Chris Crompton

I wrote about dry testing a while back… but I’ve been thinking that even that method might take too long. At the foundation, all you really need to test the market viability of your new product/service is an ad itself. If you’ve created much more than that, you’ve probably wasted too much time. (more…)

In the very little promotion I did for LaunchCap (basically just this blog and my Facebook friends), it wasn’t taking off.  Not to worry, the whole premise behind LaunchCap was to gauge market interest before building your product.  I hadn’t invested too much time.

Last week someone emailed me this feedback, which significantly altered my direction: (more…)

There’s a platform I’ve been thinking would be great for testing business ideas — but it doesn’t yet exist.

You can help change that.

Check out the prototype I just set up — LaunchCap!

I have 5-6 things on my list to promote this new venture… the first was publishing this blog post.  I need to get some momentum going, so I’ve made 5 of the “Early Mover” $10 offer slots available.  Take a look at the offer and let me know if there’s anything that needs changing (besides the cheesy video .

Thanks!

A while back I learned about a new bakery in New York City:  Butch Bakery.  Basically it is cupcakes for men.  They have flavors such as “Beer Run” and “Jackhammer”.  This reminded me of how Hardee’s revitalized itself a few years ago by positioning itself as fast food for adults with their 1,400 calorie Thick Burger.

The whole “we don’t care how bad it is for you; our food is a novelty” attitude is endearing.

There’s one industry that could really use a player with this attitude: pizza delivery.  The name of this business will be Mean Pizza.

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Alright, this business idea is actually a patentable invention. How much toilet paper do you use as a handle versus how much you use to clean up on each wipe?

The business end of the toilet paper can’t be more than 10% for most wipes. The rest is a disposable paper handle that stay clean the entire time.

What if there was a reusable toilet paper handle that would enable you to use 80% less toilet paper per year? Would you buy it?

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Do you know what CEO’s of small and medium sized businesses have in common? Besides the title, they almost all use Google Alerts to monitor their name and their company’s name. They love learning about new sites on the web that mention them. They are mini celebrities in their world.

(In case you’re unaware, people can put a search term into Google Alerts and have Google send them an email whenever any new pages show up on the web matching those search terms.)

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There’s a lot pages on a website that aren’t meant for public consumption.  Maybe it is a page for internal stats, or maybe a file download page they only want you to get to through a special link.

There are many ways to secure a page on the Internet, but the lowest level of security is referred to “security through obscurity”.  Oftentimes website owners don’t want to go through the trouble of putting actual security on a page (such as through password-protection), so they rely on the fact that their page will be hidden among the billions of webpages on the Internet.

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I had my first “fly-there-and-back-in-the-same-day” business trip last February.  (I spoke on Google AdWords at a seminar in Atlanta.)  The hotel hosting the seminar was a 30-40 minute drive from the airport.

A few days before the trip I searched Google for “airport transportation in atlanta” or something to that effect.  One of the ads caught my eye, so I booked the reservation right there.  I had heard that luxury cars are often cheaper than a taxi from the airport, so that’s what I reserved.  Turns out it was cheaper.

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Logo created by a designer on ScriptLance for $50.

It was the fall of 2008.  I had just sold my web business a few months earlier for close to $300K (at least on paper…).  I decided to start a new business: StrongResume.  From idea to launch was about 3 weeks.  The business made over $1,000 in the first month — and this was monthly recurring revenue!

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