How to Run a Business That Doesn’t Suck: The Hank and John Green Rules
So Hank and I run or help run several businesses at the moment: Vidcon, DFTBA Records, the juggernaut that is 2-D Glasses, ecogeek, vlogbrothers, scishow, and crashcourse, as well as administering the nonprofit Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck. These are not huge businesses or anything (and in some cases are not even profitable), but many of them have employees and revenue and function like any other business, so recently Hank and I have developed some Rules for Running a Business That Doesn’t Suck, which we thought we’d share.
Rule 1: Don’t be a dick. This is the governing law of the Internet, as created by the great Wil Wheaton, and we try to apply it to our businesses. Not being a dick mostly means treating your clients and customers respectfully, and focusing on creating value rather than creating profit, and generally being reasonably kind and personable when it comes to business relationships.
Rule 2: Increase Awesome or Decrease Suck. If an idea won’t increase world awesome or decrease worldsuck, we won’t do it. (And if we’re doing something that no longer feels like it is increasing awesome or decreasing suck, we stop doing it.)
Rule 3: Minimize lawyering. Hank and I tend to lose interest in any endeavor when a lot of lawyers become involved. Basically, if we require lawyers other than our cousin Mike or the people he works with, we don’t do it.
Rule 4: Employ more people per dollar of revenue than PepsiCo. This is very important to us. So one of the emerging metrics for a company’s “success” is revenue generated per employee. PepsiCo generates more than $196,728 in revenue per employee. (That may seem ludicrously high, but it’s much lower than many companies: Google generates $1,900,000 every year per employee.) The thinking goes that successful companies generate a lot of money per employee. Our thinking is that it is both good business and good citizenship to invest revenue in new employees.
Rule 5: Keep promises. We try to keep promises even when they are very inconvenient and expensive to keep, such as when Amazon Germany ships out a thousand unsigned preorders of your new book even though you signed more than enough copies for them to ship to their customers.
Rule 6: Pay tops out at 10x average worker pay. Pretty simple, really: The highest paid employees of a company shouldn’t make more than 10 times the average employee’s pay. (Current estimates in the US indicate CEOs make between 185 and 310 times more than the average worker.) Capping this at a multiple of ten means everyone is invested in seeing the company grow and succeed.
Rule 7: Have awesome customers. If you don’t like the people who watch and read and wear the stuff you make, then you will not have any fun. Speaking of which…
Rule 8: Have fun. Our grandfather wrote thousands of lists in his life—grocery lists, lists of business ideas, pros and cons of taking different jobs. Almost all of his lists ended “Have fun!” We think this is good advice.
On Ad Block
On my most recent video I saw a whole ton of comments from people saying “I never see pre-rolls on Vlogbrothers videos because I have AD BLOCK installed.” Well, two problems here.
- No one sees pre-rolls on vlogbrothers videos because we don’t run them
- I am not sure how I feel about Ad Blockers and I wish you would consider your decision more carefully, especially your apparent desire to share the world.
If everyone was like you and used ad blockers, there would be no Freddie Wong videos to watch. There would be no YouTube. There would be no Google or GMail or Facebook or any of it. If everyone used ad block, the internet would be made of things that suck and things that cost money.
And so when you say to the world “HEY PONCES! WTF AREN’T YOU USING AD BLOCK! SUCKERS!” What you’re saying is “Let’s all work together to destroy the internet.”
The only reason Ad Block works for you is that most people don’t use it. It is in your best interest to keep Ad Block quiet and not let anyone know about it. Spend like 13 seconds thinking through a world where Ad Block gets installed on a substantial number of browsers in the world:
Advertisers call up platforms (Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc) and say “We aren’t going to pay you for advertisements if no one sees them.”
The platforms freak out and spend a huge amount of time and money creating Ad Block Blockers. Maybe they partner with Mozilla. Maybe with the US Government. Maybe they create another technological solution. In any case, afterward the internet is clunkier and maybe even less free than beforehand.
Ad Blockers counter by working around the work-arounds.
Advertisers still pull back funds, the internet gets worse. Less money is spent on making the internet cool and interesting, more money is spend on trying to defeat Ad Blockers.
At the end of the day, your attempts to remove some pixels that were off in the corner of the screen where you probably would never have seen them anyway have made the whole world a less awesome place.
I understand the desire to work-around a system that annoys you. But I do not understand the apparent inability of some people to think their decisions through to their logical conclusion.
***FOOTNOTE ON TUMBLR***
You may notice that Tumblr neither costs money nor sucks. However, before Tumblr got it’s most recent round of venture capital funding, you may also remember how it was crashing 20 or 30 times per day. The funding that made it possible for Tumblr to stay online consistently would not have come in if the people with that money did not believe that someday Tumblr would have some kind of path to profitability…and the clearest of those paths is through advertising.
Is there a word to describe the feeling that it’s okay for me as an individual to do something even though I recognize that if everyone did it, it would be disastrous? Like, people aren’t generally ashamed to own cars, but we recognize that if all adults in the world owned cars, it would be an ecological disaster—not to mention the traffic. Using ad blockers is the same: If everyone did it, as Hank points out, the Internet would be a far less cool and useful place. Is there a word for that, or is it a lexical gap?
