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    Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (January 31, 2018) Entrepreneur

    January 31, 2018

    Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (January 31, 2018) Entrepreneur

    Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (January 31, 2018)

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 05:06 AM PST

    Please use this thread to ask any wantrapreneur questions.

    We do this to not overflow the subreddit with wantrapreneur questions, so please try to limit the questions to this weekly thread.

    Since this thread can fill up quickly, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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    $25k/mo selling chocolate dicks.

    Posted: 30 Jan 2018 07:09 PM PST

    Hi /r/Entrepreneur, it's Pat from Starter Story again, where I do interviews with successful e-commerce entrepreneurs.

    Here is my interview with Adam, the founder of Dick At Your Door, an e-commerce store that sells gag gifts such as a large, dong-shaped piece of chocolate that comes in a cute box.

    Adam is grossing $25k/month and recently quit his job to go full-time on the business.

    Background.

    My name is Adam Elliot, and I started Dick At Your Door, an e-commerce shop for people who like to gift pranks, gags, and funny novelties to their friends and family.

    Our main product is an anonymous prank you can send people in the mail. When they open the package, it looks like a fancy box or expensive present. However, when they actually open the package, it's a 5oz. solid chocolate penis.

    Yes, you read that correctly... Dick At Your Door sells chocolate penises you can send as a fun prank to friends and family.

    How the idea came about.

    I grew up on a farm in Southwest Iowa. Being from a small town, there aren't many things to keep you busy, so you had to be creative. This always led to drinking cheap beer you stole from someone's parents, ramping old cars on the dirt road bridges, and sometimes... prank wars. I guess that's where I started thinking gag gifts were funny.

    After art school, I moved out to California to be a photographer full time. I failed. Failed miserably. After one year on the west coast, I hated photography, I was broke, and had taken a job as a telemarketer. It was the worst.

    Before launching e-commerce storefronts, I worked in sales and as a sales consultant for startups in Southern California. That's a fancy way of saying, I spent a lot of time pitching new ideas and products to people who didn't necessarily want them. I've always enjoyed talking to people, so it was natural to start getting into sales after my failed art career. I discovered that I was pretty good at understanding what people wanted.

    Dick At Your Door started when a buddy found a silicone penis mold at a random sex shop on a cross-country drive (thank you Lincoln, Nebraska). My buddy and I thought it would be hilarious to send molds of this in the mail to our friends. Disclaimer: It was hilarious.

    We eventually threw up a website as a joke to continue the prank and people started reaching out that weren't our friends. That was the lightbulb moment for us. From there it was perfecting the molding process, finding a real chocolatier (and eventually becoming chocolatiers ourselves), building a secure website that was legit and going forth into the world of dicks and candy making.

    Creating the product and starting up the business.

    What started as a joke quickly became a viable business with real opportunity.

    When we first created our product, it was down and dirty. Just a couple of dudes in the garage melting Hershey chocolate and pouring it into a cheaply made silicon mold of a penis. Looking back to those first days, it was never even in our mind to create a business around chocolate, let alone chocolate dongs. It was always just a funny prank to pull on our friends.

    Slowly, sales started building. In the beginning, it was a very crude design. A straight black box, a stamp we had custom made, some paper mache to avoid broken chocolate, and a handheld plastic melter to wrap the box.

    I remember the first time we had 10 orders to fulfill at once. It was a disaster. Took almost 4 hours. It was frustrating and very much not worth our time. Nowadays, we can package and mail 500 orders in the same amount of time. The boxes are custom and ordered in bulk, and we are officially professional chocolatiers. It's been a long road, and to be honest, I don't know why we stuck with it. Call it a fun experiment I guess?

    To add to that, the biggest hurdles were, and have been, finding trustworthy manufacturers who can provide quality packaging at a reasonable. It's all been trial and error for us, which I wish wasn't the case. Ultimately, we found that spending the necessary money to find a quality manufacturer for our products have been worth its weight in gold. You pay for what you get.

    Attracting new customers and growing.

    It took a long time to get to the point where we were getting one order per day and even longer to hit five a day. To be honest, it wasn't until I was laid off from my corporate job and committing a lot of time to building the brand that we began seeing any type of marketable success. Getting canned was the best thing to happen in my professional life. Funny how that works.

    We are lucky in the fact that we have a shareable product that is viral in nature. When we launched our website, we pushed a bunch of social media to build awareness. People love to share our Facebook, Instagram, etc with each other. That's where we spend most of our time. Everyone loves a good meme and we have found our niche there. Comedy and dicks sell. We are always working towards that next viral post. Valentine's Day is prime right now.

    Of course, all arms of marketing are going to be important (SEO, Content, Adsense, Adwords, Facebook Advertising, sharing, interviews, etc). We don't want to have all of your eggs in one basket. However, social media has provided us with the most immediate and trackable metrics.

    These are the three of the most important takeaways I've found in regards to growing sales:

    • Content is king
    • Don't oversaturate your followers with product posts. 80/20 rule
    • (80% non-product / 20% product marketing)
    • Build an email list

    Where I'm at now, and plans for the future.

    About eight months ago, I decided it was time to dedicate my full-time hours to the business. Since then, the business has grown almost 10x. It's been a total grind with no real time off, but it's been the most fulfilling professional step I have ever taken. I am excited about all that I have learned and all I have left to learn. I know that corny, but I don't care. I love selling chocolate dicks.

    Short term goals:

    Growth and systems. We would like to be able to start stepping away from the nitty gritty more this year. That means taking on a more administrative role, rather than chocolate maker, shipper, marketer, owner, etc. With the correct operational systems in place, that transition will be much easier. Automation plus smart people in the right places will help us grow while taking some of the pressure off of ourselves.

    Long term goals:

    Build the brand to something outside of dicks. Who knows, really. If this venture has taught me anything, it's that you can succeed in anything if you can execute with good systems and are willing to get through the really terrible times.

    Online/e-commerce tools I use.

    • WooCommerce
    • Stamps.com
    • Instagram
    • Facebook
    • Canva.com
    • Google Cloud
    • Slack
    • Dropbox
    • SendInBlue Email Marketing
    • Wordpress

    Podcasts, online resources, and books I recommend.

    Podcasts & online resources:

    • Tim Ferris Podcast - Don't listen much anymore, but that was a great motivator to get me confident about starting my own company
    • How I Built This podcast.
    • Calm App - life is stressful and crazy. Mindfulness meditation has helped me so much in how I manage that stress.
    • Reddit - /r/entrepreneur // /r/smallbusiness // many others - Reddit is a great community where you can learn new ideas, methods, systems, and meet like-minded folks who are doing the same thing as you. It can be kind of lonely when no one around you is doing what you're doing. Reddit helps give you a network to learn from.

    Books:

    • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience - You know when you get so immersed in a project that hours go by and you don't even notice? That's flow. This book is about how you can train your mind and body to have a better/easier way to fall into that and become more productive.
    • Who Moved My Cheese - Dealing with change in your life.
    • How to Win Friends and Influence People - Staple of the entrepreneur handbook.
    • Anything Malcolm Gladwell - He has a great way of presenting ideas and methodology that translate well into my business.

    Advice for others just starting out.

    E-commerce is all about finding the right niche and understanding the people in that niche. For our products (and my other companies), I have never tried to be the most successful out of the gates. It is too big a mountain to climb and will leave an entrepreneur jaded. Most niches have enough opportunity in it to carve out your own little piece and grow from there. That's what we have done.

    That being said, a website owner must concentrate on always having solid content for readers, customers, and especially Google to take note of. SEO is the long game and it's not exciting, but without a long-term strategy, you could be up shit creek. What happens when social media changes? New Algorithms are released several times a year on these platforms. Those updates have a high chance of screwing up your old methods. Having multiple strategies and back up plans will save you time and money in the long run.

    Network. I am lucky to live in a metropolis. There are incredibly smart people who can offer great insight into growth. They can help avoid potential pitfalls.

    Just start. You may fail, but holy shit it will be fun. If you are laying in bed at night dreaming about building something on your own, do it. You will be ahead of 99% of the population by just starting. As stupid as it sounds, just doing the things you need to do when you know you need to do them will help you succeed.

    When your current project blows up in your face, that means you know understand how not to do something in the future.

    "The master has failed more times than the student has even tried."

    "Sucking at something is the first step to being really good at something."

    It will be embarrassing to suck and be new, but don't let that get you down. People will think what you're doing is stupid and you'll feel stupid sometimes. That's the way of it. If you can get past that part, you'll be in a good spot. The way I used to get through it was imagining myself six months from that moment laughing at how much I didn't know back then and how much I had learned. It's always exciting to learn.

    submitted by /u/youngrichntasteless
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    How to best partner with another company?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 11:45 AM PST

    I'm doing a Virtual Reality startup company, I'm the CEO in an LLC partnership. My startup will sell subscription model dance lessons in VR with continuous content update. As you can imagine, it'll be a while until I see revenue, let alone profit, but dance and VR are my passions.

    An industrial sector marketing company saw my dance demo by chance and they were impressed, so we started brainstorming about offering services to their clients. I created some demos for them to show around, and eventually they brought me along to their big conferences. They are great at everything I suck at: marketing, networking, getting leads, conversion, sales, etc. Their clients are really big, the kind that you get access to only after years of networking.

    So, we talked about partnership. They want me to raise their valuation by adding a new VR/AR division to their company. In return I would get a % of their company acquisition price. They're looking at a minimum $10M acquisition, and 5% has been casually mentioned. I assume I would need to raise their valuation more than that for this to work.

    So, a few questions (I understand I'll need to talk to a lawyer, but I want some perspective first):

    1. What's the best way to achieve this partnership? Do I as a person become a stock holder on their company? Or would it be through a contract between companies?
    2. I assume if I own a percent I won't get a pay day until the very end?
    3. How to protect myself from devaluation of their company for external reasons?
    4. Should I initially offer my services for a fee? I'd like some cash inflow for my VR dance company, and it'd be nice to be out of the red, but I don't know how investors would take "Dance VR company is profitable because of somewhat-unrelated-services"

    Thanks!

    submitted by /u/cuyflood
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    How to get products selling in luxury stores chains

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 12:56 PM PST

    A year ago during a trip to Europe my wife discovered her hidden talent: silver jewellery design.

    Since than she found manufacturers, designed a few pieces and decided to sell them to a 4 local jewellery stores.

    1 Week latter they were calling to buy more. I made a visit to one of them and saw them selling the pieces for 3x the price that she sold them, and they were almost all gone.

    After a short conversation with one of the Jewllery owners, he said that he never had any product that would sell so fast, and that women love her designs.

    The designs are complex yet beautiful, very luxurious style, and are mostly had made using old techniques by an old European jewellery manufacturer. She developed her style based on classic on a mix of classic and modern jewellery style, and adopted a very catchy brand name that she's about to register.

    So, I started thinking maybe the best would be to go big rather then stick with selling a few dozens pieces per month localy, but I'm not sure how. My field of work is somehow connected to on-line marketing, but I have no idea how to develop a brand and get it out there selling.

    Get a database of jewellery stores and call or send a sales man?

    Build an on-line sore and bet on on-line marketing?

    Try to get to Luxury brands stores? How? What do they require?

    I really don't want her to miss this opportunity and make it rewarding for her as she's very much inspired and all into it.

    Any advice?

    submitted by /u/estupor
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    This Subreddit is pretty cool.

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 03:17 AM PST

    I can think of a few things that are unique to this community, and I want to share my appreciation as its added value to my life and business. I'll list out a few thoughts I had, mainly because I dont know how else to format it so it looks good in a post...but whatever, here's the list.

    1. We can all get access to entrepreneurs who have made millions, and they are willing to share how they've done it. Not just their thoughts, but we can ask them questions and they have an opportunity to respond. This makes success more attainable for others.

    2. We can become inspired to take that first step to follow our dreams. One of the first difficulties many people face is just admitting to themselves and loved ones that they want to become an entrepreneur, but when you get the support of others who have taken that step long ago it becomes a little easier.

    3. We get support from real people who have been on the journey. We all know entrepreneurship can be lonely, hell it can be damn right traumatic and its nice to have a large community to connect with.

    4. We can be exposed to new business ideas that we may have not thought of, and we have the benefit of thousands of people to scrutinize the validity of the idea.

    5. If we have a successful business, we get the opportunity to give back and support people who share our interest. Which is nice because IRL, not everyone is interested in business or entrepreneurship, and they can get bored of us endlessly talking about it.

    6. We can brag about our success and share lessons on our failure. This is hard to do with people who are outside of the entrepreneurship community. Its hard to talk about your income goals when your business income is many times the size of your friends and family personal income. They cant relate and it can bring up resentments. Conversely, they don't understand the importance of lessons learned when you take a massive failure and they can be quick to judge.

    Anyway, I think its important that I shared these thoughts because it is rare to have a place like this. This place can literally change thousands if not millions of lives, if you stop to think about the amount of people businesses affect with employment of staff and even the products that customers use. I'm a strong believer in entrepreneurship, and I think this sub impacts the world in a huge way that we cant even comprehend, so I think its important that we take a minute and think about how valuable this community is.

    submitted by /u/johnstevens456
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    Dropshipping Legal Requirements

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 09:35 AM PST

    Could anyone explain all of the legal requirements to start an LLC dropshipping store? thanks in advance.

    submitted by /u/aaronf427
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    Crowdfund myself or give up the majority of my equity?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 08:21 AM PST

    Hey all,

    I'm in a position where I'm about to crowdfund my venture. I have two options and I'll try to lay them out as best I can.

    1. Crowdfund myself. It will be a slight mission/purpose based company and I have a friend who works in mission based PR. My last job was also in affiliate marketing and I have some pretty solid publisher connections. I'm going through outsourcing to build my website and the quality/timeframe is not ideal.

    2. Work with a reputable publisher i believe contains a lot of my target audience. They have a product line and their first kickstarter raised around $5mm. They'd take a large equity split (not sure how much yet but assume 80/90%) of the raise and possibly the product going forward. They have great content, financial, etc resources obviously not to mention the experience.

    If you were me what would you guys do? Take a larger slice of a smaller pie or a very small piece of a very large pie?

    Thanks!

    submitted by /u/vice84
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    3 years in, 11 employees. I’m ready to give it up. Convince me otherwise or don’t.

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 12:48 AM PST

    I'm 3 years into my business, we've doubled in size each year in revenue and employees. I still work 12- 16 hour days as CEO. I don't have any debt, or investors. I'm tired, I don't exercise as much as I should and I go into serious depression at times due to burnout and the constant ups and downs of running a business. I'm tired of the "advice" from people who don't run a business give me that think will help. Partly venting but partly reaching out to see if their are any other business owners who are in, or have been in this situation. Did you give up or did you push through? What was the defining moment to help you make the decision? -tired entrepreneur

    submitted by /u/halfsie
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    Help me find a CRM software & Virtual Phone Solution

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 12:55 PM PST

    Howdy doody

    I'm searching for a new CRM software that integrates with a virtual phone. Currently, our project uses google docs and excel for CRM and Grasshopper for a virtual phone.

    We've looked into alternatives such as KarmaCRM and AgileCRM, but they don't seem to be exactly what we need.

    We are a small business which sells one product wholesale and retail, and have 2-3 different customer service agents.

    Ideally, this would be a single program with a simple interface that serves basic functions, including;

    *Keeping track of all communications (phone, text, email) between customers and representatives

    *Creating calls and texts from the software

    *Some sort of mobile app or program to allow customer service representatives to have individual access

    Basically, here is a work flow of how we would use this:

    Membership request received on website or at retail location > Sends email to set up a time for a call > customer service rep calls customer to get information to place order > shipment fulfilled with invoice and tracking > follow up

    If the program could cover as many of these as possible on the CRM/Virtual phone integration end, it would be ideal.

    Thanks so much

    submitted by /u/Zigity_
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    website-services.foobar hitting google analytics hard

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 12:26 PM PST

    I went on my Google Analytics just now and noticed a huge traffic spike from different domains all starting with website-services it is 9200% increase in traffic. Anyone experience this before?

    submitted by /u/jsdfkljdsafdsu980p
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    Product Ideas of things i can make with fiberglass rods

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 01:56 PM PST

    Hey everyone, I have over 1,000 10mm fiberglass poles just over 66 inches tall. I can cut them and i have a 3d printer to make small parts. I would like to gather ideas from the community!

    Pictures

    Full pic

    metal end

    plastic end cap

    submitted by /u/handy_dandy_206
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    Setting up profit sharing (that actually works) in a small software development business

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 01:46 PM PST

    Hi y'all,

    I'm creating a plan to implement profit sharing in my business https://www.atlascode.com.

    I'd like to setup a profit share plan that takes 10% to 30% of the annual profit we make, and redistributes that amongst the entire team. This amount will be prorated according to salaries and percentage of the year that people worked, so every employee will receive a part of the profits amounting to an equal percentage of their salary.

    But...

    I fear that sooner or later, every employee will conclude they have no real power to affect the size of their own bonus, and so the motivation will slowly disappear.

    To get around this, I want to design specific profit share programmes for each department. For the sales and marketing department it's quite easy. But these departments are harder:

    • Software development
    • Testing and 2nd line support
    • Customer service and support

    For each of these departments I need to identify what it is that that they do which most contributes to my bottom line. Any ideas on how to motivate these particular departments is greatly appreciated.

    Thanks in advance

    submitted by /u/noelster
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    How we produced a $40 video that drove sales of $4000 in 4 months

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 09:20 AM PST

    Hey r/Entrepreneurs, this is the story of how we shot, edited and produced an explainer video for our product Typito in just 6 days before our Product Hunt launch. The video still drives a good part of our revenue and has done more than what a landing page video does. Check it out on Hacker Noon and I really hope it helps. Glad to answer any questions you have on creating videos for your business DIY.

    submitted by /u/tmatthewj
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    New tool for Amazon FBA product research?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 12:51 PM PST

    Hey guys, one of my favourite youtubers just uploaded a new tutorial on product research. He hasn't uploaded one of these for a while so I thought I'd share it here for you to check out. I know a lot of us have our regular tools for product research but I'm keen to try out VL that he mentions in the video. Apparently they only launched in Q4 last year.

    Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/ehYEDkS5Z2k

    Anyone here already using the product discovery thing yet or has maybe tried it out before?

    submitted by /u/drump1
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    I need a name for my ecommerce store. I'll give you $30 if I choose your name!

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 12:38 PM PST

    I've done everything I can without a name but I absolutely need one at this point and just can't think of the right one.

    Mainly I'm trying to market it towards millenials and more specifically the travel niche/market, so I'm mainly trying to create a name would sound appealing to them.

    As a starting point I've been trying to play off travel-related words like atlas,globe, world, adventure, destination, voyage, adventure etc. or words like memento, souvenir, token. Definitely feel free to word smash or just make up a word.

    The Business:
    It's just going to be a website where you can buy tshirts from different restaurants from different cities and countries. It's going to be a platform for restaurants to sell those tshirts. But i also want the business to have a distinct brand as well because we might make our own branded apparel. I don't want the name to just say what we sell so nothing like souvenirworld.com or restaurantshirts.com.

    Requirements
    -Domain must be available or have a good domain alternative
    -A .com domain
    -Relatively concise

    Things I don't want
    -I don't want to limit it to only t-shirts so it shouldn't end in apparel, tees, swag, supply, shirts, designs, collections etc.
    -I don't want to limit it to only restaurants so it shouldn't allude to it only being restaurants, food in the name

    edit: order and emphasis

    submitted by /u/ExtraFirmpillow
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    on-demand apparel?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 08:35 AM PST

    looking for a preferably US based on-demand apparel provider for a brand I have a stake in.

    would like heat transfer, silk screen, and embroidery options for things like t-shirts, tanks, sweatshirts, hoodies, beanies, ball caps, stickers.

    Any suggestions? TIA

    submitted by /u/twoslow
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    Feeling like everything has been done

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 06:01 AM PST

    Hello!

    I always wanted to be self employed and be able to do my own thing. For the past year, this "wish" has become stronger and stronger, however, I just don't know what I want or can do. Many people turn their passion into a business but I'm not really passionate about anything. I just want to earn money, that's it. I would love to have an online business. But I feel like everything has been done already, especially when it comes to online businesses.

    I'm from Germany, almost 26 years old and I'm currently in college, getting a degree in electrical engineering. I'm willing to put in the hours necessary to make a business work, but I also have exams twice a year which I need to study for, so around that time I can't put in more than 20 hours a week. I don't even need to become a millionaire within a year, just enough to be able to live from the business, I'd be more than happy if I earn 1000€ ($1200) a month after taxes within the first year. Of course, in the long run I would love to grow a bigger business but as long as I'm in college, a small scale thing wouldn't be a bad thing.

    Do you guys have any ideas what I could do, whether it be an online or offline business? What do you guys do? Motivation is appreciated as well.

    submitted by /u/SirJoey
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    Business Loan / Capital Investment from Friends

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 11:39 AM PST

    Hi there! I am launching a business in the coming months. I've decided to approach friends to assist with my $15k in start-up costs. They will be investing $3k minimum.

    They will be choosing from one of two options. One is I can offer them their money +40% by month 15, or nothing if the business fails to turn a profit percentage.

    Two is I can offer them their money +20% by month 15, or half of their money back if the business fails to turn a profit.

    How would I structure this? I initially was going to fund the entire project myself, but I have interested friends and would like to alleviate some of the risk. Thank you.

    submitted by /u/SchiavoCorpseOrgy
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    Serious Question, how much will speaking your mind hurt you profesionally? Need answers.

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 11:32 AM PST

    For a while now, with me being a young business owner at pretty much the beginning of my career; I've held my tongue in SO many outrageous situations out of the fear that I didn't want to break professionalism and potentially damage my name.

    I was always taught that your name is all that you have. So that's why my logic is this way.

    Today, I was asked to leave a new locally-owned coffee shop I visited because I was there for 2 hours and didn't buy something. Little did they know, I was waiting for a client and we each spend $10/avg each visit. The point of me sharing that is, when the owner confronted me, instead of telling him "This is absolutely ridiculous, how dare you...) I instead politely responded about not knowing that it was necessary for me to spend money just to sit down and use wifi.

    Steve Jobs was reportedly an extremely open-speaker, was he just an exception?

    Please give me your suggestions.

    Thanks

    submitted by /u/lamborghinifan
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    What do you think of this site format? I feel like it is confusing my users

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 11:15 AM PST

    I've seen similar questions get great responses here, so I figured I'd try too!

    I have a very new shopify store that sells science products to support science writers and scientists. I'm not sure of two things: 1) the landing page format in general for a store like this and 2) the catalog that comes up with the "Products" tab

    Should I just put products front and center on the landing page? Do the catalog titles create decision paralysis? Any feedback welcome really

    submitted by /u/DNAGeeks
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    What is your goal net worth for age 35?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 11:04 AM PST

    Curious what the average number is.

    Be as ambitious as you'd like.

    submitted by /u/halloweencandy69
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    Anyone have experience running or working for a babysitting agency?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 10:55 AM PST

    I'm researching the feasibility of starting my own babysitting agency. Anyone with experience have any tips?

    I'm thinking I would need a brand, sitters, and online booking. Also some type of value added over your neighborhood teen.

    submitted by /u/deebo911
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    I want to create a lip balm brand.. any thoughts/advice?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 10:55 AM PST

    I'm a software developer/graphic designer by profession, I've started a few online startups that had varying successes and recently I've been really intrigued by creating a physical product (& a beauty product, the margins are insane!)..

    I started with this idea a couple months ago -- I created my first batch of prototypes (around 50 of them) and gave them away for free and everybody really loved the way the lip balm soothed their lips (I was also really impressed with the lip balm!), I came up with some branding designs that I'm so-so on, not that fond, but good enough for now (image, still a WiP).

    I'm very confident I could create a stunning shopify store and sell them for a reasonable price ($3, costs about $0.20 to make one with high quality ingredients), and make a few other products as well like hand cream etc..

    I guess what I'm unsure of is if it's worth pursuing (considering the competition) and how I could get my first customers. I've been seeing a lot of fb ads recently for this company that sells everything for $3 and they seem to be doing well.. I'm just unsure how it's profitable..

    I think I could work on my brand and start posting some fb ads but I've never been lucky with fb ads.. maybe video format?

    Eventually I'd try to get it into stores but I think that's far from now.

    Any thoughts / advice? What would be the best way of getting my first customers?

    submitted by /u/SimonFOOTBALL
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    Help! I'm working with a designer to get my branding going and need some creative juices to flow.

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 10:52 AM PST

    So I've done my brand writing with the consult of an art director at a very well known company.

    So here's what I need from you guys: The name of my company is Kenobi Konstructs, LLC. Going off nothing but that help me come up with a simple logo mark. No words, maybe a letter or two. I just need ideas to help myself and my designer pick a creative direction to go in. So go wild.

    Edit: I realize reddit isn't exactly the place to design something. What I'm looking for is some extremes and ideas that I can then dial back or take small bits and pieces of to create something viable.

    Edit: I was trying to keep my brand writing out of this to prevent constraint but people keep asking for it. So If you'd rather follow the exercise that was intended don't continue reading.

    5 Core values: 1: Work should never be frustrating. Challenging yes. But never so frustrating as to feel stuck behind a wall.

    2: If there is a problem. Fix it. If you can't fix it find other solutions outside the box. Remember before you can bend the spoon you must first realize there is no spoon.

    3: Believe in your work and ideas to create a better world.

    4: Follow the flow of change. Never fight the flow. Unless its an ignorant regime. Fight that.

    5: Doing whats right or seeing a problem should always be encouraged and celebrated. Always step forward and be heard. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just needs to be heard. Build from it.

    Company Ethos/tagline? * Design and problem solving through industry experience.

    submitted by /u/CtSamurai
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    I️ have 100k to invest, I️ have 4-5 very famous friends (social media, music industry) all have 1+ million real followers on all social media sites, I’m thinking to start a clothing company/ and building it using their influence. Am I️ crazy for thinking this can be crazy profitable?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2018 10:34 AM PST

    Long story short without disclosing names, these people are very popular, and know popular people.

    I️ think spending 10-20k on an optimal website, advertising.

    And offering my friends 5-10k each to sponsor my brand + 3% of all sales they make can help have continuous growth.

    Obviously the clothes would be high quality and unique.

    Famous people know famous people, people start posting about the brand and soon it blows up and move forward from there.

    Am I️ crazy for thinking this is an amazing opportunity?

    submitted by /u/justinb36
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