Instigator Blog

I really should write these things down, but I’m fairly certain it was at Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger where he mentioned something about posting early in the morning to get more traffic.

Or was it post about your morning? It’s early in the morning, I’m without coffee, so who can really say?

Well after thinking about that for a few days (every morning of course) I started obsessing over blogging about my morning thoughts. So here goes:

1. When you’re brushing your teeth, do you hold your head in place and move the toothbrush, or do you hold the toothbrush steady and shake your head? Or do you move both? I notice that I do both, but sometimes I shake my head so intensely that I give myself a headache. Actually, I may have given myself a concussion…

2. When will Gillette invent a 60-blade razor and get it over with already. What are we at, 4 blades? 5? If they had 60-blades you could shave your face in one fell swoop. You’d likely cut your head off too, but with that concussion you might feel better anyway.

3. When will someone invent an alarm that curses you out when you try and turn it off or hit the snooze button? I think that’d be a great invention. Exceptionally irritating, but it could keep insulting you until you get up.

* Alarm says, “Wake up!” (or plays music or beeps)

* Ben reaches for the snooze button and hits it.

* Alarm says mockingly, “You think you can turn me off that easily you sissy punk!”

* Ben tries to turn it off, still groggy.

* Alarm laughs, “Na na na na na. You pansy! Wake up and turn me off like a real man!”

It would need a 2 or 3-step process to really shut it off, which would require just enough willpower and awareness to be awake anyway.

So there you have it. Following ProBlogger’s strategy of posting in the morning (and about my morning), those are the thoughts that have been running through my head for several days. It’s quite cloudy in my brain, let me tell ya…

We all deal with self doubt from time to time, as entrepreneurs, employees, husbands, wives, etc.

Last week I wrote a post titled, You’re Not Rich Yet? Take a Step Out and Regroup which talked around the idea of self doubt. Mostly I was talking about how to deal with not meeting your expectations as quickly as hoped, and how to take a step out and look at things from a fresh perspective.

Dave Navarro at Million Dollar Leverage (great blog name!) just wrote a post titled, “How To Prevent Self Doubt”, and it’s a great, practical guide. Often when we read discussions on things such as self doubt it’ll be filled with psychobabble and loop around in endless circles of nonsense, but Dave’s giving you 2 steps you can take.

It’s a well-written and well-thought out article, and it ties very well into what I had written about. We all face self doubt (probably several times per day!) but being able to battle it, overcome it and eventually prevent it from happening is a path to success I’m sure we’d all like to take.

Deciding the price point for your product (or service) can be very difficult. (Note: Wherever I say “product” you can easily switch in the word “service”.) There are ways of going about it, namely looking at the competition, testing the marketplace with different prices, surveying the potential client base, etc. It’s still hard to do, and a bit nerve-wracking, particularly for entrepreneurs just starting out.

But once you’ve decided on a price (and you’ve done so with at least some research and not just using a dartboard), I would recommend sticking with it. Not necessarily forever (let’s hope you can raise prices in the future!), but you should stick with it and be very careful about lowering your prices.

Why?

Lowering your prices can devalue what you offer. Retail stores do it all the time, and in fact, most consumers don’t buy anything at full price anymore. We all wait for sales. It’s so prevalent now that things go on sale before they’re ever really sold at full price. Retail is an extremely tough business, and even though sales are extremely common, I still think they have the impact of devaluing the product. “Last season’s goods at 75% off!” Great, that’s a huge discount, but it is last season’s goods…I may still buy it, but I might not because it’s now in the bargain basement bin and the new stuff looks ever-so-fine.

But enough about retail. My experience is in software development (B2B) and my new business, IGotNewsForYou.com (B2C; but not retail).

Let’s talk about the software business first. Over the years we’ve raised our prices a few times. Each time I was hesitant, fearing we were getting “too expensive”. The truth is, we weren’t. Our prices are still competitive (which is important) and our sales continue to grow even as our prices go up. There’s always the question of whether our sales would go up more if our price was lower. And while it’s tempting to think they would, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. People don’t buy solely on price (and if they do, they usually get stung by it). Having a certain pricing threshold puts us in a particular market/playing field, it sets a certain understanding for the quality of the product and its scale. It puts a marker out there for who our competitors are, and to a degree, what you can expect from the product and the company. Lowering the price devalues the quality of the product, it can change the expectations people will have about it.

Even before our software product hit the market, we were in the web services business (developing dynamic websites, e-commerce sites, etc.) and we used to receive a lot of RFPs. When it comes to an RFP most companies never take the lowest bid, they scrap it immediately. They rarely take the highest bid either, and so they look at the meaty center for their vendor. Lowering your price to be the cheapest in the hopes that it will get you the gig may work some of the time, but it’s no way to grow a business.

There’s no question in the software world that there are some inexpensive software applications that are excellent. Inexpensive doesn’t always equal cheap. And the reverse is also true, there are many expensive software applications that are absolute garbage. Inexpensive versus expensive - that’s relative anyway. The key here is that once you’ve got a price point, lowering it (whether your product is going from $19.95 to $9.95 or $190,000 to $90,000) can devalue the product in the eyes of buyers. Whether you start at $19.95 or $190,000, dropping the price may have the effect of making the product look “cheap”.

A few times in the past, we’ve tried “money back guarantees”. While this isn’t quite the same as lowering your price (and guarantees is a whole other issue) it can have a similar effect. In a sense you are lowering the price, because you’re giving people something for less than it’s worth. You’ve devalued your offer by giving people an out, and this can have the effect of people not investing as much into your product as they otherwise would have. Maybe they don’t learn it well enough. Maybe they don’t sell it up the chain of command. Maybe they just don’t care enough about it because they have that escape route (or because it was “so cheap anyway, even if it doesn’t succeed it wasn’t a huge investment”). That’s a deathtrap. When someone buys your product you want them to be dedicated to it, you want them to implement it and use it properly. Lowering the price (or giving a “money back guarantee”) can diminish people’s willingness to invest themselves into the product.

In my latest venture, IGotNewsForYou.com, pricing issues are similar but the market is certainly different. Business-to-consumer expects more pricing discounts, sales, etc. Still, if you lower prices (particularly if you rush to do it quickly before really assessing whether price is a problem) you’re not helping yourself. For example, sending an IGotNewsForYou greeting costs $3.95. Say I were to drop that to $2.95 or even $1.95 — the next thing people might say is, “Well it’s practically free, just make it free already.” Uh oh. That’s a slippery slope for any entrepreneur, and there’s no question it’s tempting to lower prices in the hope of increasing volume.

It reminds me of a cartoon I saw years ago (although now I can’t remember the cartoon) where the vendor is selling his wares so cheap it’s below cost. The genius of it (according to the vendor) is that he’s making his losses up with volume!

The price is the price. If someone feels it’s too expensive, that’s ok, they weren’t in your target market. If Porsche dropped their prices by 75% they might sell more Porsches (and they’d go out of business too), but the people that have bought Porsches in the past (i.e. the target market) would go elsewhere, because the Porsche no longer represents what it did in the past. It’s no longer an elite sports car…it’s been devalued.

When first starting out, an entrepreneur is often nervous about a lot of things, and price is definitely one of them. Will people buy what I’m selling at the price point I’ve set? That’s really the big question. If the answer is no, I would examine a host of possible reasons before I got to price (assuming again, you did some research into pricing your product competitively). As soon as you start mucking with price you’re changing the message and brand of your product, and run the risk of devaluing what you offer.

[tags]lowering prices, entrepreneurship, small business[/tags]

Regardless of how you measure success as an entrepreneur (piles and piles of cash, a comfortable living, independence, etc.) it can be elusive. And, if you’re like most entrepreneurs (particularly first-timers), when you launch your business you probably expect success to hit pretty quick. You built a great product, right? Everyone will love it, right?

Entrepeneurs need sizeable enough egos to be entrepreneurs. You have to believe in yourself and in your business, oftentimes more than others might. You’re the hero in this story, so when success doesn’t happen right out of the gate, it can be a real smack in the face. “You mean, just because I’m great and my product is the next best thing since slice bread, I’m not guaranteed success?” Far from it, and sometimes, entrepreneurs make the mistake of being too far “inside” their own business to see what’s going on around them.

First and foremost, don’t despair. It’s easy to feel a real slump after you launch your business and you’re not that multi-millionaire you envisioned in a couple of weeks. Remember that ego? Well there’s nothing wrong with an ego, and in fact, entrepreneurs need one to succeed, so use it now to bolster yourself against your lack of perceived success. Remind yourself of what it took to get where you are, all of the hard work and sacrifices.

Once that’s done and you realize you’re not a total failure, and your idea isn’t as stupid as pet rocks (which, by the way, sold millions of dollars worth, so go figure!), it’s time to take a step out and regroup.

What’s a “step out”?

Entrepreneurs eat, breath and sleep their businesses. It’s the way we are. We’re thinking about it constantly. One of the risks of that is that we “can’t see the forest for the trees.” We’re too caught up in the details, we’re too emotionally attached, and perhaps too emotionally invested that we can’t look at bigger picture issues.

I don’t think of it as a “step back”, although it’s similar. A “step back” means pausing to re-evaluate and perhaps slowing down to make sure you’re heading in the right direction. A “step out” means extricating yourself from your current position, and thinking about your business as if you’re totally new to it.

What will you see when you take a “step out”?

For starters, feedback you’ve received will start to make more sense, and crystallize into new possibilities. Someone might say, “I found this part of your website a bit confusing,” and before you’ve taken a step out you might respond, “Why? It’s obvious.” But with a new perspective it will make more sense; imagine you’ve never looked at the site before, it’s your first visit…is it as obvious as you thought?

Secondly, you’ll start to see areas of improvement on your own, beyond the feedback you’ve received. “You mean, this isn’t perfect already?” Nope, sorry. Stepping out means asking questions like, “Why aren’t people doing what I expected them to do? Don’t they see the value?”

And even if you weren’t thinking your product was already perfect, and you realized more work needed to be done, without stepping out you may be heading down the wrong path. Should you add feature A or feature B? Look at the product with new eyes and then decide.

Thirdly, stepping out affords you the chance to ask questions like, “How would a new person find out about my business?” And, “Will they understand what I’m offering right off the bat?” Most entrepreneurs, unless they’re marketing gurus (and few are), suffer a great deal when it comes to marketing. They have their specialty, they’ve developed something great, but getting it out to the right people is a whole different story. More often than not, stepping out means realizing how tough marketing is, and more importantly, that it takes time. You don’t build word-of-mouth success in a few days. Your new business won’t go viral in fifteen minutes. It takes time and persistence. Step out, think about where your target audience hangs out (physically, online, etc.) and imagine you’re presenting them with your product for the first time. What will their response be? Will they take notice?

Stepping out is about giving yourself a new perspective. It’s about taking the time to recognize that not everyone is going to “get it” like you do. Not everyone will jump on the bandwagon with your new business. It’s about refining and improving things from the outside, not from the inside where you’re so intertwined with what you’re doing, you may not be seeing everything clearly. Many of us, when stressed out or frustrated will “take a walk to clear our minds.” We’re “stepping out”, and doing it for our entrepreneurial efforts is the same thing. Regroup, refocus and with a fresh pair of eyes tackle what needs doing.

Good luck!

[tags]entrepreneurship, starting a business[/tags]

I just read Those $@!%ing Meetings! at Where the Hell Was I? and I’m still laughing!

Apparently, in Charlie’s new office building, the powers-that-be have decided to name the meeting rooms on each of the 7 floors after famous mountains. I’ve never heard of something like this, but it certainly opens up the door for some humor.

Charlie makes some other suggestions for naming the rooms:

* Days of the week
* Bodies of water
* The 7 Dwarves
* The 7 deadly sins
* The 7 words you can’t say on television (George Carlin)

I’ve suggested 7 alcoholic beverages, cause it sounds to me like someone at his office is into the booze.

And really, where does it stop? I can see each executive wanting to name his own office? The Giant Ego Office. The Superman Office. The Office Of God. Oh boy…
[tags]where the hell was i, charlie hatton, corporate culture[/tags]