Insight
Entrepreneurs make a huge mistake focusing on just one business
“The reality is as an entrepreneur that that is just going to be a huge mistake, right? I mean, it is too many people out there that frankly just dive into one thing, build it, sell it, move on to something else. I get that, but I'd rather dive into multiple th…”
Opinion
Outside executives hired for planned 2000 IPO lacked basic competency
“Wall Street wanted to see the gray hairs, the CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, all the lettered saviors, and when everything went to hell in a handbasket, basically, we figured out pretty quickly that the folks we had brought in to take us to the promised land didn't know ja…”
Opinion
Traditional book publishers act as mere printers without providing distribution value
“And frankly, you know, there's self published, there's hybrid publishers and there's traditional. I've done all three. And at the end of the day, publishers are nothing more than printers. You know, so, I mean, all they do is print, you know, the books for you…”
Disclosure
New Media Summit pays no speaker fees, only covers travel expenses
“Correct. We will take care of the hotel. We'll take care of their meals. We'll take good care of them while they're there.”
Disclosure
Olsher buys stage time at conferences as a core revenue driver
“Part of my revenue model is actually by stage time. So if you have an event and you know that people are going to, you know, be there and be interested potentially in my products, programs, or services, talk to me. I will buy stage time.”
Insight
Olsher: Organizers can charge speakers $100 per attendee for stage time
“A hundred bucks a head is a pretty safe bet. So, I mean, if you've got a 300 person event, you could easily be charging somebody 30 grand to speak on that stage.”
Disclosure
Olsher: New Media Summit covers costs upfront and profits on backend
“Strategy. Number one is to have everything covered by the time the door is open to the event. Number two then is there will be products, programs, services, coaching, those sorts of things that will be offered at the event.”
Disclosure
Brands must commit to six-figure minimum spends to advertise on Liquor.com
“That's just not going to do you any good, but realistically to work with us you're going to be looking at a six figure spend to make any sort of sense.”
Insight
Publishing advances rely entirely on an author's existing platform over agents
“Agent is, I mean, it's part of the battle, my brother, but it's really all about platform. I mean, I hate to use Michael Hyatt's term and everybody else, and you know that term, but it's, it truly is about, if you can push a button to make shit happen, you're …”
Insight
Selling 8,000 books in two weeks guarantees New York Times bestseller status
“Reality is that if you want to hit the list, if you move eight to 10,000 books in your first in your first week out, first two weeks out, you'll hit the list.”
Disclosure
Olsher: Liquor.com hired an investment bank to solicit acquisition offers
“We ended up bringing in an investment banking group to help us try to solicit offers and we're still actually in that process right now.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Olsher: Liquor.com has nearly 2 million database subscribers
“We've got almost two million subscribers on the database.”
Disclosure
New Media Summit early bird tickets cost $4,997 with 42 sold
“It's 4997 dollars to come to this event, meet with the icons, leave with bookings in hand again, take care of all your PR really, if you will in one fell swoop. And so at this point we just started marketing. We sold our first two super early bird tickets righ…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Olsher: New Media Summit costs $150K all-in to produce
“Well, all in, it'll be a hundred grand for the venue, no doubt. And then when you take into consideration the AV and the event management and everything else that goes into it, the marketing and so on you're probably looking, I mean, for most events of this na…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liquor.com boasts 36 million unique visitors and 1.8 million email subscribers
“That's a domain that I've owned since 1998, and we get at this juncture, we get about thirty-six million uniques to the site, and almost a 1,000,008 on the email list.”
Assertion Supported
Olsher: Liquor.com filed S-1 in 2000, lost domain until 2005
“Well, actually it started as a catalog company in 91. We launched on CompuServe's electronic mall in 93, put together one of the first fully functional e-commerce sites in 95, and then picked up the domain liquor.com in 98, had the S one filed to go public in …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Liquor.com is projected to generate $7.5 million in 2016 revenue
“And so that's kind of modified over the years, but right now we're doing this year we're slated to do about seven and a half.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liquor.com generated approximately $3 million in revenue in 2015
“2015 was right around three.”
Assertion Supported
Steve Olsher: Liquor.com advertises for Diageo, Bacardi, and Brown-Forman
“Yeah, no, I mean, we work with all the biggest brands in the world you know, from the Diageo portfolio, if you know Diageo, I mean, you know, and then of course you know, Bacardi and, you know, the, I mean, heck, you name it, the single malt Scotches, the Jack…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Olsher: Liquor.com gets about 400,000 monthly unique visitors from ZergNet
“Literally, because we have been taking advantage of that for as long as we have now, I mean, we'll get about 400,000 monthly uniques to the site just from ZergNet alone.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liquor.com grew email conversion rates from under 0.5% to nearly 6%
“Our conversion rates used to be just absolute shit. I mean, we were looking at like less than half of one percent and since we've been working with some of you know, some pretty interesting characters out there, They're to just really just know their stuff. I …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Olsher completed $50 million in real estate development over 12 years
“I've done commercial. I've done residential. I've done for sale. I've done for rent. I've done about fifty million in development over the last 12 years.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Olsher: Liquor.com generates about 3 million monthly impressions
“We're about three million or so monthly impressions right now for the site.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Reinvention Radio podcast tracks toward 7,000 total monthly downloads
“Reality is that we did over the weekend, we did about a thousand downloads. So for the month of May we will probably be somewhere around 7000 or so total downloads.”
