Business Tips From 7 Highly Successful Entrepreneurs 05-23

Business Tips From 7 Highly Successful Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. Running a business can be challenging, and it takes hard work and perseverance to achieve a high level of success. Whether you're already in business, or looking to start a business, it pays to heed the advice of others who have walked in your shoes. I asked a few self-made millionaire entrepreneurs to share their advice for being successful in business. Here's what they had to say:

Even when you have everything to lose, act like you don'

I used to have nothing to lose, but now that I have a lot to lose, I have a whole new perspective on this. Even after you've made it to the top, you still have to act like you have nothing to lose. And beware a man who has a great deal to lose, but acts like he doesn't. Regardless of the amount of money a person has or the size of their company, or the amount of wealth they have—those people that take action and risk without the fear of failure are the ones that will ultimately take market share.

Ryan Blair is the CEO and Co-founder of ViSalus. He is a former gang member turned serial entrepreneur multimillionaire. [Photo Credit: Sally Peterson]

Work toward being significant

If you want to have success, you can't make success your goal. The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant—and the success will naturally follow. If you do work that you love, and work that fulfills you, the rest will come. I truly believe that the reason I've been able to be so financially successful is because my focus has never, ever for one minute been money.

Nellie Akalp is the CEO of CorpNet, a passionate entrepreneur, small business advocate and mother of four. She has formed more than 100,000 corporations and LLCs across the U.S., building a strong passion to assist small business owners in starting, running, and protecting their small businesses the right way.

Seek and you shall find

There are thousands of clues and even direct blueprints to how to make money if you know where to look. Find a successful company that is creating products or services that you are interested in and figure out HOW they are doing it. I use a process called reverse engineering to isolate two important factors: Their traffic and monetization. Where are they getting people to see their products? How are they converting them into buyers? If you can answer these two questions with a systematic approach, you can start to build a business around it immediately.

Trey Smith is the founder of Kayabit Games with over 11,000,000 downloads,GameAcademy.com and L-System Records. He's created three different 7-figure businesses over the last 6 years totaling over $18,000,000 in sales of his own products and services. Trey recently finished authoring a book on reverse engineering wealth.

Love what you do

1) Choose something that is in line with your own personal interest and passion, then it never seems like work. 2) Don't be afraid to fail. 3) It's critical to spend the time early on to hire the right people. If you are disciplined in finding the best and brightest people who are also team players then management is easy. 4) There is no substitute for talking directly to customers. Whether they are happy or upset about something, it feels great to connect with people who are using your products, because you immediately get a good sense for how to make it even better.

Brian Sharples co-founded HomeAway with Carl Shepherd in February 2005. Since then, he has raised nearly $405 million in private funding, completed a successful IPO in 2011 (NASDAQ: AWAY) and acquired 17 websites, to create the world's leading online marketplace of vacation rentals.

Don't let them intimidate you out of your dream

1) Work harder than everyone else—I may not be the most formally educated, the most financially set up, or even the smartest, but I will give them a run for their money when it comes to ambition and determination. It's a bit cliché, but I always remember this quote: "Always go the extra mile, there's a lot less traffic up there." 2) Every expert was a newbie at one point—don't let them intimidate you out of your dream. Learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. 3) Ethics do matter—I don't care what they say about "it's just business," the world comes full circle. Be competitive, but stay true to your beliefs and principles. It always comes back around eventually.

Amber Schaub is the Founder and CEO of Ruffle Butts.com. The company landed at #166 of the 2012 Inc. 500 list and surpassed $10 Million in total sales that year.

Focus on quality and execution

1) Hire exceptional people, make sure they feel valued and can work as a team. 2) Work to achieve synergy (energy and alignment). 3) Practice Kaizen (Japanese for "small improvement" and "better") everyday focusing on getting a little bit better with the belief that over time outcomes become significant. 4) Focus on expands and set outcomes that are bold, passionate, measurable, written and positive. 5) Worry less about growth and more about quality and execution. When you take care of your customers and exceed their expectations, growth and opportunity follow. 6) Remember that success often comes to those who get in front of the inevitable.

Brothers Chad and Troy McWhinney made themselves millionaires when they founded their own real estate investment and development company, McWhinney, in 1991 with the purchase of 440 acres of prime Colorado land. Since founding McWhinney, Chad and Troy have taken on over five million square feet of development projects throughout Colorado and beyond, partnering in the redevelopment of Denver's historic Union Station, set to re-open 100 years after its original opening in 1914.

Be a thought leader

Based on my own experience, it pays to be a thought leader in your own industry. In today's world, it is easy to publish your own information (including videos), but the traditional media outlets still carry a lot of weight. Get positive exposure and help others by sharing your expertise. By building up a following and strategic partners, good things will happen. On a side note, it pays to love what you do. Hard work and dedication can separate success stories from those that do not have their heart in it. As the old Confucius quote goes, "Find something you love to do and you will never have to work for the rest of your life."

Mike Byrnes is a national speaker, owner of Byrnes Consulting, LLC and has been published over 250 times. His firm provides consulting services to help businesses become even more successful.

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There Is No More B2B or B2C: There Is Only Human to Human (H2H) 02-04

There Is No More B2B or B2C: There Is Only Human to Human (H2H)

It used to be that marketing was segmented into two categories; business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C). This was done (I assume), to separate specialties, audiences and segments in an effort to more highly target the groups of people who ultimately would consume a brand’s message.

What it really did, however, was create an unnatural language for marketers – with words like “synergy” and “speeds and feeds” – to tell the stories of products to their buyers and partners. It’s become like one massive game of telephone, where by the time a message gets to the person actually buying the product, the things that make it special have been swallowed by marketing vernacular.

Consumers are confused. Why can’t we make it simple for them to understand what we’re selling, to share their experiences and the value they felt with others? More importantly, why is it that what we’re marketing most often does not align to actual consumer experiences?

The fact is that the lines are so far blurred now between the two marketing segments that it’s hard to differentiate between the two anymore. We all need to think like the consumers we are, putting ourselves in the mindset of the buyer instead of trying to speak such an intensely sophisticated language full of acronyms and big words, in order to sound smarter.

Marketing increasingly strives to become one-to-one, with solutions to collect and wrangle the big data about us to serve up more personalized offers and experiences. On the other hand, social has become a more public and vast medium, where the things we share skyrocket quickly to a “one-to-many” experience. The dichotomy between marketing and social has actually flipped… and it’s out of balance. Social and marketing need to work together to personalize individual conversations, as well as deliver shared global experiences that crowds of common values can benefit from. This is what our social and digital mediums have gifted us, and how humans interact and feel more compelled take action.

So, this is how I see it:
Businesses do not have emotion. People do.
People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
People want to feel something.
People want to be included.
People want to understand.

But people are also humans, and with that comes mistakes. Missteps. Failures. As humans, it’s in our nature to say the wrong thing, get embarrassed, and not realize the consequences of our actions. The rise of social media has given a digital platform to the dark side of anonymity, both as individuals and as crowds. I say it’s time to lay down the virtual pitchforks and torches and bring this behavior back into balance. The delightful side of humanity holds with it empathy, understanding, and forgiveness, and when remembered in our communication, it ties us together as a common group.

Communication shouldn’t be complicated. It should just be genuine and simple, with the humility and understanding that we’re all multi-dimensional humans, everyone of which has spent time in both the dark and delightful parts of life.

That’s human to human. That is #H2H.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Human beings are innately complex yet strive for simplicity. Our challenge as humans is to find, understand and explain the complex in its most simplistic form. This means you, marketers. Find the commonality in our humanity, and speak the language we’ve all been waiting for.

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How much does it cost to build the world’s hottest startups? 12-08

How much does it cost to build the world’s hottest startups?

The answer may surprise you !!!!

Could $100,000 and the right developer skillsmake you an overnight billionaire? How much does it really take to build a product like Twitter or Instagram? With mobile development agencies and product incubators on the rise and more corporate “labs” spinning out each day, there’s no shortage of talent to help you build the next great Web or mobile app.

We interviewed the heads of the top Web and mobile development companies, incubators, agencies and labs to understand what it takes to design and develop the most successful apps of our generation. Here are their breakdowns of the costs and time investments to create 10 of the world’s hottest startups.

1) Twitter

Henrik Werdelin, the Managing Partner ofPrehype, a venture development firm based in New York City that has helped build companies like Tradable, Barkbox, FancyHands, Basno andPath, says recreating Twitter isn’t necessarily difficult, but the layered features will take time to get right.

“The short answer is that it will take 10 hours,” answers Werdelin, who built a Twitter clone in a one-day Ruby on Rails course. “But a good developer could make it quicker.”

This means — assuming you already have a laptop — the cost is almost nothing to build the next Twitter. Assume $160 for a Ruby on Rails course plus free Heroku, a cloud platform as a service that allows you to instantly deploy an app.

However, Werdelin is quick to qualify his statement. “It’s not that simple,” he says. “These days, it’s less an issue of creating a technology stack and more about creating the ‘experience layer’ on top, the interface that makes a product relevant and intuitive for people to use while quickly demonstrating its value.”

Still, a product is nothing without scalability. “You can’t just build a product today, you need to build a venture. And that involves processes, structures, feedback loops, analytics and a community.”

Therefore, if you want to bring an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to market, Werdelin approximates that you’ll need$50,000 to $250,000, depending on the skill sets of the developers and designers you hire.

Werdelin equates building a successful product to building a nightclub. “You need more than a DJ, a dance floor and a few bottles of alcohol,” he says. “You have to ensure that the right people come in at the right time, and you have the right decor, ambiance and music. And of course, the cocktails.”

2) Instagram

“Instagram is slightly more complicated to build than Twitter because you need a wider range of skills to handle image-filtering for iOS and heavy backend image loads. However, you could still build an Instagram-like product inexpensively, in the $100,000 to $300,000range over a three-to-six-month period,” says Werdelin.

“But even with a billion dollars of investment on day one, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever be in a position where you might grow as quickly as Instagram.”

Founder Kevin Systrom launched Instagram with 25,000 beta users on October 6, 2010; two years later, the app continues to see massive growth, recently reporting 150 million active users. Systrom, now a multi-millionaire after selling his company to Facebook for one billion dollars, turns 30 next month.

“Luck, timing and social engineering are bigger components than most entrepreneurs care to imagine,” adds Werdelin. And the best way to be lucky is to position yourself in a place where luck may find you.”

3) Facebook

Ben Schippers is the co-founder ofHappyFunCorp, a Web development company that has built sites for TeePublic, Of A Kind,Postography and Yeah TV!.

“If you asked me to build Facebook.com for you, I would quote you $500,000 and nine months of development and design time,” says Schippers. “Others would say one million or a much bigger number. But it’s a very challenging question to answer because what it would cost to build is a small number while operational costs are enormous.”

With the existing product in mind, the $500,000 would be broken out evenly over the nine months with the first three months dedicated to design, specifically user architecture, brand and polish design. The remaining six months would be focused on bringing the design to life, while the remaining would be focused on deployment and refinement.

Taking into account the difference in storage costs in 2002, Schippers estimates that Zuckerberg was spending $3,000 per month on hosting for the first year and about $10 million per month by 2006 as the network grew exponentially in that time period.

Considering Facebook’s scale, the company is now in the business of operating power plants to operate its servers, therefore, Schippers estimates that Facebook has a $30 million dollar monthly burn rate just for hosting. Suddenly, those multi-million dollar financing rounds that startups raise don’t seem so outrageous!

4) WhatsApp

“Real-time communication support can be more difficult than other apps that provide e-commerce or news,” explains Ryan Matzner, the Director of Strategy at Fueled*, a mobile development company based in New York and London that has built apps for companies such as Elevatr, Ribbon, UrbanDaddy and JackThreads.

“To put out an MVP of WhatsApp with basic functionality — something that verifies phone numbers, perhaps with a Twilio integration — and includes a payment management system would cost about $120,000.”

Follow that up with another $120,000 round for design, additional development and branding. And then another $25,000 to fix the remaining bugs and add a level of stability and robustness to the technology stack.

In total, that means WhatsApp would cost aquarter of million dollars and take approximately nine months to build, assuming you already have a large user base to assure quality and facilitate initial momentum.

5) Uber

Artem Fishman is the Vice President of Engineering at Huge, a full-service digital agency that has recently helped build NYC.gov,Revolt.TV and the redesign of TED.com.

The Huge team took a deep dive at the numbers on CrunchBase to work up estimates for Uber. The San Francisco-based company made do with $50 million to build its product from scratch to current iteration. Then Google and Benchmark pumped $258 million more into itthis past August.

“When you’re answering the question of what it takes to build the mere technical proposition, then the answer is, surprisingly, very little,” says Fishman. “Based on its early rounds, a minimum viable product for Uber cost about $1 to $1.5 million to develop.”

It becomes increasingly difficult when you’re trying to scale your business both from engineering perspective and market penetration. For Uber, the issues are more about local regulations than scale for the time being.

6) Pinterest

At its core, Pinterest, the popular photo-sharing pinboard site, is a very simple product. According to Sam Mathews, the founder of Neverbland, a product studio responsible for brands like Slate and Conjure.io, says Pinterest could be created with a team of four in just 120 days for $120,000.

Yet, it becomes increasingly more difficult to fathom Pinterest’s cost as its user base explodes from 1 to 75 million. “It’s not about the product with something the size of Pinterest, it’s about the economy of scale,” says Mathews, who estimates that it costs Pinterest, a San Francisco-based company with 150 employees, $2 million per month in developer and storage costs to maintain its current product at scale.

7) Shopify

To build a replica of the e-commerce platformShopify, Mathews estimates it would cost between $250,000 and $300,000 with highly-skilled designers, developers and product people.

These costs don’t take into account the many relevant systems within Shopify’s business such as maintaining its API, the infrastructure and server space needed to support its 50,000+ shops and designing and developing all of the beautiful templates that help make Shopify so successful.

“Oftentimes, the biggest costs with a product like Shopify come down to the decision-making process involved with the customer and product development expenditure,” explains Mathews. “But if you were to replicate the product exactly, all those decisions are made for you. You just have to figure out the architectural structure, which would take approximately four to six months.”

Riffing off of Paul Graham’s essay How to Start a Startup, Mathews says, “To build something complex you first have to build something simple. If you want to build something complex it will never work.”

The issue with building a product like Shopify is that it required seven years of iteration and feature roll-outs based on customer feedback and experimentation. Mathews adds, “So even if you replicated the product exactly from the outside looking in, you’re not going to have as robust a background system to manage all traffic and experiences that take place on the platform.”

8) Angry Birds

Our only viral gaming app on the list, we asked DJ Saul, the CMO of the DC-basediStrategy Labs, a DC-based digital agency that has built products like Grandstand and Social Machines for clients like The Washington Redskins and Nickelodeon, for input.

“First, you have to take into account the time to develop a brand identity including the logo, color palette and typography,” says Saul. “There’s the ever-important UX, both for the app itself and especially for the game. You need experienced game designers and engineers who can develop cross platform. Then factor in building for the expansive world of Android and you have a multiplying effect on costs!”

Saul estimates that he’d want a 20-person team working more than one year to deploy Angry Birds and at an average salary of $110,000 for a total budget of $2.2 million plus overhead. Of course, if you’re hiring an agency, you’re probably looking at 1.5 times that amount in total costs.

9) Tumblr

According to Saul, Tumblr would be much easier to build than Angry Birds as you wouldn’t need game-specific designers and developers. But the testing, refining and bug squashing would remain the same.

To develop Tumblr, which is currently hosting 140 million blogs, “The biggest looming variable would be hosting,” explains Saul. “On top of costs needed from the product marketing side, I would need a 15 person cross-platform development team working on Tumblr for just under one year. So 15 people at an average salary of $110,000 and you’re looking at about$1.65 million.”

10) Vine: Defining the MVP

“While the term ‘MVP’ is thrown around quite a bit in our industry, we consider an MVP to be when the product is at a “good enough” point to be released and gain traction in the market and begin to build a user base,” explains Paul Choi, CEO of Worry Free Labs, a mobile UX, design and development firm that has developed apps like KeyMe, Sendgine, TwizGrid and CraveMate.

To create an MVP of Vine, Choi estimates that it would cost between $125,000 and $175,000with four to six months of development and design time. He says that Vine is a relatively straightforward app that leverages the iPhone’s processing power to compress video files.

“With Vine, you’re building a backend system that stores video and a front-end that is a simple viewer and an easy way to share content out to social networks,” says Thadd Selden, Worry Free’s CTO.

For those just starting out building an app for videos, be aware of the escalating storage costs involved. While tools like Amazon Web Services and Parse can help you get off the ground, paying for the storage for 40 million plus registered users quickly becomes a major hit. Worry Free’s VP of Business Development Brian Badillo estimates that storage costs for an app like Vine can cost well over $50,000 per month.

All the grains of salt

Each of these Web and mobile apps has evolved over months and some over years. Estimating costs is incredibly complicated because it comes down to hiring the “right” designer, developer or product manager who could build each app for less. There’s an enormous amount of complexity that goes into each app’s environment: not just hosting costs but office infrastructure, product management and marketing to name a few.

There’s also the enormous looming cost of distribution — one that’s hard to measure and even harder to predict. Fifteen years ago, starting a business was primarily a technology problem. Now that the barrier to entry to start a business is so low — $100K in many cases — entrepreneurs are faced with a different problem: standing out from the crowd and getting their product into the right hands at the right time. In comparison to creating effective and data-driven distribution funnels to get your app out to millions, software is cheap.

“It’s always easier to copy a proven model than to conceptualize it yourself,” says Paul Murphy, VP of Betaworks, a New York City product network. “The hard part isn’t necessarily the tech, it’s building and validating the product and adjusting it until you find a fit. We could probably build an MVP of any one of these products using public SDK’s, frameworks and a rudimentary design at a weekend hackathon. But cloning something that’s been proven is the easy part.”

And truthfully, you couldn’t rebuild Twitter, Instagram or Facebook today for a billion dollars. But you could potentially spend a few million on an exact replica that no one will ever use.

As an aspiring entrepreneur you want to build something remarkable, captivating and new; something with better features, different features or fewer features. That’s what the next Jack Dorsey, David Karp Kevin Systrom and Mark Zuckerberg would do.

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

– Linus Pauling

5 Steps to Take Your Product From Concept to Reality 11-20

5 Steps to Take Your Product From Concept to Reality

Image Credit: Manifesto

Jules Pieri started The Grommet  , a product-launch platform, after realizing that contemporary entrepreneurs have ready access to manufacturing technology such as 3-D printing but no easy way to get their products into consumers' hands.

Since 2008 The Grommet has brought 1,500 companies and 6,000 products to market through its online store, which produces video reviews and social media campaigns that emphasize the people behind the products. Says Pieri: "Our first cut isn't: Will this product sell well? It's: Do people want to know this story?"

Pieri, who serves as CEO, walked us through the steps for taking a product from concept to reality.

I have an idea for a product. Now what?

Make sure there's a large market opportunity. I see a lot of mompreneurs, for instance, who are solving a very narrow problem that their child will have for only six months. Don't overlisten to your own needs. Do Google searches and see how many people are searching to solve the same problem. Check reviews on Amazon to see whether there are existing products.

What's the best way to prototype?

Start with the elementary toolkit of foam board, cardboard. You can also do 3-D printed prototypes. We had a pitch session at Fenway Park where an 8-year-old came with a 3-D printed prototype. You can rent those machines for $15 an hour now, so they're not inaccessible. If you're starting to get the kind of response you'd hoped for, you might need a visual presentation, too. I love when someone reaches out to a designer or engineer to help move to the next level. Or you can join a hacker lab to try out ideas.

At what point should inventors consider crowdfunding? 

They should get a rough prototype together first. One insider tip: Make sure you get at least 20 percent of the campaign pre-funded before it goes live; 81 percent of campaigns that have a head start are successful. Crowdfunded campaigns also are a good way to get some market intelligence. If you can get a product funded, that's a good validator. The main drawback is that campaigners can be unprepared for success--you have to quickly figure out how to deliver everything you promised.

How do you decide whether to produce in-house or outsource?

There are online inventor communities that are useful for those kinds of questions, but you can also find someone with a product in the same vein--not a competitor, but someone who uses the same kinds of processes. Sometimes people don't feel confident just picking up the phone, but anyone who has cracked this really loves talking about it. It's a real triumph to crack supply chains. When it comes time to price, make sure you create a margin structure that later allows for retail partners. Generally you want the manufacturing cost to be one-fifth of the retail price.

What are some common rookie mistakes?

You'd be surprised by how many people have a wonderful product and get a big order from someone like us, and we get an e-mail saying, "I'll be back in two weeks." They're not taking their own business seriously, and that's the kiss of death. It seems so basic, so obvious to not do that, but we see it often. The way you can get things produced today, you don't necessarily need to have the business skills to complement that, so people aren't always prepared.

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