NooB Monday! - (November 05, 2018) Entrepreneur |
- NooB Monday! - (November 05, 2018)
- Advice reddit, please...
- One Year in as a Full Time Data Strategy Consultancy
- What happened to Thumbtack??
- Plastic manufacturer recommendations?
- Wanting to interview an entrepreneur.
- Photo editing software
- Getting an idea modelled, tested and made in china help (UK)
- Hi guys here is an update :) thank you for your feedback and help.
- Purchasing a domain
- How Important is SEO for Clothing Companies?
- How to become seller on Aliexpress>
- Productive things to do in downtime?
- I interviewed Pat from Starter Story about starting Starter Story
- I am on the ground floor and need advice.
- Thoughts on how to re-sell/liquidate un-used electronic components from my factory in China?
- Ghostwriter/Copywriter/Blogger of Over 10 Years
- How much should I charge for advertising on my website?
- How would I advertise this exactly?
- How can I start sharing knowledge and not keep hoarding it for myself
- Lurker, just started a shop and unsure of next steps.
- Totally Stressed with "Success"; what's next?
- I was asked to build a system but my price is higher than they thought so I offered to own it and they pay a subscription fee instead.
- Can a stubborn person be entrepreneur?
- What advice would you give your 22 year old self?
| NooB Monday! - (November 05, 2018) Posted: 05 Nov 2018 05:06 AM PST Please use this thread to ask any newbie questions. We do this to not overflow the subreddit with newbie questions, so please try to limit the questions to this weekly thread. Since this thread can fill up quickly, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2018 08:24 AM PST Dear Reddit, I am a very long time lurker, I love reading everyone's posts. Forgive me in advance if none of this post is inline with the sub, I believe it is. I am reaching out to you for advice. Mostly, because I think you are a diverse enough group to appreciate and understand my situation. I'll try to quickly outline my problem, if you will. -I make a very nice 6 figure income -I have serious and substantial amounts of time off(4-6 months, spread across the year) -I'm insanely bored with my occupation, however, it provides my family with a stable life and it will be my job for years to come. I've accepted that as a reality. There is no room for advancement at this position, I'm at the top, taken me years to get there. Getting there was fun, and a lot of hard word, but that's it. No more advancement, no more real challenge. If the check wasn't so large I'd leave it in a heartbeat. -in my younger years it seemed like I was surrounded by brilliant minds full of energy. We had drive and go, could make $1 out of .15 at least every other day. I look around now and there is no one left. -I could be successful at just about anything to some extent, but that requires time, energy, and instability that I can not bring into my family life. -I'm a hands on guy, I like moving parts, operation plans and implementing best procedures excite me. It's not necessarily the subject that gets me going, it's getting elbows deep in something new and figuring out a better way. I want to know where today's young and energetic minds hang out. Where are the people that drink a coffee together in the morning, and by the afternoon have an almost tangible business together? I need that excitement and challenge in my boring life(my boring work life)...I know I should play my investments slow and close, I can't. Because of my personality I always need to do it bigger, better, stronger. Always all in, for the big pot. I bore my wife to no end with my thoughts and ideas, so I need to find people who won't bore. Truthfully, I'm not sure if I'm looking for partners, someone to mentor, or just likeminded dreamers and doers. Where do any of these people hang out? There you go reddit, thanks for listening [link] [comments]  |
| One Year in as a Full Time Data Strategy Consultancy Posted: 05 Nov 2018 09:00 AM PST Hi everyone, 367 days ago I was bidding farewell to my co-workers. 365 days ago I sat down at my home office and spent my first day as a full time one man consultancy. I've learnt a lot in the past year. And I'll summarize some of that below, but if you'd like to bounce any of your questions off me, I'd be happy to answer (either about data or consulting). I'm 28 years old from Canada. Netting about 130K annually, which is double the full time job I quit. What I've learnt about myself: I hate people, but I still need them. I was so excited to work from home in my PJs everyday. That quickly wore off and I now have a permanent space in a co-working building. I don't talk much to the people here, but I just had that longing to be involved in society, so I got out of the house. I need constant stimulus in terms of new work. I really lose enthusiasm when I've been doing the same project over and over again. So I'll usually try to find something with a quick turnaround that I can pump out for a bit of variety and provides a change of scenery. What I've learnt about Consulting I don't think I'll ever feel comfortable with workload. I have such a hard time not doing lead gen, even if I'm pumping out 40 hours of billable in a week. The fear of suddenly losing two big contracts and you're suddenly down to netting $1000 a week is hard to shake. I often find myself too busy. But I'm happy with that. When every hour of your day is a decision between making money (billing work) or not making money, it really puts into perspective the value of other things in your life. Is going to the gym worth $150 of time you could be billing out? How about playing on that Rec Sports team? (the answer is yes btw). Plans for this year 1. Juggle being a new father with my hectic consulting 2. Try to launch a plug and play product line 3. Hire an extra set of hands 4. Get some regional work Anyway, that's my brief reflection. Feel free to AMA. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:11 PM PST I flip houses, and Thumbtack has been a useful way to get contractor bids. It is (was) a great service, where you posted a job and then contractors bid on that service who are interested. It was a nice change from the Angie's List and Yelp setup where you had to individually call each contractor that came up in a search to see if they were interested in the job...which could take hours and dealing with countless voicemails or waiting for callbacks. I log on today and Thumbtack has basically turned in to Angie's List. Instead of submitting a job for vendors to bid on, now it just gives you a list of vendors in the zip code you plug in... This must have happened in the last few days because I just got a concrete repair quote at the end of last week. This sucks. There isn't really another service out there like Thumbtack was, and now they've basically become another useless referral site that is no better than the dozen other "here is a list of contractors...feel free to call them" sites out there. I complained on their Facebook page, but they just deleted my post... [link] [comments]  |
| Plastic manufacturer recommendations? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 01:59 PM PST Hello, I am perfecting the design of a small thermoplastic piece using 3D printing and I am searching for a reputable and reasonably-priced manufacturer who can make a cast mold and create bulk orders. Does anyone have a working relationship with a manufacturer that does something similar (small plastic pieces)? [link] [comments]  |
| Wanting to interview an entrepreneur. Posted: 05 Nov 2018 10:31 AM PST I am wanting to interview an entrepreneur for a class assignment for my entrepreneurship class. I am wanting to get an outside opinion on successful people outside of my little town in Kansas. I have 10 questions to ask, if you'd be willing to help out. Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2018 08:07 AM PST Hey all, I'll try keep this as quick as possible. I work in the soft furnishing field with my father, and a LOT of advertising is based around photos I take with my Nikon of the finished result of an interior, such as curtains hanging, sofas in place and anything to do with textiles. I like to think I have quite an eye for photography however I don't have the right editing software to really touch up my images and a lot of my pictures although very good quality, are either dull or not lit well. Can anyone who works in a similar field provide me with a good very user friendly editing software I can purchase. Nothing to Wow and ideally something very simple to use. Thanks ! [link] [comments]  |
| Getting an idea modelled, tested and made in china help (UK) Posted: 05 Nov 2018 02:24 PM PST Hi, I have been reading up a little bit about getting an idea I have had made into a reality. I work in catering and I believe I have a little idea that could really work on a national scale and it would be a piece of plastic with a small rubber(or flexible plastic) insert. I have had a look around different articles on getting stuff made in china, but most of them are a little out of date. Is there anyone on here in the UK that has experience from going from Idea - to proto - to bulk order in 2018 that can give me some useful advice and help in getting this done. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Hi guys here is an update :) thank you for your feedback and help. Posted: 05 Nov 2018 01:00 PM PST Good day everyone! Id Like to thank everyone who provided feedback and their help. A couple of weeks ago I launched a site for https://candleamor.com/ and have finished with the updates and changes as recommended. Would love to hear your feedback with the recommendations in place. YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!!! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:51 PM PST Hey Reddit, I want to purchase a domain which is currently owned by a large company based out of California. They have it parked and it has been that way since 2010. Does anyone have experience or advice on getting a larger sized company to sell a parked domain? They no longer will own the domain in 2019, is there a way I can scoop it up after their control expires? Thanks in advanced! [link] [comments]  |
| How Important is SEO for Clothing Companies? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:49 PM PST Hi, thanks for taking your time to click on my post! Looking into a little project, one that everyone seems to try. A clothing company. I've recently started helping my boss (at my full time job, rather than this project) rank better for our sites. The industry we operate in, is nothing, size wise, compared to Menswear, allowing me to acheive great results for much less work, comparitvely. My question is, for keywords that are incredibly competitive, in the clothing industury, how important is SEO for small clothing companies, as naturally, for general keywords relating to menswear, we will be buried by the larger companies. Please forgive the use of the word, company, I use it loosely, it's more of a project. Thanks for taking the time to read my post and I would love to hear your responses! Thanks in advance :) [link] [comments]  |
| How to become seller on Aliexpress> Posted: 05 Nov 2018 09:03 AM PST I have done some preliminary google research and apparently one can only become a seller from China and Russia. Is there any way one can become a seller on Aliexpress if they don't belong to China or Russia? [link] [comments]  |
| Productive things to do in downtime? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:48 PM PST I started a business at the start of August. Its slowly but surely picking up in sales. I work on my own cold calling all day, from 9 til 5. After 5pm, I struggle to think of anything that I can do to advance my business whilst im not calling customers. I have a website and social media set up already. I usually just try and learn more about the business world, visit subreddits like this and read books, but I don't really feel like thats advancing my business. Any tips? Also while this post is intended to be mainly about productive things, it would also be nice to know how you all spend your free time. I don't have much of a social life so once I finish work I get really bored, id be interested to hear what other people do in both downtime and free time. [link] [comments]  |
| I interviewed Pat from Starter Story about starting Starter Story Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:29 PM PST Hey Everyone, my name is Davis and I run the Hacker Noon Founder Interview series. I always love reading Pat's posts, and thought it would be super interesting to flip the script and hear his own story. Pat included a few additional charts and images in the original post on Hacker Noon. What's your background, and what are you working on?I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story — a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started their business and how they grew it. We also share revenue figures for every business we interview. It's been about a year since I published my first interview (yay!) and to date, we've interviewed over 120 founders, and over 300,000 people have visited the website. Starter Story is currently monetized at ~$1.7K revenue/month. What motivated you to create Starter Story?Starter Story was the result of a failed business. I was living in San Francisco, and a couple of friends and I tried to start a business that would help small brands sell to retailers. Here's our old landing page. We spent 4 months building the MVP, and then fell flat on our face trying to get customers. We applied to YC and got an interview, but ultimately were turned down. The idea was cool, but user acquisition was really tough, so we shut down the company and moved on. One of the reasons it failed was because my two co founders and I had full time jobs. We were hopping out of work to jump on sales demos, and fixing critical bugs while on the job. We realized how hard it is to build a B2B SaaS app when you also have a full time job. After that failure, I went heads down for a bit. I continued on with my full-time job but never lost that urge to start another business. I knew I wanted to start something and I knew I had to do it alone. I just didn't know what yet. Then I came across this reddit post. It's since been deleted, but I found it fascinating. This guy found a niche, hired copywriters, and ultimately made a bunch of money through the Amazon affiliate program. I immediately got started. I wanted my niche to be pets. So I bought the domain, hired some copywriters and got started. A couple weeks in, I started losing interest. I really wanted to build a blog but quickly realized I wasn't passionate about pets. What was I actually passionate about…? Entrepreneurship. Duh! I immediately pivoted to that. At the time I was also a big fan of Indie Hackers. I decided I wanted to create the Indie Hackers for non-technical founders. What went into building the initial product?There were two elements to building the product, (1) building the website and (2) finding people to interview. Building the website At first, I started on WordPress. Even though I'm a developer, I figured I should just use that and focus on getting the stories. Why reinvent the wheel, right? I sucked at design (still do, just less) so I asked an old coworker of mine to help me mockup a good design for the site. When I got the design back, I tried to implement it into WordPress. After four hours of banging my head against the wall, I said fuck Wordpress, I'm building this on my own. I ended up building it with the create-react-app and deployed on Netlify. I'm familiar with both and I wanted to just deploy something quickly — since then I've migrated the website to Ruby on Rails though. I'm quite embarrassed to say this… but my initial application was so primitive that I was saving the story data inside of a JS object in the app and wrote all of the content of the stories inside JSX! If you're not familiar with React, basically I was hard coding everything (including the content) inside the codebase! I did this because I really only cared about how it looked at the time and I've later built a much more robust CMS :) Finding people to interview Like Indie Hackers did, I planned to launch with 10 interviews. I started reaching out to friends to ask them if they knew anyone who had started a business. At the time, I wasn't really a part of any "entrepreneur circles" per se, so I just started utilizing my existing network. My first interview was with my friend from college, and my second interviewwas from my old roommate. My third interview was a friend of a friend. It was kind of a natural extension of my network to find these entrepreneurs. In the early days, I would actually interview founders over the phone and transcribe it into a text article. This turned out to be a really challenging and time consuming process. It took me like a full month to get three interviews! Instead of staying quiet and waiting until I had 10 interviews, I decided to just launch with 3 interviews. This is where I began to discover some of the power of content. Each interview I released was like its own little launch. I learned a little bit on each one — where to share it, how to write better titles, what works, what doesn't, etc. This also kept me motivated to keep working on it, because I would get "rewarded" in some way after each one. I did all of this as a side project on top of my full-time job. Like I said earlier, working Starter Story wasn't so bad with my full time job. I was able to make a lot of progress on nights and weekends. How have you attracted users and grown Starter Story?After about 2–3 months I had accrued 15 or so interviews and I decided to launch on Product Hunt. Looking back, that launch was not a breakout success, but at the time it felt like I was on top of the world. I remember feeling like the launch was a massive success. As far as getting users and traffic, I'll break down the most effective ways I've gained users. I have to give a lot of thanks to the reddit community because I don't think Starter Story would be as successful (as quickly) without them. For many of my interviews, I cross-post them to Reddit. Although this doesn't drive a significant amount of traffic to my website, the traffic is very high quality (stays for a long time, higher likelihood to subscribe to the newsletter) and most importantly, it attracts new interview candidates. Companies want to get in front of 50k people, and although StarterStory.com the website can't do that (yet), Reddit can, and that's really powerful. Here's an example of one of my bigger Reddit posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8zneu0/11mmonth_selling_beer_coolers_profit_included/ Organic search Finally, I'm starting to see some organic search, which is an amazing feeling. Organic search isn't something I thought about too much in the beginning, but since it's been over a year, I'm starting to see the benefits of it. Lately I've been getting ~400 visitors per day through organic search. I don't do much to optimize my articles for SEO. I do the basic stuff like good title, correct tags, etc, but I don't spend too much time on that. I believe the quality of content (and lots of it) will win that game. Hacker News I've had a couple interviews go bonkers on Hacker News. One in particular drove 35,000 visitors to my website in one day. This also attracted a lot of attention to my website. I had someone interested in acquiring Starter Story that day. But, although Hacker News is a great source for traffic, it's not very quality traffic. Hacker News isn't my target demographic (non-technical founders) so this makes sense. What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?Starter Story wasn't monetized for the first couple months. After that, I started monetizing through sponsors. Sponsors pay me and I put a native ad on the site or in the newsletter. I also make some money from affiliate programs, but that's pretty small right now. At first, I just found sponsors through cold emails. I sent out around 10–20 cold emails per week. Here's what those cold emails looked like: Hi Would you be interested in promoting Judge.me on my newsletter or homepage? I run StarterStory, a website dedicated to interviewing successful e-commerce businesses and sharing their stories. My audience consists dedicated, targeted e-commerce entrepreneurs who are constantly looking tor new tools to help run their business. If you're interested, I can send you more details. Pat A small percentage of them got back to me and we came to a deal on how much per month it would cost. To get paid I would just send a Paypal invoice. Last month, revenues were $1,700. Doing various native ads and one off newsletter ads was a great way to monetize and get traction, but over time it becomes tiring to manage short term advertising agreements. I'd rather have a 6-month sponsor for the half of the price of 6 one-month sponsors. That way I can focus on just growing the site. I was very lucky to get connected with Klaviyo, an email marketing tool, who agreed to sponsor Starter Story for the next year! Going forward, I'm working on finding more long-term sponsors like this so I won't have to deal with finding a new sponsor every month. Expenses are pretty low. I just pay around $60 for server costs and maybe $25/month on random other stuff like Boomerang, Email Hunter, and WIP.chat. What are your goals for the future?I'm super excited about the future. It's kind of crazy to see how far it's come after 100 interviews as a side project, I can only imagine what it will be like after 1000 interviews! About a month ago I quit my full time job to focus on Starter Story. In terms of the future, there are a couple things that I want to accomplish. More content The most important thing for me is more content! When I started out, I was just publishing one interview per week. Nowadays, I'm publishing 6–7 pieces of content per week. Over the next few months, I plan to ramp that up to 15–20 per week. I'm still doing this all on my own so it should be a fun and challenging experience. I have built (and continue to build) a lot of internal tools and automation to help. Create a community I've been putting this off forever! Next year is the year of the Starter Story community! I want to create a lot of features that engage users, like a Hacker News style forum and AMAs. Expand to other types of businesses Although e-commerce and consumer goods have been the main focus of the interviews, I'd like to start interviewing other types of businesses. Some that I'm thinking about are bloggers, software & tech companies, makers, and podcasters. There are so many people starting businesses and I'm just scratching the surface. More data I'd like Starter Story to be more than just a content & community. I want it to become a hub for data about businesses and entrepreneurs, allowing for more people to connect with entrepreneurs and businesses. Kind of like LinkedIn but not so shitty. What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?If I had to start over, I would have been less distracted about unimportant things. And focused more on the big picture and creating more content. For example, when I post something to big to reddit, I will compulsively check back on the reddit post like every 3 minutes, looking at every single comment. A few other things I wish I just did less:
I think I've become better at avoiding these things, but there's still so much progress for me. I could have saved a lot of time if I cared less about these things and focused on features and content. Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Lose the ego and embrace rejection, because it's a numbers game. I've sent out thousands of emails to no response and been rejected by tons of people while trying to get interviews. It still gets me down sometimes, but you start to realize it's all just a numbers game. If you email 100 people for an interview, you might end up with 5 published interviews. And that's amazing! More people should think like a salesman. Once you start thinking like this, you stop caring about that one amazing interview (that won't make or break you). Overall, you can just think more logically. There are millions of businesses in the world. If I can make a deal with just a small fraction, I will be MORE than successful. What's your advice for entrepreneurs who are just starting out?The biggest mistake I see people making is just not doing anything. Talking about how they want this, or that, or making excuses about why they can't do something. If there's something you want, go do it and go get it. Why are you waiting? Take control of your life and be the person you want to be. Getting started really is the hardest part. It took me 26 years. But once you get started, your momentum will carry you wherever you want to go. [link] [comments]  |
| I am on the ground floor and need advice. Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:29 PM PST I woke up last week and said fuck the man. I am a QA Engineer so I figured I would set out and see how I could still support my family but also be able to be my own boss and engineer my own products. I just want a little upside I guess. Anyway, I found out about dropshipping and because this is my first shot I figured this would be a low cost way to get my feet wet. Now, I have a niche picked out and have made a ton of headway with theme Pop (making some changes here and there). I think that I am in a good place to launch but I can't help hear that little voice saying "do you really think this will work?" I am staying as motivated as possible to keep on chugging but there are so many questions I have. I am a worst case scenario kind of guy so if this niche doesn't work out I have other ideas. My questions are:
These are just a few questions that I haven't really been able to find reliable content on. Thank you guys so much for all the help in advance. IF you made it this far thanks... really. [link] [comments]  |
| Thoughts on how to re-sell/liquidate un-used electronic components from my factory in China? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:27 PM PST I've got a bunch of assorted electronic components that were formerly used to produce a rechargeable light my company made. The product was discontinued before I worked for this company, but apparently it is about $25K worth (our cost) of components we never used b/c we were forced to over-order on some components (note: it's not all the components for the light, it's just some, so turning them into full lights to sell isn't an option). I've had a couple people tell me I should be able to sell them off to someone in China for 20%-30% of my original cost. Any money is better than scrapping them, so that's fine. I have no idea how to find someone to purchase these though and can't seem to find a platform out there to list them on. Thoughts? tl;dr I have a bunch of assorted bulk electronic components sitting in my factory in China and I need to find a way to sell them to someone before my factory scraps them. [link] [comments]  |
| Ghostwriter/Copywriter/Blogger of Over 10 Years Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:08 PM PST Greetings, My name is Thomas and I am a writer of things. Even though the extent of my experience as a writer has yet to move beyond the boundaries of blogging and ghostwriting, I have always been interested in marketing, and I believe that my command of words will prove efficient when it comes to advertising. I would be more than happy and honored to help you with your marketing project in the capacity of a writer, if you were ever in need of one. [link] [comments]  |
| How much should I charge for advertising on my website? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:00 PM PST Hi guys! I created a website a few months ago to help pilots sell their aircraft. The website is getting around 20-25k visitors a month right now, and slowly growing. A small aircraft tug company was open to the idea of advertising on my website in the form of banners, and they wanted a quote on cost, number of impressions, etc. My developer can implement the banner system, but how am I supposed to know what the expected impressions are if I've never done them before? How much should I ask for advertising on the site? [link] [comments]  |
| How would I advertise this exactly? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 11:56 AM PST Hello people of reddit. My mom and I recently started a business where we supply atms, kiosks, and gaming machines to shopping centers. Although we have social media and use business cards I've been having a difficult time with how I would go about advertising this. Do I just use ads? or is there something missing? [link] [comments]  |
| How can I start sharing knowledge and not keep hoarding it for myself Posted: 05 Nov 2018 11:50 AM PST I'm constantly defensive about sharing useful knowhow and knowledge in my Field that could help others. I still end up doing it but I always feel VERY reluctant to tell them at first because I fear losing my competitive advantage. How the hell can I get over this. How did you? [link] [comments]  |
| Lurker, just started a shop and unsure of next steps. Posted: 05 Nov 2018 11:45 AM PST Hi r/entrepreneur! So I've been a long-time lurker and I decided to dip my toe into entrepreneurship with a shirt store (how original, I know). I wanted to post and ask for advice because I don't really have anyone else knowledgeable to reach out to. I've really niched down and focused on a specific activity in a specific state. The goal is to tap into both the sport and state pride for my market. Also, let me specifically state that my goal in this project is not to quit my 9-5, but to learn as much as possible by doing. If I can break even or make enough for some new gear, I'd consider this little experiment a success. The Shop Again with originality, I set up a shopify store with printful integration. I have 6 designs up. They're clean, but simple 1 color designs. My store has been up roughly 9 days. In this time period, there have been 319 sessions, 11 people reached checkout, and 4 orders were placed. I've sold 6 tshirts for a total of around $150 in revenue. In addition to the main store, I've been thinking about an Amazon seller account to integrate with printful as another sales channel. I've also begun building out a spreadsheet with local businesses to try and sell shirts wholesale to. I would also find a local printer to do the printing on wholesale shirts to help my margins and use the "buy local" sales pitch. Marketing I am using Privy for a popup email capture that gives customers free shipping. I have spent about $75 dollars on FB/IG ads. The FB ads probably generated half of my sales, and the other half came from posts in relevant FB groups. A boosted post on IG got a ton of likes, but no appreciable increase in followers and no orders. I've been keeping a list of micro-influencers in my niche to reach out to as well with a "free shirt for a couple shout-outs" deal. I'm using Later and have scheduled 3 IG posts/day for the next week. I then plan to share these posts to FB and share the FB posts to relevant local- and sport-specific groups. I guess my question is, where do I go from here? Generating traffic from FB seems too expensive to maintain profitability. Should I try to put up more shirt designs? I feel like I've gotten the car running and now I don't really know what to do to get it going faster. I really appreciate any advice you all might have for me. Edit: Here is the shop - Riparian Trading Company [link] [comments]  |
| Totally Stressed with "Success"; what's next? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 11:42 AM PST This is going to sounds self-promotionally pathetic but the level of stress is beyond what I can handle. I'm hoping for any thoughts and insights of my fellow entrepreneurs. What do you do when things are going well but all you want to do is leave? I am a successful entrepreneur from nearly every metric. I started a professional services firm about a decade ago which has grown to 17 employees and a few million in annual revenues. I've hated the business for a long time and have been trying to get out for many years. I finally think that I have have things figured out but I'm not able to exit completely due primarily to my spouse. She also works for the firm and has a deep seeded fear that if I announce an exit the business will fall apart. All I want to do is walk away and let the firm go on without me. It's amazing that it takes twice the work to remove my responsibilities to the firm. The biggest issue being I have been principal management and rainmaker. I've hired new office management and have invested heavily in marketing over the past year to get out of being the "main man." It's an ongoing process but has definitely required a ramping up of my involvement at this point. My journey to leave the business began in real estate development. I have a few large scale projects moving forward that I've been able to hire agents to take care of a lot but not all of my responsibilities on the construction. However, if any of the deals goes sideways, I'm basically bankrupt due to huge ($10mil+) in personal guarantees on construction so maintaining these projects is of utmost importance. Finally, I've agreed to partner into a boutique investment bank which is what I really want to do with my future. I'm basically taking over operations and there is a huge amount of time required to get it up to snuff to be able to scale to the next level. I wouldn't have the opportunity without jumping into the fire without my current other ventures but have way to much on my plate to give any business the time or focus needed to make all successful. I'm afraid if I took any step back on this the opportunity will pass by. At this point I'm completely burnt out and sick of the long days and huge liability risks. Short of burning bridges or selling out, I'm fighting for a cure. I'd love any ideas and experience share that has helped in these unique situations. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2018 05:36 AM PST Hi, I'm a software engineer and recently an old friend from school contacted me asking if I could build a small system to automate some stuff at his workplace. I was hesitant at first as I was contracted to a company already as well as working on some other personal project so didn't think I would have time. I also had concerns about just how simple it would be. Fast forward 2 weeks and I decided to leave my current role to have some time off so I got in touch with my friend and went through everything via phone call but I knew it was more complicated than he realised so I tried to break everything down back to him so he knew how complicated it will be. He twisted my arm for a price, I was very reluctant but in the end, I gave him a very rough ballpark figure for the most basic aspect of the work but also mentioned that it will be higher with all the other the stuff that needs to be worked out. He seemed satisfied so we agreed to have a face to face to discuss everything in detail. It became clear that it could be split into at least 2 deliverables so I wrote up a proposal about what work will be carried out in each deliverable and estimated a price based on how much time it would take me (and more). This was my first project where I would have to manage everything so anchored the price to what I knew best, my day rate. As more and more details were worked out the more complicated it became which drove up the price, more people started taking interest and so there was some pushback due to the price. Exactly what I suspected would happen. This got me thinking, why don't I own it and let them subscribe to it for an annual fee and allow other companies to do the same? I can build the prototype by going back and forth with my friend and also use his company (they're a pretty big company) as a case study to pitch to other companies. Once that's ready I can then look at making it more turnkey. I think my biggest concern is spending this time to build something that's too specific to this company and I'm selling it for a fraction of the original cost. The cost for the annual subscription will be about 5% of what the upfront cost would have been. Is this too cheap? Have I made a bad decision? Everything is verbal so far, however, I have seen the issue they're having and there is nothing on the market that fits their needs. TLDR: Asked by an old friend to build software for a company that later turned out to be more complicated than first thought and therefore more expensive so offered to build it anyway except I own it can allow other companies to subscribe to it. [link] [comments]  |
| Can a stubborn person be entrepreneur? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 11:23 AM PST I always look for opportunities, worked on side projects (though failed), and always trying to find problems to solve. But gosh.. it's so hard. I feel like it would be easier if I wasn't a stubborn person.. I'm like looking for get-rich-quick schemes instead of sticking to a problem and work on a solution persistently.. [link] [comments]  |
| What advice would you give your 22 year old self? Posted: 05 Nov 2018 12:46 AM PST I didn't enjoy going to school - I didn't fail any subjects but I did the bare minimum to get a pass. I left as soon as I can and 4 years later, I'm 22 working as a bike messenger. I have a very lazy life style, I have a lot of free time that i spend playing video games and smoking weed. I enjoy the freedom of my work but I'm concered about my future. My goal is to start a successful business but I'm afraid to fail. I am considering going to university on the side to have a backup plan but I'm not really motivated by the subject I will study but by the fear of failure. I know that if worked hard I could get good grades and get a boring job, but I don't really want that. But I don't want to fail either. Or waste any more time. I don't know. I feel like my life is going nowhere right now, I just want to make the right decisions. I don't know what I'm doing, I feel like I'm having a quarter life crysis. Just wanted to rant. [link] [comments]  |
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