Tips for improving your businessBy: Jack Kaufman

Who am I and why am I speaking today?

● I created a book called The Found a Business Book, which has 33 interviews with successful entrepreneurs who founded or co-founded companies like:

● I want to share some valuable advice from my book and my experiences making the book that I believe will help your business!

Important advice entrepreneurs shared in my book

● Charge more for your products or services● To effectively validate an idea for a product

you should use pre-orders● Most companies don’t need VC and shouldn’

t raise VC● That being said, if you do want to raise VC, it

is important that your product has traction before you go pitch investors

● Customer service is extremely important● The hardest part about business is starting

Charge more for your products or services

● Most companies (especially software companies) undercharge

● You should price your products or services based on the value you provide

● Try doubling the prices of your products and services

Rob Walling, Founder of Drip and Owner of HitTail

Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear Software

Use pre-orders to effectively validate your product ideas

● If you have an idea for a product, the most effective way to validate it is to ask people to pre-order

● For example, Nathan Barry:

Most companies don’t need VC and shouldn’t raise VC

● Most software companies don’t need VC and shouldn’t raise it

● Goals for software companies should instead be profitability, sustainability, and happiness for founding team

If you do want to raise VC, focus on getting traction for your product

● Snapchat has raised $73 million dollars so far and is an extremely fast-growing consumer company

● You’ll have a much easier time raising venture capital if your product has traction and is growing quickly (users, revenue, customers)

Evan Spiegel, Co-founder and CEO of Snapchat

Customer service is extremely important

● Customer service is all about treating other people as you would want to be treated, being compassionate, and being empathetic

● A lot of companies do not do well when it comes to customer service, which is actually a good thing (it means that there’s a big opportunity to do customer service really well and be known for it)

Amit Gupta, Founder of Photojojo

The hardest part about business is starting

● Both Jack Dorsey and Tom Preston-Werner said the hardest thing about business is starting your project and being serious about it

What I Personally Learned from Making My Book

● Always be networking● Products don’t sell themselves (you have to

actively market and sell them!)● The best way to market and sell any product

or business is to have an audience

Always be networking

● No matter how wealthy or famous you are, you should still always network!

● Networking leads to finding mentors, friends, customers, and introductions that all could help your business

Products don’t sell themselves

● Even if you have a valuable and outstanding product, people won’t find it unless you talk about it, promote it, and help people find it!

● You should put a similar amount of time and effort into marketing your product as you put into making your product

The Best Way to Market is to Have an Audience

● Content marketing and building an audience are extremely valuable

● Paid advertising = renting an audience (it’s expensive and doesn’t last)

● Best way to build an audience is to write and share valuable content for free, and then encourage people to subscribe via email

The Best Way to Market is to Have an Audience (continued)

● Focus less on getting people to like and follow you on social media (Twitter followers, Facebook fans)

● Focus more on getting people to subscribe for email updates (the most valuable people in an audience are your email subscribers)

Data about email

● Ryan Delk (@delk) works on business development and growth at Gumroad

● Gumroad makes it extremely easy for creators to sell products to their audiences

● In a presentation he gave at a conference called Bacon Biz Conf in June, Ryan had some extremely interesting data about conversion rates across different marketing platforms

Ryan Delk, Works on Growth and Business Development at Gumroad

Data about email (continued)

The data that Ryan and the team at Gumroad has from thousands of sellers:● Traffic from Youtube converts at 2.2%● Traffic from Twitter converts at 5.4%● Traffic from Facebook converts at 6.3%● Traffic from email converts at 9.4%

Conclusion: When it comes to building your audience, focus more of your resources on building an email list.

Examples of people who have had success building audiences

● Ramit Sethi – I Will Teach You to Be Rich

● Lindsay Nixon – Happy Herbivore

More examples of people who have had success building audiences

● Brennan Dunn – Founder of Planscope and owner/creator of many successful products

● Pat Flynn – Owner of The Smart Passive Income Blog

Some final thoughts

● Starting and growing a business is challenging and takes a lot of work, but it is also worth it

● Don’t be discouraged if things don’t go exactly as planned – e.g. Before working on The Found a Business Book (my first modest success), I failed four times working on different business projects

About me

Twitter: @kaufman_jack

Website for The Found a Business Book:foundabusiness.com

Slides for this presentation available at:http://is.gd/jackkaufmandeck