The Good Business Blog

Deciding on how much to charge for me feels like a bit of a balancing act, which I suppose product pricing always is. My first product, my program builder app for strength athletes or enthusiasts, is somewhat unique in its functionality but it is not without a lot of competition. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of existing fitness apps on the app store, and many of them are simply free with ads, or entirely free for the simpler ones that the developer decided wasn’t worth charging people for. The competition is important here, because with there being so many free options, charging for the product up front may be detrimental to my applications success in the market. If I were to charge up front for the app, my initial thought is that the price would have to be very low, $0.99 perhaps. There are ways of producing income from the app without charging up front too of course, such as advertisements within the app, charging for removing the ads, or simply asking for donation...

Stephanie runs a coffee shop that I walk by every single day on campus, Metro Coffee. This was a very fun talk to hear for me because there was something different about hearing from someone whose business I have seen prior to this class. It also feels more relatable because it’s a relatively small operation and I honestly don’t see myself trying to run a very large company, at least not any time soon. Stephanie took over the coffee shop when the previous owner unfortunately became unable to run the business due to cancer. She said that much of what she learned was simply from doing the job, rather than from school or elsewhere. She also received financial help from her mother which apparently ended rather poorly and damaged their relationship, which like John Dimmer mentioned can be a side effect of getting financial support for your business from friends and family. One small thing that she mentioned that I found interesting, although expected, was that the business they do through...

John Dimmer is apparently one of the most successful businessmen that Andrew Fry knows, which is saying quite a lot given the fact that we have met many of his friends now and none of them strike me as being particularly unsuccessful. The sheer number of businesses that he has been involved in is simply staggering. I can’t recall all of the businesses that he listed, but there were many that went unmentioned. The variety was quite interesting. One of the businesses was a distillery or something similar, which is quite different than the Airstream RV dealers that he owns. He also owns a Honda dealership. Overall just a very impressive person, I can’t even wrap my head around doing so many different things. He had a lot to say about funding a new business, and what that whole process looks like from the early stages all the way to the endgame. It all starts with self-funding and getting loans from friends and family. From there you can get investments from angels and angel groups. The ...

Eric Hanberg had a slightly different story to tell compared to many of our other speakers so far. He has had success writing books, in particular for people that are running small non-profit organizations. He himself ran one and decided to make a guide for others to follow. He explained how he took advantage of Amazon and the internet in general to sell his work without having to go through a traditional publisher. Selling his books through Amazon takes care of that. To bring in customers, he pays for online advertising regularly which has worked out quite well for him. He also discovered through this that his book often sold in small bunches, usually a copy for every member on the board of a non-profit. So he saw that as an opportunity to write another book with that idea in mind, tailoring to what they would be looking for. His wife has also found success in working for herself, I believe doing graphic design commissions if my memory is correct. He also showed us a fantastic quote...

Mission: To provide the absolute best mobile solution for avid strength training enthusiasts and athletes. Vision: To lift people up and give everyone the ability to improve themselves in the most streamlined way possible.

Shadrach White started his company CloudPWR back in 2011, and as the name implies it is focused on creating cloud-based solutions. His story about how he got involved creating solutions for the government was an interesting one, and a good lesson in spotting potential opportunities to create and sell a solution to a problem. He got to talking with someone working for the government and discovered that they had to compare proposals related to the legalization of marijuana in Washington. The issue was the time crunch. With only 10 days it would be impossible to get through them all and compare them with the slow way that they were doing it. Shadrach quickly created a small web-based solution for them, using free resources such as Google forms to complete the solution that would aid in rapidly getting through the proposals. By spotting a problem and creating a solution literally overnight, he not only made some quick money but got his foot in the door providing solutions to the governme...

Matt Tolentino is the founder of a new company call Namatad (interestingly, this is “dataman” spelled backwards, a sort of nickname he had), and has now been working for several years on a product known as Firefly. This started out as using sensors in buildings to predict the occupancy of different rooms and areas of buildings at different times, with astounding accuracy. This evolved in to trying to use similar sensors within buildings to pinpoint the location of individuals. As it turns out, this was far from a trivial task. But in Matts search for potential customers, he realized that fire fighters could make great use of a technology such as this. After all, they run in to unfamiliar buildings that are potentially collapsing resulting in changing pathways out of the building, and disorientation for the firefighters. If a firefighter gets lost in a burning building and can’t be quickly located, things can end quite badly. But with Firefly, devices are worn by firefighters while ot...

Brian Forth is a business owner and web developer here in Tacoma Washington. He began his journey building websites while he was a teacher. Being that this was in the early days of the internet, this was a rather valuable skill. He started out by created websites for the parents of his students, and Brian decided to sell his skills and started the company Sitecrafting, which he still owns and operates today. He shared about some difficult times running the company and how he got past it.   He also spoke a lot about what he values in the company and creating a culture at Sitecrafting that he enjoys and that his employees are happy to be a part of. A big part of this for Brian is keeping his number of employees at Sitecrafting relatively low to keep it a tight knit group. More recently Brian also created GearLab, which is a company focused on helping its clients perform things like usability testing and data analysis to help improve user experiences. His websites for both Sitecraft...