Hero is … um

Get a FREE, postage-paid piece of original Hero Is … Um artwork in exchange for answers to an academic survey. Details below:

As any regular readers of this site and my Twitter feed know, I am working toward a master’s degree in business communication with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. Right now I’m halfway through my first of three eight-week classes focused on entrepreneurship, and one of my assignments for this week requires me to find five potential customers for my business idea and ask them for feedback.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through my degree program with a 4.0 GPA, yet I’m dumb enough to be using this webcomic as my entrepreneurial business idea. There are any number of better business opportunities out there, but my heart is in being a cartoonist.

There’s a long road ahead of me before I will feel like my work is worth spinning into products (aside from the one token t-shirt design in my Cafepress store), so please don’t confuse this for anything other than an academic exercise. Here’s what I am asking for help with:

Let’s pretend I have developed products related to this comic strip and have a store with, say, a book collecting the first 200 comics, t-shirts, stickers, posters, fake Interventionist dreadlocks, and green-and-yellow Marv-style trucker caps. I need the following market research questions answered:

• Why would you be willing to purchase Hero Is … Um products?
• How and when would you be more likely to purchase products (at a convention, through a secure web store, through a local store)?
• What actions could I, as a new-on-the-scene content producer, take to make you one of my first customers?
• Why would you be willing to take the chance on a new product from a new seller?
• What could I do to make you feel secure in buying products from me (promise discounts or freebies, use a secure third-party transaction site, promise fast delivery, offer deals from affiliates, etc.)?

That’s five questions for which I need five sets of answers from potential customers. Each of the first five people who email me legitimate answers (no goofballs, please) to all five questions will be able to choose any one of my 100-plus strips/pages in the Hero Is … Um archive and I will mail you the original, inked art on Bristol board, free of charge (note: I color and letter the strips digitally; you’ll be getting black-and-white finished artwork, but no words – I just want to be clear on that). Obviously the original art will be given away on a first-come, first-served basis.

This is not a gimmick for me to jump-start sales or collect email addresses for some crazy list. I’m nowhere close to having enough strips to even put a book together, much less think about that until well after I graduate. I really just need this information for an assignment that I need to finish by Saturday, March 13.

If you want to jump in and answer these questions to get extremely rare and hopefully one day valuable original art, please email them to this address: jason(at)heroisum.com.

Thanks in advance.

- Jason

Because I’m starting to notice more and more people coming to HeroIsUm.com, I need to up my game and give everyone a little more than a once-a-week strip. But family, work and grad school make that a tall order. However, an idea hit me a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve played around with it enough that I think it’s worth doing.

So March 1 will be the first Mondegreen Monday, starring Mindover Man, and the weekly strip will move to a Thursday morning release.

Let me know what you think!

- Jason

Even before buying an iPad, I’m thankful to Apple for rolling it out, because it gave me the idea for this week’s strip, which I submitted to MacSurfer.com, and in turn quintupled my highest-ever traffic day. And how uncanny is my depiction of the size and appearance of the iPad? OK, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine it looking like a giant iPod Touch, but still … .

Now, as it’s the duty of all tech nerds to weigh in on the device, here’s my take: It’s exactly what I expected and hoped for. It’s a big iPod Touch, with extra attention paid to books and periodicals. I want a nicely portable device that will serve up anything I want to read, save me the trouble of having paper copies of any of them, allow me to surf the web, play music, fire off an email, tweet, and watch video (plenty of others will want games, but I personally hate almost all games of any kind). That’s what the iPad will do. Great. Just what I wanted. And I’ll never have to worry about a broken H key like I do with the laptop I’m typing on right now.

One thing I’m really expecting to see and enjoy is a way to never have to buy a print comic book again. I don’t live terribly close to a comic shop and frankly no longer care to have to store all those dead trees. Now I know some comic book fetishists are going to think that’s sacrilege, but I’m already past that argument. I’m a former newspaper journalist who knew it was time to get out of the business before it forced me out because of declining economics, mostly due to people moving to the internet for their information. For a long time, I resented that. I love newspapers and think there are few more noble professions that journalism. But I finally realized there was no point in fighting technological progress: The medium does not make the message. I haven’t subscribed to a daily newspaper for more than a year, and even though it still bothers me to say this, I don’t really miss newsprint. I’ll gladly embrace that same paradigm shift for my magazine subscriptions and comic books.

As for ease of use as pertains to the iPad, especially versus the laptop, I think that will prove to be a no-brainer. Think of how you sit, recline, lie, roll over, and repeat that process for an extended period of time on your couch while reading. Most of us change to all kinds of positions. Can our laptops adjust with us? Not all the time. But the iPad will. And the coup de grace, of course, is the ability to sit on the toilet with it. Guys, especially, know I’m right. Admitting it may not be our proudest moment, but we cannot deny this truth. Our iPhones broke that ground, and now the iPad will help us avoid eye strain (so we can focus on other kinds of straining, of course). Sorry. Had to say it.

Back to more socially acceptable uses, though, I have to think one of the biggest cash cows Steve Jobs is expecting to milk is the education market. Say goodbye to textbooks and the one, lonely, eight-year-old PC in the classroom, and say hello to a 30-unit charging station/cubby — which will free up lots of room in every class, too.

Is this iteration perfect? No. But, typical of Jobs-ware, it has room built in for “great new add-on features” to make everyone gasp at each of the next several semi-annual Apple events. Upcoming versions will get what was purposely left off this version so more people will buy and/or replace their old ones: a webcam for Skype, USB connectivity, a kickstand, an OLED screen, an even lower price, and probably most important of all — less weight. You know it’ll happen (just don’t expect removable memory or batteries); it’s part of the long-term, pre-planned product cycle.

And it’s why I’ll likely wait until iPad 2.0 to buy mine.

One more thing: I’m sick of hearing the tech press whine, whine, whine about AT&T. Here in Colorado, I hardly notice a difference in AT&T coverage versus what I used to have with Verizon. And Verizon is staffed 98 percent by jerks. Can’t say the same for AT&T, with its adequate customer service. I’m going to guess I’m not alone in this view, judging by the numbers of iPhones continually being sold. AT&T just needs to upgrade its service in San Francisco and New York, and all these pack-minded, echo-chamber dwelling tech journalists will stop 90 percent of the whining that’s going on about Ma Bell.

Great work, Apple. You had me at hello.