The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.
Using our consumer-facing platform, 4MeNU, nsight2day helps individuals and organizations truly engage with one another. Using innovative tags, users can share information with their network in context. We call these messages Gems. Follow her @stephbeer.
Who is your hero?
My grandfather, who is Swiss (this makes sense if you know me).
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
Don’t be low-end. This means low margin, but it also means don’t behave badly. The other piece of advice I love is don’t “trade up” when it comes to who you spend your time with. Your friends matter more than ever when you’re starting a business, and just because you meet flashy people doesn’t mean that the originals aren’t worth their weight in gold for you as a person and an entrepreneur.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
We were a B2B team that tried to build a B2C platform. Stick to your strengths. Also, build a few similar offerings for several different types of client/customer groups and then see how hard it is to sell to each. There are big differences between selling to an individual, a university, and a Fortune 500 company. Each is a unique challenge; you may be better or, um, less well-positioned to sell to them.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
Yoga. Setting your mind straight can make or break your morning.
What’s your best financial or cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
Always try to pay based on performance and limit all your fixed costs. Try not to sign a lease (that goes for yourself and for your business).
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
Stop going to tech meetups (unless you’re recruiting) and start talking to more senior people who have decades of business experience. More pointedly, stop listening to people who have launched successful businesses by “asking my friends from my financial services days to invest.”
There are a lot of people who are professionally/socially well-positioned to win in the startup environment, and their stories aren’t that interesting or helpful to most entrepreneurs. Actually, just avoid the whole “founders cult” to the greatest extent possible (this gets back to staying close with old friends).
What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?
When we have consistent revenue that covers our costs and lets our original investor make his money back (and returns that are greater than or equal to the returns he would have gotten had he put his money into an index fund) — that’s it.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.
You have a business idea that you feel has tremendous potential. You probably got the insight by solving a problem that you had. Brilliant. Most successful companies today were created because of this very insight.
To give you an example, YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. According to an oft-cited story, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party.
When you’re solving your own problem or one that you feel is the pain point of a certain target audience, how do you know whether there is a large enough pool of people that face the same problems or challenges that you are trying to solve? If you’re just selling a product, you’re better off creating it and getting it to the market. But if you want to build a business out of it, you need to have a sizeable market for scalability.
So the question is, how do you determine the market demand for your startup idea? Read on for several ways to get the answers you need.
Google
Yes, it can be as simple as looking it up on Google. Haven’t you heard that Google is God? It has most of the answers that you are looking for. So how do you get Google to help you? Use the Google Adwords keyword tool to look for the number of people seeking out what you’re trying to do.
Put the keyword(s) in the search box, select the target country or countries and Google will show you the number of average local and global monthly searches. This is a good indicator of demand.
Minimum Viable Product
“Market research and business planning are overrated. The best market research is putting a product out and seeing if people will buy it. The best business plan is to create something great and sell it fast,” says Guy Kawasaki.
Writing a business plan with projections through market research is a sure-shot way to a startup doomsday. Nothing beats an actual customer using your product or service. So how do you get to the customer when you’re at the idea stage and don’t want to spend a huge sum building something they might not want?
Build a minimum viable product or a prototype. The idea is to put out something that offers the core value or your startup or that solves the core problem of your customers.
The MVP could be a PowerPoint slide, a dialogue box or just a landing page. This is something that you can often build it in a day or a week. A prototype can be an actual functioning product with the core features offered.
Share this with your network and see the response. Are people excited to use it? Do they actually feel their needs or problems are resolved by using your product? Is it easy to use?
Landing Page
You don’t have a product yet but still want to get customer buy-ins? Then landing pages are your best friend. Create a teaser or promotional landing page, which highlights the core proposition of your startup.
Ask for their email addresses in return for an offer or simply to be updated about when the startup is launched. Here’s a great example of a landing page that does just that. The number of email subscribers will determine how many people are interested in your startup. Try using Launchrock to create your landing page. Or use KickoffLabs.
To increase traffic, one method is to create a Google Adwords and a Facebook marketing campaign. Point the adverts to this landing page to drive traffic. Use Google Search and Network Partners to spread the campaign among a huge number of people.
You would much rather spend a little money to be sure than spend fortunes building a product that customers don’t want.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is an excellent means to get actual buy-in for your product. This concept has increasingly becoming popular with the likes of Kickstarter, RocketHub, Indiegogo launching their platforms on the Internet that bring together startups looking for funding and individuals who are interested in contributing towards an idea or a product.
Apart from securing funding for your startup, you also get to know how many people are actually interested in your product or service. Interested enough to pledge their money. Here’s a list that showcases the most funded projects.
Whatever be your path, make sure you build on something that your customers want. As Kawasaki puts it, “This isn’t rocket science. It’s mostly hard work and luck.”
This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.
Rahul Varshneya is a startup coach and the co-founder of Arkenea, an enterprise mobility and cloud solutions provider. He writes on starting up and mobile strategy at http://rahulvarshneya.com/blog.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.
Old St. Louis wants to become hot with young startups.
Civic and business leaders are raising $ 100 million to kick the region’s burgeoning startup scene up a notch. Dubbed the Regional Entrepreneurship Initiative (REI), it seeks to attract venture capital over the next five years to support the “rapidly growing entrepreneurial ecosystem and high-growth startup activity” as well as fund new ventures.
“A year ago, I asked what we needed to provide the best environment to help our best startups grow, and the answer came back with a resounding ‘get them more money,’” said St. Louis County Executive Charlie A. Dooley. “Now we are saying we need the money and are putting an aggressive plan in place to raise that capital. This guaranties the best new companies will stay in St. Louis and thrive for years to come.”
St. Louis is not exactly what you’d call a startup hub. The dominant industries are manufacturing, healthcare, and shipping, and the city is home to large corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Purina, and Energizer. It may not be a “bastion of progressivism,” but this is beginning to change.
Local entrepreneur Aaron Perlut said that over the past couple years, the region’s business and entrepreneurial ecosystem has begun to dramatically evolve and flourish and is becoming a “tech town.” Technology job postings are on the rise, as are salaries, and St. Louis is attracting enough human, intellectual, physical, and financial capital to emerge as a center of innovation. A startup called LockerDome recently closed $ 6 million in Series A financing, “big data” company Appistry pulled in nearly $ 40 million from private investors, and CrowdSource.com closed $ 12.5 million.
“St. Louis is seeing an incredible amount of early-stage tech activity right now, which is leading to a strong funnel of great deals,” said Gabe Lozano, the chief executive officer of LockerDome. “Without question, we will be globally recognized as a top 10 city in technology within 10 years.”
Square cofounder Jim McKelvey is a St. Louis native and said that in the past, many St. Louis startups left the area to get their business off the ground, but now that migration is reversing. REI is designed to fuel this trend by attracting new talent and keeping native success stories home. This requires access to capital, which is one of the main roadblocks that entrepreneurs outside of the tech bubble face, and it’s one of the main reasons they head to the Valley.
The impact that a thriving startup scene can have on the economy is well known, and President Obama is a vocal supporter of initiatives that support technology and innovation. REI is not only about capital flow but also about strengthening St. Louis’s ecosystem as a whole. Other components include building a regional customer relationship management system (CRM) to track startup assistance, investment, and impact; developing a common measurement system to track results; creating marketing and communications campaigns aimed at expanding awareness and increasing participation from people inside and outside the region; establishing programs to include minority, female, veteran, and immigrant entrepreneurs; and setting up regional mentorship programs. The $ 100 million will also contribute funding to pre-seed companies as well as increase the availability of Series A venture capital.
REI received a $ 1.5 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, will be entered at AccelerateSTL.org, and includes a coalition of public and private sector leaders as well as the region’s leading entrepreneurs and venture capital community. Some of the existing players in the St. Louis scene include Cultivation Capital, Arch Angels, Billiken Angels, and iSELECT Fund. There are also the incubator programs Arch Grants and Capital Innovators.
The money hasn’t been raised yet, but the passion is there. It is, after all, a city with a lot to offer. It has the Gateway Arch, the Cardinals, and a wealth of American history. Plus, it’s home to the gooey butter cake, which for me is enticement enough to go.
What better way for an anti-social app to get noticed than by insulting its target audience? London-based app design studio ustwo has just put up a pair of billboards in the hipster heartland of Shoreditch, EastLondon, a stone’s throw from where its own studio is based, which brazenly proclaim: You have no friends and No one likes you.
So what’s with the anti-social insults? Rando’s schtick is that it eschews all the usual social paraphernalia developers typically embed in their apps. There’s no Facebook sign-in, zero social sharing options at all, no comments, no likes, no favourites, no followers/followees. There’s also no way to tell who gets the photos you share/receive, beyond a general location. It’s deliberately — liberatingly — stripped of context.
Turning to a fixed-location, paper-based advertising medium may seem pretty old school but Silicon Valley has long had a bit of a thing with billboards. ustwo’s Matt Miller tells TechCrunch that’s certainly one reason he was keen to experiment with papering giant fliers atop one of Shoreditch’s busier junctions. “I’ve always been interested in billboards since flying out to San Fran in 2012. I remember during a taxi journey over there, being really impressed with the billboards and thinking to myself how I’d love to see our work pushed that way back home,” he says.
The cost of the Rando billboard campaign is “around the same amount it would cost us to develop a small app”, according to Mills. But it’s the only paid marketing ustwo intends to do for Rando — relying instead on “the virality of the concept” to keep it travelling, which, ironically enough, has led to plenty of organic chatter on social sites like Twitter and Instagram.
Pushing a stroller is hardly the most exciting part of any parent’s life — but this new longboard-come-buggy could make transporting your kid around town way, way more fun. More »
Apple won’t release Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks until later this year. Impatient? You can get many of the best features announced for the nextversion of the desktopoperatingsystem through third party apps and plug-ins right now. More »
Hacked? NSW Education in major outage
Using our consumer-facing platform, 4MeNU, 
