Entries Tagged 'Entrepreneurship' ↓

My sister in law recently started her own small business in San Diego.  She majored in interior design in college and she is very artistic.  Since she got married last year she has thought about running her own paper crafting business for a while.  After a fairly long period of research and planning she is finally open for business!  She named her business Scraps of Life and she is selling crafting supplies, hand crafted cards, and pre-assembled scrapbook pages.   She also made a  pretty neat shadow box  for me and the hubby so I think she could sell those, too.   She is still working on getting her online shops at Etsy and Artfire set up but she already made a lot of great progress on her current websites and her StampinUp online shop looks really great.  She also has samples of her work on her blog and I think her designs are all pretty cute.

Some good articles from her blog about her journey include:

Getting down to business – This describes her checklist for starting her business

That much closer…  – This describes how she got her business license.

I think it is really awesome that she is able to do something she loves to do and her hubby is pretty supportive.  I thought it was pretty courageous of her to quit her fairly uninspiring job in this economy, too.  I am sure that she will learn a lot  more through this process of starting her own business and her success will depend on how much work she puts into it.  The coolest thing about is that it will be her enterprise from the beginning.

Anyway, I hope that she gets lots of clients and buyers in the future and I am looking forward to see her new designs.    Good luck Scraps of Life!

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Well, I haven’t blogged for four days, and it feels like an eternity, seriously. This weekend I was down in Southern California for a wedding and that involved about 14 hours of driving between my husband and I. On Monday I was swamped with work and I kept on wanting to sleep so I didn’t blog at all, but at least this article I wrote for the Money Blog Network went up on Wise Bread, check it out!

Anyway, before I left I checked out the site of a commenter named Erica. Her story is pretty inspiring in that she is a young woman in the Silicon Valley who built up a business and recently sold it for more than a million dollars. Now she is semi-retired and writing. Recently she bought an established website on Sitepoint to run as a new business and she is only a year older than me. So this led me to browse the Sitepoint marketplace and learn about buying established websites.

So far, I haven’t made a purchase because just like any investment, it takes a lot of research to find a profitable business worth buying. A lot of the cheaper websites that cost under $1000 have less traffic than my sites or just aren’t very interesting. I see most sites in the following categories:

• Forums
• Scraper sites that steal content
• Directories
• Blogs
• Established e-commerce sites
• E-books
• Spam sites full of ads with a good domain name
• Proxy sites

There are also some unique sites with custom software, but those are very very expensive. I think if I buy a site, the only category of sites I am interested in buying is a good forum because those have user generated content that I wouldn’t have to worry too much about. As long as a community is there it would be fine. I don’t want another blog because blogs takes time to create new content for and oftentimes readers are loyal to the original writer of the blog that made it popular so once you buy it a lot of its value is lost. I also don’t want a spammy site full of butts. Anyway, it seems that people price their sites at a multiple of their monthly revenue, so anything that’s pulling a decent income becomes very expensive. However, there are gems in the rough. For example, there are sites that webmasters have not monetized at all because all they created a site as a hobby, but want to get rid of it due to it being too much work. So this creates another segment of entrepreneurs who buy a site on the cheap, slap on some ads, and then flip it for a profit. I think that’s a pretty interesting business on its own, but it takes time to research and find the best “fixer-upper”.

Anyway, as I have said to many people. I only need about 10 to 20 times my current blog income across my three blogs to quit my job and work on this full time. There is definitely potential for my blogs to grow. Currently my San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble site is growing quite healthily and could even surpass The Baglady in traffic with minimal promotion. It is already on the blogroll of Redfin, my favorite real estate site. I guess people just browse that site page after page looking at the home prices falling by 200k to 300k like they are watching a train wreck. So if I concentrate on my current blogs and make them grow to their fullest potential I don’t have to buy any more sites. It may take a longer time, but it would be all mine. If I do buy a established site, I will need to spend time to integrate it onto my webserver and learn about running the new site and that may neglect my current ventures a little bit.

Anyway, I will probably still look out for good sites to purchase, but those are very rare and people snap them up very quickly. I am more of a cautious investor and I never buy anything without a lot of research so I probably won’t be buying something within 30 minutes of the listing so I might miss out on some good ones, but I should be able to avoid a lot of bad ones. Looking at some of the better sites for sale, I am amazed at what some of these very young people have done in terms of online income. The biggest sites with millions of page views a day are basically another full time job and cost a lot for bandwidth so I probably don’t want those. I would be happy with 25000 page views a day and enough money to cover my living expenses after taxes. Maybe next year?

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Currently I work at a startup that does some brilliant technical things with software security. Honestly, I would not have thought of the idea the founders came up with in a million years. The funny thing is that no matter how powerful or brilliant of an anti-hacking software product we create, we can’t prevent the physical theft of machines from datacenters with it. It is basically impossible for our software to jump out and club a thief on the head. This means that companies still need to hire security guards at sensitive datacenters to prevent the physical attacks of information thieves. I think what is interesting is that the idea behind a physical security firm doesn’t take a PhD to understand, but these security firms are just as vital as my company in preventing data theft.

So what I have realized is that many thriving businesses are actually based on fairly simple ideas. As long as there is a need for a service or product, there is money to be made. The problem with simple ideas is that they are easy to copy so there might be a lot of competition, but with enough research and great execution they can still be very successful.

When it comes to execution of a simple business idea, technical ingenuinity and techniques could propel the business quite a bit. For example, many steps in a retail business can be automated, and having a good online store gives the business a huge competitive advantage. Great internet marketing also helps many small businesses make their presence known in the entire world. These technological advances make simple ideas easier to implement and become profitable.

Another great advantage to simple ideas is that the business could be very easy to duplicate and having a few simple businesses that run off the same infrastructure is easier than working on a complex business idea with a high barrier of entry. So even though there may be more competition, as long as the amount of available business is huge there shouldn’t be any problems to making a simple business profitable.

I am looking into starting a business or two that can be easily automated and generates recurring income. I have a couple ideas, and they may seem silly, but I think as long as I follow through and execute them well they can be quite profitable. Ultimately, I will need to be selling something that people want, and it is my job to create a product that helps people at a great price point. We will see if anything pans out and I will definitely announce my progress as I get to it.

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Welcome to the 55th edition of The Carnival of Money Stories. It’s that time of the year again. In Vietnam they are celebrating the national holiday of Gio to Hung Vuong, but here in the United States it is time for all of us to hand in our tax forms. I just begrudgingly mailed out my tax forms with payment, but today’s carnival certainly cheered me up. We have nearly 30 great stories about life and money. Enjoy!

Editor’s Choice

Praveen writes that The IRS Are Humans, Too… at My Simple Trading System. Apparently you don’t have to be freaked out when you receive a letter from the IRS.

Will presents Rogue Debt Collectors Illegally Freeze Debtors’ Accounts posted at Your Finish Rich Plan. This is a scary story of debt collectors who would freeze pension statements.

Silicon Valley Blogger tells us I’ve Left My Job! Tying Up The Loose Ends posted at The Digerati Life. I am so jealous!

Booze Tax

Kyle from Amateur Asset Collector gives us Top 4 Money Wasters in Your 20s. It seems like Kyle paid a bit too much taxes on alcohol when he was in his twenties.

Mr. Cheap presents Cross Border Shopping posted at Quest For Four Pillars. This is Mr. Cheap’s story about the tariffs he had to pay on hard liquor. That will teach him to be a cheap boozehound.

Gas Tax

The rising cost of gas is really cutting into many of our pocketbooks. Here are some stories. about how gas affects people.

MoneyKing presents Ditch That Huge SUV! Blah. Blah ,

Financial Learn presents The Frustration of High Gas Prices posted at Financial Learn.

Business

Mark Butler presents My Big Fat Learning Experience: Vending Machines posted at The Butler Project. We can all learn quite a bit from this story of entrepreneurship.

Career

FFB presents Four Ways I Upgraded Out Of My Raises posted at Free From Broke. More money means more taxes, but it doesn’t have to mean more expenses.

Life. Money. Development. presents The 7 Attributes of Leadership posted at Life. Money. Development.

Credit Cards

FIRE Finance presents UAL Visa Story! posted at FIRE Finance.

Ryan Taylor presents How Much I Make in Cash Back Credit Card Rewards posted at Millionaire Money Habits.

Hank presents The age old question: How many credit cards should I have? posted at My Investing Blog.

Debt

Here are two stories about snowflaking! You can get rid of debt one flake at a time and these two stories illustrate how you can do it, too.

NtJS presents What is: Debt-Snowflaking? posted at not the jet set.

paidtwice presents How I Started Snowflaking at I’ve Paid For This Twice Already….

Investing

Passive Income Investor presents Cheney Betting Against The Dollar posted at LIVING OFF DIVIDENDS & PASSIVE INCOME.

MoneyNing presents Financial Cost of Being Careless posted at Personal Finance Blog by Money Ning.

The Dough Roller presents Reader Question: Should $15,000 be invested in P2P Lending or in a Better Mortgage? posted at The Dough Roller.

Net Worth

Want to retire early? These stories of people who managed to accumulate a huge net worth at a relatively young age.

PT presents Where Are They Now? Podcast Interview with a Millionaire in the Making: Todd French posted at Prime Time Money.

GBlogger presents Success Stories: $800,000 Net Worth By His Early 40s? posted at CAN I GET RICH ON A SALARY.

Real Estate

Dorian Wales presents How to Successfully Navigate Your Way through Home Renovations: 10 Practical Tips posted at Personal Financier.

Retirement

Amy presents Yale’s Investment Wizard posted at My Daily Dollars.

Saving

FMF presents Do You Buy Things and Never Use Them? posted at Free Money Finance

Other

Chief Family Officer presents Why I Decided Not To Join Revolution MoneyExchange posted at Chief Family Officer. The loose privacy policy prompted Chief Family Officer to not join the new PayPal clone. I haven’t joined either, because I’m just not really into having another financial account.

First Lady Of Poker presents Women Are Naturals At Poker posted at Shopping and Poker Blog. This is an interesting story about why women can beat men at poker.

The Financial Blogger presents We Are Living In A Good Country.

Raymond presents U-Haul Rental Trucks Suck But They Are The Cheapest Around posted at Money Blue Book.

Jeremy Zongker presents All I Really Needed to Know About Managing Money I Learned From Music posted at Debt Advice.

Madison presents Applying the Five Fundamentals of Financial Success posted at My Dollar Plan.

That is all for this edition of the Carnival of Money Stories. Thank you all for participating and a link back to the carnival is always appreciated. If you have more stories you can always submit it to the next carnival which is being held at Can I Get Rich on a Salary. This is a relatively new blog that is very well written. Now if you haven’t already, go out and file your taxes!

Photo Credit: Paul Keleher

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It is the debt consolidation loans that have brought a state of global debt upon all of us. Deals like cheap car insurance, interest free loans and non-authorized grants have brought this day. People need to learn to use their free business cards properly and resist the temptation to look at all the homes for sale.

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If I had a nickel for everytime I heard the phrase “if we go IPO…”, I could probably buy a nice video game. I have been working in private companies since I graduated college and everywhere I go engineers are dreaming of their companies going IPO and becoming the next Google. I am sorry to be a party pooper but the fact is that very few companies become public, and even if they do it’s very unlikely that rank and file workerbees like me would become fabulously rich. These are the lessons I have learned about stock options and I would like to list the reasons why most people don’t become rich off them.

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