Just recently, a friend of mine asked in a group email about how to further her speaking career. Like me in 2006, she is getting asked to speak fairly frequently, but like me in 2006, she is feeling like it’s taking enough of her time and effort to start asking for remuneration for the task.

First off, with a few exceptions, I think everyone that speaks should be compensated for it. It is work and takes time to put together a good presentation. Compensation can come in the form of free marketing – say if you are the CEO of a company that is trying to get the word out, or in the form of residual income (consulting gigs). But most often (and in my case), I needed to get paid. I spent more time working on presentations and traveling to give presentations than I could consulting, so I required payment for my time.

In early 2007, I was out with a group of people and one of my favorite speakers, danah boyd, was talking about her agent. Upon further inquiry, I found out having an agent helped her get from unpaid speaker to paid speaker. So I asked her for an introduction and the rest was history. Over the next few years, I built a career speaking. I only ‘quit’ (I still do very occasional gigs if the situation is right) to do Buyosphere. But before I quit, I was commanding everywhere from $10,000-20,000 a gig. Not bad.

So, I had advice…and after I gave it, I was encouraged to post it here. So here it goes…if you want to get paid and make a career out of public speaking (assuming you are already speaking and people are responding well), here is what you need to do:

What I’ve also noticed that there are more and more women attending each year. I asked Hugh Forrest, the man in charge of the show, what his estimates on women last year were and he replied, “A VERY conservative reply is that 1/3rd of our signups are women.” That’s about 6,800 women if my math is right. Wowsers!

What I also noticed last year was that there wasn’t much catering to that growing population. From what I could tell, the only women-focused event was Digitini, a really cool event honoring the women contributing to Tech. I’ve heard that it’s probably not happening in 2012. :( Guy Kawasaki, Kirtsy and Alltop also did a fun event called Guy/Gal a couple of years back (I couldn’t attend, but I heard it was great). But for 1/3rd of the population of SXSW, I would hope there would be more!

Sure, we’re all equal here, right? An event is an event and it’s non-gendered, right? Well…yes. Most events are neutral. In fact, life is neutral. Until you realize what neutral is…

Back in my cultural studies classes (where I have my degree), we examined the problem with the center and otherness. The center/neutral/sameness is the cultural pivot point. The idea that there is a characteristic or persona that is neutral makes everyone else necessarily conform. So think UNISEX t-shirts. They aren’t really unisex are they? They are t-shirts designed for a male body that are a little bit more tapered. They end up looking boxy on women (and probably fit a very distinct version of a male physique). Think of neutral colors like beige. They work for muted, quiet designs. They don’t offend, but they don’t express either.

So here I was, running between meetings and panels and events and thinking, “Where can I get a good manicure?” and coming up short and knowing that there wasn’t really a place where women could just BE WOMEN (and that doesn’t mean anything in particular, but spaces that are built for women do feel different). So I decided there and then that I would create something in 2012 come hell or high water that would be THAT thing. Completely UNneutral.

So here it is:

Beauty Bar X

And I posted it to Eventbrite and Facebook and did mostly nothing with it yet, but am getting a steady stream of signups and messages like, “OMG…this is SO needed!”

But here is the rub…I got Buyosphere to sponsor it, but we have a wee bit of seed funding that cannot cover an event that costs $25,000 to put on (I’ve asked our amazing event planners if we could cut back and they tried, but SXSW makes the city uber costly). I squeezed $5,000 out of my company (my board and co-founders won’t approve more – that’s an entire month of runway!). I may be able to put a couple of grand into it from my own pocket as well…but we really need to raise $20,000 (or something close to it) to make this happen.

Crazy awesome part of this is that this is the PERFECT OPPORTUNITY for any brand focused on reaching influential women to do so. We will have a space catering to women at SXSW. Women from all over the world with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of followers. Not only that, we will be offering them a great space to be pampered in. Hello skincare companies! Hello nailcare companies! Hello health companies!

So…in order to make this happen, I’ve set up an IndieGoGo campaign:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Sponsor-The-BeautyBarX-Event

The goal is to raise $20,000 or as close to it as I possibly can so we can make this happen. The sponsorship levels are spelled out on IndieGoGo, but people that want to see it happen can also help out. I was ready to pull the plug last week, but something just made me want to push on. I know we can do this. I’d love to see it happen. Can we crowdsource it? I know it’s needed. Let’s make it happen!

Now that Buyosphere is funded, I’m writing a regular column on INC.com and the myriad of other things that I’ve committed to are going on, I find myself looking at the clock everyday thinking, “OMG, where did the day go?” and the calendar at the end of every week and wondering, “It’s not THAT DAY already, is it?” Time really is relative.

I used to be that person who would get back to everyone who emailed me lickity split. I would say yes to every coffee/lunch/drink invitation because, well, you never know where that relationship may lead. I took on all sorts of projects and talks and columns and mentorships and whatever I could pack into my days because I wanted to build my Whuffie and build my reputation. I took pride in all of this. I was approachable and generous with my time and I really believed it is what helped me go from a total nobody born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and raised in a small town in Alberta to being paid to stand in front of audiences of thousands of people and  blah blah blah about how I see the world. So it’s really hard to become that person who lets email inboxes fill up with thousands of unreplied email and tells people NO on a regular basis.

I still think that stuff is important. Don’t get me wrong. But I only have so many hours in my day and, as it is, I’m not spending near enough of it taking care of myself. I need to be smart with the time I have left over and, unfortunately, many of my decisions on how to spend it go back to whether or not it will help me and my business and not the other way around.

From what I hear, though, this is a temporary state of being. I’ve been told by people who have worked hard and become very successful that they can now go back to giving instead of taking again. But instead of rationalizing about it, I just need to keep focused.

All of this is to say…I won’t be blogging much here for a while and everywhere else I’m communicating, I’m going to seem less like Tara and more like, I don’t know, someone else who is obsessed with building her business. I can’t wait until I have the time again to share everything. Thanks for your support and someday I hope to buy all of you a cruise around the world with me.

Perhaps it is because I was so pre-occupied. Between being busier than I’ve ever been in my life and starting a new relationship, I lost track of time. You can say what you will about the challenge of startups, but they define a new level of focus that I didn’t even know existed before this year. Even though I’d been working pretty diligently last year on things, it wasn’t until this year that ‘shit got real’ (so to speak).

When I started thinking about my #themeword for this year (thanks to Laura, Karen and Liza), I looked back at how REAP worked out for this past year. What started out as a rocky year actually turned out pretty REAP-worthy. It unfolded slowly and I hardly even saw it shifting because it never got easier, but there it was. There was still time in 2011 and we started to REAP the benefits of the long road of work we put into things. But let me back up.

Number one was the relationship. I met someone right away. Only. That wasn’t the right person. I thought it was because, well, I asked for the ability to find one. But it was pretty quickly apparent that it wasn’t the right one. But it didn’t take long and those closed doors made way for open ones.

When I met Carlos, I wasn’t sure. He was definitely handsome, fun, smart and sweet, but I had a very definite ‘type’ in mind. That was my biggest problem. I kept going for the wrong guy. But I was lucky this time. The right guy went for ME. And even when I resisted, he persisted and wore me down. He helped me see that my list was stupid. I wasn’t looking for what I needed, I was looking for what I thought I wanted. And what I wanted wasn’t congruent with what I needed. But it took a man with a will bigger than mine to show me the light.

This has been a big 2011 point of REAPness.

As for Buyosphere, which started out this year under a different awful name. And a bit of a different idea. Well, that took a little longer. And with good reason…in retrospect.

I wrote recently about the anatomy of a pivot. It’s a really personal story. I needed to learn a bunch of things: how to let go of the solution and focus on the problem. I’m stubborn. If it wasn’t apparent in my personal relationship story, I suffer a bit from myopia. I convince myself of something and everything lines up to support that thesis in my mind. I don’t budge. For Buyosphere, I was focused on data as the solution to helping people find what they were looking for. I was so convinced that I didn’t know why everyone else didn’t see it. And, to be fair to my own thinking, it was AN idea and someone will surely do it someday, but it will take lots of time and money and huge leaps forward in web standards…probably resulting in about 10-15 years of blood, sweat and tears on the subject.

It was late spring that we realized there was an issue. People liked the name, the design, the UI and a whole bunch of other bits and bobs with Buyosphere, but it wasn’t solving the problem that it set out to solve and so it fell flat. We knew we needed to be useful now.

The funny thing is that I often told the story of my epic search for a black skirt and nobody ever questioned it…until one day David Rose made a super ‘should-have-been-obvious’ statement to me. I told him that Buyosphere is born from a series of fruitless and frustrating online shopping searches that ended empty handed and the best illustration of this was a search for a plain black skirt that took me 3.5 hours and 14 sites to find. So after giving him a few bars of my pitch, he stops me and asks, “Wait a minute. So when do you find the skirt?” I stammered a bit, “Well, after we gather the data and create this…” He stopped me, “Let me get this right, you took a 3.5 hour search and turned it into a 3.5 YEAR search? That doesn’t sound so efficient to me.” My jaw must have dropped to the ground. He was completely right. I was at a loss. But he’s a smart guy and pushed a bit more, “Stop the deck and show me your site.” And I did. I walked him through some of the features. The next thing he said to me triggered everything else that would come, “Wow, this is nice. Your site has a bunch of Quora-like features.”

*flashbulb*

Black skirt. Quora. What would it take to shift…er…pivot to make helping people find stuff less about data and more about Q&A? Turns out 3 months.

It wasn’t the first time I heard Quora brought up as a comparison or the first time someone suggested we create the ability to ask one another for advice. But it was the first time I was open to it and completely ready to hear it. David Rose is truly an angel.

It’s what turned everything around for us. Jerome started working on the new site. I re-worked the pitch deck and the business plan. Cassandra worked on the business modeling around the new, improved idea. Within 3 months, we had a new site (which we haven’t started any promotion on, but is getting steady sign ups and pick up), our seed funding (oversubscribed!) and a bright new path into the new year that is much more exciting and feels like the winner.

So…yeah…epic 2011. Very very REAPable. Where do I go from here?

Well, I know we still have lots of work to do and a long road ahead. I like the way that road is looking though. And now that I know that the road we’re traveling is the right one, there is nothing left to do but work hard, smart and…well…

GIVE’R

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it comes from my upbringing. I was raised in small town Alberta where bush parties and shotgunning beer are hobbies. If you haven’t seen the movie, Fubar, here is a taste. Ah. Sniff. Memories! The term GIVE’R is often the philosophy of the partier, but I think it applies well to startup life. In essence it means (from Urban Dictionary):

“1. Going all out and/or balls to the wall to take care of business as quickly and as awesomely as possible
2. Acting in a way that is like you’re rocking out really hard, but at the same time, trying to solve a problem that may or may not involve drop-kicking something without hesitation”

Quickly, efficiently and awesomely going all out. That is what 2012 is going to be about. With or without the drop-kicking. Hopefully without. We’re going to GIVE’R through this next year and it’s going to pay off big time.

So there you go. GIVE’R in 2012. That’s my #themeword.

So, in the tradition that Erica Douglass began on NYE 2007/2008, what is YOUR #themeword?

How to Pick Your #ThemeWord for 2011 (via Erica O’Grady):

1. Think of a word that reflects your hopes and dreams for 2010.
2. Share your ThemeWord with friends on Twitter, Facebook, or Your Blog.
3. Be sure and use the hashtag #Themeword.

What I love about boiling the entire year down into one word is that it helps focus everything else. It’s also a fun exercise. Be sure to tweet and tell me yours.

“Tara…you are a great presenter. You are passionate and can make any story or idea sound interesting. I’d want you to sell anything that I was trying to get out into the world…HOWEVER…when you talk about yourself or your company, you sound uncertain and nervous. You lose that passion. I just wanted you to know how you come across.”

It’s true. And it is the craziest thing. I DO believe passionately in what we are doing with Buyosphere. I’m excited and energized with how awesome the site is progressing and I know in my heart that we are solving a real problem with what is being launched in a few weeks. I’m so excited, I’m up at night feeling giddy and have great ideas on how to grow and monetize and build a really strong, amazing business.

So why the hell do I get sheepish when I talk about it to others?

Because braggarts are irritating and I can’t de-couple myself from my startup. The answer lies in how I tell the story. This is how I’ve been telling it since the beginning:

1. I’ve been dreaming about solving the purchasing experience online since 2007 (I have)
2. My co-founders and I are a tight-knit family who have grown together a LOT over the past 18 months (we have)
3. The broken purchase experience relates to a story from 2007 – a search for a black skirt online that took me 3.5 hours and going to 13 websites (it did)

But none of these things matter. Yes, they matter to ME. This IS where my passion lies. But all three of these things make my business WAY too personal for me. So when I pitch my company, I’m essentially telling a potential investor, “Invest in me and my dream.” Not a good sell. And, when that potential investor passes, he or she is passing on my dream, not my company, so it feels much more personal.

Buyosphere is my precious. And rejection of Buyosphere feels like a personal rejection.

I now understand that this is nuts. And I don’t know if it’s a ‘woman’ thing or what, but it’s definitely a ME thing that I need to un-learn. Yes, investors say they ‘invest in people’, but they aren’t investing in people’s dreams. They invest in people they trust to build a business, sell that business, grow that business and, ultimately, make them a lot of money. These are not charities. They could give a flying snake that I’ve grown or what my shopping woes are. They want to know the big picture and how we get there. No preciousness. I’m starting to understand what some (who are very helpful mentors) have referred to as ‘fluff’.

Someday when I write the chapter on ‘how to speak VC’, this will be the very first lesson (I have yet to know what the next lessons are). Very analogous to how the ring drove Smigel crazy and turned him into a paranoid Gollum, being too coupled with your idea will lead to heartbreak over time. Every rejection will become a personal wound. After a while, you will feel alone and hyper protective. It’s a selfish thing. I have two co-founders whose ideas, input and implementation are just as formative (if not more) than my own. Investors become partners who also bring ideas and input into the mix. It is not ‘my precious’, it is a company. A company that I believe in and I’m excited about and that I will work hard to help succeed and be a great tool that will help people.

I wanted to share this revelation because I don’t think I’m the only one who is stuck in this paradigm. I’ve heard others talk about their companies in the same way. And when you are so close to the idea, it closes you to input and growth. Knowing, instead, that this is your job (not your dream) and your job is to make your company wildly successful opens you up to more ideas and helps you see where you need to let go of others.

I’m working on shifting this paradigm now, but it won’t be easy. I’m seeking outside help from people who can take me through the withdrawal steps:

1. Reframing the pitch – de-coupling it from my ‘dream’ and speaking to the business opportunity
2. Rethinking my relationship with Buyosphere – if it’s not an extension of my identity, what is it? And really, who am I?
3. Becoming the biggest advocate for Buyosphere I can be

If you want big numbers and lots of content, make it super simple to join/post/etc. “Of course we want big numbers, Tara!” you are thinking. But it’s not entirely desireable. The downside to simple signup/posting/etc is that it attracts low-brow content. Sure, there are lots of users, but the content can become terribly uninteresting and sometimes spammy.

If you want quality content and users, you make sign up a little more arduous and content a little harder to post. Not impossible or even difficult, but your design requires the user to sign up with a little more information and posts to require a little more thought.

But it seems that today, all people seem to care about is quantity. Big numbers. Fast. This leads to ‘hyped up startups of the week’ where everyone talks about how freakin awesome and huge a startup is for 2 seconds, then moves onto the next one and rarely (if ever) discusses that startup again. When the in crowd moves on, all that’s left is drivel content. That’s not a sustainable business or something that I ever want to build (but it seems to be what any angels or vcs want us to build).

“Allow anonymous posting!”
“Take out steps to adding content!”
“RE-tweet/share/post/tumble/pin/poke/blah!”

I think there is a happy balance of creating an app where there is an ease of use and quick posting while requiring real people that have something significant to say to have a voice.

Facebook used to be that place. You needed to sign up with your real name. If you were going to post, you’d have to come up with something fairly original and semi-interesting to say before you hit post. Not all content was interesting to everyone. But it was original and it said something about the person posting it. There were rants, personal photos, bad days, breakups, new relationships, inspirations, arguments, embarrassing drunken confessions, more embarrassing tagged photos of others in compromising moments, commentary, food porn….the list goes on and on and on. Whether or not you found something interesting in your feed was completely subjective. I, for one, love the mundane. I’m deeply interested in the bits and bobs of people’s lives.

And that content still exists, but it is starting to give way to something else: RE-posting.

The other day I thought to myself, “Egad, Facebook has turned into Tumblr!” I think Tumblr is lovely. It’s easy to use and well-designed, but I find the content on Tumblr shite. It seems to be all about following as many people as you can, then finding the best, most inspiring, funniest, prettiest, craziest stuff and hitting a little button to post it to your own Tumblr. It’s the image equivalent to retweeting and I wouldn’t mind it so much, but it creates a whole lot of noise without any originality.

Take, for instance, the screenshot I took today. Yes. I think the post is interesting and very poignant…the first time I see it. And I may even appreciate how others share it because it shows me who is aligned with this line of thought in my stream. But after 20+ shares (or REposts), I start to roll my eyes. And believe me, I’m JUST as guilty of this as anyone here. It’s a rush to REpost something poignant and have a whole bunch of people REpost it from you. “Look at all the people I influenced! I’m special!” But I’m not. I was most likely the 2,345,896th person to REpost this on Facebook. I just happened to get a jump on a few dozen others.

I hate to wax poetically about the good ole days (though I have been more and more lately), but back when I started blogging, people became popular by producing amazing original content and thoughts. And if you were going to discuss someone else’s idea, you would ADD to the conversation by coming up with some of your own thoughts and then link back to the original blogger’s post. And we got smarter and were made to think about why something resonated with us and how we could improve on the original rather than just add noise.

Maybe there is no such thing as original thought anymore? Or maybe we’ve just got too busy to form our own ideas and articulate them. Or maybe it’s just unpopular to do so. Who knows. But when every platform becomes a REposting platform, I start to get really bored of the “social web” and long for a small community of original thinkers who don’t care about popularity or REposts, but instead care about learning and growing and making something worth archiving.

Tumblr is great and it exists to REpost stuff ad nauseum and somehow it works for the communities it serves. Google+ attempted to do it, too (but when you start with poor content, the hype wears off fast – lesson?). If Facebook wants to go in that direction, then I’m worried about its future. Maybe we’ll go back to blogging. Maybe something else will come along to fill that void.

But popular or not, I’m going to continue to try to produce content that isn’t about hype and is about adding to the conversation instead of just adding noise. At least as much as I can.

It also ignited quite a lively backchannel conversation amongst the various women in tech groups I’m part of. The reactions (including mine) ranged from “I can see her point, but ‘embarrassment’ is a harsh way to put it,” to “OMFG &*#(&#)@#*@!” Mine was somewhere in between, but the biggest thing that struck me was how familiar it sounded.

And it isn’t a familiar because I’m a woman founding a fashion/shopping site, it’s familiar because in every single profession where the population of women starts growing, the same thing happens and the same sentiments get voiced.

As the number of women doctors grew, there was (and still is) an outcry because female physicians outnumber male physicians in pediatrics and female residents outnumber male residents in family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pathology, and psychiatry.

I’ve heard the same said about women lawyers: they pick ‘softer’ forms of law to pursue such as non-profit, family, government and general practices. Women are less likely to run a firm or become partners at a firm and more likely to be in-house council.

But this isn’t the issue. Nature or nurture or interests or whatever, if more women choose to practice medicine, law or do startups around the stuff we are familiar with, I’m not too concerned. I figure as time goes on and our entrance into professions becomes more common, things will even out. What I’m concerned about is the sentiment around the decision to pursue more feminized versions of these professions. The feminine itself is negatively valued.

Feminine = Soft/Bad/Stupid/Shallow/Underachieving/Embarrassing ??

Think about how we assign value to certain things like: logical vs. emotional. Or independent vs. dependent. Or analytical vs. intuitive. I’ll bet when you read the words, you instantly understood what ‘gender’ was assigned to each (and when I say gender, I don’t mean men vs women. I mean masculine vs. feminine.). Neither is better or worse, but depending on the context, there is a differential in how they are valued. And in the tech industry, being emotional, dependent and intuitive is a death sentence…unless you are a man who has a ‘proven’ record (proven being the uber masculine differentiator).

The same goes for types of startups. Business tools = good. Analytics = good. Content aggregators = good. Productivity apps = good. Shopping = bad. Fashion = bad. Babies = bad. UNLESS…you are a man. Diapers.com was founded by two men. They are super rich now. Zappos.com was founded by men. They’ve done pretty well. Amazon, Bluefly, Kaboodle, Shopstyle, Stylefeeder, eBay…the list goes on. One could argue all of the founders behind these have done pretty well for themselves and even the sites that aren’t super popular were acquired for good money and had good exits. I don’t know…sounds like a shopping (baby and fashion) startup is a pretty solid, awesome, smart, hardcore, good, kickass type of startup to have.

So why is it so embarrassing to have so many women entering the startup world through such a lucrative entry point?

Because, well, it’s embarrassing because we are so few and there is so much hope pinned on our performance. We’ve been begging and screaming to get included and then we show up in high heels talking about designer snugglies and nailpolish. Damn these women being all womeny talking about women stuff! Who invited these ones to the party? Where are the serious female entrepreneurs?

Right here. In high heels. Wearing great nailpolish (I swear by this stuff…it’ll extend your manicure for…nevermind). I’m emotionally and intuitively navigating through this. And I’m dependent on more people than I feel comfortable with: my customers, my users, my co-founders, my advisors, my boyfriend, other startups, my friends, the weather, the economy…you name it.

When I moved to San Francisco in 2005, it took me about 6 months to deny myself my femininity. It wasn’t fashionable to be fashionable. I moved to SF with a closet full of designer dresses, suits and shoes and within 6 months all I was wearing were jeans and t-shirts. I am ecstatic to see photos of events filled with women in dress clothes and high heels. My only embarrassment lies in that I didn’t have the *erm* balls to be the woman I am back then.

Instead of embarrassed that there are so many women doing startups involving fashion/shopping/babies, I’m proud. I’m proud of a truly inclusive tech scene where women can women, men can men, women can men, men can women and all sorts of other genderific combinations thereof. And I, for one, welcome the pink ghettoization of the tech startup scene – at least for the time being – because it means women are making a grand entrance. And what an entrance it is!

Years ago I learned a HUGE lesson: ‘fake it until you make it’ has a cost and, if the gamble doesn’t pay off, you’ll be saddled with more than you can handle afterwards. It was my first business and everyone advised me to look more experienced and more established than I was. Since I didn’t have an official office, I needed to pretend that I do. And since I was new, I needed to come on the scene with a bang. So I spent a whole bunch of money I didn’t have up front and didn’t tell anyone that I was going in debt for it. Long story short, it seemed to work for a while, but when the market fell out beneath me, I was saddled with more debt than I could bring in income. I had to get a real job in order to pay for my previous ‘faking it’.

Lucky for me, the social web rose up and radical transparency became all the rage. Now everybody was talking about how they worked from home and coffee shops, how they don’t always know what they are doing and bootstrapping became an honorable way to start a business. Where I once needed a rent-an-office space, brochures, fancy website, answering service and other expensive collateral, I could now merely have a blog, a laptop and a bunch of Moo Cards. This no longer seemed amateur because everyone was amateur and amateur was the new professional.

But something has shifted back over the past 5 years or so since then and there seems to be a resurgence of the ‘Fake it til you make it’ battle cry. I’m not sure if it’s because we could get away with our scrappy little amateur web businesses when we were still on the bleeding edge and now we are part of a serious money-making industry or whether it’s just a natural pendulum swing to counteract the ‘We Live in Public‘ viewpoints of the world that were hyperbolically transparent (and even shocking to an open advocate like myself).

Either way, Faking it is the new transparency and I don’t think its resurgence is a good one. Why not?

1. By faking it, we fail to share our struggles – I know that’s kind of the point of faking it and all, but if nobody shares they are struggling, nobody will know anybody else is struggling. That results in a whole bunch of people feeling quite isolated and scared and thinking that they must be big, fat losers because they are the only ones in the whole wide world that struggle. Funny thing…I shared my struggle at TEDxConcordia (6,000 views) and at NXNE Interactive (167,000 views) and both were passed around like wildfire. I’ve never received so many thank you emails. This struck a nerve. People were thankful I shared because they no longer felt alone.
2. By faking it, we fail to learn what it takes to REALLY make it – the amount of advice posts written by failing startups that other startups followed and promptly failed by is astonishing. Same with speakers at conferences who delve out advice for ‘how to do it right’ when they know full well that their community is crumbling, they are running out of money and their days are numbered. This is just wrong. People wanting to do startups look up to people doing them. And they aspire to be them. Let’s not pass along our mistakes, only our lessons.
3. By faking it, we ignore reality. I recently read 10 Facts About the Condition of American Families that Will Blow Your Mind at Business Insider. Wow. I think it’s time for America to stop faking success (“Look at how Wall Street is recovering! Look at how much money is being invested! People are working/buying again!”) and start facing reality. There is something fundamentally broken here. Admit it, grow some humility and fix it so we can achieve REAL successs. Because the longer you lie to the world, the more you will believe it yourself and the longer you will struggle. You only increase your chances of success when you admit your reality.
4. By faking it, we perpetuate a culture of lies. It’s the viciousest of vicious cycles, really. If we all just admitted we struggle, nobody would feel like admitting it would make people think they were a big loser. By ‘staying in the closet’ about our fears, doubts and stumbles, we keep that closet closed for future generations.
5. By faking it, we are just plain lying. If it was my money on the line, I’d want to know what was going on with the companies I invested in. 100%. I wouldn’t want to be surprised at a board meeting that the company I see as doing amazing things is about to close down because of legal battles, especially if those legal battles had been going on for ages and I could have helped. I’ve heard this story and many others from advisors, investors and employees who had no idea the company they worked for was in trouble. Yes, yes…revealing every little thing isn’t good either. You need to help people feel like you can handle the small stuff. But when you are running out of money or being sued or discover you were on the wrong path or whatever is a bigger deal, it’s time to reach out and get help.

Now, this being said there IS such thing as TOO MUCH INFORMATION. I would never name names (even thinly veiled), give specific details in a legal or financial case, talk ill of anyone who wronged me (not naming names – but you can talk about lessons learned…how to avoid situation X) or personally attack anyone. You have to use your judgement. The way I approach transparency is: “This is how I am struggling. This is what I’ve learnt. This is what I’ve done wrong. This is what I did right. This is how things are broken. Please keep in mind this is my perspective. Anyone else want to add/share?” Sometimes I wait until this can be told in retrospect, sometimes I talk about lessons as I’ve learned them.

Of course, this is also changing for me as time goes on. I find myself clamming up more and being less involved in discussions that are heated in this area. I’m aware that my own behavior reflects on my company, which means the other people who work with me have to bear the brunt of my sometimes misguided opinons. So I stay away unless I have something personal to share that I think will help others. Mostly I speak of my own mistakes now.

And I’ve had friends in the industry advise me to keep quieter in general, but as I said above, this won’t help anyone (even though I know their intention is to protect me). And I don’t think it will help me (or anyone else) in the long run. I’m not stupid or reckless (mostly!) and I’m more than happy to admit it if I make a mistake. Feel free to tell me when I’ve crossed the transparency/TMI line. :)

I know that we had a special luxury in the early days of the rise of the social web business when we were the scrappy revolutionaries and now that we are starting to make bigger impacts and affect real lives, we need to think about how our behavior touches other people. It’s no longer about a revolution (was it ever?), it is now about changing the world to be a better place. But I do believe that transparency can grow up with us, too. It doesn’t get left behind, it just evolves to be central to the way we interact. It’s a better way and it’s definitely better than faking it.

Then why do the plethora of shopping discount, daily deal and coupon sites leave me so darn cold?

I think it’s because, instead of helping me afford the stuff that I need and want, there seems to be an endless stream of messages tempting me to spend my money on stuff that is shiny and lovely, but that I never knew I desired before they appeared in my inbox. In fact, by spending my money on these lovely objects of distraction, I’m getting further away from being able to afford the stuff I really want/need.

Another issue could be that there are just too many shopping deal sites all at once. Or maybe the coupons/deals/offers aren’t what we need as consumers after all. Perhaps it turns out that I don’t need a new pair of cheap shoes or new accessories every month. Maybe I just need to be able to afford one or two pairs of really good shoes per season, or that amazingly unique accessory by that hard to find local jeweler that makes me look European in every outfit…even jeans and t-shirts. Or maybe I need a better way to find my way to these items.

Hmmmm…if only someone could come around to help us shop SMARTER instead of just MORE. Okay, that is a bit self-serving (as that is one of the core objectives of Buyosphere – egad, I can’t wait to unveil our next phase which I think will really help make this a reality), but it’s true and it is exactly the issue that all of these hot new startups are going to face.

At the end of the day, we don’t need anything that encourages consumption. We’ve done just fine on that level for years. What we need is a better/faster route to finding that perfect thing for me, which requires the sellers who have that perfect thing for me to figure out how to find me in that exact moment and the sellers that don’t to get out of my way. THAT will be the killer social shopping site.

note: stay tuned…