Learn to Make a Product

Expert Consulting for Product Entrepreneurs

Four Ways To Maximize Family Time As An Entrepreneur

This article originally appeared on our Forbes blog

Running a business and having kids are both full-time jobs. This pairing can certainly strain one’s sanity and schedule; however, many entrepreneurs feel that the choice to be their own boss gives them more time with their family, not less . Further, it’s an especially attractive option for women who feel blocked by the “maternal wall” they encounter in corporate America–which can mean inflexibility in many traditional career paths.

Among my client — “makers” of whom about 80% are women — a common goal and central piece of their business plan is to gain more control over their time. Since many of the tasks associated with selling a physical product can be outsourced (ex: contract manufacturing, third party fulfillment, and even customer service, marketing, and design), product-entrepreneurs have an opportunity to set up their businesses in a way that allows them to focus on parenting and other personal demands.

To find out what strategies work best, I asked four successful “maker moms” to share their tips for carving out extra family time.

Use Time Blocking

Stephanie Maslow, owner of the NYC-based brand Metalicious, uses a daily time-blocking practice to make space for the ever-changing needs of her family. Each night before bed she takes 10 minutes to brain dump everything on her agenda for the following day. She then writes out a mini-schedule to follow, blocking out hours for personal and professional tasks so that there is a set window for each item on her list. Here is a sample day:

6:45-8:45 AM – Wake up, make breakfast & lunches, check emails, shower
8:45-9:20 AM – Drop kids off at school, walk to studio
9:20-11AM – Make to-do list for the day with priorities at the top, answer customer emails
11-12PM – Work on orders, create new pieces, price new styles
12-2:30PM – Photograph, edit photos and list new items on website. Write newsletters & blog.
2:30-6PM – School pick-up, ice hockey practice, call pediatrician & orthodontist, answer any new emails that have come in
6-9PM – Homework and dinner, laundry
9-10:30PM – Hang out with husband, check for any last customer emails, get ready for bed
10:30 PM – Sleep

“You can crush your goals when they’re planned and written out in front of you,” says Maslow, whose designs are now shipped globally. “The key is to be disciplined and create structure even when your routine is non-traditional.”

Make It A Family Affair

Learn to Make a Product | Four Ways To Maximize Family Time As An Entrepreneur
Doaa Elkady 2017
Doaa Elkady, Cofounder of SpiceTreeOrganics.com

Doaa Elkady, cofounder of Spice Tree Organics, has set up her business to be a “big family project.” She schedules tasks that require a singular focus while the kids are away at school, leaving other items and responsibilities involving them for when they come home. Fortunately, her children are great assistants. They regularly taste-test their new spice blends, help adjust recipes, and even participate in design work. “The older ones have as much of an intimate knowledge of our products and their uses as we do,” says Elkady, who also makes an effort to attend family-friendly trade shows and markets, giving her kids an opportunity to interact with customers and see the fruits of their labor. In addition to helping her balance work and family, this approach instills in her children the value of hard work, going after what you love, and being entrepreneurial. A definite win-win!

Outsource Promotion

Learn to Make a Product | Four Ways To Maximize Family Time As An Entrepreneur
Melanie Marie 2018
Melanie Marie, Owner of MelanieMarie.com

Social media is key for engaging potential buyers, and most businesses find that a steady stream of content and advertising is what most drives their e-commerce sales. However, it takes a lot of time and energy to execute this well! Melanie Marie, a lifestyle blogger and apparel and accessories designer, relies on several tools to outsource and streamline the company’s digital marketing, including Fiverr for branding, graphic design and ad creation, and Tailwind to automate posts and campaigns, monitor stats, and grow her followings.

Because these tools are available as apps that can be accessed from her mobile phone, Marie can quickly check-in in between personal activities such as playing with her daughter or running errands. Further, her promotions are set-up to run regardless of if she is working or not, so time off due to illness or a family vacation doesn’t necessarily translate to lost income, as it may if she were reporting to an employer.

Right-Size Your Mindset

Learn to Make a Product | Four Ways To Maximize Family Time As An Entrepreneur
Veronica Horner 2018
Veronica Horner, Cofounder and CEO of MaiaModa.com

Veronica Horner is the cofounder and CEO of Maia Moda, a line of stylish breastfeeding and maternity clothing. Her approach to fitting in more family time is to cultivate a patient attitude towards her business’s growth and resist the urge to overschedule during this leg of her career. Each week, she sets up limited working hours without being bound to accomplishing every single item on her list. “I have to remind myself that I’ve set different priorities for my current stage of my life. The business may grow slower as a result, but I’m okay with that,” says Horner.

Throughout the course of a typical career, it’s normal that one’s professional capacity will ebb and flow. It’s crucial to remember that each phase is just that: a phase. One of the unique benefits of being an entrepreneur is that you set your own performance metrics , and it’s perfectly okay for your goals and output to change with the seasons.

Why Products Designed By Women Are The Next Big Thing

This article originally appeared on our Forbes blog

An Interview with Danielle Kayembe
Danielle Kayembe is a futurist and the founder of GreyFire Advisory.

Have you heard the term coded patriarchy? According to Danielle Kayembe, founder of GreyFire Advisory and author of the white paper ‘The Silent Rise of the Female-Driven Economy’, it’s a phenomenon that impacts nearly every aspect of a woman’s waking life. Since the majority of our everyday products and systems are designed by and for men — to the exclusion of women’s unique needs, biology, and wants –our reality is in fact male-centric, says Kayembe.

Instances of patriarchal coding can be found in buildings, technology, and consumer products. For example, building doors are typically engineered for the tensile strength of men, making it difficult for some women to open them. None of the most popular health tracking apps (Apple, Fitbit, Nike)  included a way for women to track their monthly cycles at release, despite the fact that most users of these devices are women and periods are a fundamental component of women’s health. Other consequences are more sobering. When airbags were first introduced, hundreds of women and children were injured and killed because the companies who launched them had only thought to test them on the male body.

While such observations may seem negative, Kayembe posits there is a huge, untapped potential in the market for women-centered innovation (WCI): products and services that are not just marketed to women, but created by them too. Women designers and entrepreneurs have an innate ability to understand the pain points and aspirations of female consumers and thus drive new types of innovation, disruption, and brand loyalty. Or as Kayembe puts it, “Every woman, by virtue of her lived experience, is now a walking hub of multi-million dollar business ideas.”

Globally it’s estimated that women make 85% of consumer spending decisions, and when united as a market, represent the world’s second largest GDP. In the US they control roughly 50% of personal wealth ($14 trillion in assets!) and are the primary breadwinners in over 40% of households. Yet despite possessing substantial decision-making and buying power, only 2% of venture funding is given to women-led companies. According to Kayembe, this disconnect represents “the largest arbitrage opportunity in the market today.”

The tendency of today’s investors to overlook and underfund female entrepreneurs may well be changing. Kayembe predicts that as the most successful female-founded companies reach liquidity (IPO’s or acquisitions), “a new ecosystem will form.” Namely, female investors will launch their own funds, invest in companies that sell products and services they are familiar with, and actively seek out women-led companies to support. Instead of having to depend entirely on the current venture capital network, they will create their own, comprised of WCI-friendly investors and companies.

If this shift does in fact play out, other factors are likely to ignite the success of WCI. One is that women are known for sharing products they love with other women, a behavior enhanced greatly by the use of social media (which women engage in 62% more than men). The second is that millenials are buying more from smaller companies and choosing value-based brands over traditional heritage brands. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that large companies have lost $18 billion in sales to small businesses in the 5-year period ending in 2014. Both of these social trends lend themselves to the rise of female-driven products and services.

It’s easy to see the world as static, and to view people as too entrenched in their ways to create seismic change. Especially since coded patriarchy is potentially thousands of years in the making! But Kayembe sums it up best: “The darlings of the business world shifted from middle-aged men in Brooks Brothers suits, to college dropouts in hoodies — it’s about to shift again.”

Why I’m Grateful For The Hard Parts Of Entrepreneurship

This article originally appeared on our Forbes blog

Entrepreneurship has a bad rap for being risky, stressful, and isolating. And rightly so! I work intimately with founders and small businesspeople, and I’m constantly reminded that behind every creative and innovative venture are humans grappling with frustration, fear of failure, unrealistic expectations, and self-criticism. While bypassing these difficult feelings is unlikely, it is possible to draw wisdom and strength from the challenges of entrepreneurship. After all, from great struggle comes even greater growth.

Here are three reasons I’m grateful for the hard parts of being an entrepreneur.

If It Was Easy, Everyone Would Do It

This is a reminder I find helpful when going through a tough time, or when I need the motivation to push through a labor-intensive project. Why? Because creating and delivering a product or service is challenging enough on its own; if it were easy there would be more competitors vying for your potential customers!

I recently had to create 100 pages of written content for a visual guidebook about manufacturing. (It was as fun as it sounds.) Every time the “finished” product was ready for review, our team would find an important addition or revision, usually requiring the entire design layout be adjusted. This went on for months! But the process made me acutely aware of the creative and financial investment required to develop a truly useful resource, and thus clearer on our competitive advantage and value proposition.

If what you offer takes little risk or effort to imitate, you’ll quickly be surrounded by other players in your space. It requires significant effort and stamina to build something brick by brick, but the upside is that there’s less of a crowd!

Losing Money Is A Great Teacher

You can ace b-school, read lots of business books, and hire the best consultants, but as with most things, there’s no better teacher than real life. Until money is on the line, everything you’ve learned remains theoretical. The sting of actual, tangible loss is what produces your most profound lessons, and if you’re willing to examine these failures, you can gain lasting wisdom.

During my early years as an entrepreneur, I developed a habit of keeping a “money mistakes” journal. Every time our company made an expensive misstep–such as a production run filled with defects, or a marketing investment with no ROI–I recorded three things: a description of the event, how much money we lost, and what, in hindsight, could have been done to prevent it.

Evaluating each mistake helped me uncover unhealthy patterns (such as dismissing my gut instinct about a person or project) and ultimately make wiser, more savvy investments as time went along. While tallying up losses doesn’t exactly feel amazing, the lessons learned are here to stay.

Being Discouraged Can Build You Up

In my bleakest, most vulnerable moments, I’ve had to confront how I choose to view myself when I’m not measuring up to outside metrics of success. Making the decision to believe in your own worth after a failure or disappointment is challenging; however, the result is true, unshakeable confidence that remains with you through all of life’s challenges.

You might lose money or customers or a sense of status during your adventures, but the sense of self you develop is yours to keep. This is the real entrepreneurial gold! And for me it’s what makes the journey worth taking, even when things are hard.

Why You Need To Get Out Of Your “Idea Bubble” Before Launching A Product

This article originally appeared on our Forbes blog

Most people who come up with a product idea or invention are incredibly passionate. They’ve seen a need in the marketplace – most often inspired by their own day-to-day frustrations with existing products (or a lack-thereof) – and are excited to fill the gap.

This period of excitement is what I call the “idea bubble”. During which, entrepreneurs are enthusiastically planning out their product design guided by their own unique preferences, life experiences, and gut instincts. They may share their concept with friends and family to get “objective” feedback, but loved ones are likely to be encouraging rather than brutally honest. As a result, ideas in this stage exist primarily in a bubble of subjectivity.

Bubbles are only a problem if you never leave them. As difficult as it can be to hear someone say they wouldn’t buy your product, or that your price is way too high, or the design not attractive enough, this is exactly the kind of feedback makers need to collect at the beginning stage of their business. People who get too far into product development and manufacturing without thoroughly testing their concept run the risk of investing time and money into an item that few people actually want. It might sound like common sense, but after working with hundreds of start-up brands and designers I see the idea bubble trip people up again and again!

On the flip side, sometimes feedback is irrelevant and needs to be tossed aside. A few negative reactions are not enough to shift the course of a business! So how do entrepreneurs know what’s what? The answer is volume. Makers need to poll a lot of people about their product concept in order to separate one-off opinions from the general consensus of their target market.

An NYC-based business accelerator I once interviewed requires all incoming start-ups to talk to 100 prospective customers about their business concept before receiving any further support. After carrying out this work, nearly everyone makes modifications to their original business model. Whether the change is small, like adjusting the price of a product or service, or large, like deciding to target an entirely new demographic, the effect is the same: feedback forces a positive change.

Independent makers and inventors can benefit from the same approach. Set a goal to seek out between 50 and 100 ideal customers and ask them for direct feedback about a product’s design, price, branding, etc. Connecting with this many people requires getting creative! For example, a recent client making a medical garment for chronically-ill kids posted questions in various online parent support groups, spoke to her child’s doctors and nurses, and attended a conference so she could talk directly with families and care providers familiar with her customer’s needs. The response rate was fantastic.

Methods of collecting feedback vary, and can include one-on-one phone calls or in-person discussions, online surveys and polls and focus groups. Hiring a market research company can be a pricey investment for most bootstrappers, but it’s definitely an option. Remember: the goal is to leave the bubble and listen to customers, not conduct an airtight scientific research study. Questions about a product’s overall appeal, the necessity of certain features and benefits, and the target price are important, but so is allowing for open-ended conversation. In fact, off-hand comments can yield powerful insights that may fundamentally alter the design of a product, as well as inspire ideas for new products.

In order to be useful, feedback has to be measured. Inquiries like “What would you pay for this product?” or “Do you feel there is a significant need for this product in the marketplace?” are easy to track, but evaluating more nuanced intel, like the tone of a conversation or the overall level of enthusiasm from the feedback group, requires something different. In order to harvest this type of non-data, entrepreneurs must consciously avoid the trap of “hearing what they want to hear.” Giving yourself a little mental reminder to be open and clear-eyed can be helpful before each conversation!

Collecting an adequate amount of feedback will certainly require elbow grease, and in some cases, a bit of cash too. A virtual assistant to manage the project might be helpful for people juggling a day job or a family, while participation incentives such as a $50 gift card to one lucky survey winner work well too. Whatever the investment, it’s wise to spend a little money up front, before a product design has been made in bulk. The process of developing, testing, manufacturing, packaging and shipping a physical item isn’t cheap, and once it’s done, it’s done!

A maker may wholeheartedly believe there is a need for their product exactly as they’ve designed it and hopefully, that’s the case. But exposing ideas to the outside world before too many startup investments have been made can prevent wasted time and energy. Stepping out of the idea bubble as early as possible is the best way to launch a physical product.

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