business ideas Archives - Page 5 of 5

Creating rituals

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Greg Borrowman, the editor of Australian Hi-Fi magazine, has another one. He thinks we’re yearning for what was lost when analog music yielded to digital.

“CDs have no personality; they’re set and forget,” he says. “With vinyl, it’s ritual. You slide the LP out of its sleeve, then deftly remove it from the inner dust jacket, making sure not to touch the playing surface. You place it on the platter with both hands, like an offering. You clean the record’s surface and perhaps the stylus. Only then do you lower the tonearm to be rewarded with the music.”

What rituals are you creating for your startup?

Quit your job

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

You should really quit your job on Monday. Yes tomorrow today . If you are working for a salary or wages and have no equity in the business that is.

And here’s why:

You are living someone else’s dream.

You are exchanging the days of your life to build the vision of someone else. You are not doing what you dreamed about as a child.

The reality is this: once you have a place to live and food to eat, the rest is ego. Chances are you are working in a job just to feed your ego. I know because I was this person for more than 10 years. I had jobs I didn’t like – high paying ones, to buy things I didn’t need, to impress people I didn’t care for. It’s a pointless treadmill which the government encourages to maximise consumption, generate higher tax rates and PAYE deductions and enforce control through a passive education process which says consumption equals success. We must remove this idea of the power structure from our minds and remind ourselves that real wealth is defined by the cool stuff we are doing, rather than the stuff we buy.

Quite your job, de-gear your life and do something of value. To further encourage this process I’ll leave you with one final thought I tweeted a while ago:

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Cheers, Steve

[digg=http://startupblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/quit-your-job/]

The strategy is fine

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Today I had a discussion with a fellow entrepreneur who was wondering whether to reduce his pricing on a new business. His point was related to the fact that his very new business hadn’t achieved a great deal of sales volume just yet.

Then I asked him if he had implemented any of the sales generating activities we had discussed last week – to which the answer was no. My response was straight and simple:

If you haven’t been out knocking on doors selling your product to the potential target market, then how is it possible to know if the marketing mix is wrong?

It was at that time he knew he had some boot strapping work to do and get out there and sell.

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The point for entrepreneurs is that it is easy to get tempted to constantly revisit the strategy. To go back to the plans when things are not automatically falling into place. Instead of doing the really hard stuff – we look for a simple revision of ideas, the plan and all that shiny stuff. The thing we often avoid is the hard effort of selling and facing rejection. But until we go out into the market and try to generate revenue, it’s impossible to have real market feedback of what needs revised.

So before we re-design our plans and process, we have to test the current one in market. We do this by trying to sell what we already have at every possible distribution point. Until we have done that, strategy revision is just an excuse for not putting in the effort required.

When seeking investors

Posted on April 10, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s some simple advice when seeking investors for your startup.

Never use the words ‘The Next’…

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Regardless of the uber successful business which follows these two words it just isn’t going to happen. For two reasons. The first is our probability of being this successful is almost non existent. Secondly if we are this successful, we wont be the next, but something new.

The main point is when people use the words the next, they lose credibility. And when someone says it to me regarding their new business venture, I find it hard to believe anything they say after that.

Best Packaging Ever

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

What does great packaging look like?

Chances are you will have to package your widget for your start up. Or at least something in your new business. I often ask people the best packaging they have ever seen. Coming from a consumer goods background I get a lot of varied answers, but never do I get the answer I propose the be the ultimate.

The banana:

Easy opening, but only when it’s ripe

Consume straight from packaging

Changes color from green to yellow as it nears its zenith

Quality of each unit verified by packaging

Built in ‘used by date’ indicator – packaging changes color – so awesome.

Category defining

Gives off product fragrance

Uber Ergonomic design & handling

Ship in packaging with mutlipack nesting design

Childproof

Protects interior

Biodegradable

Oh, I nearly forgot, good for slipping enemies in a car chase.

What can you learn from Nature?

How would nature package your product?

New York Series: Bloomingdales – You’re Welcome, really.

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

The historically significant department store Bloomingdales do some pretty cool stuff. This includes the ‘Visitor discount’ they provide:

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Yep, if you’re from another country you automatically receive an 11% discount on everything you buy. Now, this isn’t one of those trick promotions, impossible to get, with 100 other conditions. You simply go to the visitor center pictured above and show them your passport, or overseas license and that is it. And the discount is real, even if an item is on promotion or already discounted, you get the 11% on top of that. I was fortunate enough to get an incredible winter jacket which was already half price (end of winter discount, even though it was actually snowing outside) with an additional 11%. I was pretty happy. They also have a gift incentive if you spend over $200, and yep, I got my gift…

It get’s better, they also have personal shopping assistants, Multi-lingual assistants to take your around store and free hotel delivery for purchases greater that $250. You can read more about it here.

Sure, discounting isn’t always the path to profitability, but when you are taking one time customers, making them feel special, with ‘money to spend’, under your wing, it’s pretty clear that they are ‘inventing revenue’.

What does your startup do to ‘invent revenue’?

Dubai Series: From Chrysler ‘A Space’

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s another simple innovation from an old industry, a parking lot, actually giving a hoot about their customers.

car-park-lights

As you can see in the pic there is a little red or green light above every space indicating its availability. So the tiny car space mirage is now a thing of the past. The thing that actually excites me about this innovation is that it doesn’t benefit the car park owners. They’d be better off having cars drive around longer searching for a spaces and elongated traffic jams, which would result in greater revenue. But they chose this instead which is very cool.

What stuff is your business doing for them, and their benefit?