What about a unassembled snowman that also needed to be frozen before use?

Sometimes finding a business to start requires that you turn conventional wisdom on it’s head.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Chow:

John Nese is the proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop in LA. His father ran it as a grocery store, and when the time came for John to take charge, he decided to convert it into the ultimate soda-lovers destination. About 500 pops line the shelves, sourced lovingly by John from around the world. John has made it his mission to keep small soda-makers afloat and help them find their consumers. Galcos also acts as a distributor for restaurants and bars along the West Coast, spreading the gospel of soda made with cane sugar (no high-fructose corn syrup if John can avoid it).

If you don’t live in Los Angeles, you can order any of Galco’s soda’s online at SodaPopStop.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Are you a personal chef, or an entrepreneur developing recipes? Do you want to bottle/develop a recipe?

If you want to start a food business in the state of Florida (or in most other states), you’ll need a commercial kitchen. State and local laws require that all food prepared for sale to the public must be prepared or produced at a commercially licensed kitchen. Unfortunately, the cost of setting up a licensed commercial kitchen is a huge obstacle to many food entrepreneurs. This is an expense that most folks are not prepared for or do not have the knowledge of designing a kitchen which will pass inspection.

Your Pro Kitchen offers a professionally-equipped, commercially licensed multi-station kitchen facility for professional cooking and baking. In addition, they are flexible enough to support many different uses, such as cooking classes, private events, and the production or bottling of your products.

Your Pro Kitchen also offers a traditional business center with desk space, internet access, a fax machine, copy machines, a telephones.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Earlier this week, Jet Blue announced an all you can jet plan for the month of September:

Enjoy unlimited travel with our All-You-Can-Jet Pass! For just $599 you can take JetBlue anywhere you like, as often as you like, from September 8 to October 8, 2009. Use your All-You-Can-Jet Pass for business, for pleasure, to visit your favorite cities or to meet with a client. You might as well just do it all! With more than 50 cities to choose from, and for just $599, it’s a deal you can’t pass up.

This kind of pricing structure is incredibly disruptive in the airline industry, because most flights cost about the same amount.

Think about this kind of pricing for your business. Is there a way that you could get people to prepay for the ability to use your service an unlimited amount? One example would be a pizza restaurant that offered a membership for $100 per month (prepaid) that allowed their customers to stop in and get a medium pizza anytime they wanted for free.

Does this get your imagination going?

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Since winning the SXSW blog award in 2007, Twitter’s growth has been phenomenal. From 500,000 users in early 2008, the site now hosts around 10 million microbloggers, and is used by enthusiasts, professionals and businesses alike.

99 Ways To Make Money Using Twitter was written by the editors of Geekpreneur. What started off as a introduction to Twitter eBook has turned into a 376 page reference guide. It sounds great:

The challenge in writing and researching a Twitter business book is to look at all the strategies, methods, and ways of making money on Twitter, and to bring them together into a book that is current, yet filled with case studies that will not go out of date. The methods range from one extreme to the other. We found authors who were selling their books with Twitter, and writers who were publishing their books on Twitter. We came across plenty of large firms using Twitter to improve their customer service, and one Twitter entrepreneur who was making almost $1500 a month helping CSS programmers in his spare time on Twitter. We found a bunch of different ways of inserting ads into a Twitter page – some more obtrusive than others – and users who were offering Twitter-based translation services, job listings, garage sales, retail outlets, giveaways, affiliate links, contests, directories, craft products and a whole bunch more.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Here’s a video tribute to him that includes his famous line and the openings of 30 of his TV commercials.

The commercials include:

• Liquid Diamond
• GatorBlade
• Gopher
• Ding King
• Handy Switch
• Vidalia Slice Wizard
• Green Now
• Hercules Hook
• iCan Insurance
• Kaboom
• Orange Glo
• OxiClean
• Zorbeez
• Quick Chop
• Big City Slider Station
• Engrave-It
• Fix It
• Mighty Shine
• Steam Buddy
• Awesome Auger
• EZ Bundler
• Vidalia Chop It
• Dual Saw
• Flies Away
• Jupiter Jack
• Grater Plater
• Mighty Mendit
• Mighty Putty
• Tool BandIt
• What Odor?

Which was your favorite?

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Veyis Polat

Does the idea of camel milk appeal to you? In some countries, camel milk is called “liquid gold” for its healing and nutritional qualities. Camel’s milk has three times as much vitamin C as cow’s milk and contains high amounts of iron, unsaturated fatty acids and B vitamins. There’s on big problem, though. Camels don’t like to be milked. The Wall Street Journal has more:

photo credit: dhahi alsaeedi

But there are several humps to overcome before camel milk is widely available in the U.S. For starters, there aren’t many camels here. Those that are mainly work in circuses or live in zoos.

Another challenge: Camels don’t much like to be milked. Camels can be cantankerous and persuading them to give up their milk can be part chore, part art. Camel experts say the animals are often ticklish around their udders and, without proper training, might lie down in the middle of being milked.

Camel milk is a centuries-old staple for nomadic tribes across the Middle East and Africa. It is also drunk by elderly men to enhance virility; by the sick to treat a variety of ailments; and by those who believe it has magical properties.

Camels feed at North Carolina’s Ferncroft Farms, which is working with Millie Hinkle, proprietor of Camelicious. The milk comes in flavors including saffron and date.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

If you have young children, you know how ridiculous car seats are. The instructions seem to require a PhD to follow correctly. You can’t use them for multiple kids, because they have expiration dates. You’re supposed to throw them out if you’ve ever in a fender-bender accident, but you know that your UPS man drop-kicked it onto the porch when he delivered it. You can’t donate a car seat to a charity like Goodwill, because they can’t sell it.

The Car Seat Lady has made a business out of consumer’s car seat hassles and offers experienced, private car seat installation lessons in the New York City and Baltimore areas. Here’s more from the New Yorker:

Men, of course, do not give birth, but they have their own shadow form of labor: installing the baby’s car seat. This seemingly simple job has ruined plenty of golfing Saturdays, even for guys who solved Rubik’s Cube when they were younger. Thankfully, in Manhattan there’s an expert for everything, and if you’re expecting a son and have no idea how to get him home from the hospital, you can call Alisa Baer, the Car Seat Lady.

Baer, a twenty-five-year-old medical student with curly black hair and a nonsense-free manner, doesn’t have any kids herself, but she can tell you which car seats will and will not fit in your Volvo V40.

She used to make free house calls, but now she asks that people bring their seats to her. She’s also begun charging forty-five dollars per seat, because New Yorkers told her they didn’t trust something they didn’t have to pay for.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: bogenfreund

The following is a guest post by Sahail Ashraf.

An increasingly effective way of raising money for your business is by finding and wooing an Angel Investor. As the name suggests, this type of investor is there to act as a bit of a lifesaver, offering ready cash to those companies and individuals who they feel have something worth putting money into.

The biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make when they approach an Angel is thinking that they have it covered, when instead the opposite is true. Angels, no matter how much money they have to play with, are dead serious about the cold, hard cash they give away. So doing your homework first should be viewed as essential. Many an entrepreneur has been laughed out of the room by Angels who discover that they are dealing with someone who is unprepared.

Preparedness creates confidence, and confidence seals deals. So take a good look at the following points, and see if you and your venture fit the profile.

If you can say yes to all of these questions about your company, then you have a strong case for investment from an Angel. This does not guarantee investment, but it sets you up for looking investable.

If you can’t say yes to any of these, then you have a problem.

1. Is your product selling, right now? If it isn’t, why would they invest?
2. Have you got a rock solid management team? Even if it is just you?
3. Can you sell? Sales make bottom line.
4. Does your company compel people to buy? In other words, do your customers buy from you for strong reasons? Is there an angle that people can’t resist?
5. Is your product so different that it will take sales from your competitors? In other words, will your product or service be so different that it will potentially disrupt the industry?
6. Is your business likely to make millions one day? Don’t forget that Angels are using their money. ROI is more than important, it’s necessary.
7. Have people already invested in your company? If they have, you have earned credibility.
8. Is there a clear exit strategy? Can you see an IPO in the future, or an acquisition?
9. Can you offer transparency? In other words, can you demonstrate how you will communicate regular updates to investors?
10. Have you or anyone on your team made successful companies before?

You don’t have to answer ‘yes’ to all of these to be successful. But Angels are less common now than they were about six months ago. And the more dead pitches you make, the more Angels you will lose (they tend to talk to each other, and often group up into flocks).

Angels can and do invest, but only if they see a realistic company with real potential. Spend some time on these questions and see if they work for your company. If they don’t, make them work, or find plausible reasons why not (after all, this may be your first company). But it is pointless to try and ‘find an Angel Investor’ without doing this kind of homework.

Sahail Ashraf is a freelance writer living in Devon, England. His blog can be found at www.smarthomeworker.com.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Jim Kukral has always been fascinated and entertained by fun, memorable domains names. Well, not just the domains, but the actual businesses and the ROI behind them as well. If a domain name is used well together with a creative idea, you can create a killer marketing campaign that can skyrocket your sales, generate leads and create publicity for your business or brand. That’s the premise of interesting new ebook The $7.95 Marketing Plan. The book is available as a free downloadable PDF.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.