Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - January 27, 2021 Entrepreneur |
- Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - January 27, 2021
- There are free courses at Harvard that can help you learn Data Science. Also you can have certificates for all of those courses for $49 per certificate which at the end makes cheaper than most of the online courses and academies.
- My 11 best strategies to find new potential customers online
- How we almost got acquired by Facebook and failed. Here's what I learned.
- Ambitious but Socially Anxious.
- How do you stay organized in life?
- I created a MVP for my SaaS, what's the next step?
- 2 months later: 2205 subscribed to read my newsletter
- Board Game Manufacturer
- [Need help] Starting a consultancy / course
- If anybody needs help creating their business plan or fixing it, please let me know.
- Who exactly is falling for these get rich quick ads on YouTube?
- Seeking international partnership
- Entrepreneurs in the (mobile) DJ business? (Is it B2B or B2C or some weird hybrid?)
- Why should I hire a bookkeeper when I can do it on my own?
- Does anyone have any book recommendations for starting a small business?
- To those who actually make a living working for themselves. What do you do? How did you do it?
- How to I reach potential acquirer of a brand ?
- I feel like I have the technical chops down. That I have the business acumen down. But I struggle with the idea.
- Need an interview for my final exam really soon.
- What's the best way to get feedback on a new business idea?
- How exactly is a startup owner ownership affected by raising capital from new investors?
- You have 20x light commercial vehicles and able but unskilled workers. What skills/equipment do you invest in to increase their income and the margins of the business?
| Wantrepreneur Wednesday! - January 27, 2021 Posted: 27 Jan 2021 02:00 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]  |
| Posted: 27 Jan 2021 11:56 AM PST |
| My 11 best strategies to find new potential customers online Posted: 27 Jan 2021 06:28 AM PST If you ever tried launching a startup, there's at least one thing you've learned. Building a great product isn't enough to be successful. If you're not proactive enough at finding potential customers, no one will ever know that your solution even exists. Eager to help to solve this problem, 2 years ago I embraced a new challenge to help great ideas reach the people who need them. A lot was learned and a lot was achieved on this journey. So the beginning of the new year made me reflect on some of the best strategies I've used to help teams get new customers at their door over the past years. In the end, I ended up compiling a list of 11 best strategies to find new potential customers online:
> You can find a detailed guide with actionable steps for each of these strategies. Feel free to take a look. -------- One of the things I love about this subreddit is that I often get surprised by how much one can learn from the feedback all the entrepreneurs give on these posts. If you're struggling or have struggled with a similar problem like this, please feel free to share your experience. I hope we can all keep learning from each other's experiences 🙌 [link] [comments]  |
| How we almost got acquired by Facebook and failed. Here's what I learned. Posted: 27 Jan 2021 03:40 AM PST This is not a happy ending story. The beginningIt all started back in 2014. I had a startup whose clients were advertisers. It was a platform for users to review video ads in exchange for online points that could be redeemed for money or coupons. Watch and ad; rate it; be rewarded. Simple. After 100 campaigns I kept hearing it would be wonderful to connect their offline ads (e.g. TV ads, billboards, magazines, etc) with our platform. Advertisers wanted real insights and analytics from their offline advertising investment. As dedicated founders we started working hard on this concept: "from offline to online with your phone". Within 4 months we had our first version. I remember showing it to our friends and constantly hearing "Wow this is brilliant! It's like Shazam but for videos". I was ecstatic! The investmentThe revenue was coming in but it wasn't recurrent. It was difficult to enter the yearly advertising budget. Advertisers assumed our platform as an experiment (mainly to get feedback) and not as a serious distribution channel — despite the fact we picked at 100,000 registered users. We needed investment to grow and build the new technology's infrastructure. It wasn't cheap to maintain a technology that recognized millions of videos within 4s. More on this latter. In 2015 we raised $0.5M from angels and led by a VC. This allowed us to grow our team to 7 members and accelerate product development. We were ready to storm the world! The pivotIn retrospect, our product decisions after the investment killed our startup. We shifted our focus from the local videos ads review platform — where we had 100k users and 60 clients — to a global video recognition consumer product. We created an App — like Shazam — that recognized millions of videos. Our goal was to have advertisers make their offline assets interactive and invite their audience to download our App and use it to unlock "something". The practical end was the same as the QR code. How cool is that? Scan a video and "magically" show related content on your screen? Exciting, right? Wrong. Very few people downloaded the App. It turns out the barrier of downloading the App was too much for the reward (whatever the brand wanted to offer). Don't get me wrong, we did some cool campaigns with Kia, Unilever, or Volkswagen. But again these were one-shot campaigns. Basically an investment in innovation from the brands. After long days discussing our future, we thought of something. What if our technology was embedded in native apps like Snapchat, Facebook, IMDB, or even in the Operating Systems of mobile devices — Android and iOS? This would mean everyone could easily interact with their offline environment and get something in return. Brilliant! Interactive The Walking DeadThis is now 2016 and we had a new strategy. White-label our technology and allow anyone to embed it in their platforms. We built SDKs for Web, Android and iOS and off we went searching for customers. One of our main goals was to have TV shows interactive. Allow viewers to point their phone to the TV and delight them with a new experience. In this quest, I scrapped all my network, cold reach on Linkedin, went to conferences, traveled between London, New York and San Francisco. I ended up talking to all major TV networks — Comcast, BBC, FOX, PRISA, Viacom, CNN — and closed a contract with FOX. This was a pilot experiment where FOX would use Portugal as an assessment market. It took us 9 months (!) to close the contract. Even so, we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The worst part was over, we could take our learnings from our local pilot and catapult it to the world. We will change how people consume TV and will take our place in the TV innovation history. We were ready to build a $1B company. After several negotiations with FOX we were able to add our technology to three shows: The Walking Dead, MacGyver and Prison Break. What a victory! All the major shows were interactive. FOX will advertise the shows are interactive, people will scan the TV and have an amazing, memorable experience. Win-win-win. When the first results started to come in… well let's take a detour first and come back to the results later. Entering FacebookDuring 2016 I was mainly traveling demoing our technology to as many people as I could. Besides TV networks I've met with Google, Amazon, Snapchat, Verizon, Blippar and Facebook. Our goal was to integrate the technology in their existing apps and make their users interact with the world connecting the offline and the online seamlessly. The main feedback was something like: "amazing technology, great demo! But (there's always a but) something like this isn't on our product roadmap". Except for Facebook… It was late 2016 and I've met with a Business Developer Director. Here's how it went:
After exiting the meeting I vividly remember the next five minutes. As I went through the lobby I decided to seat on a couch to recover from the excitement. There I was, all alone, in one of the most incredible buildings in Menlo Park after a meeting in one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I found myself looking at the ceiling and smiling for no apparent reason. The M&A processAfter the Facebook meeting, we discovered we had a potential new market to unveil: copyright infringements detection. Users uploaded copyrighted content with small changes (e.g. by tempering with the audio pitch, by slightly rotating the video and by changing the original video with many different techniques) to bypass Facebook's algorithms. Because our technology was designed from scratch to recognize videos from low-resolution images, we were pretty effective in recognizing tempered videos. We recognized videos that were rotated, mirrored or cropped. Our algorithm didn't use audio. We even recognized a bunch of different videos inside one. Here's a demo with a) 10 trailers in the same video and b) a rotating video. We arrived in 2017 with our FOX partnership generating mediocre results. No relevant revenue was coming in and the user interaction data wasn't exciting. We learned that people need a huge reward expectation to take the effort of scanning the TV. Without undisputed usage from viewers, FOX was gradually losing interest in pushing the technology and the opportunity faded during the rest of 2017. In February we started talking with the Facebook team. They wanted to test our technology at scale. We thought it was a fair request and agreed to be tested without any compensation. We signed NDA's and were comfortable enough discussing the internals of how our technology works. After a couple of meetings to discuss the technology, Facebook started to test us with hundreds of hours at a scale we were never able to test before. It was scary as hell! We were all extremely nervous to see if the servers' architecture wouldn't crash. When the first results started to come in we were shocked… 95% accuracy and 0.13% false positives. This was incredible for us! This was paired with the audio industry leader: Shazam. My eyes started to tear up. We were tremendously proud and happy about this achievement. Facebook wasn't…
Caption: Facebook's engineer email rejecting us Did you feel that punch in the stomach? I surely felt it. It was so unfair to have amazing results on our side and receive this email. When we asked about the differences — to understand what went wrong on our side — we got this:
Caption: Facebook's lead engineer email really rejecting us We felt kind of used and disrespected to be honest. Remember this was a two months process with several emails and calls between us. It was one of the most difficult moments of my professional life mainly because of the expectations I've built. We were devastated. I was immature enough and almost took it personally. At the end of the day, it was business as usual for a big company like Facebook — they ended up acquiring Source3 to help them solve the problem. For us, it was a Technical Knock Out. If someone from a big company is reading this and it sounds familiar, please take a moment to rethink the way you say no to a startup. Especially if you've been interacting daily or weekly for the past months. Invite them for a meeting or call and explain them the general decision process. It will take you half an hour and it will make a huge difference for the startup. Believe me on this… Unfortunately, after this, we weren't having solid revenue from our FOX partnership. After discussing with our lead investor we decided to close our doors in an unfortunate ending to what could have been a tremendous success. Lessons LearnedSo many lessons learned! We could have done so much differently. It was a rollercoaster ride with so much emotional commitment. It's a challenging exercise but I'll try to generally sum up the main learnings from the whole journey. Here's what I learned:
Despite all learnings, the cold reality is that this was a failed startup… but I'm trying it again. This time I'm doing things differently. Follow me on Twitter as I continue to share my learnings and document my journey as a founder. Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) Let me know if you have any questions. [link] [comments]  |
| Ambitious but Socially Anxious. Posted: 27 Jan 2021 07:51 AM PST I suffer from debilitated social anxiety. My hands shiver when meeting new relatives and I avoid meetings completely. Been this way for the last 5-6 years. I have a growing affiliate website that brings a couple hundred bucks, a freelance job and I am working on an ecommerce project too. I am ambitious, have a solid work ethic. Have gotten my family out of debt with five years worth of income. I work from home, live with parents (which is not considered ridiculous in my country). But socializing is painfully hard and impossible in half of the situations involving strangers. How important is it to be social to succeed as an e-commerce entrepreneur? I think I will need to go to China someday and build relationships with suppliers. Or just talk to like-minded entrepreneurs to learn things. I guess people have built $10M+ businesses with remote teams so it is not much of an obstacle these days? I have a concrete plan to face social challenges and get out of my shell. But this may not work and I may have to rely on medication. What do you think? [link] [comments]  |
| How do you stay organized in life? Posted: 27 Jan 2021 02:26 PM PST I'm just curious, what systems do you use? I'm currently trying to consolidate everything onto as few programs as possible and then live by to-do lists. How do you handle so many things to do every day from all different directions? [link] [comments]  |
| I created a MVP for my SaaS, what's the next step? Posted: 27 Jan 2021 02:52 AM PST Hi r/Entrepreneur(s), Two months ago I've asked the community how to validate an idea (an investment portfolio tracker) (/r/Entrepreneur/comments/jya445/how_do_you_validate_an_idea/). First of all I want to thank you all for the helpful suggestions. In the meantime I created an MVP of the product, but I'm stuck again, because I'm not sure how to attract the first users. I know that a good start is with friends and family members, but since this is a niche product, I personally only know a few people that are investing in the stock market. What are some good ways to acquire the first few customers for a newly founded SaaS? Also, as a side question: as you may imagine, since the service is currently in beta, it may still have bugs and performance issues. I'm worried that problems like this would scare away the first users before I get the chance to improve the stability. Is this fear justified? [link] [comments]  |
| 2 months later: 2205 subscribed to read my newsletter Posted: 27 Jan 2021 11:16 AM PST Hi, I'm Indrek. In November I started a newsletter about early-stage technology startups across the US and EU. So far it's going better than I expected! I spend a lot of time researching and testing the products. I do this so I can bring you the highest quality startups. I have no affiliation with any of the startups. As a rule of thumb, I look at startups who have at least built a minimal viable product. This helps me weed out the builders from the talkers. Send tips my way if you or your friend is building something awesome. I'll take a look at it. I'm open to ideas on how to monetize. So far I tried subscriptions but it seems readers are not willing to pay for it. I'm trying to sell a complementary database of startups on the side with the newsletter, but that hasn't taken off either. Does anyone have any bright ideas on how I could monetize the newsletter without ads? If you want to read the newsletter, here's the link: https://www.startupscrushing.com/welcome And here's the archive if you wanna see the previous posts: https://www.startupscrushing.com/archive Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Jan 2021 11:08 AM PST Does anyone have any recommendations for a manufacturer of board games? I want to line one up, as a buddy and I are looking to launch a board game soon. Ideally they can handle everything from the board game mock up (we have a pdf of the design), the board itself and the game pieces. Has anyone here worked with any that were reliable, good communication, fair pricing, etc.? Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| [Need help] Starting a consultancy / course Posted: 27 Jan 2021 10:56 AM PST I've acquired alot of knowledge in the past few years about sifferent marketing styles, copyrighting, dropshipping, email lists, SMMA etc. (For anyone wondering why I dont continue with these buisnesses is because my work doesn't allow me to. I move alot in the matter of days and cannot keep a consistent time for working on these buisnesses, marketing and such) I believe I have alot of value to share and "sell". I have done some consultancy before for dropshippers, affiliate marketers and ecommerce for many people. I feel like it's not as organized and I'm not efficiently working on this as I'm hoping on and off for a few calls a week which results in some good income for a side hustle rather than an actual second income stream. I would love help and knowledge on how to build a consultancy buisness or help creating a course. Any help would be amazing! I'm down to teaming up and maybe even splitting profits if it comes down to it. Thanks alot! [link] [comments]  |
| If anybody needs help creating their business plan or fixing it, please let me know. Posted: 27 Jan 2021 01:14 AM PST |
| Who exactly is falling for these get rich quick ads on YouTube? Posted: 26 Jan 2021 04:52 PM PST The videos typically have big houses and fancy cars in the background, and they tell you that you can be just like them with a little training. Usually it's some young guy pitching his story about how he went from broke to multi-millionaire. I don't know of anyone IRL who has bought into these ads. Do you? Who do you think is the typical person to fall for this crap? [link] [comments]  |
| Seeking international partnership Posted: 27 Jan 2021 09:42 AM PST Request international partner Me and a friend of mine are planning to start our own business. We are both engineering graduates frustrated with our respective fields trying to get on our feet. Living in India, we seek international companies that want to partner to start operations in India as we would help them set up and manage their operations here. Since it's a growing manufacturing and retail environment there is a lot of potential for growth. Any recommendations and thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| Entrepreneurs in the (mobile) DJ business? (Is it B2B or B2C or some weird hybrid?) Posted: 27 Jan 2021 03:22 AM PST I'm currently running a project for (mobile) DJs and I've found that it's an interesting industry. That is because: It's technically a B2B industry. As a supplier I supply my product to mobile DJs, they're usually incorporated and are therefore formally considered to be a company. But Most mobile DJs have more income streams than their gigs. Some rent out equipment, some provide additional related services and many of them have a totally separate job, because the mobile DJ market isn't necessarily a gold mine. Because of this many DJs do not act in a similar fashion as a 'regular' company. They do not have long-term investment plans, they do not have separate management positions, they do not have a sales department and their marketing strategies usually consist for a large portion of word-of-mouth. Furthermore I've noticed that the industry balances between a resentment because of the lack of pay, and a deep love for the thing they do, which results in undercutting to get more gigs. I feel like these businesses are both a hobby and a living, which creates entirely new challenges and opportunities as a supplier for them. How do you deal with this? I'm curious what you do in this world, and how you deal with it? Where do you apply B2B techniques (cold-calling, having a dedicated account manager, things like that) and where do you focus on B2C techniques to gain and maintain a good (and profitable) relation with your clients. [link] [comments]  |
| Why should I hire a bookkeeper when I can do it on my own? Posted: 27 Jan 2021 09:17 AM PST |
| Does anyone have any book recommendations for starting a small business? Posted: 27 Jan 2021 06:48 AM PST I've started a small interior and exterior home painting business. Do you guys have any specific (for painting) or general recommendations for small business startups? I'm looking for tangible material and steps to fake. Creative vision stuff would help too I guess. I wants steps like acquiring reviews, customer acquisitions, how to keep momentum going, accounting and what tools to use, creating financial projections, marketing tactics, hiring attorneys, etc. Does anyone have a recommendation or recommendations to help me out? [link] [comments]  |
| To those who actually make a living working for themselves. What do you do? How did you do it? Posted: 26 Jan 2021 08:21 PM PST Highly appreciate it if ya told me how you got into it as well :) [link] [comments]  |
| How to I reach potential acquirer of a brand ? Posted: 26 Jan 2021 11:52 PM PST I have a small brand in the outdoor sport industry. I am looking to get acquired by one of the big company of the industry, because I believe that my product can fit well with their portfolio. But, how can I reach them? For the ones of you who did something similar, how did you do? I unfortunately have no contact or network that can connect me to potential acquirer at the moment so I am looking for any ways to move forward. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 26 Jan 2021 07:08 PM PST I'm curious if other entrepreneurs fall into this category, and what you've done to alleviate this challenge. I suppose, like many, I was a tech guy first, entrepreneur second. I've launched a few app-based and SaaS-based businesses, one of which I successfully sold, and through that experience, went through my crash course in team building, sales, marketing, legal, support, scaling, infrastructure, etc., that really opened my entrepreneurial confidence up. Where I keep struggling is the idea. I'll give an example - my background is in video engineering for a large TV network, and after that, software development. I started recently building an app, and an infrastructure, for doing high quality livestreams of places around the world, alongside Virtual Reality livestreams of places around the world. Very similar to what EarthCam does, but with a more fluid and pleasurable/modern interface. If I had the capital, I know what I'd do. I'd hire a sales team to find clients who would find value in this type of technology (security, tourism, media production, etc.). I'd streamline the hardware into a more succinct and affordable package. I'd build out the software to have a killer interface, and prepare for the onslaught of VR and AR headsets to come. I'd basically do what I'm pretty sure EarthCam is already doing. And as I try to sit down and put together a pitch deck, I'm asking myself - What is this business? Am I trying to solve a problem that someone else has solved? Or am I trying to solve a problem so insanely niche (does anyone want to pay to see livestreams of the world in VR), it has no business? Does anyone else struggle with this? When you have the pieces of what you're trying to do, but you don't quite know who the audience is and what they'd pay for? Or is that the whole idea of being an entrepreneur? [link] [comments]  |
| Need an interview for my final exam really soon. Posted: 27 Jan 2021 10:06 AM PST Hello, one of my semester exam options is to do an interview with an entrepreneur, so it would mean a lot if one of you could answer the following questions for me! Please hurry, I don't have much time left in the semester. You can use fake names and locations if you want. What is the name of the business? Where is the business located? Why is the business owner considered an entrepreneur and not a small business? What product or service is sold? How long has the business been in operation? What is the mission of the business? What is the vision of the business? List the six business environments and ask the business owner which of the listed environments is a problem for his/her environment. List the four stances to social responsibility and ask the entrepreneur which is the preferred stance of his/her business. Describe the type of organization used by the owner How do you motivate your employees? What type of marketing research do you use? How do you use your marketing research to market your product? What do you like the most about being an entrepreneur? How has the covid-19 pandemic affected your business? [link] [comments]  |
| What's the best way to get feedback on a new business idea? Posted: 27 Jan 2021 03:59 AM PST Could anyone recommend the best place to get honest feedback from a wide group of people on a new business idea? It's a fairly generalist idea - not technical or difficult to understand. Many thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| How exactly is a startup owner ownership affected by raising capital from new investors? Posted: 27 Jan 2021 03:01 AM PST As example, a company needs funding. The business is worth, let's say 100k. Theres is a single owner, owns 100% of it. That owner wants to raise money and sell 20% of the company to an investor. For 20k. Those 20k in cash belong to the owner, not the company itselft. Then the company is still not funded and the owner is 20k richer, yet there is no new capital in de company. How does this work then? Does the owner then lends those 20k to the company so it can raise capital? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 27 Jan 2021 02:43 AM PST The skills/machinery for the following industries for example: Mobile Tyre Repair, Smart Paint Repair, Tree Surgery. [link] [comments]  |
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