My slide deck from when I presented at The Movable Type Idea Exchange.

1. Tips for
improving your
business
By: Jack Kaufman

2. Who am I and why am I speaking
today?
● I created a book called The Found a Business
Book, which has 33 interviews with successful
entrepreneurs who founded or co-founded
companies like:
● I want to share some valuable advice from my
book and my experiences making the book that
I believe will help your business!

3. Important advice entrepreneurs
shared in my book
● Charge more for your products or services
● To effectively validate an idea for a product
you should use pre-orders
● Most companies don’t need VC and shouldn’
t raise VC
● That being said, if you do want to raise VC, it
is important that your product has traction
before you go pitch investors
● Customer service is extremely important
● The hardest part about business is starting

4. Charge more for your products or
services
● Most companies (especially software
companies) undercharge
● You should price your products or services
based on the value you provide
● Try doubling the prices of your products and
services
Rob Walling,
Founder of
Drip and
Owner of
HitTail
Jason
Cohen,
Founder of
WP Engine
and Smart
Bear
Software

5. Use pre-orders to effectively validate
your product ideas
● If you have an idea for a product, the most
effective way to validate it is to ask people to
pre-order
● For example, Nathan Barry:

6. Most companies don’t need VC and
shouldn’t raise VC
● Most software companies don’t need VC and
shouldn’t raise it
● Goals for software companies should
instead be profitability, sustainability, and
happiness for founding team

7. If you do want to raise VC, focus on
getting traction for your product
● Snapchat has raised $73 million dollars so
far and is an extremely fast-growing
consumer company
● You’ll have a much easier time raising
venture capital if your product has traction
and is growing quickly (users, revenue,
customers)
Evan Spiegel, Co-
founder and CEO of
Snapchat

8. Customer service is extremely
important
● Customer service is all about treating other
people as you would want to be treated, being
compassionate, and being empathetic
● A lot of companies do not do well when it comes
to customer service, which is actually a good
thing (it means that there’s a big opportunity to do
customer service really well and be known for it)
Amit Gupta,
Founder of
Photojojo

9. The hardest part about business is
starting
● Both Jack Dorsey and Tom Preston-Werner
said the hardest thing about business is
starting your project and being serious about
it

10. What I Personally Learned from
Making My Book
● Always be networking
● Products don’t sell themselves (you have to
actively market and sell them!)
● The best way to market and sell any product
or business is to have an audience

11. Always be networking
● No matter how wealthy or famous you are,
you should still always network!
● Networking leads to finding mentors, friends,
customers, and introductions that all could
help your business

12. Products don’t sell themselves
● Even if you have a valuable and outstanding
product, people won’t find it unless you talk
about it, promote it, and help people find it!
● You should put a similar amount of time and
effort into marketing your product as you put
into making your product

13. The Best Way to Market is to Have
an Audience
● Content marketing and building an audience
are extremely valuable
● Paid advertising = renting an audience (it’s
expensive and doesn’t last)
● Best way to build an audience is to write and
share valuable content for free, and then
encourage people to subscribe via email

14. The Best Way to Market is to Have
an Audience (continued)
● Focus less on getting people to like and
follow you on social media (Twitter followers,
Facebook fans)
● Focus more on getting people to subscribe
for email updates (the most valuable people
in an audience are your email subscribers)

15. Data about email
● Ryan Delk (@delk) works on business
development and growth at Gumroad
● Gumroad makes it extremely easy for creators
to sell products to their audiences
● In a presentation he gave at a conference called
Bacon Biz Conf in June, Ryan had some
extremely interesting data about conversion
rates across different marketing platforms
Ryan Delk, Works on Growth
and Business Development at
Gumroad

16. Data about email (continued)
The data that Ryan and the team at Gumroad
has from thousands of sellers:
● Traffic from Youtube converts at 2.2%
● Traffic from Twitter converts at 5.4%
● Traffic from Facebook converts at 6.3%
● Traffic from email converts at 9.4%
Conclusion: When it comes to building your
audience, focus more of your resources on
building an email list.

17. Examples of people who have had
success building audiences
● Ramit Sethi – I Will Teach You to Be Rich
● Lindsay Nixon – Happy Herbivore

18. More examples of people who have
had success building audiences
● Brennan Dunn – Founder of Planscope and
owner/creator of many successful products
● Pat Flynn – Owner of The Smart Passive
Income Blog

19. Some final thoughts
● Starting and growing a business is
challenging and takes a lot of work, but it is
also worth it
● Don’t be discouraged if things don’t go
exactly as planned – e.g. Before working on
The Found a Business Book (my first
modest success), I failed four times working
on different business projects

20. About me
Twitter: @kaufman_jack
Website for The Found a Business Book:
foundabusiness.com
Slides for this presentation available at:
http://is.gd/jackkaufmandeck