What are /r/Entrepreneur's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I've been saying this for years.

Yelp is small business racketeering - Nothing else. Their model works/feeds of negative reviews and their "search results" are completely gamed and egnineered to support this.

They want you to get negative reviews because then your visibility drops within their search results and the only way to remedy this is to pay for advertising (If anyone cares, I'll go to in the exact mechanics of how this works).

If anyone has any doubt, just watch Billion Dollar Bully:

https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Bully-Davide-Cerretini/dp/B07QV5RQTZ

If it makes you feel any better, out of all the posts on here you probably sound more like an entrepreneur than anyone else. Remember the very first lesson of Think and Grow Rich, and a good piece of general advice as well: don't quit when you're so close.

> 2 of those instances where acts of God

If you are being 100% honest with yourself, did you deserve to succeed on these? If the answer is yes, keep going.

>I keep worrying I am going to be fired.

Fuck that shit. You're more likely to be part of a mass layoff than be fired these days. Keep doing what you need to to keep the job (you're making someone else money at those hours) and keep your mental effort focused on your business. You sound like a man on the last mile of his marathon and he's fucking miserable and dehydrated and thinks he might die. No one who is completely sane strikes out on their own; you'd have to be a little crazy to ignore the security being offered to you by a job. But you chose to do it for a reason. I took canned goods from a girl after she jokingly offered them to me because my credit cards were maxed out. I took food intended for a food bank because I was doing so badly I figured I'd just cut out the middle man and take it directly. Guess what? I lost that weight I'd gained, I got to a better place in my life.

Do you want someone to tell you not to quit? Because I'll say it right now: don't fucking quit. If you quit you'll regret it. If you quit, you might get that cute little promotion so you can keep doing something you don't care about for a little more money. And you know that. You don't want to quit. So don't. Run the last mile. Close a fucking deal. And then breathe easy.

Just some technical advice from a wordpress guy here: * Your wp-content/uploads file is still visible. So if I visit www.flightabovephotography/wp-content/uploads - I can see everything you've uploaded to the site. It is also a possible route for hackers. Have a look at this guide to fix it. Not a massive job but it's a big security factor * I'd change the log in address away from wp-admin. Leaving this at the standard address could leave you open to brute force attacks. Definitely do this urgently if your username is "admin" (But you wouldn't do that... right?) * Consider getting a domain email instead of gmail. Personal preference for me perhaps, but I have much more confidence in businesses that have done that step, looks a lot more professional to me. * You're not using a lot of plugins. This is good! Running your site through GTMetrix does show a couple of areas where you could improve the load speed of your website. Consider downloading a smush plugin that compresses the size of your images. I appreciate that as a photography firm the quality of your images is key, but the home page is big at over 5MB. There's a balance there somewhere to be found. *I think the design looks great. Well done! Good luck with your business.

I'm really sorry to hear this. I work at Stripe, and we try our best to help businesses prevent and fight back against disputes (https://stripe.com/docs/disputes). Frankly, disputes suck and are a tough part of running any business, and you're basically right: this system that's run by the card networks often favors the cardholder. Although they don't really have an appeal process, I'd love to take a second look at this payment if you could email me at

Entrepreneurship degree at ASU:

• Brief Calculus
• Understanding the Enterprise
• Mathematics for Business Analysis
• My Technology Venture
• Macro/Microeconomics Principles
• Uses of Accounting Information
• Creativity and Business Innovation
• Foundations of Engineering Design Project
• Business Statistics
• Design Methodology
• Entrepreneurship and Value Creation
• Leading the Enterprise
• Fundamentals of Finance
• Promotion of the Enterprise
• Marketing and Business Performance
• Negotiations
• Enterprise Operations
• Funding the Enterprise
• Global Supply Operations
• Enterprise Strategy and Innovation
• Technology Entrepreneurship
• Global Supply Chain Management
• Business Lay and Ethics
• Innovation Management
• Project

Some reading materials for those classes:

• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• smartups
• The Lean Startup
• Sprint
• Engineering Your Startup
• Open Innovation
• Built to Last
• Finding Fertile Ground
• Open Business Modals
• The Art of Social Media
• The Innovation Expedition
• Business Modal Generation
• Value Proposition Design

Projects:

Throughout most of these courses, you are required to do projects, where you pitch ideas to the class, interview customers, developer business models, make pitch decks, and iterate.

I don't think any modern class tells you or even encourages you to make a business plan. Instead, it's all about testing ideas, getting feedback, and iterating.

You just got your second sale too! (I bought on Amazon)

I also had really bad acne until the Navy gave me Accutane in my early 20s. Cleared it right up (seriously, that stuff is miraculous), but I have scarring and I've never really made much effort to take care of my skin until recently, when I've been using a moisturizer with SPF most days.

Your product listing on Amazon is good, but a few things jumped out at me:

1. My first thought: "Hmm...is this makeup?" (in particular, this shot made me think of makeup) -- I guess that's not the end of the world for some people, but you'll need to really sell me on it. In particular, will it look like makeup, will it feel caked on, will people notice, what if I sweat, etc, etc, etc.
2. Why no reviews?? (you HAVE to fix this, seriously)
3. $19...for how much? How long will this last me?
4. Is this something I wear every day forever? That feels like makeup. Or is it more something that will improve my skin over time?
5. What about SPF?? -- I actually probably wouldn't have ordered if I had noticed this earlier

I think you've got a good niche here, but I think you should consider a few things:

1. You've got to get some reviews, seriously. I'd make this my top priority.
2. I'm not an expert on Amazon, but content marketing to drive sales to Amazon sounds slow and a lot of work. Are you advertising on Amazon?
3. You might want to go even more niche and make it even more focused to those like us that have acne scars. Right now it feels like something that any guy could get benefit from, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

Congrats on launching and getting your first sales!

Read "The Millionaire Next Door"

Plumber; When was the last time you heard someone haggle on price the day before Thanksgiving when the kitchen drain is stopped up and there is 4" of sewage in the basement?

Even better; A service company fixing the work, 3 years later, of the lowest priced contractor, or DIY person who did the initial project. - Luckiest Entrepreneur

So mom had a background in public health, I didn't have a background in anything. But she felt that a lot of the customers were being served by these massive government contracting firms who didn't care about mission or customer service. She felt the government was paying out all this money in overhead costs for consulting fees, and that there was no need for all that fat on the hog. So these big margins these companies were charging meant their own consultants were getting worked to death for too little, and the customers were overpaying.

Instead, she could pay consultants more, be less greedy, cut the overhead costs, and give customers better service. A lot of these big companies have horrible cultures and don't care about their own people or their customers beyond money.

But we had no idea what a pivot was, we had no strategy, no business plan, just grinding out of sheer terror and fear every day. We had no idea what we were doing, we just were too stupid to know we weren't supposed to succeed.

Actually mom wrote a book about her journey, and her process, its .99 on kindle if you want to check it out.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VX83VKT?fbclid=IwAR3m0jpZ1wwddj0l7_oJ0tZZ4B8JNWUdUpuZLSlFc29sX3V1H1GjecFuCfM

Study physics or comp sci or anything other than entrepreneurship. Take some accting and finance elective courses.

edit: I'm a biz school grad (finance focus). Everything I learned in biz school was valuable but mostly theory and not as applicable in the real world(the numbers are much murkier in the real world). The book The Lean Startup opened my eyes to applying the scientific method to business. Ever since reading it I've regretted not having done a more analytical major. Critical thinking is incredibly important for the huge level of uncertainty you will face in business.

The Millionaire Fastlane - MJ Demarco Details about starting a business the right way, making sure its scalable. Very Motivating and detailed. Not as detailed as 4 hour work week but its not meant to be a template.

Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill More of a philosophical motivating book. Theres a new one out for small businesses and entrepreneurs for free on iBooks.

The Four Hour Work Week - Tim Ferriss I wouldn't call Tim a gimmicky guy but many people don't believe his philosophy in this book but I think its because most people don't understand his message. He's not outlining how to get rich exactly in this book, more explaining how to run a business so you can live a life that you yourself consider rich.

The One Week Marketing Plan - Mark Satterfield Great first book on marketing strategy, has a lot of studies in it that are very interesting.

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie A must read for anyone. Just guidelines to being a better person and getting people to like you more. One of my favorites.

More get rich fast bullshit.

OP, my business did $1.6MM in revenue last year. I bootstrapped it from $200 about five years ago. Here's the books that I'd recommend that you animate that might be of actual value:

• Never Eat Alone
• Managing the Professional Service Firm
• How to Make Friends and Influence People
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things
• Built to Sell
• Drive
• Who: The A Method for Hiring
• The Richest Man in Babylon
• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
• The E-Myth
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
• The Lean Startup

I'd also recommend that people read non-business books. Stuff like: On Combat, Better Angels of Our Nature, Scarcity, Nothing Like it In the World, etc.

As an entrepreneur, here are my favorite and most influential books:

1. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
   
2. How to Win Friends and Influence People
   
3. Positioning
   
4. Insanely Simple
   
5. Zero to One
   
6. Crossing the Chasm
   
7. The Art of the Start
   
8. Thinking Fast and Slow
   
9. Hire With Your Head
   
10. Work The System
    
11. 4 Hour Work Week.
    

Notice the permissions you give when you use snapchat:

~~~~~~~quote the apps permissions on Google Play~~~~~~~~

This app has access to:

Identity

find accounts on the device

Contacts/Calendar

read your contacts

Location

precise location (GPS and network-based)

SMS

send SMS messages

Photos/Media/Files

test access to protected storage

modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Camera/Microphone

take pictures and videos

record audio

Device ID & call information

read phone status and identity

Other

receive data from Internet

full network access

control vibration

prevent device from sleeping

view network connections

control flashlight

~~~~~end quote~~~~~

My bet is that the company is selling that information to advertisers.

You can read their privacy policy here and see what information they collect (including passwords, you'll see). Note that the privacy policy says they will use the information they collect to

> Communicate with you about products, services, offers, promotions, rewards, and events offered by Snapchat and others, and provide news and information we think will be of interest to you;

The privacy policy also says they will share information they gather about you

> With vendors, consultants and other service providers who need access to such information to carry out work on our behalf;

> In connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company;

I also notice that

> If you choose to find friends, the names and phone numbers in your device's native phonebook will be transmitted to Snapchat.

Snapchat also uses Flurry, which will also gather, use, and sell information about you, your phone, it's contents, and what web sites you visit.

If an app is free, it's probable that you are being sold for the profit.

I posted this in your post in /r/startup, but I really think breathalyzers is the way to go. You can sell them at $10/each at a 50% margin. They're small, fun to use at parties, the bar scene, clubs, etc.

> have them do the work.

There is literally no more effective learning method than this.

Everything else is forgotten within 3 months. Look up knowledge retention rates for state-funded education.

It is horrible and utter waste of everyone's time and money.

Like everything else, it depends on how much you put into it.

The whole, "get an exact match name, write some flimsy content, get backlinks, repeat" doesn't work and you know what? It shouldn't work. You need to be at least vaguely interested in providing some value. It doesn't have to be a cure for cancer, but fake or otherwise aggregated reviews suck.

That being said, there are some immensely successful Amazon Affiliate sites out there which have users who love them. That takes orders of magnitude more work than what you seem to have in mind. Look at http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/ or http://pcpartpicker.com/. They provide substantial value to their users, and it's immediately apparent why and how. It's also immediately apparent that they put a ton of effort into doing so. You've gotta give a shit, man. If you're not prepared to do that, then you're ten years late to the game.

Finding purpose and direction.

Check out this book. It's by a psychologist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz who made it his purpose while there to understand (and teach) what helps people through hopeless adversity.

https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X

At age 31 I was a security guard with a criminal justice degree and 8 year of security-experience. My best year I paid taxes on 28k.

I realized I didn't want to do 30 years as a broke security guard, so I started watching udemy.com computer programming courses ... and at age 32 I quit the security field because I got hired as a web developer, making more than double that.

The E-Myth Revisited - helps you remember that there's a lot more to a business than having an amazing idea.

4 Hour Work Week - seriously, just read it already. I refer to it as the self employed bible

The Lean Startup - build your thing, measure meaningful data, and learn a valuable lesson. Pivot (re-focus) your efforts based on validating your hypotheses. Rinse and repeat.

Paul Arden - he has 2 really inspiring short reads : It's not how good you are, but how good you want to be, and Whatever you think, think the opposite. Great airplane reads. Ideal for marketing advice, but good for general entrepreneurship thought process re-programming.

Great Question.

Lets say your product is a bath pillow.

1) You go to AliBaba and search for "bath pillow".

2) You find a product that looks cool, like this: http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2015-new-arrival-free-sample-bath_60287346223.html?spm=a2700.7724838.30.1.0DbXTT

3) Below the main picture, youll find two tabs: "Product Details" and "Company Profile". Click "Company Profile". Make sure the company that makes this product is a MANUFACTURER or MANUFACTURER/TRADING COMPANY. In general, I'd avoid dealing with TRADING COMPANY because they aren't making your product.

4) There's a window up top where you can write the manufacturer a message. Here is how you do it:

• A) Make a gmail account that sounds like ur representing a company. ""

• B) Sign up for AliBaba with this account

• C) Ask these questions. MAKE SURE you say "we", and drop hints that you're part of a company. That makes you seem bigger, and not just some guy.

"Hi. I'm Frank, and I work for Ambipath Pillows. We saw your product and would love to feature it in our line of pillows. A few questions A) Could you please send a catalogue? B) What is the price and MOQ of your pillows? C) Can I do OEM customization? If so, can I do on product and packaging? D) Can I do custom design? I have design E) How much would it cost for a sample to be sent to: [your address] Thank you very much, I look forward to doing business with you!

And that's it. Take it from there, don't overcomplicate it. If they respond, answer all your questions, it's a good company. If they send you some AutoMessage, crap company, don't deal with them.

To save time, make a Skype account, and you can hash out details in 5 minutes that would take 3 weeks over e-mail. GL!

Link: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

+1 to Moz. Their content is great. Whiteboard Fridays are good too but tend to lean a bit more advanced: https://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

Here's what I'd go about doing:

Incorporate: Get all the things you need to be a legal, viable business. S-Corp or LLC Or whatever (talk to a professional, I am not one, and can not tell you what you need for your thing) and get that EIN number for your business.

This is important, because for a lot of awesome dropshipping/wholesale companies they want hard proof that you are a legitimate, working business. One such company is Bangalla (organic foods/items for sale, drop-shipped for you), and they will not let you join their network WITHOUT this, but you'll be able to offer products that others might not.

Like I said, there's a bunch of companies like that, so if you have an idea of what you want to sell, specifically, take the time and research a company that will dropship/wholesale for you.

That will cost around $500-$1000-ish (I think).

From there, I'd set up an online store. Shopify makes it really easy to get set up fast, but if you want more than 14 days to try it out and make money with it (sometimes it takes longer, you know?) Head on over to https://stacksocial.com/free and scroll down. 60 day shopify trial? Don't mind if I do.

From here, I would look for my products, set up my store, and then start putting money into Branding, interesting things for the website, and driving traffic.

Work on your conversions, spend some money to learn how to work paid traffic (facebook ads, bing ads, google ads, youtube ads) as these will work harder and faster than trying to generate traffic for free. Also set up some retargeting, as this can bring back people who may have left the cart/site earlier but they still wanted to buy.

TL;DR: Become a business, find dropshippers/wholesalers, sell product, pay for traffic, make money.

I saw this idea posted on Indie Hackers. Was it you who posted it on the "Ideas & Validation" group? Good luck on the idea btw.

edit: Nvm it is you. Link

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel recommends: "In no case should a CEO of an early-stage, venture-backed startup receive more than $150,000 per year in salary."

I recommend NameCheap since NetworkSolutions does the exact same with stealing domain names (or at least they did, haven't used them in years) - http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/10/network-solutions-using-questionable-tactic-to-sell-more-domain-names/

The E-Myth Revisited.

I read this during a business class I took in J-term of my sophomore year. Great insight as to why a technically skilled person may not be able to make it as a business owner. Then the book expounds on how to overcome the many obstacles said technically gifted person may have in order to become a successful business owner.

Have you ever read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? Most people who achieve success don't until after 40 or 50 years old. Read it for free here, http://www.sacred-texts.com/nth/tgr/index.htm All of the big motivational speakers read, quote, and live this book.

The list could be hundreds of books long, and there are notable greats. But start smart, go through Khan Academy or YouTube for beginner guides and education.

It'll speed up the learning and help you bypass a lot of stuff you probably will never need. Then you can focus on specialty areas that are applicable to your projects.

That said, Lean Startup, The Most Important Thing and Economics in One Lesson are all fantastic books for entrepreneurs interested in the macro economy and finance.

I think at this stage, the most important thing is to validate your idea, whether are there customers who are willing to pay. Use platforms like WordPress, LaunchRock, Unbounce to put up a simple site, telling your prospective customers what you are offering, and how are they different from competitors, and see whether anyone signed up, or best, pay you for it.

This is then you will start to do a prototype. I would recommend you to at least learn a little bit about programming. There are tons of resources out there (treehouse, Udemy, Coursera) that you can pick up what you need to build a prototype. If not, at least you can divide your project into parts, and outsource it to different programmers, and you will be the one putting it together. In that case, you will be assure that no one programmer can just take your idea, and yet you can still get the prototype out. But the most important thing is you need to know a little about programming.

Actually, if I am you, I wouldn't be too concern about the idea being copied. You somehow have to market the idea to your prospective customers or users. The moment you market it, and one of the user/customer is a programmer, they can easily do up a web application that is similar to your idea.

Anyway on a sidenote, there are some free resources that can help you can started: https://www.coursera.org/course/interactivepython https://www.coursera.org/course/webapplications

Both courses started in four days time. I took the first course before, and I would say it gives a pretty good introduction to programming in Python.

In The E-myth Revisited, Michael Gerber paraphrased a quote from Gen. George Patton. It has stuck with me for many years after having read the book.

>The comfort zone makes cowards of us all.

​

Influence by Robert Cialdini is the bible. I actually learned a ton from Tom Hopkins' "Selling for Dummies". How To Win Friends and Influence People, while not sales specific, does teach you how to establish rapport with anyone, and that is a huge part of selling.

1) Buy a kindle and invest in some books. See some book recommendations at the end of my post.

2) Find a product or service that interests you, learn more about it (books, speaking to people)

3) Set up a website to promote the thing that interests you. Buy domain names, hosting etc and set up a themed WordPress site. Or, put the cash towards something like Square Space if you aren't that technical.

4) Note: Ideally you don't want to be selling your time, if you are selling time then try and sell someone elses with a healthy margin.

5) Get some business cards done.

6) Buy a landline phone number from net-telco.net, it's about £10 a year plus credit. It allows you to redirect this landline number to your mobile for £0.10p per minute. Useful for looking larger plus having a stable changable number.

7) Set aside £200 for Facebook and Adwords marketing. Important: There are lots of introductory offers out there for google to allow you to play with it before you spend money. Learning this is important as if you get your advertising model right then money in = leads, and leads = conversions, and conversions = cash. You just scale it up and you are in business.

8) Get a logo made, even if it is done on Fivr

I'm sure there are many more low price spends, though I'd need to know what kind of venture you are planning to go into.

Book recommends:

Millionaire Fastlane - MJ Demarco

Key Person of Influence (Revised Edition) - Daniel Priestly

Zero to One - Key Person of Influence (Revised Edition)

I call Bullshit on this.

1) All your latest posts are copy/paste of this.

2) When the coins are changed out someone has to pay the tax. You or the “fund” that you supposedly created to give you the “loan”

3) What does this have to do with entrepreneurship. This is tax fraud...

Not sure what your end game is or if you are just trying to feel important online for some reason but I am 99% sure you did not make any money let alone $200k. I am also sure you did not do this as any normal person would know the details due to the fact it is $200k and their freedom on the line.

Or are you saying that you did a 1031 with a fake fund you created as you say you “control” the fund. Now you are in deeper than just tax fraud and into securities fraud.

Also you may want to read this..

https://www.fool.com/taxes/2018/01/07/36-of-bitcoin-investors-plan-to-commit-tax-fraud-t.aspx

These are the low quality posts that ruin this sub. Downvote if you want, but you know it's true.

OP puts literally 0 effort and expects a road map to success? Start with books, YouTube, or literally any other mediums. Start executing on your ideas, and come back with questions of problems you run into.

Lazy people like OP, will NEVER be successful starting a business.

​

​

Took me less than 4-5 seconds to find:

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-start-a-fashion-brand

I highly recommend Steve Blank's Udacity course for this. Udacity is freemium. Only tutors and some other add-ons require an upgrade.

His course is based on "the business model canvas". Here's a brief explainer.

Try installing Hotjar on your site (the free version). Especially before you do your next paid FB promotion. Also, look into the free version of Drift to communicate with customers when they visit - they might have questions you weren't expecting.

PS also install Google analytics and Facebook Pixel so you can generate similar audiences.

1000 hits is great for just starting but you need to really hunker down and find out what your revenue driving channels are. It could be Instagram / Blog posts / Facebook (organic or paid) / adwords etc - but you'll never know until you start tracking it.

https://www.hotjar.com

https://www.drift.com

> you can read 52 books in 52 weeks

I think it is kinda bad to look at reading as somekinda contest. Reminds me of having bookshelves in your Lambo garage in the Hollywood Hills.

I love to read. I love books. I probably read and own more books than most people, but that is 'most all "light reading" subjects compared to books on financial management/investing/entrepreneurship. It doesn't mean much that someone reads a lot of novels or books on Roman history. It isn't a big deal if a reader misses a minor detail in a book he's reading for pleasure.

When it comes to books like The Richest Man in Babylon or The Millionaire Next Door, you don't need to study them, but it is better to read them slowly, stop and think about them and fully internalize that mindset. These books don't tell you anything you don't already know intellectually, the important thing is to change your mindset and make their lessons into your actions.

Obvious one, but Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It helped changed the way I focus my energy.

A Passion for Success by Kazuo Inamori. Kind of a newer, Japanese version of Think and Grow Rich.

It goes for a lot of self-help or advice books.

I mean, Eric Ries who wrote the Lean Startup... he did found a startup to be fair, but it was IMVU. I bet he got more money and fame from the book than he did from IMVU, and I bet more aspiring entrepreneurs have read that book than have read Jeff Bezos' book (founder of Amazon), or Sam Walton's book (founder of Walmart).

I'm sure that Tim and Eric's books do have some insight and value, but it would be a far better use of your time to read books written by people who actually became wealthy and famous through the business they created, rather than reading books by people who became wealthy and famous mostly by writing books.

Go for a walk while listening to an audio book. Some library systems have audio books available for borrowing now, Audible isn't a bad price, or if you're somewhere in the world that neither is an option you may find some less than legal sources too. (Support the authors and people making the audio books if you can though!)

Getting some exercise will help clear your brain and there are so many awesome audio books around now. I suggest starting with The Power of Habit.

Trello - for organising nearly anything, from meeting agendas to product pipelines to ideas. You need to become a "power-user" though - there are so many hidden features that are incredibly useful.

Google Analytics - goes without saying

GoodTodo - the best ToDo list ever. Doesn't look like much but it has two bits of functionality that no other ToDo list app that I know of has. Watch the video on their site to understand.

Gmail Multiple Inbox + Custom hack - see here: http://www.howtogeek.com/136198/efficiently-manage-your-gmail-with-the-multiple-inboxes-lab/ - this changed my life!

Notepad - not the Windows app, but the real thing. There's something in writing things down the old fashioned way. Plus research has shown that you're far more likely to remember things that you've written down on paper.

Macbook Pro, two 24" screens and a mobile WiFi dongle with support for international roaming.

Here is a list I have collected from this subreddit. They aren't specific to any one type of business. Please let me know if there are any others people would recommend. Maybe we can start a list in the Resources area of the side-bar?

• The Lean Start-up - Eric Ries
• The Referral Engine - John Jantsch
• 4 Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss
• The E-Myth Revisited - Michael Gerber
• Duct Tape Marketing - John Jantsch
• Book Yourself Solid - Michael Port
• Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh
• Beyond Booked Solid - Michael Port
• Make it Stick - Chip Heath
• Start Something that Matters
• $100 Startup - Chris Guillebeau
• The Start-Up of you - Ben Casnocha, Reid Hoffman
• Conversion Marketing - Bryan Heathman
• The Goal - Eliyahu Goldratt
• The Zen of Social Media Marketing
• The Rebel Entrepreneur - Jonathan Moules
• Getting things done - David Allen
• Free Marketing - Jim Cockrum
• Good to Great - Jim Collins
• Built to Last - Jerry Porras
• Influencer: The Power to change anything - David Maxfield and Ron McMillan
• Founders at work - Jessica Livingston
• Uncommon Service - Frances Frei and Anne Morriss
• What got you here won't get you there - Marshalll Goldsmith
• Winning - Jack Welsh
• Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
• Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
• Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
• Imagine - How Creativity Works - Jonah Lehrer
• Influence - Robert Cialdini
• Integrity - Henry Cloud
• Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki
• Category of One - Joe Calloway
• The Greatest Trade Ever - Gregory Zuckerman
• Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
• Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill
• The Founders Dilemma - Noam Wasserman
• The Springboard - Stephen Denning
• This year I will - M. J. Ryan
• Start with Why - Simon Sinek

I paid $700 for a friend (veteran designer) to make one, and I got the 'friend discount'. Your logo is your brand. It is the only thing separating your product/service from an overseas equivalent. Invest time and money into a good brand, and it'll pay dividends throughout the life of your business.

If you're interested in finding a good designer for a logo, I'd hit up Dribbble. It's an invite-only site where designers post in-progress shots of their work. Find work you like, contact the designer, and get a good brand.

EDIT: Apparently, I am become Death, Destroyer of Companies. I regret nothing.

Uhh, Facebook deprecated HPHPc two years ago (mentioned in the article you linked had you bothered to read it instead of just running a hate on)... They now use:

http://hacklang.org/

Which is basically PHP++

PHP7, on the horizon, borrows heavily from Hacklang. The PHP ecosystem is now, basically, PHP7 and HACKLANG competing against each other, and tackling valid criticism from it's detractors. From this competition, PHP developers benefit. The PHP ecosystem has evolved heavily in the last few years and in no way can be said to "hold someone back," unless of course they don't know what they are talking about...

Regards,

I would say Tim Ferris's "The 4 Hour Work Week" is a great book for getting yourself into the entrepreneur mindset.

Also, "The Art of the Start 2.0" by Guy Kawaski is really great, he gives a lot of realistic and usable advice on start-ups, without all the business jargon.

"Zero to One" by Peter Thiel is another good one. His book really developed how I assess good start-up ideas from okay ideas.

"The Obstacle is the Way" by Ryan Holiday is great for preparing yourself for how demanding and challenging a start-up can be, and how you can handle problems in a more productive way (by seeing them as challenges instead of obstacles).

"The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell is really helpful in understanding how things go viral, which is what you want to happen for your start-up.

Lastly, if you look at other threads, you'll always see "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie come up. And for good reason. This book isn't strictly about start-ups, but rather, it teaches you a skill which is so important to your success: how to successfully cooperate with and deal with people. You will have to be charming and understanding and likable for people to buy into your mission and your product, so reading this book is definitely a good idea!

I love to read, so I could give you a million other book suggestions. But I have some advice: reading is great, and I definitely think you should always try to read and expand your mind. But now that I've started to actually work on my start-up, I realize that all that reading was just stalling. I'd tell myself, I need to read this book and this book, and THEN I'll be ready to start working. Books will never make you ready. You just gotta start working, and you'll figure it out as you go. That's how you learn. I say all this just in case you're like me, and you want to read everything you can before you feel ready.

Hope this helped!

On the side of balls in, full time entrepreneur here.

I wouldn't recommend it to everyone though. There's a good/popular book called So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport that explains well why it's better to start something as a side project, and only switch once you've gathered traction / proof that it's a good idea to switch into.

The cost of doing things as a side project is low and allows you to experiment to see what you like, what you're good at, and what works. While the book wasn't specifically written for entrepreneurs, it applies really well.

There is a lot about this in the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. And in general as humans we're averse to recognizing something as luck, but objectively it talks about how luck plays a huge part in most of the mega-successful people or businesses.

Trying to emulate that luck is pointless. So IMO stories of people who didn't get super lucky with the right place and right time and who are still finding a degree of success are far far more interesting and insightful.

lol. This story is all full of holes.

> By the time he was graduating, CoolTronics had between 6-10 employees and was doing over a million in revenue a year.

That's a 40% variance in headcount. I know exactly how many employees I have.

> Tyler continued to run CoolTronics in college, and today it is still well and thriving.

That's odd because Tyler is the only person who currently lists himself working at Cooltronics on LinkedIn. And the "executive leadership" listed on his website also don't seem to exist on LinkedIn--at least noone with those names ever employed at Cooltronics.

> Currently LoungeBuddy is pre-revenue. They are generating revenue, however unprofitable yet. They are still in negative cash flow. Tyler has told all his employees that he will not pay himself anything more than his rent, until they either become profitable or raise a formal round of funding. He currently pays himself the same as interns and will continue to do so until one of the two events happen.

Uh, yeah.... that's not how a successful businessman starts a new venture. That's how a broke college student does it.

I know this sounds stupid but if you can’t breathe, focus on getting your breathing right. Your feelings follow your body and then your body follows your feelings. If you interrupt the loop you can bring the system back into control.

Healthy body, healthy mind is right. I found the single best thing personally was identifying where my body was suffering and then working on improving each area. Posture, sugar, gut, whatever. Sleep is the hardest but I try to not chastise myself if I am getting nothing done and need to sleep to get my brain back and operating.

Also worrying about worrying is a mistake. It is like walking on a broken leg to fix it. Your meat brain is injured if you’re constantly anxious. You have to let the worrying part rest and recover.

https://www.amazon.com/At-Last-Life-Paul-David-ebook/dp/B007MEMDOS

Finally anxiety is what comes from thinking about the future and being afraid. Focusing on the present helps; mindful meditation is a simple way to practice focusing because you can do it anywhere, even standing in line at the store. Also writing down your thoughts in a daily journal or even todo list so you can then organize them puts you back in control of the future so you can let your brain relax that you have all these concerns under control.

I'd highly recommend you, and anyone who's interested, the book The Win Without Pitching Manifesto by Blair Enns.

​

The key take away is: professionals say 'no' often and with confidence. My client quality and relationships got much, much better once I started bluntly saying no to stupid requests. It's hard and requires a lot practice/nerve, but that's how you leave room for the good clients.

​

Thanks for sharing your story!

Read Measure What Matters by John Doerr. It's a meta-answer to your question, but useful nonetheless. Running a business is a series of experiments and treating it as such creates a robust methodology for growth, reacting to shocks, etc. I can't recommend this book more highly.

> check out Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler I placed an order for this.

It is part of the franchise. It doesn't have a restaurant.

I think competition is good. That means there is a market for more profit. I believe if you provide an excellent service, people will choose your business over others.

I think you just gave me an idea. I am thinking may be providing a simple app that user can review when they are checking out. Just an iPad/tablet near checkout counter where guest can leave a feedback or ratings. And those how gives 5 stars, I can show a message asking them to leave a good review on Facebook, Google or Tripadvisor. Just like an app prompting users to leave reviews in the app store. My hotel has like 3.9 stars ratings, but I want to improve it to 4.5.

I need to figure out Facebook, Google and Instagram marketing.

Please, I love to know more of your thoughts. It gives me more insights and I can learn more.

Thanks for the question. Wish I was there myself but not yet ;).

The average Millionaire is not what you think.

Thomas J. Stanley wrote "The Millionaire Next Door"

He highlights critical pieces of advice for any entrepreneur.

First income doesn't equal wealth. We see this a lot on r/entrepreneur that people have a lot of revenue but their margins are slim. Net Worth is what matters.

Also, work your budget. If you don't have a budget get one. You Have to do it. It's a pain but table stakes.

He also speaks about how where you live has an enormous impact on how you spend your money. The key is to live in a neighborhood where most people earn less than you.

And here's an interesting fact: 86% percent of “prestige/luxury” cars are bought by non-millionaires. If someone looks rich they probably aren't.

In the end, save money.

As a way of background I have newsletter where I share proven case studies of successful entrepreneurs. Many of them are quiet successful. If anyone's interested let me know and I can PM you the link. (I've gotten about 10 PM's asking for the link so I thought I would include it here.)

I was a bit surprised how the author didn't mention the scientific evidence that suggests our brains respond the same way whether we actually do an activity or think about doing the activity.

For example, if you're thirsty, you can quench your thirst in one of two ways: 1.) Drink water or 2.) Imagine yourself drinking water. The same parts of our brain that light up when we physically drink water are the same parts that light up when we think about drinking water. Of course your brain will eventually learn you never drank water and you'll be thirsty again, but you do trick your brain. What if we take out the tangible object here (water) with something intangible and/or complex (starting a startup)?

Let's go back to "motivational masturbation"; when you read a blog post on how to start your first startup and then read a bunch of responses on Quora about whether you should or shouldn't do a startup, then look at a guide for incorporating a business (but you don't do it yet, need to do more research)... all of that, to your brain, registers as "making progress on starting a startup" even though you know, truthfully, you haven't done anything of substance. So you just spent a few hours "researching" and used up all your willpower on something useless instead of something concrete to move you forward, like actually filling out the paperwork to incorporate or to start putting together a splash page to capture emails of interested users.

That's what the author is trying to warn against; motivational masturbation uses all the same, identical processes your body needs to actually complete your goals. You're simply trading one for the other. Stop masturbating, start fucking.

Sources: The following books "Willpower", "The Power of Habit", "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

More fun way to digest what I'm trying to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v-IMSKOtoE

“To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Here's one of my favorites from the 4HWW:

“It's lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for 'realistic' goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.”

-Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

Anytime I meet someone and they use the term "bro" with me, it immediately disqualifies them from me taking them seriously.

Glad to hear you had your epiphony, but it reads like every other god damn inspirational success shit that I've read in my life.

Plus, there's about a bazillion websites out there (now a bazillion and one) that tried to create the exact same concept but ran out of blog material after a few months, started posting inspirational quotes, then ran out of them too, then started posting articles stripped from article directories, then it eventually just died on the vine.

Reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack: "Oh, this is the worst-looking hat I ever saw. When you buy a hat like this, I bet you get a free bowl of soup, huh? [sees Judge Smails wearing the hat] Oh, but it looks good on you, though [rolls his eyes]."

BUT, I'm just an asshole on the internet and you should be mindful of where you get your criticism from. Perhaps you have already launched many successful businesses and are doing really well for yourself, but I didn't really pick that up from your article. It reads like someone just read "Think and Grow Rich" and just paraphrased some key concepts, put a contemporary spin on it, slipped in a few "high living" terms to make me think you are something that you're not (vacationing in italy and going on a cruise) and slapped it up to a website that is trying to attract a younger, more naive demo by strategically incorporating the term "Bro" into their marketing materials.

I wish you well, and hope this takes off for you.

Edit: From your website: "9 Ways To Create an Information Product With ZERO Expertise." Shortcuts, shortcuts, shortcuts.

I assume this is part of DO's Hatch program?

You are very limited to what you can do with the credits and likely can't "covert" to cash by renting out server space without a value added service built in. The point of the credit is to build your infrastructure on DO so that you stay with them as your company grows.

Their FAQ states credits aren't transferable and you cannot mine cryptocurrency. I'm sure the actual agreement is very clear as to how resources can be used.

You need to read (probably have a lawyer or incubator consultant do so as well) the agreement and find out what you can do that is not directly related to your core business.

Basically this.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/21/snapchat-has-a-patent-that-could-help-it-become-the-defacto-camera-app/snapchat-patent/

No other app opens up to the camera ready to go, as well has has a tap to take picture, hold down for video function.

One little fucking button on a screen is worth more than my entire life.

I read through all of the comments. I really appreciate the support from many in here (thank you for your kind words!!), and also I understand where some of the hate/criticism comes from.

I reached out to /u/the_bear_paw over DM so I can better understand where he's coming from.

If you don't want to see my posts, check out the Reddit Enhancement Suite's Ignore functionality.

And any feedback about the project or my stories, feel free to DM me or leave it here.

I'm 25 and if you asked me two years ago what idea I'd be working passionately on, I couldn't even give you an educated guess.

The best ideas come out of being exposed to problems. So, the more problems you are exposed to, the more potential $-making solutions you'll come across. Two years of deep exposure to my industry generated a ton of ideas for me to latch onto and test.

I suggest you just keep holding onto hope, and take jobs that are challenging and solve problems. Always keep looking for the next best thing until you know enough about something to come up with a good solution for it.

Also read: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

Trying hard to get my latest book off the ground, it's about the possibility of creating micro ventures for all those who want to enter the entrepreneurial domain but not in an all-in manner. So far, the reception has been great, but I trying to push it further.

I'm hesitant about using paid ads - with the price of $0.99, I'm getting $0.35 per sold copy. The ad would need to be insanely successful to earn any money.

That's why I'm trying to figure out some other ways to promote it before I move onto my next micro venture.

Another that he had recommended at one point is: Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

I'm a mechanical engineer, so a lot of this calls back on my classes, but it's a really interesting read. The writing style is clear, it focuses on the history of structural mechanics, old architecture, old weapons, definitely recommend.

I always found Ash Mauryas Running Lean a far superior book about lean startups than Eric Ries. Erics has great stories and examples. Ash shows you how to do it for your own business. It is more practical focused.

No list is complete without How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I know it gets thrown out there as a recommendation almost on a whim, but I PROMISE you it is 100% worth the read.

Also, The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

And

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

Also

Buy-ology by Martin Lindstrom.

The term Mastermind group comes from the seminal work Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill. If I remember right, he got the concept from Andrew Carnegie who surrounded himself with the smartest people he could in a sort of brain trust. That is why you hear the term used. It is basically what you are looking for.

In regards to #3, I'm an engineer on Postmark https://postmarkapp.com/. While we only do transactional email, we have great deliverability and straightforward pay for what you use pricing. Feel free to hit me up with any questions!

Not the same product. There is also this one and this one. Read the reviews - we designed ours to fix the problems with all of the above. Apple doesn't drop their prices because of Samsung/Android and we'd like to be the Apple in this category.

Dog walking (minimum investment for poop bags, leashes, etc) OR flipping items on Ebay/Craigslist.

And I'm all about the 2nd one and here's why:

• It teaches you negotiating (with little to no pressure on you) if you go to thrift stores, garage sales, etc. Though you could also go to stores and buy stuff that's 50% off and flip them for 3x the regular value - depending on the demand of the product.

• It teaches you sales copy. You could sell the same thing as everyone else, and writing the correct sales copy can be the HUGE differentiator - I suggest Neville Medhora's Kopywriting Blog

• It teaches you about sales and pricing (something EVERY business person struggles with. But for you it's easy. You find your item on ebay, look at how much others have sold for in the past, and depending on the condition of your item - you sell it within that range).

• There's little to no monetary investment to start. You can start small and get bigger ticket items later, as you get smarter in the game.

• It teaches you about presentation. It shocks me how BAD the images are for items listed online sometimes. Low light, blurry, there's crap laying around the item, it's dusty...Jeezus.

You're 15 so I'm sure you have a better aesthetic for photography and presentation than others older than you.

• The only tools you need are a laptop and a good internet connection OR your phone.

As an example of this, I bought inflatable emoji balls from Amazon - a pack of 12 for $12. I then turned around and sold them individually for $10 each on Craigslist and eBay. Craigslist surprisingly did the best and my best customers were grandmothers buying the balls for their grandkids who went CRAZY over them.

Who knew?...

So $120 off of a $12 buy-in. Doing this over and over again helped me pay off a 4-figure credit card.

Hope this sparked some ideas for you.

I favor the craftsman mindset over the 4-hour workweek approach, so I (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not find much value in Ferris's work. I've read 4-hour-workweek, some of his blog posts, seem some TED talks, and flipped through 'Tribe of Mentors, all of which I found mediocre. The biggest advocate of the craftsman mindset that I know of is Cal Newport. I've read his blog (studyhacks) and his book (So good they can't ignore you). I think his work tends to be better researched and more substantive. I recommend both.

I suspect that the differences between the two has a lot to do with where they come from. In my view, Ferris is still the salesman he was when he started out. Many of his strategies are great for salepeople - 'firing' bad customers, offloading customer support tasks, etc. However, its worth thinking about what he is selling here - and I think the core idea in Ferris's work is that you can make an easy buck. I don't know that this idea is worth buying, nor that he offers anything more valuable than a few productivity tips. Newport is an academic, and so his work is oriented more as an attempt to answer a question: what choices result in happy and successful careers. He started out looking for general trends in career satisfaction and success, and his books are reports of what he's found. Of course, he is still selling something - but I think he is selling something more valuable: empirically driven insight into meaningful work (the key insight, by the way, is that you need to adopt the crafstman mindset).

Don't know if we are actual millionaires yet because a lot of our portfolio is in real estate and prices are very volatile in our area but we are at least getting close. It was a pretty odd feeling when we realized we had more money than anyone in my family had ever had (that was only $200k).

It isn't as life changing as you'd like to think. While it's great to have the money and reduces the stress of knowing about the future I don't think it changes too much short term. After all, the reason most people gain that million is that they don't spend a lot of money.

As someone else posted the book The Millionaire Next Door is a good read and talks about how millionaires are not usually who you think of from movies.

• The Intelligent Investor

• Security Analysis

• Common stocks and Uncommon profits

• Quality of earnings

• Financial Statements: A Step-By-Step Guide

• You Can Be A Stock Market Genius

• Financial Shenanigans

• Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond

Those would get anyone started to do well. They are in no real order other than how the came into mind. One thing if it has not become clear is I deal mostly with value investing. So a lot of my book choices will reflect that. Aside from books directly related. Some that may help will be after you get through all of those books it just becomes about reading what you think helps the most. I read a lot of letters to shareholders and investors from fund mangers. I read a whole lot of yearly reports. News in the morning. I read three different papers. Also if you a undergraduate textbook in economics will help if you never read one before. As I grew in my understanding and confidence I started making my own strategies which combine a whole bunch of stuff I think works form a lot of proven ones. Right now I am reading a lot of computational finance books as that is my current fascination and would like to do something with it one day. One thing to note is the books above some are more beginner friendly than others.

Two books for source material...

• The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
• Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank

These books advocate and teach an iterative and systematic approach to startups that takes a lot of the hocus-pocus out of the equation.

Having worked as a founder of a startup for 5 years now, I see lots of people who have this view...

1. Great idea
2. ???
3. Successful company

The above books cover (2) in depth.

I'd also recommend bringing in business leaders, startup founders, and startup employees. However, think about what you want your kids to get out of the class. Is this class a business networking group, an academic understanding of startups, a practicum on startups (where the kids actually build a startup), or somewhere in between?

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Price History Chart and Sales Rank | FAQ

Agreed. Why put your friendships or your new venture at risk?

Instead - start learning how to hire people now. Think of it less as a waste of time/money, and more stress, but rather as an investment in learning how to build your business, from the hiring aspect. I've only heard horror stories from people who initially hired their friends, because at some point, the relationship had to be terminated. That said - I recommend reading "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz. It's got some good information on how you should view your business, and it's people.

>Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

Anybody that says this can't be taken seriously. Whatsapp has no clear business model and was looking and still is to be bought out. The reason for this type of blog is to say we won't serve ads, to ensure existing and new customers and will continue to look at growth strategy for purchase. Whatsapp won't serve ads, but the company that does buy them, more than likely will.

Messaging services like this are a commodity and other competitors are doing much better in the space of monetization. Advertising can be very effective, and anyone that dismisses ads without understanding what works for their audience can't be taken seriously. Example : Line a competing messaging app with around 60 mil in revenue Q1 (citation) . Sells virtual goods. Much of their virtual goods are branded (ads). Its incredibly effective and clearly what their user wants. So for this guy to say its wrong.. is wrong.

Before doing anything, please read this Paul Graham essay on "Don't Talk to Corp Dev" and then read the resulting comments on Hacker News.

Are you meeting with corporate development folks of any sort? Have you consulted a lawyer?

Things to be really (and I mean really) careful about at this stage:

• Giving away your methodology/business secrets, even inadvertently. You don't know what info the airlines have or don't have, you just know what you have and that they want it. If you watch Silicon Valley, one of the more recent episodes had a scene with VCs bringing in their "tech team" to evaluate the deal, and all they were really trying to do was get a copy of the algorithm or enough understanding to just build it themselves for free.

• The airlines might want to get you and your data cheap via acquihire. Begin researching what that looks like if you are not familiar. Remember, you are small still, so they think they can get you cheap early on.

• If ALL the airlines suddenly want to talk to you, be very cognizant of which airline owns the others.

• If the airlines see value in you, and you don't give them some form of access to what they want (paid or otherwise), you likely will create direct competitors or provide them an incentive to get what they want elsewhere.

Side note...are you on FlyerTalk? Didn't see the logo on your site, but they would love you over there.

Kudos on all the great work, the site looks killer and it looks like you've captured lightning in a bottle. Would love to know if your site design was an off-the-shelf theme or all custom front-end. I see a lot of long form home pages these days, but yours is nice, clean and with minimal animations that contribute to the presentation rather than detract or hijack it.

>Hey, author here. My logic is usually that an NDA is a restriction on me, so I won't usually sign one unless I'm getting something in return. E.g. I'm happy to sign one in the context of a piece of paid work. >Most people are quite receptive when I explain the above and that in practice I don't believe that ideas really get stolen. Well not (web/app)tech startup ideas anyway. I've never had what you'd call a "bad" reaction to it and in about 75% of cases, people have then gone on to explain their idea.

source.

Heyo. I work at Less Annoying CRM. Were it not for the "free" requirement, I suspect we'd be a good fit for you, but our tool costs $10/month. So that's too bad, but I can at least tell you some other options.

Highrise is a common one. It's made by 37signals, who are startup thought leaders of a sort. It's very simple and doesn't let you tweak it much, but if all you're looking for is tracking basic interactions, it's not a bad option. The problem is that you're limited to 250 contacts on their free plan, if I recall correctly.

Base CRM is probably the most common simple and free option. I think their free option offers unlimited contacts, but limits your "deals." So if you're really just doing interaction tracking, I suspect that might be a good fit for you.

Zoho is likely more than you need, though they have a free tier as well. I hear complaints about their customer service all the time, but if you're tech savvy and doing pretty basic stuff, that might not be a concern of yours. Also, their system is ugly. You can decide how much that matters.

Insightly is one I don't know a ton about, but my impression of them is better than something like Zoho. I think they have a free tier that limits you to a few thousand contacts. People tend to like their Gmail integration.

Shameless plug part 2: if you want to poke around in our system you can try a live demo here. Best of luck on your search. There are lots of options, so it can be a bit daunting!

It's funny how you keep making accusations out of thin air and then keep demanding citations from my end.

Here - http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/examine.com - according to them, 5.5%. And even then it's overstated.

If you had any actual experience, you would know redditors rarely buy things. I have nothing more to say about your conspiracy theories (which is funny because phrakture and CharlesPoliquin actually both dislike me a lot).

When people say "Create great content", it can be frustrating.

Here's an actual "create great content" process:

• Find a competitor that seems to rank well and is creating content
• Enter their site into http://buzzsumo.com to see which of their content gets the most exposure based on social shares, links, etc. This is how you can start to define "great", at least re: how the market reacts.
• Try to spot trends after doing this with a few competitors. For example, if you thought you would write about "How to Do SEO on Your Website" but noticed that competitors get great results with case study style posts (i.e. "The Exact Content Strategy We Used to Boost Organic Search by 73% in 90 Days"), then use that as a guideline.

I'm also 20, and I started a business when I was 17 and it had a mild success. Even though I netted a profit from it, it made me think that all my businesses would eventually fail. One thing I did that really helped me get back into the entrepreneurial mindset was by reading a few books.

Two books I think are short enough to invest the time into and have a really great value in reading:

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Entreleadership - Dave Ramsey

Also I spent time reading through the first 400 or so top posts here, and I'm still actively reading and learning from any resource that I can. Education is so important to me, because it shows how starting a successful business is possible for anyone. Everyone starts out like you, and the only difference between successful people and non-successful people is the amount of knowledge and drive that person has. If you're willing to spend the time to learn the material (which is all available online), and have the determination you can do it.

Here's a recent post that links to a great list of the 50 best business books.

Specifically for entrepreneurship and related skills, I liked:

• The Innovator's Dilemma (as well as The Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next)
• The Millionaire Fast Lane
• Built to Last
• The Tipping Point
• The Art of the Start
• Guerrilla Marketing
• Positioning
• 4-Hour Workweek
• E-Myth Revisited
• Think and Grow Rich

Edit: I'd just like to add that, while it's definitely important to read some of the great business books out there so that you develop a solid baseline understanding of the most effective ways to think about modern business concepts, I've found that after some point, the law of diminishing returns starts to come into play. At that point, business books are the most useful when your purpose for them is either motivation or to lessen a specific gap in knowledge that pertains to your specific business. At least in my experience, most other business books will start putting you into a state of analysis paralysis.

Final Thoughts: By all means, read the great business books listed above and in the other comments in this thread, but just keep this in mind: No book will ever tell you that elusive secret to becoming a millionaire. If one did, a million other readers would jump on the opportunity and there'd be no opportunity left. The gap between idea conception and idea execution is the space of opportunity where successful entrepreneurs are made.

Jeez what a bunch of contrarians in here. Obviously it's not a question about a vase!

I used to work for a small online business where such a question would be relevant. A few things I'd try:

• Put a few of our products on sale
• offer a free download as a package deal
• try to promote the sale with blogs about the industry
• cold email campaign past custom job clients with an ad about custom project work to see if any would bite on a new job
• do a one-off lifeline project like Airbnb's obama o's or the infamous FedEx blackjack hail mary

Tell us more about the watches.

What makes these watches reliable?

What kind of movement do they have?

Are they water resistant?

Where are they manufactured?

What kind of warranty comes with them?

What does your watch offer that justifies a price premium over something you could buy for <$10-$15/per on alibaba and sell at a profit for $30-$40?

Basically, you need to explain the value proposition for your customer, as you're entering a very crowded field in the middle of the price range.

Help us understand what we're getting for our money, that we couldn't get for $7.41 including free shipping off aliexpress.

Not trying to be a jackass here, but most folks spending $100+ on a watch want some basic information about what justifies the price, so the better job you can do of explaining that, the more likely your product is to sell.

These have been available in China for years. The only picture I see of yours is the one on Thunderclap. I assume you have a design patent for the way your card opens which is unlike the others offered below. I just don't understand what makes yours stand out. Is there something that differentiates yours from the ones below?

92,000+ results

don't just sit there, hustle all the time. Everyone who walks past ask them something like "Do you buy new name brand golf clubs?" "yes" "Have you considered the cost savings of buying used brand name golf clubs?"

EDIT: The incubator I belong to had a speaker on "going to your first trade show" hosted by the founder of www.tradeshowsamurai.com Here is the power point. Its awesome https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9Dqrn3uMzbpSDIzMlNqa3dhZU0/edit?usp=sharing

Why use gif? HTML5 supports video via the <video> tag. Pixel for pixel video is going to be less KB. It has good support - http://caniuse.com/#feat=video

Unless you want to create a slided gif which only changes action 4x per second or so, then Photoshop or Fireworks can be used with screenshots.

I don't have a background in marketing, and I am only just getting to grips with seo, email, social media related marketing. However I would also add to your list the Moz Begineers guide to SEO. Someone else on this forum stated it teaches you 70& of what you need to know about SEO. It can be found here - https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

>The queries do go through JS. So showing that you hit the url doesn’t necessarily mean that you hit our servers with that request.

lol It absolutely does - you would see a log on your webserver with the request. If I hit namecheap.com?stuff=true its gonna show up in your logs regardless of whether you fire other requests off with JS or not. Unless of course you guys aren't looking at the actual server logs and some other type of log, but then your whole story starts to fall apart here. This isn't the only request either, I have tons of them in my history for that domain.

>we have full actual logs to prove this and would be more than happy to do so in a more official way such as in front of a judge or court of law.

Lol, Is this supposed to be some sort of thinly veiled legal threat? How is a copy of a text file that could be edited proof of anything at this point?

>
On the other hand, this still has nothing to do with your original post which claims we somehow showed you an inflated price for a domain that didn't exist.

No, but I can't prove that since I didn't screenshot before I bought it elsewhere. What it does prove though is that you guys were dishonest about having no record of the query. Which of course I knew since I searched for it multiple times.

This book will save you: The Lean Startup.

It did for me. My first company, I spent over a year trying to perfect a website, expecting the crowds to rush in when I release it to the world. Nothing happened. This book teaches you the proper framework for building a product and launching.

All general idea books are pretty meh tbh. Like Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Work Week, or Think and Grow Rich, gives you the mentality but not the fucking tools. You want a good Entrepreneural book? Pick up Dummies guide to Photoshop or 101 Excel Formulas or How to Build Click Funnels

Initiating and managing product development. Companies throw piles of money at software engineering teams or digital agencies or try to buy their way into integrated solutions but never really understand how to nurture and guide a product engineering methodology. Sorry but reading The Lean Startup and hiring a couple viciously competitive Stanford MBAs will not solve the problem.

Great share Tobias.

I have read Predictably Irrational and second your opinion that every entrepreneur needs to read it.

P.S. It was shared previously too. https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/358a2x/the_psychology_of_pricing_a_gigantic_list_of/

Sounds like your brother has real talent! Also, you sound like a great supportive brother. :)

For your gift: It sounds like he already has some of this down, but the book "The Lean Startup" should serve him very well! If someone had given it to me before I learned about it, I would have hugged the life out of them after reading it!

Not meant a sly remark, but something to seriously consider: Maybe your parents should watch this http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_herold_let_s_raise_kids_to_be_entrepreneurs.html.

Further advice:

• Having connections is key, key, key! In his current business he would've not gotten off the ground without you. There will always be someone when you look back, who were absolutely critical for the business to succeed.
• While not a necessarily, it may serve him extremely well to know a craft. I'd suggest programming because there is so much potential, and well, I like it. And no, it is not too early to learn, especially given that he's smart and goal orientated. I somewhat regard only starting when I was 16.
• He may have success now, but when he fails, which he will eventually, remind him how big a portion of the task is based on luck. The only things we can do is to maximize our luck, detect bad luck early, and most importantly, where others lose hope keep trying our luck.

Edit: Oh, and psychology suggest that you may want to appreciate his hard work, rather than his smarts or talents. That would keep him from getting lazy like me :)

"The E-Myth Revisited" is a great book and underscores everything renoirm just said. Another great rule of thumb is, if you can't leave your company for a week at a time without it collapsing around you... you have a job, not a business.

Economics & Investing

Freakonomics By Steven D. Levitt

More Money Than God. By Sebastian Mallaby

The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and J.P Morgan Invented the American Super economy. By Charles Morris

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. By Michael Lewis

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. By Edwin Lefevre

This time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Carmen M. Reinhart

Drug Crazy: How we Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out. By Mike Gray

Come Into My Trading Room: A Complete Guide to Trading. Alexander Elder

Wealth Mechanic. By Max Eames

Economyths. By David Orrell.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science. By Charles Wheelan

50 Economics Ideas: You really need to know. By Edmund Conway

Student to CEO: 97 Ways to influence your way to the top in Banking and Finance. By Simon Dixon

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. By Peter Fisher

How and Economy Grows and Why It Crashes. By Peter Schiff

The Little Book of Commonsense Investing. By John Bogle

The Essential Buffett: Timeless Principles for the New Economy. By Robert Hagstorm

The 3+1 Plan: The Insiders Way to Achieve Financial Freedom. By Brett Alegre-Wood

The Naked Trader. By Robbie Burns

Ponzi Cheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend. By Mitchell Zuckoff

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the rise of modern finance. By Ron Chernow

You learn from your experiences. As long as you can fit it into your life, why not? You'll be several decades ahead of the rest of us, ha ha.

Here's a link to someone in a similar position along with the advice he got: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-potential-low-cost-businesses-that-can-be-started-and-operated-by-a-teenager

If you don't have the license to use them, then it's a huge YES! However, there are some websites that offer non-copyrighted images that you can use, just make sure to read the terms and conditions before using them :https://pixabay.com/images/search/pokemon/

Ok man (or woman). Sorry you're pissed but I know I'm not doing anything wrong. Spam means posting something that is irrelevant and unwanted. I've never had a post removed from this subreddit and loads of people like our stuff.

If you know ANYTHING about running an internet startup, you know how fickle and unreliable reddit and hackernews traffic is. If you think I'm posting here for money or am building our company from the traffic from sites like this, then well you're crazy. I do it because I LOVE reddit, talking to our founders, and am so proud of our team's work that I wanna show it off.

We run thousands of dollars a week in ads, consistently pump out high quality content, run free events, have tons of word of mouth traffic and intro our community members to our speakers when possible. THAT'S how you grow a company...not from Reddit.

Yes, I run a company and we use content so people learn about our product, but even if you don't buy anything we're selling (99% of the visitors pay nothing) you can still learn a ton from the content we work tirelessly to create.

Here's my linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/sam-parr/54/659/964 And here's my facebook: https://www.facebook.com/parrs

EDIT After looking at your username, it looks like you're the mod of /r/bustyasians. Now I understand why your username is /u/18andover. So I don't blame you for not wanting to post your Linkedin account.

If you have a problem, contact me directly and we can discuss.

How about you post yours here...if you're so high and mighty.

Have a great weekend,

-Sam Parr

Get over yourself.