Rebooting entrepreneurship

For the last year I’ve been slacking when it comes to my personal business, it runs itself by and large, and my awesome team has been taking care of most of the day to day. This has allowed me to spend an inordinate amount of time working on things like community building, and helping other entrepreneurs solve their problems. As fulfilling as all that work has been, and arguably well worth it for the sake of the Miami tech/startup community, I felt like I was missing something. I’ve always been an entrepreneur; ever since I started selling candies in 4th grade. Entrepreneurship is a piece of me, and something I missed dearly. So I’ve decided for the month of March 2014, I will be diving back into entrepreneurship in a serious way and documenting everything along the way.

A big part of this experiment is really about learning from my past mistakes, not repeating them, and becoming a better entrepreneur. At the end of this journey I am hoping these blog posts will serve as perhaps a guide others can follow on their quest to be successful entrepreneurs.

So how will this work, and what will I actually be doing? For the first few weeks I am going to be focused on turning my new project Lavado from idea into reality. That means I need to go through and prepare everything that Lavado needs to be successful, and document it all along the way. Think of this as you all getting a backseat ride on the building of a hopefully money making successful startup in real time. I will do my best to share what worked, what didn’t work, why I tried various things, what roadblocks I run into, etc. Along the way I hope you all will provide feedback and hopefully act as my network of mentors. If you have ideas on what works or what I should try, email me or comment on these posts.

So a bit of background on the project. Lavado is a home/office laundry delivery service. We will be charging customers a weekly fee, which covers a regularly scheduled pickup and drop off of a laundry bag. All of their clothes will be washed, folded, and returned the next day.

I normally post 1-2x a month. My goal this month is to post 2-3x a week. So this first week, here are my goals, and hopefully by sharing them with you all, I will keep myself accountable. Make sure to tweet me and ping me to keep me going on the right track.

So what are the goals for this week 1?

1. Create mini validation test (with money)
2. Develop customer personas
3. Develop budget/forecast spreadsheet
4. Write content for the homepage, signup page, landing pages
5. Negotiate with minimum 5 vendors, hopefully sign 2
6. Order laundry bags to be printed
7. Configure billing system (starting super low tech on this)
8. Design an order/inventory management spreadsheet (yes starting low tech)
9. Write canned emails (signup/welcome)
10. Setup phone system for incoming support/sales calls.

So I hope you follow along and enjoy these posts. Much of this is inspired by the AppSumo How To Make Your First Dollar Course, which I highly recommend for any aspiring entrepreneur.

I’ll be sending out these posts first via email. So if you want to get advanced copies of them, get on the mailing list below: