Your business 2.0
posted by Mike Shur
Guy Kawasaki is a serial entrepreneur and tech-guru, though he would dispute that nomiker. He writes a blog about his online adventures and posted last year about how he built his latest business for about $12,000 which he just sold.
The first three points Guy makes are:
Because of Truemors
, I’ve learned a lot about launching a company in these “Web 2.0” times. Here’s quick overview “by the numbers.”
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0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).
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0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.
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7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.
Notice that the first three steps to building a business online don’t involve money. The concept, the fund-raising and the tools are all available online right now. I always want to share Guy’s 4 lessons learned (and they won’t cost you the price of having him as a speaker):
4. I learned four lessons launching Truemors:
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There’s really no such thing as bad PR.
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$12,000 goes a very long way these days.
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You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.
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Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.
It’s about now that you’re thinking to yourself: that’s all very well and good for Guy Kawasaki, he’s some kind of tech genius, knows how to build and sell companies, and besides he’s got an information aggregation business, my business is all about PEOPLE how do I put that online?
I’m glad you asked, some of your fellow practitioners have taken their people business online. Here are just three examples:
Brian Jones – on Brian’s site people can take a variety of assessments (MBTI(r), Strong, FIRO-B) as well as packages to help with specific needs such as leadership and career development. Brian does phone and team interpretations. He leverages the SkillsOne.com platform to deliver and score the assessments and has set up payment processing to facilitate the front-end transations and make them more automated.
Neil Ihde – at TypeIQ Neil offers the MBTI(r) as an online assessment and as a marketing tool for his consulting practice. The MBTI(r) tool is not only something for Neil’s practice, but also a robust part of his business.
Ross Reinhold — I’m a big fan of Ross’s site for general information on the MBTI(r) and articles by type experts. Whilte Ross does not do any interpretation or consulting work any more, his business model is based on advertising around personality assessments. He is part of Google’s advertising network and makes money by getting paid per click by directing people to content-relevant sites.
These are just three of folks who have brought together their knowledge of people and personality with a little bit of web savviness to create effective and growing businesses.
Who’s next?
