PostRanger's Entrepreneurship Stream

Converse with your customers

When marketing your product or service don’t forget to converse with your customers.

Good marketing should be a conversation because it:

• Gives you valuable feedback on what you’re doing well and what you could be doing better.
• Helps you develop ideas on how to improve your product and discover new opportunities you might not have realized
• Allows the customer to become part of the process by allowing him/her to express concerns and needs not being addressed
• Promotes innovation by allowing the entrepreneur to anticipate the changing needs of the market through a more intimate relationship with customers

Read more on the benefits of conversation as an important component of marketing here.

Photo Credit: Scott Liddell, MorgueFile

10 reasons for shoestring startups

When starting a company large or small it’s important to keep expenses down.

Here are 10 reasons to keep your business start-up (whether online or off) lean and mean at least in the early years.

1. If you can cobble it together on a home PC, there's probably no reason to take $1 million in Venture Capital to launch

2. That $300,000 you've got down for third year earnings in your big professional looking business plan isn't in the bank yet. You and your SBA advisor just made it up, remember?...

(More)

Photo Credit: Mary R. Vogt, MorgueFile

Entrepreneurship at PostRanger

PostRanger.com’s Entrepreneurship stream is all about the very special people who create businesses and help grow the economy.

This stream is for entrepreneurs and entrepreneur wannabes. We’re interested in posts including:

• personal success stories
• interviews
• profiles of products and services
• musings
• tips
• guides
• advice
• news

And just about anything else you can think of to interest the beginning or successful entrepreneur.

Becoming a guest author at postranger.com is easy. Just e-mail us to request a personal invitation specifying the stream or streams you would like to participate in.

When you receive your invitation, take a few minutes to sign up for your free guest author account and start posting. There’s no cost and no limit to the number of contributions you can make.

If you’ve got a personal blog or homepage just link back to it with every entry and share some of the community’s growing traffic. Sign up for your free account today.

Photo Credit: Phaedra Wilkinson, MorgueFile

Join the local Chamber of Commerce and make the most of it

Every small town has a chamber of commerce, but how do you use your chamber of commerce? How do you get the most from it?

Find out what services your chamber of commerce offers.

These are things to ask about when you visit the local chamber of commerce office.

• Almost every chamber of commerce does referrals. When a person asks the chamber about a type of business, the chamber refers them to a member business.
• Many chambers offer some publicity for your business, through a newsletter, website, or brochures.
• Chambers offer local business news and updates, either through their own newsletters and websites, or through the informal connections you make there.
• Most chambers are active on legislative issues and give you a chance to advocate in a group for small business issues. State chambers tend to be focused on big business issues, but local chambers vary.
• Some chambers have group membership benefits available, like insurance, discounts, or other services.
• Your chamber may present educational workshops, speakers, trainings and leadership programs.
• Good chambers tend to create events to build community and business activity, like festivals, car shows, recruiting fairs and town-wide sales.
• Larger chambers may offer business counseling to help you get started in business or solve problems in your existing business.

Use your chamber as a connection point.

Even fairly large small town chambers don't do everything. Hopefully, they should know all the other players in your local market and be a hub of connections.

While the size of your chamber depends largely on the size of your town, the quality of your chamber depends largely on the people. If you don't have a great chamber, get involved in improving it. What if you have a really rotten chamber? Try the next bigger neighboring city or see if you have a county or regional chamber.

Treat it as a long term investment. What you put in today in dollars or in time will pay off, but it will probably be far down the road in ways you don't expect.

Becky McCray is a small town entrepreneur. She shares small business ideas at Small Biz Survival.

New Business Pitch Opportunities on the Web

The Web offers entrepreneurs new opportunities for raising finance, publishing their needs to a wide audience. New sites coming on line all the time. Care is needed not to list your business on 'scammy' sites, but the surprising thing about entrepreneurship, is the serendipity of it. By casting your net wide you may catch some interesting fish. Of course you will plan, formally or even on the back of an envelope, but by  putting your ideas out there on the Net, you may have some welcome surprises. Before checking out financing, though, be sure about just how little money you really need for the startup and figure how best to plan. A visit to Savvy Business Planning would help.

A recently launched example of a Web-based means of presenting your business plan is vator.tv, as in 'elevator pitch', a professional network for ideas and finding finance and other opportunities, through video. Vator asks, "What's your pitch?" and then invites you to make a three minute video. It was created by Bambi Francisco, ex Dow Jones MarketWatch and is backed by angel investors with PayPal, MySpace and Google pedigrees. It went live in June 2007.

Another example is Raise Capital - an online community, where entrepreneurs can showcase their business ideas and capital needs to investors. They have three levels of posting possible from $29.95 a month with just text to $49.95, if you want streamed video as well. The investors are not named, but they will contact you if they are interested. A couple of months trial would not break the bank.

Social networking buzz is high right now, but have you thought of using that route for raising finance? The Go Big Network is one place to try. It is an on-line marketplace that connects the startup and small business community and allows startup companies, investors, advisers, job seekers and service providers to post requests for help on-line and have those requests routed to other members of the Network who can help them.

Yet another potential funding source, is the Lending Club - a social networking venue which opened to Facebook users in May this year and closed its first loan in early June. It is an online lending community where people borrow and lend money, bypass the banks and get better rates. It can be used for startups as well as personal loans. It is one of the new, quickly growing breed of Person-to-Person (P2P) financial operations. For a fuller description and listing, see the article on Person-to-Person Business Finance at work.com.

New Mexico Angels fund magazine, tech firm

A New Mexico investors’ group will provide $450,000 in combined funding to a Rehobath-based lifestyle magazine and a Los Alamos biotechnology firm marking heightened activity by the group this year in working with entrepreneurs.

New Mexico Business Weekly reports the New Mexico Angels have announced a $250,000 investment in Acoustic Cytometry Systems, Inc., maker of technology for the fields of life science, clinical diagnostics and industry.

The group will give another $200,000 to Land Rover Lifestyle magazine, a publication dedicated to owners and enthusiasts for the famed SUV’s.

The New Mexico Angels was founded in Spring 1999 and by 2004 its members had made investments totaling $2.5 million mostly in local technology firms. For details about the application process for entrepreneurs check here…