Phantom CTO

Your business idea doesn’t have to be great but getting momentum is critical.

If you wait to be great before you get out there, you’ll never move. Get out there when the edges are rough and keep on improving it while your out in your market. Let your market shape what you give them. Use technology to get the feedback and reiterate what your market demands from your products.

Tech breaks borders: location, location, location doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.

Email, blogs, video conferencing, wikis, and skype are some of the tools that are breaking down walls. What tech helps make happen is build interactions that foster trust and value. The key is to building relationships with your market and within your company. You don’t have to be in the middle of the hottest town to grow your business or start up. You have to provide value to your market, and they don’t care where you are while you do it.

Starting with little cash means focused better business discipline and good spending habits.

You have to choose options with better value. Limitations are your best friend to finding creative solutions to problems your business will face. Technology has made many improvements on how to get better value for your business dollars.

You do not have to be the next Google-sized business. Seriously.

Do you really need to be the next 450 billion dollar business? Heck no. Consider being the next level up from where you are today. That’s got a much higher chance of success and it’s completely within your reality. Let technology help your business move forward, not have you follow a business idea that has a gigantic chance of failure.

You don’t need a huge budget to get your business in front of your market.

Technology makes it cheap to do so and lets your message be the focus of the interaction. How much does it cost to be on YouTube versus to be on a 30 second TV spot? How much does it cost running an ad in print versus writing a blog post on your company website? How much does it cost hosting a live event versus a doing a video or teleconference?

In the early days of your new business, don’t focus on finding money. Focus on solving customers problems and getting feedback.

You might think you need lots of capital to start your new business. But what you really need is to get immersed in your customer’s world and identify their problems. Present solutions to those problems and ask them what they think of your results. At the start of your business, no amount of money will help more than being in sync with your market’s needs. It’s the ultimate litmus test: do you provide answers your market is looking for? Is it a business idea only on paper: in a business plan or through market research? Have you had real experiences with providing value to make a genuine decision on the likelihood of success?

Don’t write a business plan. Write a blog, post when you want.

Ah!! The MBA woman is saying screw the bplan. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Why is that? First off, who’s reading this plan? Investors? Banks? Your Future Partners and Employees? Do you really think someone wants to wade through 50 pages of a future potential with 5 year projections of million dollar revenue. Not really.
On the other hand, what do you think people interested in your business vision want? Bite sized chunks of value that they can get. Think ‘Thousand Songs In Your Pocket’ as the way to describe the iPod. That phrase was enough to get people to buy it.

Do small sampling size value with a blog post or a short video that you can continually trickle out to your market and get immediate and visible feedback from the people you want to serve. Not the imagined people your research tells you about. No business starting out ever has all things figured out. Be real with your market and tell them that you’re working with everything you’ve got to make their lives better. That’s what a business should be writing for. A business plan should be a living and breathing plan that changes. Make your company blog into the channel that shows your market and your peers what your business stands for. That kind of writing is what creates paying customers who will finance your business, not borrowed money from someone who is looking to turn a profit on your work.

Here’s a great list of the kinds of things a small business can do to grow their visibility, build new relationships and deliver value to their market. No business needs to do all of them but each of these technology options lets you, as the business owner, use your personal strengths and your business purpose as a guide to create more value than you could without using these kinds of technology available right now.

Enjoy!

Start a weekly or daily TV show where your market can interact with you by emailing in questions, have people twitter questions to you and answer them in real time, talk about relevant news that your market would benefit from. Would you believe  that you can set up your own live broadcast through ustream for free? If you think that doing a regular video show is out of reach for a small business owner, you’ve got to check out Wine Library TV.

Get Connected to talk to people directly. As mentioned in an earlier post, your market is online and using social media. Your users are open to talking to you person to person. Take advantage of that with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Podcast. If being in front of the camera is something you’d rather not do but still like the idea of getting your current and future customer and market to hear what you have to say, consider doing a podcast show. The distribution works just like a blog although by itself, podcasting is not a solo revenue channel. Instead, podcasting is an effective way of talking to your market, building a brand and awareness for your other products and services. It can serve as a great learning platform for interviews and client case studies too.

Print on Demand. Getting a book written that will benefit your market is no longer a feat to be accomplished. Digital Print on Demand companies like Lulu,  Blurb and CreateSpace make the publishing part of having a book a non-issue. Anyone can publish their book. What is critical though is providing the value to your market and positioning yourself as the expert and give good content that others would want to read about in print. If a book sounds like too big an undertaking, HP has put together a Magazine on Demand print option called MagCloud. You can sign up for the beta as a publisher

Indie Music Distribution. This one is more for creative businesses than most other options on this post. The way music distribution has changed in the last few years enables musicians to reach their market and distribute their music with greater ease than before. iTunes, Amazon for distribution, Facebook and MySpace for connecting with fans and touring info. There’s a great startup helping musicians take care of the back end of music distribution, check out The E.A.R. Card.

Have a youtube vidoe channel for your niche. The benefit from the mass of users uploading content to Youtube by collecting the best of videos related to your niche. Be the leader in organizing the best of your niche on YouTube. You dont have to spend the time creating the videos for your industry, just editing down the list of the best.

Foster interaction within your niche community. Using a hosted service like Ning or an open source platform like Elgg.

Start small with new product manufacturing. A new company, Ponoko lets you turn your idea and design plans into a physical product.

If your own product is out of reach, how about branding existing products that would serve your industry. AliBaba provides the resources to do so.

Clothing on Demand with Cafepress and Printfection. For small businesses and entrepreneurs with events or looking for easy to get started add on product lines.

Bonus: Start Blogging. A blog lets you develop your expertise within your industry while keeping a two way communication going. Check out Wordpress.

Get started with Twitter

Choose Your Branding, Business or Personal

You’ll want a business brand if you want to use Twitter for your marketing, event announcements, new blog/website content. A personal brand would centered around your life and want a place to discuss your business, your passions, the interesting happenings in your life, pictures things you like. Some small businesses have no separation between the owner’s personal brand and reputation from the businesses. If that’s your case, you’d be better off building your personal brand with Twitter until you grow into a need for a separate Twitter account. Now that you know the direction of your twitter account you can go sign up.

Customize Your Profile

Make it unique to you. Add a picture of yourself, your name and a layout that represents you. Twitter is only a means of connecting with an other person, not a company face. Make your twitter profile have the same kind of personality that you have and a good representation of interacting with you.

Build Your Network: Find People to Follow

See who you already know by doing an address book import.

Hit the search. Find thought leaders in your industry, peers, and competitors. Try familiar names to your business. Follow them and some of their followers

Still searching. This time your going to be looking for keywords related to your business. This will give you selection of people who are talking about your products or competitors right now and you can jump in and reply to their tweets. Go to some of the profiles and get involved in the conversations.

Building a network on Twitter is a lot like like a network event. Get over the awkwardness. Jump in and make a useful contribution to the conversation. Give people a reason to follow you by having something interesting to say.

Use the favorites to save the golden nugget tweets that showcase your brand. These could be great feedback used to improve service or your product, or testimonials from your clients that you want to organize and archive. Favorites as testimonials helps build your credibility since a trusted and reachable third party publicly said something good about you.

Find and communicate with your customers. Build a relationship with as many clients as you can on Twitter to build you brand and be that much closer to your market. It’s a great competitive advantage to be immediately available on Twitter.

Tweet helpful content. Finding value in 140 characters is less time consuming than writing a newsletter or blog post so you can do it without taking much time in your day. Add value to your followers by giving something good.