How do you find a company that does drop shipping that is worth using? There are so many of them, it is hard to pick out the worthwhile ones.

WORK! Once I've found a product, I research it and determine if it's worth devoting the next 6 months of my life to. Then i find the top 10 suppliers, interview them all. Call each one and have a talk about pricing, stock levels, discounts, shipping, returns, damages, everything. It's time consuming, but it's important.

I use a service called Volusion for my inventory and store management. The "pros" of Volusion are numerous, is super easy to use and optimize. It also sends my newsletters and has built in analytics.. However it gets expensive if you start getting a ton of traffic. The bandwidth if overpriced.

CONTENT.. Title Tags.. Keyword Density.. Internal Linking Structure
The site needs to look professional, easy to navigate, SECURE with an SSL certificate.. Easy to reach via Phone, Email, Chat

High margins + High search volume!
If a product has 50% margins and at least 500,000 monthly searches in Google then I'll consider it.

honestly.. people overhype "SEO Research"
90% of my traffic and sales in ANY niche come from about a dozen keywords max.. If you sell baseball bats, you're keywords are going to be : baseball bats, softball bats, buy baseball bats, wooden bats, metal bats, etc...

The only exception is products that have many Sizes, Brands, Colors, etc.. Then you just take your primary keywords and pair them with the variables to get your list.

Ad networks. I could just slap an ad network on it.  But I really don’t want to muck up the site with ads. Ironic since I founded a fairly large advertising company. PlentyOfFish.com is a good example of a guy allegedly making $10M/year from Google AdSense, but with a butt-ugly site.

The final class project: students must raise $1,000.

Projects have taken different forms:

Projects that introduce a new service, like Coastermatic, a service that allows Instagram users to print their photos on to stone coasters, its corresponding video series, and business lessons (Tash Wong, Tom Harman).

The reality of being a tech entrepreneur.

More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all.

Let’s take skin creams as an example. Here’s what you need to know:

- the biographies of everyone in the business
- what’s in all the popular skin creams. How does each chemical work, smell, etc.
- what’s the importance of smell in skin creams
- what are the popular brands out there? How do they work?
- who are the celebrities doing marketing in the businenss?
- what are the popular mechanisms for selling skin creams (multi-level marketing, party planning, informercials, direct marketing, informercials, internet advertising)
- what are the top 10 websites for skin creams and what are the common features among all of them (usually: celebrity sponsorship, a starter kit, testimonials, before-and-after shots, beautiful photos of the packaging, plus an FAQ on how to look beautiful)
- where can you make the creams for cheap
- what’s necessary for your starter kit (morning, afternoon, night stuff – and every item should run out in a month)
I say all of this knowing nothing about skin creams. This is just where I would start should I want to go into that business. For any business you’re in, or for any career (writing, painting, the arts, social gaming, comedy, television, investment banking) you need to know EVERYTHING.

Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success

These are the only things you need to do to be successful:

* Do things
* Tell people.

Shipping $36000 worth of Japanese candy

26 questions you have to answer correctly to get funding for your startup

There are no lifeboats. One of the reasons Google was so extraordinarily successful with search was that it was all they had. Sink or swim, those were the only options. Google's competitors a decade ago had tons of things to work on, plenty of sources of traffic and revenue. Google had only one. At the beginning, the founding team at Google came to work every day focused on just one problem. We were in the same position in 2008, and that's the case of most small companies facing down a big competitor. We focused because we had no plan B.

You’re not approaching enough.

To start a good fire, you need kindling. Something that will catch easily.

1. Have at least one very clear, and cool, use case. I.E. have something you can show someone else that makes them say "oh, my, that's freaking useful."

Cure: make a spreadsheet and try to predict the key metrics of your business. Yes, the financial projections that come out of the spreadsheet are probably worthless (or grossly inaccurate), but not their underlying assumptions. Those are the things you need to prove and the first step is knowing what they are. As a side note, this exercise will help you understand how much money you need to raise, if any.

Choosing a business location based on proximity to places the team wants to eat and drink at is a very smart idea. Food and drink are the new social medium and lubricant.
As relates to this… going out for food and drinks with any prospective hire, partner, customer, investor, etc is something I consider “new best practices.” You’ll learn so much about this person and, as I’ve said before…

Don’t try to shove yourself into a particular bucket when it’s a crappy fit. If you don’t want to be a blog, don’t wedge your identity onto Wordpress. If you can program and design, don’t work as a “Software Engineer II” at a big company. Free yourself from other people’s perceived presets.

Do your own thing. It’s great.

Email 10 people you know who would want your pseudo-product, then ask them to send payment via Paypal. This might sound a bit crazy, but you’re doing it to see what the overall response is like. If a few of them send payment, great! You now have validation and can build the product (or you can refund your friends and buy them all tacos for playing along). If they don’t bite, figure out why they don’t want your product. Again, the goal is to get validation for your product, not to rip off your friends.

Here’s what I know. If you’re raising so ..

you can quit your job
your co-founders will join you full time
you can build the features that you might monetize
you can show the world your a “legit” startup
Then you don’t have the right mindset.

And, that’s when I realized that I didn’t actually know if I was good enough because I hadn’t really failed in life (at least not professionally). Most people don’t really fail. We tend to take the job that we think we’ll succeed in. We are hesitant to reach. And, if we do reach and succeed, then we don’t reach again.

The only way to know how good you might be at something is to fail trying it.

1. Build something you are personally passionate about. You are your best focus group.

It's funny. Everyone wants to take people like me and say, "That guy got lucky." In reality, it took 20 years to get where I am today.

Creator of silly bands on his success.

SaaS product grows through bad design and makes $500/month. 

Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from the New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care, No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again.

Failure lets you move on, mediocrity stalls you and keeps you from reaching your potential.

How to launch a web business for less than the cost of an iPad

LaunchBit Startup Guide is a step-by-step guide based on lean startup methodologies that teaches you how to find your customers, build your first landing page, and test your first prototype without any programming. In the Startup Guide, you'll find<br />
Simple, actionable steps that you can take today to start advancing your internet ideaLots of resources and tools that help you build an online business, not just a websiteCase studies and articles to encourage and inspire youDon't have a technical co-founder? You don't need one to get your web idea off the ground.

There’s people that can absolutely hustle and work the phones and shake hands in order to work for a social cause, but would fall apart if they were tasked with getting money in order that their for-profit business doesn’t go broke and die.

Every event, every conference, and every blog post was just another excuse to postpone action one more day.

Books to read, recommended for entrepreneurs:<br />
<br />
* The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie<br />
* The Second Coming of Steve Jobs<br />
* Inside Steve's Brain.

What does a non-technical entrepreneur do?

I’ve invited Sahil Lavingia to do an interview because he’s a college student who keeps launching apps and websites. I wanted to find out how he keeps cranking out products while so many others only talk about launching their first site.
His products include Dayta, that’s a data tracking application for iPhone, and Rmmbr, a note-taking web app that doesn’t require registration.

5-slides strategy for powerpoint pitches

List of online resources, articles, and threads for entrepreneurship

YCombinator Startup Library

Ask YC Archive!

I've been in the "build->launch->move to next project" loop for some time. My projects are mostly based on features that are missing or misimplemented in the existing products. Some of the finished projects gone live, tried to sell some, some are rotting in the attic. When i ask about feedbacks about my products, mostly i get "i didn't understand which problem you are solving". I even deployed a localized copy of cnprog as a forum on women's issues, to see if it was me doing it wrong in designing. I got the following feedback several times: "it's too complicated, there's no order, no title in threads, other forums(phpbb style) are better ". WTF? These people are on facebook 24/7, uploading gazillions of photos, messaging their friends each second. They know what tagging is, and still a stackoverflow clone is too complicated?

you put yourself in an environment where you're likely to interact with other intelligent, capable people, and hope that you find someone socially compatible who is also crazy enough to want to do a startup. It's a good strategy, and anyway what else can you do?

“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

Does anyone want it?
Do the right people want it?
Do enough people want it?
Will people recommend it to others?

This basically means that I try to keep the big things in my life ultra-stable — car, where I live, relationships — so I can afford to be ultra-aggressive about other things. This alone has had a huge effect on my ability to take on risky and new projects all the time.

Montaigne once used the analogy of a man with a bow and arrow to illustrate the importance of meditation and analysis. You have to know what you’re aiming for before it is even worth bothering with the process of preparing the bow, nocking the arrow and letting go. Our projects, he said, “go astray because they are not addressed to a target.” The idea is that an intimate knowledge of ourselves makes it possible (and easier!) to know what we need to do on a daily basis. He advised us to meditate on our lives in general, in order to properly arrange our day to day actions.

It is easy to make a thousand or more per week from these types of jobs. If they are paying commodity prices, then you give them a commodity.
Have a standard contract. Have a standard website theme, perhaps with multiple skins. Make it easy for them to enter their own content. You can build a decent CMS in a few hours or a great CMS in 10-15 (for clients like this that don't need extensibility). So I took a small "build me a website" job. Knowing they had small requirements, it was easily done in a few hours. I kept getting more requests, I kept sending out virtually the same website, over and over. I was getting them onto the host I use also and making an additional $50-$100 for each client as well.

Eventually it was only a matter of explaining how hosting works and how to add new pages and content.

Big Tip: Record your phone calls and meetings when you're explaining how hosting works and how to work your CMS. Take 30 minutes, record screen capture videos with voice over.

Question 1: "What circumstances would lead to a 10X increase in the value of your product or business?" Question 2: "What can you realistically *do* to accomplish the circumstances that will 10X your company?"

I started doing individual private homes, then moved on to working with realtors and community organizations. Best bang for the buck is just going to few apartment buildings and dropping 200 pamphlets saying "Window cleaning on Saturday: Call 1-800-xxx-xxxx to schedule. $100 Cash/Check". If you're doing move outs, take cash up front. Don't ever ever have credit card on file; they will give you the card, then go shopping online.

Don't use a squeegee by itself, squeegee then wipe. Thin roll paper is best, the kind that don't feel spongy like a toilet paper (but more like newspaper.) If you use cloth rags get the thinest hardest ones you can get; the padded ones with sponge or cotton inside wear and tear after wash and the cotton comes out, sticking to staticy glass.
No poles or extensions. Period. If you use a ladder watch where you lean it against, and watch where it stands (I had it sink into soft ground slowly throwing me 12 feet down.)

How I evaluate an idea
#1 Make a list of people that I think will buy the product
#2 Contact those people and ask them if they will buy it

Amazing business idea - applying the subscription model in an interesting way.

Whenever a friend tells me they wish they could earn more money, I'll ask what's stopping them from doing it right now. The resulting conversation usually goes something like this:

Resource on selling - focusing on customer wants and needs before discussing price.

Most people who say they WANT to earn more… never will.

A2 Want to earn more? Do 3 things daily: Market, sell, & do less of everything else. Getting paying customers is everything #SmallBizChat

1 reason ppl don't make $: Most don’t do market testing to verify that their biz idea is viable. They just think "good idea!" #SmallBizChat

# Do basic market research to determine the best opportunities for new products.
# Design a product that inspires you and that can exploit the market opportunities you identified.
# Create the product along with the system for selling the product and the marketing plan.
# Release the product.
# Promote the product systematically according to the marketing plan.
# Measure results and gather feedback.
# Study and learn from the top industry performers (companies and products).
# Ask empowering questions like, "How can I increase sales by 20% or more?"
# Update the product, the sales system, and the marketing plan based on lessons learned.
# Repeat from step 5.

Jason Baptiste on business strategy. Great strategy level overview.

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, "I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you'd punched through the card, you couldn't make any more investments at all."

Are you near any colleges/university? If you are, try to hit up tons of student groups, frats/sororities. They usually have events that need custom designs, and/or membership t-shirts. Any huge campus-wide event usually comes with tons of t-shirt orders. You get repeat customers. Student groups are a bit more liberal with their organization's funds. And you get bulk orders.

- Give yourself credit- This is the thing I do the least of and I'm trying to work on it. What may seem simple+not that revolutionary to anyone ahead of the curve can usually be pure wizardry to the general public, whom is often your customer. Give yourself more credit.

Between 2003-2004, I used to sell women's clothes on eBay, which had a pretty high markup. I became a power seller, and sold over 2000 garments in that time. Customers were really happy with the service, and I always put in free chocolates with each order.

Forums for different business verticals

Read these forums for a couple of weeks and new product ideas should jump out at you.

Starting a small business in today’s economy can be a tough challenge. Stay a step ahead of accounting, finance, marketing, and other topics by utilizing the courses, lectures, and tools below.