at least to this point it may change I'd rather right now try to negotiate valuable coupons for nomies uh then I would you know trying to provide them for uh the greater part of the internet um you know I'm driving nomies pretty hard and and doing spending a lot of my time making sure that it has the ability to grow and be successful and like I said it's it's it's exceeded my expectations by a massive massive degree but that doesn't mean that you know should a valuable idea for a co-brand come along I wouldn't take it i' i' I've had a lot of successes with co-brands combining my strengths with someone else's strengths uh to be able to come up with something we couldn't come up with independently on our own that makes a really good co-brand and I've been able to do what I do to make it successful and they've been able to do what they've do to make it successful and I've had it oh just a handful really I would say of very popular co-brands uh what I would consider Partnerships um over the years uh very very very successful um but those are very few and far between uh only if you can find the the right person to to partner with they they you know I I get opportunities that come up but unfortunately they're just not structured in a way that makes it worth doing for me at least any other questions these are good questions by the way on the subject of failures now I'm not saying that we're all failures I'm saying it's important to watch what other people where other people fail how they fail see I haven't I mean I can go into the the specifics but I I probably won't in this video but uh things to watch out for this is largely why you know I'm ready for something like nomies because when someone asks a question I can tell them hey dude don't do that you know because this or watch out for this because that might happen and give them that advice to save them so much time and headache um and and hopefully that advice resonates I um I I have another question M have you thought about um creating a um a secondary brand um um a secondary brand um that would be based uh like a it would be based on uh uh I'm trying to think um like a um another uh business Community but based on um like game developers or something like that you know um so i' I've inadvertently created a lot of Brands over time uh you know whether it was Locker gome gnome deck now gnomies uh Chris Perillo I would say is is is probably as much of a strong brand um and I would say those have been the strongest efforts i' I've done because I've I've created other things as well to to various degrees of of success and failure uh if I were to do something like that it would probably be a subset of gnomies uh not necessarily a completely completely independent brand if only to better Leverage What uh existing efforts existed um or I would do it as a potentially in conjunction with with somebody else um as kind of like a leader for it so there there would be I I would think like in terms of how I would make that successful today what I would probably do is identify someone who had the strengths of building community a business savvy uh in leadership to say hey why don't we create a and I'm just I'm just throwing something against the wall I'm not saying this is going to happen I'm just saying that if I were if I were to try to work it today here's how I would do it why don't we create a subdomain on nomies call it uh gamed development. nom.nom brand you be the leader and you get x% of the subscribers you know who come in specifically for that set of resources and uh that way Not only would I be able to address that part of of a community for a mastermind group uh but I'd also be able to benefit the whole and be able to give rise to another business opportunity for someone who says well Chris I have an idea what about what about creating a a Nomes Community for people who give Tech Support to people and as a business okay well then I got to identify buy a leader and then boom what about you know video bloggers you know sure okay then so I I'd be able to more effectively scale out the model that way by assigning different managers for each one of those types of of membership systems which would again come back and benefit the the Nomi brand as a whole creating a new brand at this point would be a tremendous challenge um because I don't necessarily have unlimited resources at my disposal and I'm building this a lot on my strengths uh the reason why it's Nomi really a long time ago something I did oh it was called Chris perlo's Brain Trust and it was $97 a month and it was definitely profitable it it worked very very well um but uh you know ultimately it was too I I didn't want to put myself at the center of it uh but a lot of people were turning to me as the center of it but you know I was trying to build up other people and so going with a generic name nomies kind of sounds fun like nomies what that's kind of H what is this uh it's got that factor going for it uh it's generic uh and so it could potentially grow that way I mean right now this is kind of a general business uh you know let's let's see what we can help people with with their business and it's working answering questions like that uh but if I were to go after targeted groups uh I would be thinking probably going more in that direction by being able to find managers for those subgroups the problem is making sure I've got what I need done and hand l so that I I would be able to scale to that point and be able to set up an infrastructure so that it could work and then then it basically I could create businesses for other people within the Nomi brand you know creating businesses for other businesses it's kind of this weird little thing it's not a ponzy scheme not at all there's real value in it and I'm big into that I'm big into to driving uh a lot more value uh than what I ask for in returns or what I ask for in terms of compensation and hopefully every n me here the registered nomies agree I totally agree okay you got you're making me sweat there isn't okay you weren't saying anything you're the only one who agrees I disagree oh I agree you liar crit of course C all right I I agree I agree guys making me sweat over here man I me quiet group uh you know it's it's difficult to to make everybody happy it is uh but ultimately I know what I have to offer and I know what people are asking for and I know I can give it so I I found a um I was just SE searching for uh nomies and I found this one website which is available it is spelled no I want to see it let's not talk about a website we don't own okay let's let's not go that direction although I did thanks to some many he told me uh Harold one of the people who's now a regular contributor on locker.com said that nomies was available GN mes so that currently redirects to ns.com um there's uh okay but yeah any other questions go ahead and wind down I didn't want to you know wax pathetic for too long here on a Sunday afternoon thank you everybody for uh you know joining oh gosh did you ever look up the Urban Dictionary definition of nomies no and I'm not going to our goal our goal is to domain forever and I I've I've been calling my subscribers nomies from 1996 on so that's what it means to me that's all that matters well Urban Dictionary oh boy what you need to do is you need to go in Urban Dictionary and redefine no me there you go small business owners who love driving value back to one another that's that's what nomies is okay who's gonna do it who's gonna update Urban Dictionary hello nobody nope it's easier to point in G than it is to make changes yes yeah do you know how hard it is to change something on Urban Dictionary no I've never done it before it takes forever bureaucracy I've heard it's possible but I've never done it yeah well that's what nomies means to me and you know what we own the do com so that's all that matters there you go any other questions before we wind this down I was wondering what's going on with numex ah thank you again for bringing up failures um you knew that was gonna come in at some point gome deex was an annual failure that was superseded by its success um it's on Hiatus it's been on Hiatus really since uh the last one I did 2010 uh we kind of did a couple of events last year in 2011 that you were profitable but weren't really what gomex was uh I'm in the process of negotiating the ability to bring gnomex back in its former glory uh and uh stay tuned for that uh but it it can't happen on I'm doing it on my own I can't off uh i' I I've been looking for that right partner to be able to do it an event company or something of the like and uh possibly have found that group and whether that'll work I don't know but it was it was the best and some of the best and worst times of my life very stressful I mean I'd have nightmares about that thing uh but it was wonderful I mean this sense of community that was uh evoked uh from that experience ongoing for a decade uh it was an amazing amazing amazing uh conference uh and I I think K still be an amazing conference but I'm not going to put myself on the line again like I've done in the past and that's where uh you know it's like I said it's on Hiatus so it was a failure but it succeeded uh it was a failure in the sense that we didn't have every resource we should have had but it was a success because people loved it uh and they didn't want it to die uh and they still don't want it to die and so I'm doing my best to make sure it doesn't necessarily die but I can't this is where I recognize that I would not be doing it any favors if I tried to do it again the way that we've done it in the past uh it was it was a Monumental undertaking every single year and since we weren't in an event development or or uh event uh management that's what I would say we we ran into failures because of that uh and a series of failures uh that it was it's just kind of weird like you know always hear two wrongs don't make it right well oddly enough everything that went wrong with gnome deck made it right so it was kind of like the stress that one went through I mean it was like that but at the end of the day you're just kind of like wow everyone had a good time and we made money so I guess it was fine but what you had to go through to to make something like that happen I do not envy any event producer and uh they we get it like event producer will look at each other like I know dude don't I trust me I know and they're like uh so uh I I have a kindred uh uh this uh kindred spirit in every one of the event producers out there especially those who have been to Nome deck or had been to Nome deck it it I'd like to believe it'll come back and I'm going to do everything in my power to make it come back but I'm also not you know anxious if the opportunity arises it arises if no other questions I'm going to go ahead and wind this down because I know that the the rewatchability decreases the longer something goes on and I definitely did want to keep it focused um you know granted I couldn't go in depth into a lot of the uh the responses but you know if you if you do have any more specific questions on one thing or another I'd be happy to expound upon them uh in any one of the the nomies uh chat groups whether it's IRC uh potentially TeamSpeak potentially a podcast one of our Wednesday webinars uh Google+ I guess kind of although Google+ is not a great group Tool other than through Hangouts um the Facebook group uh the LinkedIn group definitely the mailman discussion list we've got a lot of places to I guess discuss things related to what we want to talk about anyway if anybody else wants to join us for the next Google Plus hangout uh you you can uh we I'm trying to do this once a week uh trying won't always happen but once a week at Google+ hangout specifically with nomies uh to be broadcast uh on uh Google+ to my 764 th000 people who have circled me and then uh also this video will be recorded for posterity and and put on to our YouTube channel at youtube.com Locker Nome so everybody thanks for joining me and I now return you to your regularly scheduled weekend oh joy we'll see you later\n"