When I was first doing the research for TalentEgg, I spent a lot of my time reading (mostly Seth Godin) and speaking with people who were smarter or more experienced than me.
The advice that stands out most was from Rick Spence, an author, speaker, and writer for the Financial Post. He was extremely kind and gave me over an hour of his time to pick his brain about TalentEgg. (Actually, come to think of it, he encouraged me not to choose the name TalentEgg :))
All that aside, the great advice had to do with sharing information. And really, it was less advice and more a challenge on my ideas of how to start a business. We had been chatting for about a half an hour at this point and I said ‘oh, by the way, please don’t share any of this information. The company is still just in idea phase and I don’t want anyone else to get there before I do’. Rick challenged me, and explained that ideas are easy…execution is hard.
I’ve read that same advice in a book that is now one of my favourites: It’s now how good you are, it’s how good you want to be, by Paul Arden.
And the idea is now one that we live by at TalentEgg: We’re open. And it’s kind of fun. I will gladly sit down with another entrepreneur and share information about everything from our traffic to our pricing structure. And I won’t exagerate. And I’ll gladly speak with a potential client just as openly and sincerely.
The great thing is that it works for us, and bonus: It’s way easier than the alternative (being secretive, exagerating truths, lying).
Guy Kawasaki even talks about it in his most recent book, Reality Check.
So, in that spirit, I am very proud to announce that TalentEgg has recently been getting (the) attention (it deserves) from google, and our traffic has been awesome. We’re getting close to 400 visitors per day! Yaaaaay!