Design Your Meeting Fee Scheduling Products Delivered: Fill & Download for Free

Simple - get off your chair and go to your clients. Here is how:Step 1: Put on some neat, but comfortable shoes. Make sure you are presentable.Step 2: Go to malls, shopping centers or other buildings where small businesses are most prominent. Ignore large chain stores.Step 3: Walk around, and take note of their names. Google every small business and see if you can find their web site. If the web site is outdated, non-existent, ranks poorly on Google or is somehow dysfunctional, you know that you have a potential client.Step 4: Knock on their door, and say: “Hi, can you please give me the name of the manager responsible for your web site? I had a quick look at yours and I have some ideas I want to share.” Even if they outsourced the development and maintenance, you will more than likely get the name of a decision maker.Step 5: Ask for the person’s name that you spoke to, as well as an email address and telephone number for the decision maker. Now you have a lead. Thank them, exit and repeat steps 3 - 5 until you have a list of 50 leads.Step 6: Go back home. Send each of your leads a short email telling them who you are, and that you spoke to X in the store. You want to share some ideas on improving their web site, and if they like the ideas, discuss how you can implement the improvements.Step 7: Wait two days. If you haven’t received a response, pick up the phone and call each of the leads. Ask if they received your email and if they would be willing to sit with you for 15 minutes to discuss your offering. You will get lots of “no thank you” responses, and a few “Sure, let’s talk”. If you do it right you can get second touch points for about 10 out of the 50 leads.Step 8: Attend your meetings, and if they seem interested, offer them a standard development package with add-ons. People like to know precisely what they get for the money they pay.Step 9: Sign them up, take a 50% deposit and deliver your work on a strict, but fair, schedule, including a first draft (for major changes), a final draft (minor changes) and a production version (for sign-off).Step 10: Let them sign off on the work, then offer them a maintenance package for a small monthly fee to make sure the site is safe, secure and up to date. Now you have cash flow.If you do this right you should hit about 2 - 5 out of 50 leads. You should be doing this at least twice a month initially, this will give you 4 - 10 new clients per month. be sure to give yourself enough time to do the actual development work. Building sites for that many clients can be time consuming.You can easily hit 50 leads in two to three hours if you don’t try to sell them at your first touch point. The idea is to get a conversation going until they trust you enough.Some points to remember:Don’t waste too much money on online advertising, the competition is tough online, but very few people take the time to put on their shoes and knock on some doors.You will need to have two to three sites as part of a portfolio. This is easy enough to do as you can create mock sites using your own domains.You should have a reliable host as part of your offering - you can get some decent affiliate returns for every client you sign up, and it will help you streamline production.There is a lot of value in specializing - for example, how many dentists or doctors have great web sites? You could easily specialize in “quality web sites for medical professionals.”Don’t fall into the trap of offering too much customization. It confuses people and will stretch your development time beyond what is necessary. Standard packages with a set number of add-ons is simple, clear and will allow you to plan your sales strategy.Always aim to generate cash flow - one-off designs a re great to boost capital, but it isn’t sustainable. If you can sign up 5 clients per month for maintenance at $50 per client, that is $250 per month in additional cash flow that you can rely on. Eventually you will have the option to employ a couple of salespeople and a designer or two to help you grow your business.

I reject the premise. I can't tell you why you should respect Google, but implying that they don't deserve respect because their products don't make money is absurd.If you choose not to respect them because none of their other ventures are as successful as Search then I'd remind you that Search represents 70% of their manpower.It's more likely that Google will acquire your startup than that it will develop an internal project that will surpass it, but the opposite is often true. Google Maps, Reader, Gmail, Image Search, News and a number of others have outlasted and surpassed dozens of startups that preceded them or tried to unseat them.I'm not sure what your underlying question is, but if it's "Why should I worry about Google when starting my own company?" then you probably have the right attitude for starting your own company because fatalism is fatal when starting a startup.If your question is simply a means of saying 'Google sucks, why don't people see that?' then I don't have an answer for you other than the one I've just given.Elaboration left in comments appended to answer by request:While I feel that Google has been unsuccessful in its attempts to compete in the Social space, I think that this has been a consistant weak area at Google, and the fact that there were several attempts in Social in the last few years doesn't mean that Google is no longer capable of creating products that make money.A few thoughts in no particular order:A) Google products that gain traction and gather dedicated user bases have the secondary effect of increasing both search engagement and brand loyalty. Whether or not a product is profitable based solely on in-product advertising or subscription fees, that product may still generate substantial secondary profits by the positive changes it makes in user behavior around the other products in the brand. This trait is not exclusive to Google by any means.B) Products in the Social space are especially good examples of this. It's notoriously hard to make 'Social' products that produce a substantial revenue stream. Part of the nature of the life cycle of Social products is that you forgo monetization in favor of increased user satisfaction, engagement, and te resulting virality and gradually blend in monetization once you have an established product with a strong value proposition and established user base. It's a non-starter to use profitability to judge the success of Social products that are still in their early growth stages.C) Google shows its excellence when it revisits a product space that has generally acknowledged to have plateaued, where innovation has been stagnant. Taking a clean-sheet approach to the product space and coming up with something highly functional and tackling 'hard' engineering problems that had been avoided by competitors is the hallmark to Google's most notable successes. Search, Maps and Gmail are good examples of this. Search, webmail and online maps had been around (and stagnating) for years before Google entered the space, but it did so in a substantially different or better way.D) Google shows its weaknesses when it tries to compete or catch-up in a product space that has gained traction on the shoulders of other companies. This is what's happening in Social right now.E) My personal opinion is that the difference between products in 'C' and 'D' is that products that fit 'C' usually arise from small teams of motivated people who push forward an idea, create a proof of concept, and gain momentum from the ground up, while products in the 'D' category are initiated by strategic direction from the top and teams are assembled around this idea. It's harder to innovate on demand, and the pressure to deliver a product to fit the needs of executive management on schedule generates a completely different quality of product than when a team has the pressure to create a great product in order to convince executive management that their idea should be productized in the first place. The first is trying to meet an expectation. The second is trying to overcome adversity.F(inally) I think we have very different views of Google as a company and what its measures of success are. I see Google's profitability in search (and third-party advertising, and Android, both of which were billion dollar businesses for Google in 2010) as the profit centers that enable them to make other products that help Google's users.This is a key point because it addresses your final question (paraphrased): 'Why would I want to follow any of Google's product development practices of spending tens of millions of dollars to develop products without a monetization strategy?' The answer is -- unless you're a multi-billion dollar company with substantial profits around a strong brand -- you shouldn't. Pursuing lines of research to make discoveries and experience failures is a strategy that makes sense at different levels for different organizations.A startup would likely find value in exploring a few variations on their primary idea to discover more about the ideal breadth of their product, but squandering their seed money dabbling in 10 ideas would be a poor choice. Once you're established and can afford to explore ways to grow your business in different areas the idea has a lot more merit. Rather than teaching with a broad brush and saying that Google's experimental product strategy 'should be frowned upon,' it would be more valuable to teach how the principles of product strategy evolve as an organization evolves. That would be a valuable lesson for organizations in any field.

This is a part of an exercise for MBA Bootcamp.My dream organization would be an idea for a start-up which I have been thinking about for quite some time to build a central portal which would link all the stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem like Patients, doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical stores, insurance companies and also act as a marketplace for products and services related to health-care.Vision:To enhance healthcare ecosystem using technology.How does it make revenue? What products or programs or services does it provide? Who are its customers?This organization would be adding value to all the stakeholders/customers and would generate revenue by providing products and services for all of them. It can add value in the following ways:Patients:1. They can store all their medical history, blood groups, allergies,etc2. Search for doctors in the vicinity & schedule appointments which can automatically be added their calendar with reminders.3. Do a preliminary diagnosis of possible diseases by entering symptoms prior visiting the doctor.4. Make payments via an app.5. Search for pharmaceutical stores via app where the prescribed medicines are available or buy them online.6. Purchase wearable devices, medical equipments.7. Link their wearable health-care devices to the app and get analytics for data collected. This can also be fed into patient history. Get an alarm in case of abnormalities.8. Search and choose insurance plans. Link their insurance plans so they can easily pay premiums and get medical bills easily re-imbursed.9. They would be given cards using which they can easily check in hospitals, clinics,etc and it would contain details regarding their insurance and people to be informed in case of emergencies,etc.Doctors:1. Get an online presence so that they are easily discovered by patients.2. Online payments and appointments facility3. Easily access patient history, their allergies, current medications,etc4. Give prescriptions via application. No need for printing. The prescriptions can be de-activated and archived to prevent abuse of drugs after a time period.5. Get information on seminars and events related to his specialization in medicine.6. Get information about new breakthrough medicines, research articles/papers,etc.Pharmaceutical stores:1. Get orders online from patients which can be later collected from counter or delivered to home.2. Manage their inventory, procure and pay for their orders online.Pharmaceutical Companies:1. Get region-wise analytics on diseases so that they can target them more efficiently.2. Get analytics on their region-wise sales3. Channel to provide informational/promotional materials to doctors.4. Better connectivity and reach to pharmaceutical distributors and retailers.5. Real time information regarding sales of their products.Insurance Companies:1. Easy facilitation of payments of premium and disbursements of claims2. Can take decision on premium amounts to be paid based on medical history.Revenue generation by:1. Advertisements on free versions (Limited features)2. Paid services for premium versions.3. Building & selling health-care specific products/devices (eg. wearable healthcare devices)4. Commission on selling medicines, products and equipments through its marketplace.5. by subscription fees from pharmaceutical stores for inventory management, procuring and selling medicines online through our portal.6. Paid analytics and services for pharmaceutical companies.Growth & Funding:As it is still just an idea, there may be a lot of assumptions regarding the needs of stakeholders and what would they be willing to pay for. So, initially a thorough market research can be done by reaching out to all stakeholders and experts in relevant fields to validate the ideas and identify even more gaps in the healthcare ecosystem.Then based on the inputs, a minimum loveable product can be designed for which people would be willing to pay(using a seedfund if needed). This would kick-start our revenues and can be scaled while adding on more features. Based on the market response and kind of growth needed we can go for further rounds of funding.Also, we can tie up with insurance companies for special plans bundled with our offerings, so that we reach the general public more efficiently and at a faster rate.Challenges:1. Regulatory: As it is a highly regulated industry, designing a product or service meeting all the regulatory requirements would be a big challenge.2. Competition from existing players like practo for searching doctors, companies who are already in wearable devices space, online health care related marketplaces.3. People may not be comfortable or willing to share their medical history.4. Bringing pharmaceutical stores on our portal - as already many people have their own inventory management systems.Thank you Ellen Vrana & User for this exercise. This is the first time I have put it in form of writing and has certainly brought a lot of clarity and things that i still need to address more. I would really like to hear your feedback on this.