The Mom And Pop Business - Successful Parenting Startups To Watch

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1. http://www.4moms.com/

Meet the Origami the world's first power-folding stroller, brought to you by Pittsburgh-based 4moms. With the push of a button, Origami folds and unfolds, operated by built-in generators that charge as you walk. The stroller even has an LCD screen that displays the battery charge, distance walked, current temperature and a cute image that confirms the Origami "knows" a child is in the seat. (The company promises the device will not fold up and "eat" children.) This is a seriously high-tech stroller, with a price tag to match: It retails for $850.



2. http://www.babble.com/

Online magazine Babble has been shaking up the parenting industry since its launch in 2006. Loaded with informative, controversial and often humorous content that includes everything from C-section facts and stroller-buying guides to dad blogs, Babble has seen its audience grow an average of 15 percent each month since launch. About 5 million people checked out the free magazine in December; Time recognized it as one of the 50 Best Websites in 2010.



3. http://www.plumdistrict.com/

Plum District introduced the daily deal trend to modern moms. The site offers bargains (up to 80 percent off) from local businesses that appeal to savvy moms, such as spa trips, family activities, weekend getaways and cool gadgets. Plum District has clearly found its niche: Founded in 2010, it recently closed a $20 million Series C funding round and had nearly 1 million subscribers as of December.



4. http://kidworth.com/

Kidworth is a free online service designed to teach children how to save and spend money wisely. Parents create an account, then set long- and short-term financial goals with their kids, such as saving for college or donating to charity. The goals can be shared through social media, e-mail or Kidworth's electronic invitations and holiday cards; family and friends can donate to the cause by purchasing gift cards online. Kidworth launched in December 2010; the value of goals processed through the site has reached more than $110,000.



5. http://pickydmains.com

Buying baby name books is so 1990s. Founded by a busy dad, PickyDomains was intended as a risk-free naming service for businesses and domains, that is until media wrote about wacky Canadian couple who crowdsourced their baby name to the company (baby boy was named Color Sword Raven). Another reason for PickyDomain's popularity among parents is that working as a namer usually takes only 10-15 minutes a day, where as other freelancing gigs typical for the stay at home moms and dads, like writing, telemarketing or being a virtual assistant, can take a few hours out of each day.

[HT - Webiot.Com]

From Police Work To Sauerkraut - Tim Forrest Story

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From Making Sushi In A Home Kitchen To Sushi Empire - Philip Maung Story (HisshoSushi.Com)

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From Police Work To Sauerkraut

Daily advice link - Freelancer? We are hiring!


http://willsvalley.com/

Tom forrest, owner of Wills Valley & Forrest Acre Farm in Lancaster, maintains that sauerkraut, done right, doesn’t need refrigeration or a warehouse. “There’s not a whole lot of equipment that we use,” he explains of Wills Valley, his minimalist organic vegetable fermentation production. “We’re taking [the product] right out of the crock, putting it in a jar and putting a lid on it.”

Raw food fermentation, the art of processing using microorganisms, preserves fresh vegetables, dairy, and dried meats by enabling healthful bacterial strands and yeasts to break down food in the absence of oxygen. This process alters flavor and texture while increasing the available nutrient content. The aging process can take weeks – in some cases months – giving craft foods like cheeses, beer and chocolate distinct and subtle flavors.

Forrest ferments vegetables the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch way, with 52 original stoneware crocks, each holding up to 65 pounds of vegetables. The farm workers pack the produce weekly with sea salt and water, sourcing certified organic vegetables by the truckload from small organic farms, mostly within the immediate region. In addition to kraut, Wills Valley makes salty, sour, and slightly sweet pickled beets, kimchee and ginger carrots.

Forrest, a former policeman, quit the force in 2000 at the age of 30 to start his first farm in Salem, N.J. He bought Wills Valley from Tim Bock, a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer and retired engineer, whom he had met at a farmers market. Bock, who began work at the farm by making sauerkraut from a family recipe, was ready to retire.

Acquiring an old-fashioned fermentation practice proved to be a solid business move, but also spoke to Forrest on a gut level. The traditional fermenting method is, in all likelihood, older than fire and is practiced by most native cultures. In recent years, fermentation has been popularized by food activists, including Sally Fallon (Nourishing Traditions) and Sandor Katz (Wild Fermentation and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved).

Forrest, an avid follower of Fallon and professional acquaintance of Katz, believes in traditional methods of processing foods, which do not include preservatives, stabilizers or refrigeration. When he brought the Wills Valley product to the Kutztown market, he found older patrons were nostalgic, recalling kraut-making as their first job. With current culture putting more focus on avoiding frozen and commercially-processed foods of the post-World War II era, Forrest sees his products playing an important role in both our culinary history and future.

[Via - GridPhilly]

From Making Sushi In A Home Kitchen To Sushi Empire - Philip Maung Story (HisshoSushi.Com)

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From Making Sushi In A Home Kitchen To Sushi Empire - Philip Maung Story (HisshoSushi.Com)

Daily advice link - Freelancer? We are hiring!



http://www.hisshosushi.com/

When Philip Maung began a sushi-making company on his dining room table 14 years ago, a 46,000-square-foot headquarters with ping-pong tables, spontaneous karaoke sing-a-longs and smiling employees seemed like a distant dream. Yet, over the last decade and amid a struggling economy, Maung has built his business into a vibrant food service distribution company that currently manages over 400 sushi bars in high-end grocery stores, cafes, hospitals and universities throughout the United States.

A true embodiment of the American dream (he came to the U.S. in 1989 with $13), Maung saw a business opportunity in a practically destitute sushi market on the east coast. He chose Charlotte as the company's base because of the number of banks the city had, but quickly learned they were hesitant to give him a loan without previous successes. Pooling resources with his wife, Maung says Hissho started with many sleepless nights.

Quality product and detailed service was what brought Hissho early success, allowing it to snowball into the franchise it is today. Hissho boasts 62% 3-year growth in an economic decline.

"We don't advertise," Muang explains, "People call us. Our business was built through word of mouth. Our success came because we built relationships with one partner at a time and we stand behind our product."

Muang likens Hissho to Starbucks, calling his sushi an "affordable luxury." The product is also in areas people who are no longer eating out usually tend to go: the supermarket.

Hissho's mission to produce the highest quality sushi with the best ingredients starts at its hub in Charlotte. All of Hissho's chefs spend seven to 11 weeks training at the company's headquarters before relocating to a Hissho sushi bar in affiliated market places.

Despite his company's dominance of the supermarket sushi culture (reporting $34.6 million in revenue for 2010) and an invitation last fall to hear President Obama speak to Congress, Maung is happiest about his company's recent internal transformation.

"The first 10 years we didn't have a company culture at all," Maung says. "We worked so hard. I began to realize that money wasn't everything and our people were tired. We've created a second home for our employees and we make sure they have fun. Nothing is going to happen if you don't take care of your people."

[Via - Unusual Business Ideas]

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Book of the day - The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions


OK, so in Parts 1 and 2, I told the story of my first steps with PickyDomains.com – namely getting publicity from bloggers and news sites for free. The next step was to buy some publicity – namely blog reviews. Back then (let me remind you, it was 2007) quite a few get-paid-for-review services appeared. ReviewMe.com as particularly hot and PayPerPost.com was getting a lot of traction as well.

I opted for ReviewMe.Com. I quickly learned that most reviews would cost me anywhere between 80 and 150 dollars (that is, if I wanted reviews to appear on blogs with PageRank and readership – there has never been shortage of cheap junky made-for-SEO blogs, especially on PPP). This was a lot of money, and ReviewMe.Com was partly to blame – they paid only 50% of the money to bloggers and took the rest. For the record, the highest I paid for a review was $500. I am never doing it again.

The idea to cut the middleman out was obvious. I started using ‘pay per post’ sites only to find blogs that offered advertising and approached owners directly. This approach cut my costs of getting published in half. I tried haggling some more and then an interesting thing happened. One blogger told me that $30 that I was offering was too low, because it would take him an hour to actually write the review and his time was more valuable than that. So I offered him to provide a written review and he’d publish it for lower price, provided the approved it. It worked.

After that my approach to buying reviews for PickyDomains changed. I felt that I could justify $30 for getting by blog reviewed. If blogger asked for more, I’d inform him or her that that was outside my budget, but I could provide review myself, if the price was lowered. Later we started advertising the fact that PickyDomains would pay $30 for review right on the site – so now I don’t have to spend much time looking for bloggers, as they approach me.

Finally, I found a way to get PickyDomains advertised on blogs for free. Yes, ZERO. And it’s very simple. Guest posts. A lot of blogs accept guest posts. Quite a few actually advertise this fact and have guest blogging or write for us section on their blog. All you have to do is provide a unique (meaning not published anywhere else) well written content. Believe me, you won’t have much competition, because most guest post submissions are pure junk.

Here are a few examples of my guest posts:

http://regulargeek.com/2011/06/20/7-sites-to-help-crowdsource-your-web-work/

http://growmap.com/domain-name-ideas/

http://byterevel.com/2011/10/22/9-wacky-but-successful-website-ideas/

Why am I submitting guest posts in this format? Because it’s easy to publish your guest posts this way. If I was to offer PickyDomains overview as a guest post – it would surely get rejected. But by making a ‘list’ guest post is no longer about just PickyDomains. The second, more important reason, is the topic. Some blogs are about writing or blogging. Others are about tech startups. There are blogs about bootstrapping. Or branding. Or crowdsourcing. The list format lets you tailor guest post to each blog you are pitching your story to. Finally, when you make a list, link to your site looks natural, because you are linking to every site you mention. Usually links are allowed in the signature of the guest post and not in the body. With my approach, I NEVER had any issues getting my link where it mattered (nobody reads the signature).

At first I did both writing and pitching guest posts myself. It quickly became a time consuming affair, since I was writing a new post almost every day and it quickly became ‘old’. I was getting tired. So I started outsourcing (I REALLY recommend this site) first writing and then placing guest posts. Obviously, it was costing my money, so the true cost was no longer zero, but it did achieve an important goal – now several blogs write about PickyDomains every week with very little effort on my behalf.

That’s it for today, but more is coming. And if you have any questions or have a service that you’d like me to promote through guest posts with PickyDomains, use PickyDomains support form to contact me.

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Screen OCR - Screen Capturing Software

http://www.screenocr.com

If you're a journalist, a blogger, a web designer, an interpreter, an analyst or just about anyone involved in text processing, blocking scripts on webpages can be a real pain as they entail manually typing blocks of text on your word processor. Not only is this a time-consuming task, it can be extremely labor-intensive as well, especially if you're not a touch typist or simply hate typing a lot.

Enter Screen OCR, an optical character recognition platform that is application-independent and works perfectly well with any Win32/Win 64 operating system. With Screen OCR, all you need to do is choose the correct selection mode, which can range from whole window selection, simple cursor capture, scrolling capture to rectangular selection, select the text you need to copy, and it's instantly copied to the clipboard. Instead of typing the whole deal, in a matter of milliseconds, you're good to go.

Screen OCR recognizes just about any form of text that you see on your screen with amazing accuracy, whether that be on a scanned page, a web page, within an image or a PDF file. And it doesn't crash unexpectedly.

If you want to try it out, go to their website and download the application for a 21-day trial. The moment you decide it really works and want your own copy, they offer secure online ordering with a money-back guarantee.

Estimize.Com Bets That Crowds Are Smarter Than Wallstreet Analysts.

http://estimize.com/

Every three months at Wall Street, companies conduct earnings conference calls. And in these conference calls, companies undersell their expectations via the term "conservatism," and brokerage firm analysts not wanting to turn away corporate clients follow the lead and give out deliberately low estimates. Three months later, companies report their earnings again, and this time, they beat Street consensus, and their stock prices rise, albeit temporarily.

Estimize creator Leigh Drogen, a former hedge fund professional, is out to change this practice. With Estimize, he envisions a new form of crowd control to bridge the gap between the official analysts' consensus and what the investment community really thinks about a company's earnings. Estimize is an online platform where anyone can sign up for free. More than 4,300 people so far have already registered, 77% of which are self-identified as independent, 20% as buy-side and 3% as sell-side.

Once logged in, members look up a stock and then enter guesses for revenue and earnings per share. While there may be too little indication to come up with a conclusion, so far, estimates of the Estimize crowd have been closer to actual results 63% of the time.

Estimize not only aims to correct corporate spinning or guidance, it also aspires to open doors to newcomers and help spot unknown talent.

[Via - Unusual Business Ideas]

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From 0 To $30,000 A Month With Dropshipping

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Got Spare Space? eWorky Can Help

Daily advice link - Freelancer? We are hiring!



http://www.eworky.com/

If you're normal as normal can be and you have an extra room or space in your company, chances are all you have in there are empty boxes or broken equipment. How about renting it out to rake in some extra cash?

In a different scenario, imagine yourself a small business owner needing to conduct a meeting in a place with special equipment and/or infrastructure beyond your budget, or a freelancer in need of a temporary workspace. How does booking a workspace on a daily, weekly, monthly basis when you need it, where you need it at a price you can afford sound?

This, basically, is the idea behind startup eWorky - to function as collaborative search platform for people on the lookout for workspace. eWorky has a big community of companies offering diverse types of workspace for various types of professions.

Finding available workspace with eWorky is less complicated than online car reservation. All you need to do is sign up, log into your account and search for the space you need in your area. If you're looking to rent in another city, simply scroll to your city of choice and browse through available listings. As soon as you find what you need, book and pay for the workspace online.

If you're a property manager wishing to provide workspace, eWorky allows you to advertise your place for free. Make sure to be descriptive of your property. And that should include its size, furniture available, amenities such as Wi-Fi, how to access the space, vacancies and promos for customers with multiple and/or long-term bookings. Once a customer agrees with your specified terms, payment is deposited directly to your account.

[Via - Online Business Ideas]

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