How to Run a Business That Doesn’t Suck: The Hank and John Green Rules

fishingboatproceeds:

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.

Thank you, Hank Green!

comedyoranges:

The odds you’ll ever see this are veryveryveryvery slim, but I’m gonna say this anyway!

Thank you soooooooooooooo much for choosing my comment on your video a few weeks ago, and for sending me a FANTASTIC pac-man poster! I’m pleased to report it’s found a sunny spot in a Canadian nerdfighter home.

I just want to say, Hank, that whether it’s Vlogbrothers, when you get super excited and get all your viewers crazy excited about charities and life-changing innovations, or Sci-Show, where we get to learn about FREAKING ADORABLE Tadigrades, or when you and Katherine play Super Mario Bros (Wii!!!) and, well, hilarity ensues, you are always so great for always thinking of others and doing things to make our days a little happier, a little more interesting, and way more awesome. 

That you and John put so much effort into your music, your books, and decreasing worldsuck means a lot to us nerdfighters.

So thank you very much, Hank Green, for this piece of awesome that, as one of my friends put it, I can show my grandkids one day.

DFTBA!

(quality’s not great I know, shhhh)

You’re very welcome!

(via comedyoranges-deactivated201204)

Tour de Nerdfighting. Houston, TX.

tothemouthofhellitis:

So…I’d have to say it was pretty freakin’ amazing. It was funny, it was clever, it was real, informative, everything a nerdfighter could ever want. So yay. They also gave away free posters, which I thought was great because some people there (and I met one) didn’t have the money for any real merchandise. I also met John and Hank and they signed things. Angels and rainbows rained down. Speaking of rainbows, John remarked that my t-shirt with a unicorn farting rainbows was interesting, and so I will love it forever. And yet all I could seem to get out was “thank you”s and so forth, until I got to Hank in which I proudly and stupidly (perhaps not) proclaimed “I like you”, but I assume he wasn’t freaked out due to the fact that he still gave me a high-five. It was my right hand. And then I gave them sparkling water. With DFTBA on it. Because I don’t know, I have my reasons…..*actually you don’t*…SHUT UP. Overall: One of the most amazing experiences of my life and I will cherish it forever along with the varying yet always impactful work of Hank and John Green. You can call them geniuses, you can call them funny, you can call them relatable and honest, but really I would use all of those and many more. The footprint they are leaving on the world is so wonderful, that it may be unbelievable. But I believe. (cheesy ending) :D

I am drinking this sparkling water right now. It is very good. Thank you for coming and for sharing your thoughts. It makes us feel wonderful.

CLUE 6

tetris-party:

To give John and Hank a chance to rest, we’ve instructed them to pass this clue on to all of Nerdfighteria. That’s right, it is YOUR responsibility to solve this part of the scavenger hunt.

Here we go.

Hank and the Katherine have covered a number of songs over the past five years. However, one song is easily the most Horrible of all. Find the video of this cover.

So after we watched this video we wanted to give the left out instrument its moment in the sun. So add the sentence that Hank chants toward the very end about said instrument to dft.ba/- to give that instrument its 15 minutes of fame and get to the next step of the Clue.

Here we are at a blog of John’s that is pre-vlogbrothers. Weird, eh? In this blog John talks about planning his wedding with the Yeti (all together now: awwwwww) and it seems that due to his and Hank’s love of shiny clothing that she barely escaped a bedazzled wedding. Find the name that Hank uses for John’s once shiny outfit and add it to effyeahnerdfighters.com.

Watch this video (we promise, it’s pure entertainment) up until you hear the following phrase: “Take your time lady, my remote is running out of batteries.” Then PAUSE. That time stamp is where you should start the next video, conveniently located here: dft.ba/-outofbatteries.

You may have never heard this story before but it’s a great one told by John about the Yeti (before, again, she was the Yeti). After watching go ahead and dft.ba the name for the people that wooed Sarah in front of John.

So this step is a bit different. Katherine made this vlog because she was tagged in a quiz. Her answers are pretty funny, right? But what you need to pay attention to in order to move on to the next step (we’re nearly there, promise!) is the info box below. There Katherine tags 5 YouTubers. Follow the follwing steps:

1) Gather the following letters from each YouTuber’s name:

First tag: last letter, last word
Third tag: first letter
Fourth Tag: eighth and ninth letters
Fifth Tag: first two letters

2) Now take those letters and unscramble them into the title of the next video (which you can locate in 2007).

Aren’t they CUTE? Very adorable, that John and the Yeti hand. Though we will likely never see her face in a video, her hand has made quite a few appearances and Nerdfighteria is very happy with that. So now to our last Katherine video (in case you hadn’t noticed the pattern yet). Head over to tetris-party.tumblr.com and add to the link the name of the very thing that landed John in the hospital.

This video’s oh-so-sweet. And it looks like Katherine’s in for another 5 years, so that’s good for everyone involved. We’re happy to have them both around. Alright, last Yeti video time! Finding it should be pretty easy, just look around on this page for a hidden link.

Alright Nerdfighteria. You did it. You made it through. Now just tweet to @nerdfighteria what Willy says at the end of the video (doesn’t willy sound an awful lot like the Yeti? Weird). 

Good hunting all! The clues go back to John and Hank tomorrow but we may do it this way again, so stay tuned.

And don’t forget, you can follow the progress of the scavenger hunt on tumblr (tetris-party.tumblr.com), twitter (@nerdfighteria) and YouTube (Nerdfighteria).

So we’ve been set on a scavenger hunt by some amazing Nerdfighters during our tour. We did the first five clues…but apparently the sixth one is for you!