Is It Time For You To Start A New Home-Based Business?

Tips for Launching Your Start-up Right

By Cynthia Kocialski

Are you considering launching or financing a start-up company? This author’s
expertise and experiences have led to the creation of a series of tips that can help you move forward with your decision.

These tips include:

Discovery is simply a starting point from which the product and business with evolve, iterate, and be refined as the concept meets the customers, the market, and the investors.

It’s Not About the Product

Start-ups are not about the technology or product or service. The product is the heart of the company, but the product no more makes a company than a heart makes a human being. There are many components to a company that all have to work together harmoniously in order to achieve a success outcome.
What does this mean to the entrepreneur just starting his business? A new business should create a minimal product or service — don’t spend extra time adding bells and whistles. Getting the product into the hands of the customers and getting their feedback as soon as possible is worth far more than all those fancy features. Don’t agonize over perfecting the first product.

The entrepreneur needs to start thinking about those other pieces of a company on day one. You’ve got the product, but what about marketing, sales, distribution, manufacturing, financial planning, funding and so on? It’s not a serial process. You can’t develop the product and then start the marketing. Many of these functions need to overlap.

Don’t Be Afraid to Discover

The early stage start-up process is a discovery process, not a step-by-step execution process. Many first-time entrepreneurs believe you come up with a great product idea, then they come up with a detailed business plan, and finally they hire the people to execute the steps in the plan. Discovery is simply a starting point from which the product and business with evolve, iterate, and be refined as the concept meets the customers, the market, and the investors.
Too often, entrepreneurs write a business plan because some expert told them that’s what they should do. The result is a business plan that is a work of fiction. You will eventually need the business plan, but it doesn’t come first. Entrepreneurs should focus on developing a concept plan in the beginning. This is a shortened version of the business plan. It outlines what the product is and how the business surrounding the product operates, but it does so mostly through all the assumptions that the business hinges upon. The concept plan is the discovery plan. Once the entrepreneur has worked through the concept phase and has a firm idea of the product and its business, then it’s time to write the detailed business plan.
Along with don’t be afraid to discover is don’t be afraid to admit the product won’t work at all and it’s time for a major change. It takes time to find the right product to market mix.

Retool and Revise

The first product idea is never the final product that makes the company famous. In reality, the worst work you will ever do is the first work you do. Press forward past the first iteration, and make use of the lessons you learn along the way.
How do you really iterate? It sounds easy, but it’s not. You’re going to get a lot of conflicting opinions and wants from the customers and marketplace. Once you’ve got the product in the hands of the customer, you’ll find some customers love your product and many don’t. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of trying to please every customer because they feel every initial customer is precious. As a result, they spend a lot of resources adding features and fixing problems for the customers who aren’t truly excited by the product. Don’t do this. Instead, focus on the customers that really love your product. Establish relationships with these customers. If they want new features, add theirs to the baseline.
Next, reframe your marketing so that the benefits your thrilled customers experience are the ones featured most prominently in your marketing materials. This will showcase your strengths and attract more customers like those that love your product. This will also help you develop customers who will act as your informal sales force and attract customers willing to provide testimonials. Future prospects are more likely to buy if your customer testimonials and referrals are from others like themselves.

Build Your Team

You need a team, but not just any team. You need the right team for that stage of a company’s life. You wouldn’t hire a college professor to teach kindergarten. For that, you need to find early elementary teachers. Ditto for start-ups. Find the right people for the right job, as well as the right attitude and stage of their careers to make them a match for working with a start-up.
In the beginning, the two most important people to have on your team are the person who can guide the overall development process and the marketing person who can start creating demand for your product as soon as possible.
Your team is not just comprised of the founders, owners, and employees. It is also the outside mentors, advisors, vendors, and consultants. Unless a start-up happens to have a lot of funding on day one, these outsiders are key to a new business thriving. Not many start-ups can afford to hire full time employees to do a specific task, and so it becomes easier to hire short-term people to do these tasks. While founders often question why they should hire someone to do what they could do themselves, remember that building a company takes many people, and you can never do it alone. CEO does not stand for Chief Everything Officer.

Think Like an Investor

Investors know and accept that investing in a start-up is a very high-risk proposition. If investors wanted a moderate return, they’d invest in publicly-traded bellwether companies like IBM and Coca-Cola. What entrepreneurs don’t get is that, to investors, the company itself is THEIR product. Entrepreneurs need to understand the investors’ perspectives. Entrepreneurs engage in the deliberate creation of their end-user products, but what they also need to do is engage in the deliberate creation of their companies. Investors buy into companies, not end-user products. For an investor, the best case scenario is a tested, proven business with a market that is poised to expand and grow rapidly.
While many entrepreneurs never intend to accept outside funding, Kocialski still thinks it’s helpful to contact these investors. They have seen so many business start and fail and a few start and thrive, that they can often shed valuable insight on various aspects of the entrepreneur’s plans. Outsiders are sometimes able to see the big picture better than the entrepreneur who is deep into the details of the product and company.

The spirit of American business is embodied in the start-up. Innovation and guts make up the foundation of the start-up, and those qualities also happen to be characteristic of the most successful mega-firms ever to hit the market. Let those qualities form the dynamic of your start-up, and you’ll be off to a good start.” HBM

Cynthia Kocialski is the founder of three companies — two fabless semiconductor and one software company. Currently, she is a consultant for start-up companies. What makes her unique is that she has experienced many start-ups and has seen them from the inside out, including the day-to-day trials and tribulations, not just the milestones and status presented to passive investors and outsiders. In the past 15 years, she has been involved in dozens of start-ups and has served on various advisory boards. These companies have collectively returned billions of dollars to investors. She also writes the popular Start-up Entrepreneurs’ Blog and has written many articles on emerging technologies. V18-5 Add: 1/12 HP:

Advice for Young Entrepreneurs in Home-Based Start-Ups

» Now on Newsstands

» Subscribe and Save!

» View Digital Archives

Alternative Way for College Students Sparks Business for Jonathan Simkin

» Now on Newsstands

» Subscribe and Save!

» View Digital Archives

Alternative Way for College Students

Alternative Way for College Students

Man’s Business is Becoming The Catalyst That Sparks More Affordable Textbook Buying

By Home Business Magazine

Jonathan (Jonny) Simkin is founder and CEO of SwoopThat LLC, a San Diego-based technology company that offers parents with college-bound students a free service which can save them up to 75-percent on the cost of college textbooks. A recent college graduate himself, Simkin brings a unique perspective to this growing, and sometimes burdensome, college expense.

Created as an alternative way to search for class books, the inspiration to create SwoopThat was based on Jonny’s own experience as a college student buying textbooks for his classes every semester. Visiting the campus bookstore and other stores to search for the books he needed took too much time, and searching online proved too costly. When he realized the high cost of textbooks was a national issue that prevented many students from attending school, Jonny decided to streamline the process and make it more efficient and cost-effective for college students everywhere.

SwoopThat currently supports course information from 2,447 schools nationwide, making it a leading provider of course search technology and textbook price comparison in the nation. Students select their courses, and SwoopThat finds every book they need to buy as well as every online merchant that sells those books. SwoopThat’s algorithms help students find the cheapest places to buy all their books collectively, rather than one at a time. In addition to textbook purchases, SwoopThat helps students sell their books by searching online vendors for the highest buyback price.

Presently, the business is promoted through fundraisers. Any organization or school club can create its own virtual bookstore from which they earn cash back. Such promotions are then shared with friends and family.

Jonny is excited about his latest business venture started at home. As his own boss, he creates his own hours and works in a fun environment that requires no driving. More importantly, his idea has recently saved students and their families close to $500,000 on a $1,000 marketing budget!

As a recent graduate, Jonny feels strongly that the textbook market needs major change, and plans to put more time and energy into his business in an effort to be the catalyst that sparks a new, more affordable way to buy textbooks. For more information, visit www.swoopthat.com. HBM

V19-2 Add: 4/12 HP:

Home Office On the Cheap

 
10 Ways to Set Up Yours for Under $100

By Kristina Wyatt

1.    Think outside of just office supply stores. Sure they have tons of supplies and equipment, but sometimes their prices are more expensive. Check out discount stores like Wal-Mart, Big Lots, The Dollar Store, and The Dollar Tree for items such as file folders, paper, pens, sticky-notes, and much more.

2.    Shop online for great deals. Visit www.dollartree.com to purchase office supplies in bulk at a great price. They also have stylish storage boxes for your desktop to hold paperclips and the like. Another great site is www.thecontainerstore.com. Although some of their items can be on the pricier side, check out their sale area for reduced and discounted items for your desk and office. Www.currentcatalog.com has great office supplies for reasonable prices. Their acrylic letter holder is only $9.99, stylish file folders are $9.99, and organizer books start at just $6.99.

3.    If you want to go green, go here. With so many people keeping the environment in mind, there are many options now to set up your home office in an earth-friendly manner. This site, www.thegreenoffice.com, has hundreds of items that are green, and they offer free next-day delivery on orders over $49, with carbon dioxide neutral delivery, as stated on their home-page. They also offer discount pricing and over 34,000 green and conventional products to choose from.

4.    Use what you already have on hand. Many of us already have tons of filing and desk accessories just sitting around in drawers, forgotten. Dig them out and take stock of what you already have. There’s no use in spending money on things that you have on hand at home!

5.    Look beyond conventional office accessories. Scavenge your kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom for ordinary things to turn into new office supplies. A kitchen utensil holder can be used for your pens and pencils. A silverware drawer divider can keep paper-clips, stamps, sticky-notes, and business-cards organized. A wire lid holder becomes a letter or file keeper for the desk-top.

6.    Scour thrift stores if you’re looking to buy a desk for your office. If you don’t already have a desk for your home office, visit thrift stores like Goodwill in your area to find one on the cheap. You can sometimes get a large desk, with a few mars, for under $20.

7.    Make sure your personality shows through. You don’t want your home office to be boring and bland. Use photos of your spouse, kids, or pets in eye-catching, chic frames. Use floral or stripe file folders (or whichever design you prefer) instead of the plain brown kind.

8.    If you can, keep your office off-limits to your kids. You want this area to be your own, to keep you inspired for your work. Don’t let your kids (or guests for that matter) clutter your office.

9.    Keep your new office organized for better proficiency. Every week or so, go through any mail or loose papers that always seem to accumulate on dinner tables and your desktop. Ideally you should be sorting the mail as it comes in, but with busy daily lives, that just isn’t possible all the time. A little effort can pay off in the long run when keeping your office organized and clutter-free.

10.  Now that you have your office set-up and organized, get to work! Whether you run a home business, do freelance work, or simply manage your household in your office, you now have a brand-new work space to call your own. So sit back, add up all the money you have saved and enjoy your budget-friendly home office. HBM

Kristina Wyatt is a freelance writer for over 10 years and owns two home businesses: Above the Call appointment reminder service and KLW Editing Writing Services. She stays busy with her family and businesses, writing informative articles on how to juggle family and career, among many other topics.  V18-2 Add: 6/11 HP: 7/11/11 CAR: ??

Mom Starts Online Travel Business

Motivated by Desire to Foster Culturally Aware Global Citizens
By Home Business Magazine

New mom Kaamna Bhojwani-Dhawan of San Francisco was inspired to start Momaboard.com when she couldn’t find online resources for traveling with her infant son. “I could find multiple resources for travel in general,” she said, “but little specifically for parents, and there really was nothing that spoke to me from a personal, human perspective.”
    Her qualifications as the maven of mom travel are unassailable. During the first two years of her son’s life she traveled with him to India, Singapore, China, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Hungary, France, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Dubai. She believes that it’s important to expose children to all kinds of cultures, sights, foods, and people in order to create cultural awareness and tolerance.
    Prior to motherhood, Kaamna was an editor for Affinity Labs — since sold to Monster Worldwide in 2008. She launched three online networks for Affinity, two of which are now named Excelle and HRPeople. She’s dabbled in a few startups since then, but Momaboard.com is her first official business enterprise of her own.
    Her home-based business is so far a one-person operation, with outsourced services and supports such as a website designer and a publicist. She also is developing a large network of “mombassadors” — real mothers from around the world who contribute first-person advice and expertise for traveling moms.
    Kaamna hires a nanny daily who frees her for uninterrupted and concentrated work at home. Yet she travels frequently with her son in order to provide new content for the site and maintain the first person perspective so important to the site’s freshness and honesty.

    Promotion is heavily based on social media outlets — SEO for the site, a Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/momaboard), Twitter (@Momaboard), and email campaigns. Guest blogging is a big component as well, and her public relations firm pitches the media nationwide.
    Momaboard.com’s primary customers are parents who are interested in traveling with their children. Working from home is a natural, as her whole perspective is about sharing day-to-day life with one’s children.
    In three years, Kaamna expects Momaboard.com to have become a household name in parent/child travel — the “Travelocity” of moms on the go with children in tow. And she is working on partnering relationships to grow revenues and the range of services available to her fans. HBM  V18-3 Add: 7/11 HP:
 

A Risk that Paid Off

 Entrepreneur’s Two Businesses Help Reunite Lost Pets with Their Owners

Entrepreneur Jack Carrier had a lucrative career as a computer programmer. In 2009, he decided to quit and take a risk to focus on an idea he had to help reunite lost pets with their owners. The risk paid off. Today, the 34-year-old has cut a niche for himself in the booming pet care industry (which according to Carrier, saw $45.5 billion in sales last year) by creating a line of fully customizable identification tags.
    Carrier’s company, Dog Tag Art, raised private investment capital during the bottom of the economic recession. Carrier then won a Technology Business Plan Competition, which earned him a $25,000 business grant. The funds helped launched Carrier’s business in 2009. The business started out at Carrier’s home, but is now located in the Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College Small Business Incubator in Candler, North Carolina. Carrier was accepted into the business incubation program, designed to give startups a boost for two years. Other benefits to the program are free professional help and business training.

    Carrier’s business has seen steady growth in the demand for customized pet identification tags, and his customers are from across the globe. Fueled by the business’ success and funds remaining from the start-up grant, Carrier moved on to the next phase of his plan in 2010 — the Virtual Leash.
    Carrier’s Virtual Leash service provides a lost pet’s most current information to anyone with a web browser. Pet owners can purchase and maintain unique websites with unlimited emergency contacts in addition to the purchase of their custom dog tags. Each pet’s personal website has the ability to send its pet owner and emergency contacts messages through email, Twitter, text messaging, and voicemail if the pet is found. The website address is printed on the personalized tag, along with the pet’s name and a phone number. The website itself can be updated when a pet owner moves or is traveling, or even when the pet is at the pet sitter’s for the weekend.  
    Since Carrier’s launch of Virtual Leash, his company and its service already have received national attention, having been featured on the morning show Live with Regis and Kelly as well as on several websites and in magazines. For more information about Carrier’s Dog Tag Art and Virtual Leash service, visit www.dogtagart.com. HBM

Previously published in the August 2011 issue of HOME BUSINESS® Magazine, an international publication for the growing and dynamic home-based market. Available on newsstands, in bookstores and chain stores, and via subscriptions ($19.00 for 1 year, six issues). Visit http://www.homebusinessmag.com

V18-4 Add: 9/11 HP:
 

SBA Business Plan Webinar (Video Series)

» Now on Newsstands

» Subscribe and Save!

» View Digital Archives

Is It Time For You To Start A New Business?

Tips for Launching Your Start-up Right

By Cynthia Kocialski

Are you considering launching or financing a start-up company? This author’s
expertise and experiences have led to the creation of a series of tips that can help you move forward with your decision.

These tips include:

It’s Not About the Product

Start-ups are not about the technology or product or service. The product is the heart of the company, but the product no more makes a company than a heart makes a human being. There are many components to a company that all have to work together harmoniously in order to achieve a success outcome.
What does this mean to the entrepreneur just starting his business? A new business should create a minimal product or service — don’t spend extra time adding bells and whistles. Getting the product into the hands of the customers and getting their feedback as soon as possible is worth far more than all those fancy features. Don’t agonize over perfecting the first product.
The entrepreneur needs to start thinking about those other pieces of a company on day one. You’ve got the product, but what about marketing, sales, distribution, manufacturing, financial planning, funding and so on? It’s not a serial process. You can’t develop the product and then start the marketing. Many of these functions need to overlap.

Don’t Be Afraid to Discover

The early stage start-up process is a discovery process, not a step-by-step execution process. Many first-time entrepreneurs believe you come up with a great product idea, then they come up with a detailed business plan, and finally they hire the people to execute the steps in the plan. Discovery is simply a starting point from which the product and business with evolve, iterate, and be refined as the concept meets the customers, the market, and the investors.
Too often, entrepreneurs write a business plan because some expert told them that’s what they should do. The result is a business plan that is a work of fiction. You will eventually need the business plan, but it doesn’t come first. Entrepreneurs should focus on developing a concept plan in the beginning. This is a shortened version of the business plan. It outlines what the product is and how the business surrounding the product operates, but it does so mostly through all the assumptions that the business hinges upon. The concept plan is the discovery plan. Once the entrepreneur has worked through the concept phase and has a firm idea of the product and its business, then it’s time to write the detailed business plan.
Along with don’t be afraid to discover is don’t be afraid to admit the product won’t work at all and it’s time for a major change. It takes time to find the right product to market mix.

Retool and Revise

The first product idea is never the final product that makes the company famous. In reality, the worst work you will ever do is the first work you do. Press forward past the first iteration, and make use of the lessons you learn along the way.
How do you really iterate? It sounds easy, but it’s not. You’re going to get a lot of conflicting opinions and wants from the customers and marketplace. Once you’ve got the product in the hands of the customer, you’ll find some customers love your product and many don’t. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of trying to please every customer because they feel every initial customer is precious. As a result, they spend a lot of resources adding features and fixing problems for the customers who aren’t truly excited by the product. Don’t do this. Instead, focus on the customers that really love your product. Establish relationships with these customers. If they want new features, add theirs to the baseline.
Next, reframe your marketing so that the benefits your thrilled customers experience are the ones featured most prominently in your marketing materials. This will showcase your strengths and attract more customers like those that love your product. This will also help you develop customers who will act as your informal sales force and attract customers willing to provide testimonials. Future prospects are more likely to buy if your customer testimonials and referrals are from others like themselves.

Build Your Team

You need a team, but not just any team. You need the right team for that stage of a company’s life. You wouldn’t hire a college professor to teach kindergarten. For that, you need to find early elementary teachers. Ditto for start-ups. Find the right people for the right job, as well as the right attitude and stage of their careers to make them a match for working with a start-up.
In the beginning, the two most important people to have on your team are the person who can guide the overall development process and the marketing person who can start creating demand for your product as soon as possible.
Your team is not just comprised of the founders, owners, and employees. It is also the outside mentors, advisors, vendors, and consultants. Unless a start-up happens to have a lot of funding on day one, these outsiders are key to a new business thriving. Not many start-ups can afford to hire full time employees to do a specific task, and so it becomes easier to hire short-term people to do these tasks. While founders often question why they should hire someone to do what they could do themselves, remember that building a company takes many people, and you can never do it alone. CEO does not stand for Chief Everything Officer.

Think Like an Investor

Investors know and accept that investing in a start-up is a very high-risk proposition. If investors wanted a moderate return, they’d invest in publicly-traded bellwether companies like IBM and Coca-Cola. What entrepreneurs don’t get is that, to investors, the company itself is THEIR product. Entrepreneurs need to understand the investors’ perspectives. Entrepreneurs engage in the deliberate creation of their end-user products, but what they also need to do is engage in the deliberate creation of their companies. Investors buy into companies, not end-user products. For an investor, the best case scenario is a tested, proven business with a market that is poised to expand and grow rapidly.
While many entrepreneurs never intend to accept outside funding, Kocialski still thinks it’s helpful to contact these investors. They have seen so many business start and fail and a few start and thrive, that they can often shed valuable insight on various aspects of the entrepreneur’s plans. Outsiders are sometimes able to see the big picture better than the entrepreneur who is deep into the details of the product and company.

The spirit of American business is embodied in the start-up. Innovation and guts make up the foundation of the start-up, and those qualities also happen to be characteristic of the most successful mega-firms ever to hit the market. Let those qualities form the dynamic of your start-up, and you’ll be off to a good start.” HBM

Cynthia Kocialski is the founder of three companies — two fabless semiconductor and one software company. Currently, she is a consultant for start-up companies. What makes her unique is that she has experienced many start-ups and has seen them from the inside out, including the day-to-day trials and tribulations, not just the milestones and status presented to passive investors and outsiders. In the past 15 years, she has been involved in dozens of start-ups and has served on various advisory boards. These companies have collectively returned billions of dollars to investors. She also writes the popular Start-up Entrepreneurs’ Blog and has written many articles on emerging technologies.

Previously published in the December 2011 issue of HOME BUSINESS® Magazine, an international publication for the growing and dynamic home-based market. Available on newsstands, in bookstores and chain stores, and via subscriptions ($19.00 for 1 year, six issues). Visit http://www.homebusinessmag.com

V18-5 Add: 1/12 HP:

90 Days to Success as a Small Business Owner

» Now on Newsstands

» Subscribe and Save!

» View Digital Archives