Indeed, the newsletter's self-effacing tone explains one advantage that the MouseDriver guys have over their well-appointed peers: they're actually having fun. "I love that they're willing to laugh at themselves and their own stupidity," says Kumar, who has even sent the Insider to Cornell's academic student clubs. One of his favorite passages appeared in the newsletter last August: "John is thinking of dying his hair Platinum blond! We're not talking about the casual highlight here...we're talking jet white."
The newsletter went on to rationalize the change by saying that Lusk was contemplating the dye job "to continue to bring much-needed awareness to the company." But then Insider readers learned the real reason for Lusk's flight of follicle fancy. "It's absolutely amazing the things you'll do to 'change your environment' when your creativity and motivation are stifled in such a lackluster setting," Lusk wrote.
Kumar sees educational value in what might look to others like a cheap, attention-getting stunt. "Something like that teaches my students the importance of creativity," he explains. "And a big part of new-product innovation and new-product marketing is creativity -- doing anything that works." As it turned out, Harrison eventually went platinum, whereas Lusk settled for blond highlights. It seems that their hair coloring, like their company, is an ever changing project.
The newsletter's quirky charm is undeniable, but to understand the essence of the Insider's appeal, it's important to know this: even other entrepreneurs seem to delight in the simple pleasure of the MouseDriver Insider.
Tedesco, who says he loves the newsletter, cofounded a company at exactly the same time that Lusk and Harrison did. The difference: his was a dot-com, with all the trajectory that that once implied. Shortly after moving to Pasadena, Calif., to launch PayMyBills.com, in July 1999, Tedesco landed $250,000 from the then-high-flying incubator Idealab. Within weeks of incorporation Tedesco was hiring employees by the dozen and buying ad space as if his company were selling cola. "The minute I moved to San Francisco, PayMyBills began advertising on the sides of buses and with billboards," recalls Harrison, who had turned down Tedesco's offer of a job at the dot-com. "That really made me question my choice -- but MouseDriver was my idea, so I had pride of ownership."
But in an odd reversal of roles, Tedesco now seems to feel somewhat envious. In August he merged his start-up with a competitor based in New Jersey. Since then he's been relegated to the second-banana position of "chief strategy officer" at the company, Paytrust, whose center of gravity is 2,400 miles away. "Each entrepreneurial experience is individual, and I wouldn't trade mine for the world." But reflecting on the adventures of his former classmates, he adds, "they have had the opportunity to do everything themselves and develop their skills across the board."
Tedesco, like many Insider readers, says that his favorite element of the newsletter is the Mood Meter -- a note at the end of each newsletter that describes the prevailing emotion of the MouseDriver partners. A sampling:
September 13, 1999: "Tempered excitement."
October 4, 1999: "An emotional roller coaster."
May 5, 2000: "Remember the last scene in The Breakfast Club when Judd Nelson is walking through the football field? He opens his hand, sees the diamond earring that Molly Ringwald gave him, and raises his fist in triumph .... That's kinda how we feel."
August 11, 2000: "Let's be honest here. We've put in the work, we've paid ourselves three times in the last 13 months, we've solidified distribution, and the holiday season is just around the corner. We're ready (and very anxious) to bank some serious cash!!"
Read the Mood Meters side by side, and you can't help seeing the company-building experience as an unyielding, unglamorous, emotion-scrambling struggle -- not at all the bloodless quick-hit event that has been portrayed in recent times. In fact, the lore contained in the newsletter -- like the time a sales rep gave a customer the wrong toll-free number, sending her to a phone-sex line -- is enough to make dot-commers realize what they missed by not experiencing the real-time version of entrepreneurship. "We were funded and grew to more than 100 people in six months, so obviously PayMyBills was a different entrepreneurial task than MouseDriver," says Tedesco. "They are more like classic entrepreneurs, working out of their apartment."
Who knows? Such classic entrepreneurs may soon be making a comeback, what with the downturn in dot-com fortunes. Of late, spurred by the newsletter's growing popularity, Lusk and Harrison have been fielding more and more offers to speak to college students and inventors' associations about what they've been through. Lusk seems particularly keen on scouring the countryside for grassroots entrepreneurs and digging up products just like the MouseDriver -- which, by the way, brought in $600,000 in revenues last year. (The mice are sold at all 214 Brookstone stores, as well as through country clubs and gift shops and online.) This year Lusk and Harrison are projecting sales of more than $1 million.
Not that they're sure they'll hit that target. As the partners will be the first to admit, and to publicize in the pages of the Insider, there's no telling what might get in their way. Or as Lusk himself once put it -- in his inimitably plain style: "We've been through all sorts of different emotions over the past 15 months. We're not really sure what the mood is this time. If anything, it's impatient and unknowing." In other words, it's exactly the messy kind of experience they hoped it would be.
Mike Hofman is a staff writer at Inc.
You can read the MouseDriver Insider online:
Issues #1 through #4
Issues #5 through #9
Issues #10 through #13
Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.
