Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (May 04, 2018) Entrepreneur |
- Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (May 04, 2018)
- A simple hack which gets me 10X more social proof on Facebook ads, at no extra cost
- At age 17, I launch my app 1 year in the making. With no prior knowledge on android development, here’s my story.
- Who Uses Skills/Behavioral Assessments For New Hires?
- How do you combine showcasing your current job achievements/skills with those needed for your side hustle on online resumes like LinkedIn?
- What are the most insightful and hands on shareholder letter feeds that one should read?
- How long did it take until launching your business WHILST working full time?
- Burning $250,000 Building the Netflix for Nollywood
- How do I create / train totally loyal employees?
- Is learning to code for the sake of potentially building valuable apps worth it? Or should I focus on something else?
- What's the best software for a mixed drip campaign/phone call lead system?
- I'm launching a free video course with "behind the scenes" of the content marketing strategy that helped us grow our 8-figure SAAS business ARR by +65% two years in a row.
- I have a logistical headache (products are 1.06 lbs) and shipping is relatively outrageous. Am I missing a shipping solution or should I try to reduce the weight?
- I want to buy your blog. Healthcare, dental, travel, or insurance related
- Own an eCommerce business? I've interviewed the Social Content Producer at Ogilvy & Mather about visual trends in eCommerce. Here is how they help you increase sales.
- UPDATE: The inner workings of a $35,000/month productized service (+ photos and thought process on scaling!)
- Instagram algorithm change
- What to do when you live in an Poor Area?
- Legal Question: Selling frozen food to customers
- Intending to start a clothing/fashion brand within the next year
- My country, Dominican Republic, just established formal diplomatic relations with the PR of China (ending 70+ years of diplomatic ties to Taiwan). What are the obvious business opportunities to explore?
- What's your method for organizing all the business cards you get?
- Building an app on Freelancer?
- Want to start my own business someday, what do I about health insurance?
| Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (May 04, 2018) Posted: 04 May 2018 06:07 AM PDT Please use this thread to share any accomplishment you care to gloat about, and some lessons learned. This is a weekly thread to encourage new members to participate, and post their accomplishments, as well as give the veterans an opportunity to inspire the up-and-comers. 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]  | |||||||||||||||
| A simple hack which gets me 10X more social proof on Facebook ads, at no extra cost Posted: 04 May 2018 10:51 AM PDT If you're an entrepreneur or a marketer, who is constantly on the look for a new hack to improve your campaigns on Facebook — you'll enjoy this one. By the time you finish reading this post, you'll know how to use & deploy this simple hack which my agency uses to get 10X+ more ad engagement (social proof) for our clients, at no extra cost. Here's a couple of ads on which we deployed this hack Deploying this won't take you more than a couple of minutes, and results will be visible within 24 hours. You'll get more engagement (likes, comments and shares), which will result in even more engagement, which ultimately results in higher CTR, lower CPM, lower CPC, lower CPA & more revenue. The Social Stacking Method On Facebook The standard Facebook campaign structure looks something like this > The Standard Campaign Structure on Facebook You have a campaign which is made for a specific offer or a promotion. Inside of the campaign you have 100s of ad sets which are targeting different audiences with 100s of different ads. As the campaign progresses and you gather more data, you find a winner ad which performs better than any other ad. Then, you'll make 100s of ad sets again. Each ad set will contain the same winner ad, but instead of having just one ad, you have 100s of copies of that same winner ad. Absurd, right? By having this kind of campaign structure, all of those 100s of copies of the same ad are going to pick up some engagement. Couple of likes, comments or shares… But what if you could stack up all that engagement a.k.a. social proof, to one single ad? Luckily, you can. We call this "The Social Stacking". The idea behind the social stacking is very simple — Instead of having 100s of ad sets pointing to 100s of copies of the same ad, you're going to point all of your ad sets to a single ad. Here's what's different in the campaign structure > The Social Stacking Campaign Structure Here's how the social stacking looks in practice > E1 (MAIN) is the main ad to which all ad sets are pointed to How To Deploy The Social Stacking Method? As I've promised, deploying this takes no more than a couple of minutes. This method applies only to the newsfeed placement, on both Facebook (desktop and mobile) and Instagram (mobile only), where engagement can be seen in the form of reactions, comments and shares. Open your Facebook Ads Manager and take the following steps: Step 1 —Select the ad Select an ad to which you want to point all ad sets (on the ad level of the campaign) and click Edit. (See here) Step 2 — Acquire the ad ID In the Ad Preview section click on Share Preview button, then click on the Facebook Post with Comments. If you're running ads on Instagram, you'll click on Instagram Post with Comments. (See here) Once the ad loads, take a look at the URL. On Facebook, you'll have 2 strings of numbers interrupted by /posts/ in the middle. Select and copy the 2nd string of numbers. (See here) If you're doing this for Instagram you'll get only one string, which you'll select and copy. Step 3 — Apply the ad ID In this step, you'll need to either make a new ad set or duplicate the existing one (duplicating is faster). Change whatever you want (age range, country, gender, interest, etc) and then go to the ad level of this new ad set. Click on Edit again and then click on Use Existing Post. (See here) Click on Enter Post ID and paste the ad ID you acquired in STEP 2. Click Submit and then Publish the ad. Step 4 — Duplicate as many times as you want The easiest way to point more ad sets to this ad is to duplicate the 2nd ad set you've created (because it already uses an existing post from the 1st ad set). The social stacking method is also good because it allows you to add multiple new ad sets in a matter of minutes. This is particularly useful if you're running robust split testing systems or launching a new product. The Next Steps… Can you believe that something this simple can make a big difference? BOOM! It can… So, put this method into ACTION now & let me know what kind of results you're seeing. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 11:15 AM PDT Back Story, Back Story, Back Story! When I got to the 11th grade my IT teacher, Mr Pat( let's call him Mr Pat) So Mr Pat thought it would be best to introduce use the world of programming. We started out on JUST BASIC. As the name suggest it was very basic, but to me it was the coolest shit ever. Mr Pat started showing us some short and easy algorithms to help people get the hang of it. But I, siting at the edge of my sit, foaming from my mouth, got very frustrated with him and felt the class was slowing me down. So I began to practice at home in my free time, and within a week I was better than every other student in my class, within a month I was better than by teacher. Wasn't because I as some kind of genius or anything, it's just that I was the only one who was willing to spend 6 hours, banging my head on the keyboard, cuz I just couldn't figure some shit out. After I while I got bored with JUST BASIC, I felt I wasn't being challenged enough. So one day I and my friend are walking to school, and an idea hits me, so I'm like "Hey Kishan" (His name is Kishan). And he goes "Yea" and I say "What if there was an app where you can post stories, books and just your general thoughts for other to read". "You've basically described most app, you gotta have something unique, or else people won't download it" Kishan says to me. So I said "What if the theme colour of the app adapted to the average colour of your profile picture, and the background colour for the stories you read was the average colour of the image chosen by the author, giving the author more control over the mood of the story". Kishan laughs and says "You'll never be able to do something like that man, it's just too complicated. And besides most people do this in teams, you're just some 16 year old high schooler with no "real" programming experience". Determined to prove him wrong I went online and started gathering all the software and hardware needed to develop an app for IOS, but half through I realized selling my kidney just wasn't an option so i moved to android development instead. So I got my dad to buy a mid-tier laptop. I download android studio and was quickly overwhelmed by the amount of icon and information that was being shoved at my face, so I shut down my laptop and proceed to completely forget about my app for a month. One day I open up android studio again and this time was determine to complete my app. I had a very tight schedule, because of school work and anything below a B- was absolutely unacceptable to my parent. So every day after school I program for 5 hours straight, half the time was spent starring at the display wonder how the hell id overcome a problem. At some point I began to ask myself why I was even doing this to myself, seemed so easy to just give up. Stackoverflow became my friend, it was the medicine id take to relieve me of a headache. My parents began to worry about me, they said I was spend too much time "playing games" on the computer. I tried to explain what programming is, but you try explain tech to Nigerian parents. So every day after school id continue my app for 4-5 hours for a year. I was really proud that I came up with an idea and pulled through, not many people can say that. I shared it with my friend and we would basically post stories for each other to read. Yesterday I decided to put it on the play store. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dev.textnet Thoughts and feedback would be much appreciated. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Who Uses Skills/Behavioral Assessments For New Hires? Posted: 04 May 2018 08:26 AM PDT I've been looking for a way to get a bit more information before moving onto formal interview/hiring. Specifically some of the unknown things like problem solving and customer service styles that might not come across in other ways. Anyone know of any reputable free versions of behavioral assessments? Any paid services you particularly like? I always get frustrated by industry niches like this that do such an effective job at gate keeping their pricing structures and then forcing super long phone calls to get any real information. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 04:34 AM PDT My current job is way different than what I do for my freelancing gigs. When I list my skills on my LinkedIn profile (aimed at my current job), I could be perceived as 'all over the place' and indecisive. How do you guys cope with 'conflicting signals' online? [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| What are the most insightful and hands on shareholder letter feeds that one should read? Posted: 04 May 2018 01:00 PM PDT I know of the famous Warren Buffet's and Jeff Bezos shareholder letters, but who else creates immensely insightful reads? Is there a tool where shareholder letters are aggregated, some kind of rss newsfeed or blog with collections of good reads? [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| How long did it take until launching your business WHILST working full time? Posted: 04 May 2018 10:22 AM PDT A general question. From when you started a business plan, to actually making your business visible to the world, how long did that take whilst you had a job? [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Burning $250,000 Building the Netflix for Nollywood Posted: 04 May 2018 01:36 PM PDT Hey /r/Entrepreneur! Its Rich, maker of Failory, where I publish interviews with entrepreneurs. Today I published an interview with Michael Ojo, founder of WURA, the Netflix for Nollywood.
TL;DR
Learn why you should not try to run someone else's race! Hi Mike! What's your background, and what are you currently working on? I'm Mike, 28 years old based in Atlanta GA. I was born and raised in Lagos Nigeria, moved to the US when I was 12 years old and I fell in love with the computer from an early age. I started simple coding in High school and that would later lead to my career now as a web developer/ internet entrepreneur. WURA started as a pet project, and for 2 years it really was that. My family and I loved to watch our native African/Nollywood movies and we generally had access to those movies on YouTube, except they were all over the place. You had to search and dig through the dirt to find a good quality movie. WURA was a way for me to curate a playlist of titles so to speak. It was an on-demand video platform we one came and built their own playlist of high-quality titles that were readily available. It wasn't until I had some cash in the bank though that I started thinking about the project more like a business. My other businesses took off and I had the capital to turn it into a legitimate business. And that I did, hired a team of 10 with myself included. And we put together a nice platform to watch movies on your pc and mobile devices. For a monthly fee of $3.99, a user had access to hundreds of new titles (movies and TV shows) both in English and other local dialects. My main task was to oversee everything. I was the owner but I was also part of a team of 9 other incredible people.
What motivated you to start WURA? When I started WURA in 2013, I was actually just recovering from a failed startup the year before. My background is in web development but I consider myself more as a project manager as I rarely get hands-on anymore with my projects. Between 2008 and 2012 I was in the flash gaming business and I ran a successful network of gaming websites, up until early 2012. Several events happened that year that shut down about 80% of my business. First was Google Panda update or Penguin, whichever it was, I lost my Search engine rankings and that alone completely decapitated my business. Also, by this time smartphones had already taken over the market so many gamers that would typically come on the site to play games now go to their mobile phones. And in my efforts to transition to mobile games and join the trend, I essentially lost about $21,000 to a sham game developer on Elance (be very careful when using freelancers for big projects). Long story short, by the time the year was over, I went from making $75k a year to barely making ends meet. I shut down the servers, sold my car, cleaned out my apartment, and moved back in with my parents. As an entrepreneur, your best insurance policy is mom and dad because when things go south (and they will at some point) you at least have a place to lay your head and try to recoup. And so, it was a few months after living on my parent 's couch that the idea of WURA came about. When you live on the couch, you tend to consume a lot of TV and online videos. At least that was the case for me. When I kept watching these movies on YouTube, that's when the idea came to me. Also, it helped that I saw another person (IROKO TV) running with the same Idea. Later that year Iroko went on to raise $8 million. And I thought for sure there is a big opportunity here.
How did you build it? Again, when I first started, it was more of a side project because of my current situation at the time. I had to work a fulltime consulting job. But while I could, I initially set up a WordPress website and I remember using the WordPress theme 'detube'. I made a list of features I wanted to add to the site to make it more usable and easier for users to find titles or build their own playlist. I played around with it by myself for a few months, and then towards the end of the year (2013), I was able to find a buyer to liquidate what was left of my gaming business. I got about $49,000 from that sale, and with the additional income from my day job, I felt I had enough to get serious about WURA. So, I did, and the first person I hired was a PHP programmer/coder, and we started adding that list of features to the site. Then I began reaching out to Nollywood producers and movie makers to acquire titles for a licensing fee Some of the major obstacles I faced were dealing with the West African business ecosystem, also having to transact with people thousands of miles away came with its own challenges. Sometimes hard drives would get lost in shipment or sometimes I get the hard drives and it has the wrong content in it. And this wasn't something you can just drive to the store and return. It would cost $100-$150 to ship hard drives back and forth. And internet connection there, is not strong enough to send very large files through the cloud. So, to reduce risks, I had producers send me hard drives first that contained several movies. Then from there, we chose 3-5 titles that we really wanted. Over time, that saved a lot of money and headache At the time I was building WURA, I also had a successful entertainment blog that brought in enough revenue for me to continue funding the project. I went on to hire a team of 9 people, designers, writers, editor etc. and my programmer was also brought in full time. Hired a mobile developer as well. So, I had a legitimate business. Had the people, invested thousands in acquiring new titles. All was left was launching and executing with the right marketing plan. Or so I thought.
Which were your marketing strategies to grow your business? For marketing, we had a Facebook and YouTube page, did some SEO, built a mailing list through the site, and I reached out to several startup and entertainment blogs to get our name out there. We also offered promotions and free trial periods to get people in the door. We spent about $35,000 on Facebook alone, that helped get some signups both free and paid, also increased our mailing list. The blog outreach helped build some link juice for SEO for the most part. A mailing list was effective in converting free users to paid. Facebook was a terrible investment. For 2 reasons:
Which were the causes of WURA failure? The main cause of failure for WURA was YouTube. Probably with some mistakes and carelessness on my part as well, but YouTube was the ultimate giant that rendered the business model unsustainable. Sadly, I didn't realize this fact until much later on. Remember when I said that I thought there was a big opportunity once I found out IROKO TV raised $8 million? Apparently, hundreds of others thought the same, particularly the movie producers. So, the same guys we paid a fee to license their contents went behind our backs and flooded YouTube with the same titles and much more. This basically erased whatever monetary value the movie titles had. I considered WURA more of a service than just a movie or video site. But it is extremely hard to sell that service to anyone if their ultimate goal is to watch a movie and that movie is already available somewhere else for free. And not just somewhere else, but YouTube, which was and still is the most recognized name in online videos. That said I had some responsibility for the failure of WURA as well. For one, I focused way too much on the product itself, that I misjudged the market. And in focusing on the product, I made way too may alterations and customizations. I also licensed way too many more titles than I should have. My marketing strategy was backward. I should have had a marketing plan and execution in place before even launching the product. I'd assumed that guys like Iroko had already proven the concept that I just need to gain some of that market share. Wrong! When it was all said and done, I started to realize that the business may not hold due to the trend I was seeing on YouTube, literally every day I would see a new channel pop up showing the same titles that we carry. Although ours were in much greater quality and high definition, still didn't matter. I naively stayed in the game and hoped for a different outcome or tried a different approach at may be changing the type of content we carried, but even if that were to be successful, I was already running out of cash by this point. Ultimately, I let everyone go and shut down once I ran out of my entire life savings. And for a while there I still left the site online and gained new users daily. I recently just completely shut down the site/server and many of the online social pages. It took about 2 years for me to get there; shut down completely. That's the emotional attachment and pain many of us entrepreneurs deal with. But sometimes you just have to let go.
Which were your biggest mistakes and challenges you had to overcome? I wouldn't say there was a particular BIG mistake or mistakes. I think I had a lot of small things that added up and here I'll list them.
Which were your expenses? Did you achieve some revenue? In the end, how much money did you lose? Expenses were mainly:
If you had to start over, what would you do differently? There are a few things:
Which are your favorite entrepreneurial resources? There are many:
Where can we go to learn more? You can visit my blog, or check my YouTube channel!
Original interview published in https://www.failory.com/interview/wura [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| How do I create / train totally loyal employees? Posted: 04 May 2018 03:20 AM PDT There are many positions such as Chief Accountant or Sales Managers that can do a lot of wrong or plan behind your back to jump ship and take all customers or data with them. How do I create lasting loyalty among employees and key employees and me? I often take people in with little or no work experience at all, I teach them the job, pour out all my knowledge, hoping to make them skillful means they will be grateful and stay, but once there is another higher paying job, they move on pretty fast to another company with higher pay or they start their own company. It is a cultural thing, there is a "I, too, can do." mentality. Only the very low educated or female employees who seek job security over career, seem to stay. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 12:32 AM PDT I've put some hours into coding and I enjoy the creation and problem solving. I'm nowhere near the level of making apps though. I started because I have some app ideas. I don't have money to pay someone to make them for me so I decided to learn myself. I'm contemplating whether or not I'm wasting my time. Part of the reason I started was because I wanted to start taking action towards having a business and reading books and watching YouTube isn't that. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| What's the best software for a mixed drip campaign/phone call lead system? Posted: 04 May 2018 12:30 PM PDT I am looking for a marketing automation platform that integrates with a CRM to perform the following drip campaign/phone call mixed workflow. What are my options? The workflow
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| Posted: 04 May 2018 08:32 AM PDT Hey r/Entrepreneur In the past two years we were able to grow traffic to our company blog by 10x (from 15k visitors/month to 150k visitors/month). But, most importantly, our blog is now one of our biggest customer acquisition channels. So I created a free video course with all our best blogging and content marketing strategies: https://ahrefs.com/blogging-course There's no catch and no upsell for some other premium course. Just pure value. In fact, we give out a 2-week free access to our marketing platform together with the course. An offer, which people at r/SEO seem to be going crazy about right now :) AND... we're also launching a private Slack community, where our marketing team is going to answer all your questions about content marketing & blogging for 30 days since the course launch. But there has to be a "catch," right? Why else would we give out so much for free? Well... we noticed that when people get the actual results with our help - they are more likely to become our customers. So with this course (and bonuses) we want to give people these results upfront. That's it. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 08:26 AM PDT I have a fragrance kit and I am getting hosed on shipping. I totally planned to make this under 1 lb, but I made some mistakes. The price is already pretty low. Right now, we utilize USPS priority mail FR padded envelopes which are $6.90. SurePost from UPS would be $7-8 and takes 1 week+ (they keep trying to sell me "the UPS guarantee") I don't know what else I can do-- unless we cut product. But I want to minimize pissing people off. We could cut one of our bottles to 4 oz instead of 5 (and tweak some other stuff like box type), which would just about do it. Right now with credit card processing fees and shipping, we pay about $8.20 through our site and $9.60 through amazon which is a significant margin on $30. Cutting the weight to under one lb would save $2.90 per sale on our site and about $1.50 with Amazon sales. Is there a good way to cut product? We still have 2,000 units @ 1.06 lbs. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| I want to buy your blog. Healthcare, dental, travel, or insurance related Posted: 04 May 2018 11:52 AM PDT As the title said, I'm looking to purchase blogs surrounding the above mentioned topics. If you have one for sale, or know of anyone who does.. please message below or DM me. Thanks Q [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 11:41 AM PDT Today it's not enough to showcase your products with a simple description and color option. Your client is more sophisticated. And your job is to keep them craving for more with EXCELLENT product visuals. We talked to Blue Hamel, the Social Content Producer at Ogilvy & Mather and learned a lot about visual trends in E-commerce. Here are the main takeaways:
➡ Instructional videos. 73% of consumers say that they are more likely to buy a product if they watch a branded video that explains the product or service. ➡ Catwalks. 96% of consumers find videos helpful when making purchase decisions online. It's hard to imagine the beauty of a folded dress while walking down the street or understand how exactly that shirt will fit you.
➡ Always use large images. FYI, Skinner Auctions tested whether increasing the size of their product images from 250 pixels to 350 pixels wide would increase conversion rates.Their results were astonishing with 63% more of visitors starting the bidding process and a huge 329% more visitors completing all the forms necessary to make a bid. ➡ Use images with high-resolution. Your visitors zoom into your product to see fabric structure and fine details. Make sure the images aren't blurry or pixelated. They are HUGE NO-NO. ➡ Make it clear. Is it clear from the photo what you sell? You sell a product first, not a photo composition. You can attach an additional photo to show the atmosphere, but it shouldn't be the one and only. ➡ Product carousels. Why not take three to five photos of a product from different angles, or close-ups of certain features, and upload them as part of a series behind your awesome hero photo? This will enhance your visitors viewing experience compared to using only one photo. ➡ Background consistency. The rule of product image backgrounds is that the background should not conflict with or distract the viewer from the product. It seems to be clear. But what is often neglected is a common picture of your product collection. Need visual examples? You can check out them and get more ideas for social media visuals here: https://en.promorepublic.com/blog/boost-sales-ecommerce-product-visuals/ Any questions? I'm here to answer! Was this post useful for you? Leave your feedback in comments, please. Happy selling! [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 07:43 AM PDT
The inner-workings of a $35,000/month productized service
TLDR:
Hey guys! I posted a lot on Reddit about the productized service I started a couple of months ago. The first post was mostly about how I came up with the idea and how I built my MVP. The second post was mostly how I grew the sales, but this post is my learning so far to reaching $35,000 a month which is a higher milestone and includes my thought process when making decisions to achieve that milestone.
In this post I write about how we got to that point and how we are planning to scale.
I always like writing here because it is super introspective and helps met to clear my head, I am also a big fan of building in public since it keeps me accountable I am also quite happy to build with the Internet since I think as an entrepreneur it is easy to sometimes be biased and building stuff that no one wants, I am a big find of hearing advices from the crowd.
I also hope this post can inspire other redditors to start the same type of business because frankly, this is just hard work (I am not a developer or designer, I am just passionate about building stuff and I do not mind putting the hours in order to reach my goals).
This advice is hopefully gold if you are also interested to start a productized service which I think is a great business model so sit back, relax and enjoy a cup of coffee with this and let me know your feedback!
How we started and what we did right
I posted extensively on Reddit about how we started our design-as-a-service so I will only summarise quickly the most important things we did when starting:
How we got the early subscribers
How we are organised
Now the most important part of this post!
It has been 5 months since I have started my company. When I first moved to Asia I did not really know what I was doing / which business I wanted to start. I started very small with a one-page MVP and clear offer, just contacted 2 or 3 designers I had in my Skype list, then started flying to the different locations to meet them in person and try to motivate even more to work with me. I since hired 5 project managers, 1 Head of Production, 1 Quality Manager and we have ten's of designers working on the project.
We have a project management tool that basically handles all requests. Clients are invited there, submit their requests which are then assigned to project managers, which then co-assign them to designers. Designers see the brief, execute on the design, and upload it on the project management tool. The client can then discuss with the project manager.
How the team is organised:
Each week we have a 15min weekly call with my co-founder (CTO) and the Head of Production where we each talk about the top 2-3 things we worked on / will work on in the next week. We have two excel files : Metrics (and finances) and Operations (where we list the customers and track their satisfaction / the last time they have been contacted). That's it. It is super simple.
What is a day-to-day like in running a productized service?
I think running such type of business is super operations and people intensive and thus the focus should be on making sure you are always improving your service delivery and talking to customers that can give you insights as to whether what you are doing is right or wrong.
My day-to-day as an early stage founder thus is mostly to get up, go to the office and do 3 things:
I talked a lot about this before but I think the key to succeed and overcome obstacles is to have little ego, learn a lot from others, and talk a lot to customers (who usually have the answers). Seriously, your focus is to make what people want, and find more of those people and leverage as much as you can in terms of resources (talent, finances, other people learnings) so that you can do more of that. That's it.
How we are thinking about growth / scaling now
The first months (December, January, February) were mostly about testing the market we had to answer the following question: "Are we creating value?" and "Are we making what people want?", the other questions were also: "What resources do we need to deliver that value proposition?" (resources in terms of staff, product, etc...). We mostly answered all those questions.
That's I think one of the major first step in building a productized service: Creating value and understanding what resources we need to deliver that value. This is it guys! Now after doing that we all sat and started thinking: How can we deliver better? or in other words: What are the obstacles of going from $15k per month to $150k per month? we listed all current obstacles in a root cause analysis and started tackling obstacles one by one:
I think your job as an entrepreneur after you've mostly done the job yourself of finding something that works is just to ask a lot of questions about everything: How can you improve your service delivery?, Why some customers leave?, Are your customers 100% happy? In the team meeting basically I just ask a lot of questions about everything and I think having an inquisitive nature really helps in finding solutions. Asking good questions is super important!
Final thoughts and final learnings: The productized service model
I will make another post on this but I think productized services can sometimes make more sense than choosing a freelancer or a SaaS solution. I think in some cases it can deliver higher value because it alleviates risk and delivers a more tailored solution. As an entrepreneur, I think it is also an interesting model to try (though operationally, it is hard to pull off) mostly for that reason: You're creating higher value for customers than what a typical freelancer would do or what a typical SaaS solution would offer. I think the key to find what out is to:
Finding value and having a standard way of delivering it so you avoid scope creep.
In addition, I think the second advantage of productized service (aside from the fact that they create value) is that they are relatively cheap to start (though this comes with lower entry barriers too). Unlike a marketplace (like Uber/Airbnb) where you might need a lot of investment to have liquidity you can start a productized service as a freelancer yourself or with 1 or 2 freelancers and start super niche. You do not have a typical chicken-and-egg problem.
I hope you like this post and I am happy to discuss about anything concerning our growth or productized services in general since I am really passionate about them! [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 11:26 AM PDT Just wondering if anyone else choses to do ads via influencers on instagram over facebook ads too. A year ago i was making way more profit then I am now. Im pretty sure instagram changed their algorithm around again where a post doesnt get as much reach. Anyone else experiencing something similar ? [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| What to do when you live in an Poor Area? Posted: 04 May 2018 10:37 AM PDT I live in a poor area with no car. I'm 20 years old and my parents are literally supporting me still. I want to become successful so bad. I'm looking around for mentors in Ohio which is right across the bridge, but it's hard to find successful entrepreneurs. Any tips on where I can find mentors? [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Legal Question: Selling frozen food to customers Posted: 04 May 2018 10:01 AM PDT So I have an idea of making empanadas (in a shared kitchen facility that is licensed). Then, I will freeze and package them and sell to customer directly. Not wholesale (still just trying to prove that people would even buy these). They will be delivered to customers f(rozen and packaged). Besides a servsafe certification, is there any regulations im not thinking of? Since they will be created in a shared kitchen that is licensed, I am not sure if I am missing any other reqs. Thanks [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Intending to start a clothing/fashion brand within the next year Posted: 04 May 2018 09:50 AM PDT I still have many steps to go but at this point I'm at a crossroads in my decision making process and I'd like some advice from anyone with experience. I've got my designs laid out and one of my primary concerns is providing a relatively affordable (not too low, my target market is not poor but not necessarily successful yet) option without cutting back too much. I'd also like to stay as environmentally friendly as possible as a matter of personal priority. However my actual question would be: what is the general thought about using either a lyocell fabric or a rayon fabric? The lyocell seems to be a better option but I'm not sure about this because I have no experience with either fabric other than having worn them myself. I'm open to other options but at this point these seem like my best two options [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 May 2018 08:23 AM PDT There are things like cigar and rum exporting which are unique to Caribbean countries like mine, and there is an apparent appetite for in China. What else is there? Thanks for your thoughts. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| What's your method for organizing all the business cards you get? Posted: 04 May 2018 08:20 AM PDT I need a better solution. I have a gnarly stack of business cards from events, meet ups and business meetings... and I don't remember who 90% of these people are, or if I even need to care. What's your guys' method for dealing with all the business cards you get? Do you sort them by date? Throw out the non-relevant ones right away? Email every single one? Scan them? Thanks guys! [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Building an app on Freelancer? Posted: 04 May 2018 08:20 AM PDT Does anyone have any interest hiring on Freelancer to build an app? Did it turn out as you expected? About how much did you budget? Sorry if my questions are a little vague, but this is my first time going for it. [link] [comments]  | |||||||||||||||
| Want to start my own business someday, what do I about health insurance? Posted: 04 May 2018 07:36 AM PDT I'm in Michigan, late twenties, already tired of the 9 to 5 grind as an engineer. someday I'd like to start my own business (Idk what yet). But what would I do about providing myself with health insurance? Obamacare has made it so incredibly expensive that there is no way I could afford it. [link] [comments]  |
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