Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (January 10, 2020) Entrepreneur |
- Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (January 10, 2020)
- Money is great, but the things you learn are (almost) forever! (a reply to the idea that "reading is for the rich")
- Fake Gurus
- Reading is for rich people, you're failing because you read too much, not because you don't read enough..
- How to write a landing page title
- Struggling to be productive in your business? Ask yourself what’s the Minimal Viable Action you can do right now?
- Did any of you entrepreneurs here had a mental block after failing at a business?
- Plastic Prototyping for Simple Product
- Should I drop out of University?
- The Myth Of Unique Startup Ideas
- Exclusive products
- New Business Idea
- How do you reach out to service providers to join your application?
- How spending $1,000 on Quora Ads helped us generating $12,000+ in B2B revenue?
- Do I need to open a company to launch my app?
- How to find promoters?
- $20k/month selling walking food tours.
- People with multiple businesses...how do you handle your disparate Email, Storage, Chrome (or equivalent) accounts
- What is the best print on demand website?
- How much should I charge to correct spelling mistakes?
- NEED HELP! Freight Forwarders?? New small business owner
- Start-up Stalled, Can't Find New Job - Suggestions/help?
- Finally launched my waitlist and weeks away from releasing my alpha! Thanks for all the love and support!
- I build a profitable company from scratch which employees 15 people
| Accomplishments and Lesson Learned Friday! - (January 10, 2020) Posted: 10 Jan 2020 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]  |
| Posted: 10 Jan 2020 01:45 AM PST I love the fact that this post on r/Entrepreneur annoys me and that, at the same time, I completely support what OP is saying. Yes, the key to success - no matter how big or small - is actually doing things. As I understand it, the OP is trying to say that endless reading in preparation of that action is often only a way how a person avoids stepping up to it, for better or worse. However. This might be a bit more complex idea and also one that comes outisde of the get-rich-or-die-trying US sphere. Now, while capitalism won over the world for good reason, I believe we should still be aware of some important aspects connected to it as well. Here's a bit of personal experience - I worked as a psychologist in a neurological clinic in Serbia (I know, not an exactly perfect representation of the globe, but maybe it's not that off when you consider all the places better off and worse off than it). This was five years ago and I had the privilege of interviewing about 150 patience in really long testing sessions during a single year. We always talked about their lives from the moment when they were born to the moment they stepped through the door of my office. I listened about their families, fortunes, big changes and anything else they wanted to share. I figured out from those people that education, not money, is the thing that elevates families through generations. It does not matter where that education came from - official, unofficial, self-taught, whatever. As long as the person started their young adult life with the idea that they wanted to improve the way they perceive the world and how they function in it, chances were that their kids had better lives 40 or something years later. Money is important, but it is also - as MC Hammer can attest - fleeting. It comes and goes, even if you're a millionaire. I know that there's this strong sense in the US that $ can protect you from almost anything which is not incorrect in general. However, it is not god-stuff, as the 1930s and 2008/9 show. Some future years will teach this lesson again. Education and knowledge, on the other hand, is recession-proof. No one could ever take away the fact that you finished high school. A totalitarian government could, in theory, take your diploma, but no one can take the content of your mind, aside from killing your brain cells. So yes, grind and focus, work and apply yourself to that work. But read and learn also, even unrelated stuff. Skip on Joe Rogan and check out an audiobook by Sigmund Freud (boring stuff but intermittent with some of the most brilliant ideas on human condition you can find even today). Let someone else smash like on a Gary Vee video and you pick up Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and allow yourself to be taken into a world to which hell must be a holiday. Open a random Wikipedia page and read about the history of some nation you know nothing about, learn about their glorious triumphs and utter defeats, the horrible crimes they did to others and the crimes that had been perpetrated on them. Even pick up some Jordan Peterson and hopefully find most of his ideas about the modern world, gender roles and all of that utter bullshit (had to add this in). Heck, even get one of my books and make at least one person really happy - that would be me! Work on your ventures and give them all you got. But, this does not mean that you should or must drop that essential desire to better yourself, even in some random directions. Do that as well, even in the tiniest amounts. Don't do it instead of working, but do it whenever you can. Find joy in it because, ultimate, learning and discovery should be a joyful activity. Trust me, you will benefit from this immensely and chances are that your descendants will do so as well! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 10 Jan 2020 09:37 AM PST Entrepreneur land has become a haven for "fake gurus". You know the ones that I am talking about. They haven't made it into the big time yet but they are charging people 1000's of $ to teach them how to make big money. I am currently compiling evidence against "fake gurus". If you have any experiences or know of any "fake gurus" share them here. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jan 2020 03:09 PM PST I guess I've done pretty well for myself over the last 15 years, and one thing that stands out to me more than anything in the divide between those of us that build successful businesses, employ people to help us scale, etc and those that always spin their wheels is this absolutely bullshit idea that reading is the key to wealth. Everything you could ever need to know about business, wealth, life, love etc is probably in a total of 20 books, and if we just focus on business and wealth creation, let's call it 10 and that's being generous. What 10? that's up to you really since most books that are decent say the exact same fucking thing in a different way or with different characters. What billionaires read, or how they start their morning has absolutely NOTHING to do with you. NOTHING. Do you know why? Because their ability to read a book a day, meditate twice, do yoga, write in their vision journal, ALL THAT BULLSHIT came AFTER they were wealthy. While they built their companies, they worked 7 days a week 18+ hours a day, eating shitty fast food or whatever was available, barely showering let alone meditating for two hours. I succeeded the same way everyone else did, working like an insane person towards my goals each day. Testing, failing, learning, testing. Sure, read Think and grow rich, read how to win friends and influence people, read the millionaire next door, read the bible or any other religious text with most of life's lessons told as stories, even read the secret if you want some metaphysical bullshit, because whether it's real or placebo, if you believe it, it's real. But then, GET. TO. FUCKING. WORK. Stop watching bullshit artist Gary V, or Warren Buffet Talks, or running to Amazon to buy Bill Gates top 10 touching books of the year. Bill Gates was a fucking savage for decades. There was no Gates reading list 30 years ago, I doubt he read anything that wasn't market reports. After 15 years I thankfully have some breathing room to read some books, post bullshit on reddit, laugh hysterically at a Gary V video and even consider stuff like hot yoga and flotation tanks and what superfood smoothie might make my dick 10% harder and perhaps give me back a few years that I burnt off of my life building a 20 person company. Early on I got my hands on some Jim Rohn videos at the library, your best year ever seminar or something, probably on youtube now. It was like 5 hours and it was enough to change my life. It all just made perfect sense to me. If you can read something like think and grow rich and feel the need to consume 500 other books on the subject, you probably won't be getting anywhere in this lifetime. STOP READING SHIT. STOP WATCHING SHIT. Downtime is for rich people. I get that you think a 4 hour Joe Rogan podcast talking about sending your blood and spit and shit to 50 different labs to get a full breakdown of your perfect diet, vitamin and mineral supplementation and optimal workouts and sleep time is what's going to make you a millionaire, but I assure you it won't. It will just make you a really healthy person with insurmountable credit card debt. Stem cell injections won't make you Joe Rogan and reading Bill Gates book list won't make you a billionaire. Self education is mostly used as an excuse for procrastination. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you are getting better by constantly trying to absorb information, not to mention the completely conflicting points of view you encounter when you choose to absorb content from an endless amount of sources. If you want to learn sales, sell something. Reading 30 books on selling is going to give you 30 conflicting points of view, mostly by people that failed as salesman so they wrote a book talking about all the shit they never did that probably should work if someone actually had the discipline that they don't. ....but at least they wrote a book which is worth something to them, what's it worth to you besides a dozen hours you could have been building your business? [link] [comments]  |
| How to write a landing page title Posted: 10 Jan 2020 10:44 AM PST The majority of things in marketing are unimportant. And we stress about them. Landing page titles are important. And we don't stress about them. I've spent the past fortnight reading hundreds of landing page titles and talking to copywriters. This is what I've learnt: 1) You're on a speed date The majority of people look at your site for 30 seconds and never return. If you can't make your product interesting in six words sell the benefits instead:
2) You're not Vladimir Nabokov Failed authors turned copywriters have a soft spot for fancy titles which say, quite literally, nothing. Don't complicate an original product:
3) Speak with conviction Take a look at Descript and Slack's titles:
Descript doesn't say "We help" it says "It's how". Slack doesn't say "alternative" it says "replaces". 100% certainty. 4) There is no universal approach Imagine you're trying to persuade two friends to join your Yoga studio. One's never done Yoga before. The other has practiced at another studio for five years. You're not going to give them both the same spiel. It's the same with landing pages. Your words should reflect your customer's mindset. Annie Maguire is a conversion copywriter. The majority of her traffic comes through personal recommendations. They're warm leads looking to solve a problem. So her landing page leads with a solution:
Zenbu is a social media intelligence app. The majority of their traffic comes organically to their blog. They're cold leads unaware any problem exists. So Zenbu's landing page highlights the problem:
5) How to choose a title: Write down 10 titles. Show them to your friends. Ignore their advice. Wait 24 hours. Ask which one they remember. That's your title. Being memorable is more important than being likeable. People jump from site to site and come back to what they remember:
That's all I've got! If you found this useful, I write marketing case studies (like this one) over on Marketing Examples. Any questions, I'll be in the comments :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 10 Jan 2020 03:32 AM PST Have you experienced a situation where you have felt particularly lazy and lethargic but for whatever reason that time you pushed through and did what you needed to do i.e. that task, email or coding and it felt amazing. But next time you fell into old habits. Well this is where the concept of the "Minimal Viable Action" can really help up to keep progressing in whatever you need to achieve. Many times we often procrastinate because we build up beliefs around the difficultly of the task i.e. I really need to do this, but it's going to be hard. We make mountains out of molehills. So we push the task away, hoping to have more motivation next time, or that it will some how get done. Next time instead of pushing it away (which we know doesn't work), ask yourself the following simple question: "What is the smallest step or action I can take to keep progressing in this task?" For example, say you need to write a report, letter or essay. Instead of committing to writing the whole thing, commit to writing one page or one part. Not only does that one page mean you physically get more done then you would have anyway, but this is where the real magic starts to kick in, as many times you actually just keep going as your now motivated and in the flow, and complete the full task anyway. I've lost track the amount of times I couldn't be bothered with the gym but I have gone to do only 2 exercise, so I have at least attempted to go (so I feel better about myself). But I ended up staying and doing some of my most intense full workouts due to the motivation of getting started and then pushing through. As we do this more it becomes easier and easier to push through these self-limiting beliefs. It's a snowball effect. I work with clients on increasing productivity, focus and lowering stress and this exercise has really shown me that the first step is really the most crucial one, no matter how big or small. Start implementing Minimal Viable Actions into your tasks today and see your productivity rise. I'd love to here your thoughts. [link] [comments]  |
| Did any of you entrepreneurs here had a mental block after failing at a business? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 04:52 AM PST I started 2 startups, one in my sophomore year and 1 right after graduating. The first one failed(had to shut it down due to small market and not finding product-market fit + poor team and mediocre execution), 2nd one has flamed out due to govt regulations and co-founder leaving and funding drying up). Now i have no ''real work experience' apart from my 2 internships i did years back. I have product ideas and few traditional online businesses to start but i ABSOLUTELY have no fight left in me to do it. Heck, i can't even muster up the will to design a Shopify webstore and run ad campaigns. I have been sitting in home and doing nothing since past 5 months. All i have is time and nothing elese. Does anyone of you have ever felt this way? if yes then how did you get out of it. [link] [comments]  |
| Plastic Prototyping for Simple Product Posted: 10 Jan 2020 09:50 AM PST Hey r/entrepreneur Team! I am currently in the design phase of a product that will essentially serve as a wall hanger and am looking for advice on how to best go about prototyping/testing. It will consist of three pieces:
None of the pieces will need to move or will undergo any real stress, but will need to hold up color and strength to hold ~3-5 pounds over time. To keep things simple, my initial thoughts were to keep all the parts as plastic and focus on adding design features in theme with the product itself. My question to you all is what might be the best, and most cost-effective, way to begin prototyping these pieces once we finish the design phase? Does it make sense to make a mold for injection molding? Should I use 3D printing for various iterations? If so, what materials/types of machines should I look into? Any help and guidance would be greatly appreciated! Happy to answer any additional questions as well. Thanks so much in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Should I drop out of University? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 07:25 AM PST I just finished my first semester of my business degree did accounting, economics, law, innovation and statistics. During the break I realized I could've learnt this shit for free on the internet (although it might take longer). But still, I already have 6k worth of debt which does my head in when I think about it. Don't get me wrong, I've definitely got something out of it, it's a great way to learn but is it really necessary in the entrepreneurial process?. I already know what I want to do, which is to continue learning python/programming to build a tech startup and invest the money. I'm not learning finance or programming in uni, it's an entrepreneurship degree. The question is do I really need it?. My uni has startup incubators but I wonder if it would be better to just focus directly on my programming and investing skills. Even if I decided to drop out, I risk disappointing my family who are so proud of me. The thing is they didn't have to take on 30k worth of debt and they didn't have the internet back then either. In my opinion they're either brainwashed about how uni is compulsory in life or they just don't understand how different the education system is now. Advice? [link] [comments]  |
| The Myth Of Unique Startup Ideas Posted: 10 Jan 2020 11:24 AM PST Introduction One of the first questions that you get when you tell anyone your startup ideas is "has anyone already done it." Usually, the implication is that if someone has already done it that is a bad thing, that you aren't a "first mover" and that your idea isn't unique and most likely doomed to fail. This discourages a lot of people. It shouldn't. In fact, the opposite is often true. If no one has tested out an idea you are shooting in the dark. You need to build market awareness, test market demand, prove there is a viable business model, A/B test, determine popular content, figure out what websites to advertise on, test ad copy, figure out which backlinks are achievable, and learn from your own mistakes instead of others… all from scratch. It's also interesting that people tend to subject only startups to this way of thinking. No one usually tells someone opening a pizza shop that it's a bad idea because there's millions of pizza shops all over the country. No one tells a patent lawyer that he should probably close up shop because he didn't invent the field of patent law. Some Reasons Competition Is A Good Thing
Conclusion Often when you actually examine a lot of the most successful startups they weren't actually the first movers. Facebook was not the first social network. Myspace and Friendster paved the way for their success. Google was not the first search engine. Yahoo and Alta Vista came before. It's possible that if Google and Facebook were the first of their kind, that they wouldn't have reached the heights of success that they did. If you are forced to figure out too many of the basics on the fly it is difficult to focus on building unique advantages in product or execution. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 10 Jan 2020 01:52 PM PST Hey guys, This question might have been asked before, but I'm going to shoot my shot anyways. As we all know, a lot of "beginners" on Amazon FBA try to resell products on Alibaba. Maybe put a brand logo on it and a nice packaging and sell it 3x the price. This business model is oudated and simply just doesn't work anymore. My question is: [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 10 Jan 2020 01:49 PM PST Hello all my fellow entrepreneurs! First time poster, here. I have an idea that I feel could be a successfull business endeavor (Website & App Based Business) however I dont even know where to begin such as who I would need to talk to because I dont want to just give the idea away, so someone can just steal it. Any websites / reccomendations would be greatly appreciated!! [link] [comments]  |
| How do you reach out to service providers to join your application? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 01:03 PM PST The question I have is for people that want to basically make a one stop shop for services something like fresha or zomato. How do you guys initially reach out to service providers to join your platform? I was working for a start up. I hated that job. I took it for the experience but got nothing. Did a salesman job and went door to door. Is that the best way or is there another way you guys do it? [link] [comments]  |
| How spending $1,000 on Quora Ads helped us generating $12,000+ in B2B revenue? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 12:32 PM PST I and my marketing team are always on the lookout for new and better ways of paid advertising to reap maximum results from our marketing budget. Lately, we were evaluating Quora as an option. The great thing about Quora is that most of the traffic to the website is from search engines and the user already has the desired intent. So, say you want to hire a content writer to come up with an ad copy. What do you do? You Google. You search for, "Where can I find the best ad copywriter," and Quora ranks atop. Screenshot of Google search result: Imgur Once the user clicks on the search result, they are taken to Quora's website where they see our ad. Quora ad screenshot: Imgur Our ad copy is aimed at reiterating the needs of the user, informing them of the benefits they will reap from availing our service and the next step they need to take. After the user clicks on the ad, they are taken to the landing page where we elaborate about our service, why they should choose us, and they are encouraged to fill out our consultation form with their contact details and requirements. As compared to Facebook ads, we got a higher CTR (Click Through Rate) on Quora and Quora ads were also quite cheaper than Google's search ads, although the CTR was lesser in comparison. We found Quora Ads to be a nice middle ground between Facebook and Google. They simplify the first stage of the marketing funnel by bringing in only those users who have the desired internet and are also cheaper at the same time. We used ads - such as the one you saw above - and got 12x returns. We created several campaigns with variations in the campaign objective (Quora offers four choices: conversions, app installs, traffic, awareness), targeting (there are four options here: contextual targeting, audience targeting, behavioral targeting, and broad targeting), target location and device types (mobile or desktop). Each campaign was given a daily cap of $30. We let the campaigns run for a week and monitored them closely. We found that some of the campaigns did not even touch $10/day while others reached their limits within a few hours). The campaigns that were getting the desired response were promoted further. What's our secret sauce? Umm, okay. Here are some things which helped in making our ad campaigns successful: 1. Quora Pixel installationQuora's Pixel is similar to Facebook Pixel and Google's Tag Manager. It is a piece of JavaScript code that allows you to track visitor activity. Quora's Pixel helped us in tracking conversions and creating a remarketing campaign. You can install the Pixel directly on the website or integrate it with Google's Tag Manager. We recommend the latter option since it saves you the hassle of inserting multiple code pieces into your website. Quora Pixel is primarily intended for tracking conversion campaigns but it will be useful to set up Pixel from the get-go so that you can use it later to create remarketing campaigns. Even if you don't run conversion campaigns, the Pixel will continue to collect data for remarketing. 2. Creating separate ad sets for mobile and desktopOne of the issues with Quora's Ad Manager is it doesn't provide separate statistics for mobile and desktop. If you want to run an ad on both the platforms, we would recommend to set up individual ad sets for each. The separate ad sets also helped us in setting different bidding amounts for both small and large screen devices. For the desktop campaigns, our CPC bid was $3.4, while for mobile campaigns, it was $0.4. With those bids, we were able to win about 40% of the auctions. 3. Designing separate ad copies for different geographiesWe created different ads for different countries and varied our ad content across the ads. For example, the ad content for developing countries emphasized more on affordability, while the ad content for developed countries emphasized more on the quality and quickness of our service. This helped in relating better with our audience. 4. Focusing more on Question targeted ads:The question targeted ads of Quora are extremely precise and produce the best results (the ad you saw, in the beginning, was targetted at questions). But the volume of traffic from question-based ads is relatively low and difficult to scale. The question targeted ads require a lot of research effort but once they are set, you can leave them running for a long time as they are slow to produce results but are extremely effective. If you don't have time to manually research for each question, you can enter your target keyword and bulk import all the related questions. Quora caps the number of questions to 50 for every ad set, so if you want to target more questions, create a new ad set within the same campaign. 5. Experiment, experiment, experiment:The key to success on any ad platform is experimentation. The more you experiment, the more likely you are to hit the combination that works for you. As we mentioned before, some of our ads weren't completing their daily budget and meeting the expected goals, so we analyzed those ads, tried to figure out the fault points and made changes to make the ad successful. The changes can be as small as the device type, but it is important to regularly monitor and update your ad. 6. Regular analysis via Google AnalyticsQuora's Ad Manager is rather limited in the statistics it provides, so you shouldn't solely rely on it. We regularly analyzed the performance of our ad campaigns with the help of Quora Ads Manager + Google Analytics. Analytics helped us in gaining deeper insights and in identifying campaigns which were performing poorly due to bad targeting. Google Analytics is a learning curve in itself, our marketing team continues to discover new uses for it but it is an extremely powerful tool for analyzing user behavior, tracking sources and meeting goals. 7. Designing ad in a question-answer styleMany believe that the term 'Quora' is the fusion of Qu(estion) + or + A(nswer). Although that's now true, it aptly summarizes the format of the platform. It turns out that ads that are designed in a question-answer style produced a much better CTR and consequently a lower CPC. if you think about it, it seems natural. After all, when a user is scrolling through their Quora feed, they have a glance at the question and read the answer only if the question appeals to them. Ads that don't follow have a question as the headline tends to be ignored by the user. The question-answer style ads resembled the very format which Quora is built on and that made it appear less intrusive to our target audience. 8. Choosing red color scheme in our image-based adsQuora offers two types of ads: text ads and image ads. Text ads are simpler since you only need to write the textual ad copy. Image ads, on the other hand, are diverse and have more room for experimentation. You can play with the image colors, font-size and much more. We found that using Quora's red color (the red in their logo) as the background produced much more engagement. This was true for both desktop and mobile devices, but the increase in engagement on mobile devices was far more than desktop devices. We believe the red menu bar housing the Quora logo and the tinted red status bar on mobile devices made the ads look more natural, which is why they got higher engagements. (PS: another bonus - Quora's red is #AA2200). 9. Scheduling our campaigns:Depending on the geography you are targeting, you may restrict the time for which the ads to run. For example, if your viewers are likely to be daytime visitors, it is better to shut down the ad for nighttime. Also, preparing an ad campaign in advance (and scheduling it) for special occasions helped us in getting better results. ConclusionQuora Ads is a very interesting and relatively new advertising platform with lots of potential for both B2B and B2C advertising. It has an easier learning curve in comparison to other advertisement platforms and you should be well versed with Quora ads in less than a month. And surprisingly, the traffic we received from Quora Ads was of very high quality -the users filled our lead forms with their detailed requirements, and some of them ended up having a chat with our customer care for over 2 hours. Now that's some insight, isn't it!? Bonus StatisticsQuora Ad Manager screenshot: Imgur As promised, here is a quick summary of our ad campaign: Total Impressions: 217,374 Total Clicks: 608 Total Conversions: 348 Spend: $935 Revenue Generated: $12,100 I hope you liked the insights from my recent marketing campaign. You may view the complete article with images here. Thanks for reading and hopefully all of you will keep crushing it in this new year! [link] [comments]  |
| Do I need to open a company to launch my app? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 12:28 PM PST Hi Reddit, I am a non American living in a third world country and I have an app for the American consumers. Do I need to open a US company in order to market it over there? Do I need to open a company for my app at all? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 10 Jan 2020 12:09 PM PST I'm building the perfect business model - I offer a free service which saves people money when they shop online. I've invented a few revolutionary features that will save people WAY more than current competitors who just use cashback and coupons. This idea is cutting edge and I'll be first to market, but how do I get the word out? I'd like to find a handful of promoters who would be willing to share the message around forums and anywhere they'd like to spread it. I even offer a competitive affiliate referral program - invite anyone who uses the platform (ie, saves money), and you'll get $5. Where should I be looking for promoters who would be interested in this? The site, https://www.checkoutsaver.com is already built and launched, and we have a browser extension coming very soon which makes the process of saving money (so promoters can unlock their referral commission) way easier, and will dramatically increase conversions and payouts for affiliates. [link] [comments]  |
| $20k/month selling walking food tours. Posted: 10 Jan 2020 08:00 AM PST Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview. Today's interview is with Joe Griffith of Wander New Mexico Food Tours, a brand that makes walking food tours Some stats:
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Joe Griffith and I'm the founder and owner of Wander New Mexico Food Tours. We offering walking food tours of downtown Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Never been on a food tour? Imagine visiting a good friend in a city you've never been to. This friend plans an afternoon food crawl, taking you to her favorite restaurants, breweries and culinary spots in the city. Along the way, she introduces you to some of the locals, who give you a sense of the city, the culture, and what it's like to live there. She also introduces you to some of the chefs and owners at the restaurants – they're excited to have you visit, and they take the time to share with you their story and the inspiration behind the dish they've prepared for you. That's our product – an immersive culinary experience that leaves people with a better understanding of Santa Fe and it's a rich history and culinary traditions. I launched our first walking food tour in the winter of 2016. That year we did $300 total in sales (no, I didn't forget any zeros) and operated one tour each week. Today we offer six different tours, operating 17 times/week in three different neighborhoods of Santa Fe and one neighborhood in Albuquerque. In peak months this past summer we did over $30K/mo in sales, and we're growing around 70% year over year. During this time we've garnered several accolades, including ranking as the #1 tour in Santa Fe on TripAdvisor as well as being named by USAToday as one of the "10 Must-Try Food Tours in North America". Enchiladas, posole, and a Silver Coin margarita at Del Charro, a stop on our downtown walking food tour What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I never thought I would have my own business, much less a tourism business. It was born of necessity, a bit of luck, and good timing. First, some important context – this is technically my second attempt at entrepreneurship. Back in 2011, when I was living in Dubai, I had the idea of starting an online food delivery business – basically UberEats, for Dubai. At the time there was only one serious competitor, Foodonclick. I did a lot of the initial legwork in getting a new business started. I bought a domain (yallaeats.ae), had a semi-decent logo designed, built a giant spreadsheet database of menus from 100s of restaurants in Dubai, and got to work on a business plan. I never pulled the trigger on leaving the comfort of my office chair to go and meet with restaurants and sign them up, mostly because I knew deep down inside that I wasn't going to take the risk, quit my job, and jump into the deep end of entrepreneurship. I know what it feels like to have an idea but to delay taking the risk – and I believe it's what's holding back so many potential entrepreneurs out there. I'll return to this in the advice section. Yalla!Eats, my first attempt at starting my own company How did that story end? I never went forward with the delivery company. The parent company of Foodonclick ended up selling for $589M to Delivery Hero, a German company. I'm not saying that could've been me – but hey, it's fun to dream! In 2016, my wife and I decided we wanted to leave our lucrative jobs in management consulting to start a new, quieter and more relaxed life in Santa Fe (she was working for McKinsey, I for Bain & Company). We didn't know what we were going to do for work, but the consultant in me knew that tourism in Santa Fe was a big market and that if I was going to start a company of any sort, tourism would be a smart move. Before moving, I started some initial business planning by researching the tourism market and sizing up the competition. My initial plans were to start a bike tour company – it's something I had done (and loved!) during visits to other countries, and it was a concept that I was eager to introduce to New Mexico. As I worked more on the business plan I realized that starting a walking food tour would a) be in higher demand b) be lower risk, requiring lower investment to start and c) would mean I could share my real passion with people – finding (and eating at) great restaurants. I got to work designing the tour route and recruiting restaurant partners to work with. We moved to Santa Fe in late September 2016, and by late December we had our first paying customers. Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Food tours are pretty straightforward – you come up with a brand, tour name, design the route, sign on restaurant partners, and away you go. As I thought about designing the tour experience, I knew I wanted the experience to be something I would pay for and love to experience. That's been a guiding principle since day one. As a very curious person, I wanted for the tour to leave people with a deeper understanding of our city, its restaurants, and the chefs/restaurateurs/owners behind them. I looked for restaurant partners with food I was excited to eat, but also with people passionate about the food and excited to tell their story. Guiding during the "soft launch" tour with friends and family in November 2016 (I'm on the right) Beyond the product (i.e. tour experience), a lot of time in the initial months was spent on brand and website. I paid to have a logo designed, and I built the website myself using Squarespace. Thankfully, there were plenty of established food tour companies in other cities whose websites I could emulate. Startup costs were minimal. Being a risk-averse person, this is part of what made taking the leap into entrepreneurship palatable for me. The main expenses, in the early days, were the logo, website, and bookkeeping. Describe the process of launching the business.The launch consisted of a "dry-run" tour for friends and family, followed by my first tour with actual paid customers. I'll never forget that tour – it was New Year's Eve of 2016, and the tour was a mix of some of my wife's family and their friends, and then my first actual paying customers, an unsuspecting family of five on vacation in Santa Fe. Our launch was made easier by the fact that several of the restaurants I was working with were already a part of a food tour with operators in Santa Fe. For those restaurants that hadn't been part of a food tour before, the dry-run gave us a chance to work out the kinks and test out the route before launching more substantially. One thing that wasn't intentional, but worked fairly well, was launching during the slow season. After a tour on New Year's Eve, it wasn't until February that we had the next paying customer. At first, sales were very, very, very slow. This ramp-up period is a challenge and something we're currently going through with our expansion to Albuquerque. As much as you can try to have a solid marketing and PR plan in place in the months and weeks leading up to launch, we've seen that it can take months before word of mouth (i.e. TripAdvisor reviews) get out and people actually find our product as part of their research in preparing to visit a city. The reason I say that this worked well is that I was able to use the slow season to work out kinks, not only with the product but also with our approach to marketing and customer acquisition. In the first several months I'd say 90% of marketing spend was wasted. Initially, most of marketing spend went towards printing and distributing rack cards, which ended up being a waste of money. I also spent a bit on un-targeted Facebook ads, which was even more of a waste of money. Since then I've learned a lot more about what works and what doesn't when it comes to marketing - more on this later. Our first rack cards (from early 2017). These were a big waste of money. Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?I like to think about customer acquisition by looking at the cost to acquire each customer (CAC, or customer acquisition cost) and the value of each customer (CLTV, or customer lifetime value). Let's start with the easier one first – CLTV. CLTV is a function of how much each customer spends on a transaction, and how many transactions you can expect from a given customer over their lifetime. Our business and product are unique in that 90%+ of customers are one-time. Not because they didn't love their experience and become a promoter, but because of the nature of tourism. Most tourists visit a location, check it off their bucket list, and visit somewhere else next year. Given this, we have to fight hard to acquire customers. Further complicating matters is our average order value – around $300 – means that our budget for cost per conversion is lower than many businesses in other industries. So, let's say our CLTV is $333 ($300 divided by 90% non-return rate). The other lever we can pull is customer acquisition cost (CAC). This is how much you spend on marketing in order to drive one transaction (the lower the better). Although we're much better now than when we started, there is still a ton of opportunity for improvement. As a general rule of thumb, I aim for a $30 CAC (10% marketing spend as a percentage of sales), but in practice, this varies greatly by marketing channel. Below is an overview of the various marketing channels I currently rely on, the pros/cons of each, and what has and hasn't worked. What has worked for us (in order of priority): · TripAdvisor: the obvious industry heavyweight, and the go-to for many tour operators. (+) it's the go-to resource for many travelers. (-) it isn't effective until you climb the rankings · Blog: this has been an inexpensive way to get discovered by folks researching / planning their trip to Santa Fe. (+) it's free, or low-cost, depending on whether you write the content yourself or hire a freelance writer (-) if your content doesn't relate to your product, or you aren't good at getting people in the first stage of your sales funnel, you can end up with a bunch of traffic that bounces · Google Adwords: thankfully, the only time people search several keywords related to our businesses ("Santa Fe food tour") (+) their intent to buy is pretty high. We've had success here, but unfortunately (-) the volumes are limited · Facebook ads: in the first year, (-) I wasted a considerable amount of money with lookalike audiences and other attempts to reach new customers. Facebook has proved effective only when it's directed at (+) retargeting visitors to the blog. · Local partners/referrals: there are a few local tourism-related sites that I advertise / list on, some paid, and some not. When we first started, the local tourism and state-level tourism bureaus were great places to be listed for free. (+) intent to buy is very high, but (-) volumes are limited What hasn't worked for us: Rack cards: you know these – the flyers in the racks at airports, hotels, tourist rest stops, etc… When I first started we tried this, first with a traditional vendor, and secondly, with a local vendor that specializes in a smaller format, "concierge" cards meant to be placed at the desk of concierges. My hunch on why these don't work - the majority of my customers plan and book their tours around a month in advance. With rack cards, folks don't see these until they've already arrived in town, and it's tough to convince people to spend $100/person on a food tour at the last minute. Instagram: this will probably come as a surprise, but simply having an active presence on Instagram hasn't led to very many directly attributable ticket sales. We're still active for brand and image reasons, but isn't a big focus. Print ads: maybe this work, but given my limited budget I haven't tried. When I look at the cost and think about how many conversions will result, I have a hard time making the math work. Concierge/hotel word of mouth: when I first launched I went around to all of the hotels in town, introduced myself, and took time to meet face to face with many of the hotel concierges. This paid off in a few instances (one hotel, in particular, sent me many bookings), but again I've found it's tough to convince folks to sign up for our tours after they've already arrived in town. There's always more that we could be doing - some of the areas where I'd like to improve our email marketing and in increasing our CLTV by introducing non-tour, ancillary revenues (merchandise, for example). How are you doing today and what does the future look like?We're doing really well! In terms of profitability, we've been profitable since nearly day 1 (the benefits of a nearly entirely variable cost business) and in terms of growth, we're almost doubling revenues each year. Beyond the financials there are a few other things I look at to measure progress:
In terms of future growth, the main focus will be geographic expansion. We just launched Albuquerque earlier this year, and I'm currently researching and evaluating other small to mid-size cities with a great food scene and a walkable downtown area. Colorado, Arizona, and Texas are interesting (and nearby), but I'm also casting a wide net and looking at locations as far as Vermont. There's also of course still more potential in Santa Fe. In addition to offering more frequency of our existing tour products, we also might launch one or two new tours next year. And I'm also exploring online retail/merchandise, as well as brainstorming possible ways to monetize all of the non-food tour related blog traffic that we're seeing. Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?There are three big lessons I've learned since starting Wander New Mexico:
What platform/tools do you use for your business?Although I try to use as much technology as possible in the business, outside of our reservations software most of the platforms/tools I use as the same that probably 95% of other startups are using – you won't find many surprises. The core of our operations is an online booking software for tour and activity operators called Peek Pro. This main function of Peek is to receive customer bookings, email customers with their booking confirmation, and provide guides with their tour assignments and tour manifests. I've been using them since Day 1, and while I'm generally happy, I would encourage anyone thinking about starting a food tour to also consider Peek's main competitor, FareHarbor. Both Peek and FareHarbor charge a percentage of sales, so while it's very cost-effective in the early days, I have lately started to consider switching to a fixed cost platform such as Xola. Two others that should be on anyone's shortlists when conducting a vendor evaluation are Bokun (now owned by TripAdvisor), and EzTix. Another tool that's been great for us is Jive, which we use for the phone system. Jive is basically Google Voice on steroids – probably the feature I love most is that both I and my customer service rep receive calls simultaneously, and we can see which option someone chose in the phone tree (which helps us prioritize which calls to immediately answer). Since each tour guide is paying restaurants directly, we have a fairly significant volume of expenses. I use Expensify for this, and to pay the guides their fees. I have a love-hate relationship with Expensify – while some of the functionality is great, and it's the best solution I've found for our particular needs, I've found their customer service is horrendous/next to non-existent. Everything else I use is pretty standard – Squarespace for the website, Upwork for finding niche technical expertise, Quickbooks Online for bookkeeping, Hotjar for UI/UX work, a bunch of Google Sheets, GSuite for email, etc… What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?I really enjoy meeting with other business owners and entrepreneurs in person. Where I live there are a number of entrepreneur meetups and speaker series, and I've found these events to be a great chance to take a step back and think about my business in a more reflective setting. Sometimes hearing from others about their business, challenges they're facing, or how they've approached things, even if it's an entirely different industry, is helpful for me as I think about my business. One resource I can recommend (and put a plugin for) is a project I'm in the early stages of working on The Food Tour Playbook. I'm the process of compiling a practical handbook of everything we've learned during our journey and is meant to serve as a playbook for others looking to start their own food tours. Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Most of this advice is fairly well-worn, but they are all the points that have been very helpful to me in the last several years:
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?The short answer is yes, I'm always on the lookout for qualified, passionate folks in a number of different areas. A few specific things: · Food tour entrepreneurs/city managers in other cities where we are considering an expansion. I'm most interested in Tier 2 cities (1M population or less) with more than 2M visitors annually, a walkable downtown area, and a great food scene · Current food tour owner/operators interested in selling a stake in or exiting their business · Tour guides in cities where we have existing operations (currently Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM) Where can we go to learn more?
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: 10 Jan 2020 11:44 AM PST It's a pretty simple question, but I have multiple businesses. They all have basically the same set up and often there are like multiple emails (contact, info, personal, etc) and thus a billion different sub accounts for everything. I deal with this by creating chrome accounts for each new email (I use GSUITES) but it is getting a bit overwhelming as I use the same computer for each business and am often jumping between multiple business emails in the same couple of minutes. I considered like creating different COMPUTER accounts, but it gets even more annoying logging IN and OUT to do small things. Any suggestions? I guess the same goes for having one phone or multiple phones per business, etc. Any resources or ideas? [link] [comments]  |
| What is the best print on demand website? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 11:28 AM PST I am currently looking at Teespring, Printify, Pritful. Which one should I choose? And is there any that allow to use my own domain(no hosting) for the shop? [link] [comments]  |
| How much should I charge to correct spelling mistakes? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 11:14 AM PST I'm thinking about starting a small business at school where I would correct spelling mistakes in essays for other students. I'm not sure how much to charge though. Should I charge people based on how many pages their project has? Instead of pages, should it be based on the number of words? I don't know what is considered a reasonable price for such a job. What are your suggestions? [link] [comments]  |
| NEED HELP! Freight Forwarders?? New small business owner Posted: 10 Jan 2020 11:13 AM PST Hey! I started a new clothing and apperal business and I am based in Canada. The supplier I am working with is in the United States and they cannot ship directly to Canada. The way they can ship to me is if I have a freight forwarder who they can ship my packages to in the US and that freight forwarder will then ship it to me in Canada. So it would go like this: Supplier (in the US) --> freight forwader (int he US) --> me (in Canada) Any recommendations?? My shipments wont be huge so they need to be willing to ship smaller packages. (like 10-30 tshirts). [link] [comments]  |
| Start-up Stalled, Can't Find New Job - Suggestions/help? Posted: 10 Jan 2020 11:09 AM PST I've been working on my startup concept for ~2 years. It moved slowly, but has no become a side project at best. Meetings take months to turn into something real, very few players who are 'open minded' enough. Regardless, I'm looking for a job that is somewhat suited to me with very little success. When interviewing, many have trouble understanding the world of a solo entrepreneur, and thus, hurts my ability to get offers. I've been told to change job titles, make it look like others were involved, all to make it seem different and more palatable. I worked in top tier management consulting for 3.5 years, though without industry specialization. I have BS in engineering, and MBA in finance. However, many roles I apply for are too junior (they tell me this) or I don't have enough experience in one industry (healthcare, fin-tech, etc.) to apply for the right level of roles. I feel that my startup work is valid. I taught myself to code in python, led outsourced development team of commercial software, did vast amounts of data analyics and market research including interviews with execs. I created a novel way of business that would be very profitable, but just didn't get to test the product with real clients (very unique situation requirements). Any suggestions on things I may be doing wrong, or that can be done differently would be appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 10 Jan 2020 09:37 AM PST As a first-time entrepreneur, this whole experience has been like the wildest rollercoaster ride - days of extreme highs (winning key partnerships and hiring all star talent) and lows (seeing investors commit one day just to pull the offer as we're about to sign). So finally releasing our service to the market and testing product-market fit feels AMAZING after months of planning, researching and prototyping. Can't say our app, a voice-activated bookkeeper, will be a huge success but I'm glad I won't have anymore regrets by not launching. In case you want to take a look at our landing page, your feedback would be much appreciated: https://Launch.getreconcile.com [link] [comments]  |
| I build a profitable company from scratch which employees 15 people Posted: 10 Jan 2020 05:21 AM PST Hello, I'm Arslan a software developer who build-out a profitable outsourcing business, additionally, I owe a successful app fitness portfolio. I have seen a lot of great people with brilliant ideas who failed, I have a lot of experience with production software. Long story short, tell me your idea if it's interesting I might even invest in it, or if someone wants to see how much their idea would cost you can get an approximation at our website. [link] [comments]  |
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