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“Will the dogs eat the dog food?” This rather crude expression weighs heavily on the mind of all good startup founders, no matter how confident they appear. We all know the products they give away, and the ones purchased by family and friends don’t count. The real milestone, proving the business model, is that first product sold for full price to a total stranger, leaving him happy. So what can you do to expedite this event, or even improve the odds that it will happen at all? Of course, one sale isn’t really enough, so you need to get the first customer to recommend you to a second, and make sure rate of sales ramps up quickly enough to keep the business alive and growing. This whole process is particularly worrisome to many startup founders, since their expertise and background more likely technology than sales. If you are one of those, here are some basics principles you should follow and live by until that milestone is behind you: It’s the market, stupid.

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Your First Sale Is The Biggest Startup Milestone

By Ernst Gemassmer Once you have succeeded in developing a solution and obtained initial funding, the next challenge is to penetrate the relevant domestic and international markets. For that, you need to implement a winning distribution channel strategy. Common channel strategies include direct to customer, distributor, and joint venture arrangements. For many markets these days, the channel owns the market. In other words, you may have the best product, but no distribution means no business. Here are the steps I recommend to face this issue successfully, and effectively build or align with productive channels: Finalize an overall ‘go to market’ strategy before you begin. It is absolutely essential to map out a ‘go to market’ strategy that works for your industry and product. Use this as a roadmap to guide and measure your successes and failures.

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Nine Keys To A Winning Startup Channel Strategy

What happened to Generation X? They are generally defined as anyone born between 1965 and 1980, sandwiched between 80 million Baby Boomers and 78 million Millennials (Gen-Y). Gen-X has just 46 million members, making it the lost child demographic. Gen-X is the group that will bridge the two larger generations of Boomers and Millennials. I guess the bridge isn’t as exciting as what has happened on one side or what might happen on the other, so they are often referred to as the “forgotten” generation. A book I spotted recently, which humorously characterizes the issues, is titled “ How Gen-X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking ”, by Jeff Gordinier, 41. He has a big generational chip on his shoulder, and his tongue-in-cheek rhetoric is inspiring age-based debates in offices across the country. What are the legacies that Millennials inherited from Gen-X?

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Gen-X May Be Forgotten, But They Run Business

Don’t charge the hill until you are “ready.” This probably seems obvious to military types, but I see entrepreneurs violating this rule all the time. They approach key potential investors way too early, trying to talk their way up the hill, with no supporting business plan, and before they have a support team around them. Needless to say, they get shot down, and get no second chance. The first rule is to separate your advisors from your investors. Perhaps a close personal friend can be both (the earliest stage and first tier investors should be “friends and family”). But for angel investors and venture capital investors, just remember that investors are not on your team (yet). You only get once chance to make a great first impression.

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Many Entrepreneurs Charge The Hill Too Soon

Like it or not, email is still a major business and personal communication vehicle, just like telephone calls. Your business and your integrity are being judged every day by your responsiveness to emails, and no one likes to do business with a dead-letter box. Unresponsive people and businesses lose friends and customers quickly. If you are one of the “new generation” who simply doesn’t do email, then don’t publish an email address, and delete all email accounts. That way, people won’t send messages, or at least will get an undeliverable notice to trigger follow-up. The real problem is people who only check their email every few weeks, have ten different email addresses, or have thousands of messages queued in their in-box for storage. Every one of these is a sure-fire way to lose customers and get tagged as a personal deadbeat. On the positive side, there are some things you can do and should do to manage your email effectively, and be seen as a responsive friend and business: Reroute little used accounts to your primary address. Every reputable email system has a mechanism for rerouting email from a secondary address to one that you monitor daily

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Entrepreneurs Can’t Afford To Be Email Deadbeats

Every entrepreneur should spend plenty of time thinking about competitors, and how they relate to your business, but you need to be very careful what you say out loud about them to your team, your investors, and your customers. What you say speaks volumes about how you think about your startup, how smart you are, and your personal integrity. I’ve spent hours talking to startup founders, and heard a thousand startup pitches, and I always listen carefully to what is said (or not said) about competitors. Everyone has a view on competitors, so you will likely get some off-the-cuff questions on this subject as well. Here are some common pitfalls or traps to avoid: Above all, don’t say you have no competitors. This statement is a huge red flag to investors, who will take it to mean that there is no market for your offering, or you haven’t bothered to look. Both conclusions will kill your credibility, and usually preclude any further funding interest.

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Competitor Traps Every Startup Pitch Should Avoid

Every time I hear about a new startup that is in stealth mode, I wonder what problem they are hiding from whom. Of course they pretend that they are trying to avoid alerting competitors prior to launch, but too often it becomes an excuse to move slowly in a world that’s all about getting to market fast. I believe stealth makes sense for large companies who can be sued for “pre-announcing” a new product to stall the market or kill a competitor. It also makes legal sense to never disclose the details of your patent application, before the product is ready to ship

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Why It’s Not Healthy To Be A Stealthy Startup

A popular approach for aspiring entrepreneurs these days seems to be to corner anyone who will listen, with a dialogue on their current hot “idea.” The initial outburst usually ends with the question “How much money do you think this is worth?” In my humble opinion, ideas are a commodity, and are really not worth anything, outside the context of a vision and plan. Over the past couple of decades, experts have perfected the art of brainstorming and other idea-generation techniques. Executives and investors are now increasingly exposed to a wealth of ideas. The result is that ideas are no longer in short supply, and no longer a differentiator in competition.

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Great Entrepreneurs Have Vision, Not Just Ideas

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. On the average, the entrepreneurs I know are broke. But one thing they all seem to have in common is a love for learning and change. They rush in with a passion to better the world, and money is just an indication of their progress. The successful ones then invest their time and money in furthering their knowledge base. I’m not talking about academic classes, because at best these only teach you how to learn. In these days of rapid change, most experts believe that the facts college students learn as a sophomore are obsolete before they exit their senior year. Learning should be viewed as an ongoing part of everything you do, and one of the most important things.

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If Money Is Your Goal, Don’t Be An Entrepreneur

Change is about the only thing constant in the world of startups. Despite their own focus on changing the world, they often forget that they too have to change rapidly and often as the market evolves. Too many find that out too late, and are left chasing a rabbit that is long gone. The solution is to establish and maintain a culture and processes that don’t view change as a discrete event to be spotted and managed, but as an ongoing opportunity to improve competitiveness. Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe, in a recent HBR article on change readiness for large companies, define it as “the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance.” Since the startup environment is usually more volatile, the challenge there in balancing advantage, risk, and performance, is more critical than in big companies. Chris and Tammie define change readiness as a focus on the following business initiatives: Improve change awareness. How good are you and everyone on your team at proactively scanning the environment for opportunities, emerging trends, and customer feedback? This contextual focus is critical to innovation and survival – the right product at the right time. Increase change agility. Change agility represents a startup’s ability to immediately and effectively engage everyone in pending changes and innovations

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Six Keys to Increasing Startup Change Readiness

Every week I browse the web for gambling related information and I always come across fraudulent promotions. I’ve just found a website called underdog wealth secret which claims there is easy money to be made online

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The UnderDog Wealth Secret Roulette System Review

Good search engine optimization brings free traffic results. It all starts with the keywords that define your product, service, concept or business in general. Web surfers type these keywords when making queries, this is why you need to choose the most relevant.

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How To Get More Free Traffic From Search Engines

As favored web-based games like Warcraft, Aion, and EVE Online all release major updates, players are looking out for updated guides to help them to make the maximum of the new game content and features. NCSoft’s Aion recently announced their 1.9 update, which introduced several major gameplay changes. CCP’s EVE Online has just released their Tyrannis update, that has absolutely modified the dynamics of the player driven economy with new features that permit players to mine and engage with planets. Activision Blizzard’s flagship game, World of Warcraft, is revving up for the Cataclysm enlargement, which should introduce not only new search content, but also new races and classes. All of these updates show that MMOs can continue to provide game players with excitement and challenge. However at the same time, players who have worked on systems and tactics to beat quests and complete missions will find that these updates will send them back to the drawing board.

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Latest MMO Updates Cause Issues, Confusion For Players

Email has become the standard mode of communication when it comes to computer usage. People don’t use as before the old postage method, also known as “snail mail”. Electronic mail (also known as email) is a sure and fast way to get your message to the recipient. The security features and the content management is great and anyone will prefer it over the older “snail mail” method. In this world, the most popular operating system (Microsoft Windows), most people will use the in-built Email manager: Microsoft Outlook. New versions of Microsoft Outlook are released with each new popular Microsoft Office package. Each version is welcomed for its new features regarding the email function. Here Repair PST File , you will learn more about PST File repair. Microsoft Outlook 2010 is the newest version of Outlook that is awaiting release. From what we know so far, this email management software is simply great: the web document management function, that was first found with Google Documents, is now fully part of the Outlook family.

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Know More About Some New Features In Outlook 2010

Are you like several others and considering you’d like to work from home, and questioning the way to launch my own personal drop ship business? Let us supply you some tips about precisely what you could do, and advise you learn how to produce cash drop shipping. Just like any other enterprise, the most essential item accessible for you to perform just before you get started out with your personal drop ship venture is commonly to thoroughly research the market first. If you ever were starting any other small corporation, among the primary points that you’d probably do would be to carry out marketplace study to verify that there may be a demand for one’s device and that you are meeting the demand at the right price tag. That genuinely indicates checking the viability of your respective service. The same goes should you are retailing any items on the internet being a drop shipper, like automotive goods or baby products for instance. One other leading item that you should verify out is your competitors. There may be no point learning suggestions on how to commence my personal dropship organization if you really do not already know what your rivals are doing.

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What’s The First Move I Should Make In My Own Dropship Company?

If you are one of the many people who lost your job during these tough economic times, you should be working on starting your own business, in parallel with looking for that ideal replacement job. Let me explain why this is a win-win deal, no matter what the outcome. You have probably secretly always wanted to run your own show, but with a full-time job, never had the time to consider a startup. Then there was always the risk of failure, which of course doesn’t apply now since your real job is gone. Also, for most of us, not having done it before, we have no idea where or how to start. Here are my recommendations on how and why initiating a startup while looking for a job is the right thing to do: No gap in your resume. Instead of an embarrassing gap in your resume for your period out of work, you have an entry for your startup business, showing initiative, leadership, and breadth of experience

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Eight Reasons to Create a Startup While Job Hunting

Would you like to turn your obsession with Construct-O-Set into cold hard cash? You just might be able to do that! For a limited time, the developers of one of the most innovative new iPhone applications are soliciting freelancers to design new app themes! If your design is chosen, you’ll be eligible to win terrific prizes and earn royalties on the sale of your design! Want to hear more? Read on! The current edition of Construct-O-Set is very simple, and aimed primarily at small children. But the possibilities are endless. The idea of turning abstract shapes into recognizable objects appeals not only to very young children but to sophisticated puzzlers as well. Construct-O-Set would like to target preschoolers right through adults with increasingly complex and elegant designs. But because the people behind the development of Construct-O-Set are programmers, not graphic designers, their artistic abilities are limited. This is where you come in

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Calling All iPhone App Freelancers

If you are brand new to internet marketing then discovering the right web host is a key decision as this will involve one of your first costs connected to your Internet Business Opportunity . First of all lets explain what a web host is used for, the web hosting service lets you to make your website accessible on the internet. The web hosting company rents you some of their space on their server, which is where you place your site. A server is just a further computer that is joined to the internet all of the time. You then transfer all of your website, including web pages, images and style sheets to the space on the server via a file transfer protocol (FTP).

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A Guide To Locating The Best Website Hosting Organisation To Help Your Internet Business Ideas Become Lucrative.

Small U.S. businesses pushing for a $30 billion federal lending fund are making their case without the support of some supposed allies: Washington lobbying groups who say they represent small businesses.

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Small Businesses Find Lobby Allies Mute on $30 Billion U.S. Aid

Startups are usually so focused on selling more of their branded product or service to their own customer base (organic growth) that they don’t consider the more indirect methods (non-organic growth) of increasing revenue and market share. Non-organic growth would include OEM relationships, finding strategic partners, “coopetition,” as well as acquisitions. This initial focus is usually driven by limited financial and people resources, as well as the bandwidth of the executive team. Yet a creative and skilled team will often find that non-organic growth techniques can better leverage these limited resources.

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Startups Should Fuel Growth By Acquisitions