$100 startup week 5

This week, I read the ninth and tenth chapters of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. The ninth chapter was about hustling and self promotion. Hustling was defined as a combination of a charlatan and a martyr where a charlatan is all talk with nothing to back up their claims and a martyr had plenty of work to talk about but chooses not to. Hustling is an alternative form of advertisements that uses friends and family spreading the word.

I feel like hustling will always be a better way to get your companies name out there than paying for advertisements. When someone hustles, they are having someone that the potential customer knows and probably trusts endorsing the product. In advertisements, it seems that companies struggle incorporating both something that will catch the potential customers attention and also make them want to buy the product. Also, advertisements cost money while hustling is free so for a small start up, it makes no sense to spend any of their little funds on advertising when they could spread the word through hustling. I always get confused when I hear how much money companies spend on Super Bowl ads. Those commercials never make me want to buy the product. Also, the companies that run ads during the Super Bowl are usually so famous that they don’t need any more publicity. I feel like these companies are losing a lot of money with these advertisements and I don’t understand why they continue to buy air time year after year.

$100 startup week 4

This week, I read the seventh and eighth chapters of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. The seventh chapter was about how to make it so your offer could not be refused. One of the tips for doing this is that sometimes there is a difference between what the customer thinks they want and what they actually want. When I first read this I was very confused but then he explained it with an example; he said how almost everyone complains about not having enough space in their airplane seat but then when the airline offers a few extra inches for a few more dollars nobody wants the seat with more space. In this scenario, the customer thinks they want more room but they actually want the cheapest possible flight. Guillebeau said that an entrepreneur should figure out the difference between what the customer says they want and what they actually want but I feel like this would be very difficult without actually testing to see what the customer wants. In a previous chapter he said that you could just ask the customer what they want, but in this situation, the customer would only say what they think they want.

Chapter eight was all about having a big opening. Guillebeau said that a good opening is similar to the release of big movies; there should be lots of people that know about and are excited about your product when it first gets released. At first I thought that the movie analogy was odd but then as I thought about it more, it started to make more sense. He chose to use the movie analogy because movies are coming out pretty much every week and almost all movies come out in the same fashion which is helpful to the reader but I still don’t totally see how a small business could open in a similar fashion to a big blockbuster movie.

The $100 Startup Week 3

This week, I read the fifth and sixth chapters of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. The fifth chapter was about how to find your customer base and reaching out to certain demographics. Guillebeau listed a few strategies for how to make sure that a specific group of people will be attracted to your product/service; the first one was to make sure that you latch on to a popular passion. The other way was to sell what people buy which included asking people what they buy. I thought that the second way was interesting because I feel most businesses need to know that people would buy the product or service before they start the business. Guillebeau said that entrepreneurs should ask their customers what they want in a survey. This confuses me because I don’t understand how someone would have customers without having a product that they knew people would buy.

Another thing that confused me in this chapter was when Guillebeau wrote that ‘the customer is often wrong’ which opposes the well known statement that ‘the customer is always right’. He explained this with an example: There was a guy selling something online and there were many positive responses and one negative response where the customer asked for a refund. He thought it wasn’t worth it to have a conversation with the disappointed customer when there were plenty of satisfied customers that he had to attend to so he gave the refund and kept working. While I agree in this situation, that that specific customer might have been wrong, it seems like it would have been worth it to see why the customer was disappointed and also I don’t think that this example would justify the statement ‘the customer is often wrong’ because it was only one wrong customer out of dozens of customers.

$100 startup week 2

This week, I read the third and fourth chapters of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. The third chapter was all about taking someone’s interest and turning it into a business by finding a way to sell their knowledge on the subject. I read about Benny who loved learning new languages. He would travel to countries for a few months at a time which forced him to learn the language. He did this eight times and then he realized that he now knew the best way to learn new languages so he started teaching people new languages. Unfortunately, not everyone’s passions can be turned into businesses; Benny’s company only worked because the knowledge from his passion was desired by many people. There was a list of questions that were supposed to help the reader decide if they should turn their passion into a business. The question that I thought would be the most difficult to answer was “Are there enough people that would be willing to pay for your product or service”. If your product is unique (which it should be according to this book), I feel that you won’t know if people will  be willing to buy your product or service until you try selling it.

The fourth chapter was all about the roaming entrepreneur. The idea of a roaming entrepreneur is fairly new because it is all about having your business being online so all you would need is a laptop, internet and a product that is digital. This allows entrepreneurs to work from anywhere at anytime because there isn’t any person to person interaction. I feel like this chapter was less useful than previous chapters because this chapter is only applicable to people that start a specific type of business while the other chapters were useful to all entrepreneurs. I feel like you shouldn’t try to come up with a product or service that would make you a roaming entrepreneur; I think you should come up with a product or service first and then see if you could make it a mobile business.

$100 Start-up week 1

This week, I started The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau by reading the first two chapters. The first chapter was all about how and why to start your own business. One of the main reasons mentioned was that you have a passion for whatever business that you are getting involved in. I thought this was interesting because I always assumed it was a bonus if you loved your work and it was much more important to have a viable business. After reading this I thought about it more and it started to make sense. When someone quits their job to work on a startup, they will be scraping by and I assume it would be hard for them to motivate themselves to stay in the business; but if it is their dream, they won’t stop working until they have achieved their goal. Another thing stated in this chapter is that “to start a business, you need three things: a product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid”. This seems very important while considering to start a business.

The second chapter was all about giving the customer what they want. A main point in this chapter was that one should give the customer something that helps them; this could range from something that physically helps them with their work or something that helps them emotionally or mentally. I think that while considering to start a business, it is important to focus on something that you can add or take away that would improve the customer’s life. I feel like this is usually forgotten and people with good, but not helpful, ideas try to start businesses that fail.

In Class C4E Week 5

This past week my group’s main focus was on selling water bottles. Going into this week, we had about $20 of sales; we needed to sell $160 of water bottles to break even so we had a lot of work to do. Our plan was to sell them to Alex the Trainer and the School Store wholesale but they didn’t respond. When we tried to sell to people individually it rarely worked. Peter and Jessica went to a basketball game on Tuesday to try to sell bottles there but nobody bought one. It looked like we wouldn’t break even. Jessica had booked a table to sell at lunch on Thursday a few weeks ago. I didn’t think it would work but it was our last shot so Noah, Nitzan and I sold during first and second lunch. During first lunch our bottles weren’t really selling so in between the two lunches, we lowered our prices from $7 to $5. It was those two dollars that made a big difference. I think we sold about 20 bottles during second lunch alone which allowed us to barely break even.

Another thing that my group worked on this week was the presentation of our storefront proposition. We did a practice presentation on Thursday in front of Mr. Fischer in the BATV theater. I thought it went fairly well considering the fact that we didn’t have time to revise the slides or clarify who was presenting which slides. We did have a few mistakes on our slide but we fixed them. The only thing left for us to do is to rehearse as much as possible between now and next Thursday so we can impress the banker and get the $50,000 to start ImagiNation. This project is a culmination of all of our work this quarter so I hope it goes well.

Tipping Point Week 5

This past week, I finished The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This reading was all about how the context of the situation is very important in order for a trend to tip. One example he references is crime rates in New York City. Crime in New York City was at an all time high during the 1980’s with the about 2,000 murders a year and about 600,000 felonies but in during the 1990’s the murders per year was one third of what it was during the 1980’s and the number of felonies per year were cut in half. Gladwell believes this sudden shift in crime rates was due to the Broken Window Theory. The Broken Window Theory states that if a window is broken, people will see it and think that nobody cares or is in charge. This leads to more broken windows. This basically means that the little things can have a big impact. In the late 1980’s, there was a new person in charge of the New York Transit Authority. While the subway had many problems, such as bad tracks which caused trains to derail frequently, he decided to spend a majority of their resources on getting rid of all the graffiti on trains. This was a large project since every train was covered in graffiti. He thought that “The Graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system”. Subsequently, the crime rates on the train decreased significantly.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I have always found statistics fascinating and I thought it was very interesting how Gladwell narrowed what determines if a trend will tip into three simple theories; The Law of Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context. I definitely plan on recommending this book because these theories would be very helpful to entrepreneurs and other people in business .