Jameson Detweiler

Last night, I received an email from an architectural photographer who travels around the country taking photos of buildings, building products, etc. Last year, he traveled to 72 cities. He gets paid to do this because manufacturers and architecture firms hire him to take pictures of their products and buildings. It’s cheaper for them than hiring someone and then paying to fly them somewhere.

This got me thinking. Why don’t I do this for my startup?

Not only do I need to meet people all around the country, it would be great if I could visit LEED Certified buildings around the country. For GreenKonnect, we need pictures of these buildings, and we need to learn about them and write them up. Better yet, we need to convince the people who designed and built the buildings to write them up on our site. We also need manufacturers to add their building products to our database. What better way to do it than in person?

Today, there isn’t anything that should be stopping us from doing this. Wireless internet is cheap, and we run our business from our laptops. Why not hit the road, go to manufacturers, architecture firms, developers, engineering firms, contractors, LEED certified buildings, and Angels/VCs around the country. We could work, sell our product in person and meet with potential investors, all things which we need to do ASAP!

I started looking around at people who decided to run businesses from an RV. Bill Myers wrote an interesting article on people who chose to quit 9-5 jobs and live in an RV. Their cost of living actually went down.

Now, I’m not crazy enough to live in an RV full time. That takes a special sort of person, and beyond that, I’m a city boy. I think we could make our way around the country, visiting most major cities (most places we need to visit are concentrated in cities) in about 6 weeks.

Here’s what we’d need:

• An RV - maybe convert it to use vegetable oil
• 2 EVDO cards (probably go with one from Verizon & one from Sprint in case coverage goes down)
• EVDO router (got one already)
• Gas – I’m leaning toward the vegetable oil solution though
• Food
• Money for campgrounds
• Toll money
• Money to cover fun stuff/activities to keep us from going insane
• Backup money for problems

That’s pretty doable. We can get a used RV for $5k and make improvements pretty easily. (We should be able to sell it at the end of the trip for about the same price.) We could probably even pick up some sponsors to cover a lot of costs, especially green upgrades to the RV such as the vegetable oil conversion. That leaves gas (not if we do vegetable oil), food, campground money, toll money, activity money and backup money. If we’re frugal, smart, and good at hustling this, we could do this for under $20k, maybe less. The press alone could be worth that money.

Upside/Benefits

• Face to face meetings – much more effective than email, phone calls and even video conferencing
• A lot of content for our site
• Mobility – we can change our plans on the fly
• Press (and probably lots of it) – not only could we easily document everything along the way, I’m sure we could get a bunch of press from this pretty easily
• Focus, focus, focus – we’d work on the business 24/7 for 6 weeks

Downsides/Risks

• People think I’m crazy (don’t care about most, but I do care about our users/customers/potential investors)
• Time lost to driving & problems with the RV
• No privacy for 6 weeks
• Disconnected physically from Philly and our advisors
• A decent amount of time “lost” to organize the trip

The only major downside I see is the crazy thing. Everything else is minor or easy to work around. Would this actually have a negative impact on our business? Would investors take us seriously? I think not considering the times and the increasing transparency we’re seeing in the business world. If we could figure out how to make this work financially, and if I could my business partner it’s a good idea, I think this could be an amazing adventure with great results for our business. I think I’d actually get more work done than I do now. The amount of content we’d create for our site alone would be huge!

Please convince me that I’m crazy.