http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ Howard Greenstein is a Social Media Strategist and Evangelist, and President of the Harbrooke Group, which specializes in helping companies communicate with their customers using the latest Web technologies. Read full bio. en-us 2010-02-03T16:54:18-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2010/02/2_services_to_help_startups_pr.html Start-ups often work in secret until they’re ready to go public. Then, suddenly, it’s time to promote what they’re doing and some entrepreneurs are stuck. It seems that they should be able to quickly and easily promote themselves – but the reality is that it’s often a good idea to get some marketing help. For those that choose to go it alone, there are several new choices for distributing news and announcements that allow multimedia content and search engine indexing, but won’t break a start-up’s budget. PitchEngine founder Jason Kintzler, told me “As I blogged about PR and Social Media, and the feedback I got helped me create the application. It’s not a traditional wire service, but it enables entrepreneurs to package content for the social web. Startups are not just trying to reach journalists who they hope will write about them, they can distribute their content to everyone and it’s searchable and stays around." They have 300,000 journalists and bloggers that sign up for their feed and come to their site to look for content. Those users take the content and share it with their audiences who have interest in a specific area. A few months ago I reviewed Drop.io as an easy content sharing service. It seems many media communications professionals were also using Drop.io to share multimedia with the press, but it was not a full solution. Steve Greenwood, VP of applications for Drop.io told me the feedback from their customers helped them create Presslift. “This is our attempt to provide a 100% answer for media distribution. We found that most PR professionals want to include multi-media with a press release and many journalists say it's important to access multi-media easily, but only about 10% of press releases contain multi-media. That's because FTP, email attachments, DVDs, and USB drives are expensive and difficult. (Note: I covered how important it is to have good materials for a meeting with a journalist in 5 Tips for How to Promote Your Company to a Reporter.) So we’re creating a new category – a place to share related multimedia and provide complete distribution flexibility. We work well with wire services. We also enable distribution of content on Facebook and Twitter.” Steve gave me the example of an iPhone application developer, but it could be any kind of product company. For that iPhone app, a text release isn’t very useful, but "screen shots, a video demo, related links, and a very searchable release with pictures of the founders of the company as well as quotes is very useful.” “We believe that Presslift offers a very innovative tool for the market, it’s extremely impressive technology, and it’s obvious they’ve done their homework about what PR professionals and journalists want,” said Susan McPherson, VP of Business Development at PR Newswire. No one is going to buy your product if they don’t know about it. If you have to go it alone, definitely look into these tools that can help your business get the word out. If you have suggestions, we'd love to hear them in the comments. 7742@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2010-02-03T16:54:18-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2010/01/smells_like_victory_olympic_st.html According to NBC’s Olympic coverage, a Freestyle Mogul Skier races “down a slope with an average incline of 26.5 degrees over large uniform bumps called moguls.” Such a skier has to be able to use the bumps in the mountain to direct their path, effectively absorb impacts, and jump when the run calls for it. Sounds like many successful entrepreneurs. So it’s no surprise that former World Cup Silver Medalist and Current Freestyle Mogul National Champion Michelle Roark is returning to the Olympics with a successful business behind her. And just like the mountain runs she loves, there have been bumps in her path before. Roark has been on the US Ski Team for 16 years, placed 18th at Torino in 2006, and has qualified for 2010 at the age of 35 (making her one of the oldest skiers in Olympic history.) But she’s not just about the skiing. With a degree in chemical engineering, Roark saw a business opportunity to create something new – a line of natural perfumes made the old way – before today’s chemical synthetics and alcohol bases. In 2006, Roark launched Phi-Nominal, bootstrapping her way into the scent business. She was determined to have a business that would help support her desire to ski. Though she’s had sponsors, her career includes a time when she lived in a tent and on friend’s couches so she could train. Roark overcame this mogul and bought a house which turned into a very good investment. “I have an engineering background, and I’m a World Cup Skier, but there are a lot of marketing and business plan things I’ve had to learn,” says Roark. Her husband has an MBA and has helped her create marketing copy and design the plan to move the company forward. Her newest fragrance, “Inspiration,” is the one she wore to qualify for the Olympics at Deer Valley. “Humans develop a sense of smell in the first trimester in the womb. It is our most important and often overlooked sense. Inspire comes from the Greek root that means to inhale.” Roark wants all her senses aligned when she’s trying to win. She also wants to inspire others – a fan telling her she’s an inspiration is her biggest compliment. One recent bump that Roark took like a champ relates to her downtown Denver business space. She bought a building with room for her perfume creation on the top level, and room for a storefront at street level. There was enough room that she offered to rent out part of the space to a salon. Four days before opening, the salon owner’s financing fell through. Having built out the space, Roark took over and created the Voila Salon, Spa and Parfumerie. The spa has a lot of potential, and she’s learning about how to run that business while also training to appear at Vancouver in a few weeks. Her lessons for other entrepreneurs? Differentiate your products. Roark’s perfumes have “all natural ingredients, mixed in proportion using the Phi Number (or Golden Ratio) and they’re about the wearer and his or her relationship with themselves. A confident person is a sexy person.” Roark’s mission statement is to have Phi-Nominal make the scent for the first woman president. How does she make time to run a business and train at the World Cup level? “If you can’t make your passion work – what can you make work? I don’t own a TV, I don’t sleep very much, and I just make everything happen.” You can learn more about Roark’s skiing at her International Ski Federation profile or at the NBC Olympic site and see recent video of her run on YouTube. 7720@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2010-01-27T15:53:46-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2010/01/new_years_financial_planning_r_1.html Financial information is the lifeblood any company. Run out of money, and you’re done. For startups and small businesses, it’s often our accountants that keep us on track. So, to start the New Year off right, I asked several accounting and financial professionals to provide suggestions that start up leaders can use to be more effective. Bob Hammer, MBA, CFO for Hytrust has run several businesses in several different industries. He also teaches accounting management at Monterrey Peninsula College. Bob told me “It’s always important to start the new year by figuring out where you’ve been, taking a realistic look at last year, and seeing what goals you did and didn’t make. When you create a plan for the new year, figure out financial goals and how you will achieve them. For example, If you want to reach 10 MM in sales, what are the activities you’re going to perform to achieve those numbers? Every time you go over or underachieve, understand why. The numbers represent your company activities directly.” Stephen King, President of Growthforce, an outsourced Bookkeeping and Controller service for companies that use Quickbooks, also values planning. King worked as a CPA with small businesses for 15 years before creating Virtual Growth, which he sold to Administaff. “Take the time to create a budget, but don’t get upset about whether it’s right. By definition it’s wrong - because you can’t predict the future. Put something down as a placeholder to help you evaluate results against what you hoped they would be. Then after six months you can look back, and you have a way to evaluate the results against your goal. Good or bad, you have something, and over time you’ll get better at making budget predictions.” King also suggests a forecast. “A budget is for a fiscal period like 6 months, a forecast is short term – 6 weeks. This helps you make sure you have cash flow to make payroll, rent, and other critical expenditures. If you have a 6 week cash flow model you can anticipate problems in advance and have enough time to figure out how to solve them. And we all know the 3 reasons that business fail are cash flow, cash flow, cash flow.” Stan Lau, Controller of Tipping Point Partners, an incubator that builds and operates Internet startups, knows "Visionaries who run startups often spend the money quickly – the finance person needs to keep them grounded around what's possible. The bookkeeping, accounting and finance (as well as HR and Insurance) is often an after-thought, and the team's focus is on building and operating the business.The office manager often gets the role to manage 'that stuff' – but can be someone who doesn’t have accounting experience. They may know how to balance the checkbooks and report what happened – but the value is in providing forecasting and insight. There are a lot of startups who don’t need a full time controller – there’s obviously a demand for a service which acts as an outsourced controller." (Stan, you should meet Stephen.) If you’re worried about the economy, Hytrust’s Hammer urges “Don’t get hung up in the environment of recession. There’s still money around. What’s missing is a shortage of ideas that can make money. People are always willing to buy something that fills a need in their business or their life.” Growthforce’s December newsletter has checklists for everyone from your CEO to your bookkeeper. In one list states that labor costs are typically your biggest expense, but investing in your people and their people skills can provide a ten-times return on investment. What are you doing to plan the year? Let us know in the comments. 7684@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2010-01-13T16:00:00-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2010/01/new_year_new_startup_new_york.html With the New Year upon us, many entrepreneurs thoughts turn to starting a new company. As a New Yorker, I’ll admit a small bias towards creating a company in the city that never sleeps. It wasn’t a coincidence that Sinatra sang “If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere.” NYCSeed is looking for start up types to come to New York this summer for their SeedStart 2010 program. NYCSeed was formed “to provide deserving New York City seed stage entrepreneurs with the capital and support they need to move from idea to product launch.” The fund has partnerships with New York City and State agencies as well as an investment committee that includes several venture and investment funds. Managing Director Owen Davis* is a veteran of the New York startup scene, working on early AOL and MSN projects and creating startups in 1995 and '99. “Part of the impetus for this SeedStart program is to provide support for the ecosystem of startups in NYC, but it is also a forward looking way to create jobs for the city,” said Davis. “We’re thinking about how can we keep building the ecosystem around startups in the city. They don’t just need money - there is always need for early stage funding, the very high risk capital. But VC firms enter when there’s a level of adoption. We’re thinking about what makes a ‘fundable company.’ There needs to be feedback from investors and business leaders who know this. We want to help scale the process of introducing founders with people who want to work in startups, like engineers. And we want New York’s Colleges and Universities involved to tap the talent of bright students that are here.” The SeedStart program is similar to programs at DreamIt in Phildelphia (covered last September in this column), TechStars in Boston, Boulder, and Seattle, and Silicon Valley’s YCombinator. (All of these sites have places for aspiring companies to apply, and TechStars’ Boston group application closes next week.) Entrepreneurs get $20,000 for up to 4 people to defray living expenses and cover hardware, server or cloud computing rental, and the like. It’s not huge money, its only intended to make it easy for the folks in the company to work without worrying about office space, rent or macaroni and cheese money. For that, founders give up 5% equity in the company they’re creating. At the end of the summer, they present to other investors, who may choose to help the company move further along the track. What’s different is the City. NYCSeed and its joint venture partners in SeedStart, Venture firm advisors from RRE, Contour Ventures, Polaris Ventures, and IA Venture Strategies, as well as its mentors and advisory board represent a path to New York’s top industries including executives from the Advertising, Media, Fashion and Financial Services worlds. "For seed-stage start-ups, where you start out should be about far more than just investment dollars. Strategic direction and industry insight are key and SS is adding that layer here in NYC - access to talent and guidance from professionals who are executives at the business partners and customers the start-ups need to penetrate," according to Danny Schultz, MD and co-founder of DFJ Gotham Ventures, an early-stage tech focused VC firm here in NY. If you're not interested in starting a tech company, New York's Fashion Incubator and Kitchen Incubator are other ways the city is trying to attract talent and create new jobs. Coming to the Big Apple to start a company is a major decision, and as the song says, "Its up to you..." What are your Startup plans in 2010? Let me know in the comments. (*Disclosure: I served on the board of the World Wide Web Artists Consortium with Owen Davis from 1996-98, but have had no business dealings with him.) 7672@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2010-01-06T16:01:43-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/12/how_do_you_end_the_year_part_2_1.html End of Year is a time for Goal-Setting as well as the year end rituals I discussed last week. Many entrepreneurs focus on what has worked, and what didn’t in the past year, and try to motivate employees for a fresh start. Several companies go on year-end retreats. Managing partner Doug Hall from and Dallas-based Financial Additions said “Everyone has to list the 3 things they are most proud of, and 3 ‘do-overs.’ We also ask for the one thing they are going to do differently and one thing the company could do different. We then set goals, hand write them and sign the handwritten statement, and put the handwritten notes in a box (time capsule) in the conference room. Monthly, we pull out this handwritten list, pass it out and remind everyone of their own personal commitments in their own handwriting. The goals are posted in a more formal outline the office for view but there is something about handwritten commitments that makes a difference.” Yola.com ’s offsite has similar qualities. CEO Vinny Lingham gathers the management team and each person shares what they felt was the biggest accomplishment for the year. “We discuss how we met that goal and what it took to get there. This also helps us set new goals for the following year. Discussing this accomplishment makes the Yola team even more likely to meet the ambitious goals of next year.” Goal setting doesn’t require a retreat, though. Todd Schoenberger, Managing Director of LandColt Trading and a Fox News Contributor said “I set 4 goals I need to accomplish in the next year. Anything less, and I really need to reevaluate my passion for the business. You need dozens of initiatives floating out there. If you don't, you get stale, and your business will--probably--not survive.” Mahalo.com founder and long time Internet Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis told me “As a startup company it's a good idea to review, and in fact celebrate, the victories you've had over the past year. Looking back at your "team emails" is a good method for this, as well as simply looking at statistics. [I’m going to tell my team] We’ve tripled its traffic and grown 11x in revenue year over year in December. That's exciting stuff.” “ I'd encourage start ups to create a system or SOP for everything so that when year-end comes, there's no pressure to get things organized (especially accounting records) or complete administrative tasks. Having a process for everything means you'll only have to spend time signing off before heading off for vacation” said Isha Edwards, Owner, Founder and Brand Marketing Manager of Epic Measures. Crystal L Kendrick, President of The Voice of Your Customer, a minority-owned marketing firm that assists clients to penetrate niche markets, wrote in to say “We review our strategic objectives to ensure that they remain in line with current market conditions. Most importantly, we include key leaders, advisors and suppliers in the planning process and communicate to our employees, contractors and customers accordingly.” With Goals set, many then take some time to relax and prepare for the New Year. Serial Entrepreneur Lucinda Holt of ClickEquations.com takes “2 weeks if possible. Really clear my head from the day-to-day of the business…to take stock of what went well and to study major industry trends.” Mike Enos, chief executive officer of Fast Wrap USA has started 3 companies. “In December of every year I take off on a 3 week long fishing cruise down to Mexico. This really helps me re-focus and re-energize for the new year as well as helping me to de-stress from the previous year. I always come back with great new ideas and feeling like I'm ready implement them.” I’ve personally been inspired by many of these entrepreneurs, and I’m planning to follow their lead, specifically by taking a few days to refocus at the end of this year. My column won’t publish the last week of the year, so I'll see you in January with new news for your Startup Toolkit. 7647@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-12-23T15:43:37-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/12/the_end_of_year_ritual_part_1.html 7621@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-12-16T12:54:31-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/12/promote_your_startup_help_a_re_1.html 6638@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-12-08T09:54:24-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/11/i_can_haz_business_success_1.html As my column before the Thanksgiving holiday, I wanted to share a story about a company that is successful by “making everyone happy for 5 minutes a day.” At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, I got a chance to interview Ben Huh, CEO of CheezBurger network and Pet Holdings, Inc(company name was officially changed). You know, the folks who make http://icanhascheezburger.com/, the site with the silly pictures of LOL* cats , the Fail Blog http://failblog.org/ (a top 10 YouTube channel) and other sites where you can spend minutes or hours laughing and clicking ‘next.’ (It might be a site you hope your boss doesn’t see on your screen when he walks by.) And yet, you could tell the boss they improve morale. Huh told me the company motto about making everyone happy “is a crowd sourced philosophy- it came from the users sending email saying the site cheers them up. They turned that into our mission.” That’s fitting considering that users create the content and make each other happy. “It’s their world, we’re just helping them,” said Huh. So, as we’re all laughing, Huh and his Pet Holdings Inc.Cheezburger Network are laughing all the way to the bank. With nearly 50 million page views a month (self reported for the network), and over 1 million unique visitors for ICanHasCheezeburger.com (according to Compete.com statistics), the network has some serious revenue potential. (Pet Holdings is privately held and do not disclose earnings). What lead to the growth of this site? Huh had been part of a failed DotCom startup, and had spent time after that working with other CEOs and entrepreneurs trying to learn what made businesses successful. He knew of the Cheezburger site started by Eric Nakagawa and several others, and was brought in to help as it grew in popularity. He raised money to buy the site outright via an angel investor in Seattle. Once he bought the site he did one thing: Nothing. “I thought, don’t screw it up. Don’t change anything, run it the same way. I inherited a site generating revenue, so the trick was not to put it in the red.” As the network of sites grew, Huh has added people, always making sure the revenue pays for the new hires. While people still perceive them as “2 guys in pajamas in their mom’s basement," today Pet Holdings Inc. has 26 employees and full time contractors. “Believe it or not, spending less than you earn is hard. The ‘If I build it they will come’ inclination is very strong,” said Huh. Growth is mostly organic -they purchased a few sites, but majority of them they built themselves. As the network grew larger, they were able to launch more sites, more frequently. Each new site is like a niche cable network, with a different audience and revenue based on their interests. Typically, the new ideas come from the users telling them what sites to build – and contributing all the material. “We get more that 10 thousand submissions of content per day,” said an amazed Huh. Some of that content has been republished as best selling books. The I Can Has Cheezburger book is currently 17th in Humor and 8th in Cats, Dogs and Animals on Amazon, 1 year after publication. Two new books have recently been released. Failure, he told me, IS an option. “If you fail hard, you can’t get back up again, and you’ve destroyed opportunity. If you make small mistakes that you learn from, you can adapt. A good entrepreneur isn’t supposed to ‘not screw up’ but to find out what works. Ben’s favorite humor site? “It's still I Can Has Cheezburger. I save it to the end of the day, when I’m tired, and I savor it. The creativity of the users is fascinating and so unexpected.” And the ultimate irony for this humorous LOL Cat entrepreneur? He doesn’t have any cats - he’s allergic to them. How can your business grow by making people happy? Discuss in the comments below. Bonus video: Behind the Scenes at Fail Blog. *(LOL means Laughing Out Loud) 6603@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-11-25T13:07:17-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/11/are_you_for_real.html When we meet people in person, there are often clues as to the person’s identity, and sometimes there are real life tokens of identification. But when we connect online, those clues often don’t exist, leading us to wonder if the person is really who they say they are? What makes a merchant or a connection online real? There are some basic steps, like having your Facebook or Twitter pages link back to a page on your official company site that, in turn, notes your official presence on those social sites. But for some people, that’s not enough. This is one of the problems that PeoplePond.com is trying to solve. When someone from a social network connects with you, how do you know that this particular “John Smith” is the John Smith who you met at the chamber of commerce meeting, or at college? PeoplePond http://peoplepond.com president Theron McCollough told me they have 2 products. “PeoplePond is a Brand and Identity management tool. There’s lots of noise on the net, this is a place where people can have their own jump-off point. It’s all the information that you want others to see, and a very robust living document for you. Since People are acting like corporations, and corporations are trying to be like people (making one-to-one connections), CompanyPond http://www.companypond.com/ creates a profile for all company online presences, with links to all the people who are legitimately part of your company.” Follow the links and you can verify that this is Theron, who works for PeoplePond, and it’s confirmed on the company page. Tools are also available to show this information on Facebook and blogging platforms. Here’s an example of Roderick Peterson, who has a verified profile. And, Fort Wayne Web Design lists Chad Pollitt on it’s company page as one of its’ employees, via his PeoplePond profile. McCullough told me the sites help startups and small businesses because “Having all your web presences listed in one place helps you manage them more effectively and helps you market and promote more effectively. If we look at building trust online – this helps show that you are who you say you are, everywhere you are online.” If you want people to have a higher level of confidence that you are who you say you are, for a fee your information is run through a 3rd party verification process improving the odds that it’s you – though this verification is not as extensive as a credit check. PeoplePond provides a badge that shows you’ve been verified, and you can put it on your website. In the future, McCollough said, they’ll be “Pushing identity account ownership beyond the PeoplePond site." Additionally, having this profile may help your search engine rankings as it aggregates information about you, and points to all the places you ‘exist’ online. This could be helpful for a new company starting out and trying to build their name and search rank, as well as for a professional trying to improve where their own name shows up on search results. What things do you do to show your customers you are really behind your own Facebook, Twitter, or Blog page? Share in the comments below. 6579@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-11-18T13:07:07-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/11/the_workforce_of_crowds.html 6544@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-11-04T16:11:53-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/10/entreprenur_vs_flu_whats_plan_1.html One thing most startups and small businesses don’t have enough of is sick days. It is something that I'm personally very aware of, having had to take a sick day in my business today. When it’s your business, it is tough to “take a day off” when you typically work eight days a week. It especially hurts if taking that day means your business isn’t moving forward. While I don’t want this column to harp on the health care debate in Washington, Terri Lonier, President at WorkingSolo.com, told me she believes “The Entrepreneurial Spirit would be unleashed in the US if we had better access to health care. Of course there are economic consequences, but in my experience, people who are ready to run their own firms stay as W2 workers due to challenges getting insurance. Illness underscores the reality that many entrepreneurs are their business. They should have contingency plans in place for someone to fill in for client or customer obligations when they’re not able to." Elizabeth Brooks, managing partner of Str.ate.gy knows about that "plan b." She has a small team, but she's the creative lead on almost all her projects, and many can't move ahead without her input. "The world stops when you are incapacitated. I've had the situation where I had a minor outpatient procedure, but had no idea if I would be on painkillers, or how long it would take for me to recover." She had people who she trusted completely, but "It is always difficult when it is a creative decision since no one will make it the same as you would. Creatives are often very 'type A' and hard to relinquish control - but you need to have that backup person." She advises that for each initiative, for each item, hand it to the person on your team with the most appropriate background. Or, give it to someone who you trust as a partner who you work with often. "You have to have faith in your ability to choose great staff, or great partners. Having been a corporate executive helped me learn to do that." Mark Tafoya, owner of the Remarkable Palate personal chef service , and co-owner of the Culinary Media Network said the biggest problem is “you’re the guy. If you are sick, you can’t work. On the media side of my business I could work from home, but as a Personal Chef, it’s irresponsible for me to cook for others when I’m not healthy. I pass the job to someone else, and end up losing the money from that day’s gig, but it is the right thing to do. The benefit of being a chef, though, is that I’m much more aware of being clean, and I wash my hands all the time. I actually am getting sick less often.” What's your plan B? Let us know in the comments. 6522@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-10-28T15:31:14-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/10/trade_show_advice_for_startups.html Today I’m privileged to speak at the NY XPO for Business, which is an expo with classes and seminars for small and mid-sized businesses from all over the NY area. They’re expecting 30,000 people or more. (Notes from my panel on Social Media for Small Businesses with be on my business’ website.) I’m going to be looking out for trade show booths, good and bad, and have posted a few pictures (bad booth, good booth). When you spend thousands of dollars for a booth at a trade show – what are you doing to attract people into the booth? Will your signage have your logo, the name of your company and your tagline or motto? Great. But what about telling people what your company does? I’m often amazed by companies who spend money for large signs telling you they’re the “Industry’s Leading Solution Provider” or the “Top In Our Field.” Which field? What Industry? What are you solving? When I’ve been to really large trade shows, done at Javits in NYC or the Los Vegas Convention Center, I’ve always come away a little shell shocked. It is overwhelming to walk literally miles of aisles trying to find a booth with a company that solves a problem or provides a new service I didn’t know about. The booths tend to blend together. Therefore, what you put on your sign is very important and relevant. Ask someone who's not in your industry to look at your design and see if they can explain what your booth is for just by looking at the signage. Once prospects are in the booth, someone knowledgeable should be there to help them. Having ‘rent-a-booth’ people often isn’t usually helpful for closing sales. Those folks may be attractive, or extra bodies, but they probably don’t know your industry or your business. They can do little more than get leads that you hope you can follow up - they can't usually qualify the lead. Use those people to help prospects fill forms, do very light hospitality, and move them to your sales person. Having your actual employees, who can turn contacts into warm leads, which turn into sales, will maximize the value of what you’ve spent. What are your trade show tips? Comment below, please. Small business trade shows are always exciting for me because I get to interact with lots of startups and business owners, and find out what they want from my column. I hope people will talk to me after my panel and let me know. Feel free to tell me more about your business in the comments below – and let me know what I should be writing about for you. 6481@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-10-21T11:19:43-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/10/customer_serivce_do_the_right.html When you read about companies that have great service, such as Zappos, you read about passion, and a desire to put the customer first. I've heard Tony Hsieh says Zappos is a customer service company that happens to sell shoes. If you want to grow like crazy and have your customers love you, you have to do the right thing - set up your company and corporate culture to focus on service from day one. It's not easy. You're out making your products, raising capital, or finding the right supplier or accountant, and sometimes the customer problems seem like, well, problems. That is exactly where a leader steps in and declares problems to be opportunities. For example, our lawn service recently burned our lawn and our neighbor's lawn with chemicals. We had to argue that they had done it, and that they should make it right. The clue was the fact that the brown streaks stopped at the property line with a neighbor who doesn't use that service. There was an opportunity for the owner to apologize and immediately make things right. He eventually did, but you can be sure my neighbor is already talking with other lawn companies, offering them not one but two new customers for next year if they can give us a good deal. And we'll be looking for customers who've used them and getting recommendations. Today I'm off to cover the Blog World Expo in Vegas. I needed reprints of my business cards. I contacted the firm I used the last time, which I won't name, but which promises a quick turn around. They delivered on time, but the cards were all cut wrong, with a 1/16 or 1/8 inch white line in the colored bar at the bottom of my cards (see photo). I've spent several hours via email arguing that they should reprint and overnight them. They want to charge me for the overnight shipping. I say, correct your mistake and make me the customer advocate. If they did that, their name would be here in the column and they would look like heroes. I was recently at a client's site, and their customer service manager told me "We think of every problem reported as a gift. It is an opportunity to make our products better, and to keep a customer." Wow. I want to work there, don't you? It is one of the best things I've heard in a long time. Of course, I don't know how it plays out in real life, but noting that this company is in a highly regulated industry where their problems are tracked by government agencies, I suspect it is more than lip service. Who gives you great service? What do you do to make sure your customers are happy? Share your ideas below, please. 6465@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-10-14T17:10:00-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/10/an_incubator_graduate_postling.html When I wrote 5 questions for a Start-up Accelerator two weeks ago, I only spoke to the incubator side of the equation. This week, I spoke to Dave Lifson, an entrepreneur whose company went through the program this past summer. Dave was formerly a product manager at Etsy, and his partners Chris Maguire and Hiam Schoppik were 2 of Etsy’s cofounders. So, they had some previous experience in a start-up mode, and had credibility for creating a large site that had traction. Dave told me his primary motivation for joining DreamIt was money. They had raised just a few thousand dollars from friends and family for their small company, Waffl.com, which helps Bed and Breakfast and innkeepers with technology and online marketing. Waffl lets these small inns create very good looking, search optimized promotion pages and more. However, now that the team has been through the accelerator/incubator experience, “The money mattered much less than the experience value. For example, we worked with the law firm, racked up thousands of dollars in fees, but they were covered.” Lifson also said that the experience gave them credibility with other angel investors and early stage venture funds. Finally, they learned a great deal about skills they were lacking such as Sales and Business Development. “We now understand price elasticity and how to create surveys to see what prices people are willing to pay for a service.” Additionally, a few weeks into the incubator experience, Lifson, Maguire and Schoppik had switched direction. They still manage Waffl, but ended up spending most of their summer creating Postling, a tool to help the innkeepers they met at Waffl (as well as any other small business) promote themselves in many forms of Social Media. A small business can create their own blog posts, and have those posts promoted via Facebook and Twitter. The posts can also flow to blogging services like Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, Squarespace and TypePad, and even more importantly, comments flow back to the Postling dashboard. So, in one place, a small business with limited time and resources can manage their social media presences. The Postling team recently added a feature that allows postings at a certain time. So, a small business owner can schedule a blog post for 10am, with Twitter and Facebook promotion at 10:05am and again later in the day. That way, if the business owner is busy at the register or speaking with a client, their information still goes out on time. There are more good things coming to Postling, according to the team, much of it from what they learned from their Waffl customers and experiences at DreamIt’s Start-up Accelerator. Is an incubator right for your business? Ask your questions below. 6439@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-10-07T15:53:59-05:00 http://blog.inc.com/start-up/2009/09/5_questions_for_a_startup_acce_1.html The incubator or accelerator concept for start-ups is simple. Wikipedia initially defines Business incubators as “programs designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services.” The question for a young start-up becomes “what is the value of working with an incubator – and what are the tradeoffs?” I spoke with Steve Barsh, a managing partner of Philadelphia-based DreamIt Ventures and a Project Faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, about how DreamIt works with Startups. (I also had the privilege of speaking to this summer’s group back in August. ) Howard Greenstein.: What’s the role of an accelerator/incubator? Steve Barsh: The number one blended role is to help them refine their idea and de-risk it. Entrepreneurs run around with assumptions, thinking that everyone is going to want their product or service. Most business ideas are based on three to five key assumptions. How do you test and remove risk from those assumptions as quickly and as capital efficient as possible? By turning assumptions into knowledge as quickly and cheaply as you can. Build a product or service, release it to the world, and get it out to your market and test metrics. That way you de risk. Figure out “What did I learn?” and then iterate. Another way of doing it is to speak to your target market first, before you build anything. There is no need to build software to test entrepreneur’s assumptions. Ask your market and you’ll get requirements you didn’t know about, including feedback and reactions. HG: What resources can a company get from an incubator? SB: The most important thing is a mentor, a been-there done that entrepreneur who can help you through the process. Another critical resource is a speaker series that is very pragmatically focused with tips, tricks and help that companies can use to take action immediately. Professional support like accountants and attorneys and office space are usually included. Don’t minimize the ideation time, bouncing thoughts off others. The teams cross pollinate and work together and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Finally, they provide some working capital -“mac and cheese money” – so you don’t worry about paying the rent and eating. We take pressure off so you can focus on ideas. HG: What are some of the tradeoffs? SB: It will be a lot more intense – people describe it as “working out at the gym vs. working out at home.” Everyone is watching; so you lift more, work harder. You’re in a more competitive situation – if another group met with business prospects, you feel pressure to meet with business prospects. Another tradeoff is a some of your company’s equity. For some of the entrepreneurs, they had to move to Philly for the summer, find a sublet and just work - like boot camp for 3 months. You can learn more about the start-ups Dreamit worked with this past summer on their Demo Day page. In the next few weeks, I hope to have one of the ‘graduating’ company’s feedback on their experience. Did you work with an incubator? Share your story below. 6372@http://blog.inc.com/start-up/ 2009-09-23T15:59:57-05:00