Yep it’s my birthday and because it’s a weekday, that means I get to chill out instead of partying all over the weekend. So that gives me time to sit down and talk to you cats about me and this blog. I been doing Dream and Hustle since 2006 which make it about 8 years. Also, this year is my 20th anniversary in the Internet/Web game from phreaking, IRC, Gopher to now creating solutions in the cloud to solve urban problems worldwide. Even though that is my past, it is the path that is my focus and the only thing to do on a path is move forward to more progress.
So what I’m going to do in this article is try to cover all of the concepts, business models and technology from the past 8 years of this blog. A lot of you cats has not been around the past 8 years and probably just turned into an adult from a teenager those 8 years so it is fair that I try to bring up all I talked about. Now you should realize something already about me and Dream and Hustle. First of all, I’m one of the few bloggers out there who can sum up their blog from the past 8 years because most bloggers spent the past several years writing up worthless rants and nonsense and emotional blather. My blog is a reusable multi-million asset and only one other hustle blogger I know can make that same claim about their blog.
Second and this is most important – I’m also one of the few African-American blogger out there so open source showing and telling brothas and sistas how to do things, make moves and bring forth real business and entrepreneurial discussions. I learned my game from the Indians because as I worked with Indian people over the years in technology, I watched and observed how Indians collaborate on solutions, teach others how to accomplish instead of harp on mistakes and happy when one of them makes it because all of them made it. And I take that same principle and apply the same attitude and beliefs towards brothas and sistas when I’m about what I’m doing.
Let me be frank, over the past 8 years of Dream and Hustle of discussing entrepreneurship, techniques and discussing the hustle and making progress, what group of people you think trolled and tried to attack/undermine this blog over the years? Do you think it was those white conservative GOP bigots the Black liberal media cats be scaring yall with? No, never seen that happen the past 8 years not even in my moderation comment queue. Also, it was not Hispanics and Asians attacking Dream and Hustle either if that was your answer. You know the answer – the only group of people trolling and attacking Dream and Hustle while I’m covering how to progress Black people were other African-Americans.
I been running this blog for 8 years and been out there with the expertise and more than qualified to tell you that the enemy is within and the biggest damage to African-Americans are self-inflicted. Brothas and sistas still playing self-hate, jealously, envy, government entitlement, corporate paycheck games in 2014 just waiting for everything to fall underneath them when things hit the fan. I use the Noah analogy a lot on this blog and Dream and Hustle taught me why that story is in the Bible because a lot of African-American cats out there want to be fools instead of build an Ark like Noah and not realize the environment is changing around them and to prepare for changes.
When President Barack Obama leaves office, the descendant of slave African-Americans is screwed and done and there is nothing you and I can do about it. We had our chance from 2009 to 2012 to make things happen for our people and the African-American community blew it. We cannot get that opportunity back and 2009 to 2012 were historically critical to African-Americans and we blew it, plain and simple. Watching too much reality TV shows, reading too much Black relationship books, Black media that disrespect Black women, promoting Black-on-Black violence, chasing garbage multi-level-marketing hustles, buying big things instead of investing and all is the melody and tune African-Americans danced to and now it’s time to pay the piper.
Look, you cannot do anything about African-American culture and people and you need to protect yourself and your family and your clan and that is all you can control, I’m being straight up honest with you and this is real talk. That Black economic self-empowerment boat set sail and left back in 2012 and that is over, Dr. Claud Anderson will tell you the same thing I’m saying and he already indicated this also. Cats can still talk about Black economic empowerment in 2014 but that is like baby birds chirping in the nest not realizing momma bird been killed by a sparrow hawk two days ago.
The only thing Dream and Hustle can do and also upcoming Hustle Space and the global 3rd Strategic Institute can do is help you brothas and sistas as individual become moguls and globally competitive to take on the world and help you realize the world is yours. I don’t give a damn about those Black identity clowns and Black Nationalist clowns and they are officially marginalized losers running their mouth like they mad. To be specific – these Black Nationalists, pseudo-Islam, pseudo-Hebrew characters are just cosplay wearing characters and worthless in 2014. You on the other hand, you can learn STEM, you can connect with people worldwide, you can adopt successful patterns and practices and incorporate them in your empire building strategy. You as an African-American individual has to be entrepreneurial and globally competitive or you are going to just cast your fate to the wind and allow things you cannot control like deficit, oil prices and market conditions be the end of you and your family. It’s your choice in 2014.
With that said and I know it’s my birthday and you only getting an hour of my time let’s go into the concepts, technology and strategy that Dream and Hustle covered over the years. Because it’s my birthday, I want a change of direction with Dream and Hustle and I want to have you understand the patterns and practices we will build upon to move forward.
The Concepts Covered on Dream and Hustle
The concepts I discuss here were things I learned on the path to success in the real world dealing with cats on all kinds of levels. These are the same principles that me and my crew lives by and what we discuss everytime we go over something and the concepts proven themselves over the year. Overall, you have to learn how the game operate and you have to learn to be smarter than the game to get what yours to the point you manipulate the game and the rules altogether.
The Perfect Setup. This is a propaganda game I spoke of early on where cats in the media and socialites try to say you need to be perfect at this and that before they acknowledge. This is where Black Enterprise magazine for example will make up an excuse why they can’t cover a tech expert like me and try to find imperfections about me as an excuse. This is where you have a boss that always find something wrong with you. As an entrepreneur, you will see cats always looking for something imperfect about you and the trap game is for you to chase “perfection” when it does not exist. What you need to do is just do you and keep pushing and embrace being imperfect and boast about your imperfections. I’m a Black empowerment entrepreneur that date non-Black sistas, run game on tricks and cheap as hell and I cuss a lot and perverted – and I’m stilling getting mine because I avoid the perfect setup.
Parallel Processing and Batching. If you are looking to become a millionaire, you have to understand the concepts of parallel processing and batching. It is a simple concept not taught to you in public education or even B-school but I’m going to explain it to you. You cannot efficiently make a million in a linear fashion such as a paycheck-to-paycheck savings or one hustle at a time. You have to create a system that can do things in parallel and batches. The best example is counting a million dollars. You can try to count it by yourself but it will take all day and you are prone to error. Instead, you have several people count a piece of the money in $10,000 batches at a time and you will efficiently go through the million dollar count.
Frameworks and Foundations. The problem with Black entrepreneurs is they like to build things off white-label stuff and they cannot scale up their hustle and get stuck. You have to establish your hustle from day one off a solid framework and foundations and build upon it and realize a framework and foundation is the only true asset in your business. If you know your framework and foundation, you can modify it yourself to increase scale with demand and downgrade scale if it is time to pull back. This is what separated me from other cats over the long term is my ability to own my own proprietary framework and foundation. Even further, I can switch out code I written for one application and apply it to another new solution, another advantage of owning your foundation and having your own framework.
Zero Sum Game Theory. For the longest time, African-Americans do not realize they have a lower threshold for zero-sum game theory than the White Privilege system and fail to use this advantage as a counter-offensive. If the news want to attack or stereotype Black people, we can go lower and dirtier than Fox News or any of Rupert Murdoch empires. Yes, in case you are clueless, there was a secret nasty information war going on last decade using zero sum and all I have to say on it is you don’t see too many media outlets attacking Black people anymore, do you? Exactly and you can thank the 30 Rotten Dissidents that morphed into the 3rd (initials for 30 Rotten Dissidents) Strategic Institute today.
Just Winners and Losers. Black people love to talk spiritual and people are right or wrong and that’s all ignorant stuff. The only thing that matter is who won and who lost and we live in a competitive world. You can believe other people of color are coming up but I can assure you other cats are making sure Black people lose so they can make gains and come out winners in America. All this praying and preaching and pundit talk about who is right and wrong, homey – either you going to be a winner or a loser and that’s the real lay of the land. You better start playing to win or you going to lose plain and simple.
Historical Data Extraction. I do not believe in Black History and can careless about the topic. I don’t give a damn who invented peanut butter because it don’t make me money to go out and buy peanut butter. What I care about and what our people should only care about is data extraction. For example, cats love to talk about Black Wall Street in Oklahoma and I can get a sh*t about Black Wall Street in Oklaoma and not impressed either. But what me and my crew doing for Hustle Space has gathered business models from streets around the world and collected data to determine the best business models that need to be put together – that is historical data collection that matters to our community for economic development.
Economic Clustering. Black Enterprise magazine and other Black people claiming they about business been promoting some bullcrap entrepreneurs shouldn’t open the same business next to each other. Our research as well as Harvard Business School demonstrated if you have the same type of businesses together, you will create a competitive sector. The best example is all the tech jobs clustered in India and all the manufacturing jobs clustered in China. Our people for economic development should look into using a strip of our hood commercial sector to focus on one sector like Saville Row in London where they focus on fashion and so on. Then everybody become an expert and it will become the global destination for people around the world to come and do business.
Global Patterns and Practices. In 2009, Dream and Hustle had an international edition where we went to Tokyo and blogged from Tokyo on technology and trends we can apply back here in the hood. We are still using information we gathered from that trip to this day on this blog while other cats post selfies of themselves traveling and ain’t gathered anything of value. Black identity magazines like Black Enterprise and a lot of these characters like Claud Anderson focus on Black people too much and showcase everything as a Black thing but we have to think bigger than that and be globally competitive. That means we need to go worldwide and find global patterns and practices to apply to our own solutions. The biggest source of solutions and patterns for African-Americans are in Asia urban cities and Dream and Hustle already proven this theory correctly over the years.
Area Domination. There is no other concept we are impressed with than 7 Eleven CEO Toshifumi Suzuki implementation of 7 Eleven global expansion through area domination. Area domination is taking over a specific area and region and putting a presence on every corner so everybody in that small area know the brand exist and the brand become strong in that area. This is the ultimate high-density urban strategy for growth and billionaire-level stuff. Once you conquer that area, then you move to another area nearby. This is the strategy of big businesses from Wal-Mart and Krispy Kreme and so on. Brothas and sistas will need to have to establish area domination in their growth strategy to grow a global brand one hood at a time around the world.
Circular Economics. Dream and Hustle is shifting all of our focus to circular economic solutions. Circular economics is the ability to share and use resources that can be recycled and reused instead of thrown away. This is done through the use of sharing services like ride sharing and also subscription models like the Laundromat model. Our goal is to now focus on shifting business models in the hood that were utility to subscription and service models. Circular economics is extremely disruptive and the benefit I’ve seen so far is realized household income savings of $15,000 or more per year, even with lower middle class families. Not owning a car, not paying all these nonsense bills and so on is the new way to go.
The Business Models Covered on Dream and Hustle
When it comes to business models, Dream and Hustle focus on core areas that I later adopted as the core areas of business. These are core areas needed for urban economic development and help elevate our people and those areas are financial, manufacturing, retailing and media. I spoke about how we can use mobile technology as a disrupter and use our hoods and empty lots as the base to start off and make an immediate impact bypassing long-term leases and holding on inventory that often trap small businesses with loans and expenses causing them to not make profits and lead to failure. Here are some of the business models we discussed here on Dream and Hustle.
IPTV. This is where brothas and sistas can create a media library that can be streamed on demand or in real-time. A service can be created where the media is located in places like barbershops and salons in the hood or on giant Jumbotron as a cornerstone of a hood shopping district or just available on setbox boxes, smart TVs and mobile devices like Netflix. The service can be pay-per-view or subscription for revenue and will increase industry for media development of commercials for local Black businesses to advertise locally. Today, it is much easier to create this technology and there are many established digital carriers to make it happen to spark economic development through mass media awareness.
Micro-Malls. The concept of a micro-mall is to help support micro-entrepreneurs and this is a concept we discovered practiced in Hong Kong. This is a setup that allow micro-entrepreneurs to setup cubes and sell stuff out of them, much like a consignment shop. However, we believe this model can be used for commercial interests and use mobile devices to make purchases and follow up with action. Me and the 3rd Strategic Institute Asian crew is currently working with other Asian firms collaboratively on the concept to improve the business model using mobile technology and micro-scaled retail design elements.
Empty Lot Transformation. We spoke on length how we can transform empty lots in our hood into pop-up economic development environments. Many people want to think flea market and not realize we got more portable infrastructures we can bring to an empty lot. We can bring artificial turf to an empty lot, we can bring shipping containers to an empty lot and setup micro-retailing. We can bring solar power lights to an empty lot and convert to a sophisticated local market in a high-density hood community conducting serious transactions.
Pop-Up Shop. We talked about creating revolving pop-up shops in the hood where people start business on the short term and we move them in and out and keep the shops open for business instead of having closed down places. In fact, our early articles on pop-up shops were viewed by cats in the industry and I helped consult on what it takes to create these kind of spaces early on when the trend first started. Pop-up shops are easier to do now with cloud-based point of sale services that use tablets for checkout and mobile store fixtures that can be quickly built up and tore down.
Black Women Empires. African-American women have unfortunately been the negative target of Black media for so many years and dissed by the Black community as sex objects. Many Black women believe they can make money being a booty video model or being a female rapper and stripper and other crap where they cater to getting money from broke ass brothas. But Dream and Hustle realize from our travel to Harajuku in Tokyo to Kyary Paymu-Paymu multi-level businesses that the sistas would be more successful and profitable targeting other sistas than broke brothas. From Black-owned magazines covering sistas and fashion to selling cosmetics to female-orientated cafes and other items like hair extensions, the sistas can set her own entrepreneurial path and Dream and Hustle led that discussion over the several past years.
Digital Money Transfer. Since our brotha Keita from his experience and contribution introduce us to M-Pesa in the early stages, we covered mobile money and how it can be used to create true recycling of money in our communities. Digital money can grow fast from one barber accepting the digital money and using the digital money to buy food from the local store on lunch break and the local store use the digital money to pay a wholesaler who buys products from a manufacturer and this economic development can happen rapidly as a result. African-Americans still have a strong advantage in America to pursue this in the hood and this is still an open market to take over.
Self-Checkout Markets. The self-checkout market is still slept on and I don’t get it. Instead of those coin-operated vending machines that serve bad food filled with sugar and sodium, a self-checkout market uses a mobile phone or kiosk for self-checkout and offer items like fresh fruits and vegetables and other items. There could be a possibility that someone like Amazon may take this over or Starbucks or Whole Foods take this over in a vending area. If a brotha or sista is smart, they would be building out self-checkout markets with the goal of being acquired for $100 million by Whole Foods. Think about the opportunity of a Whole Foods or a Quik Trip or AM/PM taking over vending machines and using the self-checkout market as extended branding. You set this up only for the purpose of being acquired by a bigger fish.
Subscription-Based Laundromat. I did not realize how influential the Laundromat article was and I received so many emails and offline comments that is the best hood model ever discussed on Dream and Hustle. Instead of having a Laundromat that take quarters, just buy regular Laundromat machines and use a membership service and a subscripting billing service in a high density hood like a gym club. A gym club can have 500 subscription members paying $35/month and have only 15 weight machines. It is stupid to have Laundromat machines have quarter slots instead of have thousands of cats in the hood just pay $20/month which will quickly turn a Laundromat operation into a million dollar business and can expand rapidly like Netflix or Redbox and so on.
BYOB Relaxation Lounge. This is a business model we discovered while in Tokyo on our trip and I thought this was the coolest ever. The BYOB angle is where the customer can bring their own bottle to an establishment which bypass the liquor license element altogether and most likely, where you live at allow BYOB without a liquor license for your business. A relaxation lounge is a place for cats to chill at and sit back and relax like they at an airport lounge and charges by the hour. People can hangout with friends or chill by themselves. Recently the 3rd Strategic Institute in Asia advised me this business model will work not only in the hood but will really work in American skyscrapers with a nice window view of the city. Many skyscrapers have cheap leases due to high vacancy and this is an opportunity.
Coupon and Deals Pickup Location. We spoke about the Groupon store concept model over in Hong Kong and realize how cheap and inexpensive this business model is to setup. In this model, an office location is establish in a high-density foot traffic city like New York or Chicago or in Asia where people who walk by can come pick up tickets or coupons for deals and discount they found on their mobile phone. All you need is printed paper and the official paper to print the serial number and code and hand to the customer. This can be done on commission and fees and help small companies reach a customer base. We discussed this business model can be done in skyscrapers also but you know where else this model can be done? Do you see at the mall these “market research” cats offering you $2 to fill out a survey? You can use that same kind of space for people at the shopping mall to pick up their coupons or even use a shopping mall kiosk to pick up coupons and tickets. A lot of foot traffic is key for this model to work.
White Paper Hustling. Instead of creating long e-books, do short white papers backgrounders and sell on Amazon and iTunes and they can cover the latest topics and stories in a more detail bullet point factual manner. This business model has been proven by Dream and Hustle to be the fastest way to generate money real quick and stack up over time and long-term. Just still content from bloggers like Ed Dunn and Dream and Hustle or a blogger you hating and repackage their stuff and sell it on Amazon, by the time they figured out, you already left the bank counting your money and laughing because you got the rent money for next month already in your hand.
The Technology Covered on Dream and Hustle
What’s funny is most of the business models I talked about on Dream and Hustle is I can build almost all of the hustles I discussed using the same technology over and over again. This is the point of talking about foundations and frameworks. This is why I get annoyed when cats come to Dream and Hustle talking about some software package they found that can get something done instead of build out the technology components themselves. See, once you learn the technology components, you can rebuild and reuse over and over again and that is how Swagg-Scientific has an advantage and we can take our hustle globally on day one and scale up real fast. Not only that, if you cats even tried to learn just one of these technology stuff, you could easily be at the $150K to $250K/year income working anywhere in the world you want but you cats want to twist your lips up and not realize there are brothas and sistas right now flying back and forth from Europe and other places in this world doing technology work making that kind of money, especially in Dubai and UAE. So real talk, let’s talk about the technology:
SMS Messaging. I talked about SMS messaging early on in Dream and Hustle but it was realized the service cost too much and each phone carrier is different with their own set of rules. Today, the marketplace for SMS is much cheaper and easier to use and there are places in the world that still use SMS but smartphone growth and things like WhatApp are taking over. What made SMS messaging powerful was the ability to tie your account to REST calls that can store numbers in a database and send messages out automatically. This is what Twitter and Facebook done back in the days. SMS campaigns are still active and this is a great skill and asset to have for marketing.
QR Codes. The ability to dynamically generate QR codes and read QR codes is a game changer asset. You can do everything from ticket redemption to inventory tracking to marketing campaigns with QR code technology and this skill can be sold on a resume or offered as a contracting service. Cats slept hard and did not realize it was Dream and Hustle who went to Tokyo and demonstrated QR codes before QR codes even was supported widespread here in the USA. Look for QR codes APIs to create and read QR codes and this technology is essential for mobile development like ride-sharing apps and other apps that need a coupon code to verify a mobile device has the right information.
Geo-Location. Geo-location applied sciences is serious business because it allow you to geo-target areas from a centralized location. For example with SistaSphere, we can target areas in Atlanta, London and Johannesburg while still be here in Atlanta. We can help sistas find the nearest peer-to-peer hair stylist on her phone using geo-location technology. Dream and Hustle provided several coding examples and projects. The best applied use of geo-location is create a service and I provide the code on this blog where the mobile phone sends the geo-coordinates of the mobile device and able to process geospatial data on the service and just return results via a Google Map or Bing Map.
Membership or oAuth. This technology allow you to manage members and oAuth allow you to connect to social media membership profiles such as the Sign in with Facebook or Twitter feature on most web sites. However, it is important that you manage your own members as an asset to sell a portfolio or promote you have a portfolio in your business. The number of subscribers to your service is important and you want to create code that sign up members, make recommendations to members and help members sign up their friends as members also to your service.
GoDaddy $5/month Hosting. This hosting allow you to cheaply create solutions and proof of concepts and when they grow, you can move on to bigger platforms. Do not build out big until your business model is proven. For Swagg-Scientific, all of our business lines are mandated to start first on $5/month GoDaddy accounts and grow from there so we do not get burned with expensive hosting for a new business that did not take off.
Cloud Services. Nothing is hotter than knowing how to program cloud-based applications and all of Swagg-Scientific businesses are switched to cloud services. Cloud-based applications allow us to create a service that allow someone in Africa run accounting or bookkeeping for their small business in a village and we manage the service here in America. Developing cloud services is how you help your African brothas and sistas in the 21st century, not wearing Kinte cloth and running your mouth. Then think about the Laundromat model, we can set it up where the whole Laundromat model is ran by a cloud service and only mobile devices are used by the attendant and the members to access the Laundromat. Learn how to program in the cloud and this is where the real big bucks are at.
Enterprise Service Bus. This is the most disruptive as it changes the way web sites are processed and I discussed ESB before. Instead of web sites that wait for code to process before returning a screen, a web site simply make a REST call to an ESB that process the message and the ESB returns back the status that is constantly polled. This create instantly scalability where you can create a web site cheap and it can just make rest calls instead of processing data in ASP.NET or PHP all the time and also mobile apps that call the ESB instead of processing. This is a big demand skill to replaced tired old web site applications globally and pays big bucks.
NFC and RFID and Bluetooth. These technology are taking off real hard and in demand. You don’t need to know specifically how these technology work on a technological level, just need to know how to use them. For example, you should know how to use NFC to create check-in and check-out services such as validate a mobile phone can make a payment. Then you should know how to use RFID to use for RFID bands to wave on kiosks to create a Facebook photo booth for example. Bluetooth is used for audio streaming and also to send data back and forth to a mobile phone. Learn the types of applications you use with these technologies to make a career.
Micro-controllers. With micro-controllers, you can create small robot and animation effects and this is a rare skill that pays big bucks worldwide. You can program a microcontroller to do a miniature water show to a huge one that does a huge led light display at a nightclub. This is a very big skill and globally in demand to work worldwide. We spoke about getting your kids into Arduino for example and this is not something to sleep on.
Database Technology. The core of all applications is data and data manage is a big skill. Not just managing database but knowing how to read and take apart data with analysis and using algorithms to investigate data. Not all data is stored – knowing how to use real-time data like the weather and process it. If you have not noticed, if you have RedBox SMS subscript and it’s about to rain or be a good sunny day to go out, you will get a text message for a 2-for-1 rental special. This is the kind of stuff you have to learn how to do with data and this is a solid career path knowing how to process database and real-time streaming data.
Now in Return for the Favor
I been doing this blog for 8 years showing brothas and sistas how to do for self and the information I provided above is not even close to everything. Now go and ask Black Enterprise magazine what they been publishing over the past 8 years and see what they come back with..thought so. Now that you read all of what Dream and Hustle and realize how awesome we been showing brothas and sistas, maybe you can hook a brotha up with something from his Amazon wish list: http://amzn.com/w/30JYQU9M6Z1HR
But anyway, I wanted to share this content with brothas and sistas to know this is where Dream and Hustle came from and how other cats simply cannot mess with us and we move forward on bigger and better things. Now that I turned another year, I’m going to have a new direction in my life and that is to do real leadership things and take a more aggressive role in working with others to solve problems and create solutions for our people. I’m not looking for anyone validation and approval and at my age, it would be unwise for a cat out there to try me, cats my age are not someone you want to mess with. That means I will be on straight mission to do for my people.
As I indicated, the biggest effort will be to incorporate circular economics in the hood as well as help establish media, financial and retailing frameworks to help as many of us out as I can. I cannot save our people as many African-Americans don’t want to be saved and may be fated to be doomed. All I can do is help those willing to do for themselves and do my part to help them enjoy the kind of life I enjoyed being in this STEM game and doing things my way. So I got to go enjoy my birthday and let’s start moving forward to bigger and better things together.