A Story about Talking Dinosaurs

A Story about Talking Dinosaurs and a Personal Business for Life

By Ryan North

I started Qwantz.com in February 2003, as a place to show some dinosaur comics I'd been thinking of doing. This was part of a project I was involved with, a Learn-By-Doing type of exercise (www.LearnByDoing.ca) in my last year as an undergrad at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

I put up the website on February 1st - at which point, if you visited, you would have seen just a single comic, but a comic representing something I thought had some promise. What I had to do, to make it work, was get people to read it.

There are literally thousands of comics on the web. The barriers to entry are low: all you need is, basically, a little dedication - which meant that I would have to do something to make myself stand out. As with anything online, I couldn't just build it and hope they would come. I did believe that if people would visit my comic once, those that found it good would come back again tomorrow. As I saw it, the trick was getting people to visit that first time.

Meet T-Rex, one of the Leads

We put up some ads around campus: cardboard-dinosaurs we made in an afternoon, each with the memorable web address poo.ca (which pointed to Qwantz.com) on them. Over 200 dinosaurs went up across Carleton University, and while most were gone a week later, some - especially those I put up out of reach (I am a tall person and as in any GM (Guerrilla Marketing) initiative, we are relying on the fact that people are basically lazy. If they have to get a ladder to take stuff down, they probably won’t) - remained for months, and may well be there still. The last time I checked, when I had graduated and got my degree, and there were still dinosaurs up.

It turns out that the dinosaur, coupled with the strange domain name, were incongruous enough that people visited the site.

The rest of the "announcing Qwantz.com to the world" process was online, as it's much easier to visit www.Qwantz.com when you're sitting in front of a web browser than if you happen to see a green cardboard dinosaur while you're on your way to class. As this was a small site and I a poor student, I decided I would not spend any money on advertising.

There are lots of free ways to advertise online: I'd post on Slashdot (a tech news site with a huge readership) and each post that was moderated would send me hundreds of hits - because in my signature line, I had a simple link. There's no need to be obnoxious when advertising online - I simply said the equivalent of: "Hey guys, I've got this comic, maybe you might like it?"

The advantage of something like a comic as opposed to a standard online business is that people feel very comfortable recommending it to others. All of my growth, past this initial 'get the word out' stage, has come from word-of-mouth: people like the comic and email it to a friend (there's a form on the site that lets you do this), and maybe they'll become readers too.

Friends tell friends who tell friends, and it seems that each day I've got the pleasure of a new reader writing me. The site covers its own expenses through merchandise that I design. There are shirts with a talking T-Rex on them. It's pretty awesome.

I see Qwantz.com as the ideal "hobby that pays for itself", or PB4L (Personal Business for Life): I do something I love, people seem to like it too, and it's been a lot of fun each day.

When I get to 500 consecutive days with the same characters (coming soon), I am going to put out a media release with a headline something like this:

"Computer Grad Student Publishes Identical Dinosaur Comic Images 500 Consecutive Days—Sets New World Record"

Postscript:

Check out the Prof. who inspired me (Dr. Bruce M. Firestone): http://www.dramatispersonae.org/ and the Professional Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs Folks who nurture people like us: http://www.exploriem.org/. Also, Qwantz.com came about as you already know because in my last year as an undergrad, I spent time in a LEARN BY DOING environment: see http://www.learnbydoing.ca/.

StoryTalkingDinosaurs.doc