Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (October 23, 2019) Entrepreneur |
- Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (October 23, 2019)
- New business competition show now casting across the USA
- $5,000 MRR – Ramen Profitability in 4 Months
- Stumble into a business idea, or aggressively hunt for one?
- Best way to find manufacturers in India?
- What's one time where you've increased your team size and still...nothing got done?
- How do you push yourself to the next step and not fall into a cycle of being too comfortable?
- Discussion: Entering which market gives you the highest chance of becoming rich: High demand and highly competitive. Or low demand and few competitors?
- Dry Cleaning Garmnet Bags
- Thoughts on buying and selling clothing as my first side hustle ? And any tips
- Buying and selling bikes?
- Want to use arnold's voice in my prototype
- Can you start a Computer repair business without any major IT certificates
- What Advice Would You Give to Someone Starting a Business?
- Launched my business, but don't know how to market my product
- How do you like to be sold to?
- 29years old male, country going through a revolution, endless opportunities. Confused on how to start in the new system. Need suggestions!!
- Has anyone vetted and negotiated with a private label or contract food manufacturer? What questions did you ask and how did you verify they were legit?
- Need managerial supervisors to answer 10 questions for case study school work
- Is it possible for an app development studio (B2B) to negotiate with their client a contract which would grant it a cut of every in-app purchase?
- Entrepreneurs who’ve failed horribly, but are now successful.....what did you learn?
- �� Innovative business development: what are the outcomes?
- Why Your Instagram Story Views Suddenly Declined
- Office Space for (3-10)?
- Need help finding bulk buyers
- Looking for short-term housing in SF (one of you posted something a while back)
| Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (October 23, 2019) Posted: 23 Oct 2019 06:10 AM PDT Please use this thread to ask questions if you're new or even if you haven't started a business yet. Remember to search the sub first - the answers you need may be right at your fingertips. 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]  |
| New business competition show now casting across the USA Posted: 22 Oct 2019 05:35 PM PDT Hi Redditors! This was verified by moderator /Fitguard I'm a casting producer for a new major network competition show about business. At this time the network has not announced the show so I cannot disclose who it is, but it's one of the big 4. Can you turn money into more money? This is a show in which a celebrity host will be giving our contestants (teams of 2 entrepreneurs) X amount of cash and X amount of days to turn it into as much money as they can. The winner will get to keep their profits and will also win a cash prize. We are seeking experienced entrepreneurs that are confident in their ability to hold their own in this competition and come up with creative ideas that make money! We are not seeking anything with gambling or anything that's purely internet (because daytrading doesn't make for great tv). Existing businesses are fine as long as you are doing something fresh with the investment. Example: If you have an existing business, you can't just use the cash for adspend for your store, but you CAN put out a higher-end product or try a new mode of sales. This is meant to be experimental and to see someone push their limits and try something new. If you've said "This is a great idea, I know how to make it work, I just need some cash" then you might just be exactly who we're looking for! We are casting nationwide in all major US cities. Filming will be in 2020, the schedule is flexible at this time. Contestants must be legal to work in the USA and over the age of 18. To apply, our application is at https://financialcompetition.castingcrane.com Please mention Reddit, it helps with our tracking a lot! [link] [comments]  |
| $5,000 MRR – Ramen Profitability in 4 Months Posted: 23 Oct 2019 07:34 AM PDT I have poted here a few times about my startup VEED and I am happy to now share our most important milestone yet! Before I start, i just want to say this was originally posted on our blog titled "The journey to ramen profitability", for images of the MVP, Revenue. screenshots.. its bet read there. Anyway, In just 4 months and 14 days since we have started charging for our product and about 13 months since our online video editor went live, we have hit an important milestone, we have hit ramen profitability. As of mid-October 2019 we are at $5000 in monthly recurring revenue, VEED now pays for two full-time founders (myself and Tim) and two part-time developers (Mate and Veljko... Love you guys) Ramen Profitable
We have hustled pretty f****** hard to get here and learnt a LOT along the way. There were a couple of moments where we thought it was all over, like the time we ran out of money and had to get contract work, or the time when we were kicked out of our office. Oh and time our first two developers quit working for us immediately on the same day. But through all these drastic highs and lows, we have continued to move forward and grow. Ramen profitability is a huge milestone, but also marks the start of the next big phase of our startup journey as we are moving towards finding product-market fit and starting to scale our product to thousands of monthly paid users. In this post I am going to go through and describe our journey as to how we got to where we are right now and document the main milestones and lessons we have learnt along the way. As bliss as our progress might have seemed from the outside, it has been a real grind with many ups, downs, failures and fuckups. So here goes... The Backstory - $0 MRRTo start, I think its important to set the scene. In 2014 online video was hailed as the new BIG thing, everyone was banging on about it. We both could see a cultural shift accelerating. We were watching more YouTube than TV, we were flicking through Instagram more than magazines and we were not alone, all our friends were doing that too. Quality user generated content was winning in a big way. The fact that you can shoot high quality videos with a smartphone and distribute content globally free of charge was changing how we were consuming media and in its wake creating a new generation of celebrities, influencers and publishers. In turn inspiring even more to create. Brands started to take note and the old model of creating two blockbuster TV commercials a year to connect with your audience started to become less relevant. At this point, I realised that most video editing software was designed for making films and TV shows, not short snappy social media content. After searching, I found no editor that was powerful, yet simple enough, that would allow you to construct a narrative or tell a story. We thought there is definitely a gap in the market, but we were not sure what it was just yet. The type of videos I was making at the time We thought we were a great team to solve this problem. I was a recent grad from Central Saint Martins, I had directed music videos for Sony music, had experience working in advertising and branding agencies and a bunch of startups too. Tim worked on a research project at King's College London and built an automated video editing platform that used AI and Natural Language Processing to summarise news articles and turn them into short, bite-sized informational videos (the project was called VEED) Tim and I did some research and really liked how Giphy's gif maker worked and thought it would be super cool to make something similar for video editing. I started designing, Tim started coding. When we messed - $0 MRRAfter Tim graduated from King's College London, we then applied to his university accelerator and got a place. We had the designs, an MVP and were ready to hit the ground running. Tim still had the veed.io domain name, and thought it sounded like video so we used it. We had limited runway, just enough to cover 3 month of the 12 month program. So we thought that we could win some cash by entering pitch competitions. So we changed our idea from simple online video editor, to automated video editing…. We got really good at winning pitch competitions, like REALLY GOOD. In fact, we won cash at pretty much every competition we entered. We even got flown to Dubai to present it at a conference, a VC firm gave us free desk space because they thought we were onto something too and we netted tens of thousands of pounds in prize money... crazy right? During those 6 months we won thousands in grant funding, we were balling and everything was going amazing, so with the money we hired two talented students to help us build this highly anticipated award winning product. From the outside, it might have looked pretty rosey. This is how you run a startup right? The product seemed like a GREAT idea. The BIG problem was all of the people who awarded us prize money where not our customers. After we built the MVP, we spent months trying to sell it with little to no interest, we got close a few times, but it was clearly not going to work. So we had a product no one wanted and with about 6 weeks runway left. We got the team to rip everything apart and pivot back to our original idea, the product we had wanted to build from the start - a simple online video editor. It was horrible, the worst summer ever Tim and I have ever had, we were broke, our startup was not working. To make matters even worse in those last 6 weeks, both of the students we hired had quit and walked out on the same day, a week later the VC firm that gave us free desk-space kicked us out too. It must have been pretty obvious we were crashing hard. So Tim got a contract Job and sent me half his wages every week so I could keep running the company. Tim would meet me in the office at 6am every morning and then headed off to his contact job for 9am and I would continue hacking and marketing till later in the evening. Fortunately, we managed to launch and get some early users with our MVP. A few weeks later, while eating a hot dog on London Southbank, I got a cold call from a recruiter offering me a contact job too. We both were tired, drained, and needed a break and some cash too, so I took it. This is the part where the easy thing would be to give up. We could have easily just fallen back to getting paid well through contracting. But we did not want to give up that easy, we understood the mistakes me made and knew how we could fix them. Lesson learnt:
BETA - $0 MRRTim and I were working weekday mornings, evenings and weekends and after a few months it was paying off, we were talking to users and our startup was growing. As we were getting paid pretty well while contracting, we thought it would be a good idea to hire two developers to keep VEED moving at a good pace. We searched high and low and where SUPER lucky to eventually find Veljko and Mate. We have learnt a lot from our previous failed hires and vowed to never make the same mistakes again. Traffic was increasing every week and just 4 month after everything came crashing down, we had built VEED to 20K monthly active users. As my contract job came to an end I moved back onto VEED full time with Veljko and Mate. We were building fast, iterating on product and growing at a good speed and Tim was working all hours too and kept company's runway topped up. Lesson learnt:
First Paid Users - $200 MRRI received an email that recommended we apply to join the next cohort of well known startup accelerator. Tim and I thought that there is no harm in filling out the application, so on a train ride home to see my mum, a few days before the deadline, I filled out the application. To our surprise a few weeks later we had a phone interview, that went well. Just 4 weeks later, we were in Mountain View California interviewing for a place on the program. Essentially, we got rejected, and from our rejection email feedback, we believed we got rejected for not having any revenue. So we added a $5 pay wall that weekend and converted our first 20 paid users. We then emailed them and asked them to reconsider. They said no.. Unfortunately, as this weekend was so mad, we did not have time to appreciate the huge milestone that we just overcome. We had always dreamed of making our first monthly revenue online and now we had it. What was even more shocking is that we found 20 users that weekend to pay for our buggy video editing app. Lesson learnt:
Summer 2019 - $3000 MRRWe returned back on London in mid June, doubled our prices to $10 and got our heads down talking to our paid users. We quickly worked out that for our paid users adding subtitles to videos and also automatic subtitle transcription were by far the most popular features. With this knowledge, we worked hard on making those features amazing. Since we started making money, we began getting a lot of inbound investor interest. Additionally investors we previously spoke with also started to get super keen. Ultimately we decided to not take any investment, we did not want any distractions and though the lack of runway would make us focus hard to getting our product to profitability. In July we have built a load of new features that our users did not want, like video effects and video templates. Which was stupid. But we wanted them ourselves, so we have built them anyway. We also changed a lot of our development processes to enable us to move much faster and speed up our lead times to deliver features and bug fixes. All this allowed us to hit 2oo paid users. In August, we had realised that at our current growth rate we would run out of money in the next 3 months yet again. So we doubled our prices again to $20 and something CRAZY happened.
Following this, we had our best month yet and best of all, we were projected to reach ramen profitability on the exact same week our personal funds would run out. As counterproductive as putting prices up feels, charging $20 for VEED brought in a different and more serious type of user, they need the product and they are happy to pay for it and have different needs to the $5 users we originally had. Things started looking up for the first time in ages. Finally overtime, our product matured and stability got better, we believe this is also a leading factor in how we reduced revenue churn to from an embarrassing 40% to less than 10% in just a few months. Lesson learnt:
October 2019 - $5000 MRROctober 17th, 2:02pm - $5K MRR, after everything we have been through to date it does not feel real. Altho we have pretty much made every mistake in the book many times over and I believe we will continue to keep messing up too, but our trajectory suggests we are not going to have to go back to contracting now. We are really excited to continue building our product and now can also see a path to really accelerate growth. Lesson learnt:
How do we run VEED on $5K Mo? Tim and I pay ourselves about $1666 each and we pay Mate and Viljko the same. In not sure how everyone else spends their money, but this is a breakdown of how I spend my money. $600 Rent$200 Bills$200 Social Life$100 Eating out$100 Travel$100 Maybe a new pair of trainers or something.. It's not a lot, I cut corners where I can; I pack lunch, ride my bike to work (much nicer than the tube), make the most of free drinks at events before going out ;) But we are all so happy to be working on a product we love, it really does not matter. We are filled with excitement and push hard for growth. We have free cloud services for the next 8 months, but will easily cover this by the end of next month too. All other bills come out of our personal accounts right now. Final ThoughtsWe really hope this blog post was valuable. We would love for other early-stage founders to read and share this so others do not make the same mistakes we did. Join our mailing list if you would like to get update from us as we build our VEED and as always, feel free to drop us an email if you have any questions. [link] [comments]  |
| Stumble into a business idea, or aggressively hunt for one? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 12:33 PM PDT This is a question that has pained me almost as much as figuring out a business idea itself. I've gone down both paths. I've looked at very simple "problems" or shortcomings in my life that I think could be solved by a product or service and pursued those. I've also looked at random ideas that aren't problems but are very typical of first time entrepreneurs (drop-shipping, online store, vlogging, graphic design, even twitch streaming) The problem is even before I get to a SWOT analysis, I've already talked myself out of the idea. I've had a few great ideas (at inception) that days, weeks and sometimes even months later I think wow, that was stupid. I'll share a few because why not. I don't see them as failures per-se, just things that would never make money:
Trying to stay positive but it is tough. I have a stable 9-5 IT job but I am not happy where I am. Great team, great office and benefits, but I'm just not passionate about it and that is a problem as generalists like myself become less useful than specialists. I know a great deal about a lot of things, but not a lot about one thing. I am an ideas guy, which is great until you want to actually be successful at anything Before this turns more introspective, I'm just trying to figure out where my success would be. In every-day problems and stumbling into a new venture or idea, or in a more strategic approach, picking what works versus what I'm interested in? This forum has always been very helpful and I appreciate any insight here. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Best way to find manufacturers in India? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:59 PM PDT I've checked out a few sites like IndiaMart and TradeIndia, but a lot of people are giving negative feedback to those sites. I'm looking to make apparel, but would like to be able to find manufacturers for other categories of products as well. [link] [comments]  |
| What's one time where you've increased your team size and still...nothing got done? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 12:52 PM PDT Have you ever brough onboard a bunch of people onto a bunch of project but instead the project took longer to get it done? [link] [comments]  |
| How do you push yourself to the next step and not fall into a cycle of being too comfortable? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:54 PM PDT Quick backstory - a few years back I launched a service business. Automated/streamlined the heck out of it and now it's completely hands off. I bring in around $80-100k/year with minimal effort. All is good and well, but I often find myself wanting to much more yet having no motivation to get there. Not to mention sometimes I get in my head and feel like a fraud who fluked out and I can't duplicate that success elsewhere even if I tried. What are some ways to deal with this way of thinking and continue to push myself out of my comfort zone? Or even figure out what I'm good at and what to spend my time and effort on. Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:46 PM PDT I have been discussing this with a lot of people and there doesnt seem to be a clear answer since there are arguments for both sides Also, there could be situations where a specific market would be favorable. Which would you choose and why? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 03:57 PM PDT Would anyone know where to find these types of garment bags? [link] [comments]  |
| Thoughts on buying and selling clothing as my first side hustle ? And any tips Posted: 23 Oct 2019 11:59 AM PDT |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 11:40 AM PDT Target sells bikes starting at $100. Is there a market for buying bikes and selling them at higher prices or would that be unethical? An alternative idea would be buying bikes, customizing/improving them and selling them. I'm an artist so I think I could get creative with designing custom additions to the bikes in order to increase their value. Is this something I should invest time and money in? I'm out of work due to injury and I'm having a really hard time finding a job near me that fits my disabilities. I'm super new to the entrepreneur world and really need guidance from those who are experienced. Thanks so much. [link] [comments]  |
| Want to use arnold's voice in my prototype Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:54 PM PDT I am developing a workout/gym-tech prototype and want to use arnold's voice in the hardware. Should i get his permission? Or will I get sued for it. Should I reach out to his team and do a royalty deal? So that he can promote my product? [link] [comments]  |
| Can you start a Computer repair business without any major IT certificates Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:43 PM PDT So I'm taking Cisco and will get the certification I need for that and I'm very good at repairing computers and diagnosing them but I don't want to go college for all the major certificates I need for A IT career. I want to focus purely on fixing computers as soon as I'm 18 years old. Is it possible to do this without a major repercussion. [link] [comments]  |
| What Advice Would You Give to Someone Starting a Business? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:29 PM PDT I'm asking for myself because as an entreprenuer...I've failed. [link] [comments]  |
| Launched my business, but don't know how to market my product Posted: 23 Oct 2019 08:31 AM PDT Hey guys, so after doing a lot of research, I finally decided on a product and built a brand around it. I sell wireless earbuds called Panda Pods. And for every pair sold, a portion is donated to Pandas International which helps support Panda conservation. I worked hard on building my website, and thought that all that was left to do to start seeing sales was to advertise a little bit on social media. So I ran a couple of facebook and instagram ad campaigns. But after spending $100 on ads, I have still not seen any sales. Here are a few questions I have after a disappointing experience.
Here is my website for reference: https://electricpandainc.com/ [link] [comments]  |
| How do you like to be sold to? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:19 PM PDT Yes, a vague question that varies from industries. What variables go into if you buy or not? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 02:19 PM PDT I am successful musician in my country(Pakistan) with a tech background. My entire country is going through a revolution after taking a hard beating of corruption from the last 50 years which resulted in Pakistan becoming a 94% consumer economy and really it has no manufacturing of its own so the new government is providing loans(approx $50,000) for new entrepreneurs to start which would eventually take the country's economy forward in the long run. With me having a technical background, I am really thinking of investing in Artificial Intelligence/Robotics/Quantum but I'm really confused since I have no knowledge of practical experience in either of those. I know about them just because I have interest and believe they can change the course of any country. Since we are entering the fourth industrial revolution, do you think setting up an R&D company can eventually become a profit making business. I hope I made sense. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 01:54 PM PDT |
| Need managerial supervisors to answer 10 questions for case study school work Posted: 23 Oct 2019 01:53 PM PDT Doing this for a case study, If you're a supervisor or manager (supervisor preferred) please answer 10 questions using google forms: https://forms.gle/8JeQRTDcvgoLqRYW6 Doing this for a case study. Thanks will help a lot. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 10:06 AM PDT Say I have an app development studio realizing apps for other clients (B2B) would it be possible to forego the upfront payment and get a cut of every in app purchase which is made on the app? How would that work and most importantly how would I be able to verify the total amount of in app purchases in an independent way? [link] [comments]  |
| Entrepreneurs who’ve failed horribly, but are now successful.....what did you learn? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 09:55 AM PDT |
| �� Innovative business development: what are the outcomes? Posted: 23 Oct 2019 09:22 AM PDT Entrepreneurs, pay attention to innovations. We have gathered some real-life examples of innovation applying in various businesses and what kind of achievements these companies have reached.
[link] [comments]  |
| Why Your Instagram Story Views Suddenly Declined Posted: 23 Oct 2019 01:02 PM PDT Hello everyone, Hope you are doing well. I've seen a lot of people complaining in the past several days that their Instagram story views declined so I've decided to address that. I don't know if you are aware of story viewing bots (but if you've been on Instagram I'm sure you've noticed random strangers viewing your stories). It all started when Russians found a loophole that Instagram doesn't limit story viewing actions. They are also the first to make public bots capable of viewing 100s of thousands up to a few millions of stories per day. Anyways, a few days ago (on October 16th) Instagram finally decided to put an end to it, and everyone using these tools got the "Account Compromised Message" so most of the people stopped. After that, I've seen a ton of people all around complaining about story views drop but in reality, it's just that all the strangers stopped viewing stories and that's the main reason for the sudden story views drop. I've made a video covering what exactly happened and also explaining more about this mass viewing method if someone is interested you can check it out here: https://youtu.be/8cEDBz6_75A If you were using this and got the account compromised message I really advise you to stop completely and to pause all actions for a day or two. The account compromised message definitely affects trust and health score negatively. Again, I'm explaining everything a bit more in-depth in the video above, so if you have time & want to know more, check it out. If linking is against the rules of this sub, please delete this post. Have you tried mass viewing and did you got the account compromised message? And if you did, how it affected your engagement and reach? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 12:08 PM PDT Hi all, I was wondering what you often use for office space for companies of 3-10 people. WeWork is way to expensive, as is traditional office space. Have you used any alternative spaces in the past? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Oct 2019 04:15 AM PDT Hello. If in short- I am the owner of the wall clock business, manufacturer located in Republic of Belarus. I have a desire to enter the European market . But I had huge difficulties finding wholesale buyers. Looking for some advices, internet sources etc that can solve my problems. Any help realy appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for short-term housing in SF (one of you posted something a while back) Posted: 23 Oct 2019 11:28 AM PDT Hi guys! My startup was just recently acquired by a company out in SF. So now I have to move out there for a few months to get on-boarded, etc. I stumbled upon a post a few months back which looked something like Airbnb but with a focus on short term rentals for business professionals. Can someone point me in the right direction? Just looking for 3-4 month short term stay, like a room (doesn't even need windows) for like $1200-$1400. Thanks for any help and advice, cheers! [link] [comments]  |
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