Thank you Thursday! - (August 29, 2019) Entrepreneur |
- Thank you Thursday! - (August 29, 2019)
- Uncle passed and left me 2 yachts. How to set them up for charter?
- If you had to name one single book that taught you the most which one would it be?
- One year ago, I left my six figure CTO job to start an opensource software company in Cambodia. We have reached break even, and hope to be profitable by end of year. AMA!
- I have such a big desire to make a change and to do something, but I am pushing myself down.
- Anyone want to expand their business to Toronto?
- Reply to this post with a link to your website/venture & I will share a growth hack for you.
- Validating e-book idea?
- Contract buyout companies?
- What is your story?
- Best app creation site?
- Question from a newbie concerning Facebook Ads
- Alibaba seller created an order for me. I can't see it.
- Opportunity in Seattle?
- How do you go about finding a manufacturer to make your product?
- What kind of event would you organize to celebrate the 75th anniversary of your company ?
- Marketing after Kickstarter
- Motivation
- Did your family or friends treat you differently when you came into a lot of money?
- After working for 10 months non stop, I just stopped caring and took 3 weeks off. How do I get productive again?
- Course instructors: Has anyone worked with Tabletwise?
- New cleaning business - should I hire contractors or employees?
- Feedback on this landing page?
- looking for any kind of tips and help
- How would you get leads for concrete polishing?
- $60k/mo with a subscription box for babies.
| Thank you Thursday! - (August 29, 2019) Posted: 29 Aug 2019 06:12 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]  |
| Uncle passed and left me 2 yachts. How to set them up for charter? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 04:54 AM PDT One is 55' luxury trawler yacht at $1mm and the other is a 60' expedition yacht at $2.6mm. Looking for advice regarding selling or chartering from Ft Lauderdale. I would love to set them up for charter as I have many clients in my business that would love to go on weekend trips. [link] [comments]  |
| If you had to name one single book that taught you the most which one would it be? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 04:40 AM PDT I'm a little sick of those business books nowadays they contain incredibly much fluff. I'm looking for good books with information densely written. Or at least one that's so important, that the fluff is excusable. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 06:29 AM PDT TL:DR, it is much harder to find talent than anticipated. Low cost of living makes breaking even easy. Alcohol is too cheap out here. Last Years post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8vrik2/i_left_my_six_figure_job_and_10mil_rev_company_to/ I was working at a fairly prestigous advertising firm as the CTO around 2017. We worked actively with Google daily (I was a keynote speaker at their mobile conference last year), especially on their targetting and search algorthyms. For many reasons, I had a mental breakdown and decided to take a break in SE Asia for a while. I drank too much and fell into a depression for about 6 months, but have since recovered and am making opensource software again headquartered in Siem Reap. We have 2 active clients geared towards conservation and a team of 8 (mix of volunteer contributors and paid employees). I left with $50,000 in savings. We are now breaking even with about $7000 in the bank. We are prepping to launch our next product, a PCI-DSS compliant payment gateway for Cambodia which integrates with ABA bank (major bank here). We are still in "hard mode" startup grind, but I can see the turning point ahead. AMA! Ninja edit because I just realized I didn't give too many details. Initially, I had moved out here with my wife. She and I had had a premium snapchat thing going, with her income being around $1500-$3000/mo. The idea was to live off that income while I started the software company, which would remain non-profit and primarily research oriented (I'm keanly interested in machine learning and its impact in the marketing field). However, we separated, which left me to live off my own savings. Luckily I had always been frugal, and saved away a bit which allowed me to drink myself into an oblivion for 6 months. Eventually though, as I hit around $20,000 in savings I decided it was time to find work. I did, as a consultant CTO for a technical university in Cambodia. This job allowed us to break even, and become stable since december. They also funded the opensource development of our software, which they are live on today (basically a hotel booking engine and web app builder). Since launch, their Year over Year metrics have been +800% across most metrics, a huge gain. I attribute most of that to a big leap from a very poor website to a semi decent one (technically). The site was developed by the students there, so there is much to improve, but we are excited to be working on cool tech in production for a good cause. That went well for a while, when I landed another contract with Bill Bensley, a major architect in the area. He does hotels that are $2000/night, designs palaces, etc. We are closing in on finishing his websites in the next two months and have a good relationship. I hope that if we show the same increase in revenue that we did for the tech university that we can continue to earn more referalls. [link] [comments]  |
| I have such a big desire to make a change and to do something, but I am pushing myself down. Posted: 29 Aug 2019 11:40 AM PDT The only thing I can think of is "no, that's dumb, someone has probably done that" I feel like everything has already been done until something new is done, but then everything is done again until something new is done. It's just an infinite loop. Especially on the internet, like, what is it that no one has done yet? Selling audiobooks was a genius idea by Amazon. Making PayPal was so smart by Elon Musk. Using the internet to transfer money, I don't have words. My point is when the internet "came out" there was so much opportunity, so many ideas. But now several years later, it seems there is nothing new to discover, neither online or in the real world. I have one idea I think could be huge, but I would say it is a little hard to pull off for me. Other than that I am empty. [link] [comments]  |
| Anyone want to expand their business to Toronto? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 09:25 AM PDT Hi there, I'm looking to partner up with someone who already has an established business model and would like to expand to Toronto. I'm currently working as an accountant but I don't think I can do this forever. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Reply to this post with a link to your website/venture & I will share a growth hack for you. Posted: 29 Aug 2019 02:43 AM PDT Reply to this post with a link to your website/venture in the next 8 hours and I'll reply back a growth hack with specific on how to implement them. About me ? I am Digital marketer, specializing in Search marketing ($10M on SEM, 30M a year traffic from SEO) so few of the ideas could be biased towards organic Search. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 02:01 PM PDT Hi all - please forgive me if there is a better sub where I should be asking this, but it seemed appropriate. I have many ideas for self-published e-books, but am trying to narrow down the best one in terms of profitability. I wrote a book about football which I greatly enjoyed and produces some income, but for my next one I want to pick a category that has more sales potential. The football book was mainly a passion project that happened to make some money. Right now I'm focusing on three main book ideas, in the fields of history, politics, and fitness. My thought is that the fitness book may sell the best since everybody's always looking for the next quick fix to give them abs, but that category seems so saturated. Although that's what I would think about trashy romance novels, and they're completely dominating the Amazon kindle store best seller lists. The politics and history books will probably take me longer since more research and citations will be required. Any best practices for validation before spending lots of time and energy writing one? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 01:56 PM PDT I'm a web developer who wants to sell a website for $100/month with a three year agreement. What I would like to do is sell the contract to a company and get paid the money upfront, minus fees of course. Does anyone know any companies that do this? A water filtration company I worked for as a kid did the same. But I could not find any information online. Sorry if this is a newb question! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 09:28 AM PDT |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 09:01 AM PDT Does anyone have experience using a third party app creation tool as opposed to coding it manually. Been looking through them and of course they all claim to be the best. Would like something with e-commerce functionality to streamline an equipment rental business. Any input is appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Question from a newbie concerning Facebook Ads Posted: 29 Aug 2019 12:37 PM PDT Background: I read an article recently that to be successful or independently wealthy you have to have 10 income streams. So in that vein I created a store on a print on demand t-shirt site. I have made $24 with no advertising. question: Will $24 budget for facebook ads generate any real traffic? My plan is to reinvest any sales back into Facebook advertising. question: I've attempted to create Facebook ads but given up in frustration. Can anyone recommend resources to generate a simple Facebook ad for a dummy? [link] [comments]  |
| Alibaba seller created an order for me. I can't see it. Posted: 29 Aug 2019 12:16 PM PDT Sorry for the pretty basic question but I'm at a standstill on my first Alibaba sample order and could use some help. The seller has told me they created an order for me based on what we agreed to. He is established and has Trade Assurance and has been pretty good to work with. Payment will be through Alibaba. However, I cannot see this order and he doesn't know what to tell me. He even pasted the order link, but an error message says the 'order isn't associated with this email', or something to that effect. My best guess is that he has my email wrong, but we're contacts. Can't he make the order directly linked from our conversation? My other guess is that there is a different problem than an email typo and the link he pasted to the order is only valid from his address. I've clarified the email, but maybe something is not clear or there's an error on his part. So what happens when a seller creates an order? I assume it would be fairly visible in my control panel, right? Any idea here? If I have him start over is there a certain way this should be done? Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 12:16 PM PDT Just looking for some opportunity in Seattle at a start up or anything really. I have much free time outside of my part time job/community college classes, and want to dedicate my weekend time especially but also time after work and classes to something. I really value time being around people at the head of organizations of their own. I'm a 19M, have experience in office/accounting environment, experience doing technical things as well. I'm interested in tech/construction. A shot in the dark at best. Craigslist has yielded itself useless for searching, and nobody I know has anything to offer. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you go about finding a manufacturer to make your product? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 12:12 PM PDT I have been experimenting with ways to make some money on the side. I have a few ideas but I dont know how to go about finding someone to make the product. How do you handle people stealing the idea. I have literally no idea where to start? Any pointers would be great, I am totally lost on where to start. [link] [comments]  |
| What kind of event would you organize to celebrate the 75th anniversary of your company ? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 11:48 AM PDT I need your ideas. One company asked me to organize an event for them. They have 200 employees. Mostly men of around 45yo. Their business is related to the environment so it has to be eco friendly. They don't just want to celebrate their anniversary it's also to make sure everyone is looking at the same direction as they were bought by the state a few years ago so their vision changed a bit. They need a theme and animations. I thought about something use technology but I'm not sure about what's truly possible [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 11:39 AM PDT So I ran a Kickstarter and Indiegogo that did reasonably well (around 200k on each). Now I'm post crowdfunding and having a bit of trouble selling. FB ads honestly just don't do it for me and Amazon won't let me sell because it contains a lithium ion battery. I was approached by someone from Newswatch TV for a spot on their program but they asked me for over 5k which just screams scam. Anyone have any suggestions for marketing a successful Kickstarter product, other than FB? The product is a solar wallet that charges your phone. Brand name is Lucca Bozzi. I'm pretty sure I can do more with 5k than a newswatch spot, just not exactly sure what. Could use a bit of help with some suggestions on where to sell a product like this. Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 11:24 AM PDT It's been a year and a half now that I'm an entrepreneur full time. Four years before that I was getting ready to start small business while still working for a company. I have my ups and downs but in general what I do now is the best job ever, because my profit is mostly based on my effort. 15 years before this I worked for 5 different companies, each of them had office full of slackers trying to work as little as possible, but just enough to not get fired. I think what people do in offices during a week on average is possible to complete on Monday before lunch. [link] [comments]  |
| Did your family or friends treat you differently when you came into a lot of money? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 11:22 AM PDT Hmm? Did anyone treat you differently after you suddenly came into a lot of money? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Aug 2019 10:34 AM PDT Hey, as said in the title I was working for about 10 months non stop and about 3 weeks ago (after I finished 1 major project) I just stopped and took some time off. I didn't go to any resort or to the beach or something like that, mostly I am chilling at home, playing guitar and hanging out with my favorite people. But now I have kind of a problem going back to business. I believe it is the time to stop playing around and start working again but I just can't seem to find motivation anywhere. I have trouble getting productive again and I was hoping I would get some tips to jumpstart my work flow again. Every answer will be helpful, thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Course instructors: Has anyone worked with Tabletwise? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 10:24 AM PDT I have a course on Udemy, and I was contacted by a company called Tabletwise that wants me to repost on their site as part of their course collection. Has anyone else worked with them? [link] [comments]  |
| New cleaning business - should I hire contractors or employees? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 10:11 AM PDT I know there are pros and cons to both. Eventually in the future once I do have cash flow, I plan to hire my own employees. I'm just starting my residential/commercial cleaning business. I probably have enough money to hire but which is the more lucrative and less risky approach to this? [link] [comments]  |
| Feedback on this landing page? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 10:07 AM PDT Hi all, I want other people's opinions on a product that I want to try out. But I figure that it's great to get feedback from this subreddit. What're your thoughts? Thank you. Link: Visit here [link] [comments]  |
| looking for any kind of tips and help Posted: 29 Aug 2019 09:30 AM PDT Hello r/Entrepreneur I'm looking at starting up a business within the next few years and have only a little bit of knowledge of what I'm getting into... Is there anyone who has started up a business that could give a few pointers, personal experiences, book recommendations, or even shady things look out for when I'm getting everything started up? Any info is greatly appreciated and will be taken note of... [link] [comments]  |
| How would you get leads for concrete polishing? Posted: 29 Aug 2019 09:14 AM PDT I'm currently cold calling, trying to get more jobs. I'm already on bid lists with all of the commercial construction companies, but specialty concrete is a niche, not everyone needs or wants it. My ideal clients would be warehouses - large and empty open spaces that would benefit from having an easy to clean concrete floor. Other than cold calling, how would you get more leads? [link] [comments]  |
| $60k/mo with a subscription box for babies. Posted: 29 Aug 2019 09:00 AM PDT Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview. Today's interview is with Charles Carette of Bambox, a brand that sells tailored subscription for baby essentials. Some stats:
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hello, I am Charles Carette, CEO & Co-founder of Bambox. We developed the first monthly subscription-based ecommerce for baby essentials combined with a virtual assistant to guide new parents throughout their baby's first 3 years. We operate in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each month, parents come to our website to tune their subscriptions based on their baby's growth and our recommendations. With Bambox, they can get anything their baby will consume daily at a friendly price and be sure to never run out anymore. Midnight runs to the pharmacy is something from the past! We started from scratch in July 2017 and we had to evangelize a community of parents in a country where ecommerce, even more in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), is not really trusted. Today, we are shipping more than 1.100 box a month and have an MRR of 60,000 USD. Or forecast for 2019 is an ARR around 750,000 USD. What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?In Bambox co-founding team, we are 3 french engineers, Timothée Jauffret (COO), Rémi Beaufils (CTO) and myself. We all came to Argentina for different reasons. One came to study and is getting married now, another settled down here after traveling around the world. For me, after graduating from an engineering Msc in Brazil I wanted to stay in LatAm to enjoy the lifestyle and I ended up working with Timothée at a third-party logistics provider. That's where it all started. We had a clear vision on how should logistics could help in everyday life and we wanted to do it our own way. At the same time, all our friends started to disappear every Saturday to hunt down discounted diapers, and that was where we started to see an opportunity to make the lives of thousands better. As millennials today, we want more time for leisure. From our background in designing logistic network plus the technological expertise from Rémi who joined the project, we designed and validated a first MVP. We all left our day jobs and we bootstrapped Bambox from our living room in our shared flat. Until today, we couldn't be more thankful to our roommates for letting us pile stacks of diapers in the house for at least a year! B2C can be hard, but it was so rewarding to see the user base grow and the positive comments we received about the very own service we designed. We knew we had a direct impact on parents everyday life. Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.In the beginning, we knew nothing about ecommerce, digital marketing and design thinking. What we had was energy and good learning capacities. we enrolled in a free entrepreneurship course from a local university and we quickly learned that the only real entrepreneur lesson: execution is everything and you learn by doing. So we started surveying during the day, benchmarking, learning, design, coding at night. We would track every potential customer up to the diaper aisle in big retailers store. We learned a lot and we had to transcribe this learning into a customer experience in our service. As we needed to try our first hypothesis spending the least money possible, we first did an overview of the landscape of all the tools that could help us. Landing page tool, mailing software, Ads & social network. Which one had a free tier, offer a discount or free money to spend on ads. But there is also a saying in Argentina : "Lo barato sale caro" which translates as "cheap is expensive". We learned it the hard way, hiring a cheap designer to build our first landing page, it was a total failure. Our first MVP was a simple landing page connected to Mailchimp to start gathering mails over a new service launch for parents. We explained our value proposition and offer a discount to anyone who would leave their mail. We drove traffic through Facebook Ads trying different kind of message. We ran the campaign during a month while we were tweaking the real website. It's fast and allows you to try different version of you value proposition. We did everything ourselves. Now I realized it wasn't the easiest way but it was better to ensure we would deliver exactly what our customers were expected. Startup cost were close to none, thanks to the cloud and free-tier in SaaS solutions. Describe the process of launching the business.We saw no need for expensive branding and marketing at the beginning. We just needed to think about one, and only one thing we wanted to do for your core customer. Ours at Bambox is: "Deliver baby essentials monthly". After a 30 days facebook campaign to get some mails from a landing page, we launched a basic website to let the user choose diapers combo and other product that we would ship it to our early adopter in a common cardbox with a Bambox sticker. And by ship, I mean we would drive Timothée's car around the city helped by Google Map. The first day the real website went live, we were really excited, we sent our "we're open" mail to our database and open analytics to follow the traffic. We made 0 sales ! All the excitement went down… So we went back to talking with parents, tweaking the copies and Facebook Campaign again. Until one day where we shut down the website for maintenance without thinking we could finally made a sale, we received a message on Facebook from someone who had bought and didn't receive her confirmation message. We had shut down our website at the exact moment our first customer was purchasing ! Today it makes us laugh but also tell us that the beginning is hard and you should give up on the first obstacle you stumbled upon ! I think the hardest in the beginning was to tune our communication. There is not enough data to take clear decisions, you have to trust your guts and keep trying until you start to see a path forming. You also need to have faith in your capacity to find the right value proposition, for the huge majority it's not an overnight success and you receive a lot of pessimistic comments. Argentina doesn't have the mentality of "everything is possible" so it makes it psychologically harder. Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Because we knew nothing, I think we've tried almost everything. From paid advertising to flyers and partnership with big name brand. Subscription-based ecommerce are a really new way to shop here for retail product and our brand is a frontier with a lifestyle brand. Moreover our target customers are millennials parents, especially moms, city dweller, well connected, what works better for us are social network. The basic recommendation we could give is beside knowing who your customer is, is knowing how does he shop your special product. Who take the decision, based on which info, when, where. Our first successful facebook Ad visual. At first, our purchase cycle were around 5-15 days. People had to know us, trust us. So Adwords didn't really work well as a purchase channel. We organize a marketing mix oriented on brand awareness and aggressive retargeting afterwards. So we started working with influencers, healthcare specialists and blogging. Our basic strategy was, brand awareness, a discount in retargeting then what we call the "magic moment". A perfect delivery and a delightful unboxing. Even if it means a lot of work, being in control of the customer experience end-to-end allows us to guarantee a good user retention rate for a subscription-based retail ecommerce. In Argentina, Amazon is not here yet, but we have MercadoLibre which is the go-to marketplace to buy everything. The purchasing experience is not the same but the prices are really. Which is one of the top two factors in the purchase decision. So we used it as an acquisition channel then retarget the user with communication directly in his box. We used the same strategy for the local on-demand delivery services (like Uber-eats) who sell retail products. How are you doing today and what does the future look like?Our sales are 100% online through our own platform. Today we are closing the gap to be profitable but our goal is to expand our operations to other cities. So more expenses are coming. We've been growing steadily for the last 12 months, around 25% monthly. The huge work on brand awareness is finally paying and we are seeing our conversion rate double last year. Every week we tweak our ads to get the most of them and we manage to keep a ratio CLTV/CAC around 3. But advertising is just one piece of the puzzle. A sentence I really like is : "Growth is not just a concern of sales and marketing, but of product, engineering and support too. It is this organization-wide commitment to growth that ultimately sets these companies apart." From Sean Ellis, founder of Growthhackers. In retail, the hardest part are the margins. Working in consumable goods and even more when it's diapers require a perfect control of your costs if you don't want to lose money on each delivery. Especially in Argentina where there is hyperinflation and expensive third-party services cost. Our payment gateway, which is in monopoly here, take us up to 6.0% + taxes on every transaction. Pricing is really tricky. We received an investment from the team which implement eBay in LatAm to keep building our platform and logistic network. So Bambox's strategy is to keep delivering a delightful experience to our customers with everyday products and slowly bring perfect recommendation for cross-selling & up-selling based on the baby's age and weight. Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?I think what is hard is to learn that you shouldn't be doing everything because you can't be the best at everything. And even if you are, you probably don't have time for it anyway. To me it's true for human beings but also for the company. Be really good at something, and even though you should be able to understand a bit about everything, get support for the others gears of the mechanism. Delegating takes time, you have to prepare the ground. You shouldn't wait to be burdened with too much tasks you can think of or you will crush under the pressure and so will be you new resource. What platform/tools do you use for your business?As we consider our core competences as technology & operation, we build our own ecommerce from scratch. We use the lean startup method. Each step going through an MVP phase. It all started with a simple landing page to collect mail, then a simple ecommerce without backoffice. Each feature designed according to incoming necessity from the customer or the team. We also connected different tools. From Analytics for tracking, Mailing and CRM with Mailchimp, Routing trucks with Routific, Hotjar etc. But the best designed tool to me is Intercom. It has a great user experience for customer support and allowed us to scale our customer base without hiring. Just optimizing the process with the tool. It also offers a great onboarding opportunity for new customers. We love it ! Another one which help to streamline the work in product & process design is miro great SaaS product. We use it to collaboratively design and study our customer journey for new product we launch. What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?There are two books that really brought me great knowledge, in marketing and value proposition building: Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers - Niraj Dawar, a well documented study about where the customer put the value in your offer today. It encourages you to take a closer look at the psychology and the economic constraints of their customers to come up with new value-added offerings. The other is Blitzscaling, by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh. An overview on how highly valuable company such as AirBnb landed high valuation by scaling at a crazy pace. It's sometimes hard to implement but you can definitely see the idea and try to follow the recommendation with the resources available. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Just start doing things with people. It can be starting to talk with friends about your idea, other entrepreneurs. Then define a first step, a small one but get the wheel spinning and work to validate your idea. In most of the cases, the unique validator will be someone paying for your value proposition. At the beginning your emotions are going through the worst rollercoaster and then even if the business is not going as well as you want it will stabilize. You will get a better understanding on lot of the area you didn't even know existed before. We are lucky to be three friends with complementary skills, it's not always like this, but not being alone is maybe the best benefit you could ask for when you co-found a venture. Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?Right now we are working on our expansion, we recently had all our positions filled. We hope to have the opportunity to grow our team more. It costs money but it brings a lot of joy into the startup to see it growing with new personalities. 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]  |
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