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FTFY
I agree. NDA's are definitely fine for that.
The worry with these is that they seem to be one legislative move away from being illegal. (Granted, so is fantasy football). I'd be careful about getting too deep into that business until I felt really comfortable with the legislative situation.
So I've decided make a run at it! Just going to start slow and small, not dumping $10K in all at once or anything. I'm buying some gear off craigslist today that I'm confident I can turn for an eventual profit. What's cool about this is that there's really no pressure on me to profit quickly. I don't really care how long it takes to sell an item as long as I sell it for a profit. In the meantime, I'll collect a bunch of cool gear. Today I'm buying a mint 2009 Ibanez JS1000 with original hard shell case, a mint 2011 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster with OHSC, and a mint Vox VBM1 Brian May Special 15W amp. Anyone interested!?Now I just have to think about getting a simple website up and running to display inventory. I'm thinking a free ".webs" website would suffice. Set one up for someone else recently and it seems pretty decent.
No.
Read Gary Vaynerchuk's book. He became a wine expert basically by doing a ton of short videos about wine and putting them on YouTube. he built a brand as a regular guy that knew a lot about wine and now is highly regarded in both the wine and business sector. Just like you, he took something he loved and ran with it.
I use shopify. It's very simple and clean. Believe the minimum monthly fee is $30-$50 give or take. They have great customer service
I highly suggest getting .com web URL vs anything else. Customers struggle to remember anything but a .com URL. If you care to rank well on Google, domain age is a factor, too, albeit less than before. A few hundred bucks on a decent domain name listed for sale vs $10 on a garbage one is money well spent.
Thanks. Not sure if you meant me but I've been a big Vaynerchuk fan for a long while. We had some talk with his people last summer as he was trying to get advertising out for Jab Jab Jab Jab Hook but we couldn't get together. He's a hustler. (in a good way)
Almost zero. The number of sites that generate substantial revenue through advertising present an astounding amount of content. For example, The Chive, The Onion, Bleacher Report, etc. have dozens of curations, articles or collections each day. Smaller sites that generate a little bit of advertising money ($200-1000/month) still get updated regularly.
All that stuff sounds good, but Joe, honestly, how many of those steps did you do before you started FBG's? The only one I did was #7.
Well, I can't say I did all these before jumping into FBG 14 years ago. But that's not the point. I didn't know nearly as much back then and I got lucky. If I was starting a new business today, I'd absolutely do these. Or at least give them some detailed thought.
That's what's interesting though. I rarely meet successful entrepreneurs who followed the "standard" steps and were successful. Most of the people I know who were successful (you and I included) did not follow those steps and instead just jumped in and did it. And yes, most of us also say we got "lucky." But I know a LOT of people who spent the time to do things "right" and never got their business off the ground.
Yeah maybe. I tend to disagree but that's not really the point.
Exactly.
The most succinct way I've heard this explained is 'Sell benefits, not features.' You don't sell a car with 40mpg, you sell a car that cuts the fuel costs in half. You don't sell a smart phone with processing power and megapixel camera, you sell a phone that can help you find a restaurant and post high-quality photos of your food to Facebook. This is where Apple has excelled. It doesn't advertise RAM, memory, resolution. It sells technology as helping solve problems easily and beautifully.
I can boil this down to 3 simple points:-create value
What hours are you working at night? I'd imagine pretty weird hours, right? Nevertheless, great example!
Should you not open a business where people spend money because some not insignificant percentage of the population gets addicted to spending and ruins their life? Should you not write a book because someone may use an idea in it to do a bad thing? Yes you don't want to do immoral things to get a sale. You don't want to sell snake oil. I left companies over issues like that. But if my product is legal, safe and it provides whatever benefit I say it will then the fact that someone may find a way to turn it into a problem for themselves isn't on me.
Careful, you might let your capitalist slip show a bit if you aren't careful...
So, for argument's sake, could you please define "safe?"
To add on to this, the browser extensions which block ads are not as concerning to me as the decline in ad costs (cost per click). A year and a half to two years ago I could get right around $1 per click. Today its 50 to 60 cents per click. The erosion in ad costs has been pretty staggering. There are articles all over the web confirming this and Google comments on it in every analyst call. :(
What is interesting though is how strong the proponents of this are. I don't have the link handy but I read a little while back an article from the guys who started Bleacher Report that after they sold, they were absolutely going to start their next venture with the same model with free content while making their money from ads.
