Archives for 2019

January
23, 2019

6 min read

In this series, Instagram Icon, Entrepreneur speaks with the individuals behind popular Instagram accounts to find out the secrets of their success.

In 2010, Chriselle Lim was a wardrobe stylist, spending her days at editorial shoots for magazines. In the early days of YouTube, at the suggestion of her friend Michelle Phan, she started posting style tutorials on the site and began to grow a following. In 2011, she launched her blog, the Chriselle Factor, to share her thoughts about fashion and style and to inspire other women who shared her passions.

Nine years later, Lim turned her love of fashion into a full-time career. She employs a staff of 13 people at her downtown L.A. office to create content for her blog and across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook for her 3.2 million followers.

The married mom of two has worked with some of the biggest names in fashion, including Dior, Gucci, Fendi, LV, Valentino, Cartier, Elie Saab, MiuMiu, Masion Margelia, Stella McCartney, SK-II, Armani, Chloe and Versace. Last year, she launched the Chriselle Lim Collection with Nordstrom. A second collection will arrive this March. She also started a branded content firm called Cinc Studios.

Entrepreneur spoke with Lim to get her social media insights.

How did you get your start with YouTube and Instagram?

I started on YouTube in 2010. Soon enough I realized that I wasn’t able to make as many videos as I wanted. So I decide to start the Chriselle Factor. Photos were so much easier to take and post. [I could share things] in between the video content. They both grew together simultaneously.

A year and a half into it is when I started to realize that I could possibly make this into a business because of the amount of viewership I was getting. I came from the fashion editorial world where I understood the business of ads and how magazines were making money. So I just viewed it the same way. I was getting close to millions of views per video. [So I believed] there was a possibility that I could actually make it into a business and someone can pay me to create a video. It took about two years for me to finally make my first real paycheck.

What’s your content strategy? How do you decide what and when to post?

We deliberately work on creating the best content for our followers on all platforms but especially with Instagram, because that is where a lot of the engagement and action happens. We have a strategy meeting every day just for Instagram. We’re always testing out things to see if the followers respond to it. What do they like most? What is the most engaging? We’re always trying to create content in the moment because they feel like they are there with you. But also we plan a lot of content as well, especially video content on Instagram. Those can take hours or days to create.

Related: Food Network’s Molly Yeh Shares How She Built Her Blog Into a Growing Farm-to-Table Empire

How do you leverage your account, and to what extent do you monetize it?

On Instagram we will see more and more brands that want to partner with influencers and celebrities on that platform because it’s an engaging platform and it’s immediate and you can interact and engage. Monetization on Instagram has just grown so much. I foresee it to continue to grow just because more brands are understanding the power of Instagram influencers. It’s the same across the board with YouTube and the blog.

We started off as more of a highly produced account. We shifted our branding on Instagram and that started after I became a mom. I have a 4-year-old and a 3-month-old. Because my followers been following me since I was in college, they’ve seen me get married and have kids and start this company and then have my second baby. They’re growing with me and they’re getting older with me so they’re just really craving authenticity versus this perfect imagery. But we do balance the two out because I have a passion for creating elevated curated content because I come from that world of editorials and fashion.

What advice do you have for other people who want to build brands on the platform?

To find a strong, unique voice. It is a crowded space especially in beauty and fashion. There’s a lot of content that feels very similar. I feel and I have noticed that once I became open about my life and who I am as a person being more raw and real and authentic to my followers, the voice became more obvious. That’s when my followers became a lot more engaged with me and just feel connected with me and knowing that I was a real person.

Second, hiring people that are better than you. I pride myself on being able to be creative but especially on YouTube with editing and the more technical elements, that was never my forte. I want to grow a brand, so whatever money I earn, I immediately invest it into hiring well-qualified people. That’s how I’ve been able to not only grow my numbers and my following but my company as well.

What’s a misconception people have about Instagram?

It’s important that brands understand who they are first before they go on Instagram. If they’re expecting to go on Instagram and get sales and more followers, then there is a misconception that Instagram is going to make them successful or wealthy or whatnot. It comes down to what the product is and what the brand stands for. That is most important.

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“My pregnancy announcement was one of my favorites as I was keeping this a secret for so long and I was in the dreamiest Valentino dress.”

Image credit: chrisellelim | Instagram

“Our very first photo as a family of four.”

Image credit: chrisellelim | Instagram

“A very real and raw moment captured by my husband.”

Image credit: chrisellelim | Instagram

“A princess moment attending the Dior fashion Show in Paris.”

Image credit: chrisellelim | Instagram

“Launching my very first collection at Nordstrom.”

Image credit: chrisellelim | Instagram

 

January
22, 2019

10 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In 2012, Libby Crow received a phone call from a woman selling renters insurance. Little did she know that the seemingly mundane conversation with a stranger would save her life.

Crow was 25 years old. She had just dumped her boyfriend, quit her elementary school teaching job to become an entrepreneur, and moved to Denver, Colo., for a fresh start. Renters insurance seemed like a reasonable precaution — but she didn’t plan on living long enough to need it.

As she listened to the woman explain policy options, Crow repressed the pain of her father’s recent death, the loneliness of being a digital business owner, and the dark thoughts that had recently emerged in the vacuum of leaving her old life behind. Crow had already penned a goodbye letter to her mother, complete with banking account numbers and passwords. She was on the verge of giving up hope.

Despite this, Crow remained calm and polite on the phone. That wasn’t hard for her: an honors student, prom queen, and star athlete, she was a natural performer. As the conversation came to a close, the stranger on the line said something that would change the course of her life.

Today, Crow runs a thriving global coaching business. She lives in sunny Venice Beach, Calif., with her husband, fellow entrepreneur Scott Oldford, and their long-haired dachshund, Cooper. The woman who had once lost the will to live can now be described as a human sparkler: one encounter with her will light you up.

At just 31, she’s mentored thousands through her online courses, group coaching programs, one-on-one consulting sessions, workshops, and retreats, teaching them how to effectively build and run online businesses.

The present-day Crow is a far cry from the small-town Wyoming girl who started her career as an overworked, underpaid teacher, numbing the grief that would eventually threaten her life and grasping at a dream that then seemed impossible.

Living from taquito to taquito.

“Where I grew up, you’re expected to go to college, get married, take a vacation once a year, and pay off your debt until you’re 60,” says Crow.

A dutiful daughter and emotional rock for others, Crow followed the script. After graduating from college, she promptly took a local teaching job making $2,200 a month to start paying off her $60,000 of student loans. While she did her best to make it work financially, she ate her fair share of 32-cent packs of ramen noodles and $2 taquitos to stay afloat.

All the while, a greater longing stirred inside her. “Even though I loved teaching, my gut told me I was supposed to be doing something else,” shares Crow. Grateful to be employed, she resigned herself to simply scraping by.

Then, Crow’s father died of alcoholism.

“My dad’s death shook my whole world. I started to wonder — if that’s how fast your life can be taken, what’s it all really for?” The tragedy led her to explore another path in life.

Life outside the box.

Crow says she is empowered by others’ breakthroughs, so it’s fitting that a girlfriend’s success inspired her to make a change. “I was on Facebook one day and saw a friend’s transformation story. She changed her lifestyle, started a business, and was glowing,” says Crow.

“At the time, I was feeling pretty unhealthy and wanted to shift my energy and habits. I reached out to this friend, and she became my wellness coach.”

The experience opened up Crow to the world of transformation and what was possible for her own life. She dove fully into entrepreneurship herself and over a short time matched her teaching salary and developed a lucrative side hustle.

Still, Crow avoided processing her father’s death by working around the clock. She would come home from her day job at school and stay up late into the night learning coaching skills. “I’d watch videos by business coaches like Brendon Burchard or Jeff Walker until 3 a.m. to escape from grieving,” admits Crow. “But it also gave me direction. I saw what they did with their online businesses and knew I could do it too.”

By working around the clock, Crow avoided processing the pain of her father’s death.

Image Credit: Libby Crow

Crow decided to quit teaching and invest all her time in building her own consulting business. It was risky, but she believed in herself. She needed to — because no one else would.

“A lot of people told me I shouldn’t go for it, that I needed a secure job with health insurance, or that I’d be back teaching by the following year,” remembers Crow.

Instead of heeding her critics’ advice, she took the leap. “I started to succeed externally, but with time and space away from the nine-to-five, all these feelings came up. I finally had to face them.” For Libby Crow, processing the grief of her father’s death would prove to be a reckoning.

An atheist’s prayer answered.

Months later, the feelings she kept shoving down had spiraled into a state of unmanageable depression. Crow sat huddled on the floor of her new home, with a broken heater in the dead of Colorado winter, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling boxes she was too overwhelmed to unpack.

A broken heater, floor-to-ceiling boxes, and an uncertain future left Crow overwhelmed

Image Credit: Libby Crow

She was afraid of the future and of how much energy and grit it was going to take to succeed. She felt alone and was exhausted from running from the grief of her father’s death.

“I remember just feeling like I was done: done having it together for everyone else; done having to push so hard to make a living. I thought maybe not being here would be easier.”

Crow had never been the praying type, but that night she made an exception. “I wasn’t spiritual at all at the time, but I asked ‘God’ to give me a sign that I shouldn’t die. I needed something, and I didn’t know what to do.”

The next day, Crow was driving down a mountain in Colorado when she received the phone call from the woman selling renters insurance. “Oddly enough, it was near one of the cliffs in the big canyon where I was considering ending it all.

“I wanted to hang up, but she was really nice. So, we had a whole conversation about the benefits of insurance,” says Crow. “The whole time I’m thinking, ‘This doesn’t really matter.’”

Then, out of nowhere, the stranger said, “This is going to sound odd, but I need to tell you about something. There’s this place in Denver that I think you might want to go to. It’s like a church, but don’t get freaked out. It’s kind of like where you’d go if you were a yogi.”

Crow listened, skeptical. Then something clicked. “Maybe this is the sign I prayed for,” she thought. “But then the atheist part of me was like, ‘Nah.’”

Nonetheless, Crow decided to give it a chance. “I looked up the place and dragged myself in there. I remember thinking, ‘Libby, you know you’ve hit rock bottom when you’re listening to the renters insurance lady for critical life advice.’”

That day was a turning point for Crow. It was when she finally let herself start to process the grief of her father’s death. It was also the day she recommitted to her journey of personal growth and full responsibility for creating the life she wanted. “The experience led me on my spiritual path. A path of self-love and self-care that inspired my company at the time.” Through Crow’s personal reckoning and new direction, her consulting business began to boom.

From personal healer to business mentor.

Crow let her inner transformation inform her business and what she created for her audience. She returned to her roots as a teacher, pivoting her business model from a healing one to a teaching one. “My first business model focused on helping other women overcome personal challenges that were holding them back,” she explains. “After years of leading clients in transformation and creating multiple successful businesses, I pivoted toward teaching new entrepreneurs how to build their own businesses online.”

Since then, she’s built a fleet of programs to teach skills ranging from social media management to list building and structuring your online business so it runs itself. She now focuses on helping service-based entrepreneurs build successful, six-figure businesses.

Crow and her husband co-founded a personal development company for entrepreneurs called The Daily Shift. “Scott and I both teach business strategy in our own companies, but we came together to help entrepreneurs grow and evolve themselves through our mindset programs,” she explains.

Crow found a life-changing partner in fellow entrepreneur Scott Oldford.

Image Credit: Libby Crow

She has also forayed into philanthropy. She recently made a substantial donation to Virgin Unite, a nonprofit that unites people and entrepreneurial ideas to create opportunities for a better world.

People often ask Crow how she keeps up with running her business and all of her other pursuits. “You need the right people in your life,” she answers. “You need the right friends and mentors, and you need to be dedicated to your own growth.”

Having a partner like Oldford has been life-changing, she says. “We have a thing where it’s not one plus one equals two. With us, one plus one equals infinity.”

“When you meet the right person, everything that you want to do becomes possible. With Scott by my side, I feel I can do anything,” explains Crow. “He sees me when I don’t see me. He believes in me when I don’t believe in myself.”

As she looks back on her journey, Crow has a few words for her younger self. “I would tell her that it’s okay to soften and to trust yourself. You don’t have to push and put pressure on yourself,” says Crow. “And any time you have an intuitive moment of deep knowing, follow that.”

One of Crow’s greatest achievements has been helping to support her mom.

Image Credit: Libby Crow

Reflecting on all that she has accomplished, Crow beams when she thinks of one achievement in particular. “My big dream was to be able to support my mom. I have helped her leave her job, move to California, and live right by the beach. Besides giving back philanthropically, that’s been my biggest success. I would do it all again 50 times just to be able to provide that for her.”

Learn more about Libby here or connect on Facebook and Instagram

January
18, 2019

6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Modern-day marketing has changed drastically over the past decade. Back in the day, when companies wanted to tweak their advertising, they would have to sift through their sales data, click-throughs and general behavior of their audience.

Related: Here’s How Big Data is Changing The World

But big data has changed all that. It’s changed the way that businesses market to their customers, which in turn, helps companies increase their profits. According to a BARC research report, businesses surveyed that use big data saw a profit increase of 8 percent, and a 10 percent reduction in overall cost.

There are numerous ways you can use big data to adjust your business model for the better, especially as it pertains to advertising. Here are examples of how companies are using big data today, and how you yourself can use it to boost your sales.

Predict products that customers may want to purchase.

How often have you looked at your Amazon recommendations and thought, “Wow, I could really use that!” Chances are, that reaction happens fairly often considering that Amazon uses big data to figure out exactly the type of products you’ll want to buy in the future.

The retail giant — which hit a net worth of 1 trillion dollars late in 2018 — gives its customers insight as to what factors go into determining those recommended products. In this context, Amazon cites a variety of data points to figure out what its customers want. Those factors include:

• When customers make purchases
• How customers rate their purchases
• What customers with similar buying habits are purchasing

Obviously, the last factor is the most important one as pertains to big data. Amazon is able to correctly determine what kind of products you want to buy based on customers with buying habits similar to yours.

Similarly, you can use this kind of data to make predictions for your own customers. When you see a sales increase, you’ll start to notice trends. For example, Amazon noticed that people who buy TVs tend to also purchase a TV mount — which the retailer began to upsell in the hope that customers would buy them together.

Amazon “frequently bought together” example

Image credit: Amazon

Related: Big Data Combined With Machine Learning Helps Businesses Make Much Smarter Decisions

Get an edge against operational risks.

Back before the world was connected via technology, issues of fraud were few and far between. But now that so many of us are connected in one way or another, sometimes an entire business can be compromised in just a couple of keystrokes.

Operational risk is particularly high in financial institutes. Scammers are constantly trying to evolve schemes to take advantage of both people and companies. As big data has evolved, however, financial institutes have realized that they can use this information to stop scam artists in their tracks.

Banks, for instance, are now using big data to monitor their transactions on a “front-to-back” business line to help eliminate fraud at all levels. They look at information about who is sending/receiving money, how often those people engage in this behavior, where they live and how much money they are sending.

This type of technology can be helpful for any business, not just banks. As data is collected, trends emerge and anything that deviates from “business as usual” triggers a digital sticky note on that transaction. This makes it easy for companies to identify fraud when it occurs and to keep their operational risks at a minimum.

Use key data to influence the customer’s behavior.

Big data is absolutely vital for figuring out how to get customers to make important decisions when they land on your page. Companies are using this data to learn their customers’ behavioral patterns, and to help point them toward a sale or conversion.

Specifically, the data analyzes every single action a customer takes upon landing on your page. It can see the customer’s keystrokes and how he or she moves the mouse; it can predict the actions that will be taken next.

As a business owner, you can use this data to give your customers what they want when they want it. For instance, if you manage a marketing website and a customer comes to your website to read an article, big data can predict when this viewer is going to go up to the “X” to close out of the window. You can use this as an opportunity to make a curated pop-up appear, offering the customer more information by entering a personal email and joining your mailing list.

Here is how a sample exit pop-up looks to customers. Who doesn’t want 25 percent off their first purchase? Enticing, right?

Exit pop-up example 

Image credit: Banana Republic

It’s possible to combine this marketing technique with other strategies like the offer of a free ebook, gift or discount as the customer goes to leave. The benefits don’t stop there, though. You can use big data to predict when customers might leave empty carts on your storefront. If they already left the page but entered an email address, you can program the system to automatically send them reminders that they left a vacant shopping cart.

As more customers come to your website, you’ll start to learn their most common behaviors and plan ahead. Your marketing plan will flourish as you gather more data on what those customers want and need.

Over to you

These are three of the most common ways that companies are using big data every single day. Because technology is continuing to grow, big data is obviously here to stay. Statista predicts that the big data business world is going to be worth $77 billion by 2023.

Related: How Can Small Business Benefit From Big Data

Most people used to think that big data was only for big business. But, as time goes on, it is clear that this technology is for everyone. If you’re interested in pursuing big data in your small business, a little research can get you started, and before long you’ll be able to increase your revenue, boost your email lead list and expand your business in ways you never thought possible.  

January
17, 2019

7 min read

This story originally appeared on PCMag

A few years ago, ahead of a scheduled operation, I had to hire an attorney to draw up my last will and testament. Per the hospital’s instructions, I was also told to bring a copy of my Advance Directive, or instructions on when to pull the plug. It was scary, grown-up stuff.

As a digital native, it all felt a bit too real. I would have much preferred to sit on my couch, laptop at the ready, with an on-screen AI to talk me through the whole decision-making process and pop it up on the cloud. And that’s exactly what former healthcare executive Suelin Chen built in her Boston-based startup, Cake.

Aware that no one is thrilled about planning for the final exit — or having to talk loved ones through their own wishes — Cake is a no-nonsense online tool. You can lay out: how you’d like to go (hospice versus at home or maybe a remote cabin in the woods); who gets your stuff; the music you’d like at your memorial; and more.

You can also specify how you want to be remembered digitally. Perhaps you want to allocate funds for annual site management fees, domain registration, or deputizing someone to ensure a Wiki-profile is factually accurate.

I spoke to Chen to find out more. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Suelin, how did you come up for the idea behind Cake?
With my background in healthcare and business, I saw not only the high costs involved in end-of-life care, but that in our country people often default to enduring more and more medical procedures without fully understanding the value, or the trade-offs. Three out of four people don’t plan for end-of-life, and I get why — the barriers to planning can be really high. Simply put, I saw an opportunity to help people plan better, to make their desires known, before it’s too late.

Because they’re too incapacitated to make their views known?
Right, it’s often brought up too late. Because, when surveyed, 80 percent of people would prefer to die at home — and yet, today, 80 percent of people die in medical facilities.

Planning for the final exit is a space ripe for disruption, then.
I knew there could be good digital tools for doing this but I couldn’t find any, so I found a great team and built Cake.

Is there also a generational shift? Due to social media, we get to “see” people die, many of whom we might have lost touch with over the years. Death is going to happen to us all. But it feels more “visible” now.
Absolutely. We have a lot of millennials on our platform, and we see that this generation is very pragmatic and perceives less stigma about death than older generations. Previous generations have been remembered through a gravestone or something similar. In time, those degrade. But our digital footprint, the traces of our lives, will persist online. I ask people, when your great-grandchildren search online for you in the future, what do you want them to find?

That’s a deeply unsettling and yet curiously interesting thought. You must have worked with many different partners to bring Cake to life.
Yes, we’ve spent hundreds of hours consulting with experts to develop all our online tools including: estate attorneys, funeral planners, physicians, social workers, and wealth managers.

How does Cake work? This is more than a basic will, right?
Yes, many of our users have done estate planning and have a will but realize that they still have gaps. We provide a personalized, comprehensive, and detailed checklist that helps people understand what planning they still need to do. It’s hard to know what legal fees are reasonable, because there’s a lack of transparency. Many of our users have seen an attorney but want more visibility into the process. It’s not just avoiding taxes on your assets after death (though of course this is very important). It’s also managing how you want to be remembered, your funeral or memorial service, your digital footprint, your digital assets (Bitcoin, etc.) — certainly doing more than putting all your passwords in an Excel doc and locking it (which has been recommended to several of our users).

How many data points is your AI gathering as it takes a Cake user through personal planning?
It’s fluid [and] really depends on the individual. Our Cake AI prompts you with questions, to capture data around many decisions that need to be made. But there’s also a freeform section for more personal wishes. Some of our users write (almost) novel-length answers to those.

What are some of the more “out there” requests?
Well, every employee at Cake has gone through the process and one of my team members loves the idea of having a tree planted for him. A lot of our users, including me, feel they’d rather have a celebration of life than a somber funeral. One of our users wants to be buried with a 6-pack of Bud Lite. Someone else I know has left instructions to rent out a movie theater for his. Your last wishes should be a true expression of who you are.

How many people have signed up so far?
We don’t reveal exact user numbers.

Fair enough. It’s free to users, so what’s your revenue model?
We make money from affiliate links and from enterprise partners who distribute to their population. For example, we’ve built a Cake back-end for a large healthcare provider, an insurer, a bank, and other institutions. A premium product is also in the works.

You don’t share data with “interested parties” who might want to sell fancy urns then?
No, trust is the most important thing to us. We will never sell or share personally identifiable information with any third party without our users consent.

Why the name Cake?
It’s a warm, inviting symbol of celebrating and honoring life. Planning is a positive act, a true gift to your loved ones.

You’ve build a web-based service, rather than a mobile app. Why?
It’s much faster to iterate and improve the platform, and doesn’t require any download. We also know that many of our user base is more comfortable with web apps than downloading native applications.

Do you have a tech team in-house or are you partnering with a digital agency on this build?
All in house! We actually have more female than male techies, who span several generations, which I’m very proud of.

Are you wedded to any particular tech tools?
Choosing Microsoft Azure as our hosting platform made it easy for us to implement excellent security and scalability for our product early on, and our code base heavily utilizes the Microsoft .NET stack as well. We recently also switched our internal IT to Office 365 and were early adopters of Microsoft Teams; so I guess we’re fans of Microsoft technologies.

Why are you based in Boston rather than any of the other Silicon cities?
I love Boston. There’s a lot of activity in FinTech, MedTech, and healthcare here. It’s a great place to be, with plenty of talent and financial support from big institutions.

Talking of support, who are your backers?
We raised pre-seed from Pillar VC, LaunchCapital, Arkitekt Ventures, and Honeycomb.

Finally, what’s next for you?
We have an exciting growth plan for 2019, and a number of new partners in the financial sector that will provide new avenues for growth and new opportunities to add features that enable our users to plan and have peace of mind. Cake is in the FinTech cohort of Mass Challenge 2019, which kicks off orientation on Jan. 18. The initiative is aimed at startups which have an enterprise-ready solution, and helps them partner with large organizations. Cake will be working with MassMutual, Fidelity, and AARP Innovation Labs.