Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Welcome Scott G!

Welcome aboard, Scott :) I`m sure you`ll find plenty of web publishing advice in the "Doing business on the web" section of the forum. Great to have you!


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Hello and Welcome Scott!

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Leslie
Founder and President
Charmed Life Products LLC
Grill Charms™… The MUST HAVE grilling accessory that is revolutionizing the American Cook-out AND The perfect gift for any occasion!
Grill Charms
                                                                                                    

Hi there, Scott :-)

Bootstrapping seems to be where a whole bunch of us are located at the moment. Yes, it`d be fantastic if we had the seed money saved up from many years of toil and trouble, workin` for The Company. Most of us don`t.

Check through the forum topics themselves. There`s been a whole bunch of really great threads and discussions about pretty much everything. What sort of business idea are you thinking about?

What an interesting concept! The first thing that came to mind was Researcher.

I don`t know how simple it would be to sell charts and graphs alone, other than perhaps as an outsourced consulting thing. But researchers, on the other hand, are a well-established field of endeavor. I`m thinking you could make your marketing focus something like that, and your target audience grant writers, polling companies, government agencies, education and science institutions, and perhaps even thesis writing (PhD, MBA, or other post-grads).

You also might hook in with marketing companies, who are always looking for ways to see demographic data in different shapes. Maybe?

Well, consider our signal flags business. The flags have been around 300 years, but who knows about them? Only people in the Navy, for the most part.

Yet they`re colorful and a different way to send messages. We could just sit back and wait for the rest of the world to figure out what to do with these flags, but that`s not useful. Instead, we try to combine the selling and the education, to grow the business.

To me, that`s real bootstrapping---where you not only have to grow your own business, you also have to grow the awareness of the product.

Because you`re a "chart geek," you would have the passion to do that education with an eye toward popularizing it. Right? Think of all the government and scientific presentations that can put the audience to sleep in less than 1 second! Could there maybe be a synergy business for you in presentations?

Many (if not most) presentations are built around graphs. Not all, but many. And yet the presenters are pretty much stuck with whatever they can pull out of Excel or PowerPoint. Worse, they only know bar graphs and pie charts.

So you have more work cut out for you. :-) This is what you`re thinking of doing for the rest of your life, right? Is there a time limit?

All good points, CraigL. Time to roll up my sleeves. Thanks for the additional ideas and perspective.