Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (December 30, 2020) Entrepreneur |
- Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (December 30, 2020)
- Why we gave ourselves 6 months to make our company work
- I think every Entrepreneur should read as much as they can
- Advice to a Motivated 17 Year Old
- AutoAdvisor - A marketplace for mechanics and automobile owners - Beta 1.2
- Starting a business with 20k
- How much conversion can I expect by advertising with an influencer that has 90k followers ? I do print on demand in a niche
- Not sure why it works like this?
- I want to share my four key lessons from starting a business in 2020
- What are some Crucial Entrepreneurial Skills?
- How Can I jump From A Single Paid Jobs To MRR?
- Creating a business with multiple products that may overlap one another
- Hint Founder Kara Goldin: How to Know It's the Right Time to Raise Money | Inc.
- New to Reddit: What’s the best way to use it for my business?
- Matt is about to make a HUGE hiring mistake that many business owners make...
- I made an animated summary of "The Lean Startup". I hope this is useful to you.
| Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - (December 30, 2020) Posted: 30 Dec 2020 05:08 AM PST Please use this thread to ask questions if you're new or even if you haven't started a business yet. Remember to search the sub first - the answers you need may be right at your fingertips. Since this thread can fill up quickly, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| Why we gave ourselves 6 months to make our company work Posted: 30 Dec 2020 12:58 AM PST In 2019, my co-founder Francesco and I realized that to make our company work, we needed to focus more, and on the right things. We left our day job in late 2018, and we started traveling and enjoying the new freedom of being entrepreneurs right away. But while we enjoyed this new lifestyle, we weren't really excited about the (very slow) growth of our company. It was 2019 and our core business then was Boxy Suite, a Gmail client for Mac. It was paying the bills (and the plane tickets) but that ramen profitability was starting to linger a bit too long. Luckily, 2019 was also the year we started working on something new: a better way to get your favorite content, unplugging from feeds. Mailbrew (our new SaaS) was born. But a new product in private beta and dreams about adding more zeros to our MRR weren't cutting it. We wanted more, that's why we left our job in the first place. Francesco had an idea: let's give ourselves an ultimatum. We both agreed that the opportunity cost of earning a minimum salary and scraping by, while being top-tech talent, was starting to get too high to make sense. So the idea was: if in 6 months we're still barely paying ourselves a minimum salary to live in Milan, we should go back to a normal day job. Even the idea of going back to a day job for me felt like seppuku, but he was right: if we want to accelerate our growth, we shouldn't look for hacks and shortcuts. We need skin in the game, we need to keep ourselves accountable. We need to make it this year, not next year, not in 10 years. The milestone to hit wasn't a specific number, like 10k MRR. We just felt that "making it" was about having steady revenues to pay ourselves comfortably, leaving some buffer in the company to invest, and eventually hire, and finally have some peace of mind. We basically said to each other: if we're still scraping by in 6 months (18 months since quitting our jobs), it means it's not working. I accepted. Having an ultimatum already helped us make a big decision we wouldn't have made otherwise: we decided to not pay ourselves anything for a few months, and instead invest in a productivity boost and lifestyle improvement. Enough working in bars, searching for wifi, trying to stay away from bad music and loud voices, let's get a couple of desks at a WeWork. So that's how 2020 started: with an ultimatum, no salary, a mission to make a new product work, and a couple of nice desks to be more focused and productive. The next few months are history. We put the finishing touches on Mailbrew with the help us our first beta testers, while we put Boxy Suite on maintenance mode (it was still making ~$5k/month). Focusing only on Mailbrew and finally working side by side every day had a huge impact on our productivity and put us on the same page on everything. In March we were finally ready to launch Mailbrew, but we have a curse that whenever hit an important milestone or we're ready to launch something, we're not in the same room. So when it finally came to launching Mailbrew in March, a global pandemic that you're probably familiar with started, and so we launched it from our homes, in lockdown. Still, with the launch of Mailbrew things started to change for us. We finally felt we were not the "Boxy Team" anymore: Mailbrew received amazing responses, comments, feedback, and it was clear it was going to become our core business if we gave it a fair chance. To maximize our chances of real success, we applied the Barbell Strategy by betting big on Mailbrew (high-risk) while de-risking with Boxy Suite and little consulting on the side, and giving some space to side-projects as well (as smaller, but riskier bets). In hindsight, giving ourselves an ultimatum gave us the right amount of urgency, and clarity, to say no to lots of things, ship faster, focus our attention, and fine-tune our bullshit detector. It was a drastic way of saying: this is not a joke, we either make it or we don't. Besides the ultimatum, there are a few other things that helped us become sharper and better entrepreneurs this year, while also improving our general wellbeing. We started giving more honest and ruthless feedback to each other, always speaking our mind and making sure that weak and bad ideas don't sneak their way in our roadmap out of sheer confirmation bias or fear to offend the other person. We kept trusting our guts when we feel like we have a strong intuition about something. Finding the balance between pragmatism and intuition is one of the biggest struggles for entrepreneurs, but it gives the greatest results when you get it right. We've decided to take our first investment. We still feel bootstrappers at heart, and the reason we eventually made this choice is because we chatted with Tyler Tringas, founder of Earnest Capital, and realized how perfectly aligned we were, and how their model is structured around founders that care about their freedom and ownership. I can't even imagine working as hard as we're working now without the peace of mind and confidence of being in the Earnest network, getting their mentorship, and knowing we finally have a safety net in our bank account. We both focused more on finding the right work-life balance. We often take breaks from work, long pauses to think, long walks, respect each other time, and always try to reduce sync work in favor of async work — in fact we slowly settled on a 50/50 async/sync schedule. Focused mornings at home, afternoons at the office. Even when we were back in lockdown, we started reducing notifications and pinging each other in the morning by default. All in all, we've decided we want to build a calm company where work is modeled around our life, not the other way around. One year has passed since Francesco proposed the ultimatum, but it feels like a decade. We started 2020 feeling lost and without purpose, disenamoured with our core business, and we're ending it with a clearer growth path, working on a product we're excited to use every single day, and enough money in the bank to work without the insidious background noise of anxiety that things aren't working out. It's not like the ultimatum itself saved our company. It was the realization that we needed to hold each other accountable, stop delaying important choices because of the commitment they required, and start focusing on things that matter while cutting back on noise and distractions. The same principles we're enforcing in our work, we're enforcing in our private lives. If there's a disconnect between how you work and how you lead your life, it's impossible to feel truly at peace and content with either. EDITED: removed Mailbrew links. [link] [comments]  |
| I think every Entrepreneur should read as much as they can Posted: 30 Dec 2020 12:50 PM PST In the new year, many of you are likely to aspire to make improvements and change your life for the better. After the year we've had, NOW is the best time for that… But all of that starts with learning from those that have done it before. For anything that I've sought to learn whether it's personal finance or entrepreneurship or productivity, books have always been the best place to start from. That's why I'm want to share my very own curated Book Club with you on www.vihanchelliah.com/bookclub In there, you can take a look at a collection of my favorite books that have brought me the most value as I navigate my life. These are my personal recommendations that I know will do the same for you. You can also send me a message on there with some of your favorites too. I might just add add them to the Book Club too or even do a video on it ;) [link] [comments]  |
| Advice to a Motivated 17 Year Old Posted: 30 Dec 2020 07:10 AM PST Yo guys. I'm 17 years old. I've spent a while hanging out on Reddit trying to find a way for me to start making a lot of money at 17, due to my age, I don't have PayPal or all the other things I would need to start making lots of money online at 17. For a while now I've spent time just trying to find a way to make the money. I've come to the realization that I've wasted so much time searching for a way to do so and I'm tired of being a little wussy about it, it's better that I develop a strong mindset now and learn skills before my 18th birthday instead of wasting all this time searching for a way to make money under 18 years old. I turn 18 at the end of this coming September and by then I'll be in college. If you could go back and talk to yourself nine months before you turned 18 what to do in order to prepare for success, what would you tell yourself? [link] [comments]  |
| AutoAdvisor - A marketplace for mechanics and automobile owners - Beta 1.2 Posted: 30 Dec 2020 11:54 AM PST Hey, I just released my first iOS App in user beta. AutoAdvisor is an app which allows you to find and contact nearby dealerships to schedule the services you need for your car. Here is a link to the beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/BHU0emq7 PS. I looked at the rules and this appears to be allowed since I am not generating revenue and am only looking for user input. If this isn't allowed I will remove it. Thank you [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Dec 2020 09:05 AM PST Hi everybody, I have 20k to invest in a small business. I was thinking about starting a siding company. I have limited experience in construction but I feel that I have the money and time to dedicate to it that would make it worth it. I'm in Canada btw. I live in a city that is sprawling out like crazy and there are many contractors looking to subcontract crews for work. From my cursory research I'd need my own WCB, insurance, a brake for the siding panels, and a truck or van. I'm ambitious, a quick learner, and have labour experience so there's no reason I can't get into this with a reasonable learning curve. I am personable and know how to speak to home owners. Marketing is no issue as I am educated in this as well. Does anybody have experience with a business such as this? Or any tips on other sectors to get into with 20k? Thank you. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Dec 2020 12:02 PM PST I sent my products to multiple influencers. Some have 3 have 90-100k followers on youtube/IG Some 20-50k on IG Others between 5k-15k I have 18 of them so far. They will receive the products in a week or 2 [link] [comments]  |
| Not sure why it works like this? Posted: 30 Dec 2020 05:43 AM PST Hi guys, got some questions. So I founded my startup (not registered yet) but launched it. A platform which track all types of investments (currently we support 8 types). And we show users the real value of their funds. Suppose I have added gold as an investment then we are showing current value of gold and showing their net worth. I saw one more platform that got seed funding for similar type of thing. They claim to have a platform which track it all. They got funded even before their product launches. They launched their product last week (I guess). So I thought of trying it out. And I really didn't believed it. So they have manual forms for all type of adding. Investments/credit card/gold etc. Ok manually entry seems privacy protected as user doesn't want to give any third party access to their accounts. So I tried entering investments and what I saw is they are asking for "Invested amount" and "current amount". Now why should I enter the current amount of my investments. That's why I am using this app, right? And they just showing whatever I have entered as my portfolio. I mean seriously. And they also have option to connect the account to their app. And how they are providing it? Well they are asking for email and password of my other account in order to show me data. Now I don't understand how they got funded for this. Don't take me wrong but I feel very sad that my product that (just 2 people) build in 2 months doing the same thing with real time data. And when we went to investors they just turned us down saying that they don't see potential in my platform. Or there are other players in the market. What do you guys. Think. I just wanted to let it out. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| I want to share my four key lessons from starting a business in 2020 Posted: 29 Dec 2020 06:38 PM PST Hello, this is my first post here. I have talked a small percentage in my LinkedIn, but I wanted to give back to this community what I have learned. The lessons are summarized as follows:
The team come in first place We offer a "developer team as a service" for startups and companies that don't want or can't handle building their own tech team. So since the beginning was obvious; without a team, there is no company. Other business can say that has asset other than its crew. Even for those kinds of business, the team is the first asset that will allow to build the others. If it weren't that way, Y Combinator and other VC would not advertise to take a bet on the team, not the product. Having this principle in mind will impact many of your decisions about hiring, handling failures, keeping the team's morale, and, most importantly, building a strong asset with the abilities and opportunity to create an even stronger product. Not every potential client is our client. We were born from the necessity of a particular client that was starting a new product. This opportunity help us to gather the initial team and build upon our expertise. We then begin to offer front-end, back-end, and even product management from the initial DevOps position. It was a big hit. It was not the only hit. Some months after, we close the second client with a similar offering. With the passing time, other potential clients have appeared. And we said no to most of them. Why? Because it is a two-way relationship. It is not just that the client needs to trust us; we need to trust and believe in the client's vision. You will know on your guts, and that team you, built by you, will confirm that is the right path to take. Your client needs education. About our clients, even that first one, they are not the perfect ones. Perfect in the sense that we need to teach them many things. Some of those things aren't about technology but business and process. At the end of the day, we need to shape the perfect client and take this to our prospect pipeline, and it is our actual challenge. When we do that, get back here to share with you guys. It would be best if you spoke about what you are doing. The last lesson is about the exact thing that we are doing right now with this post, share our day to day; even the smallest tip can help someone. And this openness is the source of authority that a company needs to reach the right and pre educated client. So, I hope this can make sense to even one of you guys out there. [link] [comments]  |
| What are some Crucial Entrepreneurial Skills? Posted: 29 Dec 2020 09:33 PM PST To get on board with a startup, what are some crucial entrepreneurial skills you guys think? [link] [comments]  |
| How Can I jump From A Single Paid Jobs To MRR? Posted: 29 Dec 2020 06:49 PM PST I have a side hustle where I build websites and also provide data analytics solutions for small businesses. I started in Q1 of this year, and so far it has netted me around ~15K. The issue I am having is that all of my contracts so far have been website builds. Once I've completed a project thats it. The client is happy.. they pay me the remainder of the contract..and we part ways. Sometimes they will reach out with new things to add or other small jobs. I want to build monthly recurring revenue from this side hustle. I have thought of moving into the SEO/SEM space exclusively, but I enjoy making websites. I'm just really not sure what to do at this point. Part of the problem is that 1) I have been too afraid to subcontract out work to explore new ideas. I'm afraid that the subcontractor will underperform. 2) I have tried in the past to use terms like "we" and to leave room for subcontracting when discussing with clients but almost always they want to only work directly with me. 3) I work full time (as a senior analyst) so I can only work on my side hustle between 5 pm - 12 am Any help or advice would be appreciated. Sorry if I rambled. [link] [comments]  |
| Creating a business with multiple products that may overlap one another Posted: 30 Dec 2020 06:27 AM PST Hi, One of the things that people say is to focus on is one particular business plan. However, what happens when you start a business and it gets mostly automated. As in you're making good money and you spend maybe 30 minutes to an hour a day just maintaining it. If you're a creative person, you probably have other ideas. Let's say your industry that you're needs more services and you can provide those services and products but it somewhat conflicts with what you are doing. Let me give you an example (fictitiously): Let's say I run a web development company making websites for people. I have 5 employees and we make 400k - 500k a year for the last 5 years. Everything is from sales to support is automated. I then want to create a site like wix that builds websites. In theory that competes with my current business but there's a reason why Im making 400-500k a year on making custom websites. People want them. I see a massive opportunity in this new site so Ill build it and do some promotion. Perhaps this site does something different than all of the other sites something that clients ask for but can't get with wix etc. Let's say I also want to make a website like Flippa but it's very niche. This way people in this niche can build websites for that niche and sell that to their niche as well. Lastly, let's say I really want to make beer in my basement as a hobby and sell it. I know this sounds all over the place, but do people do this? The main reason is that growth in the main business doesn't seem possible unless some major changes happen. People must do this. It's not uncommon to hear of entrepreneurs with multiple businesses. Can anybody think of examples of this? What's the best way to start a new business if you already have an automated business? [link] [comments]  |
| Hint Founder Kara Goldin: How to Know It's the Right Time to Raise Money | Inc. Posted: 30 Dec 2020 05:20 AM PST |
| New to Reddit: What’s the best way to use it for my business? Posted: 29 Dec 2020 03:03 PM PST Hello everyone! I'm new to Reddit, and totally hooked. I want to know... what's the best way to use Reddit to market my services, learn, and network? Basically, as an entrepreneur, I want your best Reddit tips for how you use it for business! I'm a full time writer and own a copy/content writing company. Have other ventures in the work too... Thank in advance! :) [link] [comments]  |
| Matt is about to make a HUGE hiring mistake that many business owners make... Posted: 29 Dec 2020 09:54 PM PST One of the biggest mistakes you can make in the contracting business is to hire out of desperation. For those of you that follow me or have read about the way I hire in my House Painting Business, I have a 7-step hiring process. I'll briefly go over the steps.
Now, the context of this post isn't about the hiring process, its more so to illustrate to you that this process takes TIME to get a quality result. I did a Business Breakthrough with Matt and when asking him his intentions going forward, he indicated to me that he was first going to find jobs, THEN hire. Big red flag. First, I want you to know that I understand where he's coming from…I mean, who wants to have employees and have no work to provide them. It is scary. However, I made it a point to tell him that he's only 1 job away. You see, if he removes himself from the production, he can find one job, stretch the job out (because the person he hires will be performing it) and in the meantime, he can find more work. The idea is a "cat and mouse" game of keep away. You, as the business owner, are responsible to have enough jobs in the pipeline to keep your team busy, while you find more jobs. So, going back to his mindset about hiring, he wants to find the work, then hire - and knowing this industry well enough to understand that finding someone in a pinch is a long shot (if you're looking for a quality individual that you can build your business around) He'd be making a huge mistake. I told him he needs to hire NOW. With no jobs. He needs to be doing interviews and filtering out candidates. This process could take him 3 weeks! In the meantime, he should be doing everything he can to find work and align the job with the person he hires. He had a few estimates out, so I gave him some insight on how to get them to move forward by creating urgency and offering a Value Proposition. But, the gist of this Breakthrough was helping him see that he needs to hire with the anticipation that he will find work (Which he will, it's just the holidays, so it's slow) not the expectation that he won't be able to keep them busy. The entire Breakthrough Session can be found on the Contractor Secrets Podcast. Thanks for reading! [link] [comments]  |
| I made an animated summary of "The Lean Startup". I hope this is useful to you. Posted: 29 Dec 2020 03:10 PM PST Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6QPZp--lJE I've made over 80 summaries of the best self improvement books, here's a full playlist of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOImyOGN9UE&list=PLaNTB6oQAa0AYuul0tqUscg1ZLj_arZga I release a new video every other day, if you're interested in subscribing here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfbLDMh6uGOZePAfqqjVZ-g?sub_confirmation=1 If you'd prefer to read the script instead of watching the video, here it is: Summary of the Lean Startup By Erick Reis About The Author Other than being the author of, 'The Lean Start-up', Erick Reis, an American entrepreneur and a blogger, is also the author of 'The Start-up way', a book that talks about modern entrepreneurial management. The Book's Main Idea The book's main goal is to help readers avoid the number one mistake that makes start-ups fail i.e. launching a product or a service without the entrepreneur knowing who the product's customer is and what those customers really want. To quote the author: "Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem" Erick Reis The Lean Start-up focuses on teaching readers how to better their start-up businesses by exposing them to a new way of thinking that is able to mitigate their risk going forward which automatically increases their likelihood of finding a product that sticks. The book does that through introducing the readers to a systematic and scientific method that enables them to get all the information they need to make fast and decisive decisions when starting a business. "The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that start-ups must possess"' Erick Reis A Look at the Main Topics Discussed In the Book Here is a taste of what to expect from the three phrases of the book. First phase: VISION In the book, Reis, through his experience, explains why start-ups fail. He tries to make readers understand that the battle for a successful start-up is first lost in the vision where entrepreneurs follow a conventional approach of starting a business; which dictates that immediately they get an idea and it has been approved by either their friends or family, the idea becomes legit and ready to be launched in the market. According to the Lean Start-up, the conventional approach is wrong because it makes entrepreneurs launch start-ups based on untested assumptions, which increase the possibility of them creating a perfect product that nobody wants. Reis says that the first goal of a start-up is to figure out the right thing to build, the thing that customers will want and will be willing to pay for as quickly as possible. Under the topic of vision, Reis teaches the readers how to kick start a start-up the right way. He uses a super formula, which makes the reader better at starting a successful business. Here is a glimpse of the formula. Step 1: The reader is taught how to come up with a user experience vision. Step 2: The reader is taught how to identify critical assumptions on their idea, which determines the success of the start-up. Step 3: The reader is educated on how to experiment with critical assumptions. Here, Reis uses the Zappos example where he explains how Nick Swinmurn, the inventor of Zappos, came up with a successful business by simply experimenting with his assumption, 'people can buy shoes online' by first posting photos of shoes online to test customer demand. Step 4: The reader is taught how to build an MVP (minimum viable product)- A sample of the reader's product that highlights the main features of their idea but takes less time, effort and money to build, that they can use to test their idea with. Second phase: STEER This phase the book focuses on teaching the reader how to steer his/her start-up business through using the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop formula. In the book, Reis says the lean start-up methodology is based on a cycle of rinse and repeat; the build-measure-learn. What the reader is taught from the steer phase is how: He can identify the leap of faith assumption from his idea. He can use various methods to test his assumptions. He can release his product to the market. He can learn to define his baseline metric of judging the performance of his product to the market and how he can use it to measure his products success or failure. He can assess his products results and know whether to pivot (adjust to a better one) or persevere (retain the idea). Third phase: ACCELERATE In the book, Reis uses the vision and steer phases to set a foundation for the reader's last move to take to have a successful start-up, which is acceleration. In acceleration, Reis teaches the reader how he can move past the feedback loop faster and go on to set the innovation and growth ball rolling. Under accelerate Reis focuses on teaching the reader the following topics. BATCH- This part explains how the reader can use a small batch approach to get his product going as soon as possible. The author goes on to say that smaller batches work better for lean start-ups because they enable the entrepreneur to detect a problem early as well as enable him to get quick feedback from a customer. GROW- In this section, the author teaches readers how to identify and concentrate on the right growth strategy for their start-ups. To illustrate how important a right growth strategy is, Reis gives an example of how Sabeer Bhatia, the owner of Hotmail, grew the business by figuring out her best growth strategy, which was adding signature that carried the message, "Get your free e-mail at Hotmail" onto every outgoing email. ADAPT- This part teaches the reader how to develop an adaptive culture using the 'five why's system'. INNOVATE- This part teaches readers how to set up their start-up as an innovative company that has an organized way of producing new-innovations and start-ups. Conclusion The big take away from the book, 'The Lean Start-up' is; entrepreneurship is management so for the reader to succeed in it, they need to manage their start-up business as the institution it is and avoid jumping head first into ideas. Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6QPZp--lJE I've made over 80 summaries of the best self improvement books, here's a full playlist of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOImyOGN9UE&list=PLaNTB6oQAa0AYuul0tqUscg1ZLj_arZga I release a new video every other day, if you're interested in subscribing here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfbLDMh6uGOZePAfqqjVZ-g?sub_confirmation=1 [link] [comments]  |
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