Even though it constantly gets in the way of my Twitter streams :), I don’t mention Shakespeare’s Pizza (Columbia, MO) that much. There are two reasons for that. First, I don’t know exactly what it has to do with our Shakespeare. I mean, I don’t talk about the music group Shakespeare’s Sister much, either.

Second, I’m totally jealous that people in Missouri get to actually say stuff like, “Hey, I’m going over to Shakespeare’s to get a beer,” and I don’t. 🙁 A we have in Boston is stinkin’ Cheers, and that’s been off the air for ages. 😉

But, seriously, Shakespeare’s just won Good Morning America’s Best Bites : College Edition competition. So not only do they have the best name, like, ever, but they’ve got a dedicated following and pretty killer food to boot.

Congratulations!

Been watching the early seasons of The Muppets via Netflix. Last night:
The Phantom of Muppet Theatre: “I played Hamlet! I played Othello!! I was killed on opening night.”
Kermit the Frog : “Who killed you?”
Phantom: “The critics.”
<cue laugh track>
My kids? “Daddy, Othello! Hamlet! Shakespeare!”
I like that they recognized Othello, because we don’t talk about that one much at the house. Hamlet they’d recognize, though, sure. I should break out the board game, they’ll get a kick out of that.

I had no idea what Shakespeare in Studs was when it came through my newsfeeds so I skipped it at first. Turns out it’s a Wall Street Journal piece on the costume design for Julie Taymor’s upcoming Tempest movie!
When the initial images were starting to circulate and they ended up on one of the computer-geek boards I frequent, it didn’t take people long to say “Zippers? Are those zippers I see on those costumes? Pretty sure they didn’t have zippers back then!” (Bonus points to the guy who responded, “You do realize that there’s magic and fairies in this too, right?”)
The zippers were deliberate. A lot of thought (and not a lot of budget!) went into the costumes.

The film had a limited costume budget, a relatively small $200,000. Ms. Powell sewed zippers on costumes herself during filming on the rocky Hawaiian island of Lanai. “I don’t always do that,” she says, “for anyone who’s reading this and wants to hire me.”

I’m wondering if we can get some discussion started on this topic. I probably shouldn’t be posting it on a Friday afternoon, but like so many other “rules” of working the web, I tend to go with where my attention span leads me.
I don’t think it would be a surprise to anybody if I said that “If I could make a living out of doing the Shakespeare thing, then yeah, sure, I’d certainly go for it.” The question then becomes, “What exactly is the Shakespeare thing?” And that’s where I’m a bit stuck, because I’m really over here carving out my own niche. I don’t act or direct it. I don’t teach it. I’m just….me.
I have skills, though. I’m quite the competent computer geek, and I’d like to think I’m a fairly competent writer as well. And I think it’s safe to say that after five years of doing this, even though I have no real “academic cred”, I know at least a little something about my subject matter.
So I often (and I do mean often) ponder, how can I combine those things? I read business books and listen to entrepreneurial podcasts all the time. I’m listening to several as we speak. The lessons tend to be the same.
Lesson One : People will pay you money if they think it will make them money. This comes in many forms and includes things like “if you save me time, that will save me money.” But in general there’s a whole big market out there for people to write “Succeed in Blogging Now!” and “Get Rich Slowly!” and all sorts of other items that clearly fit this pattern – if you buy this from me, then you stand a better chance of making more money because of it.
Lesson Two : Easing the “Pain Points”. This one is a little trickier, because it basically says that a given group of people will pay money to change something that they don’t like about their current situation. They won’t make any money on their own, and probably won’t save time (since that tends to be directly related to money), but they’ll pay money anyway for the peace of mind factor. I think that golf is a great example here. No matter how much money you spend on golf, you’re never going to make money (unless you’re a golf pro, of course). But that doesn’t stop people from spending a fortune on everything golf related you can imagine. The same with weddings, and so on. There’s just certain things that people say “Yes, I’m willing to spend money to get what I want.”
So, where does Shakespeare fit in? I can’t see the business of Shakespeare, from where I sit, as having anything to do with the first lesson. Yes there are people that “do Shakespeare” for a living, so theoretically there are products that you could produce that would make their lives more productive. Therefore we could assume that these professionals would pay for those products. But that market’s not really about Shakespeare, is it? It’s about the business. Would a Shakespeare actor’s iPhone application be basically the same thing as any other actor’s iPhone application?
Lesson Two is more intriguing to me. I know that I, personally, have a pain point – my kids’ education. I want my kids to know and love Shakespeare, and I work hard to achieve that. So I assume that there is another market of people out there in a similar situation – they are willing to pay money to increase the quality of their child’s education. Maybe not many of them are specifically thinking about Shakespeare, though.
There’s also the pain point group of “students who want the answers to their homework.” That audience has been addressed many times over by Sparknotes and the like and, quite frankly, they don’t have a lot of money. 🙂 But still, it’s a valid audience to target.
What about you? We all have Shakespeare in our lives, in one form or another. What sort of business needs are there? What application, or web site, or service or book or magazine subscription do you wish existed?

Yes, I’m trolling for ideas. 🙂 I have many, but ideas are a dime a dozen. Market is everything. Never build a product and say “Is there a market for this?” because if there’s not, you just wasted all your time and resources. For a long time I’ve been taking the “build it and they will come” stance to my Shakespeare Geekery, and I’d like to think that it’s done pretty well. But no way am I on a course to ever make a living at it, and that’s why I’m looking to hedge my bits with a little bit more traditional business thinking.

Quick question for y’all. I’ve dug one of my old projects out of mothballs where I look at how people ask Shakespeare questions. And something’s come up that intrigues me. When speaking of “Shakespeare”, do you use present or past tense? In other words, would you be more likely to ask
Why did Shakespeare use iambic pentameter?
or
Why does Shakespeare use iambic pentameter?
From my research, the split seems to be fairly even. As a language geek it bugs me because technically only one is supposed to be correct – the past tense one. The man’s dead, after all, he’s not still using iambic pentameter.
The problem goes back to that ambiguity that’s come to be associated with the word. When you say Shakespeare are you referring to the man, or to the body of work? It’s sort of funny that when people speak of him being timeless, they really have just no idea how far that idea goes. In situations like this we’ve essentially made the man himself immortal, taking the works to be something we have in the present day while still describing them as if Shakespeare’s right here with us, having just written them.