Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i Entrepreneur Magazine

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” —Albert Einstein Every year we do this list—this fantastically unscientific list, in which we acknowledge 100 brilliant ideas, companies and the founders behind them. This list represents everything that is great and meaningful in entrepreneurship and living in a country that celebrates and cheers for disruption. (Gotta love an election cycle.) It’s sort of our kiss on the cheek and nod to innovation. Honestly, it’s my favorite issue of the year because it captures the spirit of what we entrepreneurs stand for: boldness, creativity and collaboration. It’s our essence, and more important, it’s your essence. And in the spirit of disruption, this year we made a point of doing away with the traditional, quantifiable markers of brilliance—revenue numbers,…

MIX IT UP. Brooklyn, N.Y.–based Gimlet Media makes popular podcasts such as Startup and Reply All—but early this year, all work froze for a week. Its 45 employees were scrambled into groups and given two days to dream up a new show and produce its first episode. “It was an unreasonably difficult exercise,” says cofounder and president Matt Lieber, but the real goal was to shift comfort zones and encourage risk taking. If the exercise spawns new shows, that’s a bonus. MAKE IT UP. Louis Addeo is CEO of the SoCal gift shop San Diego Trading Co. He wanted his 65 employees to become engaged at work. So he hired the comedy troupe Finest City Improv, which led the team through some unconventional communication exercises. Improv’s first rule: Say yes…

Q How can I start an effective mentorship program at my company? A As the longtime director of the Small Business Development Center at Kilgore College in Kilgore, Tex., Brad Bunt has watched plenty of entrepreneurs put mentorship programs to work—with varying degrees of success. His three steps for getting it right: 1. Identify your goals. What, exactly, do you aim to achieve through mentor-ship? “It generally comes down to retaining employees, improving employee satisfaction or increasing sales and productivity,” Bunt says. 2. Be a careful matchmaker. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s not as simple as asking supervisors to mentor their subordinates. Figure out how prospective mentees learn, Bunt says, then find the right mentors for their learning styles. 3. Keep a close watch. Set a timetable…

1. SHYP THE POST OFFICE THAT COMES TO YOU “I used to be a power seller on eBay, and the biggest point of friction was the shipping,” says Kevin Gibbon, founder and CEO of San Francisco–based Shyp, which aims to ease how packages are sent in the mail. He traces one package’s dual paths: WITHOUT SHYP 11 A.M. You decide to send cousin Johnny your old hoverboard. You hunt for a box, contemplate the efficacy of newspaper as padding. 11:30 A.M. FedEx is closer, but isn’t the postal service cheaper? You search for shipping and fall down an internet rabbit hole. 11:45 A.M. You rouse yourself from your search stupor and settle on the post office. 12:05 P.M. You enter the post office. Fourth in line. 12:20 P.M. You debate…

1. DANISH VENTURES THE PRIZE FOR US ALL Every other year, the Danish nonprofit Index gives away about $550,000 in prize money. The winners: people who have designed solutions to life-altering problems like health and hunger. But the organizers got to thinking: Could they accomplish more? “What could we do with this volume of design solutions—and the budding design entrepreneurs looking to build?” says Liza Chong, the nonprofit’s director of strategy and development. “Could we work with them and scale them and help them grow?” Their answer: Yes, they could. Now they’re doing it with Danish Ventures, a fund that aims to raise $45 million in coming months, and that will invest $750,000 to $2.25 million into worthy projects. It will start by considering Index nominees, but with an eye…

1. THINX THE TAMPON REPLACER Don’t tell Miki Agrawal that Thinx, her line of underwear designed to let women menstruate freely without tampons or pads, might not be for everybody. Agrawal fiercely believes—to quote Thinx’s tagline—that these panties are “for women with periods.” Meaning: all of them. “Girls are sick of wearing tampons,” Agrawal says. “As a woman, how many pairs of our underwear have we all ruined from monthly accidents?” She might be right: Since a big market push last spring, she says she’s sold “tens of thousands” of pairs of Thinx, which look like normal underwear. According to Agrawal (and a few enterprising bloggers), they feel like regular underwear, too. But unlike your daily underpants, these are antimicrobial, moisture-wicking, liquid-absorbing garments that took three and a half years…

First launch: One phone is never loud enough to fill a room. AmpMe’s solution: Its app syncs an unlimited number of devices, so they act like one big speaker. But when it debuted last fall, users had to enter a four- digit “party code” to sync each device—and they just wouldn’t. “We found that most people tried anything they could to skip this step,” says AmpMe CEO Martin-Luc Archambault. “We ended up losing 50 percent of the people in the friction.” Major update: After some 1.5 million downloads, AmpMe’s designers reworked how devices find each other. Now it happens automatically—all a user needs to do is have the app open. Devices don’t even have to be online, because the app creates an ad hoc hotspot that links them. This taught…

I GET IT: You want to build a consumer product that will wow your friends, and that maybe even your mom will use. You want to join the herd of unicorns roaming the venture-backed pastures of Silicon Valley. But thanks to some painful and costly lessons, I’ve learned to mostly pass on business-to-consumer companies—or B2C, as we call them. These days, my colleagues and I are more excited to hear about startups building often boring solutions for other companies—and that means you should be excited to create these business-to-business (B2B) companies. Here’s why. Downside of B2C It may be easy to find and acquire customers and users, but they’re fickle and will drop your product for the next shiny thing. Why was your great idea so popular? Because the internet,…

“IF YOU WATCH CROSSFIT GAMES, THE PEOPLE WHO FINISH FIRST TURN AROUND AND CHEER FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE FINISHING NEXT.” MARCUS WILSON AND Michael Schaeffer had big careers in the athletic shoe business: Schaeffer was Reebok’s global creative director, and Wilson was its head of brand strategy. But two years ago, they jumped to the opposite end of the market: They became the little guys, launching a shoe startup called NoBull that caters to CrossFitters. They now sponsor four CrossFit celebrities and have 11 shoe styles for sale, and have learned a lot about the benefits of being small. Embrace simplicity: “At big companies, there are a lot of layers and lots of input, and you end up with very complex products,” says Schaeffer. NoBull has no time for that.…

TEN YEARS AGO, Chris Dingman launched his company on the flimsiest of grounds. It’s called The Dingman Group, and it relocates professional athletes—so, say, if a guy is traded from the Miami Heat to the Cleveland Cavaliers, The Dingman Group would arrange to sell the house in Miami, pack it up, move the stuff and find a new home in Cleveland. It’s a clever, one-of-a-kind service, but there was a hitch: The “Group” was just Dingman, and he had no experience in real estate or professional sports. Also, he was damn near broke—and it took him almost a year and a half to find his first client. “It was gnarly,” he says. “No matter how much you’re struggling as an entrepreneur, you have to put a face on.” His fortunes…

ADRIAN GAUT Gaut may have gotten his start as a painter, but it’s as a photographer that he’s found his calling. The Portland, Ore., native, who photographed our cover, has had his work featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair. STEPHANIE SCHOMER Schomer has worked at Fast Company, Architectural Digest and Entertainment Weekly. In overseeing our “Brilliant 100,” she got hooked on more on-demand and finance services than she ever knew was possible.…

I’m a woman in a male-dominated industry. When I was an employee, I could roll as one of the guys. Now I own a company, and an unpleasant bro culture has emerged here. I can’t hang with the guys (I’m the boss, after all), but I also can’t seem to influence their behavior. What do I do? AYOU’VE SPENT more time being “one of the guys” than being at the top, so here’s a helpful reminder, in case you’re feeling wistful: When you’re one of the guys, you’re fitting in—which is the opposite of being a strong leader. As CEO, you can’t have a sense of belonging. You need to flip that on its head and create a place others want to belong to. Every leader makes mistakes, and it…

1. AKILI INTERACTIVE THE GAMERS WITH A CAUSE Could a doctor treating ADHD or Alzheimer’s one day prescribe a video game? Eddie Martucci and Matthew Omernick think so—and the cofounders of Boston-based Akili Interactive Labs recently raised more than $30 million from pharma companies, government grants and investors who agree. The team’s tablet-based game, EVO, guides players (er, patients) through a series of foreign worlds, where they collect stars and gems and interact with aliens. What seems like superficial play at first is actually carefully designed to improve attention, inhibition and working memory in kids with ADHD. Where are you in the long slog to get FDA approval? Martucci: The past four years have been about making this new kind of medicine a reality, and now we’re staring down the…

1. LOOKLIVE THE ENTERTAINMENT SHOP Dying for that bag Kerry Washington was toting on last week’s Scandal? Need the sweatshirt you saw Kanye wearing on Instagram? LookLive has you covered. The Amsterdam-based startup spent two years developing tech that identifies exact items of clothing worn by your favorite characters and stars. CEO Christopher Archer explains how they did it. Companies have been promising shoppable TV for years. What’s been the holdup? The technical integration is easy peasy, but the challenge is the metadata, and how you get it. If I’m watching The Voice, how do I know what jacket Pharrell is wearing? The broadcaster and network don’t know—they’ll tell you to call the costume designer. It’s just impossible to do this at scale. When we started, we said that if…

1. STORMSENSOR THE WATER DETECTIVES Storm-water runoff is the leading cause of water contamination in urban areas, but tracking it has been a clunky, pen-and-paper process. Erin Rothman and Anya Stettler built a better way: Their platform tracks water quality in real time with waterproof hardware and cloud-based software. “We want to help cities spot and fix problems before they get out of hand,” Rothman says. Prior to getting funding from the 9Mile Labs accelerator in Seattle, the duo designed and built the Stormsensor prototype for $2,000. Here, their secrets to seriously bootstrapping a business. Embrace the cold call. Rothman has an environmental background; Stettler’s is software. They knew they needed electrical expertise, so “I googled ‘electrical engineer University of Washington water,’” Rothman says with a laugh. “I asked one…

THERE IS A TIME-TESTED chair that may be as close to perfect as possible. The problem: It’s bolted into a car. “The automobile seat is designed to be comfortable for long-term sitting,” says Ken Okuyama, a Japanese product designer known for his work for Porsche, Ferrari and Maserati. Now Okuyama is giving his treatment to office workers: His Vaya office chair (starting at $6,000) is supportive and infinitely adjustable, right down to the headrest. This is no mere vanity throne: Research shows that your posture can impact your body’s physiological state. “When you slouch, it changes a lot about how your body runs,” says Erik Peper, a professor of holistic health at San Francisco State University. “Even your mood can be more dominated by helpless and hopeless thoughts.” But when…

ANGELA MADER’S BUSINESS, Fitlosophy, began in 2008, when she started printing fitness and nutrition journals for men and women. Over the years, as sales grew steadily, she expanded into food scales and more journals, among other products. But one number scared her: Fifty-six percent of her online sales were coming from mobile, and yet her website was ancient and unreliable. “Without a mobile-friendly website,” she says, “we were seeing a lot of lost sales.” Still, she had only a staff of five and annual revenues over $1 million. Could she afford a slick solution? The Fix Mader talked to a lot of web-savvy colleagues, and many of them suggested a service called Shopify. It’s a simple e-commerce platform that companies can use to build their own online stores. She loved…

IF YOU’RE LIKE pretty much every business owner I’ve ever met, you can’t stomach the idea of abandoning your business. But if an accident or illness knocks you off your feet, and you’re not prepared for it, you can go from six-figure monthly revenues to squat overnight. And yet, you’ll still need to pay your mortgage, business vendors and payroll. Can you do it? If you don’t have a backup plan, turn the page—you’ll find the three financial steps you should take today to protect you tomorrow. STEP #1 Secure access to cash. For years, financial advisers have recommended that everyone stash enough cash to cover at least six months of personal and business operating expenses for emergencies. Yeah, right. To most people, that’s an obscene amount of money to…

IN RECENT MONTHS, community leaders from New York, Baltimore, Detroit and Washington, D.C., have come to Oakland, Calif., to ask: How can we launch something like the local-business-building program ICA Fund Good Jobs? The program helps new companies create jobs in underserved communities, and does so in many ways—with workshops, an invite-only accelerator, venture funding of $250,000 to $1 million and relationships with community banks and local organizations that pitch in as well. Since launching in 2013, Fund Good Jobs has invested more than $2 million in five startups, unlocked $6 million more in outside capital and created more than 100 local jobs. Here’s how one of those businesses grew, using the right tools at the right times. 2011 Oakland-based Keba Konte is accepted into an ICA 10-week business class.…

There are many subscription-delivery success stories, like BarkBox (a monthly shipment of dog treats) and BirchBox (for makeup samples). Dallas couple Blake and Taylor Davis tried to follow with The Jerky Box, promising handcrafted beef jerky from three vendors each month. Eight months later, it was dead. Time to debrief. So, what went wrong? Blake Davis The business relied heavily on the jerky companies—seeking them out, explaining why it was smart to sell us x amount of their jerky at wholesale. There were not enough craft jerky companies to make it work. Taylor Davis We had a couple months where we had to send three bags of jerky from the same company to our subscribers. We could’ve gotten 10,000 subscribers, but without having enough jerky companies to consistently supply us,…

iLoveKickboxing.com Fitness Pillar to Post Home Inspection Cruise Planners Travel Pirtek Hydraulic Hose Services Dwyer Group Home Services Pinot’s Palette Paint-and-Sip Studios Anytime Fitness Fitness AAMCO Transmission Repair Stratus Building Solutions Commercial Cleaning The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Coffee and Tea Kumon North America Tutoring TapOut Fitness Fitness Express Services, Inc. Employment Staffing…

Tapout is the official fitness and training partner of WWE. Throughout its history, Tapout has been fueled by hard-body fitness at its core. By aligning with world-class athletes, Tapout quickly became synonymous with dedication, hard work and passion. With its roots in martial arts, Tapout has evolved to focus on training and fitness for athletes of all disciplines. Tapout remains committed to the essence of discipline, determination and motivation-and today, inspires the athlete in every individual. In partnership with WWE, Tapout Fitness is set to improve the fitness industry in its entirety by creating greater member value and loyalty, which has created a better franchise model. Our partnership with WWE allows us to have greater brand equity than any other fitness franchise company, as well as, provides us the marketing…

THE REVAMPED MENU ADDED MORE “POWER FOOD” INGREDIENTS, SUCH AS QUINOA AND KALE. THE FIRST SALADWORKS opened in 1986 in Cherry Hill, N.J.—a whole year before McDonald’s added salads to its menu. “We were selling salads before salads were cool,” says Saladworks’ new president and CEO, Patrick Sugrue. And it quickly got attention, separating itself from the sea of burgers, pizza and tacos that dominated the quick–service landscape. But now, 30 years later, the landscape has changed again—and drastically. It seems that every fast-food concept, even Dairy Queen, offers a salad. Against this competition, Saladworks, now with roughly 100 locations, seemed in danger of becoming as boring as lettuce. Plus, the company was shaken by a years-long dispute between founder John Scardapane and investor Vernon Hill; it was resolved last…

FOR YEARS, I resisted the exclamation point. In emails, I typed “Hi”; not “Hi!” “8:30”; not “8:30!” And “Disregard previous email. I found a large binder clip”; not “Disregard previous email!! I found a large binder clip!!!!!!” As Kanye West and Donald Trump indiscriminately employed the exclamation point in tweets, as Panic! At the Disco enjoyed modest success in the mid-’00s, as even my least enthusiastic coworkers expressed enthusiasm over email, I remained stoic in the face of the exclamation point’s rise. And then one morning, not all that long ago, I gave in. I typed “Thanks!” And reader, I am here to tell you that it felt fantastic. Nay, fantastic! The resistance, the stubborn reluctance to emote, the grumpiness—it all fell away. In one two-step stroke, my message was…

Garamond: venerable, academic, sturdy, understated, timeless, refined Helvetica: neutral, transparent, serious but approachable, universal Bodoni: dignified, crisp, elegant, structured, grounded but not stodgy Gotham: no-nonsense, geometric, engineered, confident, nostalgic The wrong typeface can give the wrong idea about your business, so pick wisely. “Create a list of keywords that represent what you’re trying to convey,” says typeface designer Rod Cavazos, of San Francisco–based PSY/ OPS. Then do the same for many fonts. Which match up? Here, he riffs on four popular fonts.…

AFTER A LONG and snowy winter, Finnish birch trees are bursting with water. The British startup Tapped saw, well, an untapped market there: It could draw liquid from the trees, much the way Vermonters do with maples, and sell it as a new kind of water from a natural source. To help tell the story, Tapped tapped the London-based design consultancy Horse. “We don’t only consider the label and graphics,” says Sarah Pidgeon, a Horse cofounder. “Moving away from a plastic bottle helped communicate the product better and differentiate it from mineral water.” The tall font was designed to be easily read on the front of a narrow package. It also plays off Norse iconography, but without being distracting. “They wanted to nod to the heritage and history of their…

1. TOPTAL THE TALENT SCOUTS When firms like Google, Ideo, Airbnb and even Pfizer need a freelance Java expert or UX designer—and they need it, like, yesterday—they call Toptal. The $80 million company has developed a rigorous, four-part screening process: “We get thousands of applicants every month,” says cofounder and CEO Taso du Val, “and we take the top 3 percent.” Here’s how Toptal vets its freelancers. Hurdle One: Soft-Skills Screening “We have to screen for adulthood,” says cofounder and COO Breanden Beneschott. “You need to be able to work across the world and still get stuff done. So, do you have a certain energy level? Are you disciplined? If you’re one minute late to the call—literally 60 seconds late—it’s an automatic fail.” 26.4 percent of original applicants make it…

1. UNPLUG THE "AHH" FOR YOUR "OMM" “I opened Unplug for selfish reasons,” says Suze Yalof Schwartz of her modern meditation studio in Los Angeles. In 2012, she was stressed—a mother of three shuttling for work between New York City and L.A. She was curious about meditation, but classes required weeks of commitment. What she really wanted was “a quick fix of calm”—so she built it. Now in its third year, Unplug has amassed a cult following, and Schwartz “has a folder of a thousand people who want to franchise it.” Here’s how she did it: Step 1: Study the status quo. Schwartz took Deepak Chopra’s class, visited Buddhist temples and enrolled in a Vedic meditation class “in some guy’s apartment for four days.” Aside from peace of mind, she…

GOT AN OPERATIONAL PROBLEM? Big Data will solve it! Marketing ills? Ask Big Data! Those two words have become a catchall—but data-crunching services tend to chase after enterprise-level businesses, making them out of reach for most small businesses. (Google Analytics Premium, for example, starts at $150,000 a year.) Don’t worry: Martineau says that with a strategic approach to Big Data, anyone can afford it. —Mikal E. Belicove So, where do I start? Identify your single biggest opportunity for improvement. Then within that category, focus on tracking and improving one key metric—something where experimenting with a little time and money can move the needle. The three I recommend: How much traffic and leads did I generate this month? What percentage of leads converted into customers? What percentage of my customers are…

We make an iPad-based visitor log, so that people who arrive at an office can sign in easily. More than 2,000 companies use it, and many buy the dedicated iPad directly from us—and so, in turn, we make sure we’re buying all those iPads with our company credit card. With the mileage points we get, we’ve been able to book 10 international, $5,000 first-class flights to see clients in places such as the Persian Gulf since last year.…

Bonus advice:  Don’t skimp on firm your ! CPA BUSINESS OWNERS ask me this question all the time, and with good reason. Outside audits are intense examinations of your company’s financial systems and controls, including sample testing and outside verification of many transactions on your ledgers. An outside auditor’s opinion will include assurance that your financial statements are in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and that your business is viable and sustainable. They can cost tens of thousands of dollars and suck up an accounting department’s time for weeks at a stretch. Here’s when you’ll need one: THREE CONSECUTIVE YEARS. If you’re courting investment or a buyout from major corporations and private equity firms, they’ll want to review three years’ worth of audited financial statements before they commit.…

THE CHALLENGE: Suman Kanuganti and Yuja Chang knew zero VCs but needed funding for their startup, Aira. It creates internet-connected, camera-equipped glasses for the blind; if a person wearing them needs help navigating somewhere, an on-call sighted person can watch the camera feed and verbally direct the blind person. THE SOLUTION: Rather than beg for meetings, the cofounders became active in the blind community, where they hoped to find support. At a fund-raiser for the Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB) in 2014, they chatted up the evening’s speaker, Lux Capital partner Larry Bock. He’d lost most of his vision to macular degeneration. “I was so in awe of the low-profile, inconspicuous but extremely powerful nature of the technology,” he says. Soon he provided seed capital and joined as Aira’s executive chairman.…

AT AGE 15, MOLLY MARTIN took a part-time job at a mobile-phone store in Greenville, Mich. She was a natural and quickly worked her way from intern to sales associate, then sales manager and, eventually, at the age of 21, division manager. By the time she was 22, she decided to go into business for herself. “I started looking at different franchises in the mobile space and eventually signed on with Wireless Zone,” says Martin, who took ownership at 23. “This industry is growing more into a tech industry—there’s so many ways to expand.” Now 26, she has opened two successful units, in Fremont and Whitehall, north of Grand Rapids. Why did Wireless Zone take a chance on a 23-year-old you? I’d been in the industry so long that I…

“The biggest food trend is safety. We’ve started testing for GMOs and chemicals. Our wheat isn’t organic, but we test for chemicals as if it is. It’s important that our ingredients meet high standards.” —Mike Ferretti, CEO, Great Harvest WHEN MOST PEOPLE HEAR THE word franchise, their first thought is food. It’s a natural reaction, considering how many high-profile franchise concepts are food-related. In fact, our FRANCHISE 500 LIST this year contained 119 food franchises, representing more than 200,000 individual places to grab a bite, from vending machines and carts to drive-thrus and sit-down diners. This month, we look at the top food franchises—a list full of trends, such as spicy flavors (people love their Buffalo wings), wacky food mash-ups (bacon on everything) and over-the-top treats (ice cream with gummy…

Most of us are too concerned with the idea of perfection. Perfection is the death of creativity. It lacks spontaneity and assumes certainty—closed tight in its search for one “right” answer. But life is not math. The pursuit of perfection stops you from starting projects or even relationships. And it stops you from finishing or shipping projects because they are not ready or perfect. “I’ll be ready when I’m perfect!” is not our mantra. The weather, the economy, the atmosphere will never be perfect. Your timing will never be right and you will always be a little wrong. Feck perfuction. You know what’s better than perfect? Done. Done is better than perfect. James Victore is a designer for bold believers, an advocate for creativity and an artist whose work has…