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.”

July
5, 2019

3 min read

This story originally appeared on Business Insider

In August 1994, a little-known entrepreneur posted a job listing to Usenet, a pre-web message board. He was looking for “extremely talented” software developers to “help pioneer commerce on the internet.”

The entrepreneur in question was Jeff Bezos, who was taking his first steps towards building Amazon. Bezos is now the wealthiest man not only in the world, but in all of modern history, and Amazon has grown into such a dominant force the FTC has started questioning its rivals about whether they feel crushed by the company.

BNN Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman dug up the vintage job ad last year. It’s reproduced below in its entirety:

Here’s the text:

Well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++/Unix developers to help pioneer commerce on the Internet. You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible. You should have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent. Top-notch communication skills are essential. Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary.

Expect talented, motivated, intense, and interesting co-workers. Must be willing to relocate to the Seattle area (we will help cover moving costs).

Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership.

Send resume and cover letter to Jeff Bezos:

mail: be…@netcom.com fax: 206/828-0951 US mail: Cadabra, Inc. 10704 N.E. 28th St. Bellevue, WA 98004

We are an equal opportunity employer.

——————————————————————-

“It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” — Alan Kay

——————————————————————-

At this time when Bezos posted this ad he had not even settled on the name “Amazon” for his startup, according to Brad Stone’s Jeff Bezos biography, The Everything Store.

Whoever replied to that post was applying to “Cadabra,” as mentioned in the ad. “Awake.com,” “Browse.com,” or even “Relentless.com” were also names Bezos was considering at the time, according to the Stone. If you type any of those three domains into your browser today, you’ll be redirected to Amazon.

The quote at the end is from computer scientist Alan Kay, winner of the 2003 Alan Turing Award — computer science’s most presitgious accolade.

It may be lost to time who eventually got the job listed in the Usenet post, but soon thereafter Bezos hired Shel Kaphan as the company’s first employee and CTO in charge of building its technical infrastructure.

In the job listing, Bezos said he was looking for an engineer who could build complicated systems in “about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.” In exchange, they would get “meaningful equity ownership.”

How much would that Amazon stock be worth today?

July
5, 2019

9 min read

This story originally appeared on PCMag

More people are renting today than in the past 50 years, according to the Pew Research Center, but the apartment search process can be a dispiriting experience.

Just before I emigrated from the U.K., I emailed the one person I knew in Los Angeles (who happened to be a Hollywood agent so, you know, pretty well-connected). Someone in his office was moving back east, so I foolishly took over their lease after seeing just one small photograph, which didn’t do justice to the wall-to-wall 1960s-era beige carpet or the cracked French windows looking straight out onto the street. But hell, there was a pool, and it was L.A.: I coped, until I found somewhere else to land.

Years later, when moving to New York City, I used a broker. Not only was it hideously expensive, I was shocked by the jargon, which masked the true nature of what a cozy (tiny), original features (avocado bathroom set), “must-have” (for the desperate-only), room with a view (no elevator) on the Upper West Side-adjacent (Inwood) actually meant.

This is all familiar territory to Nick Dazé, CEO and co-founder of AI startup Block, which came out of beta in October. Dazé went through his own rental nightmare and decided it could be done better through technology. We talk to him about human scouts, EV charging, AI, and why no one wants carpet. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Nick, tell us your rental hell backstory. 
As a product person, I’m fundamentally motivated by scratching itches I — and the people I love — have. With Block, the “itch” was the ghastly experience my wife and I had the last time we moved. It had been bad before, but this time it was something else. It honestly felt like part of some sadistic game. We had to dodge pests, fraudulent listings, paranoid landlords — all while between work and caring for a 5-month-old baby. It was nuts. And every day around the world millions of people put up with it.

So you thought, “another industry ripe for disruption, then?”
As one of our advisors put it, if Airbnb or Uber were this bad, they wouldn’t exist. But we all put up with this terrible experience once every year or two. At Block, we see it as a huge opportunity to do a lot of good for a lot of people. Imagine if finding a great apartment was as easy as booking a place on Airbnb. That’s what fundamentally drives us.

How does Block work? 
Put pretty simply, Block works like this: our users tell us a lot about themselves, and we learn a lot about the inventory on the market. We do our best to understand what’s happening on both sides and then make a match.

“Right Swiping on a Rental” concept?
The fundamental breakthrough is a simple insight: you could have two apartment units. They’re in the same building, managed by the same landlord, have the same square footage, the same number of beds and baths. They’re the same, right? To a lot of our competitors, they are the same. But tell a person that’s in a dark, north-facing, second-story apartment right above a parking garage that their experience of the apartment is the same as someone with a bright, quiet, south-facing, fourth-story apartment. They’ll laugh (or cry) at the thought of it.

Image credit: Kurhan/Shutterstock

Good point. So how much does Block cost?
Right now, Block is free, because we’re in an R&D mode, and are running several product experiments in parallel.

Is it true you make the process 10x faster than other rental apps?
Yes, Block is fast. Without us, an average renter will spend about 45 days looking for a new place to live. We regularly find people their next home in less than a week.

How many users do you have now? 
We’re not disclosing our user numbers yet. But we can say there are a lot of people sleeping tonight in a home Block helped them find.

How many cities are you in and where’s next?
While we’re in R&D mode, Los Angeles is where we’re focused. And we chose to be here because it’s the perfect market for what we’re doing. The people are diverse, the housing supply is diverse, and the quality varies a LOT. When we’re ready to scale (soon), our technology will be applicable throughout most of the United States overnight.

Let’s talk about how you’re using AI. Is it machine learning and data crunching? Or is there some fancy triangulation and sentience analysis going on?
Relative to the state-of-the-art, we’re in our humble beginning. But relative to the rest of the real estate industry, we’re doing some fanciful things. Without giving too much away, we’re using machine learning in applications like image recognition/classification. We’re doing some fun data science for cohort analysis and user profiling. But, NLP and Sentiment Analysis are our most unconventional tools in this space. As far as what’s on the roadmap, you’d be surprised how high tech we’re going to make apartment hunting.

In true futuristic bio/AI symbiosis, you’re deploying tech-equipped human called Scouts.
Right, because, as you’re probably aware, AI is only as good as the data you feed it, and you need massive amounts of data. One of the biggest problems that renters face is the same problem our tech faces: a lot of data “in the wild” is inaccurate, and most pictures are crummy. We noticed that we could help both problems. Our Scouts are trained to capture great content (images, 3D models, video) and log clean quantitative data about each rental we visit. The content delights our users who want a better look at an apartment they’re considering but are too busy to visit, and our machines get clean data.

You’re collating data to analyze generational shifts in the rental market. Tell us more about that.
Our data on renter preferences come from the self-reported data our users give us when they use our products. We get to know our users quite well, and every bit of information about what the renter is looking for helps us find them a match faster and with higher accuracy. To give you an idea of the types of inputs we search against, a user just messaged me about his search. He’s looking for a dog-friendly bungalow walking distance to the Expo Line with EV charging hookups. That’s how we’re learning what people want and sending them recommendations that feel like “magic.”

What are the millennial/GenZ must-haves?
The must-haves we increasingly see align well with cultural shifts that millennials and Gen Z are popularizing. We see a decreasing interest in high-square-footage units, for example, and a huge increase in interest around walkable neighborhoods and public transit. Our users seem to value entertaining and socializing a lot, so kitchen space and amenities are much higher priorities to them than you normally find in pre-1990s multi-family inventory. My favorite is EV charging and access to ride-share. I’ve experienced people flat out reject apartments in areas with long waits for a Lyft.

Once people have moved in, do you expand your service offerings with discounts or recommendations to other amenities like furniture rentals? Cleaners? Repair people?
We have a number of affiliates that we are partnered with that help our users save money on things they need when they move. This is an area of intense future interest to us.

What percentage of your user base is from out of state?
It hovers around 25 percent, but we think that’s artificially high because there’s been a lot of migration into Los Angeles. That said, it’s one of our most powerful use cases. When you’re moving from out of state to Los Angeles, if you need trustworthy boots on the ground to figure out where to live, your options are pretty limited. And some of our most effusive users are ones that are moving to L.A. from out of state.

Tell us about incubating with Viterbi Startup Garage and what you learned there. 
The VSG was a dream come true. It’s honestly the best-kept secret in the L.A. startup scene. First of all, all the companies there are made up of brilliant, kind people. We’re all very generous with our time and expertise with each other. Second, starting a tech company (or any company) is hard, and having a community that is going through similar or identical problems is both practically helpful, and emotionally powerful. There’s also access to great mentorship, activities, and the view is great, too. Finally, I’ve made some lifelong friends in the VSG.

Who are your investors, and what was it about your business model that grabbed their attention?
So far, we’ve raised a modest amount from angel investors, and I don’t think they invested in the business model because we’re still testing several of them. I think our investors share our vision of a dramatic improvement in the way people find their homes. It’s a huge and growing addressable market (160 million renters in the U.S. alone), and an expensive activity (the average year-lease is worth $25,000). Also, my co-founder and CTO, Julian Vergel de Dios, is brilliant. That’s probably a big part of it. Right now we’re focused on solving problems in the residential rental market, and we’ll have our hands full for years. We won’t rest until we solve these problems.

July
4, 2019

8 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

I’m a big believer that every startup should bootstrap its fund-raising. Bootstrappinng forces you to be creative, and it allows you to stay lean and maintain control of your brand. When my husband Theo and I started my healthful flavored-water company hint in 2005, we self-financed and fund-raised from friends and family for the first two years. 

Related: How to Work with Celebrities and Boost Your Social Media Presence

But after a lot of sweat and tears, we decided that in order to grow the company the way we dreamed, we had to seek outside investment.

Image credit: Kara Goldin

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to raise money through both angel investors and a family office. One source of funding that I get asked about frequently is John Legend, the singer-songwriter and pianist who is the youngest person ever to join the EGOT club (by winning an Emmy, 10 Grammy awards, an Oscar and a Tony.) He has also done a slew of philanthropy work.  

Before I get into why having a VIP backer can boost your business, let’s be real: Sometimes, having a celebrity attached to your brand means zilch. If the high-profile name repping your company doesn’t share your values, or if his or her people are unclear why they’re promoting your product, you’re employing just smoke and mirrors.

And consumers will see right through the magic act. (I’m still scratching my head over Leonardo DiCaprio and the now-defunct photo-sharing app Mobli. Just as confusing: Justin Timberlake and former advertising startup Stipple; Adam Levine and Varsity Tutors; and Ja Rule and the ill-ated Fyre Festival.) 

When there’s no bang behind the bucks — no fire, no passion — the result feels like a money grab on the part of the celebrity. And while star power can bring visibility to your brand, research by Nielsen shows that celebrity endorsements generally resonate only with Generation Z and millennials.

Additionally, according to the book Contemporary Ideas and Research in Marketing, while 85 percent of those surveyed in one study reported that celebrity endorsements enhanced their confidence in, and preference for, a product, only 15 percent said that celebrities actually had an impact on their purchase decisions.

In November 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission even issued an investor alert about celebrity endorsements, saying: “It is never a good idea to make an investment decision just because someone famous says a product or service is a good investment.”

Sometimes, though, the stars align and a celebrity’s lifestyle and passions reflect your brand’s mission — and that famous person’s investment can bring real clout to your business. 

The value of a celebrity who shows a degree of passion

Take Ashton Kutcher, for example: Many critics thought the former That ’70s Show star was going to be a blip on the scene when he began investing in tech companies back in the late 2000s. At the behest of Andreessen Horowitz, he invested $1 million in Skype in 2009 — then quadrupled that number when Microsoft bought the company over a year later.

Since then, Kutcher has backed the likes of Genius, Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Warby Parker and more, and his portfolio of investments is worth more than $250 million. He’s clearly deeply devoted to the tech industry, and it shows — every startup wants him in its corner.

Related: 15 Celebrities Who Had Epic Fails as Entrepreneurs

When I sought outside investment for hint, I wanted people who shared my passion for both my products and my company’s healthy mission. John Legend met us in that sweet spot — he believes in promoting well-being and he drinks our water — making for a serendipitous match. 

Here’s why a VIP backer can enhance your business, and how to make sure he or she is the right fit.

1. Your investor already lives and breathes your brand mission. 

Whether Legend is recording or performing, he’s always on the move and trying to stay healthy and hydrated while on the road. In 2010, he saw hint on the shelves at Starbucks and decided our water, without artificial sweeteners or preservatives, was the perfect fit for his lifestyle.

Drinking water has loads of health benefits, of course, and nutritional research shows that it can help people consume fewer calories. Hydration also has a major effect on energy levels and brain function. Mild dehydration impairs the cognitive performance and mood of men — obviously crucial for a musician like John.

Legend eventually reached out to my husband and me, and we bonded over our passion for healthy living. When we began discussions about investing, it was important to the three of us that Legend didn’t just drink our water, but that he legitimately believed in our “Drink Water, Not Sugar” philosophy.

Our product helps Legend maintain and pursue a healthy lifestyle. And he actually drinks hint while he’s performing; he keeps a bottle right next to the piano.

It’s probably rather unusual having a celebrity reach out to you about investing in your product. We’ve certainly been fortunate, but I believe that when you create something you truly believe in, people respond. There is incredible power in believing in yourself. Self-confidence has been shown to lead to greater motivation, more resilience, less fear and anxiety, improved relationships and a stronger sense of self. 

2. Your investor demonstrates a belief in your vision.

This leads me to a crucial point. If you’re seeking funding to grow your business, it’s tempting to cast your net wide or say “yes” to the first person who shows interest. But when raising capital, the most important thing is who is giving you the money.

When we were just starting out, a friend connected me to an executive at Coca-Cola who my friend thought could help me scale the business. Midway through our phone presentation, the exec interrupted me to say, “Sweetie, Americans love sweet.”

That’s clearly not the kind of person I want on my team. I want financiers who believe in my product and my vision and want to help me get to the next level.

You must find your audience and the people who will support you, even when the going gets tough. If I went into an investment meeting and everyone was chewing on candy bars and drinking soda, that would be a huge red flag.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a partnership will be effective if all parties share a strategic vision, pursue compatible targets and show a strong commitment. The organization has also found that, “A successful partnership enhances the impact and effectiveness of action through combined and more efficient use of resources; promotes innovation; and is distinguished by a strong commitment from each partner.”

This is why John was the perfect match for us: Not only does he enjoy the product but also engages in a lifestyle aligned with our values — and communicates that to his fans.

3. Your investor nurtures your success — not just his or her own. 

Because of investors like Legend, I’ve been able to grow my company in ways that I never imagined. We’re a multimillion-dollar business and the No. 1 independently owned nonalcoholic beverage company in America. 

In the last two years, we’ve expanded outside of beverages and added oxybenzone- and paraben-free scented sunscreens. We also recently launched our beverage in kid-friendly (and car-friendly) packaging.

I ran into John Legend at the annual Cannes Lions Festival in France this June, and he took the time to connect with me for a few minutes to ask about how the business is doing and how I’m doing. It was a nice reminder that our expansion has been possible in part because of investment, of course, but also because we have the right kind of investors — those who believe in our product and what we stand for.

Related: John Legend Gets the EGOT! 3 Things to Know Today.

A backer Legend has a stake in our success not just for monetary reasons, but because he legitimately cares about what we’re doing. When a VIP investor trusts your vision, he or she can provide the unique opportunity to help you spread your message wider and louder. Who is the right celebrity for you?

July
1, 2019

3 min read

About ten years ago, Dawn Kelley went on a blind date. That’s when she met her future husband and business partner.

Steve Kelley had already been in the process of looking to buy Barney Butter, an almond butter company started by a family friend.

Related: This Entrepreneur Says the Nonprofit She Started Inspired Her to Push Her Nut Butter Business to 7 Figures

“He called [our mutual] friend after our first meeting and said, ‘Oh my God, I just met the one, and when I say the one, I’m not sure if it’s the one I want to marry or the one that I want to run Barney Butter,” Dawn said. “It ended up being both.”

Image credit: Barney Butter

What appealed to the couple was the fact that Barney Butter, named after its original founder Jennifer Barney, manufactured its own products.

“We had this opportunity where we could run this manufacturing facility and make the highest quality product that we can,” she said. “There were all these options available to us.”

It proved to be a fascinating career move to Dawn Kelley, a former tech executive and marketer. The Kelleys initially invested in the company before buying it outright and significantly growing its revenues.

“My motto — and the sign that I have hanging on my office wall — is ‘make something,'” Kelley said. “I consider myself a perfect blend, at least most days, of left and right brain. Having the manufacturing side gives us that kind of ownership of it versus just being a sales and marketing organization where we’re working with a third party co-packer.”

Related: The Company That Created a New Way to Drink Tea Is Truly a Product of Love

Barney Butter, Kelley said, sets its products apart from the many competitors in the space by blanching almonds, which removes their skin and leads to a smoother product that’s more like peanut butter. Due to its smaller scale compared to competing brands owned by food giants, Kelley took a deliberate path for its growth.

“The way we went about growth all along was not to get as many new points of distribution as fast as possible, but instead focus on velocity and turns within the accounts that we do get,” Dawn said. “There’s so many unintended consequences of taking that account in a region where maybe you don’t have a stronghold yet.”

Currently, Barney Butter almond butters — its top sellers are Barney Bare Smooth (no sugar or salt added), Barney Smooth and Barney Crunchy — can be found in about 13,000 stores. The company, which has not taken on outside funding, said it grew more than 30 percent last year and expects similar growth this year. It recently introduced a powdered form of almond butter.

Related: How Curiosity Propelled the Entrepreneur Behind Justin’s to Grow a $100 Million Brand

Kelley said that the company is focused on owning the almond space and continuing to focus on its core products, which she said is a challenge that suits her skill set.

“Why I love my job and the company is because I tend to be motivated by having a balance between spreadsheets and creativity,” she said. “I can get just as lost in an Excel spreadsheet as I can in the kitchen coming up with a new recipe with our almond butter. That’s what keeps me excited and engaged.”

June
27, 2019

2 min read

This story originally appeared on PCMag

If it’s not common knowledge that women in the United States earn cents for every dollar a man makes (89 cents, according to Pew Research), it should be. That’s not the only place where the gaps between the genders remain. For the STEM gap, new research shows the state-by-state differences.

The research, entitled Mind the (STEM) Gap, was performed by Typing.com, a free service for teachers and students all about teaching typing and other tech skills — like coding. They looked at the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Surveys from 2015 and 2017 to determine where the gaps were widest and narrowest.

The chart shows the gaps by state, according to the number of bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. It underscores one serious fact: Not a single U.S. state has a population where more women than men have STEM degrees (though only 65 percent of STEM workers even earned a bachelor’s). This data does not take into account the medical field — if you count that, woman do indeed have more bachelor’s degrees — but the debate rages on whether medical counts as STEM.

The states with the smallest gap: the District of Columbia (6.8 percent) and New York (12.9 percent). The worst gaps are in New Mexico (22.5 percent) and Montana (22.3 percent).

Compared to 2015’s numbers, the gender gaps have narrowed in some states (North Dakota was down 5.7 percent) and grown in others (Alaska was up 3.0 percent). The District of Columbia’s small gap for 2017 also came from a narrowing since 2015 of 3.6 percent.

The overall numbers of workers vs. those who earned bachelor’s is also a little troubling. While the number of women earning a STEM degree increased by 10 percent, the number increased for men, too. And the number of workers in STEM fields increased — men by 8.1 percent compared to 5.3 percent for women.