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Crowdfunding? Beware!

October 13, 2019 0 Uncategorized , , , ,

Sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe have given entrepreneurs exciting options for funding the development and creation of a business or product. But not every experience with crowdfunding is a good one. There are some important pitfalls to keep in mind!

Lessons from failure: The Coolest

One of my favorite crowdfunded products is The Coolest. Before watching the video above, I didn’t know how much I wanted something like this! The inventor of the Coolest, Ryan Grepper, raised more than $13 million to bring his dream to life! Unfortunately, this entrepreneur’s dream turned into a nightmare.

Raising a lot of money to develop a product seems like a good idea. But it only works if you’ve calculated your pricing correctly before you start raising! Grepper’s mistake was pricing his Kickstarter rewards too low: he lost money with every unit promised. Part of this was because of production problems and supplier issues. Many of the assumptions he made when calculating his pricing didn’t bear out.

The solution: a change in thinking

Instead of thinking about crowdfunding as a way to gain startup capital, it’s more useful to think about crowdfunding as a mechanism for pre-selling products. Only the margin above your costs should be thought of as startup capital. For Grepper, increasing his margins when setting his pricing would have given him the financial latitude to overcome his production problems.

Doing it right: Peak Design

Peak Design’s Travel Tripod is their 12th Kickstarter project. They don’t use Kickstarter for startup funding; they use it as a sales channel. Can you use a sales channel for startup funding? Yes, and this is a strongly encouraged practice! But only plan on being able to use the portion of your sales that you would otherwise call profit to cover your startup costs.

Avoid mistakes: pricing it right!

For more help with pricing, see our Pricing Magic Course or Pricing Magic eBook! And if you want some more personal attention, you can hire Andrew as an entrepreneurial coach.

Pricing Magic Course - Videos, eBook, and Spreadsheet

Pricing Magic Course – Videos, eBook, and Spreadsheet

This set of tools will walk you through the process of setting prices for your product or service!

It has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs go through the ins and outs of pricing. This pack has been updated and comes with a spreadsheet that walks you through the process of setting prices from a real-world, practical perspective with solid theoretical and academic foundations, a video walkthrough of the process, and an eBook with FAQs, definitions, and special cases. Download it today, use it tonight, and succeed tomorrow!

Included:

  • Video Series
  • eBook
  • Spreadsheet tool
Original price was: $149.00.Current price is: $79.00.
Shop now

How to Make a Web Site for Your Startup

March 27, 2018 0 Uncategorized , ,

Your business needs a website. It’s not hard to make a site, but it is important! I always tell entrepreneurs that you can pay for a website one of two ways: with money or with time. Having a website legitimizes your business, and it can even be a factor that funders look at when they consider your investment worthiness.

Paying With Time

If you have a lot of time, some experience with making websites, and a big store of patience, you can roll your own site. Here are a few of the more popular tools for doing that:

WordPress

I’m a fan of WordPress and have been using it since 2004. It was originally created as a blogging platform, but it can just as easily be used to manage a website. It’s highly customizable, with a huge community of developers making solutions (in the form of plugins) for almost any problem you want to solve. There’s a good reason WordPress is used by as much as 30% of the web. One of my favorite add-ons for WordPress is WooCommerce, a great set of plugins for selling stuff with WordPress.

Squarespace

Squarespace touts themselves as an easy solution for making sites, and simple drag-and-drop templates. Their web sites are nice-looking, but their popularity is fueled by a pretty aggressive marketing campaign. They have an interesting offer for a website paired with Google G Suite integration here.

Shopify

Shopify is more than a website builder – it’s an eCommerce platform. You can set up eCommerce with any of these solutions, but Shopify was built with this in mind. Credit card processing and other features are built right in.

Wix

Wix is a popular solution, known for their free sites. There are a lot of ugly Wix sites out there, but some nice ones, as well.

Paying With Money

If you want to get started more quickly, focus on your core competencies, and have someone build you a great-looking site, you have plenty of options! One of my favorites is Bet Hannon Business Websites. Bet and her team are great to work with – real people who will work with you to meet your web needs.

I already have a site

Good for you! If you want a free 2-3 minute video review of your website, Bet Hannon is offering a free assessment of websites for entrepreneurs. She and her team will tell you what’s working and what you can improve. It takes about 30 seconds to sign up for this, and it’s totally free.

How valuable are brands?

January 27, 2018 0 Uncategorized , , ,

Bumper sticker: There’s nothing a little Starbucks and Disney can’t fix

Taio Cruz, in his 2010 song Dynamite, sings,

“I came to dance, dance, dance, dance

I hit the floor ’cause that’s my plans, plans, plans, plans

I’m wearin’ all my favorite brands, brands, brands, brands

Give me some space for both my hands, hands, hands, hands.”

For Taio (and his fellow songwriters on that particular number), the clothing he wears makes a difference in the quality of his experience. But it’s not the cut, color, or look of the clothing, it’s the brand that matters. It’s the same reason Taio rolls up on a sick BMW motorcycle in the music video for this song. We define ourselves by the brands we choose.

In the (now-classic) Christmas movie A Christmas Story, the narrator (Ralphie) explains his father by saying, “Some men are Baptists, others Catholics. My father was an Oldsmobile man.”

As customers, we define ourselves by the brands we consume. Many people think of themselves as Marlboro Men or Lululemon girls. We create self-conceptions based on our status as Wal-mart shoppers or Whole Foods people.

If you’re crafting a brand, identify the hooks that your customers use to identify with your brand. Remember that your market doesn’t just want to buy a product or service – they want an experience with your brand.  Use the creation of a brand to make meaning and create community.

You know your brand is successful when your customers start identifying each other and interacting apart from you. Photoshop User Magazine and Photoshop World is a great example. Owned by Kelby Media Group, this community is a user group that collects Adobe’s fans and customers and allows them to celebrate and improve the work that makes them Adobe users. When your customers are willing to fly across the country to meet other like-minded customers, you have created a very engaging brand.

Here are some steps toward strengthening your brand:

  1. Identifying your brand’s values.
  2. Where are there people who care about what you care about? Who cares about this more than you do?
  3. How can you add value to these people’s lives?
  4. What tangible interaction points can you craft with your customers?
  5. What elements can you add to the customer experience to surface the things that you and your customers care about?

Use the Contact page if you’d like to talk about building your brand.

How entrepreneurs get things done

March 1, 2016 2 Uncategorized , , ,

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.Entrepreneurs are creatives. They’re pushed by external forces and pulled between ambitions that compete for mental space. Their dreams are rarely linear and often interrelated. Putting timelines to dreams is one of the hardest tasks an aspiring entrepreneur can face. They need systems for capturing, making sense of, and dealing with vastly disparate interests, from this month’s accounting to regulatory concerns to a new product direction. In a sense, entrepreneurs are the idealized type of the knowledge worker, but amplified to the furthest degree. Knowledge workers often have structures or supervisors to reign in their creativity, but entrepreneurs typically have neither. Their structures must be self-constructed if they exist at all.

Entrepreneurs walk along a cliff with a precipice waiting. Their challenge: how creative can I be without falling to the risk of not executing? For wannabe-preneurs to succeed, they need to build in an executive function that’ll allow them to turn dreams into timelines and timelines into reality.

Productivity is the answer to this challenge. My two favorite thinkers about productivity are David Allen and Leo Babauta.

Getting Things Done

David Allen wrote the outstanding book, “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” back in 2001. I was thrilled to find out that he’s written an update to the book, and that an Audible.com version was just released about a week ago. Allen lays out a simple, easy-to-implement system for getting more done with less stress. If you want to become a productivity ninja, this is your white belt training. I highly recommend this book, and David Allen’s approach.

focus

Leo Babauta writes the Zen Habits blog, along with a collection of books. They’re about working and living well. His book, “focus : a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction,” is available both for free and for purchase. I started reading the free version and liked it so much that I paid for the full version. It’s a wonderful daily read for entrepreneurs and other people who have a lot of competing inputs.

Have you read either of these books? How do you balance your creativity, your responsibilities, and your business ideas? Leave a comment or let me know on Twitter at @LearnEShip!

When to register your trademark

February 11, 2016 0 Uncategorized , , ,

One question I hear from a lot of first-time entrepreneurs is how they should go about registering their trademark. There area  few issues to consider here. First, let me state upfront that I’m not an attorney, not an expert in intellectual property, and I’m not giving anyone legal advice. But I hope that I can clarify the role of trademark in your company’s startup journey.

Interbrand's Top 8 brands of 2015

Interbrand’s Top 8 brands of 2015

Trademark Basics

In the United States, trademark is handled by the US Patent and Trademark Office. A trademark is the mark that helps customers to tell your product or service from those of your competitors. It’s an important part of your company’s brand identity. As with copyright, you don’t have to actually register your trademark to start using it. Unlike copyright (which costs $55 to register), it costs between $10,000 and $30,000 to register a Trademark. It’s so expensive because of the time needed to search for previous similar uses of the mark and the attorney’s fees required for the lengthy application process.

When to register

The biggest misconception I hear about trademarks is that you need to go through the extensive registration process before you begin selling products or services to customers. The truth is that this is NOT a preliminary step, and you can start doing business without registration.

I can almost hear the objection: “But what if someone rips off my trademark and starts using my before I can get it registered?” My response is that entrepreneurs shouldn’t rely on a trademark as the only differentiator between their products or services and those of their competitors.

If the only thing that makes you better than your competitors is a logo, then you don’t deserve to lead your intended market. Your goal as an entrepreneur is to create as many barriers to entry behind you as possible. Trademark will eventually be one of these, but you should also consider how to outperform your competition on cost, price, service, delivery, availability, quality, and usefulness.

It’s good to look better than your competition, but it’s preferable to BE better than your competition.

You should plan to register your trademark eventually. But your first task as an entrepreneur is to develop a product or service, get it into customers’ hands, start generating revenue, and focus of being the best (or cheapest or fastest) at what you do. Some of these tasks require money, but they all require hustle. And hustle is both free and rare.

Get out there and make it happen!

*Note: Below is a video that explains all the details of Trademarks and registration, straight from the US Patent and Trademark office. They provide the best technical guidance available. The video IS almost 42 minutes long, so strap in if you plan to watch the entire thing.