Business Ideas

I would like to note that my ideas make me sound like I am 12 years old but that this is not the case.

First Idea (and probably the best idea):

I would like to institute some sort of subscription based media service. The model I have in mind could probably be used for a number of things but I had comic books specifically in mind. With tablets becoming much more prevalent, the idea of digital comic books has become more viable. There is a great digital comic book provider already, however they have a payment plan very similar to that of printed comics. I would like to provide an on-line subscription based model to digital comics. 

Second idea:

I was thinking of a kids bubble gum line where the flavors choice would change every few months. Consumers would have to log on-line and vote what new flavors they would like to see put in as replacements. All of the flavors would be developed by flavor specialists but voted into production by voters or consumers. Consumers may even be able to vote or contribute in some way to packaging design as well.

Third idea:

I was thinking of a dog sitting/walking website. This would be similar to that care.com website were you can find certified babysitters but it would be for dogs. These would be trusted individuals willing to walk or care for your dog. I may require them to validate that they have been a dog owner at one time. However I also think that it would be cool if individuals interested in owning certain dog breeds, could use this site to "try out" certain breeds by walking or sitting for owners of a particular breed.

How to be a Ent. in 5 pages!

Our first reading assignment was the first 5 pages of "The Technology Entrepreneur Guidebook" which I was putting off for a while, but if you blink then you have read it. In the reading it talks about what qualities an entrepreneur needs to have. Most of the qualities are similar to what a lot of other reading materials have been eluding too. Passion, commitment and focus are all must haves! The odd thing about this reading material is their scare tactics on the first page. They toss out statistics that basically say that you have the odds stacked against you and as a entrepreneur you need to be prepared to fail. I am not really sure what the motive of this is, are they trying to scare the people that don't have what it takes to be an Ent. away? Or are the trying to challenge those that do have what it takes? Like saying to them, "look at how much of a champion you will be if you succeed!" In my opinion I think a good Ent. needs to be competitive, and by telling them you're going to fail will just make them want to prove you wrong. Our professor went on to say that the scary statistics may even be a little generous for today's market.

All and all I feel like reading about how to be an Ent. is interesting but at the same time annoying. It gives some really cool advice, most of which I think can be adopted for a lot of things besides business, but at the same time they make it sound like your going to have to go through the Herculean trials to be successful. Why does the Predator visit Earth every 1,000 years? So that "one in 6,000,000 high-technology business ideas can end up a IPO." Despite all the reading, my opinion is starting to be that if you want to be an Ent., all you really need is a dang good idea and the passion not to give up on it.

Eric Hanberg

We had a quest speaker come into the class today to talk about entrepreneurship. Eric Hanberg is an entrepreneur himself. He has engaged in a number of business opportunities over the years some being in the realm of non-profit, but mainly he is a writer and self publisher. Eric brought a lot of great advice to presentation on what it takes to be an entrepreneur. However, I took most of his advice as life advice rather than business advice. Its seems as though a lot of  the qualities that it takes to be an entrepreneur would benefit anyone throughout all of life's stages.

One of the things that Eric mentioned was not being afraid to take risks. This is probably the number one property that entrepreneurs need. Eric elaborated on this idea by stating that the new laziness is a fear of failure. He talked about a friend of his that was a photographer, to whom he suggested putting an ad a Craig's list for photo services. His friend however was to afraid to even post. I really latched on to this idea because it is all about putting yourself out there. What's the worst that could happen? No one will want your photos? Oh well, but what if they do? Its seems as though entrepreneurs are great at finding something the love doing and coming up with a way to get paid for it. I plan on trying to adopt this ideal and put myself out there more.

Another thing that I thought was really cool about Eric was how he took his love for writing and is making money off it. Eric stressed that you might not make money off of it right away, but that it is a possibility. It took him a few years to see any real profit from his book sales but with his current job paying the bills, his books sales are all gravy. I think it is pretty cool that he was able to take his hobby and turn a profit and now with the increase of sales he has a luxury of living a different life. With the added money from his books, maybe he doesn't need that 40 hour a week job. I think another property that entrepreneurs have is that they are able to step back and look at how they want to live there life and then figure out the avenues they need to take in order to get to that palce. Eric mentioned about how he wants the ability to vacation in Europe for weeks at a time, and it seems to me as though he is close to fulfilling that goal.

I am not quite sure that I am cut out to be an entrepreneur or that I even what too, however I am starting to find the idea more intriguing. Even if I don't use Eric's business advice for business, I plan on incorporating it into my life. Being an entrepreneur means being a little less fearful, something that I think all of us can benefit from.

Startup.com

I want to first mention that this is only my second business class, so some business aspects maybe a little lost to me. My previous business class was on management styles which while being in the business program probably isn't all the relevant to entrepreneurship.

I thought Startup.com was a pretty interesting documentary. Like I mentioned above, I think some of the more business aspects where probably lost on me, however I did enjoy how it showed the tech industry during the late 90's and early 2000's. My first thought while watching the film was I thought that their idea for a dot com was incredible stupid. I kept thinking to myself how their entire site should be dealt with by the government already. Why does a third party need to offer this service? It should already be a part of the government's infrastructure. If I wanted to pay my parking ticket on-line I would rather go to the DMV's web page instead of their's. However as I thought more about it during the movie, I realized that the government probably would not have had a webpage and probably had no plans to implement one. The web would have been to new for the government to feel like they needed to jump on board, so in reality govWORKS.com was probably pretty revolutionary idea for the time.

Throughout the movie, I assumed that while Kaliel and Tom were gathering funds and getting all this hype about their dot com that they had something to show for it. However, once they filmed govWORKS.com's launch it made me second guess if they even had anything prior. I feel almost as though they raised all this money on just an idea. Did Tom even have a prototype site set up? I wonder if the govWORKS.com domain was even reserved? These days, I feel as though some sort of prototype website would need to be set up in order for a company to even get funding. However, maybe Kaliel and Tom did have something to show or maybe because of the dot com boom a lot of investors only needed to hear a good idea in order to decided to invest.

I thought that Tom and Kaliel's bromance was kinda of funny. The company retreat to Tom's childhood home where he took all the workers to meditate under the trees like he did in highschool seemed a little pretentious to me. I was kinda looking at these guys as not being that older than me but they seemed to kind of take themselves too seriuously. This could all be a result of them getting so much exposure so quickly. All the responsibility thrust upon good have caused them to grow up rather quickly.

I also thought it was weird when their competitor came to visit the office. He didn't really seem that friendly and I don't even think he knew what he was doing there. A couple of workers even called him out on why he was there and he gave them a bullshit answer. I would have probably kicked him out or never let him in. I believe that his being there was probably related to the future break in of Kaliel and Tom's offices in some way.

Finally, one thing that I had trouble understanding was why Tom needed to leave the company. Someone in class mentioned that he should have been terminated sooner, and I am not really sure why. Maybe it had something to due with the fact that Tom and Kaliel were acting like co-CEOs? I can see this as being an issue because subordinates need to clearly know who their leader is. However, I don't think that this is an issue that Tom needed to get terminated over. Why couldn't he just take a step back and no longer talk publicly about the company with Kaliel? The only thing I think Tom was guilty of was not staying on top of technological advancements. As far as I know Tom was the head of technology but it seemed as though he let their website get obsolete pretty quickly. I don't think that he should have been terminated for this reason either, but I do think that he should have had the foresight to see that he missed up in this area and that maybe he was no longer the right man for the job.