Category Archives: Entrepreneur

How To Create A Website Using Brains Instead of Money

: Image via CrunchBase

By Gretchen Glasscock

A while back, in By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09, web guru, Guy Kawasaki, details how he built a website on the cheap. That is, for Guy Kawasaki $12,107.09 is cheap. And it is cheap for a top ranking, major website. But if you’re not in Guy Kawasaki’s league yet…. and most of us aren’t …. you can build an attractive website that captures eyeballs, brings in revenue and turns a profit for $100 to $250.00. I know. I’ve done it. Many times.

Let’s look at how, working off Kawasaki’s list ( in italics). Actually Kawasaki only had four expense items, and you can pare those down dramatically.

As Kawasaki says, “Here’s a quick overview by the numbers:”

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).
0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

Times have changed since people on the web spent weeks or months laboring over business plans. The web is fast, fast, fast and you have a built in, real world focus group. Start from where you are with what you have. Put it out and see if people like it. Or, as they say in advertising, see if the dogs will eat the dog food. If they do, then keep leveraging up. You can and should leverage up for the life of the site to keep it fresh, interesting, constantly evolving and compelling.

As for money, I agree with Mark Cuban who said: “Rule #1: Sweat Equity is the best start up capital. There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs, your own pocket and your customer’s pockets. You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders, As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t. The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.”

Kawasaki has plenty of brains and, if you follow his moves, you will be using and improving yours. On to Kawasaki’s next point :

3. “7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

I couldn’t agree more. WordPress has revolutionized ordinary people’s ability to rapidly deploy an attractive, sophisticated website which can then be updated in plain text. According to Wikipedia, “WordPress is a free, open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application, powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today.” Being open source, it has thousands of man hours of coding and is constantly being refreshed and updated. It is powerful and elegant, plus it offers many plug ins and widgets, automated pieces of software which work in the background doing essential tasks it used to take programmers many hours to do. These tasks include search engine optimization, providing Google with a sitemap and a constant stream of updates and a thousand more functions, all of which work together to make your site a success.

As for design, WordPress has a huge array of free themes you can select. There are also some premium themes for which you pay a small price. A lot of professionals prefer the Thesis theme, at $87, because it is simple, elegant and endlessly customizable without having to code. Thesis is, right off the bat, an expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework. Thesis is known for the quality of its design and search engine optimization, SEO, which is critical because it is SEO traffic which drives the success of a website. There are also many free or inexpensive”skins” or looks available that overlay the Thesis framework. But to keep it simple, and for your own look, go to Istockphoto.com, put in your keywords to search for suitable photos then pay a buck or so each for a half dozen photos to go in your rotator or media box and you’re ready to go. Add your Twitter.com widget on the sidebar to drive more traffic.

At BlueHost.com, you can get great web hosting, features and service, 24/7 for $6.95 a month, payable a year in advance and only slightly more by the month. Among the many features they offer, to make life really simple for a webmaster, is the ability to install a WordPress platform to your site with one click.

· $4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

These guys at at Electric Pulp are top notch talent who’ve developed a well deserved reputation and consequently are well known. You pay top dollar for well known. I am a believer in remote teams and, trust me, a lot of remote techs aren’t well known and their prices are correspondingly much lower. Last week-end, I had an issue with a website and, through eLance.com, I located a Canadian demon coder who worked through the night and all the next day to fix it. I paid him $150 including a $60 bonus. I also brought on a certified IT Security Expert from Ireland who handled all the IT security for a global firm. He did a review of my site security for $125. You don’t have to be expensive to be good. You just have to know what you’re doing.

· $4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something. Here’s a breakdown of what I got for this amount of money.

I agree with some of Kawasaki’s thoughts on this. With lawyers you can pay now or pay later. And, if you get very successful and are negotiating an investment or liquidity event, you definitely want top notch lawyers “not only for her expertise but to show opposing counsel that you’re not clueless.” Agreed. But, if you’re bootstrapping, you can defer this expense until you are bringing in those bucks. Yes, your lawyers may cost more then, but you will be making more, so, in my judgment, it evens out. If money is an issue, which it usually is, I’d go with later.

· $399. I paid LogoWorks $399 to design the logo. Of course, this was before HP bought the company. Not sure what it would charge now.

It still charges $399. In fact, you can get a package for $299. But there’s a larger array of choices all the way up to $2999. I paid $299 for my latest logo from LogoWorks. But there are other choices. When I started out on the Web in 1996, I used a royalty free Matisse painting of people joining hands around the world as my logo. As I got established and began to see revenue, I paid $2, 000 for a custom logo. But now, I’ve learned, you can find a logo designer on eLance.com for $125 for a static logo and $150 for an animated logo. Either LogoWorks, another logo specialty shop which you can Google, or one you find on eLance.com is suitable. However, what I particularly like and I think you will like about LogoWorks is that you go down a decision funnel selecting the look and feel you want and have a lot of control over the process and the look and feel of the final product.

· $1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy. I registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc, etc). I had no idea that one had to buy so many domains to truly “surround” the one you use.

A domain name should cost about $10. I don’t want to quibble but I like to wait until a site is a proven success and bringing in revenue before spending a thousand dollars “surrounding it.”

Kawasaki goes on to say:

“· $0. I spent $0 on marketing to launch Truemors.

· 24. However, I did spend 24 years of schmoozing and “paying it forward” to get to the point where I could spend $0 to launch a company. Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

I do understand he’s Guy Kawasaki. And, as he points out, it takes a lot of experience to get to the point where you could spend $0 to launch a company. But it will never be sooner than today, so you might as well start. If you’re known a bit around the web or in your specific field and you put up a good site, you will find your niche and get traffic also.

In concluding, Guy says, in part:

4. I learned four lessons launching Truemors:

1. There’s really no such thing as bad PR.

2. $12,000 goes a very long way these days.

3. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.

4. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

I agree. You can do it for much, much less, a couple of hundred bucks perhaps. And definitely, “Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

5 Reasons WordPress Makes it Super Simple to Have a Headache-Free Site (communicatevalue.com)
10 Killer Ways for Startups To Use WordPress (wpjedi.com)
Book review: Head First WordPress (forthelose.org)

The Entrepreneurship Track

Entrepreneurship can definitely become a way of life. I should know. I’ve been a life long entrepreneur, just as my father was before me.

I don’t know if it’s an addiction, the challenge, knowing you can bear the pain of the long climb, the exhilaration of success when, against long odds, you know you’ve created something that didn’t exist before. Maybe it’s a hidden gene, waiting to be discovered. Maybe it’s just that after entrepreneurship, nothing else seems so satisfying. But whatever it is, and the x factor is, author Rajesh Setty gets it, to my mind, just right in The Dance of Entrepreneurship:

“There are broadly three phases of entrepreneurship

1. The Beginning

2. The Journey

3. The New Beginning ( Yes, It’s Not the Destination )

rubber_meets_the_road

Now, the quick outline of the elements in each phase:

1. The Beginning

The five elements for the beginning phase are:

1. Purpose: Knowing why you are in this will help you keep going when the going gets tough

2. Passion: Doing what you love will make it feel like you are not working

3. People: Building together with the right people will make it look easy

4. Problem: Solving a real problem will help as people will pay to solve a real problem.

5. Plan: Having a plan even when you know that it’s going to change along the way

2. The Journey

The five elements of the journey

1. Patience: Everything takes longer and costs more. Patience is a MUST

2. Persistence: Sticking to the course of action even in the face of difficulty

3. Perseverance: Sticking to your beliefs even in the face of no successful outcome

4. Pain: Ability to handle the “pains” of entrepreneurship along the way

5. Politics: Knowing how to navigate in the sea of politics. You may not want to play politics but surely you should know how to survive and thrive in the politics that already exists

Last phase is what I call the “New Beginning.” I purposely did not call it the destination because rarely I see entrepreneurship “ends” with something – it’s usually a stepping stone to begin something new.

3. The New Beginning

So, here are the five elements of the new beginning

1. Pride: The satisfaction that comes with taking a concept to a completion

2. Profits: If executed well, there is money to be made. There are also profits in terms of personal growth and fulfillment.

3. Power: Since nine out of ten companies go out of business, if you are part of the one that succeeds, you automatically have more power.

4. Possibilities: New possibilities open up as you have more credibility

5. Philanthropy: You can make a bigger difference to the world as you have “extra” capacity

For those of you who are starting on this wonderful journey, wish you the very best.

Web 3.0, Breaking Out Of Our Silos, Getting Smarter

If you happen to be an entrepreneur on the web, like me, whether you’re
building your own blogs and websites or building them for others, you need to keep your eye on the web’s future. That’s where we’ll be competing for eyeballs, relevance and revenue.

Some distilled insight is offered by Richard MacManus in Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web. He analyzes and sets out to distill “a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent “Web 3.0″ concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web.”

It might be a tall order to understand all of that in one gulp, but let’s look for a second at Web 3.0, then gently peek over the horizon to see a tiny preview of what lies ahead. ( Some of it might be a little techie, but for most of us it will work behind the scenes, and we will have simple tools which help us take advantage of the Net’s increasingly intelligent structural and linking dynamics.)

“Web 3.0: What Comes After 2.0 (!)

Last year Greg Boutin loosely defined web 3.0 as “the Web of Openness. A web that breaks the old siloes, links everyone everything everywhere, and makes the whole thing potentially smarter.”

There is a lot of debate about what Web 3.0 is and the term itself is open to derision. In my view Web 3.0 is an unoriginal name for the next evolution of the Web. What’s important to note though, is that there is a difference in the products we’re seeing in 2009 compared to the ones we saw at the height of ‘Web 2.0‘ (2005-08). If Web 2.0 was about user generated content and social applications such as YouTube and Wikipedia, then Web 3.0 is about open and more structured data – which essentially makes the Web more ‘intelligent’.

The smarter the data, the more things we can do with it. The current trends we’re seeing today – filtering content, real-time data, personalization – are evidence that ‘Web 3.0′ is upon us, if not well defined yet. We actually saw a great example of Web 3.0 this week, with Google’s release of Search Options and Rich Snippets. Those features added real-time search, structured data, and more to Google’s core search.”

: Image via Wikipedia

Macmanus goes on to discus “linked data” which is interesting, if pretty techie. There is a fascinating, if mind blowing, graphic of a Linking Open Data (LOD) project. He also notes that Google will be a big player in all of this.

: Image via Wikipedia

The bottom line is that, ultimately, we will have a more intelligent web and entreneurs would do well, to position themselves for the future by keeping an eye on linkages. To dive into the complexity of it all, go to Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web – ReadWriteWeb.

Google’s Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web (radar.oreilly.com)
Linked Data is not owl:sameAs Semantic Web (semantic-web.at)

How To Gain Insulation From Competition: Foster A Tribe

: Image by Alex Osterwalder via Flickr

Not sure what the hardest thing is in business is because so much of it is challenging. But one of the hardest things to achieve has to be “insulation from competition”. Even if you are great at doing whatever you do, someone can always come along and replicate it. Seth Godin, marketing guru, makes the point in Seth’s Blog: Thinking about business models

that building a “tribe”, insulates you from competition. I can think of some examples of this. Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. After all it’s only ice cream. Volkswagon, when it brought out the Beetle. After all it was only a car. Apple when it introduced everything from the Mac to the Iphone. After all, there were competing products, but for those who fell in love with the meticulous design, ease of use and the sheer enjoyment of using the product, there was only Apple. Here’s how Seth makes that point when thinking about business models”

“A business model is the architecture of a business or project. It has four elements:

What compelling reason exists for people to give you money? (or votes or donations)
How do you acquire what you’re selling for less than it costs to sell it?
What structural insulation do you have from relentless commoditization and a price war?
How will strangers find out about the business and decide to become customers?

The internet 1.0 was a fascinating place because business models were in flux. Suddenly, it was possible to have costless transactions, which meant that doing something at a huge scale was very cheap. That means that #2 was really cheap, so #1 didn’t have to be very big at all.

Some people got way out of hand and decided that costs were so low, they didn’t have to worry about revenue at all. There are still some internet hotshot companies that are operating under this scenario, which means that it’s fair to say that they don’t actually have a business model.

The idea of connecting people, of building tribes, of the natural monopoly provided by online communities means that the internet is the best friend of people focusing on the third element, insulation from competition. Once you build a network, it’s extremely difficult for someone else to disrupt it.

As the internet has spread into all aspects of our culture, it is affecting business models offline as well. Your t-shirt shop or consulting firm or political campaign has a different business model than it did ten years ago, largely because viral marketing and the growth of cash-free marketing means that you can spread an idea farther and faster than ever before. It also makes it far cheaper for a competitor to enter the market (#3) putting existing players under significant pressure from newcomers.

This business model revolution is just getting started. It’s’ not too late to invent a better one.”

What Sort of Business Plan Do You Need ?

Business plan guru, Tim Berry, will be reading and evaluating 75 or so business plans in a single month so he should know something about how to create them and how to judget them.

As Berry says: “This is business plan season for me. I just finished reading half a dozen plans for Notre Dame’s annual business plan competition (we (Palo Alto Software) give a prize to the best one), and another half dozen plans for the Rice business plan competition (I’m a judge, and we have a best business plan prize for that one too). I still have to read five plans for the University of Oregon’s New Venture Competition next weekend (I’m a judge), and I’m supposed to produce a first-cut on 43 plans for the Willamette Angel Conference (I’m one of the angel investors) by the end of the workday today.:

Here’s his take on what sort of business plan you need:

Why You Should Start Your Own Page On Facebook

: Image via CrunchBase

Dan Schawbel makes an interesting point and one I think might be helpful to all of us about the value of starting your own page on Facebook. Schawbel in HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook notes that with over 200 million active users, Facebook has become a personal, product and corporate branding hub. He presents a very thorough guide to building your personal brand on Facebook, but the most interesting point he makes, I think, is How To Start Your Own Page.

“Facebook pages are for brands, ranging from Coca Cola to Barack Obama and even you. These pages resemble your Facebook profiles, so only use one if you have a large number of Facebook friends. By having a Facebook page, your brand can go viral, holding a spot on other people’s profiles. The other main advantage is that your page will rank high for your name in Google () () and you can use it for your professional career, while keeping your personal profile private.”

The reason I think this is a really good idea is because I recently read a study showing the most likely prospect for getting new business is from someone you are already doing business with. The next most likely place is from someone who’s heard good things about you from someone you are doing business with. In other words, credibility — being good at what you do—, attention to clients and colleagues and word of mouth or at the core of building your brand, your reputation and your business. Remember that when you are deciding where to invest your time. Facebook is a more intimate platform where you can get some of those qualities across.

Since I’ve just come upon this truth myself I haven’t built my Facebook Page yet, but it is now on my priority to do list. It will be a bit tricky because my Facebook friends come from many different personal camps or tribes, and my page will blend webbiz, social media and entrepreneurship. The idea will be to gather a small community with interesting thoughts on these subjects. An interesting challenge. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, if you’ve built a Facebook page or are planning to, please share your thoughts and experience.

Can You Start A Legit & Profitable Business For Under $20?

: Image via Wikipedia

Can you start a business for under $20? Scott Allen says yes in 10 Legitimate Businesses You Can Start for Under $20. He also tells you exactly how to spend your 20 bucks in each case.

Some of these business, although a good idea, might take a little longer to get money rolling in like Webpreneur. I should know.

More promising for immediate cash flow:

eBay Seller

I have a cousin who haunts the garage and estate sales, specializes in silver, jewelry, old books and post cards and makes several thousand a month on eBay. Of course it does take time to buy, photograph, price and upload. Or you can let someone else do it for 30% of the take.

Or, as Scott says: “Yes, there really are people who make a decent living buying things at garage sales and flea markets and selling them on eBay. The big secrets? Stick to products you know (or learn before you start) extremely well, package your goods carefully, and provide impeccable customer service. It helps to have a digital camera or a scanner, but it’s not required.

Spend the $20 on: Your first inventory at a garage sale.

Other business I think are very doable and at a professional level you probably already have the necessary skills:

Consultant

As Scott says: “Getting into consulting is relatively simple. All you have to do is know how to do something better than most people do, and be able to either teach people how to do it or be willing to do it for them. Networking is the key to success in this business, so start by making a list of everyone you know and giving them all a call.

Spend the $20 on: $14 on a box of clean-edge laser or inkjet business cards and $6 buying your first prospect a cup of coffee one morning.”

Desktop Publishing

“It’s amazing how many people have a computer and still don’t know how to make a decent flyer! If you’ve got a good design sense, are extremely familiar with your word processor, and already have a laser or high-quality inkjet printer, you can get into desktop publishing. Create a really great-looking portfolio for yourself and go door-to-door.

Spend the $20 on: Some high-quality paper to create your samples on.”

Scott also mentions: Personal Services – Shopping & Errands and Tutoring, both of which you can get into and start making money immediately.

Others depend on your personal level of interest in them. If you like selling, for instance, Avon might be for you.

Housesitter / Petsitter
Avon Independent Sales Representative
Secretarial Service – Typing / Transcription / Proofreading

Others I think might take a little more skill and experience like

Professional Organizer

If you’re looking for extra income you might want to look over the details of all these possibilities at Legitimate Businesses You Can Start for Under $20

Hope this starts you thinking of all the ways you can start now, for very little and build a profitable business, one which will tide you over in tough times.

How to Avoid Killing Innovation

: Image via Wikipedia

Guy Kawasaki, marketing and Net guru, recommends this in his Tweet: The Top Five Innovation Killers

Although the article mentions 5 top innovation killers, there were 2 that really resonated with me:

An intolerance of failure. The #1 top tactic for innovation, according to expert innovators, is to ‘experiment fearlessly’. Nothing works first time, so you may as well get it wrong as soon as you can. If you cannot accept failure you are unlikely to see too much innovation, no matter how much money you throw at it.
A desire for a magic pill, not a daily exercise regime. This requires innovation as a way of life rather than as an isolated change programme.

I have always seen people looking for a magic pill or a silver bullet to solve all their problems in business. In fact, in my 20′s, in a fuzzy, unformed way, I probably thought that as well. But experience shows that success most often comes from putting one foot in front of the other every day. Wasn’t it Einstein who said genius is 1 part inspiration and 99 parts perspiraton?

How To Survive: Diversify Your Offerings, Move From “Want” To “Need”, Pivot To Change

My father, who rose from a hardscrabble life to become an extremely successful entrepreneur, used to tell me:

“Always have at least three businesses because there will never be a time when one of them isn’t doing badly.”

Was he right on that! Particularly in the midst of a recession.

But even if you don’t have three entirely separate businesses, it is still possible to adjust your product mix so you have three or more entirely different offerings targeting different needs, possibly even from the same consumer. Look carefully at your business and learn to pivot. I have.

I was reading recently that for a number of years Target, even though much smaller, had been beating the brains out of Walmart, in terms of growth. Retail experts attributed this to it’s trendier clothes and name designers. Then, lo and behold, the recession hit and the trend flipped. Walmart is now beating the brains out of Target and the gurus tell us it all has to do with groceries. Yep, mundane old cereal and peanut butter.

Because now vendors need to be selling more of what people need not what they want. As this article put it, why buy a new shirt when you can just reach in the closet and get one. On the other hand you need to eat. So you need to buy groceries and Walmart has more of them, although Target is scrambling to catch up.

Which brings up to the Web. And to other businesses as well. I was also reading about an entrepreneur who was burning through cash and man hours and scrimping to develop a new, hopefully game changing, software product. When the recession hit, he put that on hold to offer a web design and development service. Cash now for something businesses need to have not want to have.

The lesson here is that there is, no doubt, some way you can think through your offerings and, for the moment, move away from the big ideas and toward the practical, the everyday needs, the things you can execute efficiently in a shorter time frame for a customer.

Seth Godin wrote about this on on March 13, 2009

Pivots for change

“When industry norms start to die, people panic. It’s difficult to change when you think that you must change everything in order to succeed. Changing everything is too difficult.

Consider for a minute the pivot points available to you:

Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.
Keep your customers, but change what you sell to them.
Keep your providers, but change the profit structure.
Keep your industry but change where the money comes from.
Keep your staff, but change what you do.
Keep your mission, but change your scale.
Keep your products, but change the way you market them.
Keep your customers, but change how much you sell each one.
Keep your technology, but use it to do something else.
Keep your reputation, but apply it to a different industry or problem.

Simple examples:

Keep the musicians, but change how you make money (sell concerts, not CDs).
Keep making guitars, but make bespoke expensive ones, not the mass market ones that overseas competition has made obsolete.
Keep the punch press and the lathe, but make large scale art installations, not car parts.
Keep your wealthy travel clients, but sell them personal services instead of trips to Europe.
Keep the factory that makes missiles, but figure out how to make high-efficiency turbines instead.”

There you have it. If you like this post, Tweet me. Thanks.

AW WebBiz & Social Media Blog

Mentoring, Tools & Strategy To Succeed

Category Archives: Entrepreneur

How To Create A Website Using Brains Instead of Money

The Entrepreneurship Track

1. The Beginning

2. The Journey

3. The New Beginning

How To Gain Insulation From Competition: Foster A Tribe

What Sort of Business Plan Do You Need ?

Can You Start A Legit & Profitable Business For Under $20?

How to Avoid Killing Innovation

How To Survive: Diversify Your Offerings, Move From “Want” To “Need”, Pivot To Change

Pivots for change

Related articles

1. The Beginning

2. The Journey

3. The New Beginning

“Web 3.0: What Comes After 2.0 (!)

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