more-money / uncategorized Interview with Dawn from PartyBluPrints (cont) | Better Way Moms
Today is May 18, 2012

Think Outside the Cubicle

If that job is for you then great! If you’re ready to shake it up, here’s where to look!

Interview with Dawn from PartyBluPrints (cont)

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PartyBluPrints

…it’s unique, get it trademarked or copywrited right at the beginning. Get it trademarked or service marked. We did that right in the beginning because it gave us credibility and it also protected us. Because when you do something like this, your asset is your intellectual property. And if you’re good at it, people are going to copy it. And this is the only way to protect it. So that was one of the first things we did when we started. We got ourselves an intellectual property lawyer and got ourselves service marked. And we did end up getting it! We went through all three stages of the service mark with the government so we can now use the little “R” next to our name, and that feels good.

Sarah: So you’re officially registered service mark.

Dawn: Yes, and my advice to anyone starting a business that’s blog-based or based on your intellectual property is to get trademarked or service marked right away. Get yourself a name, a logo, copyright everything. This will help to brand you. The way you’re going to make money is by being an expert and that gives you credibility and it gives any body you’re going to work with confidence in who you are. That being said, the next thing we decided is that we weren’t going to do this in a small way. We wanted to work with the big fish.

So we started pouring over the internet and what we noticed was that Microsoft had an event page. It had electronic invitations, but on their e-vites, they had no party ideas or tips. How many times do people see these electronic invitations? All the time, but no one had e-vites that were special. How many times do you see a really great party tip? Not very often.

So we got on a plane, we asked for a meeting, we got the meeting, we pitched our idea and they said, “OK.” We flew home two days later and I was like wetting my pants. We walked in there 40 years old. The whole Microsoft campus with all these amazing young harvard and MIT graduates who had jeans on. We definitely stuck out. Walking in there all dressed up to pitch our idea, but it was a good idea and they liked it. We negotiated a contract with Microsoft that provided us with a link to our site and that helped us establish ourselves as experts in entertaining at home. And for six months we ended up with that link on their events live page. And you can only imagine what kind of traffic that sent to our site. That was the trade off, they put a link up to us, and we gave them tips.

Sarah: Wow, that’s a pretty impressive story. How did you get in touch with Microsoft?

Dawn: I reached out to a contact at Microsoft who helped reach out to the right person. I wrote an e-mail and we got the meeting.

Sarah: I love it. I love the ambition in that.

Dawn: Sometimes you just gotta go for it, because you really have nothing to lose and it ended up working out for us. So when that happened, that was a big deal. That gave us a lot of credibility with magazines and with other sites, because here we were working with Microsoft. People write volumes about how do you, as a small business, get in to work with Microsoft. And we were an approved contract provider with Microsoft. And because of that, we were able to get a lot more jobs… (cont)

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