Entries Tagged 'Micropreneurship' ↓

A good chunk of chapter 6 from my startup book went live on the interwebs this morning as a guest post on Jason Cohen’s popular startup blog A Smart Bear. I edited the chapter for length and tone, but the five key points are intact:

1. Why should a startup use a virtual assistant (VA)?
2. The two points in the startup process when a VA is most helpful
3. Case studies of my use of VAs
4. The steps for finding, evaluating and vetting a VA
5. The best places to find a VA

Read the full article here.

Photo by John McNab

Popular musicians possess entrepreneurial qualities, most often the passion and drive we see in successful startup entrepreneurs.

What we don’t often think about is that although there’s luck involved in becoming a “rock star,” there are deliberate decisions a musician makes early in a career that will impact their level of success months or years later.

And so it is with starting a company.

While this article is meant as a break from the normal seriousness of this blog, I honestly believe that we can learn much from a group of founders who sold hundreds of millions (some say 1 billion) units.

Here are four lessons we can learn from the Beatles’ startup career.

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Don’t know if you’ve seen this crazy deal at appSumo, but it’s essentially $528 in website analytics and optimization services for $25. It includes:

• 3 Months of Performable Starter Service
• Lifetime Crazy Egg membership (track 1000 visitors per month)
• 3 Months of Clicky Pro web analytics
• 3 Months of Visual Website Optimizer
• 1 user test + 50% off the next 5 tests at UserTesting

I’ll be picking one up for myself this week.

The following is a guest article by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch.

Not too long ago it seemed like every product I knew was offering some sort of free plan. The strategy was brilliant: get loads of people using your product and eventually turn them into paying customers. Everywhere I looked there were stories of people making money hand over fist with this approach.

When 37signals talked about giving something away for free as a marketing strategy, it made a lot of sense to me:

“For us, Writeboard and Ta-da list are completely free apps that we use to get people on the path to using our other products. Also, we always offer some sort of free version of all our apps.

We want people to experience the product, the interface, the usefulness of what we’ve built. Once they’re hooked, they’re much more likely to upgrade to one of the paying plans (which allow more projects or pages and gives people access to additional features like file uploading and ssl data encryption).”

So when I launched Bidsketch — a SaaS based proposal application for designers — offering a free plan was a no-brainer in my book. Out of all the important decisions I spent time mulling over before my launch, I gave this one the least thought.

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When I originally published Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup, my intention was to follow up the PDF and paperback versions with Kindle, iBook and ePub versions. That plan went by the wayside once I discovered there was no automated way to go from a Word doc to these formats.

After contacting a half-dozen ebook conversion firms I found a company that turned the Kindle and ePub versions around in two days, although the Kindle version required three rounds of QA over the course of 10 days before it was ready to be published. So 12 days and a few hundred dollars later I now have the necessary hand-coded files.

Kindle, Here I Come
So as of this morning, Start Small, Stay Small is now available in Kindle format from the Amazon website, and PDF & ePub format from the startup book website.

If you’ve already purchased the book in PDF you should have received an email with a link to download the ePub version. If you haven’t, email me.

The paperback version is also available from both startup book and Amazon, but buy it from startup book (you can pay through Amazon or PayPal) since Amazon takes more than half the revenue off the top. The economics of book publishing are pretty crazy when not selling direct to the consumer.

Speaking of that, the Kindle commission is 35% of the purchase price. That’s what Amazon pays me. Ouch! As soon as you price your book above $9.99 your commission plummets from 70% to 35% of the retail price. Now I understand why the big book publishers were having such a fit about Amazon essentially forcing them into this pricing bracket.

Bye Bye iBook
At this point it does not look like the iBook version will come to fruition.

For one, you need a Mac to publish a book to the iTunes store.

For two, the handful of iPad owners I’ve talked to indicated they use the Kindle app to read books on their iPad. Apparently, the iBook app isn’t that great and the iBook selection is small. Go figure.

You’re a startup founder, whether actual or aspiring. You’re a constant learner; a student of life. Also a student of reading.

You own a wall of books, or perhaps a Kindle or iPad bulging at the edge of its hard disk with non-fiction you’ve earmarked for future reading. Business books are a founder’s learning tool. A way to stand on the shoulders of giants.

So let me tell you why you should stop reading them.

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Micropreneur Academy member Ruben Gamez launched Bidsketch five months after joining the Academy, and has experienced quite a bit of success with this niche application for designers.

I’m subscribed to his mailing list, and recently received an email update about a new version of the app; the kind of email I would typically delete without thinking.

But three things about this email drew me in until I found myself reading the entire email and clicking the link contained within. So I am presenting them here as tips for getting people to read your email newsletter.

Tip #1: Use a Custom Design
I’m typically a fan of text-only newsletter email due to the challenge of getting things to display correctly in email clients. But the design of this email is branded, yet simple. It immediately caught my eye as something I wanted to at least take a peek at.

Tip #2: Use Bullets
This email is made up almost entirely of bullets. This makes it very skimmable, and if you want to find out more information you can click through to the blog. The email is also super short so it’s hard not to read the entire thing.

Tip #3: Be Funny
The writing is clever without trying too hard. It draws you in, and not only makes you want to read more, but puts a human face on the company. The company happens to be run by a human, so this is a good thing.

(Bonus) Tip #4: Personal Reply-To Email
When I replied to the email to tell Ruben what I liked about the email, the reply-to address appeared as “ruben@bidsketch.com.” Not “noreply@bidsketch.com” or “support@bidsketch.com.” Another nice way to put a human face on your company.

My wife had our new baby 7 days ago, and I am currently on leave from work. Except I work from home so I’m not sure I can really call it “leave.” But you get the idea.

My time off consisted of 3 days completely disconnected, and then about 30 minutes each day of email and maintenance (easy to do when everyone’s asleep). Lucky for me there aren’t any tasks that I’m required to do in a given time-frame. This is the time independence I’ve talked about in the past, and the beauty of being a Micropreneur instead of a consultant. No clients busting my chops.

I’ve viewed this time off as a test of the Micropreneur approach; to see if I could really pull back from work and let things run on auto-pilot. This is helpful to do periodically, as it always exposes potential improvements I can make to my processes.

Discovery #1
I really don’t need an email notification every time I make a sale. Although it gives me a good feeling to get a “you’ve got cash!” email during my normal workday, my apps make enough individual sales that these emails really pile up.

I make a car payment to PayPal every month in commissions…that’s a lot of individual sales that I’m getting notified about, and a lot of emails I’m deleting. Waste…of…time.

Discovery #2
My income has not been impacted in the least. It’s only been a week, but if I were consulting I would be several thousand dollars down by now. A nice testament to having income tied to products instead of hours worked.

After a couple years of Micropreneurship, it’s still difficult to accept that there are enough systems in place that I’m able to make money without working…at least for a period of time.

Discovery #3
Not a single email has been do-or-die for any of my businesses. I’m confident I could completely walk away from email cold-turkey without giving notice, for two weeks. I’d just have a pile of email to sort through when I returned. I’ve also realized that I could run at this “30 minutes per day” pace for a month pretty easily. Maybe 6 weeks.

If I adjusted my current processes and outsourced a few more things (see below) I think I could pull off between one and two months at this pace (three feels like it would be pushing it). No need to do that now, but it may be something I attempt in a couple years once my kids are older and we take a (currently theoretical) trip to Europe.

Discovery #4
I’ve made the painful and extremely helpful discovery that over the past six months since I last ran this test, that I’m handling a lot of emails that I should be outsourcing to my VAs. When you only have 30 minutes a day to take care of everything on your plate, it becomes apparent right away what you should not be spending your time on.

Within 48 hours of this experiment I realized that all the “little” email support tasks I’m handling need to be outsourced. I have a VA who can handle these emails better than I can. They’ve got to go.

Rest assured they will be off my plate within two weeks.

Photo by mrphancy

I recently started listening to the E-mything Your Business Podcast which is essentially a nine-episode commercial for a book called Built to Sell: Turn Your Business Into One You Can Sell. But it’s not a bad commercial; it has interesting information about the factors that can substantially increase the value of a business.

This ties in with something I’ve said before:

Build your business to sell, even if you have no plans to.

This is because the factors that make a business attractive to potential acquirers are the same ones that make your business a better business to own: efficiency, automation, repeatable, documented, scalable, etc…

Notice I’m not talking about building your business “to flip.” Flipping implies building a shoddy company that maximizes short-term profit.

Instead, we’re talking about building your startup to maximize its value based on factors the market values, since these factors will make it a better company to own in the both the short- and long-term.

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After much toil, my book Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup is now available in paperback and PDF format at StartupBook.net.

A few reviews so far:

“Congrats @robwalling for “shipping” – I’ve started reading it, it’s GREAT stuff! ”
- Peldi, twitter.com/balsamiq

“[I] booked some time this afternoon and pretty much devoured it!  A great read, and I think you nailed exactly the right balance between big picture strategy and very specific and actionable tasks or resources.”
- Mark Roseman, www.markroseman.com

“@robwalling I’ve read only the first chapter and I think it’s the best piece I’ve read ”
- Akash Manohar, twitter.com/akashmanohar

“Started reading @robwalling’s book tonight. Got about 25 pages in, and I can already tell I’m going to like it.”
- Joel, Ross twitter.com/RossCode

“…an awesome combination of big-picture ideas with tools and tactics to make it happen.”
- Harry Hollander, Moraware Software

If you’re interested, it’s available in paperback and PDF format at StartupBook.net.