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In The Media
September 14, 2009
For LM grad, the world is his office
Going on to the University of Pittsburgh, he created a second Web-based business while maintaining a schedule that will allow him to graduate a semester early.
And he’s already earned enough through those ventures to finance three summers of travel, and then some.
Batansky, who grew up in Wynnewood, caught the travel bug early. When he was 10, his mom, Toby, took him and sister Ali on a trip to Tanzania. When he was 13, they visited Israel. “That got me really interested,” he said.
His venture into entrepreneurship started on a minor scale. During his junior year at Lower Merion, he had a friend who had sold some items on e-Bay. “I did some research and started small, selling things around the house that were no longer used,” he recalled.
Then, after some more research, he decided to set up an online store, selling “products that people had trouble finding.” By senior year he had the operation, at www.buysomethingawesome.com, up and running.
The “store” offered a “unique product line,” Batansky said, from T-shirts and backpacks and decorative neon signs to cologne, watches and sunglasses. Naturally enough most items were geared to a youth market.
“I would find people who liked to design funny images and sayings and offer to put them on T-shirts and give them a portion of the proceeds,” he said describing one approach.
One shirt, with the saying, “We do things my way or the Hemingway” and featuring an image of the writer, caught the attention of the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Ill., and resulted in one of his biggest orders. For a reason that’s a mystery even to Batansky, it remains one of his biggest sellers.
As business grew, Batansky made connections with wholesalers and manufacturers, who would ship orders directly to buyers so that he didn’t have to keep a big inventory on hand. He added a popular clothing line, Alternative Apparel, to the store.
To build the venture, Batansky knew he had to establish a strong business identity and “brand” through a creative Web site design, company logo and advertising. He analyzed Web-site statistics to write effective ads and optimize search-engine recognition and Internet links, and bought advertising space on other Web sites and blogs.
To date he figures the site has had more than 2,200 customers worldwide. In its top sales month it reached $7,050 in revenue.
With the business running well, he set about realizing the second part of his dream. Always intrigued by South America, he wanted to travel there for the summer after his freshman year at Pitt. His mom and dad, Norman, were skeptical, but when he landed a marketing internship with a company in Ecuador they relented.
“I would work four days a week, and other days I traveled on my own to different places, beaches and jungles and different cities,” Batansky said. He found ways to keep expenses low by staying in hostels. “I met people from all over the world,” he said.
Meanwhile, he kept Buy Something Awesome running, and it was so successful that he was able to fund trips to the Galapagos Islands and Colombia, a country he “fell in love with.” “I’ve been going back ever since,” he said.
At Pitt, Batansky is majoring in cultural anthropology and communications. While there, he has interned with a Small Business Administration center in Pittsburgh, where he has had the opportunity to “sit in on meetings and work on writing marketing plans and business plans.”
During his sophomore year, he needed to prepare a résumé. “I went to the advising department and got a basic critique, then started doing some research on my own until I got to the point I was comfortable with it.”
Before he knew it, Batansky said, he was helping friends with their résumés, and again, he thought, “Why not create a business?”
The result was his second online venture, www.resumetointerviews.com. Customers can get basic or more extensive help through the site. Batansky said he works with clients through an online questionnaire or phone consultations, crafting effective job descriptions, creating clear and eye-catching formats, making their writing spelling- and grammatical error-free — in short, finding ways to make their résumé stand out among a stack of applications.
While his clients at first were fellow college students, Batansky said he now works with people at different career levels “in all different industries” from film producers to engineers to information-technology and software-development professionals.
The beauty of both of his online businesses, he said, is that, thanks to the Internet, “there’s no reason why you can’t run them from anywhere in the world.”
And that is just what he has done each summer since freshman year, returning to Colombia and other parts of South America. He has traveled to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Machu Picchu in Peru, and this past January took a break from Pitt to enroll in classes at a university in Argentina, staying on through the spring and summer. He was home recently just long enough to get ready for his last semester in Pittsburgh.
When he started visiting South America, Batansky admits his Spanish was about at “beginner-intermediate level.” He now has a pretty good conversational grasp of the language, though he knew no Portuguese when he traveled to Brazil.
It’s never been a problem, he said. “People are usually very patient.”
Likewise he’s never been concerned about traveling on his own. That is, since one experience on his first trip, when he was out walking “on a deserted street at 1 a.m. — something you should never do” — and luckily escaped what was probably a robbery attempt. “When you’re traveling, you’re never alone unless you want to be,” Batansky said. He has often met other travelers, from many different countries, with whom he has traveled for “a day or two or a week,” to visit common destinations.
“Traveling is so much easier than people imagine, and so much cheaper, too,” he said.
When he graduates this winter, Batansky said his goal is to return to Colombia for perhaps six months. Later he’s thinking about visiting Israel again, and then maybe other parts of the Middle East or Asia, where he’d like to visit a friend in Bangladesh he made on an earlier trip.
To support himself he plans to keep his online businesses running. He might expand them, from wherever in the world he may be, “but I’ve got lots of different ideas, too,” he said.
September 13, 2009
Kurt Guevara T-shirt
June 3, 2008
My Way or the Hemingway
Here's a short t-shirt post to ease you back into my blogging routine, on the heels of the NINE delightful posts you've hopefully been reading the past few days, compliments of Josie and Elizabeth! How on earth they found nine chunks of time in all the BEA hubbub is beyond me, but I for one am SUPER grateful they did. Reading their reports was almost as good as being there!
September 14, 2009
For LM grad, the world is his officeGoing on to the University of Pittsburgh, he created a second Web-based business while maintaining a schedule that will allow him to graduate a semester early.
And he’s already earned enough through those ventures to finance three summers of travel, and then some.
Batansky, who grew up in Wynnewood, caught the travel bug early. When he was 10, his mom, Toby, took him and sister Ali on a trip to Tanzania. When he was 13, they visited Israel. “That got me really interested,” he said.
His venture into entrepreneurship started on a minor scale. During his junior year at Lower Merion, he had a friend who had sold some items on e-Bay. “I did some research and started small, selling things around the house that were no longer used,” he recalled.
Then, after some more research, he decided to set up an online store, selling “products that people had trouble finding.” By senior year he had the operation, at www.buysomethingawesome.com, up and running.
The “store” offered a “unique product line,” Batansky said, from T-shirts and backpacks and decorative neon signs to cologne, watches and sunglasses. Naturally enough most items were geared to a youth market.
“I would find people who liked to design funny images and sayings and offer to put them on T-shirts and give them a portion of the proceeds,” he said describing one approach.
One shirt, with the saying, “We do things my way or the Hemingway” and featuring an image of the writer, caught the attention of the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Ill., and resulted in one of his biggest orders. For a reason that’s a mystery even to Batansky, it remains one of his biggest sellers.
As business grew, Batansky made connections with wholesalers and manufacturers, who would ship orders directly to buyers so that he didn’t have to keep a big inventory on hand. He added a popular clothing line, Alternative Apparel, to the store.
To build the venture, Batansky knew he had to establish a strong business identity and “brand” through a creative Web site design, company logo and advertising. He analyzed Web-site statistics to write effective ads and optimize search-engine recognition and Internet links, and bought advertising space on other Web sites and blogs.
To date he figures the site has had more than 2,200 customers worldwide. In its top sales month it reached $7,050 in revenue.
With the business running well, he set about realizing the second part of his dream. Always intrigued by South America, he wanted to travel there for the summer after his freshman year at Pitt. His mom and dad, Norman, were skeptical, but when he landed a marketing internship with a company in Ecuador they relented.
“I would work four days a week, and other days I traveled on my own to different places, beaches and jungles and different cities,” Batansky said. He found ways to keep expenses low by staying in hostels. “I met people from all over the world,” he said.
Meanwhile, he kept Buy Something Awesome running, and it was so successful that he was able to fund trips to the Galapagos Islands and Colombia, a country he “fell in love with.” “I’ve been going back ever since,” he said.
At Pitt, Batansky is majoring in cultural anthropology and communications. While there, he has interned with a Small Business Administration center in Pittsburgh, where he has had the opportunity to “sit in on meetings and work on writing marketing plans and business plans.”
During his sophomore year, he needed to prepare a résumé. “I went to the advising department and got a basic critique, then started doing some research on my own until I got to the point I was comfortable with it.”
Before he knew it, Batansky said, he was helping friends with their résumés, and again, he thought, “Why not create a business?”
The result was his second online venture, www.resumetointerviews.com. Customers can get basic or more extensive help through the site. Batansky said he works with clients through an online questionnaire or phone consultations, crafting effective job descriptions, creating clear and eye-catching formats, making their writing spelling- and grammatical error-free — in short, finding ways to make their résumé stand out among a stack of applications.
While his clients at first were fellow college students, Batansky said he now works with people at different career levels “in all different industries” from film producers to engineers to information-technology and software-development professionals.
The beauty of both of his online businesses, he said, is that, thanks to the Internet, “there’s no reason why you can’t run them from anywhere in the world.”
And that is just what he has done each summer since freshman year, returning to Colombia and other parts of South America. He has traveled to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Machu Picchu in Peru, and this past January took a break from Pitt to enroll in classes at a university in Argentina, staying on through the spring and summer. He was home recently just long enough to get ready for his last semester in Pittsburgh.
When he started visiting South America, Batansky admits his Spanish was about at “beginner-intermediate level.” He now has a pretty good conversational grasp of the language, though he knew no Portuguese when he traveled to Brazil.
It’s never been a problem, he said. “People are usually very patient.”
Likewise he’s never been concerned about traveling on his own. That is, since one experience on his first trip, when he was out walking “on a deserted street at 1 a.m. — something you should never do” — and luckily escaped what was probably a robbery attempt. “When you’re traveling, you’re never alone unless you want to be,” Batansky said. He has often met other travelers, from many different countries, with whom he has traveled for “a day or two or a week,” to visit common destinations.
“Traveling is so much easier than people imagine, and so much cheaper, too,” he said.
When he graduates this winter, Batansky said his goal is to return to Colombia for perhaps six months. Later he’s thinking about visiting Israel again, and then maybe other parts of the Middle East or Asia, where he’d like to visit a friend in Bangladesh he made on an earlier trip.
To support himself he plans to keep his online businesses running. He might expand them, from wherever in the world he may be, “but I’ve got lots of different ideas, too,” he said.
September 13, 2009
Kurt Guevara T-shirtJune 3, 2008
My Way or the HemingwayHere's a short t-shirt post to ease you back into my blogging routine, on the heels of the NINE delightful posts you've hopefully been reading the past few days, compliments of Josie and Elizabeth! How on earth they found nine chunks of time in all the BEA hubbub is beyond me, but I for one am SUPER grateful they did. Reading their reports was almost as good as being there!
THANK YOU, Josie and Elizabeth!!
And now... another book-related item, because so many of you seem to be enjoying these. This week's wearable entertainment comes compliments of BuySomethingAwesome.com where you can (yes) buy this awesome t-shirt. But first tell me just what you think the HEMINGway is... Short sentences, maybe? Witty understatement? Hmm.
