How to bootstrap your business

Bootstrap entrepreneur creates bootstrap resource: holiday profile (Part 1)

 

We continue our holiday season bootstrap profiles with the story of Gourab Nanda from BootStrapMe.com:

• Nanda created My Business Assistant as much because of his own desire to bootstrap a business as to create a resource for other entrepreneurs.
• My Business Assistant has given even the small one man bootstrapping operation the ability to compete with the big boys by providing back office functions at a low low price.
• As illustrated by the imaginary TV commercial in the BootStrapMe posts, My Business Assistant performs a unique function for bootstrap startups.
• He’s created a back office that isn’t attached to your office and neither is any of the overhead.
• Gourab’s service offers a wide variety of features ranging from a toll free number your customers can call to reach his back office service to conference calls for up to 32 people.
• There are many more features My Business Assistant offers, depending on the business package chosen.
• For example, discounts on legal fees, secretarial services and offshore project management functions.
• Virtual assistance service, website design, 24/7 online receptionist service are only some of these.
• And there are even services to aid with global business, particularly overseas companies seeking a presence in the U.S.

  Read more about Gourab’s innovative enterprise and how it was created in our…

  (Next Post)

Joy to the world: Another bootstrapping profile

GOLDEN AGE CHRISTMAS TREE ORNAMENTS, originally uploaded by David Zellaby.

In founding her company, Strappity-do-da, entrepreneur Shelli Styles was more interested in doing good than in making a huge profit for herself:

• Shelli started with a goal to help her husband’s impoverished relatives in South America
• Her challenge was to create a sustainable business in Santiago de Cali, one of the most troubled and impoverished regions in Columbia
• For her product, Shelli selected a handmade beaded bra strap made by local artisans in the community that could be sold in the States to those who admired the beauty of the product and were moved by Shelli’s cause.
• Back home, Shelli found her product gathered a group of volunteers so enthusiastic that they acted as a volunteer sales force even modeling for her website to help get the company off the ground.
• Contrary to typical business practice but common in the strategy of many bootstrappers, Shelli didn’t bother with a business plan to get her started focusing instead on selling her product and leaving planning for future expansion ‘til later.
• Her approach worked as the message behind her enterprise, lifting women out of poverty, took hold and customers were willing to spend on the quality of her product and the socially conscious goal it represented
• Socially conscious entrepreneurship is a growing market with more business founders and customers interested not only in the product but the values it represents.

Happy Holidays!   

VA venture: Holiday bootstrapper profiles

 

For the next in our series of bootstrap profile links from BootStrapMe.com for the Christmas/Hanukah, the story of virtual assistant Denise Aday and Aday VA Solutions.

Back in 2006, Denise was laid off from her job, something many more readers may unfortunately be familiar with this Holiday season:

·        A dream come true. Though many might not react to loosing a job in this way, Denise saw it as an opportunity, and perhaps the nudge she needed to get into entrepreneurship

·        Looking for a niche. She chose a business in a going field that fit her existing skills and cost little to get started.

·        The VA boom. Denise wasn’t alone in her venture. Outsourcing of assistant services has become an efficient way to save time and money worldwide.

·        The ultimate bootstrap. Denise needed little money to get started. She had almost no overhead working from home and some overtime and a severance package her husband had received kept her going until her launch.

·        The next new thing. Her new venture has become part of a new trend of outsourcing and is not only a bootstrap business but a tool for other entrepreneurs seeking to outsource functions and get rid of overhead.

Holiday bootstrapping profile posts

 

It's that Holiday season and for those who already began celebrating Hanukah Sunday, I thought we might begin a series of eight special holiday posts running right through Christmas as well.

These bootstrapper profiles come from a previous blog I edited called BootStrapMe.com for the Creative Weblogging network.

To begin, let’s revisit the story of Santa Barabara entrepreneur Cara O'Callaghan, who made her name with a series of maternity T-shirts for expectant moms.

Learn from the links below how Cara:

• Launched her exciting new venture with a small investment and plenty of creativity.
• Used the resources of a local entrepreneurship program for women in her area for help on her venture.
• Navigated the difficult financing waters with the tenacity of a bootstrapper.
• Paid for rising costs with revenue from her company instead of taking out loans or seeking other financing
• Used creative marketing strategies like sending her designs free to celebrities and reaping the benefit of the low cost advertising this provided.
• Launched a new and unique line of infant ware built on a similar concept.

Watch for another Holiday post on bootstrapper profiles, coming soon.

Why feedback is crucial to bootstrappers

JellyBean Feedback, originally uploaded by oskay.

So why is taking feedback, even harsh criticism of your product or service, so critical?

We’ve spent the past five posts looking at how NOT to handle feedback from users, whether they are paying for your service or not.

But, especially towards the beginning of your venture, just what benefit does feedback give you?

Here are some thoughts:

• It’s a simple way to test your product. In “The Art of Bootstrapping” Guy Kawasaki explains that, in addition to the importance of finding customers, getting your product out into the market tells you what works and what doesn’t.

When your product or service is “good enough,” get it out because cash flows when you start shipping…By shipping, you'll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix.

• It’s a great way to add service people will pay for. In an interview with Inc.com, bootstrapper Greg Gianforte explains:

"This is an iterative process…[The customer] says, 'Uh, that does what your data sheet said, but we really expected this.' Well, that's good input. You could say, 'Well, you signed up for that data sheet. You have to take that.' Wrong answer. You go and put those features in."

• It’s an opportunity to explain more about your product or service and how it works. Turn feedback into not only a chance to identify where or how your product or service is lacking and what extra features are needed, but also a platform from which to educate customers and explain more about what you do and why.

• It’s a chance to spread good will. Entrepreneurs, particularly bootstrappers, who are able to give their customers a great experience and they will have an added incentive to talk about what you’ve done for them. Unfortunately, as we know, there is another side to all this…

• Word of mouth works both ways. Consider the title of Pete Blackshaw’s book “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000”. I spotted this title at Barnes & Noble last night and thought immediately about my experience with Flickr. (As you can see at the top of this post, I finally figured out the problem with photo posting from Flickr all by myself. I NEVER heard back from the company.)

How NOT to respond to feedback (Part 5)

 

(Continued from Previous Post)

 

Up to this point, we’ve seen an example of how a larger company, Flickr in this case, handled a concern I had about not being able to post photos using my account.

It’s important to note that another service, TypePad, which supports both “How to bootstrap your business” and the PostRanger network, was much quicker to respond, even though the problem was certainly not theirs.

I got a message from helpful *ginevra, community manager for Six Apart, the company that created TypePad, assuring me: let me know if you're still having TypePad issues - we're happy to help out. :)

However, after the last series of messages from Flickr, I heard nothing more for at least seven days after which I tried restating the same request for help and got pretty much the same set of responses I got earlier, from a different customer representative.

Now there’s a couple of points to make about all this:

• While TypePad is a paid service, my Flickr account is free
• Certainly I can understand that a company being paid to provide a service might be more responsive than one that is not
• Flickr is part of Yahoo! which I understand has experienced some problems with the economic downturn.

However…

·        Flickr, like TypePad, is marketing as much a community as a service and plenty of other free communities (Yahoo!’s own MyBlogLog, for example) are much more responsive even with their nonpaying users

·        The users are part of the community’s success and clearly without them there would be no community, so allowing them to become frustrated and decide not to use the product or service is clearly not in the company’s best interest.

(Continued Next Post)

How NOT to respond to feedback (Part 4)

 

Photo: Rich DuBose, MorgueFile

 

(Continued from Previous Post)

To continue our story about customer/user feedback with Flickr, I had asked for technical help and got an automated response.

 

O.K. no biggie, I figured and waited patiently until the follow up message came about a day later.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.

I apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing when trying to blog your Flickr photos.

We'll be happy to look into this matter for you. To do so, we'll need

the following information:

- a detailed description of the exact steps taken that led to the

problem you're experiencing

- the full and exact text of any error messages you received

- the web address of the page you are seeing the issue on (your blog)

If you have any other questions, please feel free to reply to this

email.

Thank you again for contacting us.

Regards,

Marisa

Flickr Customer Care

This was an automated message too, but sounded somewhat more hopeful. I wrote back explaining my problem and the fact that I had already checked with TypePad to make sure it wasn’t their problem and got this response (again about a day later):

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Member Support.

I have escalated your email to a senior representative in an effort to obtain the best answer. Please allow some time for a follow-up reply to your question.

In the meantime, please feel to check out our online FAQs:

http://www.flickr.com/help/faq

as well as our Forum:

http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/

If you have any other questions, please feel free to reply to this email.

Thank you again for contacting us.

Regards,

Flickr Member Support

(Continued next post)

How NOT to respond to feedback (Part 3)

 

Photo: Dave Watts, MorgueFile

(Continued from Previous Post)

 

Again onward with our continuing series on how NOT to handle feedback from your users/customers, recall this issue remains important to bootstrappers who use this valuable feedback to improve what they do.

 

So the question was if the trouble with being unable to post photos from my shiny new Flickr account did not rest with my TypePad account just who could help me set things to rights.

 

I posed this exact question to Flickr Customer Care and got the following automated response:

 

Just a quick email from Team Flickr to let you know that we've successfully received your recent Help by Email query and we hope to respond shortly.

 

We'd also like to take an opportunity to remind you that one query is sufficient and multiple queries regarding the same issue make the Magic Donkey cry.

 

Lastly, you may not be aware that our FAQs and forums are full of help goodness:

 

The Flickreenos

 

(Continued Next Post)

How NOT to handle feedback (Part 2)

 

Photo: Charlie Wrenn, MorgueFile

 

(Continued from previous post)

So to continue our series of posts on how NOT to handle feedback, one day while trying to post a photo here at How to bootstrap your business, I got the following error report from Flickr:

It looks like Typepad's Atom interface is down. Try again later.

Wanting to give my cool new photo community the benefit of the doubt, I first checked with my hosting and platform provider TypePad to see what they had to say. Here's their response:

Hi-

TypePad's Atom feed is working correctly. Typically this is a false error from Flickr where Flickr is not able to connect to TypePad. We recommend contacting Flickr directly or checking back again in a couple [hours].

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Jen

TypePad Technical Services

See what happened by reading the (Next Post)…

How NOT to handle feedback (Part 1)

 

Photo: Sebastian, MorgueFile 

 

Back in November, I mentioned the importance of responding to feedback.

Especially for bootstrappers, this response is crucial, since it helps entrepreneurs figure out what features they need and don’t need in their products.

Now, here’s an example of how NOT to handle feedback and proof that even larger firms sometimes don’t do it right, or perhaps how larger firms can sometimes loose the responsiveness that helped them become great in the first place.

Around this same time, I had just started using Flickr to post Creative Commons photos to my blog.

(See a great interview with Client Development Lead for the company Eric Costello at Stake Ventures about how well the company did at following the user's lead in the beginning.)

Read what happened that made me change my mind about the Flickr experience in the next post…

 

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