Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Business

Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Business

1. Do not pick an idea you aren't passionate about.

When starting a business, be sure to pick an idea or area that you are passionate about. If you choose something that you are passionate about, rather than focussing too much on the bottom line, the results will follow. When working on your business, you don’t want it to seem like work, and it should always be something that you want to be doing.

2. Do not be afraid to pivot or fail

Especially in the beginning do not become too attached to your idea or product. A large portion of the time, your idea could fail. Take what you learn from this failure, and use it to pivot, or completely drop the idea and try to come up with a new one.  

3. Do not spend too much money when you start a business.

Always start small. Don’t invest too much money into your new business idea first and try to locally expand and promote your idea without a large amount of investment.

4. Don't be overrun by the numbers

Always listen to your customers wants, within reason. Especially if you’re starting small, you need to value every customer and focus on them more than the bottom line. If you treat your customer right, the profits will come.

5. Do not underestimate the amount of time it will take to do things.

Starting a business takes a lot of effort and time and you will not be able to create a business within a day, keep this in mind and do not stop the work until the end. Always overestimate the amount of time it will take to do things.

Mama's Meals - End of 2016 Post!!

Mama's Meals has made a lot of progress since our last post! Whether the outcome of the steps we took were good or bad, we have received helpful feedback and we are trying our best to think around the obstacles we have been faced with. We sent out our prototype 300 miles away on November 15, 2016. The meal we sent as our prototype was chicken and rice with a side of broccoli. Before we sent the box out, the challenge we were faced with was how we were going to keep the food cold. We foiled and placed the chicken and broccoli in an insulated bad which we then placed next to icepacks inside the box. We found out the next day that our chicken and broccoli were not cold when they arrived in North Carolina. Despite our disappointment, we are lucky that this is a challenge we are faced with in the early stages of our company's development. We have a  Plan B in terms of keeping our food cold for when we send our next prototype so let's keep our fingers crossed that our change in packaging and icepacks will work! Another step we have taken is completing our business plan; which answers the who, what, and why of our company. Completing the Business Plan made us find the answers to some questions that we were unsure of. With the critical feedback we received on the Business Plan we were able to perfect it and Mama's Meals is now ready to tackle the next step to our final pitch. Lauren, Elli, and I are now in the midst of working on our power point slides which we will present on the final pitch day. We are also creating a website to go along with the power point which will hopefully give a better visual as to how Mama's Meals works. Once we complete our website, we will be sure to share the link with our blog readers first and would appreciate any feedback!

Surfit, an all new apparel Company

Introducing Surfit, Surfit an all new apparel company. We are a surfing and apparel company that is designated on designing clothes that deliver beach lifestyle to people across the country. 24.8% of Americans visit the beach every year thus having a very large market to sell to. As of now our design is in progress but we do have a general idea. The basis of the design will be a surfboard. The design within the surfboard will vary depending on the location you buy the shirt at. The designs could be exclusive to each beach, allowing the people who buy them so show support for the beach the attended. Surfit will also give people a sence of pride in the beach that they go to and be able to rep it.

We are currently working on our final business slide and try our best to catch up with all the other business plans in our class that are relatively more complete than ours. We will work on the design and produce a few shirts that we will initially sell in our school store, and from there we will expand.

 Real fas

No Kart

     Recently we discovered an app that is exactly the same as the app we are planning to design. The link of the app is posted below. Thus, after considering, our Go Kart idea has been abandoned. Right now, we are still brainstorming ideas that are be totally different.
   

     Also we have lost our enthusiasm about our last idea because first of all, it's very challenging to make in terms of technology. So the idea that we are focusing now should probably be easier to make and interests us.

     

http://aisle411.com/

   

Personal Reflection ---- Sean Zhou

    Currently we are halfway through the class, and I personally have achieved a lot form our attempt to start a business. After watching many successful examples of entrepreneurs, I learned so much more about business. I am currently trying to figure out what our purpose of creating Go Kart is, to make a prototype with basically no money, and to put effort into improving our website. Below I have attached the link to the website that I created for our app.
    I do realize that in order to make Go Kart work, we need a small amount of starting fund. I will continue to work on the app, and figure our why I chose this idea to work on and what our belief is about our idea.

http://szhou5.wixsite.com/gokart

What do you plan to do?

Currently, our class has only been in class for about 3-4 weeks. During those weeks we have worked on how to create ideas for products that people would need and not want. We created a padlet of multiple business ideas and eventually "shaved" it down to about 16 ideas that we believed could really take off in the business world. We will soon be choosing teams on who we would like to work with. Ideally the people who we work with will have similar ideas to ours and they would be people that we believe could bring different perspectives to make an idea grow.

The End of Candy Express

As this semester comes to an end, so does our business. We asked for $100 to start up. With that we used less than half to cover the cost of production, meaning buying the candy and packaging. However, we only received four orders. Our policy is that no one receives delivery until either my partner or I have received payment and we ask that they find us from 7-8 Am the day they would like it delivered. No one paid us even after we did deliver within the same week. Since then, we've received no orders and no money.

The most important thing we've learned through attempting to start a business is in order to have customers you have to create excitement and interest for the product or service. While our idea was a good one, we lacked in customer interest. Also, we needed to find a better way for people to pay us and follow through before we deliver.
Well, we tried. Say goodbye to Candy Express.

Stress Money $

We have almost sold out of our second shipment of inventory, marking the completion of our second goal of breaking even. It seems that when we do sell, we sell very quickly.  We have 3 stress balls left.  The challenge for us was finding time to set up and sell. It is encouraging that whenever we sell, our sales are consistent. Meaning that people are not getting tired of our project. Many customers bought more than one stress ball at a time. We would like to see people collect different stress balls; driving up our sales per customer.  Our team is content with each other and we still haven’t run into any disputes.  We even sold 16 at one time for a special bulk deal with another business class.

We do it big over at FHStress.

Progress

Since we have launched FHStress we surprising sold out of stock in 2 days. After restocking, we have sold a few more. Our marketing is still being worked out, however, word of mouth seems to have been very successful for us so far. Obviously this will not continue, and at that point, we are putting our marketing into full speed.  We are a tad worried that the hacky sacks will not sell as well, seeing as they don't have the fun emoji appeal of our stress balls. We are planning to return them when they arrive, and are now searching for other products with the same social media appeal