What happens when you combine a location-based service like Foursquare or Gowalla with a mobile photo-sharing service Mobipicture? You get PlacePop.
Like Foursquare, the location-based social networking iPhone app PlacePop lets users “check-in” into locations anywhere. Launched just last week, it aims to be ‘a digital punch-card for every place in the world’ and designed to be easy-to-use, straightforward and accessible to a wider audience. Its status model – users gain status anytime they visit local businesses and leveling up to Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum status – also smacks of Foursquare‘s badge system.
What is there to like about PlacePop? The fact that you can share photos of the places you visit with your friends, something currently not offered by the incumbents.
A Customer Affinity Marketing Program
You can earn status levels in PlacePop, much like the badge system in Foursquare.
PlacePop is really pitching itself as an affinity marketing program that local businesses can use to track their customer’s visits and reward them. In addition, users can offer suggestions to local businesses on its platform, which adds a new level of interaction between users and businesses. Whether it can steal some thunder off Foursquare, which has also started to engage businesses, remains to be seen.
A distinct disadvantage for PlacePop is that it’s currently limited to the iPhone, while its competitors already have applications that work on other mobile OSes such as Blackberry and Android. While this is unlikely to be a problem in the United States, scaling to other parts of the world with a far lower iPhone penetration will be a challenge.
PlacePop is developed by San Francisco-based consumer technology greenhouse Ooga Labs and founded in 2009 by Kent Lindstrom, former CEO of the social networking website Friendster.
Collaboration knows no bounds. Danny Halarewich (pictured) and Aleksey Bobkov may be separated by hundreds of miles, but that didn’t stop the two from joining forces to found LemonStand.
LemonStand co-founders Aleksey Bobkov and Danny Halarewich are located on the opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean – Halarewich is based in Vancouver, Canada, while Bobkov hails from Sakhalin Island in Russia (although he’s working on relocating to Canada). Despite the distance between them, they are working together remotely to build an e-commerce product – essentially a self-hosted PHP shopping cart application – that is easy-to-use and flexible enough for web developers around the world to use to create and run custom e-commerce websites.
“You can literally extend LemonStand to accomplish anything you want,” says Halarewich. “You can integrate any design you want. You can make LemonStand spit out any HTML/CSS that you want. You can create pages very easily and have non-technical people manage the content.”
Halarewich adds that they try to make the LemonStand platform “client friendly” as well, such that anyone can managing a product catalog, sales, orders, and customers, and viewing reports. “The platform and the included API really have no limits.”
Making Lemonade from Lemons?
Halarewich and Bobkov are both experienced programmers with expertise in web application development, e-commerce and web design. Bobkov has built many web applications in the course of his career, having worked at various software development companies as well as provided development consulting services independently. Halarewich, the founder of web development shop Limewheel Creative, has extensive experience designing brands, websites and user-interfaces.
Before working on LemonStand, Halarewich and Bobkov originally worked on developing a content management system (CMS) together. However, the lack of time to work on the product resulted in continued delays and postponement. About a year after putting the CMS on hold, Bobkov again approached Halarewich with an idea to build a shopping cart. “Coincidentally I had been working on some e-commerce projects for our clients and got my hands dirty with several e-commerce platforms,” Halarewich remembers. “I became increasingly frustrated working with these e-commerce platforms, especially when it came to implementing custom templates, managing content in a simple way, dealing with bugs and a lack of support from the authors.”
Bobkov and Halarewich channeled their frustrations with the existing limitations of e-commerce tools into trying to do it better. The result – LemonStand.
Tapping Into The Community
LemonStand makes it easy for designers and web developers to create shopping carts for their sites.
The application is currently in beta, but the feedback from its over 500 beta testers have so far been positive. In fact, some of these users have already begun to use LemonStand on their websites, as well as pitching the application to clients. “Many people have communicated to us that they are basically waiting for us to release version 1.0 so that they can buy some licenses,” says Halarewich.
“We allow people to use it for live websites, with the understanding that once version 1.0 goes live they’ll be obligated to purchase a license.” LemonStand will be opening up for pre-order – people can buy a license now and get a discount. Once version 1.0 is released, those with licenses will automatically be able to upgrade to a commercial version and receive updates.
Indeed, the passionate community that they engage with are pitching in, helping to write tutorials. “Web developers & designers are a tight-knit group. They like to share info and resources,” explains Halarewich. To encourage that, LemonStand offers discounted licenses to anyone who writes tutorials or produces screencasts on the application.
Halarewich and Bobkov believes that the key to its success lies in making LemonStand into a platform, and have plans for a applications marketplace – an App Store for e-commerce applications, if you will – for it. “Developers will be able to buy, sell and share their contributions to LemonStand, whether it’s a theme, module or support for a payment gateway.” Put it simply: why settle for selling lemonade when you can franchise out a lemonade stand business?
Views on Entrepreneurship
Halarewich and Bobkov love being entrepreneurs. “While it’s a day-to-day challenge, we wouldn’t want it any other way.” says Halarewich. “It allows us the freedom to originate ideas and execute on them.” The entrepreneur mindset is typically one that generates many ideas and solutions to problems, Halarewich says, but the key is to choose one and execute on it. “Stop thinking about it and do it. Don’t wait until the opportune time comes. Don’t waste time trying to be perfect. Be passionate, solve a problem, do your best and get things done.”
Halarewich and Bobkov both encourage young people to give the path of entrepreneurship a try, but advise them to enter into it without some sort of passion. “You got to believe in what you’re doing and cultivate confidence,” Halarewich says. “Don’t give up on your dream. Keep your desired result in mind at all times. It will help you get through the tough days.”
He adds that whether you end up building a successful business, or realize it isn’t for you, you will have evolved. “The lessons you learn and character building situations you encounter will certainly bring huge amounts of value to your life and others.”
The Global Mobile Internet Conference – Innovation Show, held in Beijing, China on 28 May 2010, is inviting mobile internet-based startups from around the world to feature their products or services at the show. Organized by the Great Wall Club, the conference is designed for entrepreneurs, executives and influencers in the mobile internet space to understand and capitalize on opportunities on this space, and is expected to attract investors and industry leaders as well.
Applicants must be a mobile internet-based startup that has not received significant VC funding from any part of the world. Ten finalists will each receive three complimentary tickets to the conference (worth US$4,500), but need to travel to Beijing at their own cost. Applicants can fill out and email an application form and a business plan to info@thegreatwallclub.com by April 4.
echelon 2010 – The Premier Web Technology Event in Asia
echelon 2010, which aims to position itself as the premier web technology event in Asia, is taking place over two days on the 1st and 2nd of June at matrix@biopolis.
The event will feature keynotes, panel discussions, case studies, pitching sessions and exhibitions spread out over two days, covering areas such as social media monitoring, enterprise web, mobile applications and social networking, and many more (you can find the two-day schedule here). The key highlight – to me, at least – is likely to be entrepreneur and investor Dave McClure, who will be giving the keynote address at the event.
Startups – Exhibit at echelon 2010!
Startups who showcased at UnConference Singapore 2009.
If you’re from a web or technology startup, echelon 2010 is looking for 50 startups to showcase their products. It’s a good way to spread more awareness of your product or service to like-minded individuals and companies. Who knows – you may just find your next investor, business partner, sales lead, or future employee there.
Amos Winbush III, CEO of CyberSynchs, says his team is an eclectic bunch of people and are 'dedicated individuals who each have their owns strengths'.
Losing your data when your high-end mobile phone crashes can really hurt, as Amos Winbush III found out. So he decided to come up with a solution to this annoying problem, and finally founded CyberSynchs, a online service that synchronizes your mobile content to the cloud.
“I had an issue. My mobile phone crashed,” says 26-year old Winbush, now CyberSynchs‘s CEO, recalling what prompted him to create such a service. “I assumed my mobile phone company would help me recover all my contacts and stored data. I was shocked and appalled to learn that there was no solution to help me.” He was using the first generation iPhone, and like most people living in New York, was way too busy to spend a lot of time trying to find a way to synch a device to the computer.
There had to be a better way, he thought to himself. CyberSynchs was his answer.
Universal Data Synchronization Between Multiple Devices
CyberSynchs automatically backs up, shares and restores content between multiple operating systems, platforms and devices.
CyberSynchs is essentially a web subscription service that allows a subscriber to automatically backs up and restores content on a smartphone or mobile device – including phone numbers, address books, calendars, voice messages, text messages, emails, music, ring tones, GPS locations, photos, videos and virtually any other kind of digital file – and also shares the content between multiple operating systems, platforms and devices.
Subscribers’ synchronized content is protected on CyberSynchs servers and accessible through a user’s unique device ID code and personal password. Subscribers can access their data in real time from anywhere in the world via smartphone, mobile device, PC or any device with an Internet connection.
In short, no more trauma from lost mobile content and personal information due to a lost, stolen or destroyed mobile device.
The service currently works through a mobile, as well as a desktop, application. “Losing the information on your mobile device or smartphone can be absolutely devastating, and wireless carriers don’t keep individual customers’ mobile content so there’s nothing they can do to help,” he explains. “We created CyberSynchs Mobile as a cool, easy and economical solution to spare people the ordeal of losing personal data. CyberSynchs Mobile automatically synchronizes your mobile data as often as you want – daily, twice a day, even hourly – so you don’t ever have to think about it.” “If your smartphone or mobile device is lost or stolen, that’s another nightmare,” added Winbush. “Through GPS, CyberSynchs can notify you of the exact location of your lost or stolen device. If it’s unrecoverable, our unique ‘wiping’ feature lets you instantly lock and thoroughly erase all of your data from the missing device.” Its patented universal data synchronization solution is mobile operating system and carrier independent.
As part of its growth strategy, New York-based CyberSynchs is looking to aggressively get its solution to be pre-loaded on a wide variety of devices worldwide, including smartphones, PCs, cameras, camcorders, TV’s and mobile headphones, as well as available through cable television network providers by the end of 2010.
Team Effort
Winbush founded the company with a vision of providing state-of-the-art technology and a cost-effective means of safeguarding people’s vital personal information. His team, he says, is an eclectic bunch of people and are ‘dedicated individuals who each have their owns strengths’.
“Our CFO, Joseph Gemmo, has been in the industry for thirty years. I am extremely lucky to have him; he is a great guy and extremely capable. Our CTO, Tyler Thackray, is a phenomenal engineer and leader. His execution is great and he has given our team the momentum that they needed to get us to where we are now. He does an amazing job of guiding the development team and the evolution of the technology.”
Views on Entrepreneurship
“I took a somewhat unusual path to becoming an entrepreneur – I started off in the music business and then segued into technology,” says Winbush. Since launching CyberSynchs in November 2008, he’s found the fast pace of the technology industry and challenges of starting a company ‘more exciting and fulfilling than the music industry’.
“I am very passionate about people and technology and love being an entrepreneur. I absolutely love reaching out to new people and especially new entrepreneurs to give as much help and support as I can from sharing my own experiences in building and growing CyberSynchs.”
Winbush says nothing more challenging and gratifying at the same time when it comes to entrepreneurship; entrepreneurs, as he puts it, ‘hold the cards in (their) own hands’. “If you don’t go to work, you (can) actually feel the effect at the end of the week, because even you are just in the office or talking to your team – you are always making a difference,” he explains. “Entrepreneurship is all about holding yourself accountable, building teams, building products, and developing innovative solutions.”
“It is the freedom to be who you are without restraints.”
He cautions that things don’t happen overnight, and small business owners and entrepreneurs need to remember that things takes time. “Applying the effort, doing the preparation and driving execution are key,” he shares. “These are lessons I’ve learned very quickly.”
How To Get Focused is an online book in the making that crowdsources ideas and content.
Scott Scheper is only 23 years old, but he may be single-handedly showing the book-publishing world its future.
How? He’s writing a book, day-by-day, using WordPress. The “chapters” he publishes are shipped in real-time and open to revisions from his readers. Scott’s dubbed it “Writing 2.0”, and I’m starting to believe him.
The book is How to Get Focused and you can follow along at http://howtogetfocused.com. It’s a worthy topic for any entrepreneur, as we live in an age of unyielding distraction:
I believe we all have the responsibility to break away from society’s “teet” of distraction. The responsibility to wake up earlier than others. The responsibility to get focused. And that’s what this book is about: Fighting our dopamine-driven age of distraction and getting your focus back.
After being introduced to Scott’s work by another entrepreneur I work with, Nathaniel Broughton of GrowthPartner.com, I was definitely intrigued by the idea of writing a book starting with a blog.
Did he intend to publish it afterward? Did this kid have any chops as a writer? It’s hard not to be a little skeptical. After all, there’s been numerous examples of leading blogs landing book deals as of late (Gary V. and Crush It!, Stuff White People Like come to mind). But those guys built a following long before the idea of a book ever came to be. With How to Get Focused, Scott was doing it all at once.
In his own words:
I’m outsourcing this book’s editor. It’s you. This will help make this book better. Think about it. If I wrote a crappy chapter, I’d have to wait until the book was published to see what you thought.
And this kid can write. I think it’s worth noting because while there are a ton of smart, hard-working young entrepreneurs online, not many I’ve come across are great writers.
Give How to Get Focused a read some time. See if you agree. And if you think it’s no good . . . well then leave your edits in the comments!
CEO of Friendgiftr.com Rob Carpenter believes in dreaming big and being persistent.
Tinseltown is better known for producing movie stars, but there may be another star in the making in Hollywood, California-based startup Friendgiftr.com.
Friendgiftr.com recently debuted e-commerce applications that turns sites such as Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Ning and Bebo, into social media-based storefronts that sells actual gift cards from retailers and other businesses to social media users. Through a Friendgiftr application, consumers can buy gift cards from more than 130 brands such as Gap, Dominos Pizza, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and Banana Republic, among others, for friends and connections in their social netoworks.
“Introducing our network of gift card storefronts across numerous social networking sites is a game-changing step forward in the commercialization of social media,” says Friendgiftr CEO Rob Carpenter. “It’s also a cornerstone of our unique business model. We partner with the companies whose gift cards we sell, which keeps our operating costs minimal, and unlike most web-based start-ups we have multiple viable revenue streams, including commissions from cards we sell through a growing number of storefronts, slotting fees, advertisements and affiliate marketing programs.”
Understanding The Gift Card Economy
Another unique aspect of Friendgiftr is that card recipients can exchange the card given to them for a card they prefer from any of the merchants Friendgiftr offers, at no charge, and without the buyer knowing. Not happy with your Banana Republic gift card? No problem – just exchange it for another. Recipients can even split the gift card amount across multiple merchants, to make sure they get the gifts they really want.
“It became clear that, as we were conducting our market research, we had to do more than just sell gift cards. We had to solve some sort of pressing consumer problem. So we decided on the idea that we were going to allow anyone who received a gift card from one of our storefronts the ability to exchange the gift card for any gift card they want or split it across multiple merchants,” says Carpenter. “After all, everyone has received a gift card at one point or another they just didn’t want and ended up not using it. We thought this was a total waste and needed to be fixed, which is why we allow the end-user or recipient to pick the gift card they really want after it’s been purchased for them.”
“We thought this would be a pretty neat solution for a lot of people.”
Friendgiftr.com makes it easy for social media users to buy and send gift cards to their friends and online connections.
Commercializing The Social Media Explosion
Carpenter, who previously worked at the White House and as a business writer, admits that the inspiration behind Friendgiftr is popular social networking site Facebook. Carpenter was intrigued by Facebook‘s virtual economy – virtual goods like smiley faces and cupcakes that users bought on the site – but felt much more could be done. “We thought if users were comfortable buying fake gifts on social networking sites, maybe they’d be comfortable buying real ones, too,” Carpenter says. The idea for Friendgiftr was thus born.
Friendgiftr was originally designed to sell gift cards – America’s most popular gift – on a single platform, Facebook. “Over time, it became clearer that we had a tremendous opportunity to both expand our gift card offerings… and our gift card platforms, by adding other social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo, mobile phones like Blackberry and Android, and an array of innovative new shopping platforms,” says Carpenter.
Growing The Brand
So far, accolades have been streaming in for Friendgiftr, including awards such as the Henry Kravis Prize in Venture Capital and the Venturebeat.com Technology trends competition. Reaching this point, Carpenter reveals, has been a big challenge. “Getting funding in the worst economy since the Great Depression; persuading big merchants to partner with a tiny, unknown startup; and in building customized apps for each platform that we’re on,” says Carpenter, listing some of the numerous external obstacles they faced.
“Fortunately we have overcome these challenges and are moving forward pretty aggressively on a lot of new fronts.”
In contrast to the experiences of many startups, Friendgiftr was lucky enough to land venture funding from Tech Coast Angels on its first attempt to raise capital. “We went to an event called Fast Pitch and gave a 90-second speed presentation, which then led to a 30-day negotiation before we got our first infusion of funds.” He declined to reveal the amount, except to say it has given them ‘a comfortable cushion’ so that it can focus on its mission.
Carpenter says growing the Friendgiftr brand and virtual shopping network will be key to its short and long-term success, but he’s not about to give away its “secret sauce” by saying which platforms they’re moving onto next or its specific marketing approaches. But he does offers this hint. “Needless to say, strategically we rise or fall based on our online reach. It’s crucial for us to multiply in as many creative ways as possible. And it’s especially crucial that we multiply boldly in this economy, as we want to continue to be on the offensive by giving our customers more shopping choices than they ever thought possible,” he adds.
The reason Carpenter believes why they’ll be successful, is because he feels he’s built an incredible team around Friendgiftr. “The team here at Friendgiftr is extremely passionate, hard working, creative and experimental, and willing to try bold new ideas,” he says. “We generally and genuinely love people, culture, and food – especially here in Hollywood – and definitely enjoy having fun in the very fast-paced startup world.” In particular, he gives a shoutout to teammates search engine optimization (SEO) expert Jonny Chan and creative marketing director Jennifer Reece (who Carpenter reveals is working on a stealth marketing concept that will be revealed soon).
Views on Entrepreneurship
Having been both an entrepreneur and social entrepreneur, Carpenter believes he understands the differences and similarities between the two. He encourages as many people as possible – especially the youth – to try both paths out as they can be rewarding. “It’s not just the fact that you are your own boss, but it’s the notion that you have a profound opportunity to create new jobs, new industries, and re-make society,” says Carpenter. “There’s nothing better than to introduce innovations that allow people to live better, more convenient lives – whether you’re offering them a product or service or trying to save the world.”
The biggest lesson he’s learnt as an entrepreneur is to be patient and persistent. “If you want to be an entrepreneur, run a company or nonprofit, make bold changes, and do all of the other incredibly difficult and challenging things that entrepreneurs do on a daily basis, you have to have the tenacity to hold on to your hope until one day your time arrives,” he shares. “If you believe strongly enough in yourself, other people will start to believe in you, too.”
“It’s that simple. Dream big, work hard, learn everyday, be true to yourself, and never give in. If you follow some variation of these themes, you will one day get to where you want to be and achieve your wildest dreams.”
Running your own business can be immensely exciting and rewarding. It could well be the best way to earn an income, especially if you have saleable skills, an innovative idea or an interest that could be turned into a profitable business.
However, it is important to ask yourself why you want to do it. It isn’t for everyone. Remember that it can be lonely being the boss and that you are likely to have to jump through a lot of hoops to get going; you most likely will have to work long hours, tackle paperwork and regulations and be Jack-of-all-trades to get your new venture off the ground.
Nevertheless, if you believe you have a strong business plan, the necessary resources and the determination to succeed, why not give it a go?
I have put together the below top ten tips for budding entrepreneurs as a list of things to consider before diving in:
1. Research the market. Find out whether customers will buy what you are offering, and use feedback to refine your product or service.
2. Write a business plan. Describe your business, how it will operate and its finances for the first two years. Ask your chartered accountant if you need help writing your business plan. He or she will also be able to advise you about the appropriate structure for your business. The regulations and costs of setting up a business can be complex and off putting. Get an expert to help you.
3. Raise finance if needed and build in contingencies. Being under-financed often leads to poor performance at the start. As setting up always takes longer than you think, you also have to ensure your financing has built in flexibility.
4. Choose the right staff. Unless you are planning to be a one-man-band, pick the best people you can afford. They may work for less than the market rate initially if they are convinced of the potential for growth of the business. Consider share option schemes to attract the best staff and to motivate them to work to achieve your business goals.
5. Find a mentor. It is helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off. Learn from customers and suppliers and ask the views of your chartered accountant and other advisers.
6. Ensure you have the right financial information. This is vital, not least to understand your trading performance. Set up records from the start, using software if you are comfortable with it. Employ a good book-keeper or talk to your chartered accountant about outsourcing accounting services.
7. Monitor key performance indicators. Ensure that you have right data, such as turnover, gross margins, overheads, finance costs, net profit, cashflow and working capital, on a daily, monthly and annual basis.
8. Be alive to possibilities and dangers. Don’t exclude taking the business in a different direction if you see potential elsewhere or there are problems ahead. Watch out for competitors in difficulty and listen to your customers, suppliers and staff.
9. Learn. Absorb all that you can from the experience of being an entrepreneur and from those around you, and – not least – learn from your mistakes.
10. Reduce the chances of failure. Do something you already know, or employ people with experience in the sector. Manage your overheads and working capital. Appoint a chartered accountant with experience of start-ups before you launch your new enterprise.
Alibaba.com Success Guide shows you how to navigate the labyrinthine B2B trade portal for the best results.
If Amazon.com is the paragon of a successful model for an online B2C (business-to-consumer) business, then surely China’s Alibaba.com must be its B2B (business-to-business) equivalent. Alibaba.com is essentially a global trading platform where businesses (especially small-to-medium enterprises) source for the right goods or materials, and for producers to find the right distributors and retailers to carry their products. Set up by founder Jack Ma – the first entrepreneur from China to grace the cover of Forbes magazine in 50 years – along with 17 other founders, with a vision of building a platform to help others realize their entrepreneurial dreams, it is today the world’s largest online B2B trading platform, with 45 million registered users from over 240 countries, and constantly ranks amongst the top ten as a global Internet brand.
It’s still set to grow globally as well – last year the site launched a marketing campaign in the United States to grow its business there.
The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide
But navigating the cluttered and labyrinthine trading portal can be confusing and tricky, especially for a first-time user.
That’s where The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide: Insider Tips and Strategies for Sourcing Products from the Worlds Largest B2B Marketplace comes in useful. Written by Brad and Debra Schepp and published by Wiley & Sons, the book advises how you should consider the needs of your business – from developing your idea to research to prototyping, for example – before it guides you, step-by-step, through the various functions and features on the site. Each chapter is broken down to easy-to-follow sections dedicated to key aspects of Alibaba.com, so it’s a simple matter of turning to the right page for the right advice – like posting a buying lead, for example.
The book doesn’t make easy reading, however, especially for those of us who aren’t familiar with trading terms or trade in general. But for those of you who intend to use Alibaba.com for your business but haven’t done so, this book will be heaven-sent.
So what do I like about the book? Part III, where the authors highlight various success stories of entrepreneurs who’ve successfully used Alibaba.com for their businesses. Even though I know these examples are intended to encourage you to join and use the site, the real-life stories do make one feel good about being an entrepreneur. Probably kind of like why you read this blog, really.
Trevor Ginn of Hello Baby was inspired by the birth of his first daughter to start his online business retailing baby wares.
Selling baby items online can be very lucrative, as Trevor Ginn found out. The managing director and founder of London-based Hello Baby (www.hellobabydirect.co.uk), an online retail business peddling baby wares, has seen sales for his company go up 20% over the past few months.
Hello Baby retails baby products on their own website, as well as eBay and Amazon Marketplace, in an Internet-only sales strategy that has helped keep costs low. “A multi-channel online strategy enables us to reach the maximum number of online customers” said Ginn. “We all have a preferred place where we like to buy online. Many business just sell on a website, or just on eBay, but we think that this is a terrible mistake. Companies need to be flexible and go where the customers are.”
Starting Out
Ginn worked as an e-commerce consultant before he started Hello Baby. With e-commerce growing at a steady pace, his clients were doing well – which disturbed him. “I felt that I knew much more about online marketing they did. So I decided to put my money where my mouth was and launch my own online business.”
Ginn researched into may different retail sectors before settling on the nursery industry. “I had a number of different criteria for choosing a sector, for example, it had to be something I knew about, be non-seasonal and have the opportunity for good margins,” he explains. “I had also recently had my first daughter and the amount of money which all new parents seem to spend on stuff was also an inspiration!”
Hello Baby focuses on building an attractive, user-friendly website and carrying a great range of products at attractive prices. As people cannot touch the products they are browsing, the site believes this is essential for customers to have as much information as possible before making a purchase. “We put a lot of effort into having compelling product descriptions and photos,” says Ginn. But building and managing a robust product catalogue, Ginn admits, is the company’s main challenge. “A retailing website involves the creation of a huge amount of content, and prices constantly change. Keeping on top of this is very time consuming.” His team also faced a steep learning curve trying to get up to speed with the products and the competitive landscape. “No one in the company had a background in the nursery industry!” Ginn reveals, unabashedly.
Its effective customer service and delivery – only one percent of their orders experience any kind of problem – means good repeat business. Perhaps because of that, Hello Baby has grown their business steadily – at around 10 percent per month – since their launch, and currently sells £40,000 worth of goods every month. Its iPhone app alone has garnered some 20,000 downloads.
Hello Baby is self-funded, and keep their startup costs low by choosing very cheap office space and dropshipping a large proportion of their stock. However, they are looking to expand their operations, and “aim to be a major player in the nursery market” with “a compelling offering to customer in the UK and worldwide”.
Growing An Online Business
Ginn shares that Hello Baby’s main strategies for growth are to increase the size of its product catalogue and build more traffic through natural search. More products available, he says, means more opportunities for people to make purchases and allows more content for Google to index and drives natural search traffic. “We believe the natural search is the most cost effective way to market a website and we engage in an active program of content creation and link building.”
Hello Baby has a blog where its team write about their experiences of raising children, as “a resource for new parents”. It also uses the social networks Facebook and MySpace to keep in touch with their customers. “Social networks like Facebook are great fun and a fantastic way of getting to know our customers,” Ginn explains. “They also give us instant feedback about what our customers are thinking.”
However, Ginn admits their forays into the social media front have some way to go. “Social media has only driven very limited traffic to the site although we have built up over 700 followers on Twitter. However, we are putting a lot of effort in this area and expect it to pay dividends in the future.”
Starting Online, and Starting Small
If you’re considering starting an online retail business, Ginn says that budding entrepreneurs need to consider those that have proven business models, and starting small if they have to. “Online retail is great in this regard, as online marketing places like eBay and Amazon give quick access to customers and transactional websites can be set up quickly and cheaply,” he says.
“We started off with about £1000 worth of stock and an eBay store and took it from there.”
Views on Entrepreneurship
Ginn is very candid when discussing why he became an entrepreneur. “I was a pretty poor employee which made the decision to become an entrepreneur easy. I always found it hard to work for other people and consequently did not do a very good job!”
“Having worked for myself now for 2 years I can confirm that being an entrepreneur is very hard work and quite lonely at times,” he says. “However, on the plus side, knowing that you are a master of your own destiny is a great feeling. I think that the secret is to have a clear end goal and maintain focus.”
The two most important lesson Ginn has learnt, he says, is becoming an expert in your field and being self-reliant. “Most things in business or technology are not that complicated and it is usually possible to do them yourself if you read up on the subject,” says Ginn. “I have saved thousands and achieved better results by becoming knowledgeable in areas such as online marketing, usability and application development.”
“Depending on contractors to do everything is very expensive,” he adds.
There will be two conference calls to answer any questions founders based in Singapore who may be interested in the program:
Friday, March 5th at 0800hrs in Singapore
Saturday, March 6th at 1200hrs in Singapore
+1 (605) 715-4900 / PIN: 998-602#
The Singapore program has also added four new mentors from the United States, including founder & CEO of Urgent Career, Jeff Stewart, Ron Weiner of Venture Mechanics, Will Bunker of One-and-Only (which became Match.com) and CEO of Skip Hop Michael Diamant.
James Kappen proposes an easier way for salespeople to manage their sales process with Proposable.com.
Salespeople know the pain of managing and keeping track of each step of the sales process with potential sales leads. Proposable.com believes it has an answer.
Proposable, is a startup based in Bloomington, Indiana that offers a refreshing alternative to the traditional method of sending sales material to potential customers – you know, as file attachments of various formats via email, which can get lost or, worse, zapped by spam filters. It’s developed a web application that lets users create, deliver and analyze sales material online. With Proposable, users can create, edit and store all proposal templates, sections and attachments in an online library. It even has a team account, allowing sales teams to collaborate on proposals, as well as assign a Sales Manager role who can monitor and manage sales material created by a team.
But what’s so great about this?
With a shared online central library, a sales manager will never run into problems such as having an urgent proposal stuck in the laptop of a colleague who’s away on vacation. The system allows a sales lead to view, comment and pose questions alongside the proposal, and notifies the salesperson via text message and email when the a proposal is viewed or commented on. Also, an in-depth analytics page displays a sales lead’s viewing patterns and viewing history – allowing salespeople to effectively gauge interest and focus on the “low-hanging fruit”.
CEO of Proposable, James Kappen, puts it this way. “You’ll never have to again ask yourself questions like, “Did they open my proposal?”, “What sections did they look at?” or “Which of my leads is most interested?”.”
Proposable is a joint venture between business accelerator program Sproutbox and Kappen. Proposable, Kappen’s second venture since graduating from college in 2006, won a business plan competition organized by Sproutbox by beating a thousand other entries from all over the United States. Proposable also landed US$250,000 in seed money from Sproutbox.
“The inspiration for Proposable came out of my frustration with the sales proposal process,” says Kappen. “I ran a regional print magazine and I would be sending out sales material every day via email to potential advertisers. The trouble was that I never knew what was happening with any of it. I would spend much of my time following up with my leads attempting to figure out who saw what and which of them was genuinely interested. I knew that salespeople everywhere had this pain that comes from the lack of information around their outgoing sales material, so I set out to create a solution.”
Proposable launched in early February to a huge response, garnering some 300 sign-ups on its first day. The challenge now, James says, is to make the site as user-friendly and robust as possible for all kinds of users in a variety of selling environments. In order to fuel growth, James believes it is necessary for Proposable to get thousands of salespeople to try their product. The way to accomplish this, he says, is to partner with sales organizations and publications.
Views on Entrepreneurship
Kappen says entrepreneurship is for those who have the insatiable need to create something new, to innovate. But he cautions that while creating an excellent product is necessary, the real work only begins after the product is created.
“Execution is 90 percent of what makes any venture successful. That is the challenge,” he says.
Ideas from Singaporeans from the creative, such as a pub with dynamic drinks pricing, to the utterly bizarre in the form of insect cuisine. Here is a look at some of the top ten entries:
1. RADIOactive
RADIOactive empowers brands to operate their own Radio channel, communicating with targeted audiences via mobile devices. With a 24/7 International Party Radio Channel, the space will house the studio and function as an outlet for prize redemptions, sampling and venue for making on-site paid dedications that go to charity.
2. Amnesia
Visitors are encouraged to temporarily forget where they are when in Amnesia, with its full 360-degree multimedia projectors that take visitors around the world as they enjoy on signature drinks and cocktails.
3. Bon Soir – Dark Dining
Imagine taking a meal in absolute darkness. Embark on an extraordinary culinary adventure where the visually impaired are hired and trained to serve as professional waiters/guides. This idea is not new, though.
4. Hemeryx – The Bar That Connects
A bar that uses interactive wall to change ambiance, interactive tables play games with each other and strangers at other tables. As Hemeryx expands worldwide, people can connect with strangers chilling elsewhere on Earth.
5. OliveScreens
OliveScreens combines two best things in life – food and movies. The food menu and ambience of the restaurant, depends on the movie shown in the restaurant. For instance, if a French movie is shown, authentic French cuisine is served.
The judging panel consisted of representatives from INSEAD, Standard Chartered Bank, Pernod Ricard Singapore, Origo Ventures and other partners. However, it does looks like the shortlisted entries are heavily skewed towards dining or F&B – perhaps this has something to do with the fact the competition’s driven by Martell VSOP?
Adrian Tan, founder of Antenna Consulting, wants to challenge youth to find their passion in life.
Ex-schoolteacher and founder of training consultancy Antenna Consulting, Adrian Tan, has always been passionate about working with young people. He likes to see a young person thrilled at what they’ve learnt, and finding that drive to want to succeed in life. It’s the reason he’s a leader in his church’s youth group, and why he became a teacher for four years at Nan Hua High School. “You are investing in something that has infinite returns,” says 29-year old Adrian. “You never know what could happen in 10 years time when that introverted student becomes a public speaker!”
While at Nan Hua, he had the autonomy of planning interesting lessons using technology. He remembers fondly the time he had the opportunity to share technological applications for education with then Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam (who is now Singapore’s Finance Minister) and King of Cambodia Norodom Sihamoni. “We showcased the use of Tablet PCs and later, introducing the use of podcasting for lessons.”
Making Learning Purposeful
But somewhere into the second year of teaching, Adrian became very disturbed that most of his students – many of whom were academically above-average – were apathetic about their lives, as well as on social issues. “Most of them didn’t even know what they want to do, or what their passion was,” he says. “And almost all of them didn’t relate what they were studying to its real world applications.” At the same time, his wife Alison, who also happens to be a schoolteacher, was telling him about how there was a real need to find a way to get the students in her school engaged in learning a trade skill rather than mere academic subjects.
Being involved in a rock band – Adrian was the lead singer of local punk rock band Pensionstate for more than 11 years – had taught him more about collaboration, personal effectiveness, leadership and event organization – far more than his education ever did. “It is in these years of not ever making money from music that I have been intrigued by the creative process through intrinsic motivation.”
“Why do people do what they love and push boundaries in their passion, which is intrinsic, but hate their school and work when their reward is extrinsic?” he asks. “If we are able to bring to class the real world application to curriculum, learning will be purposeful and the motivation to learn is intrinsic,” Adrian reasons.
That was the birth of Antenna Consulting – the idea to bring to the classroom real world applications to curriculum, to make learning purposeful, and the motivation to learn, instrinsic.
Challenging the Status Quo
Adrian says that it was a big decision when he quit as a teacher in December of 2008 – it was the lowest point of the global recession and Alison was eight months pregnant. It was a tremendously difficult period, he reveals, but managing to successfully convince his parents, his wife, her parents, and his school principal of his idea was an amazing breakthrough. “(It) proved that the concept is doable,” he remembers.
Adrian then pumped in S$30K of his own savings to start Antenna, with another S$30K from silent partners.
Antenna programs are customized to help schools go beyond their curriculum goals. Its target market, naturally, are education institutions that needs help crafting meaning education solutions with a real-world perspective. Adrian believes that as a former educator who understands the educational system and its needs, helps sets him apart from his competitors.
But he insists that his biggest competition comes not from similar service providers such as High Achievers or Mastereign, but the schools’ indifference and adherence to the status quo when it comes to education. “The key challenge was to convince schools that change was needed in the way training programs are run, and convince the key decision makers out there to try you out.”
But there are forward-looking schools, and school educators. In the eight months that Antenna has been in operation, they’ve signed on five schools as clients, including a 5-day workshop for Crescent Girls’ School on ’21st century skills’. “Seeing (the girls) get so inspired was a proof of concept that greatly encouraged us.” Antenna also regularly works with industry partners to develop CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiatives for schools.
Focusing On “Doing Great Work”
Antenna‘s strategy for 2010, Adrian says, is to ‘do great work and be seen doing so’. “We aim to focus on our current school clients and provide exceptional service. This will secure us more training jobs from the current schools we service as they become more confident of our service quality.” Quality, he insists, is critical in his industry. He says that the problem with most training vendors is that they try to do too many things, and have their hands in everything. “They outsource their trainers and, in the end, training standards drop.”
“We try to evolve organically and ensure that all our trainers are properly trained to facilitate.” In the meantime, Antenna expects to spend this year on research and development, continually crafting and iterating its programs before scaling out to more schools next year. They also aim freely share training initiatives at education forums and on social media.
Views on Entrepreneurship
“I have always admired entrepreneurs since I was young, and found it amazing that every product and service you use daily were (once) merely ideas in someone’s head,” Adrian muses. “Even though I became a civil servant after graduation, it was constantly bubbling inside of me, that one day I would step out and do something on my own.” (Incidentally, his sister Adrianna – a popular travel blogger at Popagandhi.com– also started her own business Pen To Pixel.)
One of the key lessons he learnt during about entrepreneurship was clarifying his idea. Don’t give up even if your idea doesn’t seem clear at the start, he says. “As I went through the first six months, articulating it to people, bouncing off mentors, crafting my elevator pitch, asking teachers and students about the problems they faced, the direction becomes clearer and clearer.”
“As a friend once shared – it’s easier to steer the car if it’s moving!”
His final parting words? “Remember the idea you had? You have five seconds to get enthusiastic over it. Now!”
Christian Arno of Lingo24: Loving the idea of a global business.
September 26th, 2001 – Oxford University languages graduate Christian Arno registers his new translation company Lingo24 as an official business. Arno and a handful of home-based employees prepare to make their mark within the translation industry.
September 26th 2009: Lingo24 has 112 full-time employees working across four continents, clients in over sixty countries and an annual turnover of over US$6m.
So what happened in those eight years? And what was the inspiration behind what is now one of the UK’s biggest translation companies?
Let’s backtrack a little to 1999, when Christian Arno was on a year’s study at a university in Italy as part of his degree course. Along with a few friends, they decided to found a small online translation company called tgv24.com. The plan was to make a little beer money and perhaps make enough to help subsidize their studies.
They did not too badly as it happens. But it made Arno realize that there was genuine potential to build a serious online translation company. At the time, the Internet was still emerging and was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today. No translation companies were using the Internet to its fullest potential.
A Home-Based Business
After graduating in the summer of 2001, Arno decided to go for it and launched Lingo24, opting for the name because he planned to operate round-the-clock. He aimed to market his company entirely on the World Wide Web, something that no other translation company was doing at the time.
One of the key factors in Lingo24’s early success was that they were home-based. No premises meant no expensive overheads, and hence they could offer prices up to 30-percent less than established competitors. Furthermore, because Christian was based in his parents’ house in Aberdeen – one of the world’s most prominent oil and gas hubs – he was introduced to some big companies and won some big contracts early on. This initial growth spurt saw Arno take his business abroad, opening virtual, home-based operations in New Zealand in 2003 and then China in 2004.
Overseas Expansion
With operations established across multiple time-zones, Lingo24 could now effectively manage projects ‘out of hours’, so to speak. When the UK closed for business, the project management reigns would be passed to a manager elsewhere in the world.
A major growth milestone occurred in 2005, when a main operational hub was opened in Timisoara, a small university city in Romania. With an excellent technical university and the city’s high degree of multilingualism, Lingo24 could recruit highly talented individuals and develop the next phase of Arno’s growth plans. It took its international operations further in January 2008 when it opened in Panama, another multicultural, multilingual country that also happened to already be an established service centre for the nearby United States. Lingo24 could now build its business in the lucrative North American market, and also offer an additional option for round-the-clock support for clients in other countries.
Its first physical office space was finally opened in August 2008, in the Scottish capital city of Edinburgh. A vibrant, multicultural city with several excellent universities, Edinburgh was the perfect city to establish its global headquarters.
Over the years, Christian’s drive and vision has also seen the company and himself shortlisted for numerous awards.
Navigating The World Wide Web
It’s also worth mentioning the role that online marketing has played in Lingo24’s rise from a small home-based business into an international multi-million dollar business. Search engine optimization has been a key strategy. A significant proportion of its revenue comes via search engines, through ranking highly on Google and other search engines for key search terms such as ‘translation services’, ‘legal translation services’ and ‘UK translation company’.
This year, Lingo24 expects sales to continue on an upwards trajectory. Predicted turnover is expected grow year-on-year by over 30 percent to well over US$7m.
Content for this post was contributed by Nora Zavalczki of Lingo24, and adapted and edited for publication here.
One of the biggest problems that movie distributors have is that they never know how much interest there is from the movie-going public in a particular movie, especially those that are not big budget or produced by movie houses. However, filmmaker and software developer Brian Chirls has developed an interesting web tool called Crowd Controls to help filmmakers, musicians and other artists find where their audiences are located around the world and hence guide distribution (i.e. convince distributors to sign on their movies).
The premise of the service is relatively simple. It essentially consists of a web form that is implemented on a film’s or artist’s site, where fans can vote to show interest. The data is then gathered and displayed as an easy-to-read map showing the spread of fans in a given vicinity. The system also gives the artists and filmmakers other statistics, and since fans will leave their emails addresses Crowd Controls also makes a good way to send targeted information to the fanbase.
“Filmmakers are beginning to realize that they can’t always count on a distributor to deliver an audience,” says Brian Chirls. “The ability to collect and visualize audience data eliminates much of the guess work in releasing a film, making it more valuable to distributors and exhibitors or enabling a DIY release. Crowd Controls also empowers the fans to make themselves visible to filmmakers and each other, particularly in places that might have otherwise been considered too small or remote to justify a release.”
Chirls built a prototype of the system for the creators of the independent film “Four Eyed Monsters”, which successfully showed their film in dozens of cities around the United States. It has also been adopted by the upcoming science fiction comedy “Iron Sky”, directed by Timo Vuorensola (whom I met when he was in town for Singapore Digital Media Fest 2008).
“It’s a great way to reach fans in a certain area and to contact them directly,” says Vuorensola. “For example, we are arranging a fan meeting during the Berlin film festival, and with Crowd Controls, we can reach out to our fans in Berlin with invitations. That kind of personal interaction gets fans excited about helping to spread the word and makes for a richer experience with the film.”
Chlkboard allows small retailers and service providers to push promotions to mobile handsets of consumers around them.
Small-to-medium businesses with their tiny marketing budgets typically struggle with their advertising and promotion efforts, especially when it comes to the Web or mobile marketing. It’s a space that mobile location-based marketing service startup Chlkboard is interested to fill.
Singapore-based startup Chlkboard is founded by Saumil Nanavati and Bernard Leong. Both co-founders have known each other for a long time and have been looking for a project they can work on. Co-founder Bernard, Chlkboard‘s CTO, is a familiar name in the Singapore technology startup scene (he helps manage community site SGEntrepreneurs and is also a partner in Thymos Capital). He has been most recently working on the area of social networks and mobile web applications, and Chlkboard is a natural transition. CEO Saumil previously ran a successful pan regional digital media company as president of Sydus, and prior to that was based in Silicon Valley with Epicentric, Scient and Motorola.
Small Medium Entreprises – An Untapped Market For Mobile Services
The idea for Chlkboard came about when Saumil and Bernard realized that most small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), unlike large brands, do not have large marketing budgets to promote their products and services. Considering that in many developed countries SMEs represent over 70 percent of total businesses, there was a real opportunity for a location-based mobile and web service that catered to this segment. “We’re focusing on an under-served market,” he adds.
Chlkboard is a surprisingly simple concept. Retailers sign up and send their promotions via SMS or Twitter to Chlkboard, who then pushes these promotions to consumers’ mobile devices within a certain range from their stores. “(It’s a) balancing of consumer acceptance versus edgy innovation for a location-based service,” Bernard explains.
Bernard shares that Chlkboard’s business model revolves around two key features – real-time media and location via GPS. “We want to deliver value for businesses who are constantly seeking real time information on their business performance and at the same time giving ability to retailers to send their latest promotion in real time, as many times as they wish via SMS to our number or via their Twitter account.” He adds that being location-specific also adds relevance for consumers and retailers, with a retailer’s promotion accessible within a range from their outlets, whilst consumers can view promotions within a range around them.
Geo-relevant applications are served to consumers in the area.
Scaling Up
A tribute to the speed of startups, Chlkboard took just two months to conceptualize and only 21 days from idea to actual product before launching on 15 January 2010. In two weeks since its launch, Chlkboard has acquired over 30 advertisers, including Standing Sushi Bar, Otaku House and The Arena at Clarke Quay, and hitting above 10K impressions on the mobile – purely via word-of-mouth marketing.
“We worked hard to get our first 30 listings with 10K impressions,” Bernard says. ” We are now focusing on product development for the publishers and getting more sales done.” He says that their key challenges are to get more advertisers signing up on their platform directly and the monetization of their products, and at the same time, increase consumer awareness of their web and mobile applications.
The closest competitor, Bernard says, will be mobile advertising network Admob (which was recently acquired by Google). But given their approach in targeting the smallest retailers which are currently unlikely to employ mobile or internet advertising, they aim to be collaborative rather than competitive. “There are indirect competitors in the form of local ad-networks, but we believe that there are exist potential opportunities to collaborate with them rather than compete against them.”
Bernard says they have a three-pronged approach to move Chlkboard forward. Firstly they are looking to work with publishers to deliver promotion on their platform. “We are in the process of a beta product testing on our own end and we will speak to the publishers we have identified and work with them to use our system,” he says. In addition, they are looking to sign up more advertisers by working with government agencies like SPRING who want to promote SMEs (small-to-medium enterprises). Finally, to continually iterate the product through customer feedback and scale the service regionally.
Chlkboard is purely bootstrapped and currently self-invested, but is open to any additional capital injection.
Views on Entrepreneurship
Bernard relishes the part of an entrepreneur, versus his other roles as an investor or industry observer. He shares a story on how he and Saumil were going around Haji Lane, trying to convince proprietors in the area to sign up as advertisers. “We were at one shop and were about to be rejected by a shop owner. One of her clients – a total stranger – persuaded the owner to let us pitch, believing that our service will help the owner’s business. We managed to get the owner’s buy-in.
“Subsequently, that same client also sent an SMS to her friends immediately, informing them to try Chlkboard out on their iPhones!” Bernard says such moments make them continue to believe that their idea may actually work. and focus to make it work. “Being able to see on the ground how people react to your products and services is a rewarding opportunity which I don’t get to see in my other roles.”
Unbeknowst to many, the main driving motivation to why Bernard is an entrepreneur is the desire to set up a foundation to fund research in theoretical sciences and humanities in Asia. Bernard says his views on entrepreneurship can be summed up by this quote from Scott McCloud in his TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk about understanding comics – “Learn from everyone, follow no one, look for patterns and work like hell”. It’s a mantra he uses everyday, he adds.
“The most important lesson I have learnt is that you need to make a sustainable and scalable business. We know that a great idea is only an idea without break neck execution,” Bernard elaborates. “The other thing is to learn from our mistakes and fail fast, as both Saumil and I have learned from the mistakes in our past start-ups.”
“Every failure I encounter in life, I take it as a lesson, move on and come back stronger.”
“It is important that you really like the idea behind the start-up and put all your passion and effort to build it. Chlkboard provided me that excitement and passion once again.”
Rob Stretch recommends Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start as one of five books to read during your next vacation or spring break.
Now that you’re probably about to start thinking about your plans for vacation or spring break, it might be time to find some literature to occupy your time. Sometimes it can be hard to stop the daily routine of checking your favorite industry blogs and magazines but it’s always nice to relax to a great book.
In this post, I will give a short review of five of the best business- and entrepreneurship-related books for strapping young minds to read. Pick one up today and enjoy.
1. The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris
This book is the Holy Grail of entrepreneurial thought in the new millennium. Tim Ferris is the poster child of the new rich. I will warn you that this book may come off as a scam; it might seem too good to be true. But sift through the first few chapters and you will start finding a plethora of resources.
Tim boils being successful down to a simple equation: D-E-A-L. In other words, Define, Eliminate, Automate, and Liberate. The book is geared towards those trying to negotiate time off their jobs and those trying to start their own businesses. This is the must-read book for entrepreneurs today. Also, check out Tim’s blog.
2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Imagine that you just died and you’re viewing your own funeral as a ghost. Who’s there? What are people saying about you? This is just one of the exercises Covey presents to illustrate how you are perceived.
Covey will introduce you to a “paradigm shift” in the way you think. The bulk of the book centers around how to improve time management and how to develop positive thinking. I recommend this book as an empowering read for any young entrepreneur.
3. The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
If you’re anything like me, then you’ve probably read a thousand “How-to-start-a-business” books. But I’m almost positive that none were as witty or enjoyable as Guy Kawasaki’s.
With his history in venture capital funding, a great chunk of the book is focused on financing your business. But he focuses on a variety of other topics also including: positioning, pitching, partnering, and branding. I find this book very entertaining and I think you will too.
4. The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Gerber focuses on the E-myth (entrepreneurial myth) that owners will always succeed if they like what they’re doing and they put in enough capital. He breaks business management down into three types of people: technicians (the doers), managers (the planners), and entrepreneurs (the visionaries).
He also uses the turn-key revolution and the franchise business model to describe how to take your business to the next level.
5. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Published in 1937, Carnegie’s tome is a bit more old-school than the others on the list. But this is the classic book when it comes to all things personal relationship.
If you’re looking to read a self-help book you’ve found it. And don’t let its age deter you. Carnegie offers a host of real-world examples for each chapter and while they may seem old, they all still apply today. Some of his tips include always remembering names, remembering birthdays, becoming genuinely interested in the lives of those around you, and always smiling. Everybody has coworkers at all, whether a manager or employee, should read this book.
Om Republic's stylish and functional activewear employs eco-friendly materials such as organic cotton.
What do investment bankers do when they are retrenched from their jobs in the financial crisis? They can sit, complain and suck their thumbs. Or they can be like Singaporean Min Sim, who chose to start her own business – in exactly what she enjoyed doing.
Inspiration
Min Sim loved yoga. An avid student of classical Chinese dance in her growing years, she was immediately hooked when she first tried yoga after college. It was a natural transition from dance, she found, and a welcome respite from the stresses of corporate life as an investment banker.
At the end of 2008, during the height of the financial crisis, Min lost her banking job. With plenty of time suddenly on her hands, she threw all of it into yoga – in fact, she practiced so much she often ran out of workout clothes. But whenever she went shopping for activewear, she could never find any that she liked. Then inspiration struck – what if she designed her own line of workout clothes?
Her background in corporate finance – near useless to what she had in mind – didn’t deter her. Min started with some sketches, borrowed a ton of books on fashion design and drew upon her experience as a long-time practitioner and user of countless workout gear over the years. The result was a line of apparel that is distinguished by clean lines and subtle embellishments in what founder-designer Min calls “modern Oriental chic” – a tribute to the company’s Eastern roots and her classical Chinese dance background.
“There is no shortage of activewear brands in the market, but the vast majority is made with synthetic fabrics and convey a hard-edged aesthetic that just didn’t seem to gel with yoga, pilates and dance,” says Min. “I longed for workout clothes with a softer look to mirror the calming effects of yoga, pilates and dance.”
“Om Republic is the coming together of my various interests – yoga, dance, art and environmental responsibility.”
The designs in Om Republic's range of activewear is inspired by classical Chinese dance.
Eco-friendliness
Launched in December 2009, Om Republic‘s Oriental-inspired designs are rooted in ideas around eco-friendliness and environmental sustainability. Om Republic garments are made from organic cotton, with a touch of spandex for stretch. Organic cotton, unlike conventional cotton, is grown using a system of farming that maintains and replenishes soil fertility without the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Fabrics are also dyed using a low-impact process, and its packaging uses a combination of 100% recycled or recyclable materials.
“A lot of people who are drawn to yoga, pilates and dance are also green enthusiasts. It was only natural that Om Republic should support a lifestyle of wellness for the body, the mind, and the earth,” Min explains.
It’s been announced that a new magazine that focuses on the needs of Singapore’s small and medium-sized businesses will be hitting the streets, and which is touted as a “must-read” for business leaders seeking to operate more effectively in new markets.
A collaboration between The Business Times, SPRING Singapore and IE Singapore (which pretty much means that the two agencies will underwrite part, if not most, of its cost), the imaginatively titled The SME Magazine will provide “news, stories and information to help Singapore’s homegrown companies grow, expand and globalize with higher value-added products and services”.
It’s about time. After all, small and medium businesses make up 99 percent of all businesses incorporated in Singapore and form the backbone of the country’s economy. It is responsible for about half of the country’s GDP and generates more than 60 percent of jobs found in Singapore (more statistics here).
Also, there’s a recent dearth of good local publications that focuses on the small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) market. Independent SME magazine BOLDLEAPS, launched in August 2007, died just after four issues, while ASME (Association of Small & Medium Enterprises) magazine Entrepreneur Digest, which is still around, can only be politely called a vanity magazine.
At least The Business Times has competent journalists who can be trusted to do a good job on the new rag. I’m interested to see what kind of focus, if any, the magazine will have on the startup scene, however.
The SME Magazine, priced at S$6 per copy, is available at all major news stands and bookstores.
Find out how you and your business can be featured in Scott Gerber‘s new book, Never Get A Real Job at AskGerber.com.
In Never Get A Real Job, Gerber challenges the social conventions behind the real job and empowers entrepreneurs to take control of their lives, fears and careers. Drawing upon case studies, experiences and observations, the author dissects failures, shares hard-learned lessons and presents practical, affordable and systematic action steps to building, managing and marketing a successful business. The methodology presented in Never Get A Real Job looks at teaching readers how to succeed on a shoestring budget by thinking outside-the-box and effectively deal with the turbulent trials and tribulations that accompany being their own boss.
Scott Gerber is Entrepreneur Magazine's Young Entrepreneur columnist, CEO of Gerber Enterprises and founder of AskGerber.com.
Shortly after my college graduation, a few friends and I started a new media company. Within a few weeks we fleshed out the concept, wrote a business plan and set out to seek financing. With a little hustle, I managed to get us a meeting with a well-known investment firm to discuss the opportunity. Even though our business had yet to bring in a single dollar, and none of us had ever been the CEO of coffee shop let alone a multi-million dollar enterprise, we were all confident that we had a sure thing on our hands. After all, our financial projections forecasted gross revenues of $200 million. What investor could say no to that?
We’d be rich. All we needed to do was raise a small amount of capital – $15 million.
I remember thinking, “How hard could it be?” We were obviously, naïve, foolish and delusional.
There was one small problem with our plan. None of us had any idea how to pitch an investor. So I did what any clueless entrepreneurial upstart would do: Google searched “how to pitch an investor”.
Nothing that I read online could have prepared me for what was to come. We would quickly find out that our presentation was doomed before we ever set foot into the meeting. In reality, it was doomed before we started writing the business plan.
At the beginning of the meeting one of the investors asked me to hand him a one-page executive summary review. I hadn’t prepared a summary, so I handed him the first 11 pages out of the binder encasing my 95-page business plan. Strike one.
Less than four slides into my 32-slide presentation, the second investor interrupted me and said, “OK. Stop. I get it. You definitely don’t need $15 million.”
Defending our business plan, I overconfidently replied: “It can’t be done for less.”
“Really? It can’t be done, huh?” he responded with a smirk masking a hint of laughter. Strike two.
Both of the investors then proceeded to hit us with a barrage of questions:
“How much money have you personally put into your business? Anywhere near $15 million?”
“Why should I pay a bunch of twenty-somethings with no track record $100,000 executive salaries?”
“How much revenue has the business produced to date?”
“Why should I give you $15 million when the company hasn’t even made $15?”
“How can you possibly substantiate gross revenues of $200 million in year three?”
“Why are you trying to produce, market and distribute 10 products at the same time before you see if a single one sells at all?”
The questions went on and on. None of our answers were favorable. Strike three.
As you might have guessed, I didn’t walk out of that meeting with a $15 million check. I later realized, however, that this was one of the greatest educational experiences of my young career. I learned more about real-world fundraising in 30 minutes than many entrepreneurs learn in a lifetime. To this day, whenever I pitch investors for capital, I always remember these six hard-learned lessons:
1. Less is always more.
An elevator pitch is vital. Verbose presentations and lengthy explanations will not impress investors, and most likely will turn them off. Present your business in a manner that’s short, sweet and to the point. Investors need to be confident that your business will attract and retain customers. If they don’t grasp your concept in a short time span, they may presume that customers won’t understand it either.
2. Never hypothesize. Execute, execute, execute.
Inspire confidence with facts, not fiction. Most investors seek out low-risk businesses with proven managers that are as close to guarantees as possible. A company with cash flow, a track record and real-world experience has a better chance of getting investors than a business plan forecasting large returns. Find ways to test your business’s viability on a shoestring budget, and turn your idea into a functional business before you seek investment.
3. Leave the hockey sticks on the ice.
Excite investors about your big picture, but be reasonable and responsible. Avoid hockey stick projections. Respectable investors will not take you seriously if you present them with nonsensical financial graphs that claim your company’s revenues will grow from $100,000 to $50 million in three years. Show investors that you have a grasp on reality with three versions of financial projections: best case, moderate case and worst case. Base each of these models on facts, past and present performance data, industry and competitor analyses and a series of well-thought-out, defendable assumptions.
4. Learn to love discount stores.
Being cheap is chic. In an age where spending is out of control, you’ll need to prove that you are a fiscally responsible manager who knows how to get the most out of a buck. Give yourself wiggle room in your operations and marketing budgets, but avoid being excessive. Never ask for a large salary or big-budget perks. Investors want you to be in a position where everything is on the line.
5. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your business won’t be either.
Investors are wary of funding over-eager businesses that seem destined to bite off more than they can chew. Before asking for millions of dollars to fund 50 divisions and hundreds of product lines, prove how well you can create, manage and fulfill demand for a single product. Demonstrate that your business can crawl before you say it can walk. Perfect your marketing tactics, sales strategies and operational procedures. Investors appreciate companies with sustainable step-and-repeat business models that are poised for exponential growth. Remember, even Google’s success is based on a single product.
6. Choose not to be the smartest person in the room.
Know what you know, know what you don’t know and find the people who know what you don’t know. Build a team of credible experts. The smartest leaders in the world are those who surround themselves with smarter people. Investors are funding a management team as much as they are investing in a great business concept.
Are you a young entrepreneur with a unique venture? Email Scott about it at pitchme@askgerber.com.
Participating teams at the Startup@Singapore 24-Hour Business Challenge.
A lot, apparently. You can come up with a business plan.
That’s what over 40 teams of 2-4 members each did, when they participated in Startup@Singapore‘s first-ever 24-hour Business Plan Challenge last weekend at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School. The teams were tasked to develop, from scratch, a business plan for an idea in three identified industries – the silver industry (the elderly market, not the precious metal), social entrepreneurship and interactive digital media. At the end of the challenge, they had to submit a 3-page executive summary and prepare a short 3-minute pitch to a panel of judges.
Here’s an idea that emerged from the challenge I believe deserves to be called out:
Smiles
In India’s Tamil Nadu, 80-percent of rural farmers live below the poverty line of USD1 a day. This poverty stems from a systematic inability to grow income sources due to land degradation. Specifically in the districts of Tiruchirapalli and Karur, only 25-percent of land is arable.
The winner for the social entrepreneurship category, team Smiles proposed a business model called MicroMacro that is an organic agriculture micro-investment social enterprise focused on empowering farmers in Tamil Nadu to increase plot utilization and alleviate poverty. Founders Ivan Chang and Keith Tan are barely in their 20s – Ivan is pursuing a degree in Business Administration from Singapore Management University (SMU) and awaiting for his CPA qualification, while Keith is headed toward NUS for an undergraduate study in Architecture.
I think it’s great that an entrepreneurship challenge like has spurred so many of our youth to think about the world at large. In 24 hours, you may just come up with an idea to save the world.
As if advertising isn’t pervasive enough in our lives, here comes yet another platform for brand owners in Singapore to regale us with the wonders of their products and services.
Cups Media – founded by entrepreneur Joelle Goh and a partner earlier this year – is the first marketing solutions firm in Singapore to print marketing messages on paper cups, which are then given free to organizations (it’s the advertisers who pay for the cups).
According to Cups Media, more than 100,000 cups have been given out over the last three months to companies in Singapore. Joelle says the free paper cups have companies save money. “As the financial crisis hurts a lot of organizations, many of them are looking for ways to cut their overheads. By receiving the quality paper cups free of charge, they can be assured that they need not to waste their money to buy these paper cups,” explains Joelle.
Ryan Meinzer, founder of language learning software startup Playsay.com, is today "substantially competent" in Japanese.
Startup Playsay.com intends to transform the world of language. The Philadelphia-based language learning software company lets users download digital “language flashcards” using any mobile device such as their iPods, cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDA), allowing them to learn languages while on the move.
“Playsay.com empowers busy people to extract value from any idle minute with the most practical language learning on the go,” says founder Ryan Meinzer, was first inspired to learn Japanese two years ago but hardly had any free time. “I wanted to learn Japanese in the many sporadic idle minutes of my day, one word at a time, one minute at a time,” says Meinzer. “I didn’t have the US$300 for those attractive yellow Rosetta Stone boxes.” Meinzer doesn’t deny that Rosetta Stone’s language learning method is superior to Playsay.com‘s. He simply argues that his solution gets around the intimidating amount of discipline, time, and money required to learn a new language.
Today, through using his own solution, Meinzer is “substantially competent” in Japanese.
Building Traction
To build awareness for its products, Playsay.com offered private beta access to many language departments of major universities across the United States. After all, most students carried digital mobile devices, and eschewing the need for the traditional paper flashcards also meant that learning could be accelerated. So far, feedback has been good.
Playsay.com currently offers products to learn Japanese, Chinese and Spanish, and its 4,000+ users to date have downloaded more than ten million free digital flashcards. It has also sold over 3,000 products to date, and plans to add more languages in the near future.
Playsay.com was launched in 2008, and is fully sustainable. It was initially funded by a PayPal Japan executive, and is currently seeking funding to continue its sustainable and profitable expansion.
The Garden Slug offers comfort food in large portions - just like their hospitality.
Located in an idyllic part of eastern Singapore, The Garden Slug is easy-to-miss. Flanked by an auto shop and a pet store in a nondescript (and some say run-down) squat building in Telok Kurau, the quirky and bohemian diner offers Western-style homemade comfort food that has attracted a following since it opened in 2007.
The Garden Slug is founded by three friends – Sharon Foong, Joseph Lim, and Sophia Leong. Sharon has a marketing background and used to be in financial services for Deloitte & Touche. Joseph has qualifications in engineering and previously worked in IT services and facilitation for Republic Polytechnic. Sophia is public relations-trained and had worked in marketing for Starbucks Coffee Singapore.
Co-owner Sophia says the three of them were prompted to start the business as they felt they got along well and could bring separate unique skill sets to the table. At the time, all three had relatively satisfying careers, but were keen to explore the “what-ifs” in life and wanted to do something exciting whilst they ‘were still young and energetic’. “We didn’t want to live to regret the fact that we didn’t dare do something that we felt strongly about. We were not particularly inspired by any event in particular, but as consumers ourselves, we saw the lack of a diner which was home-grown, owner-run, comfortable, unpretentious, quirky and offers not just a dining solution but a whole spectrum of F&B services.”
So they went ahead and put their entire life savings into The Garden Slug. Besides operating a diner, they provide services such as home and corporate catering, F&B consultancy, as well as food supply.
And how has the experience been? “It is always a challenge when people of three very different personalities come together,” laughs Sophia, “But so far, it has been a good marriage of different skill sets and diverse capabilities.”
The founding owners of The Garden Slug - (from left) Sophia Leong, Joseph Lim and Sharon Foong.
When asked why the diner was given a rather unpalatable name, Sophia replied, “Why not The Garden Slug? It is a little bit whimsical, conjures up images of sunshine and stretching of lazy limbs.” (Writer’s note: I wasn’t aware slugs had any limbs, but I digress.) “And most of all, we were hoping that people will ask us ‘Why The Garden Slug?’ and create a topic for a purposeful conversation.” More importantly, Sophia points out, the name was generic and flexible enough to allow them to expand their business into different areas in the future.
The owners believe that the diner’s unique selling preposition is the fact it’s boutique-sized and able to offer a very personalized service. “Be it telling us that you want something special that is not on the menu, creating a thematic corporate event which requires food specific to your brand identity, or helping you manage specific aspects of your new or existing F&B business,” she elaborates.
“We call it ‘service solutions from the heart’,” Sophia says, “we treat our customers the way that we want to be treated.”
“Customer satisfaction will always form the core of our business,” insists Sophia, even as she explains how The Garden Slug try to find other ways to reach out to a different set of customers. For 2010, the owners intend to fine-tune their food supply business – to be as organized, consistent and structured as possible – while retaining their quirky, bohemian feel to the diner.
Marketing Through Word of Mouth and Social Media
Their customers are primarily the residents who live in the eastern parts of Singapore, as well as adventurous foodies who’d trek all the way to the East to find them. The folks at The Garden Slug are happy – and somewhat surprised – that they’ve managed to achieve a certain amount of brand equity without having pay for traditional advertising. “We can’t afford it anyway!” laughs Sophia. “From Day 1, we decided that, no, we won’t be doing flyers, print ads etc, as we feel that these days, consumers are savvy enough to know that an advertisement will always paint a lofty picture of the brand it is trying to sell.”
“Many a times, the end product falls short of the hyped-up expectations.”
Sophia and the rest of her crew believe that nothing is more powerful than word of mouth and personal recommendations. And while food establishments in Singapore have began testing the waters where social media is concerned, its a space that The Garden Slug seems to excel at. For example, unlike some other eating places, The Garden Slug doesn’t stop diners from taking pictures – in fact they openly welcome it.
The Garden Slug didn’t consciously set out to be, as Sophia puts it, ‘active on the social media front’. “We’re not out to win the most followers,” she says. “We use things like our blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc because a lot of our friends and customers are on those platforms and it seemed like a genuinely fun way to share things and connect with people.” Its Twitter account, run mainly by Sharon, is conversational and engaging without being too overly promotional.
Its social media outreach efforts are really an extension of how they view customers as friends. “It felt natural to have a Facebook page to share little updates every now and then without being too spammy or intrusive. We don’t really like to ‘market’ to people… a lot of (them) probably find it a big turn-off.”
“At the end of the day, nothing beats meeting people in real life and being able to share or continue a conversation in person!”
Reviews on The Garden Slug have generally been positive (see the reviews on here on HungryGoWhere), and the diner’s owners try not to be fazed by the few negative comments. “Of course, not all visitors to our diner will end up being our fans, and we accept that as part and parcel of running an honest business. It all boils down to personal taste and having your own voice; we respect that.”
The team at The Garden Slug. Staff are called slugs - that's not reflective of their work pace, though!
Views on Entrepreneurship
Sophia says that they took a “somewhat calculated plunge” when they decided to start The Garden Slug, doing their math in terms of costs and risks before giving up their daily grind. “All the mathematical formulae in the world will not prepare you for some of the day-to-day challenges of running a self-funded business,” she elaborates.
“The most crucial lesson that we learnt is that there is truly no ‘quick-and-easy’ way to acquire consumer confidence and brand value. And coming from a position where we had limited marketing funds, we had to work twice as hard to win that one extra fan, and adopt more creative approaches in engaging our customers.”
“Entrepreneurs need to know that you truly need to be walking and talking ambassadors of your own brand, and work twice as hard as any of your hires.”
Legal River's Terms of Service Generator helps generate a sample Terms of Service for your website's use.
Legal services matchmaking startup Legal River, in partnership with DC-based law firm General Counsel PC, has launched a website Terms of Service Generator and a Privacy Policy Generator designed for use by small businesses and startups at the start of their business life cycle.
Both are free-to-use.
(Editor’s note: The generators adopt U.S. laws and legal terms and hence are specific for use in the U.S. Business laws differ from country to country, and startups based outside of the U.S are advised to seek proper legal counsel applicable to your country.)
The Founder Institute basically conducts a four-month training program for both new and seasoned entrepreneurs of high-tech companies, with weekly sessions guided by well-known CEOs. Program participants can look towards fund-raising opportunities at fair market value, and incubation in a startup environment where equity is shared among all participants in the companies formed.
Already, mentors confirmed for the Spring 2010 semesters include Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and uWink, Aaron Patzer, founder and CEO of Mint.com, Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, Philip Kaplan, co-founder of Blippy, founder of Adbrite and F’d Company, and Ross Levinsohn, founder of Fuse Capital and former President of Fox Interactive, amongst others.
“We have discovered a formula to help passionate founders create meaningful and enduring companies in different markets around the world,” says Adeo Ressi, CEO of TheFunded.com and the Founder Institute. “We leverage leading social science methods to identify top talent, and then we offer an intense startup curriculum focused on teamwork and guidance from leading local and global CEOs. Our unique approach has allowed the Institute to scale almost ten times larger than comparable incubators or accelerators.” He expects to graduate some 500 startup companies worldwide this year.
Anyone starting a technology company in Singapore is invited to apply here. The deadline for early admissions is February 15th, with all applications due by February 28th, 2010.
Mouli Cohen, founder of Voltage Capital, a venture fund specializing in creating high-value global partnerships in technology and biotechnology. His start-ups have generated well over US$3 billion in shareholder value.
Mouli Cohen is a successful entrepreneur who has founded and developed successful ventures in the biotechnology, high technology, digital media and entertainment sectors. Mouli has balanced his success in business with philanthropic activities, especially in healthcare for children. Over the years he has supported children’s charities, food programs, medical research, and the arts as well as education projects both in the US and abroad.
I ask the founder of Voltage Capital his thoughts on success, entrepreneurship, investment philosophies, and philanthropy.
1. So, tell us a little about yourself.
Even as a young person, I always had a very entrepreneurial mindset. I always knew that I wanted to create new concepts and new things that would help improve the way people did and thought about things. I’ve always had a very strict work ethic.
2. What are the key traits you believe that a person should possess to be able to succeed as an entrepreneur?
Never give up, and always come back. Learn from your mistakes. Be hungry – if you’re not, there will always be someone else there to eat your lunch. Without passion you have nothing. Passion is the key to succeeding in all that a person does and strives to do.
3. What are your key guiding principles in choosing a startup to invest in? Any personal philosophies?
The guiding principles around any business venture that I have chosen to be involved in have always been based around the following:
i. People – Staffing your business with people of the upmost integrity is critical to the success of any company. Without good people, you have nothing.
ii. Business Model – Ultimately it has to be a good concept.
Philosophies – loving what you do and who you do it with. Never looking at work as work. Always thinking like a key stakeholder, regardless of a person’s place in the company.
4. Share with us on your philanthropic works. Why did you decide on this?
In my opinion, philanthropy is not a choice – it is something that is mandatory. You can give back to your community in a variety of ways – not just through money. There needs to be a balance in every person’s life – in what we do, how we choose to live, and what we choose to give to others. I very much believe that philanthropy is reciprocal – when you are blessed with a lot, your responsibility to give should also be great.
5. As both an entrepreneur as well as an investor, what is your stand on getting entrepreneurs to pay to pitch to investors?
I don’t believe that anyone should ever have to “pay” to pitch their idea to anyone. I would never do this, nor would I encourage others to. If you really believe in your product, you will inevitably find a way to promote it to investors.
6. Any words of wisdom to share with aspiring or budding entrepreneurs?
Every day is a new tomorrow, a new game. Take it day by day. We live in a world which is full of untapped opportunity; take full advantage of your potential. Stretch your limits – always persevere.
Under the program, Guardian will grant a total of US$30,000 to 15 female teen business owners who demonstrate exceptional entrepreneurship and community service. The money can be used to further entrepreneurial pursuits or saved for college. “The Girls Going Places program inspires girls to see the potential of their entrepreneurial dreams by providing financial rewards and recognition for their business and community achievements, “ said Kathy Readinger, Guardian’s national manager of the program. “The Girls Going Places program is one of the many ways Guardian supports and recognizes women-owned businesses.”
Submissions will be accepted through February 26, 2010. Teachers, parents, and community members can nominate accomplished young female entrepreneurs between the ages of 12 and 18. Adults can nominate girls by submitting a 750-word essay endorsing accomplished young female entrepreneurs. Nominees must also write a 250-word personal statement on entrepreneurship, leadership, financial independence, or giving back to the community.
You can find out additional information about the program and nomination forms for the competition at the official website.
