Marketplace Tuesday! (January 08, 2019) Entrepreneur |
- Marketplace Tuesday! (January 08, 2019)
- $15K/month selling CBD cigarettes.
- Hey it's the Poop Scooping Guy - An Update
- Left my corporate gig to start my own company
- How to turn a great FB ad into zero sales/signups.
- Should I sell it ?
- I am 17 and starting a tutoring center. Any tips?
- How to deal with overbearing parent being constantly critical of start up?
- How I didn't get my first paying customer!
- How have your marketing strategies changed as you've grown your business?
- What do you do once you patent a product
- Product Photography/Videography Service Startup - Looking for Tips and Advice: Gaining Clients, and Beginning
- Anyone Got a Mom and Pop Shop and Want Free Advertisement
- Feast and famine?
- Misconceptions about startup fundraising
- Starting a magazine (huge reach, and some skills). What is the next step?
- I need to get 10 students by January 22nd
- Loose Leaf tea company idea – looking for advice
- HR / Payroll
- Switching from paper based inventory system to a software inventory system. HELP!!!
- How to monetize a million verified user data containing phone, email and social network IDs?
- Start up advice for a CBD business.
- Please someone, help me finding something useful for learning about Amazon FBA that is not drenched in fake hopes and "rich-over-night" undertones.
- Anyone else having Instagram engagement issues since Jan 1?
- Advice on pitching to stores that you can't visit?
| Marketplace Tuesday! (January 08, 2019) Posted: 08 Jan 2019 05:05 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]  |
| $15K/month selling CBD cigarettes. Posted: 08 Jan 2019 09:15 AM PST Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview. Today's interview is with Evan Marshall of Plain Jane, a brand that sells CBD cigarettes. Some stats:
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?I'm Evan and I started Plain Jane with my college roommate, Duane Dennis. Plain Jane is dramatically changing the CBD market. We're the first ultra smooth and low odor Hemp CBD flower and cigarette. Not a ton of people know what CBD is. It's a cannabinoid in the Cannabis plant like THC except it doesn't get you high. It also has anti-anxiety and anti-pain effects. Generally when people refer to the medicinal properties of cannabis, they're talking about CBD. Most people aren't aware that you can get these benefits without intoxication. I believe we're the best CBD company because we offer the best prices and we have unique products. Unlike the vast majority of companies, we do not have middlemen. We've partnered directly with farms to bring customers the best prices. We're also continuing to innovate and create new products. Our flagship product is a low smell and ultra smooth CBD cigarette. It has the same potency of other CBD flower products but without that identifying weed smell. Within 5 months of starting to sell, we're now generating more than $20K a month in sales. We have customers in 47 states and we're in more than 12 retail locations. What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?At MIT, Duane and I grew weed in our dorm room and were really interested in learning more about the plant. After college, I went to work for a tech startup in San Francisco as a software engineer. Duane created Miramix, a supplements manufacturing and branding company. Over the few years we were out of college, we saw the tides turning for cannabis legalization and knew we wanted to be involved. When 2018 rolled around, I quit my job and Duane flew out to California. In college, we figured out a way to remove the smell and harshness from cannabis. We read about it on some online forums and thought it'd be interesting to try out. It ended up by far being our favorite. We could smoke it without smelling strongly like weed and it caused much less throat irritation. We thought this would be a pretty cool thing to work on and we didn't really see any products that offered less smelly weed products that don't make you cough. Our friend, Lindsey suggested looking into CBD products. The more we learned about CBD, the more the excited we became. CBD provides many of the physical benefits associated with cannabis without the intoxication. Lindsey has since joined us as a founder and is constantly help us develop new CBD products. Since I had struggled with smoking cigarettes since college, we created a non-addictive alternative and that's our flagship product. A low smell, ultra smooth, CBD-rich hemp cigarette. Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.There are a bunch of different philosophies about creating products so this is just my take. I believe a product has to have some essential attribute that makes it different from existing products. It can be price or a unique feature but something has to be different about it. I believe marketing and brand is a lagging indicator of your products. Simply selling something already out there with a different label doesn't really appeal to me. Most of the work of selling a product is done by the product so differentiation can be crucial for growth. Our first goal in prototyping our product was to figure out if our identifying attribute, a low smell and ultra smooth weed was an interesting concept to anyone. Validating the idea To test this idea, we bought some weed from a dispensary, processed it to remove the smell, and brought it to Hippie Hill on 4/20. (Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on 4/20 is a giant cannabis celebration event with thousands of people). We printed out a bunch of surveys and went person to person asking them if they wanted to smoke a bowl and see how they liked it. After doing about 50 interviews, we found that people who considered themselves connoisseurs of cannabis hated it, but the more casual smokers loved it. This was a pretty positive sign that we were going in the right direction. We wanted to be polarizing because with a unique product, the worst someone can say is that the kind of like it. There are a lot of people out there working on a lot of different products. You should try to understand why no one has created your product yet. Most people in the industry consider themselves cannabis experts with an appreciation for complex flavors and smells. They smoke too much to ever really cough. They don't care about the smell. Our product isn't for them and they make up most of the industry. Making the product We then had to make a product. We decided to create a hemp cigarette because we saw parallels in the THC market and really liked the form factor. I also recently learned about CBD and how it provided many of the sought out for medical benefits without any intoxication. It is a product I use personally. We spent 3 weeks designing and perfecting the box. I learned how to use Free CAD to design it. We cut the original box shapes out of paper and then taped them together. When we finally got it right, we went to a print shop and then printed a bunch of box templates. We put it online and started selling it. The first few boxes we sold took about 30 minutes each to make. I literally cut them out of paper and glued them together. It was kind of ridiculous in hindsight. Since then, we've focused on small and consistent improvements to our product. Figuring out the attributes that people care about and then optimizing them. We've really focused on improving the burn experience, packaging to prevent flower from falling out the ends, and even the audible snap the box makes when you close it. We recently started selling less unique products. After partnering with farms and moving to a farm in Oregon, we also saw that market prices are greatly inflated. We decided to start selling less unique products but at a much cheaper price. We've spent way less time on perfecting and testing the products as they are more common and our key differentiation is our lower prices. Describe the process of launching the business.We funded the company from savings. We've bootstrapped ourselves to this point. Plain Jane didn't really have a launch. We just put out a website using shopify and then tried to start selling. It was about 90 days after we started selling before we saw any real sort of usage or engagement. The hardest part at the beginning was just figuring out what worked and what didn't. I sort of felt like I was wasting time. After a while, you start figuring out the things that didn't work and continue doing the things that worked. I'm very glad that people really like our products. Our customers love our products. That's made everything a lot easier and less of a grind. My big piece of advice is to make sure your customers love your products. The first time I saw that someone love our products was when our 6th customer asked if we could met her in person to drop off her order because her son uses them for migraines and didn't want to wait the 3 days for shipping. When a customer wants to meet you in a Safeway parking lot to get their product faster, you know you have something, Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Almost all of our business comes from social media. As a CBD company, we cannot spend money on Facebook or Google Ads. Basically everything I knew about paid advertising before was pretty worthless. Influencer marketing has been huge for us. Our approach is pretty simple. We give out samples of our products and ask people to post about us on social media aka a micro-influencer strategy. We really like this approach because we get authentic stories and content. We cannot really control the messaging so the product has to speak for itself. We don't really take product photos at all. Our customers take the photos and we ask to reuse them. With any influencer strategy, you have to be very sure you're targeting the right people and engaging with them. You can make sure you're targeting the right influencers by looking through their posts and then looking through the profiles of their engaged followers. It takes more time per influencer but the payoff is certainly worth it. Make sure their followers look like your existing customers. It takes a ton of time and work to grow a social media following this way but it's worth it. Other accounts have tried to grow themselves through botting or other manipulations. As a CBD company, we didn't want to give Instagram any reason to shutdown our account so we've done everything through content and real engagement. It's not magic to make this happen. You just have to post consistently and then reply or like every single comment you get. It takes months but it works. We tried a lot of things that didn't work. An early mistake we made was paying large botnet instagram pages to post about us. This almost always lost money. We did it because it was easy. These pages contacted us and asked we wanted to post. We said sure, why not. After wasting a couple thousand dollars trying this out, we went with a more manual approach and hired someone to implement it full time. How are you doing today and what does the future look like?We're doing alright. We're profitable but not yet paying ourselves more than our living expenses. We've chosen to focus our efforts in growing the company first. We put in a ton of time and live right next to our production facility in Oregon on a hemp farm. We've come a long way from walking around a weed festival asking people to smoke a bowl to renting a production space with employees. Currently, we have 63% margins. We're constantly figuring out ways to make our production more automated to bring down our price and pass it onto customers. In November, we sold a bit more than $24K, mostly in prerolls and flower. Most of our sales are through our online store which has been growing around 37% each month. Our conversion rate hovers between 5.5% and 6%. We're trying to find ways to improve this but we're fairly content with where it stands. Our goal for the company is ambitious. CBD is the fastest growing segment of the fastest growing industry (cannabis). We have our sights set on the stars. Personally, my goal is to make a larger enduring company because before Plain Jane, I really enjoyed my job and the people I worked with. My goal wasn't control but to create influence in an outsized way that I couldn't accomplish by being an employee. Operationally, we always try to free ourselves from a task once we've figured it out and it becomes repetitive. For example, we social media, we have our influencer strategy down so we hired someone to do what we already know works. I'm personally against hiring someone to solve a problem I don't have any clue how to solve. I believe hiring is for scaling up efforts or if you're hiring an expert, you should already know how to basically do their job. Maybe not as well though. Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?It's really hard to go from being a Software Team Lead to a CBD company. Now my job is mostly online sales and general company strategy. The mindset you bring to a sales job is very different than one you bring to creating high quality software. Changing my perspective took time. After being really good at something for years, it's difficult to be bad at everything. Learning is basically admitting that you're bad at something. I learned a lot in many of different areas. One area of advice I'd have for other software engineers starting a company is that you should build in runway for the adjustment. Remember what it felt like to learn how to code? Like the first few months when making the most basic thing happen was tedious and slow progressing. Learning to start a company is like that except you're worried about running of out money at the same time. What platform/tools do you use for your business?We use Shopify for our store. As a programmer, it was difficult to make the decision not to custom build something. It was the right decision. We use tons of apps on Shopify, here are a few:
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Funnily enough, now that I'm an entrepreneur, I don't really read overarching high level books about entrepreneurship. When I had a 9 to 5, I read everything like Good to Great, The 5 Hour Work Week, Zero to One, and many more. The books entertained me and somewhat prepared me as I started out this journey. Most of the content I consume now is pretty small and tactical. I read a lot of one off blog posts about how to do a task I'm trying to complete. I've also found myself engaging with online communities more like reddit/r/startup & reddit/r/shopify. Again, most of the interaction is about pretty low level things instead of entrepreneurial philosophy. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Just do things. Most people worry a lot about doing things well. Just doing something is way better than doing nothing. Many people frame this as the 80-20 rule. The downside of the 80-20 rule is you don't necessarily get the feeling of pride from doing good work. I'd recommend just trying something out and being okay with doing it poorly, especially when people are telling you you're doing it poorly. Another lesson I had to learn pretty early was getting past negativity. One time pretty early on, we got a very harsh review about our product. I was doxxed (personal information exposed) and I didn't know what to do. I just kind of left it while it haunted me for weeks. We ended up introducing another product that I knew the reviewer would like more. We sent him a sample and got a glowing review. Now with so many more customers, we still get occasionally very mean people to deal with. The emotional cycle still happens but now I get through it in an hour or so instead of a couple weeks. I focus more on trying to solve the problem and figure out if it's a problem we should be solving. Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?We're actively looking for a social media manager: someone to create content and engage with posts. We're also always open to affiliate partnerships. Where can we go to learn more?
Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos. [link] [comments]  |
| Hey it's the Poop Scooping Guy - An Update Posted: 08 Jan 2019 12:52 PM PST So hopefully some of you remember my original thread about starting a poop scooping business from zero investment to £300 a day in 3 days. Well I thought I'd update you all and let you know how things are going, I still get questions in my inbox about the business! So basically this thing absolutely blew up, at the end of the second month we were doing about 100 houses a day. We had me and 3 other guys working it and still more inquiries than we could handle. All of this done with literally zero money in advertising just using the free social media marketing techniques I spoke about in the original post, good customer service and excellent word of mouth. Sadly this didn't end well, I was involved in a motorcycle accident, nothing life threatening but I did lose my ability to walk for a substantial amount of time. This basically put me in a position where I couldn't even work the business any longer never mind run it. I ended up selling the business to a local landscaping company we were working with (they provided us gardens to clean prior to them performing their work, it really worked out and I really encourage anyone following this plan to attempt this). This basically gave me enough money to be able to take time off and focus on physical therapy. So here we are. As I started to recover I decided to put what money I had in to another business and get something else going. Looking to turn my hobby in to income and something fairly easy going I decided to start an online vape shop. It allowed me to work from bed while I recovered, stock was mailed to me and the courier company would collect the packages to ship out from my home. This really exploded, I knew there was good money in this but I really didn't expect the results we got. We used ebay as our platform to sell products and keep money ticking while a Web developer built our own stand alone site (still in progress). This turned out to be an awesome choice. Month one we delivered 84 orders totalling just over £4400. Average profit margin was around 50% but varies from product to product. This was ahieved on a fresh ebay account with zero feed back and we only had 14 products available for sale due to ebay listing restrictions. Since then I've secured a team if investors and enthusiasts to help grow the business even further. Now that I'm basically fully recovered and ready to rock we signed a lease on our first brick store today. Can't beat this feeling! So yeah there's my little tale, from poop scooper to vape shop owner and still showing results! I hope you get something from this or at least enjoyed reading it. Main things I've learnt over this year long process is it doesn't matter what your industry is or how deep your pockets are, how much you want it, how hard can you work and how much sacrifice are you willing to take on? Food for thought maybe? Keep grinding guys, you got this! [link] [comments]  |
| Left my corporate gig to start my own company Posted: 07 Jan 2019 11:39 PM PST Had an amazing corporate job where I designed shoes for a living. Designed there for 4.5 years, but became incredibly comfortable (never knew comfort could feel so scary). In 2016 I decided to pack up and head home. 18 months later, I finally finished setting up my own footwear company and will be launching said company in 10 hours via Kickstarter. Any advice on not only the next 30 days for me…but if this Kickstarter goes well, how to continue to ride the wave? Also, I'm doing this all by myself. Who are the first 3 people I should hire to make a more well rounded team? - - - - - - - Edit - Wow thank you so much for all the amazing advice, support and questions! I will read through them all today and respond back. For those interested, my Kickstarter campaign launched a couple hours ago, and already raised 20K! - - - - - - - [link] [comments]  |
| How to turn a great FB ad into zero sales/signups. Posted: 08 Jan 2019 08:25 AM PST This is the last part of a series I've written on how to check/improve your FB ads performance. I audit a lot of FB ads accounts, and have collated all the data together to show the most common mistakes made, and how to avoid/rectify them. This post is about an area that is consistently given less attention than it deserves, which is crazy because it can easily increase/decrease the ROI on your ads by 100-500% and more. Landing pages.or 'The page that you send people to if they click on your ad.' This could be a blog post, a product page on an ecommerce store, a booking page for a cafe, or an opt-in page where someone can give their info in exchange for a download/course/freebie. First up, I'm going to walk through the most common mistakes, and then I'm going to outline the best approach to putting landing pages together to use with your FB ads. >> Bad pop-ups <<A local Events company I audited were guilty of this - as soon as you got to their website - you got a pop-up in your face asking you to sign up to their mailing list. Pop-ups are controversial - on one hand, they can be very effective at capturing people's contact info and getting them into your funnel. And on the other hand, EVERYONE hates them. But these guys were doing everything wrong.
One thing they did do well though, was to use a really clear graphic to explain the next steps - see the bottom section of this post for why this is important. >> Slow site << I audited an E-commerce site selling art. The website was clean and looked the part, but it just took too long to load. Quoting Neil Patel (who I turst) "nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn't loaded within 3 seconds." This site loaded in about 6 seconds - that was coasting them hugely. >> Missing out on blog post conversions << A B2B Saas company I audited sent a lot of traffic to their excellent blog posts, but then didn't do enough on that people to nurture people into the next step. Sure, you can retarget them with more ads, but the more people move through your funnel organically the cheaper and better they are. I advised them to put a clear (but not annoying) button where people opt-in for the next step manually if they want to. I like to have one in the sidebar and another when they get to the end of the blog post. >> Too many clicks << An E-commerce site aimed at gamers that I worked with was guilty of making people do too much work. Their products were great, so people would make some effort, but from the landing page, most people needed to visit a minimum of 3 more pages before they had all the info they needed to buy. Keep the user experience as un-taxing as possible. >> Crazy colours/fonts << An SEO company I audited were sending people to opt-in pages to download guides and build their email list. But the colours they were using made the pages look crazy. (Admittedly I'm colourblind - so not the best judge of this, but) keep it simple and easy to see/read everything - that includes not using a million different fonts. >> Sending people to your homepage << The Cardinal sin of landing pages - not bothering to use one, and instead sending traffic to your home page. An architect firm I worked with had a great website, but if the goal of the ad is for someone to schedule an appointment, don't have them scrolling all the way down and avoiding distractions before they get to the contact form. You'll get better results by sending people to specifically designed landing pages that pick up where the advert left off. >> No FB Pixel << Actually, the Architects went even further and didn't even have the FB pixel installed on their website, and that's just like pissing money away - you've paid to get someone to your site, now you're just letting them go cold so easily - install the FB pixel and you can set up simple retargeting ads based on their actions. >> Not testing << I wrote a whole long post about testing and one e-commerce shop I audited was making mistake no. 1 - zero testing. They were sending traffic to their product pages, and spent good money testing different ad copy/headlines/visuals etc - but had never edited their product pages at all. See below as to what you can test. Landing page ground rules: -ONE- Know your avatar. If you've got so far as creating a FB ad and an landing page - you'd hope that you have a clear picture of who you are speaking to, but a lot of people seem to completely forget by the time they get to doing the landing page. This is a huge topic, but answer these 9 questions and you've 90% of the way there.
Figure these out & you'll be able to show folks that you GET them. Obviously, this applies to writing the ad too. -TWO- Congruence - style/images/copy You know the cliché online dating situation where someone has used a photo of them from 5/10/15 years ago, and you instantly know somethings off? Same with landing pages that don't 'feel' the same as the ad the user clicked on. As much as you can, use the same headlines, images, videos, copy, and colour palette as you did in the advert - this will minimise the risk of people feeling the disconnect and dropping off. -THREE- Relevant One problem one solution, keep to the point. Yes you now have a whole screen's worth of real estate that you can fill, but that doesn't mean you have to. Facebook as a platform is built largely on two words - relevance and engagement - If your content isn't relevant or engaging then results will suffer. Likewise, FB now looks at how people interact with your landing pages to determine whether that keeps up - so fight the temptation to start talking about anything that isn't directly relevant to your user, and focus on them taking the action you want. -FOUR- Keep distractions to a minimum Following along from relevance, keep your landing page as distraction-free as possible. What this means is that whatever the goal is (a sale, a signup, a video view…) you should be removing everything that doesn't contribute directly to that. This is why sending people to the homepage is so bad, there are too many different areas to click/read/watch that don't keep the user moving in the right direction. -FIVE- Mobile first Chances are, most of your traffic is coming from mobile, so it's no good spending two hours on ClickFunnels designing the most beautiful page you've ever seen, and then 2 minutes making sure the mobile version is OK. Mobile FIRST, then make sure the desktop version is fine too. -SIX- Clear Call to action People are crying out for someone to tell them what to do - so be that person. Tell them exactly what to do, and then exactly what will happen next - spell it out very very simply so that they can't possibly get confused. This is what the events company did well, they had a big diagram with 1,2,3,4,5 written out big, explaining all the next steps nice and easily. -SEVEN- Speed The speed of a landing page is SO important, it's huge. Load a new tab now and Google 'pagespeed insights'. Click the top link, then enter your website/page. All those things that appear, they are all costing you money. 'Eliminate render-blocking resources' 'Defer unused CSS' 'Properly size images' - it's all geeky stuff, and you might now know what it means, but it all counts. And the great thing about speeding up your site is that it's going to be a one-time (or at least infrequent) cost that will pay for itself over and over and over. -EIGHT- Test Any landing page software lets you create A/B test, but people just don't use them, or they test one thing and that's it. Systematically testing different headlines/copy/images/colours/layouts/CTA's WILL increase your conversion rates, which will increase your ROI. It's a long-term approach, but that slow progress over time is 100% worth it.So there you go. Create good landing pages and you'll avoid sacrificing all the hard work and money that went into the ads. Happy to answer any questions. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 08:42 AM PST (edit/) I countered at plus 15% which will be ok if accepted. Else, I'm going to finish building it out for residual income. That's why I bought in the first place but I've waited until the time was right to work on it. Apparently someone else thinks the time is right. (/edit) Hello - I develop websites for myself on the side. I recently purchased a URL for cheap and now there is a large offer for it. Its politically related any may become very valuable if certain likely events take place in Washington DC. I can build it out myself and turn it into a affiliate site of some kind. Or sell it. Someone with similar creativity has decided that its worth quite a bit. Im not sure what to do ? [link] [comments]  |
| I am 17 and starting a tutoring center. Any tips? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 12:25 PM PST Hi, I am a 17 yr old. I'm starting a tutoring center in Brooklyn (NYC) that preps middle school kids for the SHSAT (Its this test that you have to take to get into a specialized high school). I took the SHSAT 3 years ago and scored in the top .1% and got into the best specialized high school. Based on personal experience, tutoring for the SHSAT is in high demand, especially in South Asian and Asian American communities (So I will be mainly targetting them as customers). Parents pay 1000s for good prep schools. I am planning on starting the prep school after I get about 10 customers lined up. I am going the tutoring service will be 4 hours every weekend. Do you guys have any advice/tips for a beginner? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| How to deal with overbearing parent being constantly critical of start up? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 11:31 AM PST I've recently opened up a chocolate/candy business and while my dad is okay, my mom has become a bit too much. She constantly says that she's the only one doing anything and that I need to consider all these different things. The thing is, I have done the work. I always have a solution to everything she proposes and I've put a lot of thought and planning into my business. I've also been in the F&B industry for over 9 years and have a bachelors in hospitality as well as an associates in baking and pastry. I'm not officially open and I already have orders pouring in and I'm on track to being out of the start up phase within a month if I continue to hustle. Today she freaked out on my dad and I heard more than I should because I was in the middle of production for orders I need to fill tomorrow. She said I was messy, disorganized, and that this wasnt going to work and I needed to get my life together. It was super discouraging to hear. Any advice on how to deal with this? I love her but I need to stay focused on my end goal. [link] [comments]  |
| How I didn't get my first paying customer! Posted: 08 Jan 2019 02:34 PM PST This is about how I did not or could not get my first paying user. Sometimes no matter what you have or how many clients you have ready for paying you, you simply can't get paid. If you want to know how it went please read the full (long) story at https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-i-didnt-get-my-first-paying-customer/ [link] [comments]  |
| How have your marketing strategies changed as you've grown your business? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 08:22 AM PST Sometimes small business owners can focus too heavily on creating the perfect business or product before allocating the time and resources necessary for an effective marketing strategy. This can prevent cash-strapped small businesses from ever really getting off the ground. With that said, what marketing channels (and how much money did you put into marketing) when you started your business versus what you do today? What marketing strategies have been most effective along the way for you and why? [link] [comments]  |
| What do you do once you patent a product Posted: 08 Jan 2019 12:21 PM PST I've been developing a product in my free time and it got me thinking. A quick initial search didn't reveal any likely matches that'd make getting a patent challenging. So once you patent a product, how do you typically go about profiting from it? My current problem is, I'm not sure what to even google! For example, say I have the next "sliced bread" product, but I don't want to start my own company to produce it and I'd like to sell rights to a company for a period of time or X products to produce this product as their own. How is that usually done? Do I just sell the patent? Do I do something to give them rights to it and I just collect royalties? I'm really curious what the typical routes are in these kind of scenarios. Once I have some direction I'll be back to google. I really appreciate any info you guys can give me! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 12:21 PM PST Hey everyone, I'm starting a company that is dedicated to product photography and videography. In order to be transparent, I'm writing this to: help expand on my idea with the help of others, gain insight from potential clients (anyone here that sells on Amazon/Shopify/eBay), outline my experience/skills/knowledge. Background: I began photography in high school and throughout college I primarily shot portraiture, weddings, with the occasional corporate event/product shoot. While the pay for weddings was nice, I didn't like the nature of that business. I moved and began free lancing product photography and eventually picked up a job where our main client was an international glasses, and an extremely well known footwear company. A few thousand product photos later I moved jobs to help manage an individual owner's multiple eBay/Amazon/Shopify stores. The main responsibilities were inventory, product sourcing, and the majority of my day was spent shooting and editing photos for our listings. For reasons unimportant I've recently moved back home and I am wanting to pursue this professionally as a personal start up that I own. My main concern is finding clients, I've signed up for Fiverr, however I know that is not going to be a scalable or viable long term solution. TLDR; 99% of income from 2013-2019 has been photography. 70% has involved product photography. Experience/Skills/Knowledge (A bit outlined in the paragraph above, but to elaborate more):
Questions I Have: Could anyone suggest getting traffic to my website or fiverr or just to cut to the chase: how I can find/bring leads to my business? Opinions or things you would change/like to see on my website? Is there a better option than following/liking/dming small businesses on Instagram? If anyone here has any tips, ideas, or advice for the services I offer or has any questions regarding please don't hesitate to comment or DM me. If your business is in need of product photography or videography I'll gladly provide my services to anyone here for an extremely generous discount. Website: https://www.360fullview.com/ Please note, the reason I don't have many samples and no samples of videos is because I can't use content I provided from previous jobs for legal purposes. Thank you for reading, and sorry for the long post. TLDR; Starting a product photo/video company. Looking for tips on finding clients and pitching my services, also if anyone here is looking for a digital media option I would love to offer that to you for an obviously discounted price. [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone Got a Mom and Pop Shop and Want Free Advertisement Posted: 08 Jan 2019 09:46 AM PST I'm looking to grow my coupon website and wanted to offer free advertising to any small businesses. These coupons will be show to anyone who visits the site and is within a few miles of your address. If you're interested or just have any questions, shoot me a DM. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 09:07 AM PST Any help or advice is greatly appreciated! I am a Graphic Designer and run my own business that sells my services. I launched it a little over a year ago, and it's been steadily growing ever since. Around the holiday season, however, all contact with new clients completely stopped. I was seriously starting to worry that I had become a ghost! Now that the holidays are over, I'm starting to pick up clients again, but it sucked to take that loss right at the time of year where I spend the most money. I know that sometimes businesses can be feast or famine, especially when starting out. But my question is, is the holiday thing typical for service related businesses? Also, is there anything I can do to offset this effect in the future? Thanks for any help you can give [link] [comments]  |
| Misconceptions about startup fundraising Posted: 08 Jan 2019 10:39 AM PST So I'm the CEO of a company called Slidebean, we have a platform that many startups use to create pitch decks. We are trying to get involved with them and find out what they are struggling with. The most common topic seems to be fundraising, followed by hiring marketing talent. Having failed at fundraising for the first company I started (2011), I look back and realize the problem was we spent too much time trying to find investors, and we failed to notice some of the fundamental flaws in our product. For Slidebean, we raised a seed round of $800,000 and things have moved along since then. I have this problem with startup press. It gives new founders a false notion of how fundraising works. You read the story of Yo, an app that just sent notifications saying 'Yo' and how they raised a $1,000,000 seed round, and companies assume that's something anyone with a couple of lines of code can do. In my experience, most companies raise money AFTER getting traction. Very few companies raise money with just a prototype and no users; and certainly, NO company raises money without a fully formed founding team. The most extreme case here is tech companies that are trying to raise money to hire a CTO, we see so many of those. Tech talent is expensive, and it's scarce, and the first proof that a company is worth something is that you managed to find a full stack developer that would turn down a job at Google to work on this idea. As a CEO, you need to be able to find and convince that guy, who joins your company for the stock and not for the salary; when he could be making $150,000/yr otherwise. The reality of startup fundraising today, at least in Silicon Valley and New York, is that companies are pitching investors with traction, excellent traction, ie revenue (tens of thousands of dollars per month, growing over +20% month-over-month). Sourced this from Elizabeth Yin (https://elizabethyin.com/2018/10/18/should-you-raise-money-or-bootstrap/). As an exception, pure play, no-revenue traction counts only when you are dealing with millions of users and fantastic retention rates. How can we get this into their heads? [link] [comments]  |
| Starting a magazine (huge reach, and some skills). What is the next step? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 10:35 AM PST I want to start an online/offline (can't be too specific) magazine. Would this be feasible? And what would the next step be? If anyone has helpful skills you can always tag along. My deck of cards:
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| I need to get 10 students by January 22nd Posted: 08 Jan 2019 02:16 PM PST Hi! I'm new to reddit and still trying to figure out how it all works, so tell me what I'm doing wrong. I'm a full time college student and I study marketing, but I used to study music. I've been obsessed with starting a business since I was little, and I think I've finally done it. The thing is, I need 10 students to make it work. I decided to teach a beginner's piano group class for six weeks with a maximum of five students per class. It'd be modeled similarly to a basketball camp. I have a space reserved weekly for three hours (two for classes and one for set up and break down. Payment is due by the 22nd, but my classes start February 5th. I have a *very small mailing list and a facebook following of about 300, most of which are local family and friends. I did do a promotion where someone would get $30 off their class ($180 value) for signing up to the mailing list. The area is affluent enough that many families can afford great lessons, but I have years of experience doing exactly this with less resources than I have now. I'd hoped that holding it at one of the local middle schools could bring some credibility, and that the price point would be attractive as it breaks down to $30/hr. Lessons usually start around What other selling points do I have? With the startup costs of electric keyboards, I need all 10 students to break even, but going forward, I would only need 2 students per class to turn a profit, which isn't at half capacity even. How do I market this class further? Where do I go? Who do I talk to? [link] [comments]  |
| Loose Leaf tea company idea – looking for advice Posted: 08 Jan 2019 08:01 AM PST Hi all, been lurking here for a while now. I'm a graphic designer by trade and have been self employed for over 10 years now. I make a good living, make my own schedule and work from home and it's great and all but I'm getting bored and want to do something else. I'm a big craft beer guy, coffee guy and in the last few years I've really gotten into tea having landed a tea client. Fast forward to the present and I'm considering starting my own line of tea. I have the supplier, I already have the name and branding thought out but not executed and I'm pretty sure that I plan on starting this as a side business to see if it has potential to take off, meaning I'll most likely approach cafes and other business in my city to see if they'd be interested in stocking the product plus selling online. I know this is all very vague at this point but I was wondering if anyone has done the same thing with tea, or any other product and if there are any suggestions you may have on how to really get this started. I'm just not sure on the exact steps that I should be taking here. TIA, and any questions, fire away and I'll answer best I can. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 10:00 AM PST |
| Switching from paper based inventory system to a software inventory system. HELP!!! Posted: 08 Jan 2019 09:53 AM PST My family purchased a company and their inventory management system is completely 100% paper based. Employees currently have to sign stock cards and manually record how much inventory they have taken out or how much inventory they have returned. We feel like its time to bring this company into the 21st century and upgrade to a computer based system. We are currently looking for something that is user friendly (We have some pretty computer illiterate employees here) as well as barcode scanning for inventory management so that employees do not have to touch a computer, only management and shipper/receivers will have to. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated [link] [comments]  |
| How to monetize a million verified user data containing phone, email and social network IDs? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 01:21 PM PST Let's say if I have a database of million users and for each user if I had their verified phone number, email address and their social network links. What's the best way to monetize this data? What other information about the user will add value to this data? Demographic? Preference? If I had their age and location, how would it help with the monetization? Thank you for all your thoughts, answers, criticism! [link] [comments]  |
| Start up advice for a CBD business. Posted: 08 Jan 2019 01:13 PM PST Hello! I am currently getting ready to open a CBD business with my brother-in-law (who is the investor). I come from the electronic cigarette industry, so I have multiple contacts and customers ready to start buying. I have a few questions that I cant find answers for anywhere online (I am not the best with technology). We are trying to create a business model so we know how much we need to have to start up officially. For your reference, we are based in California and plan to sell in all states where CBD is legal. We will be sourcing our product through a manufacture in CA who provide all paperwork and forms on ingredients, test levels, etc. so that there will be no issues for us providing that information moving forward.
If there is anything else I need tobe aware of, or any overhead I am missing that I need to take into account for stsrt up costs, that would be very much appreciated. Thank you so much for taking the time to read and hopefully answer our questions! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jan 2019 01:04 PM PST So, I recently heard about this Amazon FBA thing and I dont know anything about entrepreneurship. Ive been looking around for good books and articles and guides about this but it seems to be such a huge market for it that no article or video seems real. Its usually giving advice for 5 minutes that I found out by myself reading Amazons webpage and then "buy my course for 500 dollars" or its someone desperately promoting how amazing Amazon is. No source seems sincere, just schemes to earn money from you because I assume alot of people go into this as a cash grab thing and pay whatever for these tutorials. Im actually interested for real, not in a, ill be rich in a month way but really want to get into it but I cant find any sincere information? Any books? (I found this one, how about it? https://www.amazon.com/Product-Research-101-Winning-Products/dp/B01M680YDI/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= ) [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone else having Instagram engagement issues since Jan 1? Posted: 08 Jan 2019 12:16 PM PST I run a large Instagram-centered brand, engagement is down 60% since Jan 1 for me and multiple colleagues and we cannot figure out why. None of us are shadowbanned. Anyone else having this issue? [link] [comments]  |
| Advice on pitching to stores that you can't visit? Posted: 07 Jan 2019 03:50 PM PST Hey everyone. I have a product that is under $10 that I want to start selling to small gift shops and markets. Usually I would go in and talk to the people, but I'm unable to drive to every store since some of them are in completely different cities and I also just don't have the time and gas to make it everywhere. Does anyone have any advice on getting to the right people when cold calling stores? Should I immediately ask for the number or email of the owner/buyer so that I can then send follow up information and pictures? I love being able to go in and create a connection but I also want to expand. I know it will be harder for them since they won't be able to hold it in their hands and see it all, so hopefully detailed pictures will help. I appreciate any advice so that I don't immediately fail when calling to pitch stores out of driving distance. Thank you so much! [link] [comments]  |
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