Thank you Thursday! - (June 13, 2019) Entrepreneur |
- Thank you Thursday! - (June 13, 2019)
- $5k/month selling patches on Etsy.
- As a young and new entrepreneur. I am wondering how you all find balance? It seems I have days where I will be completely lazy and others where I'll work 16 hours (day jobs and my business).
- Have I built a product that no one wants?
- Looking for a co-founder? Make sure you ask each other these questions
- Laundry owners, what is a good per pound price to charge for 930,000 pounds of laundry per year for a single customer?
- Should I have a logo?
- Have any business owners been issued business credit cards that they didn't consent to?
- Anyone in here braking more than 200,000 a year in profits. What is your business?
- Want to be an entrepreneur but don't want have an idea? I have three ideas and no time to build them. Let's join forces and conquer the world!
- Need tips on how to avoid crashing after work.
- How I had my second company stolen. Also, bonus office scandal
- Looking for ideas and a place to start.
- Website Review / Critics
- Where do I start?
- 17 Year Old’s First Mobile App
- I need help with recording/managing contact information that we use for advertising.
- A true story about how I built a lawn care website and just let it sit... and 5 years later my brother jumped in and started crushing it
- If you were to decide between these two #laptoplifestyle "fake" business models, which would it be?
- Sourcing Products on Alibaba to Sell on Amazon
- When and where should I register my LLC?
- My first partnership opportunity!
- Can I use LeadPages for entire website instead of Squarespace?
- Computer/electronic cleaning biz in a city
| Thank you Thursday! - (June 13, 2019) Posted: 13 Jun 2019 06:13 AM PDT Your opportunity to thank the /r/Entrepreneur community by offering free stuff, contests, discounts, electronic courses, ebooks and the best deals you know of. Please consolidate such offers here! 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]  |
| $5k/month selling patches on Etsy. Posted: 13 Jun 2019 09:15 AM PDT Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview. Today's interview is with Mike Lecky of Vagabond Heart, a brand that sells modern travel patches. Some stats:
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hi! My name is Mike, and I'm a serial entrepreneur living in Montreal, Canada. I run Vagabond Heart, a company that makes modern vintage-inspired travel patches and stickers to help your luggage stand out on a the carousel. I started the company just under two years ago, and we've been growing at a 100+% growth rate ever since. Currently we sell just over $5,000 per month worth of patches and stickers. What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?As I mentioned above, I'm a serial entrepreneur, and a lifelong maker. I've been selling online since the early 2000's, well before Shopify made it easy, even before Amazon existed. In the past I've designed typefaces, ran a literary magazine, published books, sold vintage menswear, and even built and sold wooden furniture online. The idea for Vagabond Heart came to me three years ago when I was on a winter-long vacation in a small town in Mexico, which I loved, except for the fact that I didn't really have anything to do with my time. I thought to myself, "If i'm going to come down here every winter, I need a project to keep me busy." The idea was a combination of my interest in vintage clothing, style, and old movies, with my love of menswear and fashion, and of course, travel. What I wanted was a way to make my normal looking duffel bag look like an updated version of the luggage you'd see on a trans-Atlantic crossing in the 1920's, or on the runway in Casablanca. I wanted to have patches from Paris and Rome and Cuba plastered all over, but I didn't want the readily available (and boring) flag patches, and I didn't want something too retro and costumey. Casablanca, 1942 Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.I learned a lot from being a book and magazine editor that helped with the design process. My strategy:* find the right person to do the design work and don't get in their way!* I had worked with the designer Ryan Brinkerhoff a few years before on a small project and it had turned out really well. I thought his style fit what I was looking for so I reached out and explained the concept and he was really excited to do it. As far as the actual design process goes, I make a list of the designs I want done, usually in batches of ten. I send Ryan as much reference material as I can, from online photos to poorly done doodles, and some notes on the vibe or the colors or anything else I can think of, and then I let Ryan work his magic. Inspiration for the Miami patch As far as design goes, I think you should do the hard work up front of finding the right person who understands your vision. Then the actual design and revision process becomes a breeze because everyone is on the same page. The end result of our Miami design. Fortunately, patches are a pretty cheap thing to prototype. I emailed about 25 or 30 suppliers on AliBaba, then sorted them by price per piece, and also by MOQ. I chose a company with a competitive price, about $1.50 per piece, who would allow me to order only 50 pieces of each of my 10 original designs, so 500 pieces in all to start. From when I sent them the payment (upfront) to when I received my product was probably about a month. As the company grew I eventually switched suppliers to one that required a higher MOQ, but made a higher quality product. At this point I was sure I could sell what I ordered, and my orders per design have crept from 50 pieces, to 100, to 500. Describe the process of launching the business.The main store, VagabondHeart.co is hosted on Shopify. I chose Shopify because while it isn't the cheapest option, it's the leader in providing ecommerce stores, and with that you get a lot of bonuses, like the giant number of third party apps you can install, and the tons of podcasts and blogs you can read to get help with the technical aspects. I also started out by uploading everything to both Etsy and Ebay. It was kind of an afterthought at the time, but Etsy has turned out to be our best channel for sales. I never really had a proper launch to the business. I started off with my 500 patches, and sort of put them up online to gauge interest, and pretty quickly enough of them had sold that I needed to get a reorder sent in and then it made sense to make 10 more designs, and then a few more and the next thing I knew I was at 50 designs and 500 orders a month. The main thing I've learned is the importance of a marketplace like Etsy. What I didn't realize originally is that the best place you can be is on a platform that has already got people on it, actively trying to buy things. This has also been true about selling on Amazon. When we launched on Amazon in January of this year we went from zero sales to basically twinning what we were selling on Etsy in about 3 weeks. Our Dublin patch. Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Growth for Vagabond Heart has come primarily through expanding our product line. I started out with a test run of 10 designs, and now we're up to 50 different locations. That allows us to get a higher average order value, because now someone looking for a Barcelona patch can also find a Lisbon patch while they're on the site. Last year, we started offering all of the designs as a sticker as well, for hard sided wheelie type suitcases, and so that doubled the number of SKUs in the store in one day and widened the potential audience. As I mentioned above, just this year we've added Fulfilled by Amazon sales, and seen the number of orders on Amazon go from zero to 250 a month in 3 months, without any advertising. The downsides to this are
Knowing what I know now about Amazon sales and fees, if I was choosing Amazon as my #1 sales channel I would try to create a product with a higher retail sales price. Right now my Amazon fees take up about 30% of my sales price, but if you sold something worth more the fees don't scale one to one with the price, so you could end up with closer to a 10-15% Amazon fee. I think the sweet spot is probably something in the $25-$50 range, cheap enough that it's still an impulse buy, but priced at a point where you aren't having the Amazon fees take up too much of your profit margin. We don't do much advertising, save for the automated advertising on Etsy where you can set your maximum bid and their algorithm takes care of everything else. This is a great place for people to start to learn about advertising, as you can set a very simple max budget and watch as the algorithm picks your keywords for you, before you try doing something similar yourself on Facebook. The main marketing push for me is our mailing list. Currently the list is at 2,000 subscribers, with a 30% open rate. I try not to spam, but the nature of our product is that if you like one of our designs, you probably want more, as long as it's a place you've been to. Our best responses come from the 5 or 6 emails a year where we say "Hey, we've got new designs in the store! Have you been to X or Y?" Those tend to get a 50+% open rate and a 25+% click rate. A simple email launching our Las Vegas patch. How are you doing today and what does the future look like?While the company started off slow, it's been essentially profitable from day one. In the beginning, I was packaging and mailing each order by hand, and we're just now transitioning to having a fulfillment warehouse take care of all of our shipping. When we started, I bought the patches separately, printed packaging separately, and bought plastic bags separately, because it was more affordable to buy them like that in small quantities. Eventually we transitioned to ordering large enough numbers of patches at once that it became affordable to have the embroidery company package everything in advance. Currently we're selling about a 40%-40%-20% split between Amazon, Etsy, and our own store. The plan for the next 4 months is to tidy up the loose threads in the business, optimise our listings, redo all of our photography and visual elements, and get everything in order before expanding the collection in the fall in time for Q4 and the holiday season. Our Lisbon patch and the streetcars that inspired it. Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?The one lesson I've taken with me through all my businesses is the idea of bootstrapping, of not buying anything until you absolutely need it. Once you have your idea for a product (or service) come up with a Minimum Viable Product and test interest on that. For me, I was able to produce a small number of my actual product, which meant if the product had been a total failure I would have only been out about $1000 in unsold product. If you can't do that you can create a website for your product with a BUY NOW button that goes to an error page or a "sold out" notification, and you can judge the interest by seeing how many people clicked to buy. If you want to write a book, write a shorter version of it, the first chapter or a framework, and offer it up as a freebie. If thousands of people want your freebie, 10% of them will probably buy the full book off you 6 months from now when you're finished writing it. What platform/tools do you use for your business?The main apps I use with Shopify are Affiliately, for setting up affiliate accounts for Instagram influencers, and Jilt, which sends out my abandoned cart emails. I also have an app installed called Give & Grow, which allows me to automatically donate a percentage of my sales to charity. I chose Doctors Without Borders an organisation that provides medical care in disadvantaged places like war torn countries or areas that have suffered a natural disaster. The app adds a widget to your Shopify store that shows shoppers how much you've donated. Etsy has the Etsy Sellers App, which I have on my phone, that allows me to track sales and respond to Etsy Conversations on the go. Our Portland patch. What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?I'm sure this gets mentioned a lot, but when it came out, over ten years ago, I read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and it really changed how I thought about a lot of things, not just work and business. A lot of the lessons in it have been so incorporated into the world of online sales that it might not seem revolutionary to someone reading it today, the way the CGI in Jurassic Park doesn't drop jaws in 2019, but there's a lot in there. I think it's probably less helpful for someone starting out than it is for someone who has their business running and wants to make it easier to run, but I'd probably recommend someone reading it before they start their business anyway, because that's when you make the decisions that will affect how easy it is to automate your business down the road. Seth Godin's books (and his blog and his podcast) are great as well. Less for technical help on how to start a business or how to promote a website, and more for the Big Thinking part of it. Why are you doing what you're doing? What makes your business or product special? Who is it for and why are they going to love it? It's this sort of thinking that helped me niche down until I found a product I was interested in making that no one else had made yet. I listen to about 20 different podcasts for business help. I would say some of them are good but have a lot of fluff episodes, or interviews with someone peddling their Shopify plugin, which might or might not be useful. My favourites, with the most useful content, would be How to Quit Your Job by Steve Chou and Ecom Crew with Mike Jackness and Dave Bryant. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Something I've learned with this project is that there's a great advantage to selling a product that people are already looking for. People on Amazon already want a "Tokyo Patch," I've just come on to the scene and am offering them a better one than was previously available. People are probably already searching for "joke golf t-shirt" or "retro map posters." If you have a product like this you don't have to spend as much on advertising, you just have to have the best available product. The reason there were so many commercials for Snuggies when they first came out is that no one was googling "blanket with arm holes in it." Our Rome patch, featuring the Colosseum. Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below! Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data. For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily. Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 12 Jun 2019 09:21 PM PDT |
| Have I built a product that no one wants? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:22 AM PDT Some context: Tiny home builder in Pacific Northwest, We just built a tiny home 'show model' for a Small home Expo a couple of weeks ago. We tried really hard to differentiate ourselves, so we came up with a rooftopdeck model accessed by a spiral staircase (Photo here https://imgur.com/a/IIEfB8P. The Railings fold down flat for transport. The expo seemed good, people definitely seemed to be impressed and surprised by the deck and finishing. We had pretty consistent lineups. Lots of good feedback. After the show though, different story. The lack of interest has been pretty depressing to be honest. I now have it listed for sale and not getting many hits yet. The hope was to differentiate ourselves enough that a few people would resonate with this type of build. I see the market as becoming more and more saturated with similar tiny home builders, and we do have the capacity to design and build more unique homes, so seemed like a prudent choice. In hindsight, It now seems like a bad risk to take, (eats up alot of cash). The easier option would have been to fit in more with the regular designs (or not bother with the expo). But its not where my passion lies. I'm trying to establish what is correct at this point:
From personal point of view, this build is the most challenging, but fulfilling and rewarding of anything I have ever done in 15 Years of construction. Its weird to have feelings of pride mixed with feelings that I have made a bonehead decision! Any tips would be well appreciated [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for a co-founder? Make sure you ask each other these questions Posted: 13 Jun 2019 05:01 AM PDT A lot of folks around here are probably looking for a co-founder or have someone in mind but aren't sure if they're the "one"? My friend Eduardo and I were in the same boat before we decided to work on Houston full-time so we collected this set of questions and asked it to each other. Tbh it was a little awkward because we've been friends forever and this felt too formal but it we don't regret doing it at ALL Here's the doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u-kNfoA9YlMqHt7dxidSYmVlD8h7aBWG74pYeifX2NU/edit?usp=sharing Feel free to share with anyone else that might find this useful(: [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:31 AM PDT The contract is in Front Royal, Virginia and the round trip to pick up the laundry would be roughly 3 hours. Daily pickups- 7 days a week from 4-6 am. All hospital linen. Edit: Yeah I'm not sure why I'm being called a wantrapeneur ha. If this was near our main facility I would be able to know exactly what our costs would be but it's in a different state. That's why I'm trying to reach out to contractors in Virginia. I've already contacted multiple commercial launderers in the area and am waiting to hear back that's why I posted on here. We're thinking of working with a partner company there and would like to know if their prices are competitive for the general area. I have already spoken to all of the local companies, I am literally just on here trying to connect with a launderer that is in Virginia. This is one step of many I have taken. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2019 10:33 AM PDT I will be starting my advertising agency in a few months from now and am finishing some things up such as additional planning. Something I'm pondering is whether or not I should have a logo. I know you don't NEED a logo to have a successful company, I'm more so just thinking about doing it as a personal touch. This is a dumb post tbh since really I feel like it just comes down to preference. I still wanna hear other opinions though since I'm curious to see how other people think [link] [comments]  |
| Have any business owners been issued business credit cards that they didn't consent to? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:53 AM PDT I'm working with a colleague who is collecting stories of this happening. Apparently, it's becoming an issue for small businesses and credit card companies are taking advantage of folks by issuing business cards without the explicit consent of the business. Has anyone encountered this? [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone in here braking more than 200,000 a year in profits. What is your business? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 09:03 AM PDT |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2019 02:00 PM PDT Title pretty much says it all.
About me. Deep supply chain experience, hence two of the companies being physical goods. I would work on these companies if I had the time but I'm currently full time on my own start-up that began 5 years ago. I've raised $4.9mm for my current start-up over the course of 5 years. It's my first VC backed company and I have learned a metric ass-load. The first two ideas would require little venture funding until they're ready to scale/be acquired. The goal for all these companies is to sell them in a relatively short period (3-5 years) and to generate revenue from pretty much day 1. My start-up has afforded me some amazing opportunities, including having dinner with Richard Branson, Tim Draper, Bill Tai, John Donovan, and several others. Some of those individuals are my investors and I continue to meet with them on a pretty regular basis. I can provide the following.
You must be able to provide
I don't know if this is interesting but I figured I would give it a shot. I found my last co-founder on Reddit, so why not? Reply to the post or PM me if you're interested! [link] [comments]  |
| Need tips on how to avoid crashing after work. Posted: 13 Jun 2019 01:47 PM PDT Desperate to work on my side project to get things going. However, I'm really struggling to find the time and energy to get anything productive happening after work. Some details.. I wake up at 4:30am and start work at 6. I finish at 2:30 and usually home just before 3. I have a 8 month old Son who Ofcourse i need to spend time with and give my attention to when i get home + also my partner. By the time I've really sat down to relax its 5-6pm+. Which usually involves my partner wanting quality time or I need to do some chores, maintain our house etc.. I'm mostly a zombie by this time. My business is online and when jumping on my pc my eyes are half open throughout my work. This also includes my son waking up throughout the night and i get maybe 5 hours max of disturbed sleep. What do you do to keep yourself motivated and have enough energy to do both jobs? Thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| How I had my second company stolen. Also, bonus office scandal Posted: 12 Jun 2019 10:51 PM PDT This is my story of how I lost ownership of Unifide, my second company. I began my entrepreneurial journey in 2015 with Spawt, a Foursquare for Food. Spawt was my first full-time venture as a naive, fresh graduate. Like every virgin entrepreneur hopelessly hooked to startup porn, I believed with every bone in my body that Spawt will be the next big thing. Of course, if I am onto the next best thing, I have to include my best friend in the venture. What could go wrong? Kian Wei was my buddy from secondary school, and he joined and has worked in ST Engineering as a grunt software developer. We chat every night, and it was fun because he was the only other programmer I knew in real life. And I will tell him about Spawt, and how with the remarkable $25,000 that I had raised from Crystal Horse, I would be able to hire him for a few months and together, as buddies, we will build the next big thing. Then Spawt failed. (Who knew two engineers in a startup would be a bad combination?) But it was ok. We were brothers, we would build another company with 50/50 equity split. Except that this time, we NEED to make money from day one. Having paid for my expenses as a freelancer building websites for small businesses, I decided that this will be it. This was the plan -- to build websites for businesses and charge a hefty recurring fee for the use of our awesome CMS that I will build. We will be day hustlers, night owl programmers. Our leads will come in via the automated emailer that I will build and crawl emails with. We were programmers, and I figured that we would learn how to sell. But we were not designers, the last missing piece. So I prowled Temasek Polytechnic (TP) design show, and there I found Jamie Low, a fresh graduate from TP. Right off the bat, I made an offer of $3500 because I admired talent. With that, Unifide, my second company, was born. For months, three of us toiled. We took calls, we had meetings, and we designed and we built. And we made significant traction, and accrued a monthly recurring revenue of up to $15000. Our company's bank account actually had zeroes in it. And it was our thing. Then slowly but surely, Kian Wei started coming to work late. Our day begins at 10, and Kian Wei will be here at 11. Then 12pm, then 2 pm... He took fewer meetings, and he played more games in the night. But there was always one thing Kian Wei did for sure. He came to work and had lunch with the team, for which had grown to 5 at this point. "Lunch?", he'd ask. I never went because I have to build a business! That 1 hour of mindless chatter can be used to get more customers, to write more code, to get better at programming. Besides, I had Kian Wei, my 50% co-founder whom I can trust to take care of the team. The late-coming issue was a thorn under my skin, and his sales volume slipped to 40% of what I bring into the company. Something was seriously wrong. And for the umpteenth time, I talked to Kian Wei: "Dude, this is not ok." And he will always follow up that he is clocking the hours. No, it has to be about the discipline. If you do not come in on time, how do you expect your staff to come to on time? I believe in discipline, I still do. (Same reason why I am penning these stories daily) Then for the last time, I was done. It was 2, and Kian Wei wasn't here. It just was not fair. Why do I work so much harder, get paid the same, but he gets to sleep in till the afternoon? So I took him downstairs, and I said, something must change, or I will go. And he said coldly. You can go. Jamie will follow me anyways, and we will take all the clients with us. I was taken aback. Goddamn. I couldn't think, and I didn't think. Fine, I said. And I added that Kian Wei could have the company. Because I honestly believe that the company will die without me. A few days later, he gave me documents to sign over all my equity and gave me half of what the company had in the bank. It is 2019 today, Kian Wei and Jamie have left Unifide to join other startups. Jamie has left her boyfriend and got together with Kian Wei. And for years, they have enjoyed the fruits of the recurring income of the clients I had gotten for Unifide. Today, I try to have lunch with my colleagues as best as I can. And I no longer do 50/50 equity splits. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for ideas and a place to start. Posted: 13 Jun 2019 01:31 PM PDT Not sure if this is against sub rules but I'm looking to start a business of some sort. I'm aware I need to learn some things as I have absolutely zero idea how a business works nor any jargon. If anyone can point me in the right direction with resources or even ideas I'd much appreciate it. FWIW, I'm a 27 year old truck driver (wanting to get out), I enjoy snowboarding, powerlifting, vagabonding, MMA, speak 3 Languages and currently learning Python. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2019 01:31 PM PDT Started a website about freebies and deals. Still working on it but could use some critics! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2019 01:28 PM PDT I'm currently a college student studying computer science. I am extremely ambitious. Whenever I see a goal, I don't see my life without it. Unfortunately, I always lack knowledge when going for that goal. Is there something I can learn that'll help me launch a business? I took business classes throughout high school, but they never really taught us anything about starting one for real. My goal is to become a software developer and, after I've allocated enough funds, eventually start a business. How do I learn about actually starting one? Everywhere I look, they only talk about the idea. What if you already have the idea, but don't know where to start? [link] [comments]  |
| 17 Year Old’s First Mobile App Posted: 12 Jun 2019 04:09 PM PDT My first iOS / mobile app got approved a couple of days ago. It is a dog walk tracking app similar to Strava or MapMyRun but tailored to dog walking. You can check out the website at https://walkiez.app/ You can check it out on the App Store at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/walkiez-dog-walk-tracker/id1464450487?ls=1 Please leave any feedback it would be very much appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| I need help with recording/managing contact information that we use for advertising. Posted: 13 Jun 2019 01:15 PM PDT Hey guys, I'm in insurance and would love some help with finding a way to manage/store/record all of the contacts that we will use to mail/email, as well as who responds. We currently use QQ Evolution for our clients/prospects management, but I feel like that is for the next step once they fill out a questionnaire and show interest. I don't want to put thousands of "contact info" in QQ, unless you think that is the way to do it. Any help would be greatly appreciated! PS. This is my father's agency and I'm trying to upgrade EVERYTHING.... eventually.... we're kinda stuck in the early 2000's. Any other advice would be greatly appreciated as well! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2019 12:52 PM PDT Rewind to 2012. My partner and I were building our student storage service business and we weren't sure what the future had in store for us. I thought back to my lawn care days in high school and realized running a business like that could be a fall back plan if I ever needed cash to hold me over. So I thought about cities and where I would want to live if I needed to start from scratch and build another business. Bloomington Indiana is an awesome college town with a lot going on and a reasonable cost of living. I had a lot of friends nearby and my family was only about an hour away. I bought thelawnsquad.com web domain and built a pretty crappy website myself with Wordpress. I had a good friend there attending graduate school so I sent a Google My Business listing to his house. I got a few of my long time customers from high school to leave reviews on that Google listing. Then I just went about my life and worked on my business. I didn't do any marketing and I never went to Bloomington. I didn't form an LLC. I didn't get insurance. Nothing. The first year I got a call or two a week from potential customers. They left messages and I never returned them but I used Google Voice to track the incoming leads. The next year I got more calls. 3 or 4 calls a week. Then the next even more. By 2015 I was getting calls daily. Still not answering any. When a snow storm would hit Bloomington my phone would absolutely blow up with 30+ calls because I had a snow plowing page on my website. By 2015 our business was growing fast and I knew lawn care in Bloomington Indiana wasn't really in my future. But that year my brother ended up enrolling at Indiana University. I asked him if he was interested in mowing lawns but being a 19 year old freshman navigating his first year in the real world he declined. So the phone kept ringing and I kept ignoring the calls. After his first internship pushing paper around for a summer making $15 per hour he decided he'd rather give entrepreneurship a shot. In February of 2018 he started answering the phone and mowing lawns on the side. Being a junior in college (he did a 3/2 MBA program) he quickly got overwhelmed and by May he turned off the phones and didn't accept any new clients. That year he booked about 30 weekly customers and made $30k or so in annual revenue. He already had a truck and borrowed my family's backup mower so he cleared about $25k. Pretty good for working 12 hours a week. His senior year he got more serious. He built a nicer website and he set up Jobber. This spring he still didn't answer most of the calls because he was in class and on the mower but he followed up and ended up booking a lot of them. He graduated in May and now he runs the business full time. He has expanded to pest control and weed control/fertilization. He's got over 60 recurring customers and is on pace to earn $70k+ in profit this year with a lot more in the future. -- So maybe you're in a city right now that you don't see as long term. Maybe you've always had a dream to move to Asheville, Charleston, Austin, wherever. Consider doing something like this and you never know. Maybe you'll have that option someday! [link] [comments]  |
| If you were to decide between these two #laptoplifestyle "fake" business models, which would it be? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 12:46 PM PDT SMMA / Lead Gen Agency vs. eCommerce (dropshipping / 3PL / FBA) I know they get a ton of crap for not being "real" businesses, but I think there are perks to both. My take on the two is that eCommerce has massive potential for scalability without requiring much more of a time investment. SMMA builds more tangible business skills, such as prospecting, sales, and client management, and offers the potential to scale into a more traditional company (i.e. opening an office and hiring employees). Which is more appealing to you and why? [link] [comments]  |
| Sourcing Products on Alibaba to Sell on Amazon Posted: 13 Jun 2019 12:25 PM PDT Hi everyone! Something like this might have been posted on this sub so forgive me if I'm beating a dead horse. My agency recently partnered with Amazon and we've gone through some training the past few days. Alibaba got brought up and some people were going back and forth about it. I wasn't too familiar, so I started poking around. What I found was an insane amount of items that seem very cheap (probably low quality) available to sell in bulk. The first item that caught my eye was a wireless phone charger for 2 dollars. I looked up the exact item on Amazon, and it was being sold unbranded for about 12 dollars - there were hundreds of reviews. My question is is there anything illegal involved here? Are suppliers knocking off legit brands? Can someone sell the exact same product sourced from Alibaba with a different name without being sued? How do you go about finding out if something is patented? Does doing something via an OEM and having your logo on it make it yours if it isn't patented? Will Amazon ask these questions? Is it feasible to find a product (let's say a tent) for 10 dollars on Alibaba, and sell it on Amazon unbranded for 50? I know that Amazon FBA generally takes about a 30 percent fee and you'd eat some shipping costs, but a 50 percent profit margin for doing nothing seems a bit too good to be true. I started going through some of the items on Alibaba and found multiple duplicates on Amazon, each with dozens or hundreds of reviews so people are buying them. Why should I not just sit on my couch and re-sell things from an outsourced manufacturer? I apologize in advance for asking all of this, I'm just blown away by how easy all this seems. [link] [comments]  |
| When and where should I register my LLC? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:46 AM PDT I am starting a company (YAY!), and it is a software company that provides a service to manufacturing companies. Can I register this type of company in a different state, like Delaware or Nevada? Should I wait until I start to get customers before I register? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| My first partnership opportunity! Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:37 AM PDT Hi all, I am a woodworker. I make custom signs, home goods and decor. I have been trying to start my business in the Celtic niche, but am finding it rough going. The people who like my products really like them, but it's a small market (locally). Anyways, I happened to be speaking with someone who owns a wedding venue. He mentioned it after I told him what I did. I asked if he would be open to talking about working together, and he said yes. We will be meeting for coffee to discuss. My thought is that I can help him improve his offerings and perceived value by including my services for X number of custom decorative signs for the wedding and a custom sign for the couple to hang in their home. Or something like that. Does anyone have any other ideas that I can pitch to this guy? I'm very flexible in my work and can easily expand my product offerings. I'm just wondering what you think he will see value in, and more importantly what his customers will see value in! [link] [comments]  |
| Can I use LeadPages for entire website instead of Squarespace? Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:36 AM PDT I'm about to build a new website and I was thinking to do it with Squarespace. However, LeadPages seems it had better tool to get people to opt-in, do stuff in my site. Can i just use LeadPages to build out the entire site? I will be blogging in the sense that I want a ton of content pages, but I could care less about displaying a date in the url. And so this makes me wonder if I could achieve a whole site in LeadPages [link] [comments]  |
| Computer/electronic cleaning biz in a city Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:10 AM PDT Long story short, I'm looking to start a niche cleaning business. Specifically, computer/electronic cleaning business. I've noticed in this area that there are a decent amount of cleaning companies, commercial and residential, but none of them touch electronics. My guess is it's the liability + training that would be involved in teaching people to clean computer guts. I've also looked at the repair shop guys... A lot of them will only clean your computer if you actually get a repair -- and then your computer has to be excessively dirty, unless you get lucky I guess. A lot of overheating/recurring problems can be alleviated by routinely cleaning the guts of a computer/server/photocopier. Or at least the vents... I have almost 10 years experience in putting together/taking apart/cleaning and maintaining computers. I'm not certified in this because I work in a different field, and have maintained doing this as a hobby (friends know, and have asked me to clean/help them with their computer issues) since I was 15. I'm 24 now. I'm wanting to solidify this idea and develop it over the next few months. I know I would have to get the appropriate licensure and also a good insurance policy before getting started. My biggest concern is people trying to say i "broke their computer" when it was probably broken from the beginning. I imagine a remedy for that would be having them sign something + me personally verifying that the device worked appropriately before cleaning it. What else should I plan for look into? Mainly trying to avoid hot water down the road. [link] [comments]  |
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