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Funding Fun with John Dimmer

John imparts many important lessons when seeking investment. When looking for funding, it helps to know what angel investors are looking for. First off, investors want you to be successful. Nine out of ten businesses fail, and they want to back the winner of the group. This means that any investor worth their salt is going to do their due diligence. They want to see everything is in order, including patents, trademarks, copyrights to financials, contracts, and everything else related to business planning. It is important that the business is well run, planned, documented, and adequately protected. They also want to see that the founder has invested in the company. This demonstrates that the founder has skin in the game and is willing to commit. Once due diligence is satisfied, angels are looking for a 10x return on investment over five years. This is because they need enough of a return to offset the average failure rate of businesses.  Typically businesses go through five stages o...
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Brian Forth, Site Crafter

Brian's talk was a good glimpse into the world of SiteCrafting. There were many interesting aspects to the work of contract website creation. I really appreciated how Brian didn't shy away from referring customers to other services like Squarespace when they couldn't afford SiteCrafting or if it didn't seem like they were the best fit. There was also excellent insights about working with 3rd party design firms, and how much of a nightmare it could be. The story Brian Forth laid out about how the design firm they were working with really screwed them over by over promising to the client and then leaving them to actually implement the promised features. In the end, SiteCrafting ended up losing money on the contract. It was a lesson in picking who you collaborate with, and sticking to dealing with clients directly whenever possible. Designers left to their own devices won't adequately consider the engineering costs of their design, especially when all of these costs ar...
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Magic Greeting Cards: Products, Pricing and Customers

 In one sense my list of core products is a simple one, if you disregard the sheer amount of Magic The Gathering (MTG) cards. I will simply be selling a set of decks, and single cards. However, MTG has over 27,000 cards, and hundreds more are added each year. It will be impossible to keep every card in stock, and much like a comic book store, my stock will differ in the collectibles it holds from other similar stores. My core product listing will be: Single cards Official MTG Singles - $0.30 - $800 Custom made "proxies" - $4 Decks "Starter" decks - $20 Custom decks - $140- $10,250  Proxy decks - $200 As you can see, MTG can be a very expensive hobby. To buy all the cards individually, a tournament deck can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. It can cost even more if you try to get the cards for a deck the old fashion way, by opening booster packs. This makes "proxies" all the more attractive for newer players. Proxies are stand-in cards that can be...
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Three Competitors

     Upon conducting some research, I was able to identify three competitors to my business idea for selling Magic The Gathering (MTG) cards as individual cards by themselves. This is commonly referred to as "selling singles". If Magic Greeting Cards is to get off the ground, it'll have to be able to go toe to toe with these other companies selling singles. Lets take a look at the following businesses.  The Magic Cove An eBay only business that purely sells MTG cards. What you see is what you get, and there isn't much depth to this particular business. However, there eBay page has 7.2 k sales and 99.9% positive ratings. Card Kingdom The business that I used to work for opening card packs. Card Kingdom has 4 physical storefronts and their own online website. Their website offers not only card singles, but pre-made starter decks. However, all of their starter decks are currently sold out. Each sales page for a given cards has a number of recommended products, much like...
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Entrepenuer Erik Hanberg

Erik's visit to class was definitely an eye opener. While Erik has multiple successes as an Entrepreneur, what struck my interest was how he used authorship as an Entrepreneur. I've talked to people who have had their work published, but only get paid pennies per copy sold. The fact that Erik was able to make $4-8 per copy was super impressive. Combining that with paid seminars about his book was another inventive way to make money of his writing. Not all authors are necessarily entrepreneurs, but Erik shows us that authors definitely can be entrepreneurs. "Little Book of Gold" really turned out to be Erik's own golden goose. What I liked a lot about Erik's entrepreneurship is that a lot of his money was made through his own skills, rather than employing a lot of people. He does own a local podcast network, but it doesn't really make money off it, and it is more of a passion project. It's a small thing to most people, but for me, I really respect peopl...
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Startup.com? More like this startup bombed...

 My first impression of Startup.com is that I don't particularly like any of these people. It's a good way to dissuade me from getting into this sort of business with friends. I know that the actions of these people make sense given the situation, but why put yourself in this situation in the first place? Seeing friends turn on each other over money is a sad sight. I also think that everyone in the story is in over their head in one way or another. Tom wasn't ready to be a co-CEO, but Kaleil wasn't either. Of the two, Kaleil was the more competent, but he also had massive shortcomings. He had trouble suppressing his ego and he wasn't able to articulate solutions, only criticisms. In the end, the third founder, Chieh made the most money. Tom and Kaleil were left high and dry due to the dotcom bust. During the whole saga, one point of intrigue did catch my attention, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. I think the break-in exemplified how the GovWorks crew, a...
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10 Strengths and Weaknesses

 When reflecting on my own strengths and weaknesses in building my company, I think the following is the best summation I can come up with. This is all within context, mind you, and I’m specifically reflecting on building a “company”, rather than some other economic arrangement. This context is in play, and I would write a different set of strengths and weaknesses for other endeavors in life. These are my strengths and weaknesses if I were to take on being a corporate entrepreneur, not my strengths and weaknesses as a human being in general. Strengths: Curiosity  I’m always willing to learn new things, constantly asking questions, while also seeking  answers. Curiosity is the seed of endless potential, rather than being stuck in a given  set of knowledge. One can be intelligent, but without curiosity, the growth of one’s  intelligence will be stunted – which is exactly why curiosity is one of the best traits  that one can have.  Logistics One should ne...
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