I just wanted to share this video with you. This man runs a store called Soda Pop Stop. All they sell is carbonated soda of different types. Colas and Rootbeers of course, but then cucumber soda? Rose pedal and coffee sodas? He’s got them!
Plenty of variety in the sodas. Plenty of passion in the entrepreneur.
Quite some time ago on Aridni I wrote about a dilemma I had in getting a project done. I didn’t have the technical skill to actually write the software myself and I did not have the time to learn it adequately enough.
Now that I am actively trying to restrict the number of projects I’m working on, I wanted to get these ideas out of my head. They are not quite as powerful as they were when the ideas were born, but they might be of interest to someone out there. If you decide you want to take on one of the projects, great! Go for it. I’ll even help you with getting hosting.
The three projects are right after the break. They are ‘Hivemind Snapshot Project‘, ‘Articles of Organization and Operating Agreement Generator‘, and ‘Auto-task generation… thing‘
Hopefully you will find at least one of them useful!
Last summer I was doing some work for a store with a lot of walk in traffic. It was interesting how diverse the people who came in were, but aside from grandparents, adults, and teenagers coming in as customers we had another group as well. People trying to sell us things.
They would have these ‘opportunities’ for us that could usually be described as ‘hemorrhaging money from the company.’ This is clearly not the best thing to do, unless you are trying to show a loss for they year. Yet still we would have a couple of people per week who had no idea about the business come in with plans that offered little to no value.
To be fair, there were some legitimate ideas and a couple were even worth taking up. For the most part they were a waste of time.
One particular company was basically putting together a local web directory. To be in the directory you had to do a little interview so they could write a paragraph about your company. Then they would let you be in the directory to try it out for 90 days. After that time was over, you needed to shell out some money. $100 bucks per month.
While $100 a month isn’t a whole lot for online advertising, there are much better ways to spend it. Especially due to the fact that our store’s web page had higher search engine rankings and we were able to track the minimal amounts of traffic that their site brought in.
There is some value in their business model; however it is not quite balanced. The value that they provide is having another link to your website, presumably marketed to people living in or traveling to the area. One of the bigger problems about this site was that it was to new. It didn’t rank well in google for local terms and not a lot of people knew about it.
If they would have also had a deal along the lines of, “If you link to us as well, we’ll give you x% off each month.” Then they could build up the amount of targeted local traffic to their site buy leaps and bounds. The more people that link to them, the more valuable their links become.
Any business wants you to provide value to them. If all you have is a team of salesmen then where does the value come from?
If you are going to pitch your product or service, make sure it benifits enough to justify your pricetag.
Have you been wondering if now is a time to start your new business or quit your old project? Right now is a great time to get going with your new business. There are plenty of opportunities out there and with so many people focused on the recession or the depression or whatever you want to call it, there is a perfect distraction away from what you are doing.
Building something amazing.
It is interesting that this company is selling phone services, but still they made a great video. So get out there. and get focused. Get determined. And when the economy is running full steam again, you will be ready.