Knowledge vs. Experience

Sunday night, the Chaj and I worked on our third official Beercast. It gets easier each time we do it and (we think) we're learning more and more about what it will take to make it succeed. I still recommend everyone to try it at least once.

One important aspect of our show, unlike traditional Podcasts, however, is the real-time involvement of total strangers. For the most part, Podcasts to date seem to mimic the radio format from start to finish. We're doing more of a "Feet on the Street" kinda thing which brings us into contact, one way or another, with total strangers.

Sunday, I recruited two young women sitting besides us to answer a pretty straightforward question about men, women and mixed signals. We recorded their opinions and then discussion drifted the Beercasting itself and we chatted about why we were doing it and those kinds of things. Towards the end, however, I was cornered into providing a business model by the feisty, 24-year old marketing student.

Initially, my reaction was quick and incomplete. I decided to just write it off as an experiment, a work in progress, a living prototype - that sort of thing. I'm not sure, but I think she was laughing at us because we weren't out to necessarily make money right off the bat - because we didn't have a marketing plan.

What struck me the most, and led to this post, was her assertion that nothing on the Internet happened by accident. She cited EBay, Amazon, and others as all these other big shots as proof that she was right and we were crazy. The Chaj told it to her best: "Well, you read that somewhere so we're not gonna argue with you." Of course, everyone out there on the Internets knows that statement is categorically wrong. Though it's true that most experiments don't mature into solid business models, it's also quite evident that what starts as a simple trial can easily grow to something quite more.

The moral of the story is that you can't trust everything you read in books either. Sometimes it takes putting your nose to the ground to smell the rain and not just the Farmer's Almanac's prediction.