Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (November 08, 2019) Entrepreneur |
- Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (November 08, 2019)
- We Grew Our Pregnancy Supplies Subscription-Box to $20mill ARR
- $3,500/month selling custom maps as a side hustle
- A quote to get you fired up!
- Don't waste money on buying cloned mobile games - they will never pay themselves off
- Hey Reddit! We are dotmobile, a team of six building Canada’s first tiny telecom (aka independent MVNO). AMA!
- Is it worth trying to start a community in the early days of a startup?
- I will respond to your worst, most negative review
- "How do you come up with text copy for your business?" - A Short DIY Copywriting Guide for Entrepreneurs
- David Wachsman Discusses Founding Global Blockchain PR Agency (Story time)
- Interested in lead generation and sales tips & tricks? (Live Q&A)
- what would you do with 5k?
- What 7710 games of chess have taught me about endurance.
- EIN Question regarding general partnership
- Facebook won't give me "Dynamic Creative" as option on ads I am trying to make
- What is best way to pitch your services to someone you think may buy?
- Thanks to r/Entrepreneur I finally built a startup to crowdsource climate solutions and launched it to HN front page yesterday!
- How should i handle payments for a very small landscaping company?
- What are some examples of an existing product that a new company added value to with brand image/marketing?
- Does anyone need a Social media manager?
- Is it worth going all out and bringing on an angel investor when you have a really good idea
- Getting from Manufacturing to Distribution/Fulfillment
- POS/accounting/Shopify Integration
- How to connect and what to watch out for when connecting with Chinese manufacturers?
- Entrepreneur class Interview Subject
| Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (November 08, 2019) Posted: 08 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]  |
| We Grew Our Pregnancy Supplies Subscription-Box to $20mill ARR Posted: 08 Nov 2019 09:01 AM PST I was an accountant in a cubicle at a large publicly traded firm in a small town in Central Illinois. And then my husband and I got pregnant. All I wanted to do was protect my unborn daughter and I quickly realized that other expecting moms wanted the same. So I started Bump Boxes: a subscription service tailored to mom's due date, filled with healthy, pre-screened products. My husband and I self-funded the company: I kept my day job and worked on Bump Boxes between other things. We managed our expenses carefully -- both personal and business -- and that mentality still runs through our company culture today. We did raise a small seed round of $100K from angels a year or so into the company. At this point, we're profitable at the unit level and the business level so we'll continue to self-fund our growth for the foreseeable future. I started with zero experience in e-commerce. When I wasn't packing boxes myself, I was calling other moms and emailing other mom bloggers. I put the product in front of them and refined it along the way. In hindsight, I was successful because I iterated on the product quicker than most of our competitors. Along the way, I learned how to acquire moms at the right time in their pregnancy -- and I learned how to do it faster and more efficiently than our competitors. Over the past four years, we've doubled our revenue yearly while growing the team to nearly 50 people here in Central Illinois. I've challenged my team to be the number one mom acquisition company in the world. We've gotten to this point by being relentless - we try more things in a month than many of our competitors do in a year. How did you find your early team members? My husband is my co-founder but we couldn't do it without our team. Hiring for fast-growing companies, particularly in the Midwest, is challenging. You're looking for people that are positive, that are hungry, that want to grow and accept the discomfort that can come with that mindset. Those people exist in the Midwest, they can be hard to find but, if you want your business to be successful, keep your standards high. Did you run any companies prior? I was an accountant at a Fortune 50 company -- a CPA, actually. When I resigned, most people I knew thought this was a terrible idea. Even some of our earliest vendors, and now they're wanting to work on strategic initiatives with us. Do you have any advice for someone just starting out? I like to say that if you want unsolicited advice, start a company or have a baby. All of a sudden, everyone has advice for you. Most of it is well-meaning, all of it is noise. Pay attention to what your customers do -- not what they say. If they're not ready to pay you, refine the product instead of trying to convince them further. Your success is a function of the number of things you try. For anyone that's starting out now, do things that don't scale: pick up the phone and call your target customers. Talk to them and refine repeatedly. You can build systems and processes later: revenue fixes everything. How do you protect yourself from competition? Over the years, we've watched many of our competitors run out of money or approach us for an acquihire. The simplest way to explain our strategy is with a sports analogy:
Unless it costs you $1M+ to acquire your first customer, you don't need a patent. More importantly, don't be romantic about how you make your money: the default state of your company is failure and revenue is the only antidote. What apps could your business not run without? When it comes to tools: Slack, Asana and Google Analytics. We started with Wordpress and only recently built a custom application to bring our store in-house. Would you ever sell? We've given all of our employees stock options which, implicitly, means that we'll sell the company some day. That being said, I'm well aware that there's a huge difference between wanting to sell our company and someone wanting to buy our company. Our goal is simple: Grow fast - Make Bump Boxes the #1 Mom acquisition company in the world. By putting ourselves in that position, we open ourselves up to a number of new revenue opportunities. I can't share many details about that yet but let me just say this: mom's generally have the majority of the spending power at home and we're on a mission to make her life easier than it's ever been! If you enjoyed the post, the original is here. [link] [comments]  |
| $3,500/month selling custom maps as a side hustle Posted: 08 Nov 2019 08:00 AM PST Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview. Today's interview is with Love Regefalk (u/MrP0ng) of Mapsery, a brand that makes map posters you design Some stats:
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hello StarterStory! My name is Love Regefalk (yes – it actually is) and I am the co-founder of Mapsery. I founded Mapsery together with my twin brother, Daniel, and we run Mapsery on the side of our engineering studies. The idea of Mapsery is to let you design a map posters of a place that's meaningful to you, such as where you went to university, got married or where you grew up. Literally any location on the face of the earth can be chosen. All you have to do is to enter your preferred location, adjust the level of zoom and decide on a color theme and style that matches your criteria for an awesome looking poster. Want a map of London or New York? You got it! Want a map of the middle of nowhere? No problemo! Unlike regular stock posters, our posters can be customized in an infinite number of ways, making them truly unique and personal. That being said, although our maps are unique, the idea isn't. When we launched Mapsery at the end of 2017, there were two other competitors in this space. Since then, 5-10 new direct competitors have seen the light and space has gotten way more competitive. Looking at our customers, they can be found all around the world (30+ countries to date) who share a love for maps, traveling and interior design. Owing to the fact that our website is in English and that we only run ads in English, a majority of our customers can be found in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. To a lesser extent, we get customers from other corners of the world. In terms of demographics, slightly more women than men purchase our products and people aged 25-34 are our primary age group. What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?My backstory is that I, during my 2nd year at university, got particularly bored during an exam period and toyed with the idea of starting my own business. In short, I wanted to put the theory from university into practice. Said and done, one month later I had put together a website where I planned to sell beer pong related products that I would import from China. The setup, however, was far from ideal. I kept the stock in my dorm room and I would personally run home from school in the middle of a lecture to hand the orders to the DHL guy every day. Eventually, I got enough orders to make the move to outsource the logistics to a third-party logistics (3PL) partner. Finally, I didn't have to handle the orders manually. Great success! One problem remained, though. Inventory management was a bitch. The products that I ordered from China were made to order and then shipped by boat, which created lead times of 60-90 days from placed order until the products where restocked. The result? My products were out of stock 25% of the time. I decided that I didn't want to deal with the inventory anymore. Especially not with such long lead times. In a weird way, this is what made me think of the business idea that later became Mapsery. I loved the idea of e-commerce, but I hated the idea of keeping inventory (and yes, I hated the idea of dropshipping even more). The solution? A product that doesn't have to be kept in inventory. At this point, I had heard of a company called Printful and I knew that they did printing on demand (PoD). However, I quickly realized that my margins would be thin if I were to use PoD. So I said to myself, how can I increase my margins? Easy. I would have to charge a premium for my posters. How? By having the customer design them themselves, of course. This way, they would stand out from regular stock posters, which would allow me to charge a premium. By this logic, I argued that I could sell custom made posters for $50 instead of $25. By the way, at this point, I decided to involve my twin brother Daniel in the idea. There were two reasons for this. For one, I wanted to have a partner on board because that was something that I missed on my first entrepreneurial endeavor. For two, I lacked the programming skills required to realize this idea, so why not invite your brother who knows how to code? With my brother on board, we looked to create posters for couples and families that would change shape and color based on user input such as the names, the number of family members, the date of marriage and so forth. Although we liked the idea, it became clear to us that it was a hard task to create graphical representations of families and couples that were good-looking and truly unique at the same time. We decided to settle for custom map posters instead, which we knew had been done by two other companies. What's more, judging from their profit and loss statements we could easily see that there was a demand for map posters. We drew a lot of inspiration from these competitors, I can't deny that, but we wanted to make sure that we used a different technology (vector rendered maps, rather than image-based maps) and we styled our maps slightly differently. To launch this idea, we started a limited company. By Swedish law, 50,000 SEK (~5,000 USD) in equity is required to do so. A small portion of that money was used for printing prototypes, setting up a domain, server hosting and so forth, but most of it was never used. In total, we spent a little less than $500 to get started (but a lot of time). Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.The first step for us was to design the raw map data. As you might have guessed, the core of our map posters is map data. More specifically, we use data from the Open Street Maps (OSM) to create our posters, which is a free wiki for map data for the world. It's a wonderful thing, really. However, if you compare our posters with OSM, you'll quickly realize that they don't look the same. The OSM maps are informative, factual and great to use if you want to find your way from point A to B, but they're not necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Thus, we had to break them apart and redesign every layer of them – from paths and highways to forest areas and buildings. This took a ton of time. The most difficult part was that they had to look good regardless of if the customer wanted to frame a rural area or a city. When prototyping and honing the design of our map posters, we utilized a printing facility on campus that was used for printing doctoral theses and what not. We managed to convince them that we would use the printers for a school project, though I'm not sure whether they actually believed us or if they just didn't care. Regardless of which, it allowed us to print the prototypes that we needed. To conduct some market research on the different color schemes and styling options that we had designed, we put together a Google Form where our friends and family could rank the different designs Once we had a product that we liked, all that was left for us was to find a partner that could print our posters on demand and handle fulfillment (note: we didn't use Printful). This proved to be easier said than done. However, one lucky day, I googled "[competitor name] customer case" and struck gold. Bingo – I had found a partner that I knew could deliver. https://www.instagram.com/p/BdheFrGHDrD/ Describe the process of launching the business.To launch Mapsery, a lot of time was spent on designing and developing the product. Given the fact that we developed Mapsery on the side of our engineering studies and other commitments, the development phase took quite some time. In addition to this, my brother was left to do all the coding. At the beginning of 2018, we launched Mapsery. I wouldn't really call it a launch, though. We didn't reach out to any media outlets. We didn't post on Producthunt, Reddit or any other forum. And we definitely didn't hire a PR agent. In fact, we didn't even tell our friends about it or share it on our personal social media channels! No, our so-called launch consisted of us rolling out some ads on Facebook and Google. The reason? We didn't think that our launch was newsworthy. We didn't believe that our idea was novel enough. The fact that our main competitor – the company who invented the niche – also was Swedish, played a part as well. Had the primary competitor been from any other country, I think that we would have felt more comfortable doing a proper launch. That being said, If there's anything to learn from our launch, it's this: don't launch as we did. Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?To be honest, this is probably where we've performed the poorest. We haven't spent more than 2-3 hours per week on Mapsery, in total. Of that very limited amount of time, a majority of it has been put on customer service and minor developments. In other words, we've barely spent any time at all on growing our business and attracting new customers. Crazy, I know. What's more, we haven't created a lot of content for social media and we haven't worked with influencers. Our ad spend, apart from Google Adwords, has been limited and the same could be said about our SEO efforts. Without a doubt, this is the reason to why we sell for a meager $3.5K a month and not ten times that amount a month. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we could easily sell ten times more. I'm simply saying that I know why we don't sell for more. When comparing us to competitors, this is definitely where we lack the most. Sure, I'm 99% certain that we spend less time on our business than they do, but we definitely should be able to do better. How are you doing today and what does the future look like?We are doing alright. We're profitable and our profit margin is around 25%. Given that we charge a premium price, our gross margin is 65%, which isn't too shabby. The cost of printing and fulfillment is 35% and we spend roughly 25% on customer acquisition. Primarily through Google Adwords and to some extent on retargeting ads on Facebook. In terms of traffic, we bring in 3.000 visitors per month, out of which 50 converts. Not great, not terrible (hello Chernobyl fans). Our presence on social media is quite limited. We have a little more than 1K followers on Instagram, but we rarely post. Our social media efforts can at best be seen as a hygiene factor at this point. We haven't given social media any love and we don't work actively with influencers. Given how social media-friendly our product is, this leaves a lot of room for improvement, to say the least. Moving forward, we have decided to spend more time on Mapsery to increase sales. We've got a good picture of what needs to be done in order to do so, and we'll try to execute that plan. While we don't hope to tenfold our sales, we believe that we can do a lot better by increasing the time that we spend on Mapsery and by directing our efforts towards sales efforts. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bdm_zEqn838/ Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?There's a difference between a business and a hobby. Frankly speaking, I've come to the realization that we run Mapsery as a hobby and not as a business. It's a fun side project, absolutely, but it's not a business. We might like to think that we run it as a business, but we don't. It's time to change that. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1_SSG5Hzcv/ What platform/tools do you use for your business?Our website is built on WordPress and WooCommerce, using Braintree Payments to process payments (in the process of switching to Stripe). As mentioned before, our map data comes from OpenStreetMap and we use Google Analytics and Hotjar to make informed decisions about how our users interact with our platform. On the rare occasion that we post to social media, we use Buffer. For customer support, we use Gmail. To use Gmail for customer support is nothing that I recommend because it's really the wrong tool for the task, but it gets the job done for us at this stage. To avoid disputes about who spends the least amount of time working on Mapsery (hint: both of us do), we use Clockfy's Chrome extension. What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Apart from Swedish podcasts on E-commerce and entrepreneurship, How I Built This on NPR is an all-time favorite. Honorable mentions should of course also be given to Indiehackers, Product Hunt and Reddit. The reason as to why I'm writing this StarterStory is actually because of Indiehackers. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Just do it. Afraid of failing? Don't be. That's part of the process and that's how you learn. However, if you must fail, make sure to fail early. How? By creating an MVP and by involving your potential customers in your product development. Don't spend your time and money developing something that no one wants. These tips aren't necessarily related to the story that I just shared, but I think those tips are crucial for anyone starting out! Where can we go to learn more?If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below! Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data. For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily. Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Nov 2019 08:46 AM PST I think this quote is great because it is true on so many levels. Myself included should take more action to go after our dreams. Hopefully this quote can inspire someone. "The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream." - Les Brown - Manureprenuer - Wayne Gretzky - Michael Scott [link] [comments]  |
| Don't waste money on buying cloned mobile games - they will never pay themselves off Posted: 08 Nov 2019 06:36 AM PST I'm seeing a lot of people throwing anywhere between $200 - $1000 on these simple cloned games for the mobile market. On Fiverr, you can find dozens of sellers providing you with a finished game that you can then publish on Google Play or Play Store and get money either as a premium app or through ads. Don't fall for this. Even if you get a very polished title, you'll still only get a simplified clone of many hundreds of copies of the same game (match 3, endless runners/driving games, 2D arcade platformers). All of them are in one way or another better than your purchase (which will be technically sound, but will miss any interesting/risky creative decisions that otherwise help games get discovered). Post-launch marketing won't help you escape this losing setup. The mobile gaming market is incredibly competitive - price for user acquisition is far beyond their individual lifetime value, even if your projections are correct (they are likely off drastically towards the more positive outlook). I know that this all looks like a simple setup - you buy a game that is all yours, publish it and then get money through ads as a passive income. Sadly, you'll have a lot of problems organically reaching dozens of players, while hundreds and thousands will demand additional marketing money. As the bill racks up, your profit will never be even close to matching it. In the end, you'll likely pay off maybe 10-20 percent (if you're lucky) of the investment and the game will reach a plateau and stop making anything. The gaming industry is tough as nails and there are neither shortcuts nor neat&tidy small projects you can purchase on a fire&foreget principle. Don't waste your money. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Nov 2019 08:42 AM PST Hey guys, we are dotmobile, a telecom startup based in Toronto, ON, Canada. We are sitting down together to do this AMA so you'll be hearing answers from a bunch of us today. About us Algis (CEO) and I worked together for a decade on the inside, then incorporated our own business in December 2018 and achieved about $1M in funding in March 2019. Since then we have grown our team to six employees, moved into an office and have been hard at work building our product and brand. We're building an independent tiny telecom (aka MVNO), and right now our service isn't available. It will be digital-only - no call centres, no stores, just a native iOS/Android app that gives users full control of their wireless plan. We aren't selling anything at this point, but we are having conversations with Canadians about what needs fixing. Some Canadian context In Canada, tiny telecoms like us don't really exist - essentially we just have "The Big Three" (Rogers, Bell, TELUS) who share towers and copy-cat price plans. Then there's a bunch of smaller wireless providers that are owned by The Big Three, plus some smaller regional carriers like Freedom Mobile (now owned by Shaw). This is one of the main reasons that Canadians pay some of the highest prices for wireless in the world. We believe that if more tiny telecoms like us enter the market, there will be more real competition driving better pricing differentiation and service innovation. (A recent Financial Post op-ed on the topic) To make this possible, we need to change how telecom works (in Canada) - today, the regulations favour The Big Three but there's a CRTC hearing in February 2020 about improving the industry for consumers. Why an AMA? We've been looking for more ways to connect with Canadians, beyond our website. Questions, stories and suggestions are important to us - they motivate us, help us build a better product, and improve our ability to tell the story of Canada's wireless industry and how we fit into it. It's equally important that we give back in any way we can, sharing our own stories or industry experience, and helping Canadians better understand what's happening in the industry after it became part of the election platforms last month. PS - the Dot Mobile on Wikipedia is not us - they're no longer in business, from the UK, and we aren't affiliated with them in any way. EDIT: thanks for the great questions, everyone! We're wrapping up the day here at the office, so if you have more questions come on over to r/dotmobile and ask away! [link] [comments]  |
| Is it worth trying to start a community in the early days of a startup? Posted: 08 Nov 2019 01:38 AM PST We are in the process of building a passwordless authentication solution. It's not hard to find users who dislike passwords. Because of this wide spread sentiment we thought it might be valuable to start a community. We were inspired by the Monzo community here in the UK that managed to start a discussion around what people liked/disliked about banking in general. forgetpasswords.com is the community we started and we welcome discussion about all passwordless solutions. Passwords are such a large problem that we know there will be many solutions in the future. Our biggest worry is at this early stage it might prove to be hard work and a distraction. Does anyone have experience building a community tangential to their business? was it worth it? How long did you wait to see some results? [link] [comments]  |
| I will respond to your worst, most negative review Posted: 08 Nov 2019 08:55 AM PST You have that one review that's costing you business or keeping you awake at night - I will tackle that. The one by the unreasonable customer (or worse, they weren't even a customer), that won't go away and sticks at the top of your Yelp or Google page? No problem. I'll help you not just respond to it, but respond to it in a way that shows your values and benefits - why OTHER people would want to do business with you, even though you have this negative review. The ask? $10 and I won't rest until you're happy with it, and you'll have a better understanding that a bad review can actually be a positive for your business. Why am I doing this? I'm a freelance small business marketing consultant, writing a book on marketing and customer service, and I've recently found that many, many small business owners have no idea how to respond to their negative reviews - or they know that if they do, they might seem mad or defensive. I'm testing the concept that business owners would pay for this kind of assistance, so I'm throwing out a very cheap price (10x cheaper than my cheapest hourly rate) to see if this is something business owners want. EDIT: I will do 2 here in the thread for free and explain my thinking behind it - whoever comments first get it! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Nov 2019 06:17 AM PST If you just want to read through the bullet points, here's an Imgur album with 6 key points. Hi, I recently came across a few questions about copywriting from a small business owner. Here they are with my answers. Question 1: How can business owners come up with text copy on their own? Here's a very basic (but great) approach business owners can take to write great copy. 1. Put yourself in your customer's shoes. I've worked with a ton of enthusiastic entrepreneurs and most of them have one thing in common - they see their product as their baby which means most of the time they're wearing mom-goggles. It's hard for them to see the short-comings that might be glaring to customers. So forget that you know how it works, forget what it's intended to do, and look at your landing page like you're seeing it for the first time, as a customer. 2. Focus on benefits, not features. Feature - r/entrepreneur has over 600,000 users. Benefit - Participate in meaningful discussions with over 600,000 like-minded users. A feature is what your product does. A benefit is what your product does for the user. An extremely important distinction between the two. 3. Consider A/B testing (test different copy and see which one performs better). A/B testing is simply figuring out which copy converts most. A simple implementation of this would be to write to pieces of copy and share it with your peers to get their feedback. You can also use different combinations of copy, web elements, and graphics to see which works. Alternatively, show different people different landing pages (when they come from different sources). 4. Include statistics/numbers This isn't too complicated. Statistics inspire confidence and are great for grabbing your reader's attention. I like to start my content pieces with a powerful statistic. 5. Check out web copy on your competitor's site. When I am creating a content strategy, I do something called a competitive audit along with the content audit on the client's site. A competitive audit is basically seeing what pieces get them the most traffic, where they're getting their backlinks from, etc. If you're completely blank and have no idea where to start, just type in your service into google like [product development] and check the copy of others. 6. Do not buy courses (please). You can learn a lot more for free if you really want to. Yes, they are some genuinely good courses on copywriting but a vast majority teach things that you can learn for free. Also, they cost $500 to $1,000... Here's what you should do instead. Step 1: Take the $1,000 you were going to use to teach yourself copywriting. Step 2: Give it to a decent copywriter. Step 3: Roll in money you get from conversions, thanks to the new copy. Step 4: Do the course. Step 5: Profit? Question 2: Do you get a brand agency, marketing company, or copywriter? Who does this sort of thing? What in particular do they do? If you don't have the budget for it, don't hire a copywriter or an agency. A landing page can cost you anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. If you already have a healthy marketing budget, hire a copywriter, if you don't, use those funds for paid marketing. Organic reach on social media is almost dead in late 2019 so I would suggest experimenting with ads and boosting your posts depending on which platform you use. This, of course, is more complicated but learning how ads work is a lot more beneficial in the long run. As your company grows, you can hire agencies and freelancers to take care of all of this but in the initial stages, getting the word out should be your top priority. Now, if you've got zero writing skills and think you couldn't sell something if your life depended on it, discard most of the advice above and hire a copywriter to help you out because you DO need good copy to convert your visitors. That's it, boys and girls. Thanks for reading and I hope this was useful. [link] [comments]  |
| David Wachsman Discusses Founding Global Blockchain PR Agency (Story time) Posted: 08 Nov 2019 12:28 PM PST When he founded Wachsman, a blockchain-focused professional services agency based in Manhattan, CEO David Wachsman didn't know what to expect. "I had absolutely no idea," he told me. "Anyone who would say they had a vision that it would look like this – well, they would be insane or lying. What I knew was that the bitcoin and blockchain space had a lot of brilliant people in it." He calls his decision to found Wachsman the best decision he ever made. "I've had a chance to travel the world," the Binghamton University grad says. "I've had a chance to meet with hundreds or even thousands of brilliant people all over the world who are interested in this technology, what it can do, how it can change the way we live – not just to make things cheaper, faster, better, but transform the way we do things." He believes the industry focuses too much on price. "We should be talking more about all of the IQ points in this industry," he says. "All of the innovation that's already occurred. All of the brilliant business people, the great marketers, the great product people, the wonderful UI designers who have contributed thus far to our industry. That's what makes it exciting for me. Assuming that there would be this rush over to blockchain is what led me to start an agency focused exclusively on the blockchain space." It's clear to Mr. Wachsman what makes blockchain technology significant. "It's more democratic, It's freer," he says. "And the other thing I love about it is how horizontal this technology is. It's applicable to small companies, large banks, food distribution companies and farmers, social networks, and to gamers. And we're only beginning to see what this technology can do. That's why I'm so supportive of it and why I wake up every single day – to support this technology and support the innovators behind it." Wachsman specializes in earned media. Entrepreneurs in the blockchain space have a misunderstanding about what PR is, he says. "What we do is talk to reporters and say, 'Here's a story, are you interested in it? Here's an angle. What do you think?'" It is a line of work that comes with a lot of failures. "The vast, vast, vast majority of the time we are turned down," Mr. Wachsman says. "These reporters have editorial freedom. They work with their editors, with their publication. They can put whatever spin or whatever story they want together. It's all their choice. And what we do is we act as a resource for reporters and help our clients put forward a story that is comprehensible, and a fact sheet that makes sense. PR is not about puffing things up. Good PR is about reducing the number of adverbs and adjectives that exist. It's about telling a story that's concrete and tangible, and something that shows some sort of transformation because that's what makes interesting news." He adds: "We help our clients figure out what's newsworthy about what they do and we help reporters to the best of our ability by being a trusted resource for them. That's what PR is and that unfortunately not common knowledge." Entrepreneurs have a tendency to conflate PR with advertising, says Mr. Wachsman. "They are not in any way the same, outside of the fact that they're both subsets of 'marketing'," he says. "That's the number one misconception by far. Besides that, not everyone really knows how the news organizations work. We spend lots of time talking to our clients about how journalists operate. How each of them is their own person and how it's our job to be a resource to them. And how any company that wants to cooperate with media is going to need to follow some of those best practices." Along the way, Wachsman has been having fun. "Becoming an entrepreneur has been a remarkable ride," he says. "It has been incredibly exciting. There's an enormous amount of stress that goes on behind the scenes, making sure that you do things properly, make payroll, find insurance companies, work with accountants. These are challenges that I didn't ever face before until I founded an organization – not at this scale at least. And then building a global organization only multiplies the difficulty with setting up foreign offices. And it's figuring out how all these different systems work and how they integrate. This has been an incredible learning experience for me. It's been fascinating. It's been primarily a joy and I don't know if I could go back to doing anything else." One of the first things Mr. Wachsman learned when he started the agency is that you cannot make everybody happy. "It's not possible," he says. "So, you need to do your very best and set yourself up with remarkable people to rely upon. That comes down to hiring, which is incredibly important. Finding people who share your passions, who share your work ethics, who share your vision, and then giving them the tools they need to succeed. It has been something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. How to employ these types of concepts and then bring people on board, help train them, help upskill them, and then give them an opportunity to contribute to what our organization does. But, more importantly, contribute to our clients." If he were to go back to the beginning, he would have done one particular thing a bit differently. "I would have hired a recruiter earlier," he says. "That's actually an important lesson. There are people who are experts at recruiting – they're professionals. And I think that if I could go back towards the beginning of this company, I would have hired internal recruiters earlier who are people who fully understand your vision, have a professional skill set and can help bring great people to the table." Overall, Wachsman feels an obligation to his clients and to the industry as a whole. "It's something that I'm so incredibly proud of," he says. "Having an opportunity to work with so many great companies and to travel the world and go to so many amazing conferences, I get a chance to meet great people. And that is the thing that I love most. I have great conversations with so many brilliant people from so many backgrounds. What I cherish the most is the relationships. Not only that I've built thus far, but the opportunity to go and build many more. I hope I have the chance to meet another 10,000 people over the next year or two who can share their stories with me and I can learn from." source: https://cryptographicasset.com/david-wachsman-discusses-founding-global-blockchain-pr-agency/ [link] [comments]  |
| Interested in lead generation and sales tips & tricks? (Live Q&A) Posted: 08 Nov 2019 11:47 AM PST Hi everyone, If you're interested in lead generation and sales, we're doing a live Q&A tomorrow at 1pm CST. My guest will be Vit Gelfand, a seasoned expert in those two areas and actually the person who is spearheading the sales for our company right now. We'll try and cover as much as we can on those topics and also adding a presentation on the best practices for follow-ups. Link for the live stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un1lVH35JZ0 If you have any questions or other suggestions for the live session please don't hesitate to comment below and we're looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. Cheers! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Nov 2019 11:43 AM PST |
| What 7710 games of chess have taught me about endurance. Posted: 08 Nov 2019 09:05 AM PST This is an article I wrote recently. Here's the TL;DR: Over the last 5 years, I've played over 7,000 games of chess. My favorite piece has become the pawn for four reasons: 1) Pawns are underestimated, but reliable: focusing on the core strength of your product/service will put you further ahead than people who make their strategy murky with constant featuer additions and "side hustles." Your main skill, the thing you're best at, is what will move you forward, even if it's not as sexy as you'd like it to be. 2) Pawns determine where the "stronger" pieces move: With that core skill in mind, you can move confidently into the market without worrying about the competition. If you are really great at what you do (and you've worked to do it the best), your competition will move around you. 3) Pawns are strongest, strategically, when they work together and worst when left alone : Everyone needs a strong social and professional network to grow. 4) Pawns only move forward, one space at a time : Even when you fail at something, you haven't moved back. You have all the knowledge and experience from your mistakes to learn from (which you didn't before). In business, like a pawn, you are either stationary or moving forward. You never go back. Kind of cheesy, but I enjoyed writing it. You can see the details here but you don't need to. Above is pretty much the jist of it all: https://www.nathanlikeswriting.com/post/chess-and-perserverance Would love your thoughts and comments! [link] [comments]  |
| EIN Question regarding general partnership Posted: 08 Nov 2019 11:38 AM PST I have applied for an EIN as a partnership, and listed the name of my company on the application. I was assigned an EIN. My business partner and I have a signed partnership agreement, and we are opening a business checking account. If we use that EIN to open the account, what is tying him to that EIN? In Texas, you are not required to register a general partnership with the state, so is the only thing tying my partner to that EIN the signed partnership agreement with the name of the business? [link] [comments]  |
| Facebook won't give me "Dynamic Creative" as option on ads I am trying to make Posted: 08 Nov 2019 12:26 PM PST Anyone else encounter this problem? Know the fix? I am trying to make an event responses ad for my band, and I want to test different images and copy, but the dynamic creative option is totally missing. If I go to old ads I made I see the dynamic creative option, but it's not even an option to turn on/off on new ads. I've tried making sure everything is shut off, and it's definitely on stuff that isn't published yet. If anyone knows about this and how to fix, please let me know! [link] [comments]  |
| What is best way to pitch your services to someone you think may buy? Posted: 08 Nov 2019 05:16 AM PST I came across a few people who I think may buy my services but how should I pitch them my services to get a good rate of conversion? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Nov 2019 08:03 AM PST Hi everyone, First of all thank you to this amazing community. It gave me the motivation to actually build something I've wanted to make for a long time and get it out into the world. Yesterday, I managed to get my startup featured on the front page of Hacker News for most of the day. Here's the original link for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472817 I want to give back to the community by telling you what I did. I have always felt like these types of things were some kind of voodoo magic where Mercury needed to be in retrovirus or some such thing. I had been feeling pretty guilty about not launching this project yet after building it and so I decided the worst that could happen is that my launch would get ignored - I would be in the same spot. Of course, luck did play into it but I want to share the approach that I took in case it helps you. Straightforward Title - A mistake I've made on HN before is to try to sell to them. These are smart people with hyper tuned BS sensors. Tell them exactly what you made in very few words. My title was "Collective.Energy – Crowdsource climate solutions as a community" Respond Quickly - Being able to provide near instant replies to the comments and questions kept the algorithm treating it as a hot topic Show HN Tag - Less people are launching products than are posting news articles. Using this tag will get you on the Show page instantly and might help you get the crucial initial support to rocket your post onto the general front page Likeable Product - Probably the most important factor but also the hardest. HN users need to identify with your product right away. In my case, Collective.Energy has the environmental activism angle going for it which really helps. Anyways I would be a bad entrepreneur if I didn't tell you what my project was (mods pls allow). As you may have guessed from the title, https://collective.energy is a community for crowdsourcing climate solutions & actions. The platform empowers individuals by providing inspiration, feedback, and an audience. It allows you to turn climate solution ideas into plans into reality - all in one place. My thinking is that harnessing the collective energy of smart people who care about the climate everywhere will yield environmental benefits. If you're an environmentally focused entrepreneur, feel free to feature your business on Collective.Energy as well, some projects have already gained a following. It's free to join and we have some really interesting discussions going already with eco-friendly startups. Let me know what you think, I'd love helpful feedback. It's still very much a work in progress. Here's the Collective.Energy link again for your reference: https://collective.energy Thanks everyone, this community is really awesome [link] [comments]  |
| How should i handle payments for a very small landscaping company? Posted: 08 Nov 2019 10:37 AM PST I am building a small landscaping company i plan on starting in the summer. I will be going around finding clients around march to schedule appointments starting april 1st. I need some advice or some videos to watch etc on how to set up a bill pay. The basic premise will be that i will charge a flat rate for strictly lawn mowing and weeding, charge additional fees for hedge trimming. Tree trimming. Sod/garden installation. Tile walkways etc. It will be a weekly service mowing lawns once a week $40/wk + any additional services for that specific visit. Should i set up some form of bill pay so they can just sign up and pay automatically once a month/week? Should i have it so they can just pay directly to myself each time i visit the home? I plan on starting with just around 20-25 clients and doing something around 4 or 5 jobs a day. I will have a friend joining me after some time so i will hopefully be able to increase that to around 30-35 and send.him on smaller jobs (cutting grass, weed eating, trimming etc) while i do larger installation jobs where i can only get 1-2 done per day. If it goes correctly we would both be making around $200-$300 a day but starting out it may only be 1-3 clients per day each week. Should i make this a cash business since its this small or would digital payment be ideal? Any help would be appreciated. I have never had to set up a payment method for anything before so i am in the dark here. But like i said i have around 4-5 months to set this all up which is more than enough time considering the small size of the company. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Nov 2019 09:32 AM PST The obvious one is Apple. I'd like to hear some more. Specific examples are appreciated, in any industry. Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Does anyone need a Social media manager? Posted: 08 Nov 2019 01:56 PM PST I saw a post yesterday and figured i'd shoot my shot to, i work for a company specializing in vape products, i manage and grow there Social Media, its not enough money for me to just have this job and i figured since i'm already experienced in it i could offer my services to others!!! if your interested in this kind of thing pm me!!! [link] [comments]  |
| Is it worth going all out and bringing on an angel investor when you have a really good idea Posted: 08 Nov 2019 01:51 PM PST Okay, here's my situation: I have enough to buy a house, but not in a huge city (Chicago, SF, LA, NY). I also have a really good idea, provable, and can scale insansely. Most angels seems to want 25k for 10%, which is insane to me (100k for 5% is more reasonable). What should I do? A. Keep working until I wouldn't have to work for ten years (rent/expenses can be paid from savings) in a city like Chicago. B. Get my idea through to every pitch contest, incubator etc... C. Cold email investors. [link] [comments]  |
| Getting from Manufacturing to Distribution/Fulfillment Posted: 08 Nov 2019 01:27 PM PST I'm currently researching a design for something with a manufacturer. The object is pre-existing, I'm just coming up with a logo for it. They do bulk shipments. Rather than have the product shipped to my house and me mailing them by hand, what are my options for transferring a bulk shipment to a distributor/fulfillment/ecommerce service for shipping? I inquired with the manufacturer, but they only do bulk shipping. Unless I'm not asking them the right question. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| POS/accounting/Shopify Integration Posted: 08 Nov 2019 01:06 PM PST Hi All. I currently run a little coffee shopify store that as evolved a bit from what I first thought I'd end up... we now have some wholesale accounts, and some in person sales. Wondering if anyone has any tips on software that will integrate my shopify, POS sales, and accounting into one neat little bow. I'm in Canada by the way. Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| How to connect and what to watch out for when connecting with Chinese manufacturers? Posted: 08 Nov 2019 01:35 AM PST We are looking for someone who is involved in the production of leather or artificial-leather products to help us develop and organize production in preferably China, but we're intersted in any country within the same price bracket. We are interested in launching a new product line and are ready to go as soon as possible. What we would like the best is for someone to walk us through the process of connecting with a chinese manufacturer. [link] [comments]  |
| Entrepreneur class Interview Subject Posted: 08 Nov 2019 12:37 PM PST I need to interview someone for my entrepreneur class. [link] [comments]  |
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