#startupmode

I just completed the process of setting up my freelance business in March of 2020. I felt lost in trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. The process of starting any business seems overwhelming, even more so when everyone says you need to have a business plan first. Well I didn’t and in this post, I would like to share with you the steps I think are most effective when starting out. Instead of over complicating things here are my suggestions are starting out. Make sure you have photography basic equipment and editing software. If you want to do this for a living you most likely already have these things. No need to go out and buy fancy equipment to get things started, just have the basic photography equipment.

To start your business, you will need a website. There are several hosting companies out there from Wix to Word press. A popular one for photographers is photo shelter at photoshelter.com, they have over 80,000 photographers around the world which, provide marketing, basic analytics, and have a very simple upload process. Then you will want your own web address this is called domain name and you can purchase one for under fifteen dollars for the year. I paid twelve dollars for the year.

Then, I suggest getting a business or life coach, I would get both because they do very different things. If you can only choose one, go with the business coach first and then do the life coaching afterword’s. If possible, find a business coach that specializes in photography, this way you get help with photography issues also. The coach will be helpful in setting your niche market. Your niche market is the type of photography you will specialize in. (Stay tuned I’ll post more about this later)

Now, register your business with your states department of revenue and pay your permit fees. I’m in Wisconsin and my form took about twenty minutes to fill out. If you do not understand something type it into google and read a little while filling out the form. I did this throughout the process to make sure I was understanding the questions. I also choose the bill me option and then sent a check out a few weeks’ later. Here in Wisconsin the permit fee was twenty dollars.

Most of us are using social media for personal reasons and this is the time I recommend deciding if you will start using these platforms to market yourself. Social media seems simple but when you’re using it for business it can get very complex and difficult. This is one good reason for the business coach. You will also want to do research on using hashtags, geotags, stories, and understanding the algorithms. Also, consider blogging. Do you think you will want to write or is it not for you? There is a schedule to stick to and research on SEO’s (Search Engine Optimization) and keywords so people will see and read your blog. After all this there is google analytics, this is a free addition you can add to your website that will allow you to see how many people view your site each day, where they live, and how long they stay. It is a great resource to use for marketing and we will discuss this more as well.

This article is part of my blog series, “Idea to CEO”. In my earlier article I spoke of ideas and inspiration, and how my own pain and frustration led me to build a startup to solve the problem for other parents. In this article I provide some techniques and insights that I used for my idea validation of Yoyochimp. I have split this article in 2 parts as there is lot of ground to cover on this topic. This is a long article, but with lots of golden nuggets and inspiring stories to help you with your idea validation.

The boom of 2k

It so happened that in 2002 when I started my earlier startup, Amnel, with my husband, nobody had heard of the beast called “idea validation” or any validation for that matter. Then, all you did was, learn to spell World Wide Web, find a domain name, and you were all set to open doors to VC money. Back then it was the VCs who prepared shiniest of the pitch decks to lure entrepreneurs into taking their money! Ok, I am exaggerating, but just a bit.

And the bust

It's 2014 now, and idea validation is a pre-requisite to building your startup. Now it means that you try to build products by asking your prospective customers whether they will buy your product, yes I mean BUY, with cold hard cash, and not just use it for free. The “build and they will come” humble attitude has been flipped on its head to a more egotistical “If they come, we will build” attitude. But that’s how most of the big name startups are building their businesses, and surprisingly it is working!! It is all about Lean Startup movement pioneered by Eric Reis and promoted by Stanford professor, Steve Blank. Lean startup is all about doing more with less, by building products iteratively – build, measure, learn over and over again, so that you build products that will actuallysolve customer problems and one that your customers will actually pay for. There is a ton of material out there on Lean Startup topic at the links above. Lean Launchpad, a free course on Udacity, by Steve Blank, is amazing!

Houston, we have a problem

If your idea comes from a problem either you or your friends are facing, you still need to verify whether the problem exists on a large enough scale that justifies building an entire startup for. In case of Yoyochimp, it was very clear that this was indeed a large problem for both working moms and small businesses. If you do find enough people facing this problem, find out how they are solving the problem today, what tools/apps are they using, what’s wrong with those tools. This will also help you gain insights into your competitors’ weaknesses. Their weakness could help you find your strengths or differentiation. It is important that you limit yourself to just understanding your customers’ problems and not asking your customers to suggest a solution.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

- Henry Ford

Define and refine your target audience

So now that you know there is indeed a problem, do you know if you are solving the problem for the right audience? Do you know if your target audience is an individual consumer, a small business, or fortune 500 enterprise? If it is an individual consumer, what is their demography – age range, gender, income, education, job, etc.? The more specific and clear you are about your customer persona, the easier it will be to solve the problem and acquire customers. It is ok to start by targeting a very small niche audience but make sure that it constitutes a large enough market size in dollars (either due to high revenue/customer or due to large number of customers). Not knowing your target audience or targeting a very large, generic market, for example, targeting “everyone”, is one of the most common and fatal mistakes entrepreneurs make. At Yoyochimp, one of the customer segments that we have identified is made up of working moms aged 30-45 years with school-age kids 5-13 years old and an annual income of 120K+. Yes, that specific!! We may later expand to offer services for other kids’ age groups as well, but this is our starting point for now.

Build a low-cost, low-effort prototype

If you’re a techie/expert and capable of building a low-cost/low-effort prototype in a few days, that could be your aid in communicating your idea. Depending on your product – hardware, software, drug, service, drone, robot, app, virtual currency, etc., it may or may not be possible to build a low-cost, low-effort prototype but I have heard stories of people successfully using easily found materials like paper, plastic, etc. to build complex hardware prototypes and using them to demonstrate their ideas. Web and mobile apps are a no-brainer.

Get out of the building

As Steve Blank says, “Get out of the building” and talk to your customers. The key is to not to pitch your product, but to get them to talk to you about their problems. Starting your pitch with “I have an awesome product that will solve your problem” will not take you far. Instead start with inquiring about their business problems. What keeps them awake at night and would they pay if someone offered them to solve that problem. There are plenty of tricks and techniques that you could use to find your customers. Though many times it starts with cold calls, cold emails, cold walk-ins, etc., over time you will find out what works or doesn’t work for you. Read how Aaron Patzer of Mint.com interviewed his customers at train station. For Yoyochimp I used a lot of cold calling and cold walk-ins to my customers’ (class and camp providers) offices located in strip malls and was surprised to see how willing these businesses were to share their problems with a complete stranger.

Build a landing page

Another neat trick that entrepreneurs use today is to create landing pages to validate their idea. Here is how it works:

Create a simple web page explaining your idea with graphics and text. Write a simple but crisp message explaining how your product works.

Create a simple form for visitors to sign up for, just name and email address, not a mile-long form

Now promote this page as if it were a real product/website/app, through Google adwords or social media. Spend no more than $100 on advertising.

If you get enough signups from your visitors, you know you are on the right track.

It is important your message and value proposition is simple yet compelling that users are willing to give their email address to you. Do spend time and effort crafting your one-page landing page.

There are quite a few websites that will let you easily build and host landing pages for free. There are free site builders such as Weebly, Wix, Strikingly, etc. you can use to build your 1 or 2 page website for free and start collecting leads.

Create a 2-minute video explaining your concept with graphics, audio, or your product demo and add this to the landing page, it could do wonders. See how Drew Houston’s video got him VC attention. Fiverr could be your friend to find help with some of these things for cheap.

Eavesdrop on LinkedIn groups or industry forums

There is quite a lot of learning you can achieve just by listening, reading and observing. Join industry forums and LinkedIn groups, monitor the conversations or best yet participate and ask questions, you will be surprised how much you get to learn from others.

These are the techniques that I used for my idea validation, but be creative and go wild, that’s why you are an entrepreneur – you don’t follow rules! Now that you know that the problem indeed exists on a large scale, your next step woud be to find out how big a market, in terms of dollars or other currency, is this, and who your competitors are. That is the topic for part 2 of the idea validation topic that I will publish next. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, share in the comments, if there are other techniques that you came across or used for your startup. Any out-of-the-box, creative ideas that worked for you?

Follow me and Yoychimp on LinkedIn

Who doesn’t dream about writing a blog series called Idea to IPO, but some of us don’t have it that easy. For us the day we can afford to quit our full time job and openly let the world know (through a change of title on LinkedIn) that we have a dream, is a BIG milestone! For me that day was a few months ago when I quit my job at HP to start Yoyochimp.  This blog, in honor of that milestone, is a series of many small steps and mis-steps that I took along the way to reach this stage. I hope this blog will help aspiring dreamers and doers to learn a few things from my mistakes or inspire others to make a few because…

 “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” 

― Albert Einstein

   On Ideas

 Most of the startup ideas come from the problems that you often face yourself, either in your personal or your professional life. Mark Zuckerberg was frustrated that he had to spend so much time finding “real” friends in real life, and thought to himself, "wouldn’t it be great if one could make friends with her friends’ friends online and skip the awkwardness of talking and socializing face to face", or, "how cool would it be to be able socialize while in the bathroom"!  And so, Facebook was born! Similarly, some folks had such hard time coming up with more than 140 characters at a time that Twitter was a natural answer to their shortcoming!  Ok, for the disclaimer,  having gone through this life myself, I have nothing but respect for any and all entrepreneurs out there,  and especially for Mark Zuckerberg, so no hard feelings there, right, Mark? Now, if you have tough time coming up with ideas for your business, look around and see what bothers you and what you wish could be done better. But seriously, thinking of becoming an entrepreneur and then looking for an idea is like tail wagging the dog. 

  My inspiration

Mine is a little less dramatic story compared to Mark or the Twitter founders – my idea came out of my own pain and frustration of trying to find alternate care or camps for my kids during summer/winter break when both I and my husband went to work or to find other activities to keep kids busy during weekends and after school. I spent way too much time researching, finding and booking these camps and classes for my kids. Finding these classes was one thing but scheduling drop-off, pickups, coordinating with friends and family, tracking payments, cancellations, refunds, make-up classes, etc., was a project by itself. I was forced to use some really sophisticated tools such as post-it reminders on the fridge, Google Calendar, Excel spreadsheet, etc., to manage the project. It was a great learning experience though; I learned how to manage time conflicts between me and my husband, to balance a shrinking budget, and to make optimal use of limited resources, such as my husband’s time. After suffering for almost 2 years, and talking to other parents who felt the same way, I thought this was the perfect solution to build for busy, working parents, and hence, the idea for Yoyochimp was born!

  And then there was the  business school

 It was 2012 and I was a year away from completing my MBA at UC Berkeley when I was overcome with the idea of doing something of my own. That’s what business schools do to you – they brainwash you and make you believe that your current job absolutely sucks and that you deserve a much better job, or that you were born to be an entrepreneur, that it’s your calling and if you don’t follow it, you are doomed.   I bet anyone who goes to business school, at some point of time dreams of striking it out on their own.  No, my job did not suck, in fact I enjoyed it, but  over time I was so consumed with this idea, that my job finally did start to suck.  The more I thought of this idea, the more my job sucked. I guess that’s a very natural phenomenon that happens to every entrepreneur who tries to start a startup while holding a full time job. You cannot like 2 jobs equally at the same time, just like you cant love 2 people at the same time (you know what I mean). But, I could not afford to say goodbye to my full-time job, not yet, the timing was just not right.

 They say ideas are cheap, until you make something of them. So that was the easy part - coming up with an idea! Now what? Well, the challenge was that mine was a “real” problem that many moms faced, hence I was a little skeptical as to whether this idea could really make it as big as Facebook or even take off the ground. So I set out to validate my idea, aka to find the product-market fit (start-up lingo).

Stay tuned to read my next article in the series where I tell you how to validate your startup idea, conduct market research and how to estimate the market size. 

Meanwhile, let us know what inspires you and where do your ideas come from? Do you have a formal method to evaluate your idea. Share your tips in the comments and I may end up including it in my next article, "How to validate your startup idea".

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