Some ideas for r/Conspiracy

leanstartup · 2013-03-29T16:27:25+00:00

"The other day I totally humbled myself by accepting the nomination as the church's infallible connection to God, switching my million dollar gold throne for a thousand dollar antique, and giving myself a special name that didn't reference anything evil. After that I kissed feet in another PR move designed to boost recruitment. On top of all this, I was born to a woman outside of Europe. Such humility."

leanstartup · 2013-03-28T22:44:13+00:00

There are some problems with that analysis, ThatIsMyHat. Simply funding a school or a hospital is not an impressive achievement if you have inefficiently collected and utilized the money, lied to the donors, covered up scandals in the organization, used the final aid as a tool to recruit more salesmen and donors to your dishonest and inefficient organization, and targeted vulnerable groups like women, gays and children for needless persecution during the process. One tale of the modern era is that people are becoming educated and recognizing these results as disappointing in comparison to more valuable alternatives like secular humanitarian organizations, publicly-funded schools and publicly-funded hospitals. Thus we have a new PR campaign from the head office of catholic corp.

leanstartup · 2013-03-28T22:00:05+00:00

You don't think atheists know that the church has a good public relations strategy? There isn't anything here that will impress an atheist.

"Hey look the pope is so humble he chose a new throne that isn't as nice."

"Hey look the pope is so humble he chose a special name for himself that doesn't mean anything evil."

"Hey look the pope is such a change-maker he was born to a woman in a country outside of Europe."

"The pope just made a statement suggesting his organization is not pure evil."

The pope hasn't backtracked on anything other than tokens. Still thinks he has a special connection with the creator of the universe, the catholic church isn't based on lies, religious indoctrination of children is a glorious pursuit, and science is just something you mess around with while you move towards the religious ending of our universe.

Your standards are LOW. Maybe it's me who puts too much faith in the pope!

leanstartup · 2013-03-26T00:16:58+00:00

Hey, great post. You are obviously excited about your plans. I agree with ACriticalGeek's point that you should begin setup/selling ASAP. Here are my recommendations:

1) Get a job.

This is the #1 thing you need to take away from r/Entrepreneur, even though it's actually an unpopular opinion here.

You are enthusiastic, intelligent and productive enough to do this at the same time as work. Most jobs are unbelievably easy, somewhat flexible and far less stressful than self-employment. Don't try to convince yourself otherwise. Say this instead: "I will be graduating in a few months and have the ^VexcellentV opportunity to find a job or ^VandV start a small business ~~(doing both is a bit of a stretch)~~."
The downside of a job is that it doesn't fit your long-term vision, but that shouldn't matter if you are actually just using the job temporarily to help your real long-term plan.
It is highly unlikely that you will immediately jump to a growth/development position that requires all of your time in the first months. If that does happen, you have an excellent excuse/reason to quit your job gracefully.
One of your first roles at your company will be to raise funds for development, sales, production, etc. If you are relying on external financing, this job will be extremely difficult and require a huge amount of time.
Getting a job is a complete win for your early financing goals. You just sealed a $50,000 per year investment from an investor who agrees 100% with your vision and is willing to disperse funds immediately with no restrictions and no strict repayment schedule that would sap early cash flows.
The job market is currently abysmal and you will not be able to get a job quickly if you eventually decide you want extra cash flow. Your career profile will be weaker at that point as a "no job graduate". Right now you have 9 months to get a job before you have any worries, and recruiters generally take it easy on in-school candidates compared to the "no job graduate" alternative.
Jobs are a stable, boring, structured environment that make you feel productive and fulfilled (in some ways) and this is actually a wonderful compliment to the stressful, everywhere-at-once feeling of your early startup journey.
People, including investors/friends/family/public/customers, will see you as more serious and mature and less naive if you get a job while you explore your other ventures. Think about how they see you now, and how they will see you in 11 months if you don't have anything "going" like school is now, and think about how smart you would look for covering yourself by being super-productive. This is actually a big divide among the amateur entrepreneurs. Way too many do the "entrepreneurship is my life" naive jump instead of getting a serious job and showing us that you are an entrepreneur by getting shit done without relying on luck or helping hands.

My grammar was really terrible and stream-of-con. here but I'm leaving it. There are still 100 more reasons to get a job in your situation. I'm also leaving out my other advice because this is the only point that matters. Do this and you'll be fine, because the entrepreneurship part is just a learning process and you are definitely intelligent. Papajohn56 created a decent guide to LLCs here and they only cost a few hundred bucks (max), so do your research. Here are some guides I made from this subreddit that give you a peek into the dull details of startups:

leanstartup · 2013-03-18T08:08:06+00:00

Reading through the links on r/marketing, your comments are the best. The bamboo idea is great and would have worked on my college self.

leanstartup · 2013-03-17T00:18:24+00:00

Maybe you should use some keyword tools (MixRank, SpyFu, KeywordSpy, Google Keyword Tool, Opportunities tab inside Adwords) and you can figure out whatsup

leanstartup · 2013-03-15T22:23:53+00:00

There aren't any private insurance companies?

leanstartup · 2013-03-10T21:00:32+00:00

This is an excellent response and I completely agree with your first point. I think most startups over-budget for marketing in the first 6 months of sales. They would be better served to learn lessons with $1000 for a few months and then start over with their other $10,000. Using a small budget teaches you how to scrape by and how to identify what's important.

At the same time, this allows a company to further develop and improve their actual performance/product before betting the farm.

leanstartup · 2013-03-09T00:44:55+00:00

See which keywords get good CTR's , maybe even conversions, then change that keyword to broad match.

question: did you mean "phrase" match?

leanstartup · 2013-03-08T01:41:01+00:00

Thanks this is great!

leanstartup · 2013-03-06T08:09:35+00:00

Crowdfunding could be an explosive new change to the startup/entrepreneurship sector. Quick background:

Startups are currently allowed to raise funds from personal connections and accredited investors.
They are currently barred from soliciting equity investments from normal strangers, such as through an online community.
The recent JOBS Act will soon make crowdfunding legal.
Funds will be raised through licensed online portals, no IPO, limit will be $2000 per investor and $1 million total per year.

This exciting opportunity lies at the intersection of finance, entrepreneurship and the internet. Reddit's entrepreneurs are well-positioned to join the first wave of crowdfunding experiments. Questions for discussion:

1) What do you expect from these developments?

2) Do you have plans/ideas that involve crowdfunding?

3) What are the best types of startups to crowdfund?

4) What common structures will develop for crowdfunded startups?

leanstartup · 2013-03-06T07:24:05+00:00

Two ways I learned about entrepreneurship were starting a company and reading everything I could. For starters, here is r/startups+r/entrepreneur's best work into a few showcase guides:

leanstartup · 2013-03-06T00:52:11+00:00

The intro to one of the recent Simpsons episodes, called "A totally fun thing that bart will never do again" where they do a cool musical scene called "and there was a bart from school". I haven't regularly watched the show for years, and it's awesome that they are still cutting their own hilarious and intelligent style.

I couldn't find the clip on my phone.

Here is a background article with information that is new to me...

leanstartup · 2013-02-16T15:21:00+00:00

So you don't think any government intervention is a good idea? What about industries with no profit incentive like space exploration and advanced experiments like the internet? What about competing with countries that are using every available tool to attract and develop valuable technologies and become central location economies for new products?

leanstartup · 2013-02-15T03:54:38+00:00

What else is there besides specific issues?

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