Archive for November 2005
Clarifications on Venture Capital
Dave Taylor gives a few simple clarifications on Venture Capital and provides some good links to read more about it: A common scenario, however, is for a VC to buy 20% of a company, where that might look like this: • pre-money company valuation: $5 million • VC investment: $1 million • post-money company valuation: [...]
This week’s Brain Brew Radio episode is online: This week on School Time, Dr. Jeffrey Stamp explains why keep is simple stupid really works… Craig with Naturally Elegant in Atlanta, Georgia seeks out Doug and Dave’s advice on how he can brand his mineral mud from India… Doug and David talk to Tom of Cottingham’s [...]
Flip Your House Without Losing Your Shirt
Bankrate.com: Bolstered by the many home renovation shows that dot the TV landscape, the recent housing boom has spawned a lot of interest in making money, by renovating a fixer-upper and selling it at a higher price. It seems like a no-brainer, but is flipping a house a sure-fire path to riches? “It’s not that [...]
Everybody seems to have their own definition of exactly what Web 2.0 is. According to Wikipedia, “the phrase currently refers to one or more of the below”: a transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming a computing platform serving web applications to end users a social phenomenon [...]
I Believe in Network Marketing
I believe in some basic concepts behind Network Marketing: 1. The opportunity to own and operate your own business with very little start up costs. 2. The opportunity to help others start their own business. 3. The opportunity to build a business in your spare time outside of your regular job or traditional business. Most [...]
This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Financial Fruition.
Evan Williams of Odeo, Inc. has posted his Ten Rules for Web Startups: Be Narrow Be Different Be Casual Be Picky By User-Centric Be Self-Centered Be Greedy Be Tiny Be Agile Be Balanced Read about them…
Being First Is Often Enough For The Media
Duct Tape Marketing: Business owners always want to know what they should pitch to media folks to generate a story. Guess what, it’s not your 5th anniversary, unless you are the first business of its kind to actually last five years. The media loves firsts and so does the market. First to market is news! [...]
The third Carnival of Marketing is being hosted at Pete Caputa’s pc4media.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Gill Blog.
Buying A New Car This Holiday Season?
My Audi A4 3.0 car lease expires in a few months. I’m looking around for what I want to get spring 2006. So many people have had terrible car buying experiences, but in reality it’s very easy! My tips below should help new car purchases—I’ve tried my best to keep it very simple. 1. #1 [...]
Noah Kagen of OkDork.com is starting off the holidays by giving out a $500 scholorship to the best business idea sent to him. You can see the details at his site.
Gifts That are Better Than Money
Free Money Finance has come out with their list of suggested Black Friday gifts: Emigrant Direct has a 4.0% yield — a great place to store your emergency cash. Open up an account for yourself or someone you love. You Need a Budget is a powerful, easy-to-use budgeting system that offers $65 in free offers [...]
While Dane’s off being a daddy, I’ll be hanging around to make sure everything keeps on chuggin’ in his absence. Along with me, the guest posters will be: Chuck Huckaby Ty Tribble David Xue Dan Portnoy Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to forward them my way.
The Right Network Marketing Company
Ty Tribble: The Direct Selling industry has nearly doubled in the U.S. over the last 10 years and Network Marketing is one of the least expensive ways to start your own home based business. Here is a short list of questions that may help you evaluate a Network Marketing company. 1. Would you buy the [...]
Jeff Cornwall has the full text of the original Thanksgiving proclamation: Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that [...]
How to Raise Money for Your Business
Entrepreneur.com: To help you get your head around the different ways you can finance the growth of your business, we’ve compiled mini-guides that cover the basic information on 19 different financing sources. Read through our guides to learn the basics, and then start hunting! Start-Up Financing Equipment Leasing Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) Microloans Asset-Based [...]
Online Retailers Gear Up For Busy ‘Black Monday’
Startup Journal: This coming Friday is one of the year’s biggest days for shoppers and retailers. But for many, the Web has made the following Monday just as crucial. With the rapid expansion of the Internet, the Monday after Thanksgiving has grown to be the all-important kickoff of the online holiday shopping season. On that [...]
Seth Godin: Pricing is a very effective signaling device, no doubt about it. People (and businesses) assume that good stuff is worth more. People pay for stuff on eBay for stuff based on the velocity of the auction instead of the innate value of the item. Real estate brokers warn you that a house that [...]
This week’s Carnival of Marketing is up on About.
Carnival of Personal Finance #23
This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Frugal For Life.
A man goes to his bank manager and says “I’d like to start a small business, how do I go about it?” The bank manager leans back and clasps his hands together on his gut and replies “Buy a big one and wait.” via Blue Mau Mau.
Role Reversal Serves Ex-Owner and Employee
Startup Journal: After 20 years of remodeling homes on picturesque Whidbey Island, Wash., Rick Newall closed his small contracting business to move back to Seattle. His wife wanted to be closer to family, and Mr. Newall, now entering his 50s, was ready for a change. “I needed to do something different,” he says. “I was [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Brian Gongol’s Gongol.com.
How To NOT Write A Business Plan
David Cowan: It’s always a good idea to put down on paper your plans for the business, so that your team can build consensus around objectives and metrics. Make it as thick and wordy as you like (though show some restraint–over-modeling the future only wastes your time). I’m sure that Brad Feld’s upcoming series on [...]
What’s Your Business Really Worth?
Inc.: But it’s not just the fast growers who think their companies are worth more than they really are. Consider a deal that was brought to my attention a few months ago by my partners in the document destruction business, Bob and Trace Feinstein. They’d heard about a smaller company that was looking to be [...]
Kauffman eVenturing: After about a year in the making, our site Kauffman eVenturing is ready for its public coming out party! The site is designed for busy entrepreneurs, and is well on its way to being packed with relevant, practical and timely information on how to manage and expand your business. We will offer original [...]
Six Disciplines’ CEO on Small Business Trends Radio
Be Excellent: Gary Harpst, Founder and CEO of Six Disciplines Corporation, was interviewed today by Anita Campbell, host of Small Business Trends Radio, as heard on VoiceAmerica Internet Radio. Harpst, himself a successful entrepreneur (having been CEO and founder of Solomon Software,) discusses what small businesses need to do to build organizations that learn, lead [...]
eBay Founder’s Bid To Aid Small Entrepreneurs
Starup Journal: Ebay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pamela, have given $100 million in eBay stock to Tufts University in suburban Boston to create a fund that will invest in microfinance, the practice of loaning small sums to people who are too poor to qualify for traditional lending. The university says it will [...]
This week’s Brain Brew Radio episode is online: This week on School Time, Dr. Jeffrey explains how simply writing down what is in your mind will transform cluttered thoughts into creative ideas… Lawrence with Sample Saint in Cincinnati, Ohio finds out from Doug and Dave how he can creatively market his company at almost no [...]
Network Marketing Without the Networking
Ty Tribble: It’s called Network Marketing… yet the sad truth is that most Network Marketers do neither.
How Much is My Blog Worth Now?
Boy, what a difference a month, a million extra visitors and over ten thousand new links make: On October 10th, when I launched the How Much is Your Blog Worth service my weblog was worth* $125,327.88. Today, it’s over $5 million! Not to toot my own horn, but I’d call my little viral marketing experiment [...]
Ellen Goodman: Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can [...]
Entrepreneurs Have A Better State of Mind
Cristian Dorobantescu: Looking back to this year I can say that having a running business have changed a lot my life. Things are easier to see, and having opportunities to think about all the time makes the future bight. Sometimes I’m not very sure what the future will be like, or how I will manage [...]
AOL Small Business Launches Season Two of ‘The Startup’ Online
AOL: With any new small business comes a hefty dose of headaches and hassles – and AOL Small Business is ready to share them all during “The Startup 2″ online reality series. Now in its second year and available on the Web, the Internet series highlights real companies as they weather the startup and survival [...]
Your Pet Product Could Be Worth $40,000
From the press release: Always thinking of great ideas for your pets? PetSafe challenges the public to enter innovative, quirky, fun or helpful pet ideas between October 1st and November 30th, 2005, on www.ideafetch.com, for the chance to win $40,000 along with having their idea developed into product and sold at PETCO stores nationwide. It’s [...]
How to Find a Manufacturer’s Rep
AOL Black Voices: You have just entered the market with a great new product to offer. But how do you get it into the hands of the people who want and need it? That all depends on the kind of sales entity you intend to use. In essence, you have three choices: hire an in-house [...]
Venture Voice: Derek Sivers of CD Baby
This week on Venture Voice: Many would-be tech titans dream day and night about how their hot new idea will change the world. Derek Sivers just wanted to have his independent band’s CDs sold over the Web. No one would do it, so he built his own music store. CD Baby now generates $25 million [...]
Entrepreneur: Benesh is part of an explosion in pet businesses that is inspiring many new entrepreneurs to start their own ventures offering a product or service for Rover, Fluffy or almost any kind of animal you can think of. Since many animal businesses can easily be launched at home with little capital, entrepreneurs are lining [...]
Scott Heiferman: The most attention-worthy advertising that I see all year? This guy was at a busy intersection in San Jose, holding a sign for a burrito joint, wearing headphones, and dancing his ass off. Dancing like a madman. With a big smile on his face. Virtually impossible to not look at him and smile [...]
Solo Tees Interview with Dan Sherman
SoloTees, our t-shirt company, has interviewed the idea man Dan Sherman. As always, Dan has a ton of great insights and ideas: Solo: What is your motivation for being an Entrepreneur? Dan Sherman: I’m a big believer in ownership of your livelihood. If you’re working for a paycheck, in most cases, you don’t own your [...]
Paul Graham: In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They’re already stuck with a seller’s market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven’t invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it’s just [...]
Ireland: How Do I Turn My Brand Into A Franchise?
Sunday Times: Watching a business grow rapidly into a recognised brand is every entrepreneur’s dream. Franchising is a popular route to turning that vision into reality. That’s what three former IT entrepreneurs did with the wine shop they launched in Limerick (Ireland) five years ago. Having sold their previous venture, a technology firm, to an [...]
BusinessTown: For any new business, you should predict what gross sales volume level you will have to achieve before you reach the break-even point and then, of course, build to make a profit. For early-stage businesses, you should be able to assess your early prediction and determine how accurate they were, and monitor whether you [...]
Business Opportunities Weblog Turns Four
Four years ago yesterday I made the first post to the Business Opportunities Weblog. Today, this weblog contains 4260 posts and the network it spawned now consists of six blogs, including: Ask, Brazil, Español, Franchise, MLM, and Work At Home. If you think the site’s name is long now, when I started the four years [...]
On Continuous Innovation And Disposable Business Ideas
Fortune Magazine’s Business Innovation Blog has posted a Q and A with me on small business innovation: Q: How can a company unlock its “innovation DNA”? Dane: Ideas have always been cheap, because it’s how you execute that matters. Now it’s finally possible to try what I call the disposable business idea: Have an employee [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is at Jeff Cornwall’s The Entrepreneurial Mind.
The very first Carnival of Marketing is up at Noah Kagan’s Okdork.com. Next week’s carnival will be at SoloTees.
Is Your Business Ready To Franchise?
Entrepreneur: How would a smaller, lesser-known concept know if they should franchise? It depends on the person’s experience, but for us, what a franchisor brings to the table is his experience. One of the things a franchisee is buying, in a very soft way, is that the franchisor has made mistakes and survived it. The [...]
→ seekerscoffeehouse.com Seekers® is a faith-based business opportunity that offers a place for specialty coffee, quick-serve food, merchandising, live entertainment and a wholesome, family friendly environment. The Seekers® Coffee Houses model blends a coffee house, a café, a meeting place, and a music event venue together into an inviting and upscale space. The original coffee [...]
