business ideas Archives - Page 4 of 5

Industrial Tourism

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Industrial Tourism is big business. It’s a little know fact the Boeing factory in Seattle has over 180,000 visitors a year. At $15 a ticket that is approx $2.7 million in high margin revenue.

Local Australia firm fosters brewing has a popular brewery tour at their Melbourne plant (you get a free beer at the end of it) as does Media conglomerate NBC in the Rockerfella Centre in New York. None of this is free, and they are all fully booked pretty much every day. The thing that is almost as powerful as the cash such Industrial Tourism generates, is the relationship it builds with the brand.

It is pretty cool to be taken into the ‘secret back room’, even though we can all be pretty sure that Boeing or any large conglomerate are not about to give away any secrets on said tours. But this is where startups and SME’s can do it even better. We can let our early adopters into our Factory, Alpha testing, Retail back room, Warehouse, New Product Development session. We can let them expose our secret goodness to the market for us. Especially if we do something awesome like make great software, use recycled materials or anything creative.

So the question for startups is this: How can we let our early adopters and brand evangalists into our secret world to spread our world?

I am on Twitter – Click here to follow me

Difference between traditional & social media

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

This is the difference between traditional and social media in one simple chart (albeit a little fuzzy). Forget all the crap you have read on how social media differs to traditional media. This is it summarized right here on startup blog in terms which matter for business:

I’ve made some notes above. Don’t believe what you’ve heard – old media isn’t dead – sure it’s more expensive for the return, but it still kicks but. When rentoid was featured on a nightly news TV show as a positive story, we had more hits that one day than we did for the entire year. And we had been and are investing a tremendous amount of time on new and social media. It’s been a two year effort.

If you want a few other qualitative ideas to take with you then here’s a few:

They work better together
Social media is incredibly slow but has a compound effect
If I had endless funds available for media, I’d still prefer traditional media (for now)

These comments are based on fact and real experience in Australia from my business rentoid.com which has had heavy exposure in both.

I am on Twitter – Click here to follow me

Business pulse

Posted on July 6, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

You have a pulse – it’s important it never stops.

Your business has a pulse – when it stops your customers assume your dead or dying.

pulse

This why the following elements are crucial for your business or startup:

Advertising frequency
Newsletter updates
Web page changes
Twitter feed on your homepage
Regular blogging
Returning phone calls & emails the same day
Speedy invoicing (guilty)
Product iterations and improvements
PR & media exposure
Team, fan, member, evangalist get togethers
Conversing with your people on line
Conversing with people off line
Acknowledging (not hassling) everyone who enters your office, retail space or workshop.

Let your customers know you’re alive, and they’ll treat you like you are. Let them think your dead or dying and they’ll ensure you die for sure.

Path to startup success

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

As published in Australian Anthill this week.

I was thinking about business and at what point it becomes possible to believe you have a good chance of winning. I came to the conclusion that four elements pave the way to start-up success.

The four elements are:

Your concept has been validated in market.
You know what to do.
You know how to do it.
You are actually doing it – right now.

If you work through these four elements, then success is inevitable. Of course, all of these elements need some explaining.

1. Your concept has been validated in market

Firstly, let’s look at the last two words in this sentence – in market. This means you have launched, you are live, and you have customers and revenue. We have gone beyond the idea (the easy part) and launched something, which makes the original business launch plan a historical and irrelevant document. Until this point, there is no proof that anyone actually cares about your idea; that anyone will buy your thing.

Concept validation – this occurs when people are buying what you sell, as well as any positive coverage you receive. Positive coverage includes people and media talking about what you are doing – not what technology you have used, or how you bootstrapped your business (which is not concept validation, but method validation), but talking about the benefits your business is providing customers and the problems you are solving. This coverage is about them, not you. At this point, you know the business has potential and isn’t a stupid whim.

2. You know what to do

You’ve been doing what you do – selling what you sell – long enough to know the crappy parts of your business. You know what you must improve to make your semi-broken yet still alive start-up better. You’ve worked out where the original model and plan was terribly wrong. You’ve also been around long enough to gather feedback from the market, which gives you a good indication of how to improve your ‘thing’. Until this point, innovation, location, good people and lots of saying sorry has kept you alive. But time has nearly run out, and you’ve learned what must be done to grow and eventually thrive.

3. You know how to do it

Not only do you understand the above conceptually, but you actually know how to make this stuff happen. You’ve gone beyond ideas for improvement, such as make the website more usable, reduce the price of the widget, create national brand awareness or increase distribution. Now you actually have an executable plan in place.

So what is an executable plan? An executable plan is a set of projects that are achievable with the immediate resources you have at your disposal, in a reasonable timeframe. Financial resources, human resources, organisational infrastructure – an executable plan that you can deliver to the market, not a pipedream of appearing on Oprah or getting funding from Sequoia Capital. You have the team with the skills to bring the improved offer to market. It may not require huge financial resources, it may involve more creative solutions, but you know you can do it.

4. You are actually doing it – right now

The plans have been put down as discussed in parts two and three. In fact, you won’t even need to look at them again. They are now ‘historical documents’. Instead, your team is fully engaged in implementing what you have agreed is the correct strategy. The steps to completing the projects are known. They are live projects the team is actively engaged in on a daily basis, which will fundamentally change the marketing mix of your business. The projects have budgets and deadlines and you will not rest until they have been completed. Only then will you need to go back to part two again, and work out what to do. Then go through the process again. In fact, this process never ends. In continues in perpetuity. The important thing is that you implement strategies before re-viewing them. There is nothing more counterproductive than constantly re-assessing what to do. The only way to know what works is to experiment and do it.

When we do this – we are on the path to success. This should perhaps be defined as: “Success = the progressive realisation of a worthwhile ideal.”

10 steps to web start up

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s never been cheaper to start a business in the history of man. Especially on line. Startup guru Guy Kawasaki proved it with his $12,000 example for www.trumours.com – But startup blog says you can do it for pretty close to zero. In the spirit of sharing here’s the startup blog list of the 10 things you need to get started, and resources to help perform these necessary tasks.

Idea generating – Ideas these days are free and omnipresent. Steal ideas from www.springwise.com or www.idea-a-day.com – Just take one that suits you and do it. Maybe bring their idea to your geography, or just copy something already successful and do it. There is no currency in ideas. They are free. Take them. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you that is the easiest part of any venture. And they are right.
Name Generating – Actually your business name has nothing to do with success. There’s only two things to consider. Firstly that it’s available (.com?) and secondly that people can say it. Check out www.nameboy.com to help you generate some.
Idea testing – I loved the idea from Timothy Ferriss who tested the idea for the best book name (4 hour work week won it) by using Google Adwords for the various options and seeing which one got the most clicks with certain key words. Inspired stuff. Steal his idea and use adwords to test your business proposition before investing heavily.
Project Managment – Keep your project stuff all in one digital location. The crew over at 37 Signals provide some awesome tools for free in doing so. We’ve used it extensively for rentoid.com
Communication – Get skype set up for all your international dealings phone calls and chats required in managing your project and team. I work with with people all over the world on rentoid and have never paid for a phone call yet. You can even get it on your iphone to make free calls from – Giddy up.
Design – Don’t get stooged paying a zillion dollars for an agency to design your stuff. Leave the agency work for big companies with big budgets, you’re a bootstrapper and need to get it done cheap. But lucky for us these days cheap doesn’t have to mean crap. Check out 99 designs to get your site designed. If you need digital icons or related visuals check out istock photo for great up to date design. For pictures use Flickr creative commons.
CSS (Cascading Style Cheets) – Check out slice and dice it to get your shiny new designs ready for coding.
Coding / Programming – Yep, that tricky stuff which makes it all work under the website. Easy, go straight to Elance or ODesk to find coders for HTML, PHP, Rails, AJAX – anything. They’re all there waiting for your brief. (this should be the only biggish expense for your web startup – which means a few hundred dollars with a currency advantage)
Payment gateway – Use paypal – free set up and the cheapest, most trusted way to accept credit cards and multiple payment forms on the internet.
Promotion tools – OK this is the stuff you’re all familiar with and using daily. So turn these fun parks into business tools by using them properly. But just choose a couple of them and use them well. My favourites are youtube, twitter, blogging (recommend wordpress).

So there you have it – web start up in 10 easy steps. Feel free to add any other cool tools and ideas in the comments.

What are you waiting for? Get started.

Steve.

A real bootstrapper – literally

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

The other day I was in the RACV club when I ran into a business I had heard about.

shineshoeshine – which as you’ve probably guessed is a shoe shine business run by bootstrapping entrepreneur Kate Kay.

I had a chat with Kate who has a permanent shoe shine location in the Rialto Towers in Melbourne – a classic corporate targeted location. But also sets up in lots of temporary locations as can be seen above in the RACV city club.

There’s a lot to like about this business:

low startup costs (Some polish, foot stools, a chair…)
Reinvents old world values and personal service
Instant cash payments for service
Ability to be mobile

and my favourite part which I’ll talk about in more detail….

What Kate is now doing is offering her services as a promotional tool. Where brands & company’s can hire her services as a special offer to their staff or customers. The cool thing about this idea is that Kate can become your personal selling agent and talk to her ‘captive audience’ about which ever topic you choose, while her and her staff are busy shinning.

I think it’s a great idea, with a cool point of difference – You can contact her here.

How to generate media for your startup

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a recent Article I wrote for Anthill Magazine:

When aiming to generate media coverage for our start-up or business, we often get one thing wrong. It relates to our training as marketers. We are too targeted.

In fact, we need to do the reverse and cast the media net wide – as wide as possible. What needs to be targeted is ‘the message’, not the media organisations we aim at. The message needs to be written for the forum. But, in truth, most of us have way more messages in our business than we have bothered to think about, or even invent. Yes, we can invent messages.

The message or pitch needs to be all about them, their readers and their viewers. Never us or our start-up. So before you pitch, work out how many angles you’ve got and you’ll be surprised what you can dig up. In fact, you’ve got to give a bit before you get anything – especially for start-ups, who can exchange a few learnings from the battlefield.

Here’s an idea-jam for potential examples of media angles for Start-up X.

Altruistic – helping people
Business methods you’ve used
Helping people make money
Saving money by using your products
Productivity improvements of staff
Web news – first of its type
Start-up stories
Technology used
Ecologically sound (no, we don’t mean carbon offset)
Green message
Making the web-physical connect – going beyond virtual
Helping the financially challenged
Help people connect with customers
It’s über new
It’s the old world reinvented
Vicarious living….

There’s more, but you’re bored already. I’m just showing what’s possible. Stuff like this equals free media. Pages/slots have to be filled.

Frequency vs Depth

While we know we need advertising or media exposure, the thing we need most is frequency. Advertisers talk about depth and frequency. (Depth being how many people we reach on each occasion. Frequency being how often we reach them.) It’s great to let zillions of people know about our start-up as quickly as we can. We may even be lucky enough to get some kind of viral campaign working for our start-up – we may be featured in the newspaper, on TechCrunch or we might even be lucky enough get a TV spot.

After the event, here’s what happens: people cook dinner, pick up the kids from school, pay the bills, kick the dog and get on with life. Our start up doesn’t really matter to them… straight away.

Consumer awareness goes something like this:

Exposure 1: “That’s a cool idea/product/concept.”

Exposure 2: “Oh, yeah, I must remember to check that out.”

Exposure 3: “There it is again. Might be worth having a look.”

Exposure 4: “Hmm, Ok – I’ll check it out when I’m shopping/online next.”

Exposure 5: They finally act and go look at / investigate / touch / feel / try….

After many exposures we have “a chance” of selling to them. Sure some people check it out first time, some buy straight away, but the large majority need to be reminded, over and over again. This doesn’t mean you need to spam them or do terrible interruption marketing. It means you need to send frequent and relevant marketing communications to the people who might care.

It’s a lot like us never noticing an advertisement for a car until you are in the market to buy one. They’re always there, we just have selective perception.

This is why advertising frequency is king. No point having a big launch campaign if your prospective new customers aren’t looking on that occasion. For entrepreneurs, the big launch concept is a hoax. It’s unsustainable. We’re far better off being there all the time, in some way – then we don’t have to predict when people will buy.

And before you waste a shipload of money on a PR agency, the truth is the media aren’t listening anymore. Well, listening to PR firms…. Once upon a time, a PR agency had the secret access keys to journalists. That made them powerful. But things have changed. Now we can access anyone with a few Twitter messages and some Google magic. And the PR agency messages are very 1993. In an age of authenticity, we are far better off going direct. Developing a relationship with media contacts is far more valuable than wasting money on outsourcing PR. People want to talk to the person, and that person is you.

Want proof ?– check out the rentoid.com about page and scroll down to see the media we have generated – none of which has been paid for.