Monday’s Startup Junkie Underground featured serial entrepreneur and Google AdSense expert Joel Comm. Comm walked the audience through his career over a decade of involvement in the Internet, from video game enthusiast to producer and star of “The Next Internet Millionaire.” A common theme across much of Comm’s success has been his repeated ability to identify and pounce on opportunities quickly.
Comm’s first business came out of a desire to get video games for free, which led to the creation of “Dallas – Ft. Worth Software Review” and later the “National Software Review.” This plan for free gaming took shape when Comm elicited reviews – for no payment – from the community on the newly formed World Wide Web in late 1994. To this end Comm created InfoMedia, Inc as a company and WorldVillage.com as a software review site, along with partner Ken Burge. This venture struggled until a Japanese conglomerate came knocking and offered to pay $5000 a month to syndicate the content. Thus began a string of entrepreneurial endeavors, a few resulting in failure but most ending in profitable success.
In 1997, Comm came across a programmer who had created a site that allowed users to play card games online. He helped to re-brand the site to ClassicGames.com and expand both the offerings of games and increase the user base. ClassicGames.com was sold to Yahoo! in 1998 in Comm’s “first seven figure deal” and became Yahoo games. As a historical footnote to this deal, Comm’s caricature is still regularly featured as a player on this massively popular site. A variety of web ventures followed, including dealaday.com, which posts a variety of coupons from online retailers online each day. Comm noted that not all his ideas have been winners, citing “virtual-whassup.com” which features ecards with celebrities like Hillary Clinton blaring “Whassup” (the site is still active if you have been searching for just the right message to send that special friend).
The advent of Google AdSense in 2003, which enables website publishers to easily add advertising, offered Comm a platform for many revenue generating opportunities in the years to come. Comm realized that he could increase AdSense revenue more than threefold on one of his websites simply by changing different advertising options like placement and color. After completing his own experimentation, Comm wrote his first book on AdSense – a 66 page eBook which sold (think no publishing costs) for $77. This first edition generated revenues of $10,000 in the first week. The book is now on its fourth edition, having seen several iterations since the original launch. Comm has also ranged into other AdSense related products, like website templates that make it simple for publishers to incorporate AdSense revenue model.
Comm’s company InfoMedia has also ventured into other arenas including offering its first conference, Elevate 2008, and producing an internet reality show entitled “The Next Internet Millionaire”. Comm has also recently finished writing a book on the medium Twitter (for business purposes), for which he highlighted the upcoming Tweet-a-thon the company will host on February 19 to support the charity waterislife. Comm credited some of the recent successes of InfoMedia in bringing back Ken Burge (who had left for the corporate world soon after InfoMedia’s founding) to run the company, as Comm called himself “an entrepreneur, not a details person.”
What has brought InfoMedia to the foreground recently has been an iPhone application it created called “iFart” – which, as the name suggests, enables the iPhone to produce all sorts of gaseous sounds. According to Comm, the InfoMedia team was sitting around the conference table and came up with an idea that sounded like a winner to team members because they “still think like 12 year old boys.” Apparently Comm’s team are not the only iPhone owners in this mindset, as the application, which sells for $0.99, has sold over 400,000 copies and ranked as the number one paid iPhone application for three weeks.
The evening concluded with a brief panel discussion moderated by Dave Taylor. Highlights of entrepreneurial wisdom offered by the panelists included:
From Joy Milkowski of Access Marketing: “Get out and meet people. You can’t [start a business] sitting at home in your underwear”
From Janice Jensen, an Emmy award winning producer: “It’s pretty simple if you want to simplify…just forge ahead.”
The DaVinci Institute produces a variety of events designed to share the knowledge of most talented thinkers and seasoned veterans who have fundamentally changed the business landscape. Upcoming events include a Seed Capital Bootcamp on February 28 and Night with a Futurist, featuring Michael Cushman on “Next Generation Learning Technologies” on March 2. The next Startup Junkie Underground meeting will take place on March 23rd at the MADCAP theatre and feature Perry Evans.
