July
12, 2019

2 min read

This story originally appeared on PCMag

In the past few months, everything Netflix has spent billions preparing for has begun to come to pass.

Preceding a new wave of video streaming competition from heavy hitters including Apple, AT&T, Comcast, and Disney, all launching in the next year, Netflix announced it’s losing its two most popular shows. Friends will depart for HBO Max in 2020, and The Office is heading to NBCUniversal’s service in 2021.

According to a recent comScore report, 64 million US households used over-the-top (OTT) streaming services in March 2019, through a smart TV, media streaming device, game console, and other means. The report found that Netflix reaches 75 percent of those households, followed by YouTube at 55 percent.

Amazon Prime Video and the now fully Disney-controlled Hulu reach 44 and 32 percent of those OTT households, respectively. The big four comprise 79 percent of total viewing hours, according to comScore. But for Netflix in particular, the big question is whether its continued investment in originals can replace the engagement it gets from licensed sitcoms.

Nielsen provided PCMag with data from its 2018 SVOD Content Ratings report showing that The Office was the number one Netflix show by hours viewed by a healthy margin last year — more than 52 million hours for its 200-plus episode run. Friends and its 254 episodes were second at over 32 million hours, and the rest of the top five were also licensed shows (Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, and Criminal Minds), not originals.

Part of the reason for that is syndicated shows simply have more episodes, but the data shows why Netflix has gone into more debt to bankroll billions of dollars in original content spending that often prioritizes quantity over quality. Netflix needs to own more content to keep users subscribed and streaming as more licensing deals expire and well-funded competitors enter the market.

For a deeper dive into the escalating original content war between all of these streaming giants, and where this increasingly cordoned-off landscape leaves consumers, check out our story on the streaming-industrial complex.

July
11, 2019

3 min read

This story originally appeared on PCMag

Ever been on a plane as it’s about to take off, with your phone in airplane mode or even turned off, then looked over to see someone FaceTiming at full volume? It happens plenty, despite requests from flight attendants who ask you to turn off connectivity on your phone for your safety (and because the Federal Aviation Administration makes them).

A new survey by AT&T reseller All Home Connections put 1,000 travelers to the test, asking them point-blank what they do with their phones on a plane. The answers might be startling to anyone with aviophobia. They might also seem worth a big ol’ shrug to weary travelers who’ve seen it all and believe the rules are arbitrary, capricious, and a trifle unfair, especially because air travel has become such a chore, with all the pleasure of taking a covered wagon across the prairie in the 1800s.

What it boils down to is this: One in 15 people surveyed never even bother to put their smartphones in airplane mode when a flight attendant asks. Only 67 percent turn off their phones. And men are twice as likely to flaunt instructions from the crew. You can see all the details in this infographic.

All Home Connections went the extra mile and talked to a pilot and author who said pretty clearly that phones “can and do interfere with radio transmissions,” and the only thing saving the plane’s communications with the tower is that the majority of passengers do use airplane mode when requested. It turns out that at least 61.4 percent of respondents believe that to be true. (14.5 percent believe using a phone will outright cause a plan to crash. But considering how many people apparently don’t turn off their phones, the ground would be littered with fuselages and wings if that were the case.)

The survey also covered the worst habits of people on planes. Playing audio without headphones topped the list of things respondents hate, with 83 percent of people annoyed (at best). Fewer people (63 percent) dislike when passengers talk on the phone when the plane is still on the ground. And a lot of people hate when you use a bright screen (whether on a phone or tablet or laptop) when the lights are out for a night flight. Plenty of people would like to see transgressors’ devices confiscated or see them get fined for their hubris. One to 2 percent would like to see them banned, depending on the etiquette “infraction.”

For more, read the full report. Think about it next time you’re flying the not-so-friendly skies.

July
9, 2019

8 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Given your entrepreneur’s spirit, you likely have more business ideas than you have time to pursue. Every new consumer pain, every new piece of technology, every up-and-coming sales trend: They all seem to spark a new, ambitious, seemingly fool-proof business idea.

Related: How to Come Up With Startup Business Ideas in the Digital Era

And while you’d love to pursue all of those ideas at once, face it: You don’t have the time (and your energy, anyways, is more effectively spent on a single business venture).

So, amidst that raging sea of different business ideas, how can you determine which one is worth pursuing… and which ones are bound to fail? Well, there are always exceptions to the rule, of course, but here are five pretty strong indicators that a business idea isn’t all that great. 

1. No demand exists for the product or service.

No matter how cool, edgy, or compelling you think your idea is, if there’s no existing demand for the pain that that business will solve or the pleasure it will create, it likely won’t get far.

Of course, some of you remember when Steve Jobs famously said, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” in an interview with BusinessWeek, as a Forbes report reminds us. Jobs was right: Sometimes, you do have to create a product before consumers know they want it. Who among us could have desired the iPhone, for instance, before it was actually created?

A case study about an existing need — In an interview, Alexander  Mamasidikov, the CMO of Isina, added to what Jobs said, talking about the existing need that even a brand new, previously unimagined product must solve. Isina is an online platform where young musicians get mentored by Grammy Award winners and has clearly worked because it salves an already existing pain.

As Mamasidikov pointed out, “Before we launched, no one had really done what we’re trying to do with musicians and mentorships, but from interviewing young musicians, we quickly found out that our business idea was a winner: Young musicians want to get their big break, and we help them with that by creating a worldwide music talent search that opens opportunities for artists in all corners of the world. That is the desire we fulfill.”

Added the CEO: “Even if it’s in a way that our market couldn’t have imagined before we showed it to them, the jumping-off point was pain and desire in our market. Without that, we wouldn’t have a business.”

2. People aren’t willing to pay what you need to charge

Good business is simple math: More money should come in than goes out, and if that isn’t happening, that negative flow should last only a short period of time to benefit the long-term wealth of the company. Of course, simple math doesn’t mean easy business. Lots of entrepreneurs are struggling to fund their small businesses, with 21 percent borrowing from their credit cards and 11 percent planning to do so in the next year, according to the 2015 Hiscox DNA of an Entrepreneur report.

Your business might not always be making you tons of money; fluctuations in revenue and expenses are to be expected. But if the math doesn’t make any sense at all — if ongoing overhead costs are more expensive than what your market can afford to pay — things probably won’t pan out. So, either find a less expensive product or a target-market that can afford your high-ticket price. 

3.Potential investors won’t pay attention.

Every business needs cash. Without funds to operate, a business is like a car without gas; it might still exist, but it ain’t going anywhere. Sadly, 29 percent of small businesses fail because they run out of money, according to research conducted by CBInsights. For that reason, explaining your business idea to potential investors before launching can be a great way to determine how good your idea really is. After all, if your business doesn’t convince investors to provide necessary funds, it probably doesn’t have a fighting chance. 

Related: The Emotional Moment That Sparked a Winning Business Idea for This Entrepreneur

Celine Lu, the founder of BitDeer — a computer power-sharing platform which allows its users to mine for cryptocurrency by collaborating with the world’s leading mining pools, such as BTC.com and Antpool — explained this issue this way: “When we were testing out the idea of BitDeer as a business,” she said in an interview, “one of the first things we did was write up a detailed business plan and bring it to investors to see how they responded.”

Added Lu: We knew if we couldn’t get investors to buy into it, either our business idea wasn’t very good or, if it was, we hadn’t articulated it well enough yet and it would be time to go back to the drawing board.”

4. Your product’s or service’s demand depends on a current fad.

Remember fidget spinners? Those little un-patented spinning toys which Gen Z went crazy over for? The toys had a search lifespan that looked like this in Google Trends. 
 

Image credit: Google Trends

Between April 30 and May 7 of 2017, interest in fidget spinners peaked. Then, just as quickly, it declined into oblivion. Toys ‘R’ Us, hedging its bets that the toy was more than just a fad, didn’t even stock fidget spinners until the first or second week of May. Richard Barry, the company’s executive VP, told the Chicago Tribune: “We think the overall fidget trend can be very sustainable… the life cycle for any one product could be long or short, and only time can tell, but other products will come in, and we think it will last at least the year.”

Oops. Clearly, Toys ‘R’ Us was wrong; the fidget spinner fad lasted just a little more than a month. 

Fortunately for the toy chain, one such blunder wasn’t going to destroy its business. But if a startup had launched (and many did) with fidget spinners as its main product, it wouldn’t have survived very long. The point is, if something is a fad, don’t go building a long-term business around it. Rather, build a business around sustainable trends that can support your business well into the future. 

5. Other businesses have tried … and failed.

In almost every city around the United States, there’s a storefront where every business that opens in that building seems to go bankrupt or fail for some other reason. Many locals think these buildings are cursed, and subsequent businesses are often hesitant to test their luck at those locations for fear of upsetting business-hating ghosts. 

Jokes aside, there’s a reason that smart business owners are hesitant to build their empire where so many others have failed. The reason probably isn’t ghosts, but instead bad location or market expectations for businesses which open in that building (i.e. cheap, trashy, poor, etc…). This is true when it comes to online businesses and SaaS companies, as well.

If you want to create a product that another company has already tried and failed to create, ask yourself, why will you be the one to succeed? What makes you different? What have other companies done wrong in the past and how are you going to not make those same mistakes? 

Other businesses trying and failing to create a previously launched product or service doesn’t definitively mean that that product or service will fail again, but it is a warning — to be careful, to study your market and to find a unique selling proposition which other failed product launches have not had. 

Related: 75 Ideas for Businesses You Can Launch for Cheap or Free

Whether consumers can imagine wanting the product or not, the business should salve an already-existing pain or fulfill an already-existing desire. People may not have been able to imagine an automobile before it was shown to them, but they sure as heck wanted to get places faster than by horse and carriage. That’s a lesson worth thinking about.

July
8, 2019

4 min read

Selling ice cream out of a beat-up postal truck on the streets of Los Angeles about 10 years ago helped Natasha Case and her co-founder bring their brand Coolhaus across the country. To help Coolhaus become a household name and bring its products to the world, Case has embraced the power of leadership in her role as an ice cream shaman.

“Tapping into the inspiration and the spirituality of other people is what it takes to do this,” she said. “Sometimes I sit there thinking, Why are they listening to me? Why do they believe in what I say and what I think? And of course I have 10 years to show for it. That’s something that I know I can bring to the table. I really love to bring out the coolest ideas and the most creativity out of the people on my team.”

Related: How This Entrepreneur Found Her Sweet Spot and Scooped Up $30 Million in Sales Last Year

Case and Freya Estreller (they’re now married) started Coolhaus when they bought a broken down postal van and had it towed to Coachella to sell their premium ice cream sandwiches. The concept proved to be a hit almost immediately.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Coolhaus

“We saw the opportunity to reinvent and elevate the ice cream category, which had been sitting sadly with no innovation and no real brands that spoke to millennials and definitely not women,” Case said. 

Women are vital to the Coolhaus brand. Not only is the company founded by women, Case said, its corporate team of 14 is filled with “empowered women leaders.”

“It speaks to how we make things and how we think about the product and our audience,” she said. “We have authenticity in that dialogue with our audience.”

Coolhaus’ homebase of Los Angeles also plays an important role in that dialogue.

Related: When Her Mother Was Diagnosed With Breast Cancer, She Started a Popcorn Company to Raise Money for Research

“The vibe of our brand is very bohemian,” she said. “It is not being afraid to be expressive. It’s very warm. It has that California kind of love and joy built into it. We let the brand be who we are. It’s letting it be more organic and authentic and not being afraid to be really expressive and silly.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Coolhaus

It’s a brand that has delivered. In 2016, Coolhaus brought in $7 million in revenues, Case said. This year, she said she expects revenues to climb to between $15 million and $17 million. The company has received $13 million in funding. Coolhaus’ current line of 42 products can now be found in 7,500 retailers, two of its own scoop shops and trucks in three cities. Its top sellers are its Chocolate Chip Tahitian Vanilla Bean Sammie, Street Cart Churro Dough Pint, Chocolate Molten Cake Pint and Dairy Free Cookie Dough Sammie, the latter of which is part of a dairy-free line that launched within the past year. Mini sandwiches are slated to launch in 2020.

As Coolhaus has grown, so has Case’s belief in herself as a leader.

Related: These Childhood Friends Created a $100 Million Brand by Putting Frozen Greek Yogurt on a Stick

“When you’re a young leader, as I was at 25 when we started, you’re figuring yourself out too,” she said. “So you have to be patient with yourself and you have to grow your team and really make sure that you 100 percent believe in who you’re bringing in and that they fully believe in the brand, because there’s just no time to waste otherwise.”