School for Startups Minutes

One of the most common mistakes I see is failing to ask for help — and I don't mean financial aid. I mean mentorship. There are so many organizations actively seeking mentees — people to train. There are also individuals who are excellent at mentoring and are actively advertising for new clients — entrepreneurs to guide and support. But the average entrepreneur is often too arrogant, too egotistic...

When an entrepreneur is starting out and finally finds success with marketing, whatever channel brought that success often becomes their favorite. They become obsessed with it — overly in love with it. So, if their first success comes from Google Ads, they tend to forget about all the other options and focus only on Google Ads. That's a huge mistake. You must use all marketing channels: word of mo...

One common mistake that entrepreneurs make is in their pricing. You're probably thinking they charge too much — but no, the exact opposite is usually true. Most entrepreneurs charge too little in the beginning. They don't value their own goods and services enough. They try to fight for business by thinking a low price will win customers. In fact, I believe a higher price signals greater appreciati...

Here's something to be careful of — a suggestion to avoid: Trying to serve everyone. As I said, you can't do that. No matter what your product is, you have to find a niche. Even if it's ice cream — and I assume 95% of the world loves ice cream — you still need a niche. Are you offering extra-fat, low-fat, homemade, or restaurant-quality? Whatever it is, you need to choose a specific angle, because...

This year, we're diving into every aspect of entrepreneurship, aiming to cover every single topic. And this week, we're talking about five mistakes that you should — or can — avoid. I hope you do avoid them during your first year in business. I'll give you the first one right now: One of the most common mistakes is poor cash flow management. You can go bankrupt and run out of money, even if you're...

Touch is the final love language. Rub my feet, and I'll be happy for a week! Have a great weekend—bye for now!

Love language number four is acts of service—think of it as the "honey-do" list. Simply doing what your partner asks—whether it's taking the kids to school, doing the dishes, or cleaning the carpet—can make a big difference. Do it, and you're likely to have a great weekend, I promise.

Love language number three is receiving gifts. For some people, receiving a gift makes them feel deeply loved. Try it out and see the difference it makes.

The love language I want to focus on today is quality time. It's the act of truly being together—whether it's for five minutes or five hours. The amount of time doesn't matter. What matters is being fully present with each other—committed, engaged, and not distracted by your phone, the TV, or sports. Take a walk and do nothing but be together. That's quality time.

I want to talk about love languages and how understanding them can have a powerful impact on your relationships—with your family, your kids, your spouse, and even your employees or your boss. This concept comes from a book by Gary Chapman, which explains that every person gives and receives love in one or two of five ways. One of these love languages will resonate with you the most, and when someo...

All of the other tips I've given this week are free, but this one depends on using Google and its analytic tools to do A/B testing on your brand, products, and messaging. Set up two different campaigns and test the daylights out of them. Run each campaign for a week, review the data, make changes, and try again. This process will help you deeply understand your customer.

Conduct surveys. In fact, I'd love for you to give fifty dollars to every one of your customers who fills out a 10-question survey. That information is worth five thousand dollars, not fifty, because of the insights you'll gain from your customers. Ask open-ended questions and let them write whatever they want—you will learn a lot.

At my very first business, my customers were kids. They were dropped off in the morning and picked up late at night. As they were being picked up, I would ask every parent, "How's it going? What do you like? What don't you like?" I got feedback every single day—within the last 12 hours, I knew whether my customers were happy or not. That's the kind of thing you need to do. Engage in any forum or g...

To understand your target market, you should extensively study your competitors' audiences—whether through commercials, online discussions, product comments, or other channels. You should understand why their customers buy from them and try to identify if there's a missing niche or an area they've overlooked. Also, study their common complaints to see if you can solve problems they aren't addressi...

To understand your target market, you must know everything about your customer—their age, gender, location, income. Are they married? What are their interests? What are their goals? What are their pain points? What kind of computer do they use? All of these details matter. For example, I had a program for kids, and we stayed open until 9 PM because all of our parents were dual-income workers.

I believe that when you set the price for your service-based business, your pricing should reflect that you are very, very good at what you do—so you charge one of the highest rates in the industry. That's how I think you should determine your price for a service business: find out what the industry norms are, and then charge a little more than that.

The loss leader pricing strategy is used when you want to penetrate an existing marketplace and take customers away from someone else. It's what the Japanese did in the 1970s by entering with very low-priced but good-quality cars and taking market share from American automobile companies. It's a great strategy—if you're willing to lose money.

Designer clothes, jewelry, and luxury items are all based on value pricing—based on what you think they are worth. A diamond is not worth the tens of thousands we pay for it, guys. We're paying for the perceived value.

Another pricing model is called cost-plus pricing, and it's exactly what it sounds like. When you sell your product, you add 20 percent on top of whatever it cost you to make it. You can negotiate the percentage—maybe even show the customer the actual cost and negotiate from there.

We are slowly working our way through all the aspects of starting a new business. I hope you can listen to these segments and feel motivated to crush the remote control under a rock—and go start a business. Many people have used these skills, tips, and techniques to become millionaires and to run businesses they can eventually pass on to the next generation. This week, we want to talk about pricin...

The thesis of all of these segments is that entrepreneurship does not have to be risky that you can do it for under 5 thousand dollars. A lot of times you can do it for even less than that. The idea of the minimally viable product is this software version of that. Same thesis, we 100 endorse this I hope you use it.

The really cool thing about the MVP is that it allows you to get customer and user feedback immediately they tell you what, they like, they suggest new features. They tell you things that are not working and it allows you to iterate and make a better version 2, version 3, and so on.

If you were raising money and that's why you're building your MVP to show investors, it doesn't even need to work. You can have fake slides. That emulate the website as if it was working and pretend and you can hit the next button and that would actually Advance the slide, not take you to a different place on the website, but be honest about it, tell them this is just our template but this is exac...

The first step in building a minimally, viable product is to identify your core feature, and then build that in only that, I know you have dreams of having 10 really cool functions but to get started and out in the marketplace as soon as possible, you need to identify the core offering and get it and it only out in the marketplace. I worked with a healthcare startup. One time they insisted on wait...