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[Posted: 03/29/07]
Interview with
Michael Fox, Co-Founder of SwiftCity.com
by Michael Haaren
Swift City, a new,
travel-oriented
site which features insider reviews of “the best places” in various
cities
internationally, came to our attention a few weeks ago when we found
their lead
for Freelance Travel Writers. (If you’re interested in proposing a
review of
your city, click here. Writers are paid
through a sharing of advertising revenue generated by their
pages.)
For
background, Michael earned Commerce and Law degrees at
the University of Queensland in Australia, and spent a year at
a
law firm before taking a post at an Australian auto accessories
retailer. He’s
working on his MBA part-time at the Australian Graduate School of
Management.
Like
many entrepreneurs, he has both successes and “failures” (a better form
of
success, where learning is concerned) in his background. He included
this in
his bio:
“During
college and in the years since, he has pursued a
range of different 'Rat Race Escaping' projects, including a restaurant
discount card (which failed spectacularly!), a website hosting business
(which
went a little better and was acquired by a web development company), a
joke
online dating site www.DarwinDating.com
(which is still running) and now a travel guide website www.SwiftCity.com (which is
progressing very well!).”
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RRR.com: You've
taken a slightly different approach to escaping the Rat Race, and are
developing Swift City while working
full-time. How has
that worked out for you? Did you have any entrepreneurial role models
among
friends or family to follow?
Michael
Fox: It
poses a set of challenges, particularly with time, but I think it's a
great way
to work on 'escaping the Rat Race' without taking a giant initial leap.
A lot
of successful entrepreneurs started their projects on a part-time basis
and,
while it's a challenge, it's working very well at the moment.
The
other five Swift City co-founders have
definitely been great entrepreneurial role models for me. Working with
a strong
team who shares ideas and loves what they do definitely helps us all
out. I've
also been lucky enough to meet extremely entrepreneurial people like
Richard
Bell, the founder of 1800 Reverse, a very successful Australia reverse charges
phone
company. And when all that just isn't enough, there are some great
entrepreneurial books out there. One of my recent favorites is Small is the New
Big, by
Seth
Godin.
RRR.com: Many of
our readers internationally may be interested in becoming Freelance
Travel
Writers for Swift City, and profiling their
cities. How do you define a "city," and what kind of cities, in
general, are you most interested in?
Michael
Fox: One
of the great things about the Web is that there aren't the normal
restrictions
on what information can be provided. For Swift City,
we don't have to limit our guide to 200 pages or something that can
easily be
carried around. This allows us to write about places that wouldn't be
in your
standard printed travel guide. We certainly need to cover the major
cities, but
we are also very interested in offering our readers something different
by
providing guides to smaller, obscure and interesting places.
RRR.com: Here, we
loved your "Google eye stunt" [for details, see the company’s
blog] to draw
attention to your site (no pun intended). Since many of our readers are
entrepreneurs on a budget, could you share your favorite tips on
"guerilla
marketing"?
Michael
Fox: Do
something whacky, fun and a little controversial! The Google eye stunt
was
successful for us primarily because it sparked a debate on whether what
we were
doing was a new form of 'spam'. The fact that it was a little whacky
helped and
people seemed to like the fact we had fun doing it, which we sure did!
Our
inspiration for that idea probably stemmed from reading Buzz Marketing by Mark Hughes a few
years back. It's a great book!
RRR.com: What do
you see as the three greatest challenges to getting a business "up and
running," and how has the Swift City team dealt with
each?
Michael
Fox:
1.
Finding the right team of people. For some businesses,
starting with one person is fine, but for ours we needed a Web
developer,
strong journalism experience, marketing skills and organized people to
help
manage the guide writing process. Given that we wanted to keep our day
jobs, we
needed a decent-sized team to get all the work done. And on top of all
this, we
wanted people who are passionate about their work. Fortunately, we had
a good
network of people from law school and could draw the right team
together.
2.
Sticking with the task through thick and thin. Starting
any business is tough and there are always hurdles and pitfalls to
overcome.
There is nothing like a love of what you are doing and a belief that
you are
creating a great product to get you through this.
3.
Concentrating on the core product. We have thought of all
sorts of things to add to the Swift City site. We've thought
about creating comments pages, allowing users to write guides and
cutting down
on the quality of our editing. All these things might have added value
to the
site or made our jobs easier, however our core product is short, sharp,
entertaining reviews of the best places in each city. If we had let
ourselves
become distracted and not focused on the core product, the site
wouldn't be as
developed as it is today.
RRR.com: How will
Swift City set itself apart
from
"infopedia" sites like About.com and the blog aggregators, which seem
to be assembling blogs on every topic under the sun?
Michael
Fox: The
key differentiator for us is in combining traditional journalism --
having a
consistent, fun style to the writing on our site -- with a Web
interface based
around Google Maps. Infopedia sites tend to have information come from
a lot of
different sources and it isn't necessarily edited by a single editor,
so the
writing style is inconsistent. And we think there is no better way to
get a
feel for a city than to view it on a map with all the best places
marked out
for you!
RRR.com: If there
were one thing you could do over again in the Swift City
startup process, what would it be?
Michael
Fox: If
we had the opportunity to do things differently, we might have taken
off some
time from work to get the business well and truly established. Doing it
part
time is fun, but you really need to dedicate yourself to the task for
long
periods of time to make something a success. Now that the site is
established,
this has become a little easier for us, however some time off from work
in the
beginning would have really accelerated our growth.
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Rat Race Factoids
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Work
From Home Scams
There
is a 42-to-1 scam ratio among "work from home" ads on the Internet, and
that is not counting the ones that arrive as spam in your inbox. [Read
our press release on this statistic.]
Average
Annual Vacation Days by Country:
United
States...........13
Japan...............25
Canada...............26
Great
Britain............28
Brazil..............34
Germany...............35
France................37
Italy.................42
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