For the last weeks we’ve asked you to think about one very important questions of rus: how should we categorise and structure our new-in-progress magazine? It has helped a lot to get feedback from all of you and we somehow proudly present the poll results today. We are really happy that our potential readers are thinking forward and want a new way of structure. The preeminent majority of voters clicked “Living Spaces” which is also one of the founder’s favourite!

My sketchbook is already full of scribbles and ideas what to incorporate, which rooms our first “SISTER Living Space” will have and which articles I would love to have written or write myself. If you have any wishes yourself, please comment or write to us and we’ll happily consider each input!

Thank you for participating!! Stay tuned for our introduction of each category!
Thea

With the possibilities of digital ages one can build up an audience even before launching the actual product. This manifests itself in the number of friends on Facebook, the followers on Bloglovin or the followers of the blog itself. Thus one of our most important tasks for SISTER is to win a lot of friends and followers.

It is not that easy to think of all the ideas and inspirations once heard of, seen or read about. That’s why we want to start introducing our ideas and we would be glad about other recommendations. Just send us any links, crazy things, give feedback whether positive or negative!

The first step is to tell as many people as possible. You often get asked questions which help to improve things or you unexpectedly get great ideas. We also try to go to a lot of events and conferences. Thea just went to Hello Etsy conference in Berlin last week. Besides many interesting lectures and presentations she was also able to hand out business cards. Soon we will also have flyers with our url which we will hand out in places where our potential target group hopefully is: universities, cafés, etc. – would you have any suggestions for places??

Facebook is one of the most important channel. As some of you might have noticed ;), we invited many of our own friends to the SISTER Page (and are still thrilled about each and ever like). Moreover there is twitter, Google+ and to a certain extent German StudiVZ. We want to try to be present in these networks.

Right now the blog and website is the core of SISTER, it can be seen as the prequel to our digital magazine. We hope that who came to sister-mag.com once, will actually come again to see the finished magazine. Continuing visitors are key!
Therefore we try to connect to bloggers and strong webpages with many followers. We also would love to get attention of offline media and are working on that as well. The easiest way however is to connect to the lovely bloggers all over the world, which we also want to win as contributors.

We already started with features on our own blogs Neu4bauer and Toni in Viaggio. In order to get more followers for this blog we have also planned a few Incentives and Giveaways, which we are very excited about.

Classical ads for our target group we have on our lists, however only on the basis of performance.

Liftings in Blogger networks and other platforms we sure want to try – we’ll tell you our experiences with that!

I am very excited and looking forward to seeing how our ideas actually turn out. As with all former client projects, which I’ve participated or controlled, you are never sure whether your ideas will turn out the way you want to. Every day you stare at the stats and are excited about every movement or comment!

In this sense I am excited to hear from you and get new ideas! Toni

Image Source: Mochatini

There has been quite a buzz in the internet about the Hello Etsy conference in Berlin on the last weekend. The schedule was full of speeches and workshops which I found more or less inspiring and well done. The very first official speech was done by Doug Richard:

Doug Richard is a Californian entrepreneur and specialist in technology transfer, commercialisation and business incubation who is now based in the UK. Through appearances at the BBC programme Dragons’ Den he became somewhat famous. Himself he founded and sold the two companies “Visual Software” and “ITAL Computers”.
In 2008 he founded the School for Startups, which is based in the UK and wants to teach founders how to do it right – teaching entrepreneurship in cooperation with the Royal Institution and the British Library.

He started off his speech by emphasizing how important young businesses and startups are: “all new jobs in the US come from young businesses – also the innovation and changes in the world”
However being small does not only have to mean to stay local. This great opportunity for globally active small companies is only possible today in a world which has been completely changed by a few “titans of communication”. He briefly talked about the innovators of KAZAA (do you remember that file-sharing software which was then shut down?), who used this technology of connecting and sharing to found SKYPE. The third titan in this series for Doug Richard was Mark Zuckerberg: “Mark admittedly was looking for a date … and changed the whole world.”. Whether we think about Facebook, Skype or Google – which are all commercial concerns today, they all have helped to make the world smaller, communication more effortless and by tightening the world they let us float up a little bit. A small business is not any more just a small local business.

He then talked about his own biography and the challenges of being an angel investor: “You only invest in the most risky enterprises and the average return is one out of ten”. Thus, when one was investing in one startup, the whole time he wonders if this special idea is this ONE which has to cross-finance all the other nine. However this system has changed too: as other people have built up a virtual world around us, so too the costs of starting a business have been reduced and the risk has gone down.
His School of Startups does teach exactly this: a business without money, start it lightly without offices – offices are according to Doug for the ego. There are hundreds of “offices” in cafés and homes which you can use.

Doug demanded for all people to create new wealth. There supposedly is always an opportunity for massive new wealth in society – whether economical or in other virtues such as happiness.

Last but not least he made some comments about programming which were both hilarious and so (!) true: Programming is a craft and not a science … it is an art. As soon as you make that differentiation, you’ll be able to handle developpers in a much more elegant way. Because: a good programmer will produce code, a great programmer will make elegant code. Thus his conclusion: hire a great programmer and wrap them in cotton wool ;)!

What I also liked about his last remarks: he said that we all mistify the art of business. Anything you’ll learn at the schools and universities about entrepreneurship is quite academic … and thus deeply impractical. One an learn only practical things by STARTING! Thea

The whole speech as video:

When we had to decide which logo would be our SISTER branding we asked some friends and we got an amazing return of mails and messages! This time we want to ask all of you with quite a delicate decision: categories! Below I’ll explain the five different approaches we are currently ruminating about. In the end we ask you to vote for your favourite – how would you like SISTER mag to be structured!?

Traditional

With the goal to be stay open for innovative approaches when creating this new magazine we are questionning all old concepts of magazine publishing. If you think about women’s magazines you mostly have the traditional division of topics: Fashion, Beauty, Living, Food etc. It is for sure the safest way to structure a publication. Almost every article I could think of snugly fit in one of them = biggest advantage!

What it could look like – an example!: