Several weeks ago, I asked the question about whether I could create a muse, as described by Tim Ferris in his 4-Hour Workweek.

Background on my Muse(s)

I’m a big fan of the book and I strongly recommend that anyone who has not read this book yet that you should take the opportunity to read it.  He has some very good ideas and novel ideas on how to approach your life.

I believe that one of the keys to successfully work a “4-Hour Workweek” is that you have to have a self-supporting business, or as Tim calls it, a muse.  He lays out a detailed plan on how to achieve it and for this, I give him a lot of credit.  Most “self-help” books or “how-to” articles paint in such broad strokes that it is hard to get any actionable ideas out of it (on a side note, that is a criticism of a book on what I believe to be a related genre - Rich Dad, Poor Dad).  Regardless, I think that these books are more important for their ideas than for step-by-step approaches.  If it were that easy, everyone would be rich and the efficiencies of the markets would eliminate this easy path to riches.

However, I digress.  Anyway, I love the ideas in the 4-Hour Workweek but I think one of it’s biggest faults is that it is MUCH harder to create a muse, even with such detailed instructions.  My premise is that if someone with my online marketing skills, knowledge, and a bit of investment to start the venture has trouble setting up a sustainable venture, then motivated, everyday reader would not be able to create their own 4-Hour Workweek.

So I decided to try to create my own muse.  We haven’t done much in product related online marketing (basically just an e-commerce site) and I always wanted to try my hand in that arena since it is almost pure direct marketing and I thought this would be a great arena to do so.

My 2 Muses

Instead of creating just 1 muse, I decided to try my hand at two.  While it might dilute my effort there were several reasons for trying this:

• I know the suppliers for one of my products and they have always had difficulty with online marketing.  If I am successful with this muse, it could be very helpful for them.  On top of helping myself, I am helping them.
• There was another product that I thought fit great into some of the criteria that Tim outlined and I saw some businesses that had success in the industry.  I think I could improve upon their online marketing efforts so it looked like a ripe market.

The Status of the Muses

Upon deciding what markets I wanted to target, I decided to use Yahoo to sell my products.  There are other platforms that I could have used but I felt that there’s is a great one to set up an initial e-commerce site.  My only reservation is that it requires knowledge of a fairly rare programming language so the cost to develop it would be a bit higher.

I hired a firm that had some great looking websites and contracted a better deal for doing 2 websites at the same time.  We have worked together several times a week over the past month and a half to get the site up and running and it’s pretty close.  There are some small changes that they have had to make and are about ready to make it live.  This part of the process has taken much longer than I figured it would.  I should not be surprised however because designing websites with another firm always seems to take an extensive period of time. 

For my muse that I am not disclosing, I have 1 deal set, and several others in the works with other suppliers.  I think they have some good products and I could probably just go with them solely right now while I test it out a little bit.  The process also looks pretty good on drop-shipping the products so that takes some worries away.  Now I just have to work on getting all the products loaded into the catalog.  And of course, I have outsourced that task to some of my personal assistants.

For my muse that is around a subset of office furniture, I have the supplier lined up for that (which is one of the reason I chose that) but we are only now getting into the details of the products that I will sell.  I was a little disappointed in that they are only able to supply a percentage of what we originally talked about.  However, that might be a good thing because I can focus my advertising on those products before expanding.  And it’s in a “niche-type” product - monitor arms.  It fits into a great price range $75-$150 and they aren’t sold by absolutely everyone.  In fact, if they do really well, I might just focus the site specifically on those products.

What’s Next?

The building of my muses is progressing a little slower than what I wanted but it’s still going in the right direction with no major hurdles.  Part of it might be due to the fact that I can’t focus on it as I have to worry about my primary business, but I don’t think that takes away from this experiment at all because that will be the case with most aspiring entrepreneurs attempting to create a muse.  I think they should both be live in the next 30 days and I’ll probably provide my next update then.