soundlab

+1 I've found that the major bottleneck in all this for SMB's is Intuit's Quickbooks- whose terribly unstable sync/integration capability requires 5 different 3rd party systems just to receive an online order via your e-commerce cart, fill a phone order, input a purchase order received by email/fax..

And that's before you even get to pick/pack/ship an item and sync to your company file in QB, drawn down inventory on hand, send tracking info to your customer and update your CRM...

There seem to be a handful of startup software co's in this space but none can handle the entire picture:

methodintegration.com lettuceapps.com

So how does this affect various email template applications such as Tout or Hubspot's Signals? IIRC Tout drops a pixel in each email and uses that as a primary tracking source for opens/CTRs etc...

Cold calling via phone is a not an effective use of a smaller team's time in my experience-- you will rarely reach the right person within an organization, there are lots of 'gatekeepers' for high level executives, and voicemails just don't generate responses. You can only make so many dials per day, and it is exhausting getting rejected all day. Where I've seen it become more effective is for larger inside lead gen teams for products like credit card terminals, or energy efficiency services where a quick pitch can be made to almost any business person who picks up the phone.

Email however, when done correctly (and legally!! don't spam!!) can be very effective. Instead of focusing on making a sale via an email, try instead to focus on getting a referral. Consider it a "win" when you get a referral to someone in the organization with whom you can have a "warm" conversation.

If you are honestly looking for feedback on your product/service, the sales will come. Your cold email will get forwarded to the right person and you can get some conversations started. For us, these campaigns have been extremely low cost and have yielded some great partnerships and repeat business in our niche industry.

A couple rules we laid down:

1. No attachments, no pricing, no selling

2. Make no more than two attempts over 30 day campaign

3. No more than 5-6 sentences with 1 embedded link and a clear request for a referral

Some recommended tools and resources include:

http://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practices...

http://www1.toutapp.com/

http://www.data.com/

Shoot for a bank loan! <-- what you'll never hear from startup advisors but is exactly the type of mental framework you should adopt if you're bootstrapping or working on limited seed round funds.

But banks don't lend to startups! <-- they sure don't

But you know who they do consider lending to? Companies with minimum 3 years of tax returns, breakeven cashflow and realistic projections and payback window.

This is of course difficult to do and the dreaded chasm where most startups die. In the process you may even be categorized as gasp a small business- but some of the most successful people I know started small businesses, retained ownership, methodically grew sales to medium to large business scale, and along the way established long standing non-dilutive lending sources aka banks.

Great article and advice at the end- the author correctly identifies that perseverance in the face of uncertain market conditions and lots of "no's" from investors or other so-called experts is a key quality for entrepreneurs that have the guts to stick it out over the long haul.

The story also conveys about how important it is to put in TIME in a marketplace. Everyone wants to quickly flip for the big exit but the real value comes over the long and arduous process of iterating, growing, and especially uncovering unmet customer needs regardless of if it's product / service

If you have a high margin, recurring revenue SaaS business doing $1-2MM and are looking for growth capital, you do not need to dilute your equity with VCs expecting an exit on their terms (not always yours)- you need bank debt. One of the perks of bootstrapping is once you get to profitability and have a business built on good fundamentals (versus vanity metrics/eyeballs/"scale") you can walk into a bank and obtain lines of credit or debt finance to help you add those customer service folks or incremental sales help in other territories or whatever overhead you need to take on for the next stage of growth. The reason for all the VC hoopla in the first place is the overwhelming risk associated with your pre-revenue, pre-profitability business- traditional commercial bank financing is vastly superior if you can get it on decent terms, which you should be able to if you've bootstrapped your way to $2MM

Same here. Profitable two year old hardware startup in niche distributed antenna systems and M2M www.RFvenue.com

I have such a hard time with these studies that view everything through the lens of venture capital. What a horrible metric for sustainable business creation.

How many accelerator companies are breakeven, steadily growing businesses? Isn't there something to be said for stable ground? Cash positive, lateral expansion into markets and positions leveraged on traditional debt sources?

The richest guys I know started out 30 years ago and built on strong fundamentals, not on "demo day funding requests" and "exits".

Too many young entrepreneurs are clouding their judgement by aligning their decisions with those of VCs and articles like this.

Phonak has done a good job of balancing hearing aid business with Assisted Listening platforms, including an iCom system for TV.

http://www.phonak.com/com/b2c/en/products/accessories/commun...

No way- selling should be a primary focus?

If this comes as some kind of revelation to you, you need to take time off of whatever you do and learn about selling.

Go talk to a seasoned quota-carrying sales manager and show him your vanity metrics- he'll laugh at you and ask you how your pipeline looks and why haven't you closed XYZ Co. this week. Way too many founders are catering to investors vs. universal sustainable business practices these days. The vast majority will never, ever, ever raise beyond friends/family, you may as well cover your own ass with an executable sales strategy that can keep you in the game.

"Stop getting excited by the “maybes” and “lets have another meeting” responses you get to your product. IT MEANS YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS.Budgets, approvals, etc are all excuses as to why they don’t want to buy, but don’t want to say no.."

Unless you have a team of field sales guys getting these kinds of responses you could be making a colossal mistake.

Typically, a very small number of people are in the market, ready to buy what you are selling right away- especially with zero credibility in the marketplace or if you have a very new approach to solving their problems. If you're not taking those "no's" or "soft no's" and putting them into a nurturing or marketing funnel then you are missing future business for when they are ready to buy. This is the way of the B2B sales cycle hath been written by the B2B sales gods. Force feeding people your product at gun point and not taking no for an answer makes you look like a needy asshole that no one wants to buy from- now, or in the future.

FWIW I read a new book over the weekend on building sales teams and lead gen systems called Predictable Revenue by a guy that ran sales teams at Salesforce- very highly recommend.

P.S. Wish I had never heard the term grinfucking - creepy as hell...

Note the dual axis solar trackers in the field adjacent the facility. They are from Bend, OR solar startup PV Trackers http://www.pvtrackers.com/

Go find access to ReferenceUSA, Biz Miner, Capital IQ, D&B, Hoovers, InfoTrac, EBSCOhost, Factiva, ProQuest and do searches by NAICS code. Ideally you ought to do this before launching your venture as part of due diligence on the opportunity. Best way in is through a university library. Ask a friend or shoot a question out to your network to see if you know anyone with access. A single license is prohibitively expensive and you really want an aggregate of databases because they each have their positives and negatives.

I know MBA bashing is en vogue these days, but grad students have access to incredible database resources and rarely take advantage of them. The other day I read a $9,000 research report on a niche medical device industry segment and then pulled 5800 executive leads for my startup's first marketing effort.

happy hunting

I recommend reading Buying a Small Business http://amzn.to/bmRz0T. It is really outdated in terms of the search methods (You can use a computer to do searches for information!) but the fundamentals about evaluating financials and understanding the relationship between buyer and seller haven't changed. One of the most intriguing aspects is for "lifestyle business" owners, your credentials and commitment to growing and protecting the seller's baby is nearly as important as your offer price. Huge caveat is that 99% of Business Brokers are complete morons and terrible to deal with, give them no insight into your liquidity, net worth, etc and stick to the type of business criteria or industry you are interested in.

Anyone who thinks "lifestyle businesses" are a waste of time should look through some of the very small (in employees) companies for sale on bizbuysell.com. Yes, the sandwich shops and laundromats are poor earners, but I have run across 2-3 man operations selling niche products like vintage car parts that profit $500K-1M/year. I'll take earnings like that over "top tier VC", ridiculous business plan competitions, self-promoting PR, and dealing with staff any day.

I got the impression that Reich's article was more about the reporting of labor statistics than people working as temps going around claiming to be entrepreneurs. Economist semantics really without much actionable insight IMO

This is great, except for that some element of Google (address bar search?) is running in the background of my firefox browser and the siren audio is on a continuous loop even after leaving Google. No add-on or plug-in I remove helps.