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Business Opportunities Weblog

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An Ecosystem Of Startups On Facebook

Posted: 09 May 2012 03:30 AM PDT

Mercury News:

Facebook’s ecosystem was at first dominated by social gaming companies, particularly newly public Zynga in San Francisco. But that is changing as fast-growing startups built specifically around Facebook create new ways to find a job, buy and sell merchandise, plan a trip or find new customers — all inside the world’s largest social network.

In the Bay Area alone are RootMusic in San Francisco, which helps recording artists create fan pages on Facebook; Gogobot, a Menlo Park travel service where members can tap the expertise of their Facebook friends to plan a trip; and Emeryville’s Rotten Tomatoes, where fans can share movie likes or dislikes.

The Facebook ecosystem already supports at least 18 times more jobs in the United States than Facebook itself, according to one recent University of Maryland study. At Wildfire, one of the busiest spaces is the orientation area, where the roughly 20 new hires each month get training.

Photo by MoneyBlogNewz

Student Creates Gluten/Dairy Free Pizza

Posted: 08 May 2012 09:02 AM PDT

One year ago, Aaron Greenwald was a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis when a business professor challenged him to formulate a business plan for a class project. Having experienced the benefits of gluten and dairy-free eating as a competitive tennis player and frustrated with the poor taste of suitable foods available in supermarkets, he set out to develop a pizza that was both delicious and healthy.

Working with local St. Louis renowned chef, Eric Brenner, he succeeded. His company, BOLD Organics is currently distributed throughout 200 stores around the country, including independent shops and chains.

BOLD Organics' mission is about creating healthy, great-tasting products that consumers will have fun eating. Aaron and Chef Eric developed a line of pizzas that are bold in flavor (hence the name!) and were bold in the sense that no one had ever tried before to make a great tasting, healthy pizza that was gluten-free, dairy-free and certified organic.

Don’t Compete: Create!

Posted: 08 May 2012 08:54 AM PDT

A reader sent in this interesting article from the NY Times about competition and innovation yesterday. He said it might be “a bit heady.” You’ve been warned.

My favorite paragraph:

One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

In fact, Thiel argues, we often shouldn't seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it's often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.

How to Generate 10 Freelance Business Ideas Today

Posted: 08 May 2012 08:50 AM PDT

Running a freelance business is a dream for many working professionals, but the mechanics of starting one can be mysterious and intimidating, even to most seasoned work veterans. What keeps most from starting a freelance business, however, isn’t a lack of expertise, an underdeveloped client base, or even a bad idea.

The thing that keeps most people from starting a freelance business is not having an idea at all.

If you were to examine the situation psychologically, it makes a lot of sense. Even those who have enjoyed a great deal of success in their careers have done so under the direction of a superior, or at least under the direction of a social-psychological construct, such as “if I do X, Y, and Z, I will be promoted.”

Kenneth Burke called these constructs “scripts.” Scripts make our lives manageable and comprehendible because they organize our thoughts within a framework. In a corporate environment, the framework is built in and manifested by the structure of the organization, with the chain of command representing the structure.

When an employee is uncertain of the correct thing to do, she can approach her supervisor and seek advice. Similarly, when an employee is outperforming her peers, it is her supervisors that notice and recommend her promotion to higher executives. Everything that happens within a structure.

What does structure have to do with being unable to generate an idea for a freelance business? Everything.

Once a person steps outside of a recognizable script or structure, she has to create the rules for herself. It’s difficult to think of even one idea in an undefined space, because you don’t have any familiar anchors to base an idea on. And this can be extremely discouraging.

The thought process many of us go through when flirting with the idea of starting a freelance business often runs something like this: “What will I do? Well, I take pretty good photographs. But who would pay for photos? How would I even get started? What would I charge?”

The inundating flood of questions drowns any possibility of an idea forming — and at this point, you can probably take a guess at where all the questions come from. Lack of structure.

When you don’t have structure you are more likely to be trapped in a state of paralysis brought on by too many doubts and not enough action.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to be Rich has said that execution is all that matters in freelance business. Even a mediocre idea can be wildly successful with great execution, and that’s the key. Asking questions is important, but answering those questions is much more important.

Most people allow the fear of the unknown to stop them from chasing their freelance dreams. It becomes an excuse. Don’t let this be you.

The strategy:

Step 1: List your skills.

Give yourself between 3-5 minutes and simply write down everything you are good at. Photography, design, cleaning fish tanks, finance, math, whatever. Set a time and write it all down. It’s important to write it down and not just think about it, because once it’s written it becomes substantial. And don’t worry if some of your skills seem odd or if you aren’t the single best at whatever skills you write down. You don’t have to be the best, you just have to take action.

Step 2: Examine your strengths.

Set that timer for another 3-5 minutes and now write think about and write out your strengths. Strengths are different from skills in that strengths can be attributes and characteristics, and are generally less specific than skills. For this step, it helps to consult with a family member, friend, or co-worker, as they can readily confirm your strengths and even suggest ones you weren’t aware of.

Step 3: Think about your interests.

This step can be the most difficult for some, mostly because some people haven’t thought deeply about their interests in a long time. Still, set your timer for another 5 minutes and list out everything that interests you. If you’re having trouble, think about the things that you do on your free time, or imagine that your work lets you go home after lunch. What would you do with that time? Write it down.

Step 4: Connect the dots.

After you’ve written out your list of interests, skills, and strengths, review them and look for overlaps or groups that work well together. For example, if you wrote down that you excel at taking care of dogs, love exercise, and are very reliable, you might think about starting a dog-walking business for dogs that are overweight or sick. Give yourself no more than 20 minutes to do this. The time limits are important because the longer it takes to spring into action, the more doubt will seep in and cripple you.

Step 5: Identify your market.

Spend some time searching online for possible clients. A good place to start is Craigslist: if you find other services being offered there that are similar to yours, that is a good thing, because it means there is already a market established. When you are just starting out, it’s essential that you constrict your business to a limited number of clients as a test case. If you spread yourself thin early on only to find that there isn’t that big of market for what you’re offering, you’ll have spent a lot of time and energy on a flop. So start small, determine profitability, and then adapt. And remember, you always have your three lists you can turn back to when you need a new idea.

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031@gmail.com.

Photo by Shane Gavin

Flat Rate Chiropractics

Posted: 08 May 2012 08:45 AM PDT

19 Dollar Sidebar

Greenville Online:

German-born entrepreneur Michael “Mici” Fluegge is bringing a new model in chiropractic service to South Carolina, selling franchises of The Joint that he says will make the services more convenient to clients.

But critics say the low-cost, low-diagnostic clinics undermine the profession.

Fluegge – who is selling franchises of The Joint in South Carolina and eastern Georgia – said the clinics typically charge a flat $19 fee for a first visit and then membership fees from $12.25 and up for future adjustments. Founded in Arizona nearly two years ago, The Joint – unlike traditional chiropractic clinics – does not perform X-rays, does not take appointments and does not accept health insurance.

Franchise info is here.

Turning Your Old Factory into a Tourist Destination

Posted: 08 May 2012 07:46 AM PDT

Television shows like How It’s Made are very popular, but watch it on TV if you go see the real thing somewhere? If a tired old fortune cookie factory in San Francisco can become a tourist destination, why can’t your factory?

Wired:

Every day, tourists pop into the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory to watch its three machines squirting out batter and bathing it in flames. Each one is the size of a piano and their operators only have a few seconds to stuff the batter with an enigmatically profound message before it hardens. The one-room workshop is narrow, long and fragrant with warm sugar and vanilla.

“Look! They’re making them!” a woman squeals during a recent visit.

Located in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the factory has been in business since 1962 and produces 20,000 cookies a day.

“There’s a certain amount of thrill to come into an old-school factory,” says tourist Joanne Phua, who followed a friend’s suggestion to see the factory while visiting from Las Vegas

R2D2 Bathing Suits: They Sold it First and Negotiated the Rights Later.

Posted: 08 May 2012 07:36 AM PDT

R 2d 2 Swimming Suit

Last year, an Australian geek-chic fashion company called Black Milk created a line of Star Wars themed bathing suits: one designed to look like 3CPO and one modeled on R2-D2. As you can probably imagine, the internet immediately went crazy.

Just as quickly as it had begun, though, it seemed to be over. Within days of the launch Lucasfilm lawyers had presented a cease and desist order. Black Milk, dejectedly pulled the suits from their site and planned to move forward with other things.

The internet didn’t forget about them. Within hours things got crazy:

When production of the $90 swimsuits stopped, the Artoo and Threepio suits soon became collectors’ items, fetching about $600 each on eBay.

Soon the label was attracting an international cult following and the owners quickly saw that what had started as a legal wrangle could become a business opportunity if Lucasfilm would agree to license the images.

Eventually the companies came to a equitable licensing agreement — a very expensive one — but one that Black Milk would never have negotiated if they hadn’t first discovered the demand for their product.

Turning Doggy Doo Into Light!

Posted: 08 May 2012 06:54 AM PDT

Dog Waste to Energy

TriplePundit:

The idea of converting dog waste to renewable biogas started off as a modest art project in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two years ago, and it has struck a spark across the pond. A new company in Wales called Streetkleen has constructed a dog waste-to-biogas conversion station in the county of Flintshire and plans are already in the works to expand into a network throughout the U.K.

The art project in Massachusetts was the Park Spark Project. It used a biodigister to transform dog waste into methane that was then used to power a park lamp. I’m assuming the Streetkleen system will be similar.

Popcorn Stand Represents A True Small Biz

Posted: 08 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT

9News.com:

No one in Granite Falls is old enough to remember the exact year the stand went up, but sometime between the ‘Roaring ’20s’ and the Great Depression the corner of 7th and Prentice started popping.

“It’s been there as long as I can remember and that’s a long time ago,” laughed Jim Finnes, one of Granite Falls’ senior citizens. As a boy Finnes remembers stopping at the popcorn stand with his family. “We only came to town on Saturday night and if we could find a nickel, down to the popcorn stand we’d go.”

Launched by brothers Jule and Fred Ernston, the popcorn stand changed hands a half-dozen times before the Kiwanis club stepped in. Last year the club raised nearly $10,000 selling popcorn and root beer. The stand is open seven nights a week through mid-September, from 7:30 to 3:30 p.m. It’s staffed by Kiwanis volunteers.

Who knew there was still money in selling something as simple and affordable as popcorn?

Photo by jayneandd