Cameron Olthuis

I have to admit, I’m really having a lot of fun playing around in the action sports industry. Besides, my passion for action sports, one of the main reasons for starting Factive was that I knew I could come in with my audience building skills, dominate the online space, and have fun while doing it.

Our audience is growing at a very rapid pace… I couldn’t be happier. The best thing is that it’s super defensible traffic too, we get a very healthy mix of Google, direct, social, and referral traffic. We’re now at the point where we’re ready to start monetizing our sites. Exciting!

I love the fact that I’m building a company around something I love so much. I wish I would’ve done this sooner as it makes life so much more enjoyable to combine work with your passions. At that point it no longer becomes work, as big of a cliche as that is. For example, ‘board meetings’; instead of sitting in an office, I now have meetings with people while I’m surfing. I get to go hang out at cool places like the Red Bull headquarters. I can fly around the world on exotic surf vacations and call it work. And companies are backing their trucks up to my door with free products for me to review. Its got it’s perks to say the least.

My advice to you is: get into something you truly enjoy and figure out a way to make money doing it.

5ones is a project that first began last July. It all started when I met Chris Bennett from 97th Floor at last year’s SMX Advanced. We quickly hit it off, partly because we both share a deep passion for surfing and other action sports. We talked a lot about how the action sports industry is pretty lame when it comes to the web. For an industry that’s generally pretty forward thinking, it’s amazing how many years behind they are with this online stuff. After the conference we kept talking about projects that we could work together on in this space and eventually we settled on 5ones.

What exactly is it? 5ones is an action sports news and information site covering surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and other industry happenings. Right now what you see on the site is just a small taste of what’s to come in the future.

Although technically started last July, due to both of our busy schedules it didn’t take long before the site was placed on the back burner, as neither of us could find the time to keep it regularly updated and give the TLC it needed. It’s around this time that I started to realize I was taking on too much client work and I needed to slow down or I’d never have time to focus and build out my empire. So that’s what I did, I started to make the time and refocus on doing this thing proper.

Fast forward to Jan ‘08. I hired a couple writers, gave myself the position of Editor in Chief, and started pumping out regular content again. Although we originally launched the site back in July ‘07, we feel that we didn’t really start the site until the first of this year. Since then we’ve been keeping the site updated regularly. We just finished the redesign and now we’re launching what we call version 1.0. I must say that I am very impressed with the design, which was done by Pat Bennett from Modern Web Design. I would highly recommend using Pat for design work as you can see he did a fabulous job with 5ones. He also did all the custom WP hacks/programming.

One of the questions I get a lot is - what’s the meaning behind the name? To be honest, there isn’t one. As most of you know, finding domain names is pretty damn hard these days, most everything we wanted was taken so we just brainstormed, that name came up, and it stuck. I wish I had a good story about how the name came about but I don’t.

5ones is the first of many projects that I’ll be releasing through Factive over the next year. It’s a joint project in partnership with 97th Floor, who will also be involved in one other Factive property that is expected to launch this summer.

I also want to give a shout out to the wonderful staff of writers we have on the team. I am very pleased with their work and their desire to step it up and progress with the site. We have had tremendous success with traffic and growing our audience in just a few short months and much of that is because of the quality of content our writers have produced.

So, the first of the two exciting redesigns and announcements that I’m rolling out today is Factive Media. Factive itself isn’t necessarily new but I don’t think I’ve ever really mentioned it here on the blog or really told you guys what I was up to with it. The official direction of the company has switched today as well so I’ll talk about that.

When I left ACS last summer, I left because I had an idea, or a vision if you will, and it was just the right time to make the move and go for it. Although ACS was becoming a very successful company, my heart was no longer in building out a large consulting firm. I also felt like it was an opportunity cost and there were much bigger things in store for me.

Two things happened when I left. I was suddenly bombarded with tons of consulting opportunities and I started my startup. The good thing about the consulting opportunities is that I could pick & choose and I could now also command the same rates that ACS, a full service firm, was charging. It’s pretty lucrative when you’re a solo dude charging what big firms do. But again, consulting was not what I wanted for myself so I made sure I didn’t overload myself and would still have time to dedicate to this other thing.

So while Factive started out as my own little consulting gig there has always been something much bigger brewing in the pot. Today I am happy to announce that I am officially changing Factive from being my little consulting shell to an action sports media network.

What you see on the page there is a very small taste of what’s to come. Seeing as I’m completely self-funded it’s not exactly going as quickly as I’d like so I’ll slowly be rolling out sites one-by-one.

So what exactly is my vision? Well duh, I’m building myself a nice little media empire in the action sports industry. Right now there is one site, which I’ll be posting about separately, that has officially launched v1.0. There are quite a few more that are in the works and will be rolled out over the next 12 months. These include everything from content sites to an ad network to community sites and other stuff not yet mentionable.

As many of you know, I’m an avid surfer and skier, so this fits the mold perfectly of doing something I love. I’ve been involved in action sports my whole life and I’m very excited to be building a successful company in this vertical. It’s a great opportunity for me to leverage my expertise and build a large online audience that will be worth a lot 5-10 years down the road.

As for consulting, I’m still doing that as well, but have been cutting back a little to put most of my focus on this. With the projections & numbers I’ve come up with I expect to be consulting for at least another year, unless I take on a small investment which is a small possibility at this point.