Marketplace Tuesday! (March 06, 2018) Entrepreneur |
- Marketplace Tuesday! (March 06, 2018)
- Employees first, customers second
- Beardo: Grossing $30k/mo selling beard hats
- From 3 failed projects to 1200 users in one week
- We need to stop sending emails at 10am on a Tuesday [seriously]
- "Best" route for making around $40,000 per year online?
- Jobs that would provide entrepreneurial experience
- How much does a sit down session with a CPA generally cost?
- Looking for honest feedback on our e-commerce store
- February Report: 25,045 Sessions, 3,650 Subscribers and $160 Income
- Looking to start a business with someone
- I'm Adam Lawrence, A Serial Entrepreneur Who Just Launched His Third Digital Marketing Business - AMA!
- I want to start a business in a saturated(but growing) market, because it's my passion. Can we have a discussion on ways to set myself apart from my competition out of the gate?
- Focus on building relationships and not sales
- How to take the next step beyond a very successful etsy shop?
- Looking for advice on renting out a space
- Months of Developing & I Finally Finished the Instagram Marketing Tool!!
- How would I go about starting a non-PC tech company?
- What Are Some Tips For Writing Press Releases That Get Opened?
- New community blog, need feedback :)
- I'm creating an on-demand service marketplace for entrepreneurs. If you're interested, I'll let you use it for free forever.
- Product liability insurance with dropshipping? (US-based supplier)
- Help with Shopify and Godaddy much needed.
- Best marketplace payment platform
- Looking for most accurate GPS or locating type service
- What do I need to do everyday to get to where I want to be?
| Marketplace Tuesday! (March 06, 2018) Posted: 06 Mar 2018 05:06 AM PST Please use this thread to post any Jobs that you're looking to fill (including interns), or services you're looking to render to other members. We do this to not overflow the subreddit with personal offerings (such logo design, SEO, etc) so please try to limit the offerings 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. [link] [comments]  |
| Employees first, customers second Posted: 06 Mar 2018 06:54 AM PST It would be very hard for you to convince me otherwise, but this is the number one rule for a successful business. From day 1, I have had made the promise to myself that I would treat every employee that worked for me as if they were the most important piece of the puzzle, and two years later the results have been unprecedented. Let's dive in to why I made this promise in the first place: Money only motivates for a short amount of time, expecting money to be the only thing you give an employee is like trying to build a cement block house on a wooden foundation, eventually the weight will topple the structure over (this is an example of when an employee is burnt out) Think about this, what is stopping your employees from working elsewhere if the only source of gratitude is their paycheck? The only thing your providing them is something they can receive anywhere! My theory is this: An employee will second guess him/herself to venture somewhere else when they consider: My excitement when they ask for a day off just to rest, and my willingness to step in and cover them. My encouragement to leave an hour early to make it to their kids dance recital or little league game. My endless praise after every job, for their diligence and hard work (even if some minor things need to be touched up - I own a paint company, and it would be very very easy to be picky, sometimes I won't even tell them a customer needs touch ups, and I'll go do it myself without them knowing to keep morale high) My offering of free lunch each day, yes, they can bring their own lunch, but to me, they can save up to $50 each week if I provide it for them. Giving them weekends off no matter what! We had a job run a little over time last Friday and I called our job for Monday and rescheduled instead of having them come in on Saturday to finish. This, is how you grow a successful business: Accommodate your employees! As a result, my employee retention is near 80%. Even if they are tempted to make more money elsewhere, which has actually happened, the intangibles are what keeps them happy. By the way, I would say 4/5 reviews we get online from customers who's house we've painted mention how wonderful the crew is, how polite, respectful and happy they are! It's amazing. We've all worked for an employer that didn't show us this appreciation, the key word is "worked" as in no longer working for. Thinking about it, they could have gave me a raise and I still wouldn't work for them! It was like pulling teeth trying to get a day off to do something with my family. I hope this helps you in your entrepreneurial journey, because it truly has made an impact on mine! Best of luck to you all. Happy Businessing! [link] [comments]  |
| Beardo: Grossing $30k/mo selling beard hats Posted: 06 Mar 2018 05:04 AM PST Hi /r/Entrepreneur, this is Pat from Starter Story, excited to share this new interview with Jeff from Beardo. TLDR:
Here's the interview - hope you enjoy: Hello! Who are you and what are you working on?Hi, my name is Jeff Phillips and I am the inventor of the Beardo beard hat. We started out with one product which is our patented hat with a detachable beard (the Beardo), but have since launched hundreds of unique products and have even moved into branded promotional products. Beardo really started out as a bit of a gamble and we never really took it that seriously. I knew the Beard hat was fun and functional and that I really liked it, but my friends weren't so convinced that others would feel the same and actually purchase it. I really just trusted my gut and went for it. I am glad I did because within the first 25 days of launch we had sold out of our entire years stock of 1,000 units, and pulled in over $40,000. What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I suppose I get my creativity from my Dad and Grandpa. They both were always looking for ways to improve things and generally just liked working with their hands. I'll never forget the day my dad designed a 'can crusher' so that our recycling didn't take up so much space. He never wanted to put it to market or anything like that, but just wanted it for himself. When he saw that someone had released one a few months later and was probably making millions on it, he was pretty annoyed! Like Dad and Grandpa, I am constantly thinking of crazy inventions and edits around the house to make life simpler. It's not something I can turn off, so I started writing my ideas down in a journal. I guess it was just a matter of time until one of us went into mass production with a crazy invention! The Beardo came about organically and out of sheer necessity. At the end of 2006, I was snowboarding in Whistler, and it was an absolute chiller of a day. We had made our way to the top of a run called '7th heaven' and I was certain that the wind was going to be the end of me. I had this old brown knit scarf in my bag and had tied it around my face to stay warm. About halfway down we stopped on the side for a bit of break and instead of taking off the scarf, I just spread a hole in the knit and popped my water bottle through to take a drink… one of our group cracked up laughing because it looked like a real beard! I got back to where we were staying, cut the scarf up to refine the beard a bit and the first Beardo beard was born! I used it a few more times until I got some better prototypes knit, and the true form took shape into the World's only hat with a foldaway, detachable and adjustable beard! I did keep the original though and I have been meaning to get it framed to hang on my wall! Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product.Though I didn't have any design experience, I had run a few small businesses before and knew a little about graphic design as well. I also had a couple degrees (B.A and a film and TV diploma) that gave me a lot of great experience and the know-how to do things myself. All of these experiences really came in handy while designing the beard hat because it helped limit the startup budget. When this really started to take off, I was living in a friends garage to save a bit of money. We had no internet and things were pretty tight. Getting Beardo off the ground with trademarks, patents, and web design was costly, so again I did a lot of it myself and leaned on friends for help when needed. I remember that I used to drive around the suburbs with my laptop open trying to find a wireless internet signal that was unlocked! Most of the designing, patents, and trademarks were created in my wagon. I remember one house must have picked up on what I was doing because I had been in front of their place for a week when they started to peer out the window and the next time I went back the free wifi was no more. The design process was pretty straightforward though, it was easy enough to get an actual knit prototype made and from there I went off looking on Google for manufacturers. My early focus was to stay in Canada, but after seeing the quality issues with the first round of samples and a price tag of more than I could sell them for, I had to look elsewhere. I ended up finding some great companies in asia who specialize in knitwear and went back and forth for a while before deciding that they were a great company to work with. After getting the patents, trademarks, website design and the first batch of beard hats, I had spent about $8,000 and was ready to launch. I still wasn't sure what would happen, but I figured that at worst case, I could take the beard out of these really nice knit hats and sell them to a store for cost. That was my backdoor if the whole thing crashed and burned. Describe the process of launching the online store/business.I've seen a lot of changes since I started Beardo and there are definitely a lot more people launching sites and small brands. I think it's great and it makes things that much easier to get going, but it also means you have a lot of competition and you need a point of difference. Luckily for me, I had created a unique product so I didn't have to contend with any similar businesses. The best advice I can give is that before launching you need to have a rollout plan in place. A lot of people think that getting the site and product made is the hard part and that all you have to do is wait for orders to roll in. In reality, the launch and promotion are the hard parts. Before going live, you should be ready to contact media (local and otherwise), start advertisements, run promotions, send out free samples to bloggers and influencers and keep pushing and expanding your reach every day. For example, one major undertaking was to search for direct email contacts for all the magazine, Newspaper, TV, and University newspaper editors that I could find. Then one by one, I hit them up and try to get a story, collaboration or even a paid ad. Below is a short list of some of the neverending projects I would also work on in those early days:
Now I am not saying that you need to have everything ready to go before you launch, but you need a rough plan. Truth is you'll never launch if you try to get everything all lined up. it's going to be messy and constant and that's ok. Just roll with it and keep planning and pushing. I had a pretty good plan in place but was really surprised when the first order came in - it was from South Korea! It seems my planning had worked and Beard hats were quickly picked up by global bloggers and the media, which was unreal! The best part was, after only one live-to-air interview on the Canadian news, it quickly went viral and more and more bloggers and 'cool product' sites started listing the Beardo. What has worked to attract new customers?Without a huge media boost, it can be tough to get new customers. I would always keep a list of ideas I had, or things I saw that other brands were doing that seemed to work. That pretty much became my neverending to-do list. The MOST exposure and returns we have seen were directly resulting from being featured by the big fish like 'Good Morning America', our Kickstarter, or our appearance on 'Dragons Den' and also having exposure from celebrities. A company called FAB (daily design deals) liked our product so much that they used it in their online campaign in 2011/12 which resulted in HUGE social media growth and a lot of sales. One thing leads to another though, so the more exposure you can get will almost certainly lead to more and more. It's kind of a snowball effect, and that's what you want. Out of everything we do, social media and SEO are consistently the best returns for us. When you set up your website, the first thing you should think about is SEO, and making a list of all your top keywords is just a small part of that. There are some really great google SEO guides out there and I recommend that anyone starting out should take night classes or online course for the basics, like: SEO. blogging for business, HTML, photoshop, photography. A good place to start for SEO are on the guides that Google provides. SEO is constant and you need to keep on top of it. Not only in terms of your site changes, but also google is constantly changing their own algorithms and with that, suggestions to improve your strategy. One thing I would recommend everyone do is to start following @SEOMOZ and even signing up for a trial. You'll learn alot about SEO really quickly and it's a great way to look into what your competitors are doing too. How is everything going nowadays, and what are your plans for the future?I joke with friends that I thought Beardo would be a short-lived business, and beard hats would be a fad that would be dead in 12 months. I don't think anyone thought it would do so well, or be around so long. As long as I am still meeting people who have never seen it yet, there is always room to continue. Today, Beardo has warehouses in 5 countries and has a range of over 140 fun and functional winter headwear products and we are always coming up with new ideas! We do have plans for new products, but they are top secret! Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?As I said earlier, I have seen a lot of changes in the e-commerce space and I think the number one regret I have is not blasting Facebook ads more. When I first started advertising beard hats on facebook it was just to grow the fanbase as the objectives today simply didn't exist. I started out with about $10-20 a day and at a cost of about $0.01- 0.02 per fan - it grew really fast! Back then I thought $70-140 a week was quite a lot of money to spend on advertising, and kinda thought things would stay the same… I was dead wrong. Facebook changed their algorithm and cost per reach, which basically means to get that same fanbase growth you would have to spend thousands a day. It's also now nearly impossible to speak to your own fans through organic reach with your posts without paying, so that's a big bummer. Back when we had 10k fans, we would get 500-1000 likes per post. Now we have 330k and are lucky if we get 10 likes. We should have been focused more on channeling our fans into email subscription as it allows for a direct method for contact. I think there is no real model for success that covers all brands and products, you really never know what will work and what will fail and just because something works for one brand doesn't mean it can be reproduced. You should try everything and don't be afraid of failure and definitely don't get hung up on failure. Move forward and try your next idea. If you are out of ideas, Google, follow others or ask around. I think a major attribute of a successful entrepreneur is not just driven but creativity and the ability to think outside of the box, so trust your weird ideas. What platform/tools do you use for your business?We now use Shopify because it is nearly impossible to crash it! We have tried and have even had hundreds of thousands of concurrent visitors on the site with no issues. Not even a flicker. One of my friends just had her bikini site crash last night because she wasn't prepared for a big rush of visitors and it's been down for nearly 15 hours now. Do yourself a favor and go with Shopify. We also use the Product Upsell App through Shopify as well as discounts, reviews, and BitPay which allows people to pay using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We also accept Paypal and Shopify payments too. What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources for your business?I really liked the 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. It's a bit of fiction, but gets you thinking out of the box! Besides that, I don't really look for business motivation. I am more interested in design inspiration, so I just look at lots of strange art, and try to travel as much as possible to open my mind to new ideas. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?If you are looking to start out online, you should remember that simple is better. When designing your website try to make it as streamlined as possible. That goes for product design, packaging and ads as well! Simple is better and trial and error is the key, so keep testing. Some issues I see are things like spending too much money before you have even started. These days you can start with an idea and turn it into millions before you even have product! Just look at Kickstarter.com. It's a perfect place to launch and trial your product or idea to see if others are even interested. If it gets funded, perfect! If not, you hopefully haven't spent too much and can move to the next idea. We did a kickstarter of our own in 2013 and it was the reason we were able to launch our line of ski masks! You can also start out on the cheap by selling on a platform like Etsy and try to grow a fanbase and revenue that way before blowing your paycheque on a fancy website. Things like patents and trademarks are important but easily done without spending tens of thousands on legal fees. Trademarks are especially easy, so before getting a lawyer, check it out yourself! The most important thing is to trust your gut and go with it. There are lots of people out there with great ideas but who are too afraid to start. Interview at https://www.starterstory.com/beardo-beard-hat [link] [comments]  |
| From 3 failed projects to 1200 users in one week Posted: 06 Mar 2018 06:25 AM PST Hey /r/entrepreneur Over the last two years, my partner and I tried to launch several projects while working full time. We failed. We failed hard. Sometimes because of a lack of motivation, but often because of a lack of methodology. In this post I will give you my experience about what we did wrong in all these failed side projects, and what we did right to finally launch Shoptolist. ShopToList is a universal wish list. It allows you to track the products you want to buy, and get notifications if the price drops. Think Pocket, > but for shopping. 1)What made us fail our previous projects ? Too much focus on the engineering process/hype As developers ourselves, we spent too much time hunting for the perfect process. We wanted a perfect Continuous Integration/Continuous deployment process, 100% unit tests coverage. All these things are important for "mature" projects, but it's a waste of time if you want to build your MVP. We spent hours learning new shiny JS frameworks and tools, instead of actually building our product. We sometimes treated our projets as a playground to test new tech / frameworks. The learning curve can be steep, and our productivity often fell to near zero ! Re-inventing the wheel We did everything on our own. For example, on our first project, we spent two weeks implementing our home-made login/register/forgot password system. That's stupid. It's a "commodity feature", and there isn't any value for our users in it ! Then there is the design part, again, we did everything from scratch. We spent so much time trying to make a good looking design. Design is really important, it can sometimes be a feature but arguing about how we name our CSS classes or this damn 10px padding is a perfect example of how not to launch your MVP quickly. For our first project (a lead generation tool that tragically died before even one user could try it) we spent three weeks working on a cool admin interface full of data / analytics. What a waste of time ! Entrepreneurship porn overdose We spent countless hours watching entrepreneurship videos and advices, instead of shipping our product. It's kind of funny to write this on a post about entrepreneurship but, there is so much informations available, with Hacker News, Reddit, Youtube channels, it's really easy to get lost and procrastinate. Not talking to users We barely talked about our side projects, even to our friends. By doing this, we kept ourselves inside a bubble, and it had two bad consequences. First we did not have any inputs on wether it was a good idea or not. And secondly nobody but ourselves could encourage us. 2)What we did differently with ShopToList We often read that ideas don't matter, only execution does. In fact, we think ideas does matter a lot, for your own motivation. We switched our mindset from "There is this opportunity in that niche" to "I would love a product that does this". With Shoptolist, the problem we want to solve is first for ourselves.We were really motivated because for the first time we were about to launch a product we would actually use everyday. We used tools we knew Instead of playing with shiny new languages and framework, we used Python and Flask, because we felt productive with it. We could have used React — Redux but we are bad with front-end and we know it. So instead we went with the basic CSS-Html-Semantic UI. For hosting, we used Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, which is a service that automate the deployment setup on AWS. We can deploy our code with a single command, and that's great. There are lots of alternative, Heroku could have been a good fit too. You don't want to spend time configuring servers etc. Templates and boilerplate This is something that made us save a lot of time. We used a boilerplate for our app, Flask-base. Basically it's an open source code skeleton that does every basic things all web app needs. User management, email, admin dashboard… There are boilerplates like this for almost every languages / frameworks, use them ! By doing this, we were able to focus on our core feature, not the "noise" around them. Then instead of building a custom dashboard for business metrics, we leveraged Google Analytics and tracked everything in it. It works great and took us 1 hour. For our landing page, we used a landing page builder called Launchaco. There are lots of tools like this, it's a great way to build a great and responsive landing page. We talked to our potential users From day 1, we talked about our project to everyone around us. Our friends, collegues, and it helps us understand how people shop online, what they want, and focus on the "Viable" part of the MVP. Then after a month of hard work, we made several posts on social media / reddit, and got 1200 signups in one week. It's great to have that many users early, it allowed us to get TONS of feedback, via email, Google Forms survey, and iterate around this feedback. For example, on the first version of the landing page, lots of people told us they didn't really understand what the product did. Or they asked questions like "Does it only work with clothes?" So we changed the wording, like "It works with every website / product", add some screenshots to make it more understandable, and it worked, our conversion rate on signup immediately went up ! This is just the beginning We still have a lot to do, we are not very proud of the design, we'd like to add support for every major browsers (there is only a Chrome, Safari and Firefox extension for now), deliver notifications if we see the product cheaper elsewhere (not quiet sure about how to do that at the moment) build mobile apps, there are some bugs… With ShopToList taking more and more of our time, we might have to think about a monetization strategy. Early on we were upfront about the fact that we don't want ads at all, we might go the affiliate links way if it is necessary. This was a humble post about our experience, what worked, and what didn't. I hope it can help people launching their projects, and not doing the same mistakes as we did on our failed projects ! In the next post we will talk about the money problem, mobile app and getting traction. Stay tuned if you want updates about ShopToList. Links: Website: https://shoptolist.com Medium: https://medium.com/@sahin.kevin [link] [comments]  |
| We need to stop sending emails at 10am on a Tuesday [seriously] Posted: 06 Mar 2018 01:42 PM PST Hey all, Question: what's the best time to send an email to your list to maximise your opens? If you're anything like me, you'll have it seared into your brain that it's 10am on a Tuesday. That's the advice that's currently circulating on most marketing blogs. And for good reason. It's what the data said (2 years ago). But here's the problem: We all read the same blogs. And we all follow the same advice. So suddenly, we're all sending out to our list at 10am on a Tuesday. And what happens...? Everyone's inbox gets flooded at that time. And slowly but surely, getting your email seen (and read) on Tuesday at 10am becomes a little harder. So what should we be doing? Well, firstly, we should be testing. Boiler plate advice should always be taken with a pinch (or bucket) of salt. What works in one industry might not work in another. For example, if your list happens to go out to plumbers (why not?) then they might happen to check their emails at 9pm on a Saturday. So that's when we should be sending, even if the "big data" tells us that's the worst time But, that being said, us marketers do like big data don't we...? So what is the current "best time"? Well, according to an analysis of 10billion+ sent emails (by Moosend), it's between 8 and 9am on a Thursday. I should point out that Moosend's 2016 data agreed with the 10am on a Tuesday advice. But over 2017, they saw a gradual decline in the effectiveness of that time/day. So yeah, that's the current "best practice". But of course, if we all start to follow it... it will be subject to change ;) So opening this up to discussion, what day/time have you found to be most effective for YOUR list? Do you run tests/change it up periodically? And have you noticed any changes in the effectiveness of certain times/days? [link] [comments]  |
| "Best" route for making around $40,000 per year online? Posted: 05 Mar 2018 03:49 PM PST Hello everyone, My father is at a higher risk for heart disease, and the job he has now is crazy stressful, so I am hoping to somehow start up something online that he can eventually take over as his new job. Neither him or I have more than two years of college, so it would be need to be a sort of non-specialist job. Online work seems best for him since he doesn't have a college degree and my parents need about $40,000 to survive, as they both have expensive health insurance from lots of health problems. I don't think he could find a job around here that would pay that much (with his education level), so online seem most rational. If I am wrong about this, please tell me! But I am posting here mainly to get some advice on the "best" online career route to go. Some major ideas I've came across are drop-shipping and blogging (ad payment). I don't really know any others than those. What might be the easiest online "job" for me to start up for him? [link] [comments]  |
| Jobs that would provide entrepreneurial experience Posted: 06 Mar 2018 12:18 PM PST What are some ideal jobs for a college graduate that would give that person a lot of entrepreneurial experience, before he or she sets out to start their own business? [link] [comments]  |
| How much does a sit down session with a CPA generally cost? Posted: 06 Mar 2018 11:44 AM PST I just want to talk to a CPA for like 20-30 minutes and ask very basic general questions about my small business, accounting, and taxes. How much am I looking at for just a quick chat? [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for honest feedback on our e-commerce store Posted: 06 Mar 2018 11:38 AM PST We launched our store about 6 months ago and wanted some feedback from some more experienced folks. The store is called ChillCave (as in we make your cave chill) and features mostly home decor designed by us and a few artists (we are recruiting more artists currently). We are targeting millennials and nostalgic Gen-X'ers with retro and quirky designs. [link] [comments]  |
| February Report: 25,045 Sessions, 3,650 Subscribers and $160 Income Posted: 06 Mar 2018 02:02 PM PST Hey /r/Entrepreneur! It's Rich Clominson here again, maker of Failory, a website where we weekly interview failed startups. A few months ago we decided to become a transparent startup and begin sharing our numbers. We have just published the February report. This was a special month. We had a lot of time to publish new great interviews and work on different features. This resulted in a lot of new users on our website, hundreds of email subscribers and our first dollar (which, in fact, were $160!).
Here are some of the main points:
Let's get into the article! Welcome to our second-month report. Despite we started Failory a few months ago, it was just in December when we took some courage and wrote our first-month report. In January we announced that we weren't going to publish an article, as we haven't had too much time to work on the project. But we are back. February was a special month. We had a lot of time to publish new great interviews and work on different features. This resulted in a lot of new users on our website, hundreds of email subscribers and our first dollar (which, in fact, were $160!). So, let's begin!
MarketingWe are still figuring out how should we write these reports and which format should they have. We couldn't come with any great idea for this month, so we will keep the same format we used in December. That month, we included in the marketing section, everything that had helped us attract new visitors and emails subscribers. So we will do the same on this report. You are now warned that in this section you will not only learn about the marketing strategies we have used, but you will probably also read about new features we have built and cool side-projects we are trying to launch. Let's move into the interesting and funny part. Our month started with the launch of Entrepreneurial Lists.
Entrepreneurial ListsEveryone knows how engaging lists are. Every day, thousands of websites publish articles listing their favorite tools, articles, products, websites, videos, or whatever you can imagine. We have always been big fans of Product Hunt, and we have always been shocked by the ridiculous amount of upvotes products featuring the best tools for entrepreneurs/startups receive. In fact, the most upvoted product ever on PH was Startup Stash, a curated directory of 400 resources & tools for startups. That is why we decided to build Entrepreneurial Lists, a page with curated lists of resources & tools for entrepreneurs. We launched it the 2nd of February, with a pretty successful campaign. But before the launch day, we spent weeks curating resources, brainstorming ideas, designing the website, building it on Webflow and preparing the marketing campaign. Let's take a deeper look at this cool side-project.
BrainstormingWe wanted our project to be different from the other millions of websites featuring entrepreneurial tools. So we decided that we would keep it stupidly simple: just the name of the resource and their link. But that was not enough. Our tool was still really similar to the rest. That's when we decided that we wouldn't only feature the greatest tools to do X, but that we would also recommend learning resources, articles, blogs, and Twitter followings, among others. It would be more like a page with recommended resources to learn about entrepreneurship and tools to carry out those lessons building a business.
Design & DevelopmentAt the end of January, we did a re-design of the homepage, in which we changed the boring square view for a nicer list view. To design Entrepreneurial Lists, we copied the design of those lists and adapt it to what we needed. We wanted to keep the project cool and funny, so we included emojis on each list. Moreover, we took a look at the other websites featuring startup tools and realized they all had a logo or an icon they identified with. That is why we decided to put a big emoji at the top, which is the one we then used as a logo. Once we had the design, it was time to develop the website. We, of course, did it with Webflow. If you are not yet using Webflow, we can't understand why. It makes everything so simple! Building the Entrepreneurial List page took us less than two hours, and only because we are still learning about how to use this great tool. But we are sure someone with a bit more experience can create it in less than 20 minutes.
LaunchWe prepared and carry out a really successful launch campaign. We started by promoting it on Product Hunt. It went okay… We didn't achieve the front-page, but still got 25 upvotes and some visitors. More importantly, we received some feedback on how could we improve it. We then submitted it to Designer News, where we got 15 upvotes, Hacker News, which was a complete failure, and on differents subreddits, which went pretty well. Moreover, we shared it on our social media and a few communities. Until now, it was a really similar launch campaign to the thousands of products that are launching every day. However, we carried out a great strategy on Twitter. We scheduled +30 tweets along all the launch day, tagging each of the companies and products that our lists were featuring, and sharing the link to Entrepreneurial Lists. It was really time-consuming, but it totally worth it! We supposed that the companies we were mentioning would be happy to like and retweet our tweet. And that was exactly what occurred. Some of our tweets went "viral" and meant many visitors to the website. We also got many new followers that day! Entrepreneurial Lists was viewed 3,826 times in February, being the second page with most page views on Failory of the month. But this is not all… Many websites found Entrepreneurial Lists really interesting and created some backlinks to it, which is awesome as we are planning to rank with it by different keywords. Moreover, Pieter Levels, the guy who has mainly inspired us to create Failory, tweet about our project.
InterviewsOur interviews are still our main source of traffic. In February, they represented +30% of our page views. Some of them receive much more traffic than others. This not only depends on the quality of the interview, but also in the way we promote them. On February, we published 4 interviews with failed startups:
Let's start with the first one: Botnim. We personally really like this interview. It is super interesting and quite different from the rest, as we interviewed two persons. We were really enthusiastic and created a great marketing plan to promote it, but it was kind of a failure :/ We shared it in different places, and we wanted to get viral on Hacker News. That is why our interviewees, Shaked and Gilad, asked their friends to help them with an upvote. As soon as we submitted the link on HN, we sent it to Shaked and Gilad, who immediately upvoted it and asked a few friends of them to do the same. In less than 5 minutes, 6 people had upvoted the link, which is an amazing number. But when we checked the front-page, we were not still featured there. A few more minutes later, 2 more people upvoted the interview, but nothing worked. Unless Hacker News reported the link as SPAM, we can't understand what happened.
The second interview we published was a complete success. It was with Jan Johannes, founder of Flux, a modular multi-messaging client. The promotion strategy basically consisted of Reddit. Before publishing it, we identified a few subreddits that would find the interview interesting. It was really tech-related, so we searched for subreddits like /r/webdev and /r/programming, and shared it there. The post on the webdev subreddit went completely viral. It was upvoted +290 times and received 5.8K views. The post on the programming subreddit went even better. Not because of the number of upvotes or views. In fact, the interview was only upvoted 18 times. But the programming subreddit only accepts links, so this meant a lot of traffic. Until now, the interview has been read 3,478 times, representing the 8.44% of the total page views of the month.
The third interview of the month was with Cody Howell, a man who failed to build an online store where individual sellers could go to sell their products. It went okay. It wasn't a thoughtful interview with lots of lessons and mistakes to learn from. It was just an interesting story. It only received 1,068 views, mainly coming from Designer News and Reddit.
Finally, the last interview was with Dave Desi, founder of The Nerd Cave, a truly safe space for gamers of all kinds. It is such an awesome interview. We published it only a few days ago, and it has already been read 2,250 times. One more time, most of the traffic has come from Reddit. As it was an interview related to games, we promoted it on /r/gamedev. It received 42 upvotes, which kept it on the front page for some hours. Gamedev subreddit accepts links, so instead of writing all the interview on the post as we usually do, we just shared the link. Big success!
"Learning from Mistakes" InterviewsA few weeks ago we published a survey on our homepage asking our users to help us decide what should we build next. By far, the winning option was "Interviews with Successful People who had to Overcome Big Stumbles". We began working on this at mid-month. We are trying to stop being just a place of interviews with failed startups and create a website with many more tools and resources. That is why interviews with successful entrepreneurs was a great method to expand our scope. We described the process of getting interviewees in our previous monthly report. It is really time-consuming as we have to email a lot of people, and only a few are willing to answer our interview. So we postponed this for a few days, until we finally took some courage and did it. We got many more interviews than we have expected (and there are still some people writing them). We have a long queue of interviews to publish during the next weeks. Our initial plan was to launch them all of them at the same time. We wanted to create a different page where we would constantly publish new interviews with successful entrepreneurs. However, we decided to start publishing the best interviews we have received on our blog, and then move them to the new page.
The first interview we published is called "Bootstrapped e-Commerce Making $100,000/Month" and the interviewee was Eric Bandholz, founder of BeardBrand. This interview is so great! If you haven't read it yet, you should take it a look now. Great quality of interview, plus a catchy headline, plus a perfect promotion strategy, resulted in 2,414 reads. It went viral on /r/Entrepreneur and /r/EntrepreneurRideAlong, but this didn't mean many visits, as we had to publish the content of the interview, instead of the link. Designers on DN seemed to like a lot the interview. 11 upvoted it so it stayed in the front-page for an entire day. Furthermore, some people (somehow) arrived at the interview organically.
The second interview is called "How Ron Makes $10K/Month With 6 Different Websites". The interviewee is Ron Stefanski, a guy who is making $10,000 per month with 6 different websites. We published it the same week we published the BeardBrand one. It was read 2,531 times, most of them coming from Designer News. On Reddit was a complete failure, but designers seemed to like it, so we are happy anyway ;) Moreover, the average time per page on that interview is incredible: +7 minutes!
Finally, the third interview we have published is named "How Lidiya Built a Personal Development Blog Earning $2,000/Month". Lidiya is a full-time freelance writer who has started Let's Reach Success, an authoritative site on anything related to personal, spiritual and business growth. She is earning $2,000/month. We haven't finished promoting it, so there isn't too much to say.
Social MediaThis month we kind of stopped working on some of the marketing strategies we mentioned in the previous report, such as SEO, PR coverage, and newsletter cross-promotion, to put a big focus on keep improving Failory, launching new interviews, building new features and interacting with our users. However, we are still putting big efforts on social media marketing. We love Twitter, so we are working hard to get new followers every day, to create a great way to communicate with our users and share our interviews. In February, the social media that meant the biggest traffic was Reddit, representing the 56,52% of the total coming from social media. Hacker News also gave us some traffic. Moreover, we received 434 sessions from Twitter, representing 8,28%. A few week ago we started sharing our interviews on StumbleUpon. We don't like too much this social media, but it sends some traffic, so it is okay. We just share the link and create a ViralContentBee campaign to get some votes. We don't understand yet how it works and how we can take the most advantage possible. But we will read and search about it soon. On Twitter, we keep the same posting format that we have been using on the last months. We schedule 3 tweets every day:
On every tweet we send, we try to tag someone or a company so that they retweet it, and more people find us. At mid-month, we start sending the fourth tweet of the day. But this one is totally automated, by Quuu. This tool curates articles and schedule tweets. We are just testing this new technique, so maybe we realize it doesn't have engagement and we quit it. Our Twitter analytics were quite great this month. We got 68 new followers, tweeted 166 times, and had 80.7K impressions. One of our tweets even went viral. We shared a great article we had found in which @ajlkn talks about how he built Carrd. He has +43K followers and he retweeted our tweet, which meant a lot of new likes, retweets, and followers. As for Facebook, it has generated 312 page views. But we have almost gave up on FB. We got a few more likes on our page, but if you don't pay, your posts aren't seen by anyone. We only share the link of new interviews, just because it is easy to do. But we will soon stop doing it. What we will probably continue doing is sharing our interviews on different FB groups. We have to search for more active groups and not just spammy ones. We still have to work on this strategy. One more thing about social media marketing. There is a lot of opportunities on Quora and Pinterest. We need to read about them, as we don't know much yet. But they can be great ways to get some traffic to our interviews. We are principally enthusiastic about Quora. Our friend Emil Bruckner has built a great tool that helps you find great questions to answer. It is called "Find Better Questions" and is free. So we will definitely start using it soon!
NumbersWe have shared some of our analytics and numbers throughout all the article. But here are the main two ones:
Google AnalyticsOur website, due to the type of content we publish, is always receiving big spikes in traffic, when we publish a new interview, but big downs, when there is any new content. It is something we will have to learn to live with, until we find other marketing strategies that don't depend on our content promotion strategies. Let's take a look at our analytics. Our website is receiving an average of 670 users and 894 sessions every day. During the first days of February, our traffic was quite low. We were only getting some spikes every time we published a new interview. However, this changed from February 19 towards. That week, we published 3 interviews (one interview with a failed startups and two interviews with successful entrepreneurs). We also asked for some design feedback on DN, which sent us a lot of traffic. We will try to keep the traffic this high, by publishing 2 interviews every week.
Email SubscribersWe had faced some problems tracking the number of our email subscribers, so this report will just be approximate. At the end of December we had 2,759 email subscribers. We got a lot during the last days of this month, due to one of our articles going viral on Hacker News, and our free eBook. However, when launching the eBook we committed a big mistakes. We start adding everyone who downloaded it to our email list. This meant a big decrease in the quality of the list, and lower open and click rates. To stop this, we created a question on the eBook landing page, just below the download button, asking people whether they want to receive our weekly emails or not. This has helped us a lot to slowly start recovering the great quality our list had. Due to many people unsubscribing from our newsletter, at the beginning of February, we had almost the exact subscribers we had in December: 2,759 approximately. Our list has now 3,650 subscribers. This mean two things:
Furthermore, our open and click-through rates are higher than in December:
Revenue & ExpensesWe have finally made our first dollar from Failory. One of our goals last month was to start monetizing this project, and we achieved it. We earned $160 coming from sponsorships on our newsletter. A few weeks ago, the founder of ThoughtLeaders, a website that connects newsletters with advertises, contacted us and proposed us to start working as a publisher. Our list was small at those times, but with the rapid growth we achieved in December, we were now able to start monetizing the newsletter. According to our subscribers and open and click-through rates, we agreed that $60 was a reasonable price for a sponsored email. However, as they are they search for companies who want to advertise newsletters, they are staying with $20. So, we are earning $40 with each newsletter we send. We know it is quite expensive, but we don't have too much time right now to search for advertisers. And with this tool, we don't have to do anything, more than to include the ad in the newsletter. On February we sent 4 emails, resulting in $160. The first 3 emails were sponsoring Monday, a great team management tool. The next email was sponsoring Builder, a tool that transforms ideas into products. For a few weeks (and probably months), we won't focus on any other monetization strategy. We want to implement affiliate marketing and create a subscription model website with a community and some great things we are still figuring out how to create. We will also add advertisement on our home page. However, we won't look and reach advertisers. Instead, we have included a little card on the homepage, telling advertisers to contact us if they want to reach +15,000 startup owners per month. This month we almost didn't have expenses. Just a $12 payment of the Webflow subscription plan. So we will reinvest all the rest in new content, improvements on the website and new features.
GoalsLast month goals were a bit too ambitious. We are not great at setting goals. We set some really difficult goals, and some really stupid ones. We can't find the middle between easy and impossible. Last month goals were:
We won't have too much time to work on Failory this month. We will continue publishing new interviews and articles, but we won't have too much time to promote them and interact with our users. That is why we will set ourselves 4 "easy" goals:
Thanks everyone for your support this month. We have received a lot of nice feedback and kind words, which keep us motivated to continue working on Failory. Remember to email us if you have any feedback, ideas, recommendations, or just want to talk. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking to start a business with someone Posted: 06 Mar 2018 02:00 PM PST I am a web developer and can make a website of any type, I have been freelancing my services but want to start a business of my own. I can do this on my own, but I would like to do this with someone, so I am coming to Reddit to find out if anyone would be interested in partnering with me or has any online business ideas they would like brought to life. My Skills (What I bring to the table): I am a web developer and can make any kind of website given enough time, I would make this website for free if your idea was good enough and had the potential to make money. Furthemore I can manage all the hosting, setting up a domain which is all very simple. Oh, and I also don't use shopify or wordpress, I actually code it myself. My point being that I actually know my stuff. Your Skills (What I would like from you): The main thing I am looking for is someone who can advertise and get a large userbase, this is the biggest problem with all websites no matter how good a website. So if you are good at advertising, send me a PM and we can discuss any ideas you have or ones that I have. I am very bad at Photoshop so if you also happened to be a designer that would be great (Not necessary or even important though) Ideas: If you don't have any website ideas or can't think of anything unique, I have a few ideas that I can brainstorm with you and we can work out what seems best from there. But I can make any type of website, for example a website like Reddit (Maybe an improved version of it), or a YouTube type website. Of course these are just bad ideas, but I am just trying to explain that I have the capability of making any idea you have come true. Note that I am not saying that I am wanting to make the next Reddit or YouTube, these companies make millions and are impossible to compete with, I was just trying to explain I have the capability to code a site such as that. COSTS I expect that we will be 50/50 business partners and we will bring as much to the table as the other person does, I don't expect any kind of payment, simply your skills. When it comes to hosting and advertising costs we will of course discuss how we want to go about this. WHY? I feel it will be a lot better to start a business with someone as it gives me motivation and 2 people working on something is better than 1. It would mean the world to me if I could find someone with a good idea and dedication to starting a business. Even if you don't have all the skill in the world, as long as you have dedication anything is possible! I hope to hear from someone in the near future and hopefully we can work together in starting a business! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Mar 2018 01:59 PM PST Hi! I'm Adam Lawrence. I just launched my third business, ClearHat, a few days ago with Shark Tank Entrepreneur Shaan Patel. ClearHat provides effective digital marketing courses for marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs looking to grow online. I also own two other successful marketing firms, a brand marketing agency and a PPC ad agency. And I am more than familiar with failure. :) I'm here to answer any questions you may have about digital marketing, small business ownership, entrepreneurship, and more. AMA! P.S. For more marketing tips, please check out my free class on Facebook Ads or Shaan's free class on PR & Media! Both are packed with information and run throughout the week. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Mar 2018 01:39 PM PST I'd really like to start a fishing business. Tackle, merch., videos, guides, whatever I can think of. There are 100s, if not 1000s, of small business out there doing this already and more seem to start every day. What makes some of the newer/smaller ones successful? What out-of-the-box thinking can I apply to my venture to gain exposure? I'd really like to bounce ideas around and see what maybe worked for your business that I could meld into my own. [link] [comments]  |
| Focus on building relationships and not sales Posted: 05 Mar 2018 10:46 PM PST |
| How to take the next step beyond a very successful etsy shop? Posted: 06 Mar 2018 01:16 PM PST Hi guys, would love some input. I have a very successful etsy business where I sell downloadable paper goods. Things like invitations, wedding printables, banners, etc. The items are designed by me and I own all designs. I sell the files to customers who can download and print as much as they like for their event. I have over 12k sales, but am not sure how to monetise my work outside of etsy or how to take the next step to turn it into a real money maker. Etsy is so good at driving customers and has a built in infrastructure making selling there very easy compared to building my own site, seo, etc. But using etsy comes with a price. I am only accessing their customers and am paying a premium in advertising (promoted listings) and commission to sell my items. I have over 800 items and personally enjoy selling them as digital items because it is a passive income for me that requires little day to day effort. But I am interested in taking the next step. How would you guys suggest selling more/doing more? Happy to answer any questions, if it helps. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for advice on renting out a space Posted: 06 Mar 2018 03:30 AM PST Hi guy's, first time poster here looking for some advice on possible ventures. I have access to a large meeting/board room and have been researching ways to make some money from it. Currently we rent it out for functions maybe once a month and between times just use it as an office. I was thinking of renting it out as office space (it is fully kitted out and attached to a coffee shop) or possibly as a space for pop ups. Does anyone else have any other ideas? Maybe you have done something like this before? The more unusual the better - I'm open to everything. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Months of Developing & I Finally Finished the Instagram Marketing Tool!! Posted: 06 Mar 2018 01:05 PM PST Hey /entrepreneur, I wanted to create a tool that increases user engagement by promote all of their social media / business links in one place. After months of developing I have finally released version 1. I have created www.LitURLs.io This tool allows you to create as many customizable links (titles & descriptions) and display them in whatever order you wish on your profile. You then share your own custom LitURL link to your instagram or friends. The best part about this is users that visit the link will also see your other social media profiles, like your facebook, music page, stores, business website and they will more likely click on it and check it. I offer a FREE version (up to 3 links) or a paid Pro version that has unlimited links, analytic system and all future features included! Please let me know any other features I can add. I am working on a analytic system for the Pro Plan currently and some other features secretly. I will be randomly selecting 2 people for FREE PRO ACCESS for LIFE! Wish you all the best! [link] [comments]  |
| How would I go about starting a non-PC tech company? Posted: 06 Mar 2018 12:44 PM PST As many of you are aware, Apple, google etc. have been exposed for political correctness and censoring conservative views. I think there is a niche for a more conservative tech company that produces phones, tablet, etc. I figure I could use alibaba to hire some overseas production staff and I could use Android so I don't have to program my own OS. I made an excel spreadsheet that shows the proposed company making a profit after 3 quarters (the first two would be spent on designing and producing our first phone and tablet and the third would be when sales pick up). I feel confident enough to present this to a Goldman type investor but I don't have any contacts there. Any advice on how to approach them for funding? [link] [comments]  |
| What Are Some Tips For Writing Press Releases That Get Opened? Posted: 06 Mar 2018 12:21 PM PST So I am almost ready with my company to release my first press release but I have heard from so many people that their releases never really get read and they stop sending them out. How can I write an amazing press release that will get read and published or will make media outlets want to do a story on what we are working on? [link] [comments]  |
| New community blog, need feedback :) Posted: 06 Mar 2018 12:20 PM PST Started a community blog last month. Our posts are focused on personal experiences and unique short stories. We made the website live on 8th February 2018. Here's the link: http://www.coffeewritersblog.com I'd love to get feedback on these points: 1) Overall look and feel 2) Navigation 3) Readability 4) Something that you hated 5) Something that you liked 6) Something that you think is okay, but can improve 7) Anything else you'd like to add! Thank you! Just as an aside. Here's the stuff we're working on: 1) Building a writing community 2) Increasing readership 3) Increasing website speed (shifting from shared to private hosting once we cross average 1500 page views per day - it's 250 right now) 4) Getting a SSL certificate if we ever begin collecting sensitive information 5) Using Instagram to get more readership (230 followers as of now) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Mar 2018 08:27 AM PST Here's what I'm working on: http://workwizrd.com Here's how it works:
How much does it cost? It's completely free for entrepreneurs and their customers to sign up, and there's only a 10% commission on orders that happen on WorkWizrd. Progress so far: I worked with about half a dozen service business owners in a few different niches in my home town. I got fantastic feedback from them, and they used my previous version of the platform (MVP) to do real orders for a few months. Now, I'm looking to build more relationship with service entrepreneurs to help me build the best product for you. In exchange for your feedback as the platform is built, I'll allow you to use WorkWizrd for free (no commission), forever. Literally 0 risk. Drop me a DM or let me know if you're interested. [link] [comments]  |
| Product liability insurance with dropshipping? (US-based supplier) Posted: 06 Mar 2018 11:48 AM PST I am just about to set up a dropshipping store to go with an already well-established website that I have, as I came across a US wholesaler and dropshipper who does quality products in my niche. I am based in the UK, but my website visitors are mainly US-based. I'm a bit stumped on the whole product liability thing. I've done some research, but most of the information I've come across is for AliExpress dropshippers. I'm finding some information saying that in the case that the manufacturer is US-based, they are the ones who would be held liable, and not the retailer. I'm hoping this is the case. I've already contacted my dropshipper to ask for their advice, they have been quite helpful so far, but while I'm waiting for them to reply, I'd really like a second opinion. [link] [comments]  |
| Help with Shopify and Godaddy much needed. Posted: 06 Mar 2018 11:42 AM PST I recently bought a domain from Godaddy with the intentions of connecting it to Shopify but now experiencing difficulties doing so, any help would be much appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Best marketplace payment platform Posted: 06 Mar 2018 11:30 AM PST Hey everyone. Im looking for a marketplace payment gateway, has to be able to accept multiple currencies. Anyone have any recommendations? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for most accurate GPS or locating type service Posted: 06 Mar 2018 11:24 AM PST Hey everyone! We are building out some solutions for software in sports and as we are doing research I am trying to learn more about accurate location services that are available today or becoming available. We would love to hear if you guys have any experience in this area, and accuracy is very important to us. [link] [comments]  |
| What do I need to do everyday to get to where I want to be? Posted: 05 Mar 2018 07:46 PM PST This entrepreneur life seems like an old legend or fairytale I hear. No one around me has done it so the only people I can look up to are in books or online. I want to accomplish my dreams and turn them into a reality. I don't care about the money I just want some to survive off of. I want to be able to live my life and do what I want. No one in my life or that I've ever met has as much ambition as me (or at all it seems). I feel like I'm the only one that wants to do something big with their life (that I know). I'm a realist and a dreamer. I know it's been done before countless times, but it just feels like I'm at the Grand Canyon looking across and trying to figure out how to get to the otherside, without dying. I don't want to live if I don't even have the chance to accomplish my dreams. [link] [comments]  |
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