Starting a second business or expand your existing one? Part 1

There are many issues involved in whether to start a second business or not, often they go down to: "would the time, money and energy invested in starting a second business be better spent by focusing on the growth of the first one?"

This is something I am going through at the moment as I am investing most of my (little) free time on my new second business (Photography), sacrificing time to fine tune my pricing, advertising my bots and a good part of my stock (Event Tickets) in order to kick start it.

Many entrepreneurs have become successful by putting all their efforts into growing a single business, while on the other hand, many have found success through diversification. Just like most choices in the business world, both have pros and cons. On the next part I will be going to share some of them with you.

ML Bot Webshop Automation

Last week I found two interesting examples of webshops based on ML Bot and mtgolibrary.com. These are interesting because the owners found a way to interact with ML Bot and expand it beyond its original features. I'll talk about jbmtgo.com (a shop to buy cards online) and mtgotickets.com (a place to sell and buy tixs). Please visit them to get an idea.

• JB Mtgo Shop (click on the image to visit it)

Jbmtgo.com is a shop selling mtgo cards. You place the order, you pay with paypal, you go online on mtgo, contact the accont of the owner and you get the cards immediately. I tried it and it's very efficient. Technically speaking, the shop parses the file "cardsNeededAndCollection.txt", originally designed for debug purposes (and not documented on the manual). The files contains a list of all cards in the collection and their prices, so the shop can populate the inventory. One could do the same by parsing the csv of the collection, a file named .csv located in the C:\ folder (where "some_strange_characters" is a random string with numbers and letters such as hd67c2msd13d02p.csv).

• Mtgotickets (click on the image to visit it)

The other shop, mtgotickets.com is even more interesting. It just sells and buys tixs but it is more automated than jbstore. To buy tickets, just click on the orange button, choose the amount of tixs you want and then pay with PayPal. Right after the payment your account will be credited. This works more or less like this: when you send a payment, PayPal sends an email to the owner of the shop. A script on his server looks for new emails every 5 seconds and when one is founds it sends an SMS. The owner will connect, possibly via mobile, and adjust the credit on the Online Control Panel, so you can take the tixs in 1-2 minutes.

Prices change with time. Yesterday the price was 1.03 usd per tixs, today it is 1.02. I asked the owner if he has some sort of automatic updater to adapt the price with the market , like mtgotraders, but he didn't answer the question.

On mtgotickets.com you can also sell tixs. There is no automation here since the payment is manually sent via "gift" payment to save the fees. If the shop would have sent regular payments instead of gift payments, this side could have been automated too: the shop would have parsed the Tradelog on the Online Control Panel and once a "deposit" is found, a PayPal payment (via the PayPal REST Api) is sent.


Do you own a service like the ones above? Do you know / use one? Please write us (staff@mtgolibrary.com) and we'll talk about it!

Should not post this..

Today I received an email. It made me happy.

"Something seems to have improved I have had more traffic than I have in a long time.

Thanks for the effort and hard work."

Well, I guess this is the result of the hard work we are doing here at mtgolibrary. Most of the work is hidden to the eyes but your account feels it :-)

The future of ML Bot - ML Bot for v4 online now

Hello to everyone,

I am glad to announce that we are finally there, we have a public ML Bot running on MTGO v4. The account is named "The_Kate_Bot", and it's available for trade now!

The account is not a real "business" one because the collection is poor and we stop it frequently for debugging reasons.  Still you can trade with it and see how the development is going.  Any feedback is highly appreciated and encouraged!

Please spread the voice and trade a lot! Try for example to purchase cards...... try to sell some, or try to trick the bot doing "strange things" :-) ....  spend 5 minutes and write us when done!

UPDATE***: thanks to all, we had many trades today! The_Kate_Bot will be online again on Monday!



Thank you!
Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

Force of Will - not the card one!

I would love to say that I am a navigated businessman who found the secret of growing a company :-) Of course this is not true, but yet I find a common pattern on the successful companies and how their CEOs manage them.

in two words: "Force of Will" (not the card!)

You have to be smart, brilliant, passionate.. but if you lack the capacity to "stay at it", to hold on, to work hard in the tough periods... you won't succeed. Running a business is not a sprint, 

it's a marathon. 

Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (Budget)

Introduction:  So you want to play with robots? 

When I recently started my bot-chain using the ML Bot I read everything I could regarding everything related to starting and running a bot chain on MTGO. There are some pretty good guides available, especially on this blog but I still had to spend countless of hours researching information all over the web until I felt I knew enough to start my first bots. Therefore I will be writing yet another guide on how to start your bot chain, and I'll try to make this one as comprehensive as possible.

The first two parts are going to be an introduction that goes through some of the basics to keep in mind before starting a bot and I'll continue going through more advanced stuff in later parts. Since you're reading this I'm assuming you're interested in the world of MTGO botting. This might seem really complicated at first, but the truth is that anyone with some basic computer skills can do it. How complicated it is will be totally up to you, as you could basically start a bot in a matter of minutes with next to no knowledge, or capital investment, if you want. It's your tactics and plan that will determine how much work and how complicated it will be and of course, how successful you will be.

 I'm guessing capital investment is one of the most important factors for any aspiring botter, so here's a quick estimate of how much a new botter needs to invest.

First of all you need a basic computer, almost any old junk will be able to run a bot or two. When I started I ran 2 bots on an old Core 2 duo CPU, a 128gb SSD and 4gb ram. GPU is irrelevant as long as it can run MTGO.
An SSD is a good idea but not necessary in the beginning.

Each bot needs around:

• 5-10gb on your HDD
• 1.1 gb RAM (for MTGO 3.0) or 2-2.5 gb RAM (for MTGO 4.0 when it's released) 
• preferably one core of a shitty CPU. 

I'll assume you have a computer at home that meets these requirements so initial investment on hardware shouldn't be much. Other than hardware you need to buy accounts for each bot, which is $9.9 and I'd recommend buying at least 50 Event Tickets per bot.

• Hardware: 0 
• Accounts: $9.90 (per account) 
• Tickets: ~$50 (per account) 
• Total: ~$59.90 (per account) 

 More next time!
 I'll gladly answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Cheers!
-Tom (Sitrec) 
Archbot MTGO Store: ArchBot, ArchBot2, ArchBot3 & ArchBot4

Building Customer Confidence

Building confidence with customers is simple and productive part of operating a business. When a potential customer is confident they are dealing with a reputable company they are much more likely to make a purchase. There are many ways to increase a customers confidence in your brand but one of the easiest methods is to make yourself available to a customer and provide them with as much information about your business as you can. Here are a few thoughts to consider while you initiate or update your botting business.

Email

Perhaps the most important thing you can do to improve your relationship and trust with customers is to provide an email address for them to contact you if they need assistance with your bot. You can use any free service to operate an email address for your bot and it takes only moments each day to check.

Website

There are many free website services that you can use as a base of operations for your botting chain. There are also paid services if you can spare the money for a domain and hosting. A website is a great place to include additional information on your business and any activities your business is participating in(Prizes, events, products, etc). A bot with a website will draw more trust and interest than a bot without a website because of its professional appearance and availability of information. 

Brick and Mortar Location

While this is certainly not necessary for many online businesses some people are more willing to trust a company if they make openly available that they have a brick and mortar location where an individual could meet in person. If you run a Ma and Pa card shop be sure to let your MTGO customers know that! It shows that you have an investment in your business and wont just disappear in the middle of the night.

Phone Number

People like to meet in person before they make a large purchase, the next best thing to meeting is to hear a humans voice on the phone. If you are comfortable with the occasional phone call from an angry, concerned or excited customer then you may wish to explore this option. It lends a great deal of credibility to what you are doing if you make yourself personally available to customers.