Kisstv.co.ke – whoops, Round 2

September 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Yikes, the Kiss TV seems to have no luck whatsoever. The site is down, its hosting account with Glow Host has been suspended. Keen readers will remember the….weird launch of www.kisstv.co.ke.

What’s the lesson here? Be professional in all that you do. There is no reason why your website should be down due to suspension. Much less so if you are an organization as large as KISS. Frequent visitors of that site must be awed at the turn of events.

One wonders how long KISS TV will take to fix this…..Murphy’s law applies, I guess.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

What Successful Companies Do Differently

September 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

This article was submitted to Like Chapaa anonymously.

To be frank – your best clients and your easiest jobs – I don’t want. We don’t look for typical clients looking to build a website or implement some online marketing. We turn down all requests that come our way.

Here Is The Goldmine I’ve Discovered…
Create “products” for niche markets and sell them to the masses of small businesses who are eager to buy them.

We’ve perfected the formula. It goes like this. Pick a niche. Develop something that works and passes the following test:

  1. It is simple and inexpensive to produce
  2. It can be priced to produce a killer profit
  3. It can be marketed like crazy

Successful Businesses Create Niches Where They Don’t Exist
Most businesses are the same company with different owners and a different name and logo. They’re all chasing after the same prospects and leads with the same marketing and sales methods and the same products.

Successful businesses, on the other hand, sell a different type of product or service. They are not carbon copies of their competitors. They have found a different type of product or service to sell to their clients.

  • Maybe they add something to their product to make it different from what everything else sells
  • They sell their service as a premium version of the commodity that everyone else sells, since it is unique
  • They are able to control the price as their product/service is unique

Do SOMETHING different than everyone else. Usually that involves the product or service that you sell. When you dig real deep, it might be the same type of thing that your competitor is selling. However, successful businesses have done something different – made it more special somehow. Once you do that, it’s easier to sell, you can make more money, and you don’t have to struggle to reach a hotly contested market. Why stay in the shark-infested waters when you can seek out the deep blue ocean?

For example, if you run a web design company, or if you do web design on a freelance basis, do you really think you can compete in today’s market? Everybody and their mother is a web designer nowadays! If you run your business just like every other web designer out there you will be dead in a few months. You have to be smart. So be smart. Be different.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Choose a Boring Industry and Excel!

August 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

One of my big irritations (that I do not know how to handle) is when a friend comes up to me and says they have an awesome (often get rich quick) idea. Usually it’s something really stupid that no one is going to be interested in.

Everything thinks they have to invent the Next Big Thing to be really successful (and rich) and it’s just not true, and highly unlikely. Here’s a much better and easier option for you. Pick the most boring industry and do it better than anyone else!

Shoes are Boring
I was reminded of this from Seth Godin’s post on Zappos. In case you don’t know Zappos, they are a web retailer who only sells shoes. Think about that – selling shoes for a living (boring). Not only that, they sell them online, which seems like the worst product to sell online. Everyone wants to try on their shoes to see how it looks and determine whether it fits right. But they went against what most people would think of doing and are doing incredibly well.

Do It Better Than Anyone Else
The reason both of the above examples were so successful is they did it different than everyone else. They went against convention to give clients what they really want. That’s the real key. But I tell you what, I would rather come up with that new idea for a boring product than invent something brand new that will take a ton of money to build and might not even have a market yet.

One way I suggest doing it is create the most efficient, awesome process in your industry. Make it a great experience for your clients because you have refined your processes to the Nth degree. It’s not sexy or exciting, but it will differentiate you from the competitors in the industry.

Remember – no one wants a company that just lays concrete. But if you could be a business owner with a lot of money from that concrete business or a poor owner working around the clock for a new idea, what would you choose?

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Making Money Online Successfully

July 30, 2010 by 1 Comment

So a while back we wrote about how it is better to earn offline than it is to earn online. Part of the reason why we wrote that article is that many people are trying to build revenue around models that will either:

  1. Not be around in 5 years because the powers that be (ie: Google) have changed their operations to make the strategy unprofitable
  2. Replaced by another method or competitor with a new perspective or method to attract customers.

How can we define online success?

How Much Money are You Making Tomorrow?
I think there has to be a certain measurable criteria as to what makes someone successful online and that can be as simple as the ability to make Kshs 5,000 per day, Kshs 10,000 per day, working full-time independently, etc. that a lot of people like to use.

However, I think there are less measurable means to determine online sucess as well. If I were buying a business, I’m not buying the business on how much money it made today, I’m buying it based on how much I think it will make in the future. Because of that, there are some criteria that I would like to add to what I consider online success:

  1. Is the business defensible? Is your business model based on arbitrage of PPC ads or is it based on a steady amount of traffic from a variety of sources (PPC, SEO, direct referrals, repeat visitors, etc).
  2. Are you too reliant on 1 supplier, customer, or web site? Supply chain issues are a reality of any business. Now it’s much more of an issue in a manufacturing or product based business but it’s a reality in the online world. If you have just one web site or one source of income, then your success is at risk. If you have just one product or one major client, an innovative competitor could very quickly and easily sink your business.
  3. Is the Product commoditized? This is one of the biggest mistakes that many people make who are trying to make money online. The web sites that they are offering are, in essence, a commodity. There are thousands of other people or web sites out there who offer the same product (or could easily offer the same product). And the problem with a commodity business is that lowest-price wins. And those hyper-efficient markets are very difficult to win in.

My Definition of Online Success
A. If you are looking for some extra disposable income, Kshs 5,000 per day is a great goal to have and I would consider that a huge success.

B. If instead of just disposable income you want to work for yourself, things are a little bit different – instead of considering 5,000 a day a success, we should look at a number that permits you to live comfortably. If that is 30,000 a month, and you are earning that regularly, that’s awesome. Now if you make 50,000 one month and nothing for 3 more months, that’s not really successul.

C. If you are building a business, that’s much tougher to define. To have a successful business, you must have systems and processes, and if you have systems and processes, then you can have employees. So I think that when you get to a point where can support yourself with company profit and you have an employee on board, then I think you are moving in the right direction.

Successful Online Entrepreneurs
There are a lot of people making money online who make more per month that I do and most people would consider them to be successful. These are often people that are in the top 1% of their market. The diffference between them and the rest of the online entrepreneurs is that they have differentiated themselves.

If they run a successful blog, their differentiation is the personality behind it. If the content was written by a bunch of no-names without the personality, I doubt they would be as successful. And some of the other successful entrepreneurs have built up a portfolio of well-performing sites. They have created processes and eliminated the dependence on any one web site/asset.

Ideas from the Masters
I am a big fan of the ideas of Warren Buffett because I think they can be applied universally. Warren Buffett doesn’t follow the stock market on a daily basis and he doesn’t follow quarterly earnings reports. He’s not even a big fan of annual reports – he doesn’t think businesses should be judged based on the amount of time it takes the Earth to circle the Sun. He believes in looking at businesses over a much longer term.

I think that people looking to make money online need to look more at where they’ll be in 5 years, and not just based on the projects they would like to be working on at that point. If they have a collection of a variety of web sites with increasing traffic from a variety of sources, which have a differentiated advantage, I think they may be much more successful than someone who is making more money right now but with no prospects of growth.

So if you have a software product that you are selling online that only a few people that have discovered so far but they love it…Or you have a community web site that is very small right now but has a strong, but growing base….Or you have a collection of websites with unique content or a unique, driving idea behind them

Then I think you are well on your way to being succesul. Just make sure you have implemented the processes to really grow it successfully.

Filed Under: Internet Culture, Small Business

Maybe This Aint For You

July 26, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I hate to say it but you’re probably not smart enough to come up with a completely new idea. You don’t have the intelligence or creativity to come up with the Next Big Idea.

Newton thought up the Law of gravity; the founders of Google came up with a breakthrough by inventing the concept of PageRank to rank websites. Do you think you can replicate these feats, much less come up with one from scratch?

The reality is that 99.99% of aspiring entrepreneurs don’t have the mental chops to come up with some totally original idea. These are all smart people but chances are that even if you do happen to come up with a great idea, it will either have been done already or it hasn’t been done for a reason.

The Good News
Before you abandon all hope and embrace your life as an employee, there is some good news. There are millions of entrepreneurs in this world who had just as much originality and creativity as you do. They didn’t come up with the Next Big Thing and they’re wildly successful. What they all have in common is that they are good marketers.

Yes, that evil word – marketer. But the fact is that most successful entrepreneurs are successful because they are good at selling their business. They didn’t come up with some earth-shattering idea that their competitors couldn’t match. They just did a better job at marketing their own business.

Car Dealers Haven’t Invented Anything Lately
Car Dealers are interesting because they are basically selling a commodity product. If you don’t want to buy a car from a particular dealer, you can go to the dealer down the street that sells a car in the same class for a similar price. And if you want the exact same car, go to another dealer 20 miles a way who sells the exact same model. There is almost no room to differentiate their “product” from their competitors’.

But I’m sure that we’ve all seen or know the local car dealer that has 5 dealerships, 3 houses, and is absolutely loaded. Somehow they found a way to turn their commodity product into a goldmine for themselves. Why?

They are good marketers.

Maybe everyone knows their name from annoying billboard ads or painful TV ads. However they know them, the fact is that they do. Now I’m sure that these car dealers also run a well operated business. You can’t afford to bring potential customers in and give them bad service. They still need to be good business operators. But the fact is that their marketing skills got the name of the dealership out there and people in the door.

Do You Know How to Market?
So don’t spend all your time trying to think of the Next Big Thing. It’s a waste of your time. And honestly, you might come up with a great idea but if you don’t know how to sell it, it’s not going to be successful.

You’re may not be smart enough to come up with new ideas. Spend your time learning how to sell and market and you can sell anything. It could be the most boring product – it doesn’t matter. If car dealers can do it, you can too.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With:

Less is More

July 17, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I find myself watching some strange reality shows at times and last week I was watching Kitchen Nightmares. It’s hosted by that British chef who’s always swearing at people in his “game show”. The premise of this show is that he goes into a restaurant that is failing for some reason and some drastic changes, brings it back to life.

Don’t Give Customers What They Want
In the show that I was watching last week, he visited an Indian restaurant that was bleeding money. The biggest problem he found in the restaurant is that they gave their patrons too many options. The customers were able to customize the sauce that they wanted. The owner came from a sales background so he had a noble strategy – he just wanted to give the customers what they wanted. Great intentions but bad results.

The problem with this strategy is that everything suffered in the business because their was no consistency:

  • The customers thought they knew what they wanted but the fact was that the experts (the chefs) could put together a better combination of flavors that the customers would enjoy
  • The orders would not come out in a timely matter because there were so many different combinations and the chefs could not operationalize the preparation
  • The waiters could not stand behind and recommend different dishes because they were all just slight variations of each other and could not be differentiated from each other in blind taste tests
  • The customers were left paralyzed with too many choices and felt unsatisfied that they weren’t getting what they want (having too many options is a classic in limiting sales because of “paralysis by over-analysis“)

Less is More
The lesson in this when running your business is that you should limit the options for your clients. Too often, we try to satisfy the wants and desires of our clients and what we end up giving to them is something that they don’t really want. They may think they want it when they “order” it but they leave our “restaurant” unhappy with the whole experience.

Even worse than a restaurant, we get clients who just get up and leave. If we don’t present a clear offer with a limited number of options, they’re less likely to become our clients.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: ,

No Business Is Successful Right Away

July 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Chances are, you’re going to fail a lot before you build a successful business. Everyone has heard the numbers before:

95% of all businesses fail within their first 5 years

If you know people who started their own businesses, they are probably just getting by or they have already boarded up and shut down their business. It’s just the reality of running a business.

Why Do Most Businesses Fail?
I’m sure that there has been plenty of research and analysis into why businesses failed but if you just look at it objectively, I think it makes sense.

  • Most new businesses are coming into an existing market and their competitors have a big head start on each part of the business
  • Any obvious profit opportunities have probably already been discovered and exploited by these competitors
  • Competitors in the market have real experience with what works and what does not
  • While the product is the most important part of the business, entrepreneurs need to know how to do everything in a business (accounting, marketing, sales, customer service) and there is a bit of a learning curve with these activities

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
One of the biggest things to remember when setting up your business is that you don’t know what you don’t know. As much as you plan, you can’t plan for things that you don’t know you need to care for.

You Need Money
One of the things that I get asked the most is how to take some of the first steps without any money. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s very possible. With all of the mistakes that you make, you’re going to need money to help get you through the bad times until your business finds its way. Your competitors probably have more experience, more time, and more resources than you so you need some money to keep up with them.

The advantage that you have is that you’re more nimble and don’t have as much of a cost structure that they do. It is much easier for you to change direction until you find what works for you and your business. If you’re using your only resource, time, instead of money, you lose that nimbleness, your only advantage.

Some Businesses Get Lucky
Some businesses are successful when they start but this is usually because they were able to change their direction as they went. If you look back on them, they didn’t have the answer but they were able to buy enough time to figure out how to get their operation running successfully:

  • TiVo’s initial business model was based more around of the concept of being able to apply super-targeted advertising options to clients. Now, they’re more of a subscription-based option, which is much simpler than the original vision
  • Google was always a search engine from the beginning but there was never any plan on how they would capitalize on their search engine for several years. Even their Adwords program, which is their primary revenue stream, took several iterations before they got it to work successfully.

If you talk to just about any successful entrepreneur, I’m sure you’ll find that there original vision didn’t match up to what they became. There were changes that they made along the way to get to that point.

Accept that you will make a lot of mistakes (whether it’s multiple decisions in your businesses, or multiple failed ventures) until you gain the experience you need to be truly successful. And don’t be afraid to drop some of your ideas as soon as you realize that they aren’t going to work.

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: