Despite TechCrunch’s insistence that the word “vacation” not exist in any startup environment unless you are operating across the pond, I believe that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So when a good friend of mine invited me to serve as crew as he sailed The Bahamas and needing a respite from the rigors of startup life, I booked my flight with images of beach bars and white sand beaches dancing in my head. Little did I know that El Capitan had other thoughts in mind – a nearly 300-mile open ocean passage from the southern Bahamian island chain known as the Exumas (approximately 100 miles east of Cuba) to the northernmost area known as the Abacos (50 miles east of Florida).

Sailing for 11-hour intervals in open seas with no land or humans in sight, one’s mind can’t help but wander on to anything and everything.  Every thought gets vetted, new ideas spring to life, memories revisited, your brain entertaining you to combat the boredom/relaxation. Inevitably my thoughts raced back to business, specifically the business of Jippidy, and what it means to launch your own enterprise. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many parallels there were between sailing and launching your own business. With that, here are the 11 ways that sailing the Bahamas reminded me of hustling to launch Jippidy.

I’m sitting here on a deck chair in the backyard, working on Jippidy. I’ve probably slaved away at the computer for 14 hours a day for the last week. Nights brighten into mornings, hours bleed into days, and yet I remain tethered to the computer. The only thing that changes is the chair I’m sitting on. As a fledging startup working to gain traction, especially a bootstrapped one such as ours in which most of our team members work remotely in isolation, it can often feel like you’re working in a vacuum. Google analytics, @replies on Twitter, and fan posts to our FB Fan Page can prove to you that people are "listening", but just like the lonely tree falling in the woods, if the entrepreneur speaks and no one is around to hear it, does the entrepreneur really make a sound? Such is the life of a startup.

So when you find that some users are embracing your product, that the service you are providing is helping another business gain even a single new customer, it can’t help but make you smile, at least momentarily. It can’t help but motivate you to put in another hour in front of that darn computer which you love/hate so much. So when I saw that Northstar Moving, aka @MovingPro on Twitter, had not only created a Jippidy profile but had also taken advantage of the site’s functionality to really illustrate what we can do for a business, I had to reach out to the Northstar Moving team and ask for their feedback on the site. Since we are working hard to build the ideal platform for a business’ needs, it only makes sense to learn what sparked Northstar’s interest in our site. Here’s what they had to say.

I present to you the facts:

• Fact 1: Youtube is now the world’s 2^nd largest search engine.
• Fact 2: Video improves your average conversion rate by up to 30%, sometimes without the consumer even watching the video.
• Fact 3: Having a video on your homepage makes your website 53 times more likely to appear on Page 1 of search engine results.

Which brings us to Facts 4 & 5:

• Fact 4: Fewer than 1 out of every five small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the US currently has an online video incorporated in their marketing campaign.
• Fact 5: Less than 5% of total online ad spending in the US was spent on online video as recently as 2008.

So if video is so fresh and so clean, so vital to your business, then why are so few business owners currently utilizing video in their marketing efforts? Let me answer a question with a question we commonly hear: “Why do I need a video on my website?” This question is probably the single biggest stumbling block we at Jippidy have encountered in our attempts to market the product on a larger scale. So, why the slow growth in adoption?

And we’re back! We, the Jippidy team, took some time to work out the kinks, and now the Jippidy blog is back! We’ve revamped our blogging platform and enlisted new bloggers to complement our original crew. Most importantly, we’ve revised our focus.

Given my limited video production experience, my main objective as head of Jippidy’s videography team is not to tell you HOW we film, but rather to share the WHY & WHAT we film. The HOW we film will be handled by our team of experienced videographers, young, hungry, up-and-coming film students and video professionals who have gone to school for this their craft - they are filming and editing every Jippidy video you see on the site to make Jippidy what it is today: an online video marketing directory for local small business.