Terthe Business Blog: Business

Saturday, April 1, 2017

The Ins and Outs of Microfinancing Your Small Business

Venture capital may be the hot, sexy funding route that helps a few businesses and grabs a lot of headlines every year. But it turns out another type of funding works out better for most entrepreneurs: microfinance. Microfinance loans are small loans typically in the range of up to $50,000 in the United States, with an average loan amount between $9,000 and $10,000.

Non-bank lenders such as Accion USA provide loans that average just $7,000. Here’s the funny part: The businesses they lend to have a survival rate that’s twice the national average. Repayment rates are on par with traditional banks, too.

Why do micro-borrowers do better than owners who use traditional bank loans or credit cards? Here are three reasons:

Monday, March 27, 2017

What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business

When a four-foot snake slithered through our window, we screamed and hopped around, then chased it out with a broomstick. Next we emailed our host. We were at an Airbnb in Koh Lanta, Thailand. It took 24 hours to hear back. Locals, she wrote, believe “a snake in the home is good luck.” Wrong answer! And wrong attitude. Let’s get one thing straight: For all of Airbnb’s live-like-a-local propaganda, it’s about paying money to sleep in a stranger’s bed. An Airbnb listing is a small business: Guests are clients, hosts are vendors. This simplicity makes Airbnb an instructive space to discover what makes a good business.

5 Top Entrepreneurs Share Best Business Advice and Tips for Success

Navid Moazzez. "There's one incredibly painful mistake that I see new entrepreneurs make. It’s painful because it keeps them from success. They feel like they're working hard, but not making any progress. The mistake? Trying to do too many things at once."“Focus, by definition, means narrowing your field of vision and attention. It means choosing which opportunities, projects, and even customers you’re NOT going to pursue. And it’s really, really hard. When I first started online, I was trying to do it all: podcasting, writing epic guides, blogging and I wasn’t doing any of it well. I realized that each time I jumped from idea to idea, I was diluting my efforts."
Tim Soulo. "They're convinced that success in business is pre-determined by the awesomeness of their business idea alone. And they couldn't be more wrong. Execution is equally (if not more) important than the actual idea. Ideation is the easy and fun part and execution is the hard and tedious one.""That's why people would rather put faith in their ideas than invest countless hours of work towards making it happen. Like the character of Mark Zuckerberg famously said in "The Social Network" movie: "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook."
Caroline Beaton."The most painful mistake I see entrepreneurs make is launching before learning. For example, you may decide you want to launch a marketing consulting company, so you hastily make a website, content and reach out to people, but you haven’t yet figured out who your target clientele is. What people actually need help with or what you're specifically good at. So no one bites." "Or you could launch a new app, but you don’t know what sells well in the app store or how to promote it. So even though you have a great product, no one sees it. Or you decide to write a book but haven’t really spent time with the key concept—researching, talking to people—so your book proposal falls flat and feels generic. Publishers ignore it."
Lauren Holliday. "You read about this new social media tool or this new game or social app. And it's like: What happened to solving REAL, big, hairy problems as opposed to helping privileged kids send pictures that explode in a day (sorry, Snapchat - first example I thought of)?""My advice is to spend time with people who are different than you. This will open up your mind to different people and different problems, allowing you to connect the dots faster and make a real contribution to the world, as opposed to just being the next Mark Zuck."
Cody Lister. "In other words, too often first-timers build a product behind closed doors and don't get the feedback necessary to ensure they get buy in for their idea. As a result, they don't reach product-market fit and end up building a product that fails or succeeds by mere chance, not by calculated steps.""I recommend that first-time entrepreneurs take this as a real wake up call to avoid making excuses for not getting meaningful product validation before spending resources on development. You need at least 95% confidence that the thing you're working on will be predisposed to some initial success. There are too many other factors out there working against you when you're first starting out and are tight on resources that make the road of entrepreneurship hard enough as-is. Don't make it more difficult for yourself by building a bunch of features no one really wants to pay for."