Aqz

Startups, Entrepreneurship & Development

Preparing for Entrepreneurship

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While nowadays, it seems cool to skip college and launch a startup, there are still quite a bit of aspiring entrepreneurs who still choose to go to college first. Their reasons can range from wanting the degree safety net, maybe they don’t have a solid idea yet, or their parents pressured them to go. Regardless, there are a couple things you can do during these years to prepare yourself for the world of entrepreneurship when you graduate, here are few of them:

1. Get a degree or finish a bachelor’s course in business
This might be unnecessary for some but there are many advantages you acquire while you are enrolled.

  • Gaining connections
    It might be a friend or a classmate, what is important is that you can build trust. You might not know that your friend or classmate might become your future business partner.
  • Opportunity to learn
    College experience is not limited in the four walls of your classroom. It is the best position to learn: how to interact with different personalities, how to win people, how to gain trust and so on. In here, you will encounter many challenges and discover many things which you may use later on in life and in your business.
  • Trial & Error
    In college, you are not afraid to commit mistakes because it is part of your learning process. You may have your ideas corrected, checked and sometimes critique for you to improve them.
  • Mentors
    Having someone to teach you the basics and their experiences are very helpful when starting your own business.

2. Master your venture and everything else that falls in between
Although experience is the best teacher, it is not advisable to start-up when you don’t master it. Mastery will definitely be helpful everytime you encounter problems and challenges in your business. (e.g. absence of important personnel)

3. Trust in yourself and in your idea
This is a very important aspect to deal with before starting up. It is one thing to have the idea and another thing to have a complete competence in that idea. You can not enter into business with a half-heart, doubting the capacity of yourself and your idea. Be confident and never back down if not necessary.

4. Read and Learn from others
Knowledge or the know-hows are important in every aspect. Do some research and interview, ask questions, observe and gain helpful advice from others.

5. Be ready to commit
Being an entrepreneur is a commitment. It’s like being a parent, if you want to see your children happy, do the effort, care for them, and make time with them. Similarly, if you want your business to succeed, make the necessary effort, care for it and make time for it.

6. Consult with God
Business is not for everybody. In order for you to succeed make sure that it is God who places you in that right position.

“Success comes, not overnight, but through hard work and persistence. It is important to thrive, not on your own, but with the knowledge bestowed upon the Almighty God.”

– Stephen Cabaltera

 

Common Content Marketing Mistakes

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There are over 27,000,000 pieces of content being shared every day, but did you know that 60-70 percent of content produced by B2B marketing goes unused? Why? Most often it’s due to common content marketing mistakes like not knowing who you’re producing content for, trying too hard to sell with your content, and other content mishaps.

Content marketing is not easy. Sure, it sounds that way on paper — publish some content, reach out to influencers, go viral, rinse/repeat — but that’s because most people only ever see the results of a good content marketing campaign, not the creation process itself.

In reality, content marketing requires lots of coordination, time and energy investments, and solid research. Most veteran marketers have learned all about these processes the hard way, by doing it wrong the first time then making corrections.

As a beginner in content marketing, you may be making some common content marketing mistakes.

Here are some of the common beginner mistakes in content marketing and what you can do to improve your content creation and reach a wider audience:

1. Do not have a plan or clear goals and strategies
Your business plan will dictate your content strategy. You need to know what your objectives are or why you are creating content. As a follow up, you also need to know who your target audience is to be able to create content that fits their needs. You need to develop buyer personas which will allow you to anticipate and meet the needs of your audience.

2. Don’t Know Your Audience
One of our biggest challenges is to create and deliver content that people actually want to consume. With so much competing for their attention, if your content can’t break through the noise, it’ll never be seen.

3. Confusing Content with Ads or Sales Copy
The content you create is not an advertisement for your company, or your product, or your service. Content is merely an expression of ideas and values relevant to both your business and your customers.

“The content that consumers are going to find most valuable is the kind that they are already looking for,” Honoway says.

4. Scrimping on quality writing
Do not take content creation too lightly and assume it is something you can do whenever you have spare time. Do not also assume that you can just crank out as much as you can and call it valuable content. Remember, quality trumps quantity. Take time and go over your work but keep the publishing pace consistent. Once a month is better than once every week and then you stop for two months. That kind of inconsistency won’t get consumers to trust your brand.

 

Business models that are really unique

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What is a Business model? Which one works and why? How do you know you have the right one?

According to wikipedia.org, “a business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural or other contexts. The process of business model construction is part of business strategy.”

In theory and practice, the term business model is used for a broad range of informal and formal descriptions to represent core aspects of a business, including purpose, business process, target customers, offerings, strategies, infrastructure, organizational structures, trading practices, and operational processes and policies.

It is difficult to know whether or not a business model would fit with your company unless you try it. Below are some unique business models I gathered that are already proven to succeed in their respective domain:

1. Duolinguo
An online language program, startup Duolinguo teaches you basic vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure through games and motivational hearts. It’s completely free, and makes money by pulling thousands of web translations and merging them to create almost flawless, human-like ones.

Check out: The founder’s TED talk to learn more.

The numbers enumerated above are the unique business model which I find interesting, practical and could easily work. Considering that there are also other choices you could browse the net, hopefully, you’ll find this suggested models to be helpful in pursuing your own strategy. Who knows, this could be a foundation that can help you develop or create your own unique business model.

2. Set up person-to-person exchanges.
Some young professionals living in the city need a car seven days a week to commute and do errands. Find trustworthy people who will pay to drive those cars, and both sides will be better off.

3. Reverse Auction
In a reverse auction, extremely price-sensitive buyers name their price for a service. If the seller accepts the price, the buyers must commit to the seller’s terms.

4. Orchestrate demand aggregation.
Assemble all the sellers and buyers for some stuff in the same virtual location. This will give sellers the deepest pool of buyers and vice versa.

5. Offer a product at the highest price.
Find customers whose survival depends on a product that nobody else can provide. Then charge them half a million dollars a year to use it.

6. Friendsurance – The future of insurance

I find the Friendsurance business model innovative because it brings communities and social trust into the insurance industry. By sharing an insurance pool with friends, people are less likely to cheat with insurance money, thus they can pay less insurance premium. Friendsurance facilitates this by acting as a broker between insurance companies and their users.

7. The make it private / anonymous approach
This is more like a feature, but somehow the Snowden controversy seems to have caused a stir in the business world. I expect we will quite many startups succeeding with privacy as an integrated part of their business model. The interesting question is if any for-profit companies will be able to convince people to trust them enough.