Thank you to everyone who has participated in OCM Guest Blogger Week! (Bloggers & Readers alike). We are going to cap off this very successful week with a post from Erin & Sean from pickmidate.com. pickmidate.com is all about bringing community together. It acts as an online dating site (with a twist). The site strives to engage with their users as well as promote local businesses in the area. It’s a great idea and anything that can help the revival of Detroit is A-OK with us. Here it is:
True Stories: The Adventures of Erin and Sean.
The names have been changed to protect the ignorant (insert: Cousin Eddie and Catherine from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation).
Story #1
Erin (attending a business open house) was introduced to a woman (let’s call her Catherine):
Catherine: “What do you do for a living?”
Erin: “I run the blog Positive Detroit and I am launching a new venture next month called Pick Mi Date, it’s like online dating meets game show, while promoting our Michigan based businesses and downtowns.”
Catherine: “I’m a business coach and the one thing I ask a client when starting a new business is ‘Who’s your competition?”
Erin: “No one.”
Catherine: Begins lecturing Erin about her “naive” business thinking.
Erin: “My business partner and I created something that doesn’t exist in the marketplace. Find me another business or website like ours that is doing what we are. There isn’t one. We don’t have any competition.”
Story #2
Sean (attending a random event in Detroit) is chatting with a friend (let’s call him Eddie):
Eddie: “I see you’re always attending a lot of events and witnessing some neat things in Detroit. How do you get to do that?”
Sean: “(I get this question a lot and I always want to answer with ‘huh?”)
“I do all these things because in Detroit, we have some of the most interesting people and coolest places in the world….and I want to surround myself with that.”
Eddie: “Huh?”
It is a shame a camera was not handy to capture these Kodak moments with Catherine and Eddie. They both looked at us like we had 7 heads and 5 were on fire. This is what happens when you set trends, instead of following them. Once it catches on (i.e the tipping point), it extinguishes the flames and the 6 heads magically disappear.
This leads us to explain our business philosophy:
1. We will only create what is unique and original.
2. Being a niche lessons/eliminates competition.
3. Creating a business that is a solvent is far better for the greater good than recreating what already exists and attempting to do it better.
In June of 2009, we came up with the idea to create Pick Mi Date after reading two reports stating that Detroit was one of the worst metropolitan areas for singles and dating for unemployed men is extremely difficult. Coupled with the common theme we hear from our friends that online dating feels like homework or a job, we created Pick Mi Date. Pick Mi Date is a fun and interactive online dating site that engages the community (audience plays matchmaker/wins prizes), promotes our neighborhood business and downtowns (dates are only held at Michigan based businesses), while the entire tab for the evening is taken care of for the daters (eliminating the worry and hit to their bank account).
People ask us all the time, “How can you create a profitable business in Michigan’s current economic climate.” Our answer has always been the same “find a pressing problem that has a high demand for it to be solved. Then solve it.” We know it sounds simple, but in practice it is a hard concept for most to wrap their heads around. Most people see a thriving business and want to duplicate it. They stumble on someone else’s great idea already in practice and want to copy it. It’s the path of least residence in their eyes. In ours, it’s just short sighted.
Just like when Clark turns to Eddie upon his family’s unexpected arrival and says, “If I woke up tomorrow with my head sewn to the carpet, I wouldn’t be more surprised then I am now,” we are surprised that more people are not getting out there, identifying problems (because we sure have them), and creating a business that provides an exceptional solution.
You can learn more about Erin and Sean by tracking them down at a local well and buy them anything that contains grapes, grains, rye, and/or hops.
You can find them online:
PickMiDate (http://pickmidate.com)
Facebook (http://facebook.com/pickmidate)
Twitter (http://twitter.com/pickmidate)
To learn more about starting a business that makes competition irrelevant, pick up a copy of Blue Ocean Strategies by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
