Posts Tagged ‘Startup’

A Smart Bear:

My idea isn’t good enough yet” explained a friend who is thinking of starting his own company. He was waiting for the idea to be completely fleshed our before taking the leap.

Here’s a newsflash: Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn’t matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different.

Sounds wrong? Let’s see.

In 1998, a company received $4.8 million in funding to “beam money between Palm Pilots.” I’ll code-name this product: MoneyBeamer.

Here’s the pitch. Alice wants to give Bob some money, but Alice doesn’t have cash or her checkbook. There’s no ATM around. Both Alice and Bob do own palm pilots and they both previously installed MoneyBeamer and, despite having forgotten all their normal modes of money transfer, they did remember to bring their palm pilots. MoneyBeamer will allow Alice to send money to Bob. Well actually it won’t, but it will remember that Alice wants to send Bob money, and once Alice gets back home and connects her Palm Pilot with her computer, and after she dials up to the Internet, MoneyBeamer will contact a server and transfer the money, provided of course that Alice has the money and didn’t secretly change her mind in the meantime.

Would you have invested in them? Not with an idea like that. You’d be wrong though — it was PayPal. Their work with encryption was combined with an idea for a consumer-targeted on-line banking system made it the easiest way to send money by email. They were sold to eBay for $1.3 billion. Today they process $2,000 in payments every second.

Photo by trublueboy.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

CNNMoney.com:

In Detroit, a city with rampant unemployment, big crowds in the middle of the day may mean someone is giving out freebies.

But on a recent workday, over 450 people packed an auditorium downtown. They weren’t looking for a hand out, sympathy or even a job application. They were looking to start their own business.

These would-be entrepreneurs flocked to an auditorium on Wayne State University’s campus with ideas big and small.

Attendees also took part in a variety of workshops including ones on how to raise money, how to save on shipping costs and how to run a service or lifestyle businesses. Each attendee got a chance to meet one-on-one with a business counselor and the opportunity to sign up for more free classes.

Some proposals focused on technical businesses — a former Ford manufacturing expert wants to start a consulting firm advising companies on how to make their manufacturing processes more efficient, while a former software engineer had started a company that makes Web-based system that hosts emergency contact and other medical information for children.

Photo by LeoSynapse.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Fortune Small Business:

Bob MacLeod was a talent agent and Steve Byckiewicz a flight attendant in 1980 when they ditched city life for a farmhouse and a fresh start. Unlikely entrepreneurs, they were mostly interested in gardening and entertaining. But dwindling savings prompted them to launch a business inspired by their healthy lifestyle.

Almost 30 years later their company, Kiss My Face, sells more than 200 bath and body products in 19 countries.

What inspired you to launch Kiss My Face?

Steve and I weren’t exactly visionaries. We moved to a 200-acre farm in Gardiner in 1980 because we couldn’t afford to stay in Manhattan. We were both vegetarians and grew most of our own food, but soon began running out of money. We started selling our produce to health-food stores in nearby Woodstock, Kingston and New Paltz. After we took some produce to sell in Manhattan, we realized we could get three times as much there as we could upstate, so we began selling in the city once or twice a week. Back then, produce wasn’t labeled organic. We just called it homegrown, and consumers responded.

One day, while Steve and I were shopping at a Woodstock clothing store, we saw a big basket of rough, earthy-looking Greek olive oil soap. We thought it was beautiful. Its label listed a SoHo importer. We drove into Manhattan, bought several cases, repackaged it in old olive oil tins and added labels that read, “Pure Olive Oil Soap of Greece.” We brought it to health-food stores and sold it along with our produce. Within days two stores requested more, and one had sold out. We were onto something.

Then our importer called. He was moving and couldn’t supply us with soap for a few months. So I requested 90 days of credit in exchange for his inventory. Steve and I rented a U-Haul, loaded it with six tons of soap — 24,000 bars — and stored it in our garage and in our barn.

Was it hard to sell 24,000 bars of soap?

Continue Reading: “How Kiss My Face Got Started”

Photo by FSB.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.