After you complete the 7 week Ramped Blogging eCourse, I offer the opportunity to publish your blogging story on RobbSutton.com to show off your success after completing the eCourse. This week, we have a submission from David Edwards of A Sitting Duck.
I started “A Sitting Duck” in May 2008 after 5 years in the sales industry. I was 25, I had a good background for working with lots of different people and I have always enjoyed working for companies. The interactions are great and it’s always good to go out for drinks on a Friday at the end of the week.
The reason why I left, was because it seemed that although I was gaining experience over the years, I was not building anything that I could be proud of. In the sales industry, you are constantly reminded that you are only as good as your previous week’s sales. I started to see the more experienced guys feel down as the new starters were hitting more sales than them. I thought that’s just not fair and I don’t want to end up in my forties competing with someone on a gap year!.
So I vowed never to go back to sales… I said to myself if I do then I have to own a substantial stake in the company so when I do walk away, I can look back and think: “I built that!”…
Back to blogging…
Maybe some of your readers have picked up on the fact that I’m not going to write the next “Harry Potter”, the website was built and on-line in September 2008, the plan was to make the blog more visual with photographs and illustrations. I have always drawn on envelopes, scrap bits of paper around the office and on the back of bills!. I had never taken illustration seriously and always thought I had a business mind, but I do enjoy drawing and designing characters so I thought if I can start a business around that then its a win/win situation!.
I uploaded all my drawings and illustrations, I wrote about different artists and I read 100’s of art blogs and websites. After a while I got bored of small blogs and ended up just reading “Kidrobot” which takes all the news from artists and presents it in a really cool way.
Getting tips from those artists was great and how they promote their work. It was clear to see that video was so powerful to them and combine that with photographs and illustrations, you can have a really nice looking website.
So I thought: I have a well designed website, good illustrations and a pretty good number of posts. I need videos!… I was too shy to be a presenter like “Gary Vaynerchuk”, he’s fantastic at video blogging. I’m not ruling it out in the future, maybe interviews etc, but I couldn’t talk directly into a camera!. So the mission was to make the best “flash animation series of all time”!!!!!…
Before I could make awesome flash animations, I needed to build a team that could achieve this goal with me. Siobhain my fiancee was happy to be a voice, Boyd Clack (incredible actor) I’m friends with agreed to be a voice as well and I found Luke Hyde (flash genius) on Facebook. He met up with me and brought his two friends along: Mike (Sound Producer) and Joe (Graphic Designer). The team was built!.
In May 2009 we launched the first episode, it was a success!. 5 stars on “You Tube” and we distributed the video with top established websites. We followed with episodes 2 & 3, which were also getting thousands of views…
Bring it forward to March 2010, the internet series : “Candy The Magic Dinosaur” has been viewed over 100,000 times on “You Tube” and estimated over 1 million times on the internet in total!. We have a video-game being launched in November and a toy deal with “Patch Together”. To give hope to your readers this is all from a £500 website and a lot of hard work, no other investment!. I have lived a pretty simple life for two years, no holidays or fancy restaurants but I’m sure that I’ll make up for that next year!..
David Edwards
10 comments