Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (November 29, 2019) Entrepreneur |
- Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (November 29, 2019)
- My investors have been leaking confidential information—What should I do?
- If you had to start over (or start at all) with $500, what would you do?
- People are copying my website. Can I do anything about it?
- Growing Airbnb Management Service to $125k+ without Paid Ads
- SaaS Business Owners of Reddit, What are some ways to make your SaaS stand out from competition or in the market?
- How to decide how much of a product to buy before you start selling?
- $28k/month with an automation tool for developers [built it myself]
- How Boomer Methods Got Our First 3 Clients With $0
- Imagine you are a young age and full of ambition to make it big. What business would you go into assuming that you have the funding to do it?
- Is This Illegal? (UK)
- Deciding who is CEO in a 50/50 split start up
- Last 5 events you've attended as entrepreneur (related to work/business, not entertainment)
- Just an idea
- Knowing how much to ask for in pre-seed round
- I doubled my prices for Black Friday
- I made a task management app for ADD people like me
- Product promotion video with limited spend
- Trucks
- Start funding with pre-orders?
- How to find Sales People?
- Good Companies for Sustained Release Pill Technology?
- Request for people with experience running a digital marketing agency that service realtors
- Looking for website feedback
| Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (November 29, 2019) Posted: 29 Nov 2019 05:12 AM PST Please use this thread to share any accomplishment you care to gloat about, and some lessons learned. This is a weekly thread to encourage new members to participate, and post their accomplishments, as well as give the veterans an opportunity to inspire the up-and-comers. 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]  |
| My investors have been leaking confidential information—What should I do? Posted: 29 Nov 2019 02:16 AM PST Hello Everyone. My team updates our investors with a vlog every month. Then somehow, my little sister who went to University and saw that two freshmen are talking about my business. She asked me if my company has launched the product. I replied," Not yet, why?" and she said, "two freshmen mentioned your company name and stuff at lunch table..." I pressed further to learn that one of our investors show confidential videos to one freshman. I'm pretty speechless about this one. What should I do about this? Any advice helps! [link] [comments]  |
| If you had to start over (or start at all) with $500, what would you do? Posted: 28 Nov 2019 06:13 PM PST |
| People are copying my website. Can I do anything about it? Posted: 29 Nov 2019 07:12 AM PST I've noticed a few competitors of mine ripping off the content (and in some cases the entire design) of my website, including testimonials & portfolio pieces. Has anyone else experienced this before? Is there anything that can be done about this from a legal standpoint without spending tons of money? [link] [comments]  |
| Growing Airbnb Management Service to $125k+ without Paid Ads Posted: 29 Nov 2019 12:14 PM PST HostGenius became HostGenius months after we were already operating, had clients, and were figuring out exactly what to do. I started the company mid 2017 by renting a home, and subletting individual bedrooms out on Airbnb. I lived downstairs in the mud room while I learned what worked, what didn't, and what I could scale. I did this for about 3 months, and learned two things. The idea was rudimentary and unscalable, and that effectively managing your Airbnb guests is a 24 hour job. Then I realized that there was a larger market in helping existing Airbnb hosts with both improving their listing and taking the hassle out of hosting. I connected all the dots, and set up a management company that provided a full end-to-end service. Our first clients came from cold calling and emailing. I was reaching out directly to hosts asking for a 5 minute phone call on how I could both make their life easier and make them more money. Many were interested to hear back to say the least, but a lot less wanted to proceed when they found out I was quite a bit younger than them and had no evidence of my work. However, I had one client who gave it a shot, and allowed me to manage his 6 bedroom house. I used this as a case study to prove I could both save hosts time and increase their rental yields. How do you attract clients? HostGenius' target demographic are homeowners who want to use their property for short-term rentals. Fortunately, our service is not a one size fits all, so there is no one type of homeowner we are for. We have helped helicopter pilots, native art collectors, travelling hydrodam technicians, Canadian snowbirds, experienced superhosts - and a lot more. Our aim is simply to help people make their life easier with hosting on Airbnb. We attract clients through our around the clock affordable service. Most local managers charge more and offer less services. The strangest request we have had was to act as both property managers and cat sitters. The client requested that we take care of the cat in between reservations, and during reservations discuss with the guests on how often to feed her and to make sure she comes in every night. How did you fund the idea initially? The idea was initially funded by itself. Managing a place was near free to me as I would do all the work myself, including photography, editing, listing-setup, and even housekeeping and replenishments. However, as we started to grow, I dipped into all my savings made from refurbishing and selling sofas on Facebook marketplace. After a few months, I met Alex, our COO of the company. He further helped the company drive forward and see accelerated growth. The excellent part about working with others is they have a different perspective on everything you've already imagined. Do you have any advice for someone just starting out? Stick to a goal, and remind yourself of it every day until it's reached. Set small goals as well as large, so you can check things off as you go. As a CEO, it is very important to never lose sight of the general mission of your company. It's easy to get bogged down into small matters, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for the growth of the company and have to make sure a lot of what you do helps with that. If you are just starting out, I recommend staying organized. Most people's mistake with staying organized is in the bookkeeping. Even if you are only running through a few transactions a month, the last thing you want to do when you are ready to grow substantially is spend your first few weeks going backwards. If you are not yet in the position to hire a bookkeeper, learn the basics and do it yourself. Keep all your receipts and organize them. I also recommend reinvesting money into growth as well as improving your product. Consider learning how to run Facebook ads manager, or pay a consultant on Fiverr to give you a breakdown. It is a very cost effective way to run ads for even the smallest of businesses. But do not forget to invest your TIME in marketing as well. There are so many free ways to market your company… just because large companies spend a large percentage of their revenue on marketing does not mean you have to at such an early stage. We built HostGenius from $4,000 MRR to over $125,000 without a single client from paid ads. Whether that be through cold calling, emails, or community outreach, there were a lot of people who were interested and we could reach without spending money. There are also a lot of free ways to build up communities that take nothing but time. An example of that would be the way we use Meetup. We have a Vancouver's Airbnb Hosts meetup group, which is filled with 75+ hosts who are in the position to use your services. There is also a local grocery store who built up a group of over 6,000 members talking about environmentally friendly grocery options, and they host monthly meetings at their store. Look at your company's clientele, and see if you can build a community out of it. But make sure to build the community as yourself and not your company. It doesn't matter what you do, if you are a small company, you are not yet in a position to be a community host for your topic. What apps help you run your business? We use Monday.com, Slack, and Waveapps. It doesn't matter how big your team is, productivity management tools will help your team understand who is doing what, when things are due, and an incentive to complete tasks. Slack helps bring your team together for communication. As easy as sending texts to each other is, it's definitely not the best way for a company to communicate internally. What are you working on now? Our aim is to provide our hassle-free service to more Airbnb hosts around the world. We currently operate in 3 cities, with the plan to open up in 4 more in 2020. We are currently going through a seed funding round to accelerate growth to new cities. Our revenue for the past 12 months was around $700,000. However, as we saw a lot of our clients join us on the second half of the year, we saw over $500,000 of that over our last 2 quarters. With our largely increased portfolio, we expect to see over $3,000,000 in revenue over the next 12 months. If you enjoyed this post, the original is here. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2019 08:12 AM PST Saas is one of the lowcost ways Entrepreneurial developers could make money, yet with more people coming into the industry it might seem a little difficult to stand out especially if you aren't established. One of the things most people who start out get feed up of hearing "How is your's different from theirs" or "I'm already using B's service" . So despite the obstacles, what are some clever ways you took in your Saas business to stand out? Were these attempts successful? IF YES: Why did you feel this particular action worked for you? IF NOT: What did you learn from the experience and what would you do different? [link] [comments]  |
| How to decide how much of a product to buy before you start selling? Posted: 29 Nov 2019 08:19 AM PST Lets say its supplements for something like workouts and want to sell it at $20 a bottle and it costs half of that to manufacture each bottle, but takes two weeks for shipments to arrive. how do you decide what is a good starting amount to store on the warehouse before you start selling? [link] [comments]  |
| $28k/month with an automation tool for developers [built it myself] Posted: 29 Nov 2019 08:01 AM PST Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview. Today's interview is with Joel Griffith (u/mrskitch) of Browserless, a brand that makes automated web browsers Some stats:
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hey folks! I'm Joel Griffith, founder and sole entrepreneur for a business called browserless. browserless is one of those newfangled "SaaS" businesses (software-as-a-service), and lets users automate all the stuff you'd normally have to do manually with a web browser. This can be as simple as taking screenshots of your page, perusing the internet for data, or even generating PDFs of a cool dashboard on your site. I've been building the company over the last two years, and this September we did about $28,000 in sales. Used our service to generate this screenshot What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?It's a bit of a curvy road in how we got here. Like a lot of businesses out there, browserless was something I stumbled upon while building other things. Kind of like how alchemy was back in the Medieval ages: I was trying to make gold but instead discovered plutonium, if you follow my metaphor. More specifically I was building a wishlist app for my family to use to create birthdays, weddings and holiday lists. The core idea was to gather items from across the internet into one place, as opposed to the way it works now where a single site pretty much "owns" your list. Anyways, while working on this I ran into frequent issues where certain sites didn't have any product details available via programmatic means. Most of the time this is pretty easy to work around: you simply "get" the site's contents and parse out the parts you care about. However, certain sites explicitly don't have this information in their site's content. You have to have a web browser actually load the page, execute all the code before the data you care about is even there! This sounds like a problem most folks will think isn't really a problem. But, as a developer, I can tell you with pretty good certainty that it still is a problem, and the solutions at the time were extremely costly, don't work well, and use pretty unsophisticated technology that's brittle. They were also hard to use for certain cases like pages that required you to login or are only available via your corporate intranet. What I really wanted was a way to control what the browser was doing with high-fidelity, and on-demand (another pitfall with other solutions). After taking a tough look at what I was building, and the clear lack in the market for a tool I already needed, I decided it was time to pivot into this new business. Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.My first version of the site Since the product is purely a software service there wasn't any manufacturing or designing that needed to be done. Building software with recurring revenue is a particularly great business model as there's generally low or no upfront costs. Since I'm a software engineer by trade this made it possible for me to self-fund. To put it quite simply: I spent no money whatsoever to get started, just a lot of time. I knew roughly how the product looked like and worked: a cloud-based service where users (mostly developers) could connect to a headless browser and tell it what to do. However, I didn't know how to charge for it and spent a good deal of time trying to come up with a model wherein I wasn't left holding a huge bill. In a lot of cloud-services providers simply over-buy compute to ensure there's enough supply to go around. This is fine for them: they can recoup their expenses via margins or simply eat-it as they're in growth-mode and living on borrowed money. I didn't have either of these comforts, so I naturally came to an on-demand model where I buy no infrastructure until someone signs up. It's then, and only then, does my software go and provision for a new account. When I originally started I think I had a baseline cost of around $40/ in order to keep things running, which is nothing when you think about it. My "first office" where I wrote the original code My "new" office now that it generates revenue Putting these two things together, I decided it was time to trial the service and all its technology. I was able to build up a small list of potential users through a landing page, and even garnished a few more folks from various issues they troubleshooting across the web. This process lasted about a month or so, and after things stabilized I opened the service for anyone to sign-up on. Describe the process of launching the business.The process of launching was, in my opinion, entirely underwhelming. After spending months building and testing the product I was hopeful that we'd have gotten a few customers on day one. However, it turns out that the old "if you build it they will come" adage doesn't really work out that way. You have to go out and meet your customers where they're at in order to start gaining any sort of traction. So, for the first week or so, we literally had no one sign-up or even contact us. As a matter of fact, the first few months were painfully slow since the product was so new, and I didn't have any sort of prior social following. What eventually worked was when I started blogging about the product, how it works and what it can do, which eventually led to our first few real users. Early on I was mostly writing about best-practices and how to make things easier -- all the stuff that I knew people were searching for because I was searching for it as well! I even wrote a few times about running the business itself. Things like good habits, how to provide good service, and how to tackle the hard stuff. Surprisingly it's nothing you probably don't already know, however saying the same thing a different way can often produce different results. You don't really know until you try, and trying new strategies was how we found what worked. All this cost me was time and improving my writing skills, and after a few posts got some traffic from bigger sites then we started to get some real momentum. It's quite different than a lot of the success stories you hear, where most folks launch with something and it sells out like crazy or they can't even meet initial demand. While I do think those types of events occur they are in no case the norm. Sometimes the thing you just built won't have an audience for a while or is just ahead of the demand curve. If you give up right away you'll never know. Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?We tried a lot of things, including paid marketing, which unfortunately didn't work as well as I'd hoped. I sort of naively assumed that since we had some recognition amongst developers that paid ads would be like throwing gas on the fire. After running ads for a few months I don't believe we got a single sign-up for it, so I pulled the plug. As boring as it is, the things that have helped attract users and retain them are is our support and content. I do a lot of work on our blog, helping users on other sites, and even helping our customers one-on-one where I can. Normally you'd have to charge for stuff like this, and we definitely do for bigger projects, but I feel it's really important to win over fans versus build a user-base, especially when you're not spending money on marketing. It also depends heavily on the market you're after, and whether or not those people even respond to advertising. My guess is that most of our target users are running ad-blockers, so I'd doubt we'd even be showing stuff to the right people at the right time. One of our most-referenced blog posts As an example, one of our most trafficked blog-posts is just a simple guide on how to get better performance out of puppeteer. Since we've got over 600 users doing puppeteer work daily, we have a good sense of what works and what doesn't. This actually helps us in two ways: it's great SEO content that new users will find at the start of their journey, and it helps get these folks set up for success. That last part is really key: setting expectations early on, and even getting more performance than you anticipated, makes for "fans" of your service that will go tell others. Word of mouth is incredibly powerful if it's the good kind! Another example is a post with details on scaling out your headless work on your own and what you can expect. This doesn't necessarily convert that great, but it does establish some good-faith feelings. It also serves as a mechanism to build up browserless as a domain expert on running headless browsers, which is a great non-tangible thing to "offer" in away. Wouldn't you want the expert in the field helping you out to get started? The other big thing that has helped is being open-source. You can try out our code, on your own computer, for absolutely no cost whatsoever. This gives you a lot of time trying out the service and sees if it fits without spending a dime. This also saves us the hassle of supporting, securing, and (in the end) chaperoning free accounts so that they're not abused. I'd imagine we lose some monthly cost, but it helps a lot in retention: the users already know the product and have possibly read the source. It's something I value personally, and since I happen to also be a developer it gives me a glance at how our users feel as well. How are you doing today and what does the future look like?The greatest thing is that we've been profitable since the first user signed up. I've never had to bring aboard to make trivial decisions and the monetization model is already in place, so all of the business stuff is done which is something I think late-stage startups can run into issues with. Our margins are doing pretty well, hovering around 80%, and we don't really spend money on ads or anything else aside from infrastructure. Almost all of our sales are self-serve, though we do occasionally get questions. I generally prefer higher-touch sales as it builds a better overall relationship, which can last longer than the business itself. I'm keen to get more involved with enterprise users, which have a lot more restrictions and barriers to entry. Having been an engineer in many enterprise companies, the challenges they face are quite large and harder to scale. Having a product that can be more easily adopted in their scenarios will help us tremendously, so I'm looking forward to that. Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Hahaha, there's* so* much to talk about it's almost hard to know where to get started! The first thing I'd say, without question, is getting better at writing. Since most of our customer acquisition is via content, and that's where a lot of our users find us, having a good first-impression there is critical. It also helps immensely in emails and the sales cycle, as the more concise and poignant you are the more deals you will close. That segways nicely into the next one: sales. I hated the thought of doing sales, but because I had the wrong definition of what sales actually is. Originally, I correlated sales as "selling as much as possible" to everyone, but the reality is quite different. A good salesman will end things early if they know it's not going to be a good fit, versus pushing a solution that doesn't work. Actually, a lot of the time my sales cycle is purely just listening to what folks are trying to do and working back from that to see if browserless can do what they need it to. Obviously, it's great if it works: we build a nice relationship and they solve a problem they're having. If it doesn't then no sweat, we both move on. The worst thing that can happen is if you over-sell to people that don't need the product, which can show up in metrics like churn and retention. The last thing I'd say is dealing with the roller coaster of software. You'll have someone sign-up one day for a multi-thousand dollar plan, and lose your #2 customer the next. Now, this obviously isn't every day, but it can and does happen and it takes you on an emotional roller coaster. Learning to cope with the highs and lows will definitely keep you in the game longer. There's definitely a reason why most people don't strike-out on their own: you really have to be the right kind of crazy. What platform/tools do you use for your business?I'm super old-school in the tools I use, which probably flies in contrast to being a tech startup! We use Stripe for doing all the really hard parts (billing and payment settling), Sendgrid for transactional emails, and DigitalOcean for all of our infrastructure. Since most of our users are self-initiating we don't yet utilize CRMs, however, I probably over-utilize Gmail to force it to be a CRM. What I mean by that is that I do the whole "inbox-zero" setup. If I have an email in my account then something terribly wrong has gone on! What this means, pretty simply, is when an email comes in I label it, set a reminder on it, and generally write the person back pretty quickly. If I can answer it right then and there I generally do so, however, if it's going to take some time I'll let them know that I'm on it but will get back in touch. The last thing I'll say is that I write a lot of my own tools, being a developer and all! They're pretty business-specific, so I'm not sure they're entirely useful outside of browserless, but I'm sure there's another business hiding in there potentially! What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?The one I highly, highly recommend is IndieHackers if you're looking to do a more software/hardware business. There's a lot of new folks and seasoned veterans there, so you're likely to find someone in your position and someone a step or two ahead. Having both is super helpful so you can get reassurance on where you're at, and know what's ahead. I also enjoy the How I Built This podcast as well, but more for the inspiring stories than the execution-ary part. It helps to have a goal to work towards, however sometimes seeing how well others are doing can be depressing, and I've found "How I Built This" to be a good balance since they give you the good and the bad. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Learn to write, validate, and execute as cheaply and quickly as possible. Nothing's worse than learning the idea has no merit and you've wasted a year even getting the thing off the ground. Find new communities and place to post what you're working on, and definitely don't let no always be a final answer. It takes some time to learn when to press or when to throw in the towel, and there's no hard and fast rule, so be ready to get uncomfortable and test the boundaries. The final thing I'll say is that it's incredibly freeing to know you're not made of glass. Test yourself: make the call you wouldn't normally, go out of the way to help someone who's possibly angry at you, and practice saying yes more than no. Being pushed outside of your comfort zone is when the biggest changes can come about, but getting there is incredibly challenging, so get used to not always being in control! 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]  |
| How Boomer Methods Got Our First 3 Clients With $0 Posted: 29 Nov 2019 11:45 AM PST Hi /r/Entrepreneur! After my last exit with a saas software that I grew / solo founded, I'm now entering the agency game.... And I'm off to a decent start, without using my network or bugging friends hoping they will hire me. Lots of agencies start that way and I have nothing against it at all, it's just not for me. Oh, and this should work for any b2b type startup! I've received 3 clients from 3 different sources:
Cold email was the hardest because you're going in cold but I have lots of excitement towards this channel the most for short-term growth, while we build other channels out. The tools for cold email are:
The goal with LinkedIn sales navigator is to get as many leads as possible in your target market, they have amazing filters you can do and I easily think it's one of the most powerful tools in B2B. After I find the profiles, I use SalesQL to organize and find their email. Then I cold email them after I build out a list of 100 for the week (yes I'm doing 100/week). The only tip I have for cold email is, don't read articles on it. They all have the most cheesy cold emails I've ever read. Keep it short and human. I've also tested some longer emails with personalization such as screenshots that I draw on of their homepage, but it's really draining to do that with every single lead. Worked well though. Secret tip: We joined a paid slack group and the amount of high quality people here makes it TOTALLY worth it. Twitter & Slack & Conversational PlatformsI'm not going to go into details but I suspect there are others, like Discord that might be able to be used. The key here on all of them though is the same. Build real relationships, don't market yourself. Build friends with your target market and they will naturally want to do business with you. It's a long-game but it works. Moving forward, I'm going to be scaling cold email and I just launched a new YouTube series that is targeted at general marketers I could use your feedback on. It's supposed to be really casual, ASMR almost - Just hangout and hear about cool stuff going on. Would love to get your opinion on it so far : https://www.oakhq.com/video-show - EP1 has some stuff I want to edit out but I'm trying to move fast and just focus on making EP2 better. Breakdown On Everything We're doing & WhyQuora Answers - Traffic Building, small tiny hope to get a client one day. Slack - Engage daily. Hope to get a client every month or two. Reddit - Traffic building for YT Upwork - Starting to hire people to automate our processes Cold Emails - 100/week Blog - We call them insights. To provide value the viewer visiting our website. NOT for SEO benefits. Sick of seeing useless blogs with no purpose other than to drive low quality traffic. YouTube - Attract marketers that will have marketing managers in the target which will hire us. Podcast - Coming soon, same as above. Monthly Industry Insights - Ebook type deal, again to provide value to people and something to promote. Instagram - Not started yet but will be starting Monday. Not sure on the strategy yet, but we have lots of content to make an interesting page. Twitter - Daily engaging other users and sharing cool stuff not related to us, e.g. a song we like. Build rapport. Week Analytics from the website:From an agency with 0 SEO , 0 Network, 0 Anything - I'm pretty happy with the growth. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2019 01:50 PM PST |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2019 01:16 PM PST Sending emails to potential clients (local businesses) and offering my services? Seems like a totally standard thing to do - but it was suggested to me this might be illegal. Looked into it... Kinda grey area. I guess the question is - is 'cold emailing' illegal in the UK? And if it is... does it even matter? Surely most freelancers or small businesses would email people in their local area? [link] [comments]  |
| Deciding who is CEO in a 50/50 split start up Posted: 29 Nov 2019 01:05 PM PST How would you decide who is the CEO of a startup? Backstory: A friend and I are going to start a business together. I thought of the idea and feel I have a great vision for it. He is more task oriented so I think he would make a good COO. All profit would be split 50/50, but the CEO does have the final say on moves the company makes. Thoughts? -Manureprenuer [link] [comments]  |
| Last 5 events you've attended as entrepreneur (related to work/business, not entertainment) Posted: 28 Nov 2019 10:29 PM PST Hi! I'm building app with the list of upcoming events for entrepreneurs related to startups (founders and investors mostly). By events, I mean the big ones like conferences and exhibitions and smaller ones like local meetups. I want to tag every event to let you filter out only those you interested in. I'd be very grateful if you list couple of last events you've attended. I'll checked their description and try to figure out if there is any new tag I can add to my list, which for now contains: *tech (like fintech, martech etc), crowdfunding, fundraising, pitch contenst, smart city, social impact, vc, IoT, e-commerce. The tag's names proposals will be ok as well. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2019 12:22 PM PST So I know this isn't going to pay a stack of cash, but what does this community say to the idea of vlogging. I've always wanted to vlog my road trips but what's the verdict on it. It'll mainly be for fun but could I perhaps turn it into something viable? [link] [comments]  |
| Knowing how much to ask for in pre-seed round Posted: 29 Nov 2019 11:53 AM PST As I work towards a proper business plan and pitch deck, my business partner and I are trying to figure out how much to ask for in the pre-seed round to get going. For background, we're creating a pretty full-fledged app that includes payment, scheduling, and messaging modules so I assume it will not be a cheap endeavor no matter how simplistic we keep the UI aspect. The money is all in the back-end development. We're just past the "this would be a great idea" phase and have moved onto mockups and comparisons. The goal of our pre-seed round is to create the MVP (not just a static prototype or illustration which we have now) that demonstrates the app in action, potentially catapulting us towards bigger investments in the future. The market we're targeting is fairly large (billion dollar market), niche but not overly unique, and there's probably 4 or 5 other competitors we have to contend with. As with any business idea, this could be pitched to 100 investors and all 100 say "no thanks" but as we're keeping operations fairly thin and doing a lot of the mockup and business plan ourselves, it's only time that we're burning if this ends up being a dud. The problem is not knowing the app development realm enough to say "we need 40k to build this initial app" or maybe it's 100k....its tough to say depending on where we hire contractors from, how nice we want it to look. This question is posed more to entrepreneurs that have built an app from scratch. I'd be interested to hear your stories and how you took off (even if it was a failure in the end). [link] [comments]  |
| I doubled my prices for Black Friday Posted: 29 Nov 2019 11:46 AM PST I don't know about everyone else but I've been inundated with offers today. It's actually been a good reminder to unsubscribe from a lot of mailing lists! Anyway, I've doubled my prices for my job board from $99 to $198. Most people increase their prices in the run up to Black Friday anyway. Hell, I could take my price back down tomorrow and then try and get people with a 50% offer! Anyway, I thought I'd poke fun at all the crazy spamming. When everyone zigs, you should zag. [link] [comments]  |
| I made a task management app for ADD people like me Posted: 29 Nov 2019 11:06 AM PST Hi all! —I work on a lot of tasks and constantly have the need to move tasks around projects or lists, complete them, search them, bring them back, leave a comment, add a subtask, upload a file, etc. So, by scratching my own itch, I build Claritask.com — to help me work fast and jump from one thing to another quite quickly. Please, note that the pricing page is for big companies only. There's an un-advertised Free account with 1 Workspace and 2 Projects, which is plenty for any individual or a smallish team. Not pitching or trying to make a sale here, just shooting it here and hoping to get a few thoughts on how you feel about it. PMF is what I am looking for — the type of a company that this would be useful to. I'm open to suggestions and even some roasting — I believe open convos bring about great discoveries! I already have a few paying clients and most of the improvements have come from their feedback. But, I want to grow more or find that channel/market that Claritask is the best fit for. Also, I am documenting everything out in the open: https://twitter.com/bootsaas feel free to AMA [link] [comments]  |
| Product promotion video with limited spend Posted: 29 Nov 2019 09:35 AM PST My fellow bootstrapped product owners, is it possible to create a small video trailer using free stock footage found on youtube? Will that be a copyright problem and if yes, how do you even identify the real owner and since there is a commentary over stockvideos, would that be fair use? The quotes I am getting from even normal agencies is upward of 2k. Even if I spend that, marketing costs are humungous for user acquisition and dont think we are there yet. Ofcourse, when there are available resource, we would spend it as required but currently we are just not there yet. How do you get around this grey area. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2019 09:14 AM PST I was thinking about aging industries that millennials don't find sexy like software and thought of trucking. Poking around on forums its seems trucking turnover rates are very high, for a lot of reasons, but one of them seems to be dissatisfaction with legacy companies. Tesla trucks come out in 2ish years or so and I was thinking about putting down the money to start an electric fleet. My thoughts are lower costs per mile with electric trucks. Also transportation has to go electric eventually and this industry is probably the most reluctant to do so. Also the work is always there. Almost too much work it seems. Trucker demand is high, again for a lot of reasons. Most young entrepreneurs say you can start a business with no startup costs and I get that. A service company or online company can rake in millions with no effort, or at least thats what it sounds like. I know this is a huge upfront commitment relatively speaking but it seems manageable. Maybe. I currently (try to) run a company selling services like advertising and web development. Ill make animations, videos and websites for businesses. Its not enough to quit my day job. My family is what taught me all about trucking. My background is pretty damn blue collar. So should I pursue it? Or should I focus on finding clients for my current business since it has no overhead? [link] [comments]  |
| Start funding with pre-orders? Posted: 29 Nov 2019 08:47 AM PST If been toying with a concept all week, making CAD designs etc and I've just found an already made item on Aliexpress which would do the job but is not currently being marketed at the niche market I am or the use I intend to promote it for. I don't want to go down the drop-shipping route, I tinkered with this in the past and nobody wants to wait 20-40 days for anything these days. So my conclusion is to use FBA, nice, quick and reliable deliveries worldwide. My question is, as I have very limited funds at the minute, could I potentially get the ball rolling with Pre-Orders? Offer a discount but enough to cover buying bulk from china, set up FBA etc?? Has anyone done this or is there another route I haven't considered? thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 28 Nov 2019 08:57 PM PST Hi, I need help in my IT business. I am overworked and the business has reached its capacity with me doing all sales. I don't know how I would go about finding sales staff which are worth keeping, they seem to be incredibly rare and I wouldn't even know where to look. What would you guys do? [link] [comments]  |
| Good Companies for Sustained Release Pill Technology? Posted: 29 Nov 2019 07:54 AM PST I'm looking for a company to contract with that can make controlled release pills such as the ones used for controlled release caffeine pills. So far I've found only one company named Catalent but communication with that company is very difficult and I'm having trouble gathering guotes for pricing totals. Does anyone here know about good companies that give you a good bang for your buck for this kind of technology contracting? [link] [comments]  |
| Request for people with experience running a digital marketing agency that service realtors Posted: 29 Nov 2019 10:01 AM PST Hello all, we're ready to start cold calling and want to roleplay some sales calls so we can practice our scripts and tonality and get some feedback, if anyone would be willing to set aside some time and patience that would mean the world to us. Our main focus is going to be on the real estate industry so if you have any experience with realtors that would be a great asset to help us refine what we have further. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2019 09:54 AM PST Hi, I recently launched my website (www.carletoncreativeconsulting.co) and I'm looking for some feedback on the general design/copy/etc. [link] [comments]  |
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