Thank you Thursday! - (July 09, 2020) Entrepreneur |
- Thank you Thursday! - (July 09, 2020)
- The problem with most start-ups
- WTF Client Truly Made Me Sad
- Business is a roller-coaster
- Looking for a business idea? Here are three companies that are ready for disruption!
- Register your domains anywhere but Godaddy.com
- I found an interesting person on youtube that I now follow for entrepreneurship.
- Sorry, Not Interested... (Plus You're Boring)
- How Zillow Makes Money
- What do you do when the domain name you want is taken?
- Currently writing a 'self-help' book about getting your financial shit together, afraid of burnout.
- I feel trapped in generational poverty and I don’t know how to break the chain.
- Should I seek ecommerce investors on this new venture?
- Free Startup Pitch Deck Builder Tool Needs Users and Feedback
- 4 Resources To Help You Grow Your Online Startup��
- A conversation with Joe Hollier, founder of the Light Phone. A minimalistic phone that respects your time & privacy.
- Got laid off during COVID, made my own Cashback site
- Recommended inbound phone number provider in the UK?
- not the best experience with 3dcart.... is shopify the way to go?
- Is it possible to never succeed?
- In theory, whats it worth to completely empty a large full garbage dump and put 100% of it to use as storage of potential energy? No atom is garbage if piled into a mountain and on demand trade that potential energy for rising of something else.
- How much to charge for advertising?
- Question About Funding Product Prototype/Development With Pre-Sales
- How to set up free ebook after purchasing one product?
| Thank you Thursday! - (July 09, 2020) Posted: 09 Jul 2020 06:08 AM PDT Your opportunity to thank the /r/Entrepreneur community by offering free stuff, contests, discounts, electronic courses, ebooks and the best deals you know of. Please consolidate such offers here! Since this thread can fill up quickly, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| The problem with most start-ups Posted: 09 Jul 2020 07:51 AM PDT Preface - I've owned, run and help grow dozens of businesses in the past 20+ years. This is a general observation I've had with many businesses especially startups. I've been through all the stages Employee/Self Employed/Business Owner and find myself at the investor stage of life. As an investor I find the following is a real concern with most people who "knock my door". Buts it's not confined to just start ups. So I offer it to help with your business idea. A lot of business ideas are a solution in search of people with that specific problem. However, you want to build a business around an existing problem that a whole bunch of people have. People rarely jump on innovative ideas, it takes time to change behavior and is expensive to market behavioral change. I call it "The Friendly Advice Problem"... imagine an acquaintance who you were on nodding terms with, came to you and said they thought you had a problem. Described their thinking and why they came to their conclusion. Then explain exactly how they could help you solve it. If you hadn't recognized what they said as a "problem" what would you think? Now, imagine they then said... "and for only $XXXX I can solve that problem for you", how do you feel now? That's what most businesses market their goods and services like. They find a problem then go out and try to convince the market place that their solution is a "great idea"... no amount of bashing the customer over the head will force them to change their behavior. You have to find people who already know they have a problem and are seeking a solution to it. To those people you can sell to all day long... So, go find people with a real world problem and solve it. Have them tell you EXACTLY why it is a problem and the headaches it causes them. Then ask them "if we solve that problem, how much would you pay for us to fix it?"... then go make it work! When my kids come to me and say "I've had a great idea", they are sick of me saying "no, you had an idea, the market tells you if it's great". Sure, sweeping statement, but don't get blinded by your own greatness, the market may be blind to it... sometimes willfully so! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2020 05:37 AM PDT I have recently started a web development business with my wife. We have built a couple of mockup websites on our portfolio to showcase our work. In May 2020 we had talked to two clients. One was a friend, who said that she wanted a website for her cleaning business, but then she came back a week later after we developed the website and said her husband said no. The other one actually seemed serious. We had truly landed our first real client. It was a one man construction company owned by a 19 year old my wife had found through a shout out on Instagram. We made our first big error by charging way too little for too big of a promise. Here's where the trouble started: First off the consultation call started out a bit strange. Whenever we would ask him a question he would always answer as if he didn't know. What type of services does your company entail: "uhhhh uhhhh construction" well what type of construction: "hmmmm roofing, trailer for hire". Things like this. When we asked him for example websites he had in mind, he did not have any to provide. When we asked him for a company bio, company statistics, and company information. It was not provided. We had to write it all ourselves. He only provided really broad information. It was kind of weird that he didn't know much about how to explain his own company, but we decided to proceed anyway. We decided to create two mockups in the beginning of the project and had him choose. At around half way during the project, we made him check over to project to ensure he is still satisfied with it. He stated it looked amazing and our work is well appreciated. Well later on, a week and a half later, we are approaching completion and it's time for him to confirm the things he would like to change and then mark the website as complete. My wife had reached out to him 3 times and we received no response, as she proceeded to reach out again, he finally responded with changes he wanted. We then requested that he can recheck over the website. Two weeks have gone past and we haven't heard from him. Multiple outreaches had been done once again and still no reply. I then sent a very forward text requesting changes, if not then payment. He then replied and requested more changes. After this, we requested him to review it again and submit the payment. Again no reply. He would constantly read our texts, but not reply. We had sent out 5-6 texts in total with no reply. We thought he was having a little buyers remorse. So then I had sent him another text asking if he would like to just cancel. He then replies that the website looks great and perfect. He will send the payment my way. After waiting and waiting once again for a week, I received no payment. I sent out another text follow up, then he hits me with this: "Hey, I've been doing some research and looking at different roofing companies websites and I want to do some more research before putting up a official website. You guys do great work just looking for something a little different. Let me know what I owe and I'll send it your way. If you could make sure the website isn't up that would be great." I asked him what he meant by this and if he would like us to adjust the website or go a different route and he chose to go a different route, however he still stated he would pay us. Well it's morning and I still haven't received payment, or anything. I asked him again if he was going to send the payment and he said yes, but I still haven't received anything. I also asked him what we could do different but he totally ignored that. I know him paying doesn't sound just, but per our contract rules, if he confirms and signs off the project as complete, he will need to pay us. IMO I think we built an amazing website, a $1000 website for $200 dollars. I just don't understand what we did wrong. It's really gotten me down and depressed. Two websites but zero fulfillment in them. I know business is business and you shouldn't put feeling and emotion into it, but I just don't understand it sometimes. Is this just how some clients are? Or did I enter into this market at a bad time? Edit: I forgot to say that I did charge half payment up front. Sorry about that. Thank you for your time guys! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2020 05:05 AM PDT Running a business is a funny old thing. Every day is a roller coaster of 'yes this is brilliant! I've got this nailed!' and 'oh my god I'm so screwed!'. Sometimes it's an hourly change! It's something that those more experienced in running a business will tell you but you don't really pay much attention. Probably because of the 'my business will be different' mentality. But also because of the addage that 'no good advice is free' (is that an addage? I kind of just made it up but I feel like it's something). I won't lie, being your own boss is epic. Case in point - I'm writing this sat in a local cafe, sipping on a hot chocolate, feeling content because I've just signed on a large client and I finished my work at 11am. But yesterday I spent the entire day stressed, wondering how I was going to pay both myself, that holiday we've just booked and an invoice next month. What you don't see while I'm sat happily spooning feeding myself marshmallow from my drink is :
A lot (not all) of folks here have a goal of starting their own business. And please go for it with everything you've got and don't ever give up! But to completely contradict what I said earlier about offering free advice... It's not easy. You will have amazing days but you will also have really bad days. So when things are going well, allow yourself a treat and some down time (seriously, it's crucial). But also don't rest on your laurels because tomorrow you could be back in that 'oh my god!' place again. Whatever happens and whether you're feeling pretty good or like your back is against the wall just remember this one rule. Every day make sure you're making some kind of progress. However small just make sure you're slightly further forward than you were yesterday. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for a business idea? Here are three companies that are ready for disruption! Posted: 09 Jul 2020 05:12 AM PDT How did you find these companies?Every week, I find VC-backed or profitable, upmarket companies that bootstrappers can compete with. Here's how it works:
Sound good? Let's get started. (Warning: This is a 15+ minute read. Brace yourself!) Opportunity 1: ReviewTrackers"We like ReviewTrackers, but we have also recently started using some other tools that also include review tracking. We plan to evaluate those before renewing our ReviewTrackers contract." Details:Estimated revenue range: $10M to $50M Number of employees: 51 to 100 Funding raised: $17.7M Founded: May 25, 2012 Metrics[2]: Monthly web traffic: 129,194 visitors Monthly web traffic growth: 14.91% Price[3]: Custom quote only, but plans used to begin at $49/month. Opportunity Size: Indie Hacker This is an opportunity that is of moderate ambition, relying on a minimum market size to drive out bigger competition. Summary:ReviewTrackers began in 2012 as a VC-backed company focusing on review management and review generation for small and medium businesses. [4] Their customers love them for their powerful consolidation of different review sites and custom reporting alerts. This product is most frequently used by businesses with multiple locations, such as franchises. Market Background:Review management and review solicitation are life-or-death activities in many service industries, including hotels, restaurants, and residential cleaning. Services such as ReviewTrackers are essential for businesses in the service industry, and, by extension, agencies that handle online interactions for these companies. Products in this market tend to have one of two customer audiences:
Be careful when investigating this area, as the two have notably customer bases, features, and prices. Competitor Analysis:Competitors targeting agencies include:
Competitors targeting business directly include:
The self-serve market is comfortable anchored to the $40 - $50 price range, and another product could fit there comfortably. Downmarket Opportunity:This is the classic example of a niche opportunity. The major players in the market reach their size by needing to appeal to all the users in the market. By specializing your positioning to a particular type of service, you would be able to hyper-focus on a specific group of people, find them easily online, and incorporate niche review sites that only their niche will care about. Which market you chose should depend on your own personal connections, which niche you would most prefer to serve, etc. However, I'll use a specific niche for the example: Reputation Management for Chiropractors. (Looking for an example of this strategy in the market? Check out ReviewRight: Reputation Management for Dentists [11]) USP:Out unique selling point is a simple, traditional niche offer: We are specifically for chiropractic businesses, and we offer review management on niche sites that are specific to the chiropractic industry, as well as the general, more popular ones. MVP:An MVP could look like the following:
Note that we don't need to offer integrations yet (where you can reply directly in the application). That can come later
Next Steps:If you want to pursue this idea, you should investigate the following: 1) How can I reach chiropractors? What channels can I reach them through? Likely answers include online communities (Reddit and Facebook), cold email, LinkedIn, organizing online webinars, and paid advertising. You should investigate these channels and see if you are able to get traction in any one. 2) Which service are chiropractors already using, and why? How much do they tend to pay? This allows you to identify any other notable competition, as well as build a roadmap of critical features for beyond the MVP. Opportunity 2: TapInfluence"I find the price is a little outrageous for a small agency. The platform has been designed for enterprise level purchasing and re-licensing out to clients - this is really prohibitive when first trying to sell the product to clients as we can't show them results without huge initial investment." [1] Background[2]: Estimated revenue range: $10M to $50M Number of employees: 51 to 100 Funding raised: $22.7M Founded: June 1, 2009 Metrics[2]: Monthly web traffic: 30,624 visitors Monthly web traffic growth: 14.02% Price[3]: $10,000/month .Opportunity Size: Bootstrapper This is an opportunity that is of large ambition, best suited for someone willing to commit over multiple years. Summary:TapInfluence is an Influencer Marketing software, whose main pitch is that it allows you to find and buy influencers for campaigns, all on one proprietary platform. Customers of TapInfluence love the ease of use for finding influencers, while agencies in particular love the ability to sell it to clients. [4] Market Background:TapInfluence, previously named BlogFrog, began to exist in its modern form in 2013. [5] Their main pitch is that they are able to maintain a list of 100,000 influencers for brands to connect with. (Click the link to see Rustin Banks, the Co-Founder of TapInfluence, on how the influencer market works, and how TapInfluence operates) [6] The influencer market is huge, rapidly changing, and growing over time. Click the link to take an in-depth look at the influencer market data from 2016. [7] Competitor Analysis:There are a large number of competitors that do not offer a self-serve option for agencies. These agencies are all trying as rapidly as possible to move towards the "Holy Grail" in this industry, which is a product that offers the following:
(Want to know more about this? Check out the link here: [8] ) "Hopefully one day creating an influencers campaign is as easy as setting a facebook ads campaign."[9]
The following companies aim to be the all-in-one solution listed above, and have custom-only pricing:
These companies, on the other hand, offer self-serve plans:
Downmarket Opportunity:The lower-end of the market is wide open for a white-label "Land and Expand" opportunity at the small agency level. Land and Expand is a strategy where you launch a small initial offering to a smaller audience, and slowly grow to compete in a bigger niche. This is a good strategy for when the highest-level of the competition is too stiff to break into, but the lowest-level of competition is quite weak. A white-label product is a product that your customers can customize the logo and branding (as well as the subdomain it lives on) to appear as though it is software owned by the marketing agency. It is then resold to the customer at a premium. By targeting small marketing agencies of 1-5 people who want to add influencer marketing to their services, you can launch a competitor product in the low-end of the market.From there, slowly expand your product offerring to vertically integrate into all five aspects of the influencer campaign management process. USP:The unique selling point is to explain that you are a company that specifically works with small marketing agencies to enable them to run influencer campaigns for clients via white-label software. Most agency-focused solutions are incredibly expensive, in the range of thousands of dollars per month. Instead, you can offer a more reasonable amount for a small agency, and use that time to grow and expand the project to be able to service larger agencies. (Note: There is opportunity here to run a service-oriented SaaS model, where you offer up-front training and guidance for as a productized service, with the SaaS fee trailing afterwards). MVP:The MVP might look something like: 1)A facetable list of influencers (see "Next Steps" on how to acquire this data) 2) White-label: Ability to customize domain, branding, and logo 3) Profile analysis - Investigate if an influencer's following is real and heavily engaged. Note: This can be done in a more niched way by focusing on one particular medium, such as only YouTube influencers. However, doing this would require you to likely adjust your strategy to target individual brands instead of agencies, which is why this concept hasn't been covered in depth. Next Steps:1) Create a list of small marketing agencies, either via LinkedIn or through some other curated list. These should be easy to find, since marketing agencies want companies to be able to get in contact with them. 2) Reach out and offer to interview for a company round-up that you will be publishing to your audience. This allows you to do customer research while still offering something of value. (You can mention you will publish the article to IndieHackers, which is home to tens of thousands of entrepreneurs who may be interested in such a campaign). 3) Investigate the following questions:
4) Acquire the data: The majority of the industry uses a database called Demographics Pro, which offers API access to their information. This is also what TapInfluence uses for thier software (at least, as of 2015.) [14] You could either utilize this data or find a different source for the list and attributes of influencers. Opportunity 3: BugHerd"It removes any ambiguity about bugs and feature requests. Being able to annotate a comment directly on a live / staging website, is a huge perk and something that I now cannot live without."
Basic Info:Background[2]: Estimated revenue range: $10M to $50M Number of employees: 11 to 50 Funding raised: $1.5M Founded: 2011 Metrics[2]: Monthly web traffic: 138,468 visitors Monthly web traffic growth: -12.05% Price[3]: $39-189/month Opportunity Size: IndieHacker This is an opportunity that has limited technical complexity, a clear niche with visible channels, and does not involve incredibly stiff competition, making it a great product for an IndieHacker-type entrepreneur. Summary:BugHerd is a visual feedback tool for websites. Their tagline is, "It's like using sticky-notes to capture and pin client feedback directly onto a page." Customers love BugHerd for it's ability to easily get feedback from clients, and some customers are even using it to help generate feedback from QA testing. [4] BugHerd is unique in this list, as it originally was a VC-backed company, having raised almost one million dollars, before their upmarket play crumbled and they were forced to scrap two projects and repay their investors. [5] As such, this opportunity is not necessarily a downmarket play of a VC-backed company, but an alternative positioning play to a cashflow-positive one. Market Background:The user / site feedback market has been around for a while with a wide diversity of tools available. No single product has been able to dominate the market, which makes it unique when compared to the other markets in this analysis. Below are the two main competitors: Competitor Analysis:
Downmarket Opportunity:There is a strong opportunity for a positioning play here. A strong focus on the QA niche is a promising opportunity for a competing software. Currently, all of the major projects attempt to appeal to multiple niches, notably agencies. The mix of their positioning prevents them from diving deep into what would make the ideal QA experience. The QA market itself is already worth over 5 billion dollars, and is still growing rapidly. [8] As more and more companies begin to take a OpEx hit in this category, solutions to improve workflow will naturally improve in value as well. As such, a fast follower to BugHerd and Marker.io can quickly reach feature parity by focusing only on the features that QA want/need. USP:The unique selling-point of this product is simple: You aim to make the manual UI-testing process as efficient as possible. While manual testing is being reduced throughout the industry as a result of increased DevOps practices (such as CI/CD), manual testing remains a large part of the testing process for critical flows. By positioning this product as a solution for QA teams to more easily return feedback to developers, the market and value-add is clear. MVP:The basic MVP can look like the following: 1) A javascript snippet that can be inserted into a page, rendering a toolbar. That toolbar will communicate with a service and store the user's feedback, along with a screenshot. 2) An integration with some project management tool, such as Jira, which if enabled will automatically create a ticket in Jira. There is much more potential here than the MVP. Some additional features include:
Next Steps:The next steps for this task is to communicate with software development teams, such as agencies, that have QA departments, and validate this angle of approach. My preferred method to do this is via the "Company Roundup" hack I mentioned in the TapInfluence section above. Once you are in contact with companies, you'll want to ask these questions:
Based on their responses, you'll gain an understanding on the language, pain, and context around this problem. Then, assuming signs look good, you can either pre-sell the product for increased validation, or go straight to building the MVP. There are likely many channel plays for this product. You can attempt to reach QA directly via inbound marketing, such as content creation and SEO, or you could target agencies directly via an outreach approach. A combination of both will likely be needed in the beginning. If you liked this post, and are an entrepreneur who is serious about finding a viable business idea, I'd love for you to check out my website: softwareideas.io. Every Thursday, I release a newsletter just like this one, available exclusively to those subscribers. I'll also eventually be doing a free version of this newsletter, so stay tuned! [link] [comments]  |
| Register your domains anywhere but Godaddy.com Posted: 09 Jul 2020 11:44 AM PDT Many know this, they pay a lot for the marketing but their service and prices are absolutely terrible. I used to have 300 domains with them and move almost all of them out. I still have a few left and got a notice today to renew one, $50CAD for two years $30CAD for privacy, which literally costs nothing on their end. They used to be cheap but the now use price gouging tactics and prey on new users and/or those that have been there for a long time. And now I'm trying to delete private registration from my cart and it won't let me. Great. [link] [comments]  |
| I found an interesting person on youtube that I now follow for entrepreneurship. Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:03 PM PDT Hi just found a channel that I am certainly interested to see where it goes. As an entrepreneur myself I like seeing others approaches on becoming their own boss. Nothing like working for yourself, that feeling of accomplishment. The best thing is its a new channel and I am going to entertain myself with some new creators as I am home all the time now anyways. [link] [comments]  |
| Sorry, Not Interested... (Plus You're Boring) Posted: 09 Jul 2020 09:59 AM PDT Jeff sees your link... He's intrigued... He clicks it. Your beautifully designed site opens up. "I like the colours!" Jeff thinks to himself. 5 SECONDS LEFT Jeff looks at the tagline on your site and is confused... "I don't get it." he thinks. 4 SECONDS LEFT Jeff glances the description of your product when his inner voice says... "Huh... I kinda get it? I think?" 3 SECONDS LEFT Jeff scrolls down to the images of your product. He's got an icy, blank stare on his face... Almost as if he's growing tired and bored. 2 SECONDS LEFT As Jeff scrolls down your page... His face is definitely starting to SCREAM "I'm Bored." 1 SECOND LEFT Jeff's right eyebrow flinches up and down, unconsciously. He kind of gets your product... At least, the features of it... But he thinks "Eh, is this really useful for me? Do I want to pay for this?" 0 SECONDS LEFT Before Jeff figures out if your product is right for him or not... He has an AMAZINGLY exciting epiphany. "I wonder if my favourite YouTuber has uploaded a new video?" And as he closes the tab with your site on it, with ZERO remorse... He thinks "Sorry, not interested... (Plus you're boring)" And just like that... Another potential customer of yours goes away. All that preparation you did... Weeks... If not MONTHS of trying to get your landing page looking PERFECT... And Jeff (our typical human being) gives you JUST 5 seconds of his day to impress him. After that 5 seconds, if you don't do it... He's GONE. 5 seconds and Jeff went from potential customer - to "Sorry, NOT interested.". You might have seen the study a few years ago that mentioned the average attention span of humans has reduced to less than the attention span of a GOLDFISH... So what is an entrepreneur to do? Should we give up? Should we flush our dreams down the toilet? Should we pack it up and head to the nearest office job? How can we make sure the people that land on our website will convert into loyal customers - as often as possible? (Whether its Jeff... Lucy... Samuel... Stacy... Steve (and on and on...) There's actually a REALLY simple method to it. (And you DON'T need to be a Copywriting expert or anything) Here's how... You see, when Jeff lands on your page... There's only ONE subconscious question on his mind. "How will this help me LEVEL UP?" That's it. And it's not just Jeff... It's ALL humans. Me... You... Your family... Your friends... Whenever we see a product, this is the only question at the front of our minds... "How will this help me LEVEL UP?" But we often default to this following mistake when we try to sell our product... We tell the customer what our product does. Which is a BIG mistake. What we should do instead is this... Tell the customer how they will LEVEL UP with your product. Our job as entrepreneurs is to tell them that. Over and over again. It's the old "Sell me this pencil" example that sales people love using. Don't tell them: "This pencil lets you make notes on paper! You can also rub out the lines with an eraser, because it's made of graphite. It also is long lasting, so you don't need to worry about buying another pencil for a long time!" Instead, tell them: "This is the pencil you'll use to write the business plan you've been meaning to! And if it succeeds, this business will take you further than you EVER imagined. More money than you know WHAT to do with! Schmoozing with elites at fancy exclusive parties! NEVER having to worry about another bill payment! And it all starts HERE today... With this single pencil. This single pencil will get you the life you DESERVE... The life you were DESTINED to live." Here's another quick example, with an imaginary product... Say this product is an analytics platform tailored for content creators. Don't tell them about all the various numbers they can track and whatnot (at least not in the beginning). Tell them how this product will get them THOUSANDS of new subscribers every week... And how they can make SO much more MONEY through big brands wanting to work with them... And yada, yada, yada. You get it, I'm sure. Now after the big pitch telling them how they will LEVEL UP with your product... Of course, you need to get show the features of your product. But always... ALWAYS... Lead with telling the customer... How THEY will LEVEL UP with your product. If every single line of your initial pitch should addresses that question... I assure you, you'll have a MUCH easier time selling. Cheers, Bezan P.S. join my free newsletter to get more of these methods to LEVEL UP your entrepreneurial skills BEYOND your WILDEST dreams! See what I did there ;)? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2020 04:10 PM PDT I noticed that Zillow's been discussed a lot on here, so I thought I'd give my own analysis on the platform. Perhaps this can be helpful for all of you looking for new marketing and business strategies. BackgroundThe platform was founded by two ex-Expedia guys back in 2005. So that's the context + mindset they brought to this (making marketplaces). At the time, they had just sold off Expedia, they were looking to buy a house and couldn't get the info they needed to make informed decisions. So they're like, "Yo, why not just solve this problem?" Initially, Zillow started off as a place to just find super-local listings and connect with a real estate agent and a mortgage broker. This is all they were for a long time. In as early as 2006, they started collecting data from agents on the homes they sold. By 2020 they had data on 110 million homes - selling price, home details, neighborhood deets etc. They use all this to create an estimated home value for any home in the US - called Zestimate. They also use these to programmatically make instant offers on homes that they then flip for a profit (called iBuying). This is a lot of data. Now, with that being said, just how big is Zillow? In 2019, the website reached 8+ Bn user visits a year across all it's online properties. Not only that, it had $2.74 Bn revenues in 2019 -- about half of this is from Internet business (46%), about 50% is iBuying, and a little bit is SaaS (Software as a Service) revenue in the Mortgage industry. Ways Zillow Makes a ProfitHow does Zillow make money? Ads, iBuying, and some SaaS. Ads: When you check out a property on their site and hit Contact to get in touch with an agent, agents pay big money to Zillow to show their face right there, and to get your contact info. Zillow sells your info to them as a "lead". This makes up 46% of their revenues. Other brokers, property managers etc also pay Zillow to get leads. It's always free to list your property though, and this is further explained in the attached YouTube video (look above for the link). iBuying: people want quick cash. To capitalize off of that, Zillow uses Zestimate to quote these people an offer to buy their house below market value, and then flip it for at or slightly above market value. It does this in 22 markets as of now (2019), and, conveniently, it does not come visit your house or demand fixes etc. This process makes up almost 50% of their revenue in 2019. Currently, they are betting big on this to grow to 20Bn in revenues in the next few years. Right now Zillow's iBuying program still results in a net loss (they didn't sell as many houses as they bought - I can go into other concerns around iBuying in a separate post if you guys want and I'm making a breakaway video about this, will post when ready). Mortgage revenue: it does NOT underwrite mortgages. It just does the paperwork for you and then sells your info to brokers. Plus they bought a SaaS product used in the mortgage industry that makes them a little bit. Ways They Can ImproveEven then, there are several things that Zillow could be better at. For example, they're losing their grip and focus on their cash cow. Even today, about half of their revenues and over 90% of their net profits comes from their agents who pay them for leads and ads. This is their cash cow. But ask any realtor and they'll tell you how much they hate Zillow (I can go deeper into this in a separate post). They need to focus better on the one part of the business that's making them their profits and is giving them the cash they need to slowly diversify their revenue streams. (I'm making a breakaway video about this, and will post when ready). Zillow also spends a lot of money ($714 million in sales / marketing costs in 2019) on making sure homebuyers and homesellers visit Zillow to get insights on their properties. And realtors argue Zillow's data on these properties, including Zillow's proprietary Zestimate, is outdated and not nearly accurate. This puts realtors in a difficult position with their clients who are getting conflicting information from different sources. Zillow acknowledges the issues with their Zestimate and has mentioned that they've updated their algorithms in 2019. The reflected so with an increased spend on technology in 2019. Not only that, Zillow only updates MLS feeds once a day, whereas the market is so dynamic that properties and availability changes by the minute. Their revenue stream relies on visitors spending time on listings so they can be connected with 'Premier Agents' - outdated data directly hurts this and erodes visitor trust when agents have to do bait and switch after being contacted about a property. Going off of that, Zillow drives leads away from the listing agents and towards any agent who pays them more for ad placement. However realtors posit that most of these leads aren't even quality leads / or qualified leads. Basically, they charge a lot, do not provide enough value, and create problems by confusing potential customers - making it harder for realtors to earn a living. To pull off making real money from advertising you need to either have a large user base or a super-engaged user base. Zillow has the former - a large base (remember the aforementioned 8Bn user visits a year). They went a long time relying on just one revenue source - ads. But they knew this can dry up any time, like in a recession; basically, it's not predictable and it's not stable. So they are now diversifying. If your primary revenue source is not stable / predictable, think about that too. Things to ConsiderZillow is able to continuously own more and more of the lifecycle of their user (who's in the market to either buy, or sell, or rent, or get a mortgage etc) because they have been able to establish a relationship of trust with the users (by using things like Zestimate and other data on the property level that's hard to discover elsewhere). Investment in data is paying off big time. It's important to know which type of data to have and how to use it. Not all data is useful. But when a real business use case is found, data can literally be an inimitable wall that protects your margins and allows you to grow safely. Thanks for reading! For more info in video format: https://youtu.be/4TVHLySAjWc [link] [comments]  |
| What do you do when the domain name you want is taken? Posted: 09 Jul 2020 01:10 PM PDT This is a request for information. I'm writing a blog post about: "What to do if the domain name you want is taken?" The target audience is financial advisors, insurance agents, or people in the finance industry. So...what do you do? Make a change to your desired domain name and just pick a different one? Are there better options? What are they? Any insight with sources appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Currently writing a 'self-help' book about getting your financial shit together, afraid of burnout. Posted: 09 Jul 2020 05:15 AM PDT I've taken to attempting to supplement my measly fast-food income by writing a book about saving, investing and getting ahead in life, aimed specifically at below median salary families and individuals as helping low-income individuals take control of their financial future is the dream I hold near to my heart. I know that I need to write every day, even if it's garbled static and nonsense just so I can get into the habit of writing, as well as chugging through the slog on day's I don't feel like writing. The problem (no, the concern) is that I'm afraid I will get burnt out on writing said book and begin to avoid it. The last couple of day's I've spent hours on writing and researching for the book. I've gotten more than a dozen pages in (Granted a couple pages are blank for chapter titles lol, progress is progress though!) I'm wondering if I should write to my hearts content and then as the honeymoon phase begins to slow to a close and the slog sets in should I have instead limited the amount of time/pages I write per day so that I have something specific to look forward to do in regards to the book, or as I said before should I vomit words into Word until the inspiration wears off and the 'real' work begins? [link] [comments]  |
| I feel trapped in generational poverty and I don’t know how to break the chain. Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:38 PM PDT My mum was orphaned from her family and grew up from institution to institution. She was homeless, in prison, and eventually died when I was 16 due to her alcoholism. My dad divorced from his first (and only) marriage, and had an unplanned pregnancy resulting in me sometime after with my mum. He was also an alcoholic and he wasn't very present in my life. While I grew up mostly with my dad, I can't say that he ever raised me. He worked constantly to try and make ends meet. Out by 5am, home by 8pm where he'd do maintenance on the car so that it would get him to work again the next morning. He was a grinder and did everything he could to put food on the table and a roof over my head. And I'm grateful for that... but it's just that I needed more than just a provider. I needed a mentor too. I eventually left when I was 16 and have gone through life largely alone until now. And Iv made some very life altering mistakes in my 20's due to a lack of people in my life to help me watch out for those pitfalls. And at 32, I'm still paying for them now. Iv blown opportunities, chosen the wrong decisions, and just genuinely made a mess of things. It's only been in the last few years that Iv started making progress. I fell homeless for the 2nd time in 10 years in September 2017, and for me, that was the last straw. It was then that I vowed to change. But it all feels like too little too late. I have some savings now, and I'm about to graduate from the degree that's taken me 8 years to accomplish. But that's it. I feel discouraged when I see others at my age and younger boasting out their hundreds of thousands of dollars in net-worth, getting these massive inheritances, and just genuinely kicking ass in life. They made all the right moves early on with a bunch of support in their corners - and I'm genuinely glad for them. But it just kinda stings when I reflect on the lack of support in mine, and the subsequent beatings iv taken because of it. This is not to say that I'm blaming my short comings on other people. In the end, I know that it's all up to me and that I'm accountable. I guess it's just hard at the same time to not also focus on some of the basic fundamentals that I missed along the way. I just genuinely don't know how to excel, the steps that I need to take, or the plans I need to put in place. I'm scared of making more mistakes, and I don't have the smarts to know exactly how to form my plans for the future. All I know is, I want to be successful financially and I want to contribute to those around me. But I don't know where to start, or how to go about it. Iv reached out for help plenty of times - asking for mentoring, even through just one or two email dialogues per month, but most of those people never replied or wanted to help. So it's just me. And I guess I'm asking for a little advice.. Thanks a lot. [link] [comments]  |
| Should I seek ecommerce investors on this new venture? Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:33 PM PDT I currently have a successful ecommerce business that revolves around a single product. I've built it up nicely over the past couple years and it now does 6 figures a month. I am launching another product in the same field. In fact, I have done a soft launch of it and now I'm re-branding and re-launching it. I have many of the assets already in place due to my experience with my other product, so this is a very promising venture. My first product was a risky venture, and at times it was a struggle to finance inventory (I even had to take a loan out against my retirement account). I've thought about seeking investors this time around to reduce the potential downside (but also the potential upside due to having to give away equity. Thoughts? Is there a good platform for finding potential investors? [link] [comments]  |
| Free Startup Pitch Deck Builder Tool Needs Users and Feedback Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:32 PM PDT Hi, we just launched a very easy-to-use pitch deck builder tool - simply fill out a form and we email you a finished pitch deck complete with your company data that you provided. We'd love to get a handful of users to complete the form, get a free formatted & designed pitch deck, and give us some feedback. Additionally, we'll have our investor-advisors give you extra constructive assessment & scoring of your deck, based on the data you provided. Check it out here: [link] [comments]  |
| 4 Resources To Help You Grow Your Online Startup�� Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:20 PM PDT Hi everyone! I'm glad the very catchy title and emoji caught your attention! I'm here to showcase 4 tools that were immensely helpful in growing a few of my side-projects' traffic. Let's get right into it, shall we? UberSuggestOne of the few SEO tools that I fell in love with. Lets you view content ideas based on keywords, shows you keyword difficulty for ranking, and a lot of other cool things. Coupled with Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends, UberSuggest is a very powerful tool to boost your SEO game. You can read my LinkedIn article for a step by step guide on creating a good keyword plan. IndieHackersI just love this community. Full of like-minded people who want to quit the rat race and focus on growing their startup. Here, you'll find advice on marketing, design, development, and basically anything you'll need to get off the ground. It's like Reddit but for 'Indie Hackers'. HotjarVery helpful in tracking people's actions on your website. Free plan allows for 100 recordings and is a great tool to help identify bugs on your website. Recordings don't show field entries so it's safe. Plausible AnalyticsIt's surprising to find that not all people enjoy using Google Analytics. Plausible Analytics is an alternative to GA with a cleaner and more straightforward UI. You pay according to your monthly traffic with 10k views starting at only $6 a month. Bonus Resource RepixelI discovered this cool little website a couple of days ago (somewhere on the interwebs, I think HackerNews? Not sure). It allows you to use other websites' pixel. Pretty simple and straightforward. I haven't tried it myself but I thought I'd mention it. Let me know what type of resources you use for your online startup and if you enjoyed this, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter at http://techmunch.net/ where we send out weekly emails with resources similar to these! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2020 11:39 AM PDT |
| Got laid off during COVID, made my own Cashback site Posted: 09 Jul 2020 11:04 AM PDT Like many out there, COVID disrupted the job market and in particular, the place I worked. Having a background in Affiliate Marketing (retail) working for various Cashback related businesses I decided to start my own cashback business. Having the knowledge of how things work on a cashback site was a tremendous help, which helped me kind of bootstrap my cashback technology. In case you were wondering, the company I did work for paid $1M for just a brand name change. I assume that the tech behind designing their cashback site cost more than that. I designed my site and the cashback process for what it costs to host a site and domain. While this is a win, I definitely feel like I'm at a loss for actually getting new sign ups and customers. I've tried PPC, FB Ads, and SEO. Some offers on my site literally give out money for free, so I guess I'm simply a bad salesman overall. The site does compare well, in terms of cashback rates. This is because most of the larger cashback sites like Rakuten have a workforce of thousands, whereas I don't need to pay anyone but myself. This makes my cashback rates I can give out just as competitive as theirs, and in many cases better. While I don't expect anything to explode overnight, I think it's important to adapt and continue to innovate during this time. [link] [comments]  |
| Recommended inbound phone number provider in the UK? Posted: 09 Jul 2020 01:57 PM PDT I require a inbound phone number where clients can contact me on. There is a lot of options but keen to see if anyone could recommend? I am in the UK and would be looking for a virtual phone service that diverts the call to a mobile and provide call whispering. [link] [comments]  |
| not the best experience with 3dcart.... is shopify the way to go? Posted: 09 Jul 2020 01:02 PM PDT I went with 3dcart for my webstore as I had some familiarity with it through a past job. The product is decent, it works. But their support, and lack of transparency has bothered me and cost me money. My issue comes from new plan changes that were not made available to my account, nor to which i was sufficiently notified about. They finally went unlimited bandwidth - but I was never given access to these plans directly through my store manager for over a year. They even deleted all downgrades and grandfathered me into a more expensive monthly rate. I ended up paying 155 a month for a capped plan when the unlimited plan I really needed was just 30. Their email notifications on plan and price changes are slipped into the daily stream of marketing spam, and are not displayed on the admin site manager where a store owner visits daily. I directly emailed the ceo who claimed they sent out "3-4" email announcements for the new plans, which is not true as I have only one. In their business they even know when emails have been read which should provide opportunity for followup to make sure the customer is aware of their choices. Instead they kept me in the dark by not giving me direct access to any downgrades, or any of the new unlimited plans in my plan menu (which i have checkout out MULTIPLE times over the past year when monitoring my data usage). So..... hows shopify? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it possible to never succeed? Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:42 PM PDT This might be a bit of a rant, at this point I'm confused about all of this life stuff. I'm 24 years old and I know that can be quite young depending on perspective but I feel like I'm at the end. I've been an entrepreneur for about 6 years, I've also had multiple jobs in between. Does this cancel the whole entrepreneur thing? I've done regular retail work, customer service management, real estate sales, call centre and more so I'm pretty well experienced. I give everything I do 110%, its just in my nature and I take pride in separating myself from the crowd. I've done buying and selling of everything you can imagine (all legal) and I run an online clothing store. On top of that I've been in the stock market, forex etc. It might seem like I'm a jack of all trades but I try and put my efforts into 1 thing at a time. Have I still done too much? No matter what i try, I keep failing, am I looking for instant gratification too much? I've been running the clothing brand for about 3 years now and its only just getting to a point where I might make £50-£100 in profit per month, on a good month. I've just been scammed for £4,000 by some crooks, my bank has said they can't help me. I don't really want to live anymore. I lost £5,000 doing a favour for someone 2 years ago. What's the point of continuing if it seems like I'm only going to suffer. I'm a Christian and I actually paid tithes the same day I was scammed. I don't know, I'm tired of this. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:41 PM PDT Please answer about the garbage dumps, value of emptying them for use as potential energy stores. The wind at 2 near points normally slightly differs in velocity, etc. By many tiny robots strategicly pulling on the web of tiny strings for tensile force, maybe using GPU calculations from many sources for more precision, could in theory gradually lift itself then adjust string/chain/etc to, for example, swing a weight around to pull on the wind more somewhere, or lower it fast while raising any mass (potential energy storage). I imagine some tiny simple automated robots performing maintenance continuously on a bunch of huge very very thin kite-like material, but as a non-newtonian fluid it can be (by tiny robots) changed in tension to reliquify then shaped into wings somewhere else. No compression strength is needed if enough of these huge sky sails, that might partially block out the sun for miles or across an ocean. Only tensile (pulling) strength is needed as the very thin weak (fishing line or lighter) would be climbable by the tiny robots in case some falls they can go down and pick it up and reattach, and maintain the thiness of the material by those attachments (when nonnewtonian isnt puzzle-locked tight) might somehow hammer or vibrate and slide along it, reshaping the partially fluid partially wing material. If it gets wet or dirty, back to fluid and do maintenance on it, maybe contract someone specialized in chemistry etc. Imagine 20% of the wind energy on earth (would prefer it all except being only 80% as bright on average)... is gradually slightly mined between these various very thin sheets, with forces adjusted by robots in realtime, and moving around bigger stronger ropes, industrial chains, skyscraper backbones or whatever force the tiny things sum into from many above... Most would be small, just carrying 1 bucket of water or claw grabbing anything its allowed to move, so it could grab some garbage from the top of a mountain near for example the hoover dam and lift water from the bottom to the top in exchange for in part energy storage and turbine generator use and a little profit for those who own those specific wind mining machines. Similarly, if there were enough of these, they could have piled a mountain of something on austrialia's beaches over time (or someone else could have done that) then a swarm of these weak light but many wind miners could simultaneously grab that and lift water, or if there were enough of them they could maybe gradually create a tornado and use that as energy to lift the water as they would have no problem, being fluid math balanced, mining energy from a tornado or hurricane but the robots would need to take the wings apart while in the air and make them thicker, deliver bigger ropes etc. Garbage or dirt or whatever can potentially store and burst rate deliver as much energy as a nuclear reactor IF water was dropped from many places above into a tiny tall water tower reinforced with diamond thread around it or just a bunch of dirt piled up on its sides... If enough of these swarmed, moving weights etc, and probably needing a few of those... These robots would in theory work based on a universal lambda function formally verified. The cost of the nonnewtonian fluid (such as made with corn starch, it gets tight when you move your hand fast in it or stab it with a knife (it goes slightly in) would likely be the major cost, but if I wanted a mountain of corn starch (not saying thats the best way to make a thin nonsticky-doesntmixwiththingsinair. The materials arent really the issue, its possibly (if i were to pursue this), getting all that to bend and reshape and move right. If a tornado rips it in half, nonnewtonian fluid can be reattached or strings adjusted etc. [link] [comments]  |
| How much to charge for advertising? Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:36 PM PDT I have created an app that has ad spots that are location specific. Meaning if you are in a certain town you will see those towns ads. There are 40 spots for advertising that gets user to customers sites. Based on my algorithm I estimate each customers will get about 300 to 1500 clicks per month. Right now I have the price set at $0.22 per click. Is this high, low, or about right? [link] [comments]  |
| Question About Funding Product Prototype/Development With Pre-Sales Posted: 09 Jul 2020 08:40 AM PDT Hello there, Currently nearly complete with my product. However, since it's quite expensive to manufacture, I was told that funding product development with pre-sales was a thing you could do. As you all know, the initial unit is always the most expensive (with small batch production being much cheaper) and it would be a little outside of my target market's (Enterprise) comfort zone in terms of propensity to pay based on my research. This is even taking into account the fact that I'm not aiming to make a ton of profit the first sale. The first unit would be ~18k USD to produce with price in small batches eventually going down by ~50%. What would be your tips for incentivizing an initial pilot customer to pay this extra amount? Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| How to set up free ebook after purchasing one product? Posted: 09 Jul 2020 12:00 PM PDT I want to sell a product, but I want to include a free ebook that will go to their email after purchase, how do I set that up? [link] [comments]  |
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