All Businesses start with an idea!, How do you find the right one??

All businesses start with an idea. Ideas are two a penny, millions of people have millions of them every day…somebody should do such and such…I saw this here or there….what’s needed around here is X……I could do Y much cheaper than X etc. etc.

The vast majority of these ideas die a death in the recesses of gray matter around the world. For some people these ideas fester and grow and sometimes they just won’t go away. For others the idea finally moseys off after growing tired of hanging around or worse somebody else grabs a hold and runs off with it.

But what about you? What brings you here?  Have you got an idea that you are struggling to find validation for? Or are you 110% confident that you have a winner and are itching to get going?

Obviously we cannot tell you whether your idea is good or bad, in fact this is in many ways is irrelevant. An amazing entrepreneur with a mediocre idea will still probably outperform an individual with an incredible idea but who lacks conviction, drive and the ability to make things happen.

What we can tell you is this; you need to think about the end game from the start. What hypothetically would you be doing this for? What is your motivation? Is this a lifestyle business? do you want to make the world a better place? Or do you simply want to get filthy rich? It is important to be aware of your motivation as this will help to dictate your course of action.

If your motivation is to quit your lousy job, spend more time at home with the kids, or make the world a better place then our advice is above all to do something that you are interested in or preferably passionate about. Starting a business is tough often really tough but at least if you are interested in the product or general area it won’t seem quite so bad on those quiet days when you are wondering what the hell you have gotten yourself into. The very very lucky get to make money from what they love doing this is the ultimate goal.

So you want to get rich! Not unreasonable, in fact why not? What else are you going to be doing?. The only advice that we can give here (without an in-depth study of your business plan) is this – Play in a field where there is money to be made – sounds obvious doesn’t it?. Yet you would be amazed at the amount of people who expect to get rich selling herbal T bags or similar. Business is so much easier when you are swimming with the current, think being an estate agent over the past 10 years or opening a mobile phone shop around 1994…easy..nice!. So which businesses are moving with the current now? Green energy? Liquidation agencies? Cloud computing? Find one and dive in.

Ed.

Digital Marketing School is a free online video resource for anyone who has an interest in the world of digital marketing, from a beginners level, right up to seasoned professionals.

The aim is to help people with some of the basics, put some meaning behind the buzzwords, and give a broad understanding to newcomers of what is possible in the world of digital marketing

The school also looks at more advanced areas, new evolutions in technology, and where the digital marketing industry is going in the coming years.

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There are loads of ways to subscribe, so click on one of the links to receive updates as each new show arrives.

http://www.digitalmarketingschool.com/
www.vstream.ie

1. Some people just don’t want to…great no issue, being an entrepreneur is not the be all and end all. The majority of people who work for themselves work extremely long hours just to get by. Many many others try and fail. Unless you are an extremely unbalanced individual most of us know that the ultimate goal is to lead a happy and fulfilled life during our short allotted time on planet earth. What is a happy and fulfilled life is for each and every one of us to define for ourselves. It is ones of life’s great gifts that we get to set our own standards and goals the fact that many people choose badly and end up miserable is outside the remit of this article. The fact remains that your family, peers, colleagues and every dog on the street may be telling you that fulfilment lies in money/ fast cars/ high profile promotions etc. You are free to decide that for you its flip flops a surf board and enough cash to get by. Screw them it is your life…if you can achieve true happiness for the majority of your life you my friend are the real winner in this silly little game.

2. The Fear Factor…. Given that you are reading an article like this you probably are not surfing at the moment, so you think that you want a crack of the entrepreneurial whip. Ok then. The Fear Factor holds more people back from starting their own business than probably anything else. The old ‘what if’ deamons have caused millions of would be entrepreneurs to turn back and walk away from the scary dark edge with its lurking dangers and uncertain hidden treasures. For its sheer ability to slay ideas and dreams the fear factor remains the number one reason that people do not give it a go.

3. People are lazy…..Sad but true may people would kind of like to be successful but will never make the effort to actually make it happen. It is so much easier to talk about doing stuff and to wait ‘till the time is right’ than to actually go for it. If you are in this category please take the following advice. Admit it to yourself!!. By giving up the game you will take the pressure off yourself, focus on something else that you enjoy and get on with your life. This may seem harsh but it is a case of being cruel to be kind. There is a window of opportunity in everyone’s life to start their own business, this is not age specific but for every Colonel Saunders who founded KFC in his sixties there are hundreds of people who put themselves financially and physically at risk at a time in their life when they should be looking to retirement. There are exceptions to every rule but being successful involves being smart and realistic.

Important note: beware the disgruntled would be entrepreneur, this is a dangerous breed that will be full of stories about how they nearly invested in this or that that would have made them a fortune. They nearly patented some form of widget that would have been a runner etc. Avoid at all costs, they will have nothing positive to say about your plans but will be able to tell you how they tried ‘something like that’ and it didn’t work out. They will hate to see you succeed, you don’t want to be around this kind of energy.

4. People lack personal confidence and therefore (they think) the ability to run a business. A lack of personal confidence will kill the entrepreneurial spirit in those afflicted by it. It undoubtedly has other negative implications on their life but again these falls outside the purpose of this book. Entering the battleground of business with little or no personal confidence or self belief is as stupid as it gets. Sort it out…life is too short.

If you are interested in using the Internet to grow your business virally, then “Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves” is a must-read.

Viral Loop literally dissects and breaks apart the code behind what makes some businesses and ideas go viral and others go fizzle. The first sentence of the book had me completely hooked.

“Two Heinekens into a lazy Tuesday afternoon, James Hong, a twenty-seven-year-old dot-com refugee from Mountain View California, was listening to his roommate, Jim Young, a Berkeley graduate student in electrical engineering, wax on about a woman he had spotted at a party the previous weekend. Young, also twenty-seven, insisted she was a “perfect 10.” Hong didn’t believe him. He knew his roommate had a thing for “goth,” while Hing’s own tastes were more Abercrombie & Fitch. What the world needed, they agreed, was a metric to reliably rate someone’s looks.”

This book was not only educational, but really entertaining. That’s because the author, Adam L. Penenberg, is a journalism professor and assistant director of the Business and Economics Program at New York University. He has written for Fast Company, Inc., Slate, Wired, and a series of other well known magazines. And you can tell that he is an expert in explaining highly technical information to an audience that needs to learn and understand it, but doesn’t have the time or the inclination to do all the research that’s required to get there.

How to Read Viral Loop

The book is broken up into three major sections:

•I Viral Businesses:

Penenberg gives context to the viral business model by going into detail about the grandfathers of the viral business model: Tupperware, Mosaic and Ning are just a few. If you’re thinking about using a viral model, you’ll want to pay attention because each of these stories holds a key to the foundations of a good viral loop.

•II Viral Marketing:

This section continues to lead the reader from the basics of viral marketing and shows you how these same principles are applied to other businesses. Perhaps the most striking thing to me about this section is how perennial a good business model is. In this section the key story is about Hotmail and how they used the “home party” idea as inspiration to spread the word about Hotmail by placing something in the footer of their e-mails.

•III Viral Networks:

This is where everything you’ve read before comes into play. This book is not for the weak-at-Internet-strategy-heart. In this section you learn about building an architecture that can sustain the masses that will throng to your site if your viral loop is good enough.
You’ll want to read this book slowly and surely page by page, chapter by chapter so that you can be sure to get every bit of viral history, company story and business model.

Why Read Viral Loop

At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, you can’t afford to run a business in this economy without reading this book. The historical perspective combined with the real-life stories and wrapped up in the high quality story telling that Penenberg brings makes Viral Loop a must read.

Company: www.theclothesline.ie
Website: as above
Founders: Tammy Darcy
Age: 30
Based: Waterford
Staff Number: Just me so far!
Date started: February 10

Tell us what your business does?
The website offers parents the opportunity to submit their outgrown or unsuitable kids, babies and maternity clothes in exchange for credits which can be applied towards the purchase of more suitable items

Where did the idea for your business come from?
As a mother of three, the idea actually evolved over a number of years, and I decided to go for it when I lost my job.

Have you always wanted to run your own business?
No! There are obvious pros and cons to running your own business but I feel passionate about what I am doing so I don’t have a problem staying motivated

What planning did you do before you started up?
I researched the idea for six months and tested every aspect of the business before I launched.

What challenges have you faced how have you overcome them?
The biggest challenge is balancing work and home life. When you run your own business it’s very hard to switch off at the end of the working day.

How have you promoted your business?
Because the business is very much a public interest subject, I have received a lot of media interest. Apart from that I have done a lot of online promotion through social networking sites. It really works, and its free!

What has your growth been like?
I’m very happy, we’ve been live for less than a month and it’s hard to keep up with the growth. But its testament to the power of word of mouth amongst parents.

What’s the impact on your home life been like?
I’m lucky to be able to plan my time around my family demands. There are times when it’s a challenge but it’s great to be able to collect them from school, something I wasn’t able to do when I was in full time employment.

So you have a great idea, now all you need to get going is some lovely money. The main sources of finance for startups are:

1) Friends & Family
2) Government support agencies
3) Angel Investors
4) Banks

1) Freinds & Family

Tapping friends and family for investment may seem tempting as quite frankly it is easy, people who know and trust you may be willing to back you to help you get started. However be very aware that you will now be compromised (whether you like to admit it or not) to this investor. If the business fails you will be in a very embarassing situation until the money has been repaid. Try not to mix business and pleasure for everyone’s sake. If you cannot resist the temptation to take the cash on offer (which is perfectly understandable) then please be very careful to frame the exact terms of repayment out from the start and also what the investor will receive in return for the investment. It is very easy to be casual at the start of a business relationship, time and time again when money is involved things turn sour. What if the relation becomes hard pressed (probably from throwing money around on startup companies!) suddenly they want their money back!. What wait a minute I presumed I would repay you at a later date shock horror. Consider an alternative scenario and your business starts taking off, suddenly the investor is eager to get more involved with his 50% stake, what? who said anything about 50%?, I thought we said we would see how things went!

Copperfasten everything in a written framework and hit the roof at the first suggestion of deviating from the agreement. Better still get them paid off ASAP and hold on to as much equity as possible (Make sure you never do a 50% 50% deal, these just don’t work and lead to a legal quagmire)

2) Government support agencies

People automatically presume that they are entitled to all sorts of grants and funding, God dammit I am creating employment am I not? I am helping the economy to recover! I am opening a coffee shop!. This is not how it works do not expect any civil servant to get excited about the fact that you are opening a run of the mill business. The amount of applications they get for the resources available are astounding. Unless your business has the potential to create significant employment (i.e. Manufacturing) or has export potential, the main support offered will be discounted training courses, some small employment grants (5K), web development grants (2k) that sort of thing.

Look at it from the other side of the table, application 1 = a website for stag & hen trips in Kilkenny or 2 a private label cream liqueur plant in Cavan. Now which is of more interest?

Local county enterprise boards offer basic support and the training courses are generally worthwhile and often great value (I am just about to start a Accountancy for small businesses course which cost €100)

Enterprise Ireland are the big guns and they have ‘Business bouncers’ at the door rejecting 100′s of business each year. A good route into the system is the hothouse scheme (www.hothouse.ie). Enterprise Ireland are really interested in high potential startups mainly in technology, pharmaceuticals etc. They have huge investment funds at their disposal and are prepared to invest in the right businesses.

3) Angel Investors

Angel investors were very popular in the dot com era. Basically successful individuals who probably founded and sold their own business and now have both time and money to get involved in startup companies. Try www.businessangels.ie for further info, according to their site they were involved in completing 36 deals totalling 6 million of angel investment in 2009 – not bad. The angel networks try to match suitable angels with the right business, so if your business is in retail they will try to find you a Theo Paphitis type etc. Again I would not be approaching these guys with a plan to run a local babysitting service.

4) Ahhh the Banks

Where do I start? Firstly, despite the fact that you opened your first bank account in AIB at UCD and got a free USIT card to boot does not mean that your bank will lend you any money. The banks spend a small fortune promoting their support for small businesses and new business packages, they do want to have new business accounts for the simple reason that they are very lucrative, between cash lodgement fees, cheque book fees, overdraft fees etc you would be very surprised at how much your bank charges will be every year (this is often totally underestimated on business plans where people put down €1000 bank charges, a shrewd bank manager will have more respect for a biz plan with realistic charges).

In Ireland we tend to forget that banks are businesses, for the same reason our families vote for Fianna Fail / Fianna Gael etc for generations despite their varying levels of ineptitude, we tend to see ourselves as being owed something by our banks for years of custom.

Banks in general only want to lend money to people who do not really need it, at present they will expect you to be putting up about 50% of the money required. If you are not prepared to risk your own money then why should they?. You need to be very confident and well prepared and don’t be afraid to play one off against the other “ulster bank have offered me €30,000 at 3.0% can you match this? has a better chance of succeeding versus please sir can I have some more?

As the list of marketing options grows to include social networking, email marketing and whisper campaigns, small- and medium-size businesses must have a solid marketing strategy.

But the truth is that more than half of new businesses don’t bother. A recent survey found that 58.9 per cent of small-business owners don’t prepare an annual marketing strategy or attempt to identify the benefit and cost of marketing. This could be why the failure rate of small businesses is so high in the first year.

The director of Marketing News, Mary Brennan is not surprised by the research.

“A lot of businesses don’t put much thought into a marketing plan and as a result, it’s often done ad hoc,” she says.

“Businesses need to realise that marketing isn’t an expense but a legitimate business-building activity.”

But a lot of small businesses don’t know how to develop a marketing strategy.

“Often they will try a marketing technique based on their own ideas or what may seem like a bargain only to realise it only reached a small percentage of their target market, by which time their budget is blown,” she says.

The classic first step for Irish businesses is something like a leaflet drop or taking an ad out in the local paper. Often this course of action is taken in the absence of any other ideas!

A marketing plan should look at how a business will promote itself to its target audience, usually over a 12-month period.
Brennan says a marketing plan should include a detailed budget and examine the best ways to promote the business.

“You want [it] to take in analysis of your competitors and to have specific goals,” she says.

“It also needs to break down how much you’ve set aside for marketing, how you’re going to spend it, look at who your target audience is and how you tackle internal and external communications.”

A marketing plan for a small business might be only a few pages long but larger businesses often require a more-detailed plan.

The plan needs to be revisited monthly – or, at the very least, quarterly, Brennan says.

Business owners can write their own plan or if they have no experience in Marketing should contact an expert, even having a chat with one or two marketing companies will give you new ideas and an insight into how professionals appraoch marketing. You may not end up hiring anyone but I guarantee you will pick up some valuable tips along the way.

“We found that companies are either too busy to stop and write a marketing strategy or simply don’t place enough value on having a plan in place,” according to Brennan.

Like other key aspects of developping a successful business your marketing activity must be relevant and effective. If marketing is an area of weakness for you find a solution / person to manage it. You may have the best product or service in the world but unless the right people (your target market) know about it you are dead in the water. Do not ignore marketing your business and if your efforts to date have not been succesful it means one of two things …your idea sucks or you are no good at marketing…so which is it?

Is anyone else loving the Irish apprentice this year or is it just me? I have to say I am totally hooked, this is car crash TV at its best. I have noticed a growing trend among people who love reality TV all of a sudden but feel embarassed to admit it!. Between the X Factor on Saturday and Sunday and The Apprentice on Monday sitting in has never been so much fun.

Each week I find myself praying that the Breffmeister survives for another week, the show will just not be the same without him. I actually think that he is the funniest character on Irish TV since Ardal O’Hanlon’s Fr Dougal McGuire. This is the man who describes his background as rowing, has shocked the people of Cork by claiming to be one of them, speaks like Prince Charles illigitimate son and gets more likeable with each week.

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Last week saw Breff kick ass in the Cadburys chocolate challenge. He has had his ideas rejected and mocked before even though his gut instincts were proved to be on the money in previous tasks. Not this time! despite the clever attempts by Aoiffffe to cover all the bases by saying that she supports all ideas 100% and then 5 minutes later stating that she is totally opposed to the idea hence being able to pull either card out in the boardroom, the Breffmeister stood firm, hanging up on the patronising backstabbers and sticking to the task at hand.

Breff won the day and in the process his stock shot up. As an act of concession to the nose out of joint duo of Aoifffe and Ruth, Breff let Ruth present for the team, her robotic presentation (see below) and funeral parlouresque choice of entertainment nearly blew the Breffmeisters victory.

Expect no quarter to be given in future, go Breff go............

Twitter is poised to close a $US50 million funding round that values the microblogging startup at a staggering $US1 billion, according to TechCrunch and AllThingsD. Since closing its last venture round in February, the startup’s value has grown fourfold.

Grown, that is, in the eyes of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, slaves to the technology fashions for which Twitter is the leading model: real-time, micro, iPhone friendly and acquisition bait for Google. Twitter might say it’s in this for the long haul—someone is spreading word the company has $US30 million, or most of its last funding round, sitting in a bank account—but the company has proven far more adept at finessing moneyed suitors than in groping for reliable revenue streams.

Twitter’s trend hopping founders, whose project management company began their blogging company, which led to their podcasting company, which began Twitter, seem more likely to seize on the easy exit of the former rather than the long grind of the latter.

Especially when, as these charts of their past investment rounds show, they’re so very good at jacking up their price:

Welcome to the Startups blog

This Blog covers all and any aspects of business and entrepreneurship. The idea behind this blog and startups in general is to try and bridge the gap between the vast quantities of general information out there i.e. government pamphlets, county enterprise websites etc. and the reality of starting a business. This blog is written by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs and as we are busy running our own businesses we would appreciate participation and content from anyone with an interest in this area.

Entrepreneurship and business success are fascinating areas, the challenge is like cracking a combination lock to a safe with riches within. Some make cracking the code look painfully easy others struggle for years without success. Managing the vagaries of timing, opportunity, ability, passion and luck seem to come naturally to some and prove impossible to manage for others.

Maybe some are born lucky maybe the harder they worked the luckier they got? Throughout this blog we will fluctuate between the philosophy of entrepreneurship and more nuts and bolts practical advice.

Thanks for visiting ….Now lets get started…………..

Ed.