Launching Options – With or Without Beta Test or Editing Help
Four Years into my Magnificent Obsession project, after much financial and personal sacrifice, I have taken a further detour by seriously considering sharing my project with a few ESOL colleagues, prior to actual Launch. I do not take this lightly. I have gone back to teaching Continuing Education ESOL classes, which I had promised myself I’d do after retirement, anyway, and have reached a sort of equilibrium and sense of partnership with some great people at NVCC. The administrators of the program are excellent.
Part of me wants to keep quiet about the specifics of my massive project, and allow things to evolve 100% naturally. This would mean making any needed changes as I go along, while actually starting to earn two separate additional incomes, beginning to recoup the unbelievable investment devoted to the project to date.
It gives me pause to let any of my personal, professional contacts peer behind the curtain, without assuring their discretion. To do so introduces additional variables and risks, not only in the area of potential confidentiality leaks, but also opening myself up to criticism from multiple individuals and diverse personalities. These are after all current colleagues who work where I currently emjoy employment as a language instructor.
After taking stock of where I am, with regard to my readiness to launch, I thought it might be worth the risk. It would be great if, before we started working the System in earnest, we could have already fixed a good number of bugs, and typos. Then I know that there are also a number of incongruities across (1) multiple web-pages,(2) my free PDF report, and (3) the full e-book. The original 22-page Free Report to which I’ve added details each time I’ve reviewed it over the years, has become bloated. So has the full 38-page e-book, which now weighs in at nearly 60 pages!
So in my ideal scenario, I imagined I might actually be able to launch in a few weeks, with these volunteers fully-knowledgeable about what we’re trying to do. They could assume the roles of our first Qualified Contractors, Candidates and Benefactors, after me, and actually become my personal team members. So I have chosen to open up my plans to a few select colleagues, to see if they can volunteer some time to give me feedback and help with corrections, and then just give them the Right of First Refusal, actually inviting them to take part before anyone else ever sees the final product.
Just at that juncture, I was reminded by administrators at the college that online surveys and polls, if you have ready participants, can be an effective way to test the waters. Introducing the project and determining if there is interest seems an efficient use of time and resources.
I’ve decided that if it doesn’t work for at least a couple of my colleagues to spend any time helping me as Beta-Testers and/or editors, I’d move ahead with one or both of my original options.
The first is to hire contractors overseas (outsourcing) from my contractor’s network, before launch, whom I can afford to pay for hourly work or actual results. I’ve used them for my online publishing needs in the past.
However this reality – that many American businesses have to hire cheap labor overseas – is part of the underlying cause of the economic quagmire where we find ourselves. And it’s what I’m trying, on a small scale at first, to address. So while it is an affordable way for me to test the internal emailing system and website access, and edit the two documents,
(1) it doesn’t allow feedback or participation from anyone that could well really benefit from my launch, input which may well make a difference in what the system does and looks like in a few months
(2) it doesn’t allow me to invite people with whom I already have some affinity, people that I feel (since they are colleagues in a nurturing profession, qualified educators, and have mastery of English, not to mention having been admittedly underpaid for decades) might really resonate with what I’m trying to accomplish.
I’ve been doing this alone for 4 years. Clearly, to have a trusted group of colleagues that are coming from a place of contribution to our entire mission would be beneficial, psychologically and spiritually.
(a) good people that have a vested interest in our mutual success (“skin in the game”) and
(b) who might offer intelligent suggestions, and
(c) who might sooner become closer partners on my Inner Core team, than others who just need or want me to dictate to them what to do.
The second option is just to go ahead and launch. That is I would just follow the directions (tweaking them if I find that rules have changed for Classified sites) run a couple of free classified ads to get some extra, fresh business contacts. Then I’d simply copy and paste names and emails into my ShortList, and finally act as though I’m starting my own Free Trial, completing the daily work tasks myself.
I would start driving paid traffic to my Global Waiting List site allowing Global Candidates to begin to qualify themselves as they wait to be introduced to a new Benefactor, and invited to join a Private Waiting List nd Inner Core team.
Shifting to an “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” strategy, I would then fix issues as they actually come up in real time – reported via my HelpDesk at http://billalatis.com/support. This work would be backed-up by help-desk contractors to whom I can delegate much of that work. A support team will need to be in place in a few weeks anyway, however –
The challenge with the second option is that much of my attention will need to be devoted to putting out fires, rather than being proactive. At any time this devolves into a massive game of Whack-a-Mole, where I’m just feverishly hammering at issues as they rear their ugly heads.
I am sad to say that I can hire full-time contracting work overseas, with near-native English speakers and writers, for well under $400 a month, full-time. This fact, plus U.S. commerce policies such as NAFTA, which make outsourcing abroad practically essential for a majority of today’s American businesses, have helped to essentially decimate the American Middle Class.
Upon completing an online publishing project, several years ago, I fully understood that many entrepreneurs in developed countries could afford to complete projects like mine, and even to start and manage entire enterprises, ONLY with the help of cheap foreign labor. This revelation as to the reality of modern business growth, and it’s impact on us living in American, was instrumental in the evolution of the Un-Business System – and that story is touched upon in the introductory website and video presentation on the Contract site.
I do not intend to directly offer the Guaranteed Contract deal to my low-paid outsourcers, or invite them to my Private Waiting List, although they may choose to become Global Candidates. I can’t avoid this, since they will know about and have access to the Global Waiting List of Candidates for Funding This site is central to my Big Marketing Funnel, to which I actually drive traffic through paid advertising and free traffic methods. It is described both in the Private Course and in the E-Book and Free Report PDF files, both of which I am requesting, in this email, to be reviewed by eyes other than my own.
I predict that not many of my personally-hired contractors overseas would be inclined to take any kind of business risk. As a whole, these workers have proven to be reliable in completing tasks on an hourly basis, but are not entrepreneurial as a group, and with a few exceptions are not likely to take any kind of risk outside of being paid for hourly work.
However, as I said, they may choose to join the Free Global Candidate’s list. After they have provided the services I need prior to launch, then they would be invited down the road just like any other Global Candidate.
But for those of my actual colleagues who need money now, the small hourly wages I can offer to beta-testers is hardly worth mentioning, and is not going to make much of a dent your monthly bills.
So here is what I’m offering in exchange for any help you may be able to agree to volunteer:
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Beta-Testers and Editors
Promises and Benefits for Beta-Testers
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere or in person, I’m requesting your help to fine-tune, or overhaul, where necessary, my online part-time contractors marketing system. This consists of visiting several web-sites that I’ve built and linked together, over the past 4 years.
You would be trying them out and navigating the pages out as a user, and reporting back to me any issues, discrepancies, or directions that you may find unclear, or downright confusing. We are looking at them with an underlying mission in mind – that of creating a system for newbies that will take them from very basic skills (specified in Skillset, below) to productive, Contractors and Contract Managers, These roles are currently rewarded by commissions from our affiliated Company 1, a federally-regulated global communications provider and Company 2, a global travel company.
Even if you only agree to be a Beta-Tester, it may still involve some proofreading or basic editing skills.
Those who are then willing to take on some proper editing work would not only be looking at the writing on the web-pages, but may take on the actual editing of one of two documents – a 30-page Free Report, and then the full 60-page eBook that give more in-depth background and knowledge to better grasp the system of websites and software tools which I’ve developed.
1) In my opinion, the best overall advantage, benefit, and incentive I can offer you
is a Right of First Refusal to take part in, and thus be offered my Guaranteed Work-at-Home Contract
which guarantees compensation equal to from $90 to $150 per hour of work as a Qualified Contractor. The guarantee of at least $1500 of compensation, paid roughly within the same time-frame as it would take to earn this amount from a 10-hour a week part-time 7-11 job (if one could even be arranged with so few weekly hours) at $10 per hour.
So, first, I’ll outline just what THAT means, in terms of your existing skills and resources that I’m requesting your help with.
2) But then I’ll go on to describe other benefits in terms of skills, knowledge and expertise I can promise you will gain just from going through the Beta Test. Even if you don’t take me up on my Guaranteed Contract, you will be able to apply these to your own career or other business choices you may be inspired to make going forward. I own and can present training for several other on-line business models which I will be happy to share with you at no cost, although these are quality, paid courses.
SKILL-SET
The only real skills you need to begin with are the ability to send and receive emails, fill-in online web-forms, including signing up for a new, separate Gmail account, and the ability to Copy and Paste text into emails or web-forms. If you don’t know how to Copy and Paste, I can send you a tutorial.
WORK PARAMETERS
As a Qualified Contractor, Starting the day you begin your Free Trial of Services of our First Affiliated company, over the next 35 days, you will be able to work, sometimes as little as 15 minutes a day, other days 30 to 45 minutes, for a total of between 10 and 15 hours of focused effort to be spread over those 5 weeks.
The tasks are designed to be done on a home computer, in parallel with whatever other means of paying the bills that people already have in place. While many of the sign-up forms and content itself may be viewed and completed on mobile phones, the actual work still requires a computer or at least a tablet with proper internet access, for all practical purposes, to be accomplished easily.
If you decide, by the 7th day, that you will be happy enough doing the work itself, which you will understand completely by then (and that you’ll really be doing more supervising, than actually doing) over the next 4 weeks, then you will be charged $10 by that first company. I will reimburse you that within 24 hours.
Then you will sign up for a second company, for $25. According to the terms of our Contract, at least the first 3 team-members who get this far will also be reimbursed.
But my inclination, due to the power of cementing business relationships by providing actual, tangible monetary help, is to reimburse all 5 team members. My experience is that this is a way to begin to earn a free agent’s loyalty, so that we are likely to can continue to work together in future. For $50 more than the $125 we are required to contribute by the 3rd week (the Week after the Free Trial) that it’s well worth it to me, personally.
The entire underlying premise to this written Contract is to create a measurable, clearly-defined set of benefits I will provide my Contractors, to include reimbursing them for their first month of services I am promoting on behalf of the provider companies, as well as free access to all my System of marketing, support and training sites and actual personal access to me as mentor via email and secondary channels.
This entire set of benefits constitutes the “Big Favor” alluded to in the movie Pay It Forward from the novel of the same title. I have merely codified the vague “big favor… something that they can’t do by themselves,” that the protagonist Trevor describes in the story. And I have created a Contract for that Favor, stipulating the specific tasks completed and support and funds provided that must be committed to and completed, in order for the Favor to have been considered fully Paid-Forward, and the Contract thus fulfilled.
Here is the original information site I created in 2010 which outlines the idea.
http:allpaidforward.info