How?

Via FoodEat

What Is FoodEat?

FoodtoEat is a web-based delivery service designed to make food ordering fun, easy, and convenient.

FoodtoEat also lets you check your delivery status so you can plan your day with ease.

How It Works:

Its innovative online reservation and delivery system makes ordering food a breeze, so there’s no waiting in line, phoning in your order, or confusion on the web.

Unlike other food delivery service FoodtoEat offers customers options from restaurants and food trucks!

With FoodtoEat you can pick up your meal in person or even reserve a last-minute table through their sister site, www.SeekaTable.com .

Best Part Is:

FoodtoEat is a completely free service for any customers wishing to browse and order food online. Customers don’t pay a penny to order, and eateries only pay ten cents when the final order comes through.

More at: https://www.foodtoeat.com/Home.aspx

People who are afraid of failing should not become entrepreneurs. They can’t overcome the psychological fears of making a mistake, and are afraid of losing money. They are better off keeping their day job. Successful entrepreneurs, on the other hand, tap into the positive power of failure. Here are three examples:

• Steve Jobs was fired by Apple Computers in 1985, the company he helped to create. He went on to acquire Pixar, made it a success, and then came back to reinvent Apple as a very successful consumer products business.

• Dean Kamen, the creator of the Segway Human Transporter, several successful biomedical device businesses, and holder of 440 patents, jokes that his biggest failure is “that I have too many to talk about.”

• Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, central power generation, and the phonograph, but failed in his effort to extract low-grade iron ore from sand. He brushed this off, and went on to many successful media and transportation businesses later in life.

According to investors I know, young entrepreneurs who have failed at least once are more likely to get funding from them, compared to entrepreneurs with a perfect track record. Investors know that founders often learn more from a failure than they do from a success, so don’t be so quick to delete a failure from your bio. Serial failures, on the other hand, send a different message.

A failure can be a milestone on the road to success, if you celebrate that failure for what the mistakes taught you – and use the experience to move to the next idea. Here are three points of learning that many famous failures emphasize:

1. Accept responsibility, don’t spread the blame. It’s easy to blame partners, investors, customers, and the economy. If you blame someone else, you’ll never learn from your mistakes. Remember, you volunteered to be the entrepreneur, so you are not the victim.

2. Capitalize on the good relationships you found. In every bad deal, there are always some good people. Many entrepreneurs have taken on one of these as a new partner, and gone on to make millions of dollars. The good investors will fund you again, and the good customers will gladly take your next offering.

3. Study and profit from your mistakes. Mistakes are priceless lessons, so you should learn from them, rather than run from them. Making mistakes and becoming smarter is the job of an entrepreneur, while not making mistakes is the job of an employee.

Failure is not usually a single event, but a collection of mistakes and circumstances that add up to test the patience of the founder. Failure combined with a strong sense of business ethics can motivate and produce innovation, while failure due to a lack of ethics can lead to desperation. Certain types of failures, like failures of integrity and ethics, are harder to recover from.

Failure, even multiple failures, can be the first stage of a very successful journey. Success usually comes to those willing to keep coming back. Resilience and agility are really the only sustainable edge in business. So when you experience your first failure, just give up your ego, let it go, and get back to work smarter on your next success.

By
MARTIN ZWILLING
CEO & Founder of Startup Professionals, Inc.; Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; ATIF Angels Selection Committee; Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Syndicated

1.
Duplia

Duplia makes it easier to upload audio, images and videos with just a simple click of a button. It is a new and innovative way to share media with your friends, family and users worldwide

2.
Medifund

Medifund is a crowdfunding platform which supports Medical Students who are struggling to pay their school expenses.

3.
ManagePlaces

ManagePlaces lets you manage land, projects, customers and any type of asset using their online system.

With intelligent integration of spatial information as well as access from any device (laptops, tablets, mobile phones – with or without an internet connection) ManagePlaces saves you staff costs and time, by improving your outputs and reporting.

4.
Stems

Stems is a new beta startup that aims to help you collaborate on music projects in real-time from anywhere in the world.

There are no middle roads to real commitment, and if you are not ready to fully commit to all the rigors of a startup, you are better off sticking with your current role. For your calibration, here are some characteristics that you and others need to recognize in yourself as a truly committed entrepreneur:

1. Actively seeks leadership and responsibility. Many people need the comfort of following, rather than leading. When things go wrong, it’s then easier to point to someone else as the scapegoat. As an entrepreneur, the promises anyone makes on your behalf are yours. You need to be ready to accept “the buck stops here” and make it work.

2. Exhibits surging raw ambition. Successful entrepreneurs are generally ambitious and confident in their abilities. They may have many ideas, some of them are more workable than others. Failure is viewed as a learning opportunity, so it’s no disaster that some ideas don’t actually get done the first time.

3. Minimum positive feedback required. As I’ve said in previous articles, it’s lonely at the top. If your psyche is one that needs regular positive feedback, and a commensurate paycheck, to stay motivated, you need to find a real job rather than an entrepreneurial one.

4. Social life is not the highest priority. If you find yourself unable to clear your head of work-related thoughts at the end of the day, that’s committed. Social relationships are important, and you do need to blank out work from time to time, but if social priorities are at the top of your list, you probably won’t enjoy the role of entrepreneur.

5. Comfortable with unpredictable working hours. Some people need a predictable schedule, for family reasons, or just peace of mind. Entrepreneurs need to be flexible, and assume there will be long working hours. If you are annoyed rather than exhilarated at the long or unpredictable schedule at your startup, you are involved but not committed.

6. See vacation as an interruption. Most entrepreneurs I know can’t remember the last time they had a “real” vacation (without bringing their work along). This may not be healthy, but it illustrates the level of commitment that you are competing with in the marketplace. If you insist on vacations “without checking in,” go and work for a big company that gives you a holiday allowance.

7. Haven’t even thought about retirement. Many people involved with startups are working hard, but are looking forward to retirement. The committed entrepreneurs wouldn’t think of retiring, even if they made millions from the current project. They enjoy work too much to stop, and can’t wait to start their next venture.

Making a commitment is a serious matter and one which should not be taken lightly, especially in a startup venture where the team needs to pull its weight together to achieve goals. Individuals who need structure and workload predictability won’t be able to maintain the high levels of enthusiasm and motivation of a startup team.

This isn’t a statement of right or wrong, just different strokes for different folks. The next time you have the urge to chuck your day job and live the dream of being your own boss, remember to test yourself for how committed you really are, before you jump off the cliff!

By
MARTIN ZWILLING
CEO & Founder of Startup Professionals, Inc.; Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; ATIF Angels Selection Committee; Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Syndicated

From my perspective as a professional investor and long-time advisor to entrepreneurs, much of this urban legend advice is just plain wrong.

Of course there are scenarios where a written business plan is not critical, but I haven’t seen one yet where a well-written 15-page document, or at least a 10-slide pitch, is a negative. Let’s look at some common scenarios, and put this into perspective for entrepreneurs:

1. You don’t need or want investors or a loan. With bootstrapping, no business plan is expected by anyone. Yet I would suggest that creating one is still a valuable exercise, since you need the plan as the blueprint for your company, team communication, and progress metrics, unless your management style makes this a waste of time.

2. You have built a successful startup, and plan to use the same investors. If you have a proven track record, investors don’t have to see a written plan to believe you can do the job. In fact, they are probably in such a hurry to give you money that they don’t want you to waste time writing anything down and passing it along to new investors.

3. You need funding, and plan to get it from friends and family. Hopefully you know your friends and family better than I do, so you decide when a business plan is required. If your rich uncle is an accountant, or has his own business, I recommend a good business plan. On the other hand, your mother probably won’t read one.

4. You need an investor, and want a document to mass-mail to everyone. Creating a business plan for this purpose is a waste of time. In fact, the whole process is a waste of time. Most VCs and Angel investors don’t read unsolicited proposals, unless they have met you first, or have a glowing recommendation from another investor or acquaintance.

5. You need money, and plan to do crowdfunding. Although technically the major crowd funding sites today, including Kickstarter and Indiegogo, don’t request a business plan, they do require essentially the same information in a project format. Thus building a business plan ahead of time will improve your application and chances of success.

6. You need an investor, and want to solicit professionals online. Major platforms are available online to find Angel groups or VCs, including Gust and AngelList. These platforms, and every investor who uses them to find entrepreneurs, expects to find a good business plan posted. You won’t even be considered without a business plan.

7. You find an interested investor, and need to close the deal. Most professional investors, even if they like your story, and were properly introduced by a friend, will ask for a business plan at the due diligence stage. They want to see if you have done your homework, have reasonable expectations, and are willing to commit to something.

You might fairly conclude from these points that a business plan is only “required” if you want to close funding from professional investors who don’t already know you or know your track record. Since the best VCs deal primarily with known and proven entrepreneurs, it’s easy for them to say that they don’t read business plans.

On the other hand, don’t forget Angel investors, who fund 60 times as many startups, to the tune of $20 billion last year, who start their search primarily from platforms like the ones mentioned above. A business plan may be a small investment to get a shot at that opportunity.

For the rest of you entrepreneurs, consider the value of a business plan when it is not required. Clemson University professor William B. Gartner looked at data a while back from the Panal Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics,and found that writing a plan increased the chances by two and a half times that a person would actually go into business.

Of course, building a plan is not an alternative to getting out there and doing something. There is no substitute for knowing your customers first hand, and iterating on a minimum viable product to find the most marketable solution. Writing it down promotes both understanding and commitment.

Overall, I sense that not writing a business plan is more often an excuse rather than a time saver. Building a business is a long-term non-trivial task, like building a house. Would you give money to someone, without a plan, who had never built a house before? Hopefully you wouldn’t even build your own house without a plan. You should treat your new business with the same respect.

By
MARTIN ZWILLING
CEO & Founder of Startup Professionals, Inc.; Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; ATIF Angels Selection Committee; Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Syndicated

Often these facets of entrepreneurship don’t rear their ugly head until well down the road. Yet before you start, you should think about what the impact might be on your psyche, and how to neutralize these challenges in your own plan. I’ll summarize key ones here, from the positives and negatives in “Build a Business, Not a Job” by David Finkel and Stephanie Harkness:

• Long-term daily job grind. Sometimes entrepreneurs are so set on creating a successful business, they forget to create one that they love to work on every day. After a time, they find that they have merely created a job for themselves, with the same rote responsibilities and stress that they experienced in a prior corporate world. Daily attendance is mandatory in order for the business to succeed and be profitable, and the so-called freedom is hard to find. Vacations and time-off don’t happen for years.

• No formal training courses. Larger enterprises are always sending their “high fliers” to leadership refreshers, new technology updates, and training on employee performance management. Entrepreneurs find themselves all alone in the trenches, without the time, money, or incentives to do these things. The result is a sinking feeling after some time that you are no longer vital and competitive in your own domain.

• Personal wealth management. Entrepreneurs find that the business skills needed to grow their business are not the same as the personal wealth skills needed to manage a healthy personal wealth plan for their family and their retirement. Their business is their entire portfolio. They are at the mercy of innumerable catastrophes, making this a huge risk.

For these individuals, a lack of financial fluency often leads to poor decisions after they no longer have their businesses. They wake up one day without their business, and with nothing to show for the years spent building it.

• How society perceives you. As a young entrepreneur, everyone looks up to you for running your own business. But later you find that you may be perceived by many as a person without job security, unlike your classmates or ex-colleagues, who are sought after or being placed in well-known large company or multinational positions.

Even worse, you find that your business domain has developed a negative stigma through no fault of your own, as has happened to investment banks, mortgage brokers, and many nightlife businesses. It’s no fun to hide your business role rather than proudly proclaim it.

• Business must be more than the money. Years into a successful business, owners often wake up one day facing a painful question: Is this all there is? To truly be successful your business must be about more than the money.

Good entrepreneurs find a great personal adventure, like Richard Branson, or great philanthropy, like Bill Gates. Guy Kawasaki says the best reason to start an organization is to make meaning – to create a product or service that makes the world a better place.

Every business startup has to have a viable idea, but it also needs a strong sense of realism on the possible pitfalls. Starting a company as an entrepreneur should be viewed as the beginning of a lifetime career, not a work project that you expect to be over in a few months. As such you should consider the long-term challenges as well as the short-term ones.

Life is too short to end up with pain and regret after a “successful” career.

By
MARTIN ZWILLING
CEO & Founder of Startup Professionals, Inc.; Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; ATIF Angels Selection Committee; Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Syndicated

Today’s roundtable had a higher percentage of concept-stage entrepreneurs than usual.

Query

First up was Salil Agrawal from Bangalore, India, pitching Query, a Q&A forum concept, supposedly for solving problems. Now the Q&A market is cluttered as hell, and I see absolutely no case for entering the market at this stage.

Slamly

Then Manikandan Saravanan from Chennai, India, pitched Slamly, a social media app that fuses the ideas of SurveyMonkey for brands, and a consumer Q&A concept. Mani hopes that consumers seeking ‘person opinions’ about products and choices would use the app to ask around, and every so often, brand questions can be inserted into the stream.
Again, I am not convinced about the concept.

Nurturize

Next, Rehana Shrestha from Woodbridge, Virginia, pitched Nurturize, a very high level concept for offering educational activities to students. The learning technology market is extremely cluttered as well these days, and without a fine-grained positioning, something as broad as what she presented has no chance.

All three concepts need serious sharpening and validation work before I would feel comfortable recommending that you spend invaluable years of your life on developing them as businesses.

Query

Last up, we had Manish Shara from Jaipur, India, pitching Offermandi, the best company of the day. Manish has already launched an online comparison shopping portal in Jaipur, his hometown, for mobile and tablet products. The twist is, the portal generates leads for physical retailers, not ecommerce shops. Most of Jaipur’s retailers are not selling online as yet, but are open to using online marketing channels.

Manish has 100 retailers using his service, and 10% of those are already paying customers. Within the next couple of months, Manish will have a sense of whether and how much the rest are willing to pay. If a couple of hundred retailers pay, say, $30-$50 a month in subscription fee, at least one monetization strategy for the business gets validated.

Then comes the question of market sizing. How many retailers would be willing to subscribe to such a service? At what price-point? And what does it take to scale the business? One of the challenges of the business is its highly manual nature. Nonetheless, there is at least a small business at the core of this idea.

You can listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here.

By
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, a virtual incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond.

She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. Sramana has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1.
Sqwiggle

Sqwiggle is an always on online workplace for your remote team to work together throughout the day.

Sqwiggle includes a unique media stream that lets you drag and drop, paste or type anything and share it with your team quickly and efficiently!

2.
Heeduser

Heeduser is a community powered customer as well as visitor engagement platform designed for small and medium size companies to reduce customer attrition, increase conversion rates, build visitor and customer engagement, acquire more customers, drive product innovation and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3.
Seek4Career

Seek4Career is the place where the searching for your appropriate job vacancy becomes a convenient and pleasant process.

4.
Translation Cheki

“Translation cheki” is a new translation app that translates as you copy new content..

“Translation cheki” is observing the content of paste board in the background. When new sentences are copied, it will be translated continuously.

After your copy work done, let’s go back to the app to see the translated sentences.

A while back I read “The Collaboration Imperative,” by Ron Ricci and Carl Wiese, which makes the case very well for why collaboration matters in every business, as well as startups. Every entrepreneur should heed the following lessons on collaboration derived from the authors work on the culture, process and technology of collaboration in hundreds of companies:

1. Consensus is the enemy of collaboration. Collaboration leaves everyone with a feeling of “win-win,” while consensus is “win-lose” or even “lose-lose.” Collaboration opens more possibilities, while consensus narrows them to a compromise.

2. Collaboration has to start at the top. Company culture is not set by words, but by the actions of the founder. That means treating everyone with respect, and providing regular constructive feedback. Trust is required for every successful collaboration.

3. The biggest barriers to collaboration are not technical. They are cultural and organizational in nature. Startup executives need to first build a culture and processes with communication and shared goals, rather than internal competition and bureaucracy.

4. Collaboration cannot be deployed – it must be embraced. Executives and managers must be willing participants, modeling collaborative behavior and embracing the technology tools, not just taskmasters. All team members must be committed.

5. Good ideas come from anywhere, so the more voices the better. These are critical in arriving at a clear idea of what is important, exploring what is possible based on constraints, and coordinating effective actions to produce successful outcomes.

6. Collaboration enhances personal communication skills. As team members interact and play to their strengths, they learn to be authentic and genuine, which increases their effectiveness as well as their skills. They reach agreement faster and communicate more.

7. You get out of collaboration what you put in. According to a global study of business conducted by Frost & Sullivan, the return on a collaboration investment progressively improves as better tools are deployed and a collaborative culture takes shape.

8. Collaboration success means changing both roles and rewards. This means creating processes that allow more perspectives, but make it clear who has decision-making rights. It’s essential to provide incentives to change ingrained behavior.

9. More interaction opens opportunities to create more value. Within any given startup environment (market, industry structure, competitors, product/service mix, etc.) opportunities exist that are often missed unless everyone is listening and communicating.

10. The average return on collaboration is four times the initial investment. From the study referenced, measured gains ranged from three to six times. This ROI comes from cost avoidance, cost reductions, business optimization, and faster business decisions.

In today’s highly competitive and unpredictable environment, it’s not enough to do one thing better than your competitors. You need to change your organization so that it can rapidly recognize and adapt to new opportunities and new threats.

Collaboration is the new imperative. It may be the only way to accelerate innovation, improve agility, increase adaptability and cut costs all at once. But building a collaborative culture is not an easy transformation for the traditional fiercely independent entrepreneur. How long has it been since you have taken a hard look at your own startup?

By
MARTIN ZWILLING
CEO & Founder of Startup Professionals, Inc.; Advisory Board Member for multiple startups; ATIF Angels Selection Committee; Entrepreneur in Residence at ASU and Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Syndicated

How?

Through DoorBot.

What Is DoorBot?

DoorBot is a simple, yet powerful wireless doorbell that streams live video and audio of your front door directly to your smartphone or tablet.

How It Works:

All you need to do is just install DoorBot, download the free app and you’re ready to go.

Best Part Is:

With DoorBot you can check out the video stream before answering – if it’s someone you don’t want to deal with, simply ignore the notification.

More at: https://christiestreet.com/products/doorbot