What we did in 2011

In 2011 we……joined the short board revolution. Surfers figured it out during the 60’s, and we’re starting to catch on. If you want to ride silly steep mountainbike tracks, you need a board that is short, light, and super agile.…did the Five Passes Challenge, riding all five of the mountain passes in the Lake District in one day.

…held our first Remolition Freeride Masterclass. Went to Allestree Woods, learned some stuff, taught some stuff, and did our first manual slides.

…got technical. Started using blogs, twitter, and pinterest more, wrote our first kindle book and launched two new websites; The Beginners Guide to Mountainboarding andMountainboarding.info.

…learned to love Dave just a little bit more. Held our first DH comp, had loads of fun, started planning for next years DH comps.

…got chased by evil pumpkins, smashed them to smithereens, and won Habitual Suicide T-shirts.

…took night riding to a whole new level (of darkness).

…went to Scotland for the first time, met some great guys, rode some great places, and decided that we need to spend more time there.

…got high. 950 metres high, on Helvellyn.

…turned brakeboarding around. We got to play with the new Trampa Brakeboard, questioned whether brakes should be on the front or the back, and how well they work with eight inch wheels.

….went steep. We rode the Western Wall for the first time and began inventing and learning new techniques for riding slopes that were too steep to ride normally.

I wonder what will happen in 2012…

High entropy marketing systems

A highly organised marketing system built on a linear organisational principle can be described as a ‘low entropy system’. As a highly organised system there are fewer ways of organising the parts without risking destroying the overall structure.

Better is a high entropy marketing system. One that allows for many ways of re-organising the constituent parts without disrupting the overall structure. It would be built on network principles with each part effecting and supporting the other parts, so if one part fails the focus shifts to the other parts.

Supermarket Shopping List app

The Supermarket Shopping List app lets you make a shopping list of items you need, import lists from your online shopping account, and remembers items on previous lists. Then, when you walk into the supermarket the list sorts into itself into the most efficient way and helps you navigate the supermarket to get to the items on your list. As you pass items that were on previous lists it pops up to ask you if you’ve forgotten it. You’ll also be able to set regularity to items so that they are automatically added to your next list if the time set has passed. All this data is fed to the marketing team to enable them to improve and optimise the user experience.

What have you always wanted to know about Remolition?

Remolition Interviews kindle

We’ve been working on ‘Remolition – The Interviews’ for our upcoming Kindle release. And as a bonus just for Kindle readers we turning the interviewing around and asking you to ask Remolition the questions. Head over to Rem Extra at remolition.blogspot.com to find out more and ask your questions. And Merry Christmas.

Must try harder

Nompa in leaves

Took the Nompa for a test ride. Turns out the alloy trucks give it a really short wheel base which gives the board a really low inherent stability and means you can’t rely on it to hold you up. But it is really really agile. So even though I fell over the back a few times, I think it has potential.

Giving blood

Gave blood last night. I was the only one there in the multi-million pound donor unit. Made me think about how they market giving blood, mostly with radio ads. The ads ask you to donate, but they miss something. They don’t say how. If the nation-wide advert could say ‘your local donor unit is opening until 9pm this Wednesday’ it would remove one of the barriers that prevent people from donating, namely not knowing when the unit is open. The ad also needs to send them to the blood.co.uk website to find their nearest donor session/unit.

It’s all about the pathways. Identify the pathway you want people to follow, identify the obstacles that prevent them from following it, and then put things in place to help them get over the obstacles. Spending thousands of pounds on ineffectual radio ads can’t be the way to go.

Nompa Version 2.1

I’ve put noSno alloy trucks on the Nompa and tightened them down. This should allow me to compare how it rides with solid axles against flexi axles and see just how much torsional flex I’m getting out of the deck. I’m going to take it for a test ride tonight.

Next step is putting the brake on. Then I might do a ‘Ben‘ and start cutting holes in it.

Cost effectiveness of email marketing

£1,800 for 19,000 emails. That’s 10.5p per email. But the average open rate is only 15%, so out of those 19,000 we can only expect 2850 emails to be seen. That takes our cost-per-email up to £6.66. If we assume that 10% of the people who see the email might actually want to buy the item advertised, that takes our cost per email up to £64.28. And if 10% of those interested enough in the product to click on the link and view it on the website do actually buy, that takes the cost-per-email to £600. And we’ve sold three items.

B2B Email Marketing

Considering using Thompsonlocal for some targetted B2B email marketing to sell a particular product to a particular type of business. They haven’t got back to me with numbers and costs yet but once I have all the figures I can do a cost analysis to a) work out how many units we’d have to sell to see a good ROI and b) see if its worth doing.