Small businesses are often similar to other businesses. Your institution will need to compete with many other businesses in a variety of markets. Competitors will try outrageous stunts to keep their business afloat, and they will do so to maintain their position.
According to the Small Business Association, small businesses provided 55% of all jobs in the USA. This number is expected to increase over the next years. It’s not surprising that people are now considering starting their own small businesses to provide financial security and sustainable employment within their local communities.
Although starting a small business can be challenging, it can yield rewarding results. There are many steps and brainstorming involved. If your business does not help to meet the needs of a dynamic, growing community, then failure is likely.
I believe in inspiration. Inspiration and motivation are the key to building successful brands. Inspiration gives us a jolt of inspiration that drives us to do our best, even when failure seems possible. It is my personal belief that inspiration plays an important role in the establishment of small businesses that take it seriously compared to their larger, more lucrative counterparts.
Tobias Lutke of Shopify shares the inspiring story of Scott Lake, Shopify . It shows how a software that has limited funding from family and investors can suddenly become a highly sought-after E-commerce solution for online retailers.
It was a difficult start. The co-founders were without salaries for almost two years. Lake left shortly after launch. “It was slow at the beginning, and it took some time before people realized we had a great product,” CEO Lutke says. It seems like the slow start is a distant memory. Shopify powers more than 21,000 stores, which sell merchandise from small businesses as well as big brands like 50 Cent, Angry Birds and the Foo Fighter. Shopify stores were able to sell $124 million worth of products in 2010. Lutke claims figures reached $275 millions last year em>
– This interview was taken out of Entrepreneurs’s startups issue .
Lutke’s entrepreneurial story sounds like something out of Hollywood. A guy launches a product, but it fails to generate revenues that can be used to pay back the funds. Product then gets back on track quickly and eventually, it reaches the public consciousness. Many entrepreneurs have the same inspiring story, but it’s not common for them to be featured in traditional media. Entrepreneurship builds and accelerates economies.
How to turn inspiration into profits with social media
Lutke’s interview highlights how Shopify became a great product. Innovative and intuitive are the key words. Although I won’t be able to go into detail about Shopify’s features, after seeing a demonstration, it is clear that the E-commerce platform offers valuable and unique software for online sellers.
Once you’ve found the inspiration in your head and have executed it, it is time to launch the second phase. Use social media to help people find your business. Because you can easily brand your business with a Facebook Page, share events with your followers and collaborate with other entrepreneurs using Linkedin, social media networks have the potential to outweigh costly websites.
Social media has also been influencing search engine optimization’s (SEO) relevance in ensuring an impassible presence on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. According to gShiftLabs the lines between SEO and social media are still blurred. SEO will continue to gain importance for social media.
Shopify’s success was due to Lutke’s programming skills and assertiveness. Although he didn’t use social media to promote his product, the engagement that you will provide your prospects will be similar to Shopify’s dominant performance in E-commerce taxonomy.
1. Facebook is changing. Some users find it manipulative to build relationships and interaction on the platform. Status updates, which can include images and uploaded videos, don’t show up in their profile pages. Instead they are categorized by month. The Facebook Timeline design is attractive and beneficial for businesses that want to increase branding strength and reach more people.
Create a Facebook page that cleverly combines personal branding with natural engagement through resources, links and other relevant information. Make sure to include your logo in your timeline header. Engage your fans with resources that focus on your business. Create a comic strip, stimulate discussion with controversial blog posts from experts, give away giveaways, and add a personal touch to the approach. Ask your fans to answer trivia and mind-teasing questions What color would you choose if I were a businessman?
2. Twitter is a great tool for quick promotions and announcements. It might even make it onto the list of trending topics. Twitter’s most prominent tagging feature, making someone or something Trend every day, has kept it popular. You can also use it to announce your business’s latest interactive projects or other noteworthy developments. Because it displays the interaction between a group of users in a single word, or group of linked together phrases, digital strategists refer to Trending topics as social networks’ pots of gold.
You can trend your business by sending out a tweet that is mind-blowing. Make sure that you have followers who actually engage with the content and pro-actively retweet it. Create rewarding Tweets that will encourage your audience to join the conversation or announce something important.
3. Create a social media network that caters to a diverse audience. You can increase engagement by creating multiple accounts on social media networks such as Pinterest and Tagged. You can intensify your social media campaigns by engaging with people who believe that Twitter and Facebook are not worth the effort. If your company wants to be competitive with other conglomerates that have irremovable footprints on social media, it is essential to explore the vast social media wilderness.
We are going to tell the story of Tobi Lutzke, founder and CEO at Shopify, in this success post. He was born in Koblenz (Germany) on the 16th July 1980. He was part of the Ruby on Rails core team and created Active Merchant, an open-source library.
Tobi Lutke, Education and Earlier Life
At six years old, he was given a Schneider CPC by his parents. He started writing the code for the games he played, and modified the computer hardware.
Lutke quit school to enter an apprenticeship program at Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School, where he would become a computer programmer. In 2002, he moved to Canada from Germany.
Tobi Lutke Career
Tobi Lutke, along with Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake, launched Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop, in 2004. After looking at the various web-based business options and being dissatisfied with them all, Lutke decided to make his own using Ruby on Rails.
The Snowdevil authors decided to shift their focus from snowboarding to online business and Shopify was born. This stage of the web-based business stage was officially launched in 2006.
This was a benefit to Lutke, who was on the “The remarkable 30” List in 2012. The Globe and Mail voted Lutke “Chief Of The Year” in November 2014. Shopify had over 30000 users by September 2016. The organization has also generated over $20 billion in gross product since 2006, and more than 30000 shippers have used Shopify.
Shopify CEO says long hours aren
Tobias Lutke is the founder and CEO at Canadian e-commerce firm Shopify. He says that working 80 hours per week is not required for success.
You can’t cheat when it comes to creative work. Lutke tweeted on Thursday that his belief is that everyone has 5 creative hours per day. Shopify employees should only ask for 4 creative hours to be channeled into the company.
Shopify CEO, a response to ongoing Twitter conversation in which some were discussing whether it was necessary to work nights and weekends to achieve success, shared his thoughts.
One CEO tweeted Christmas Day, “Most people who changed the world were workaholics.”
Lutke argued against this.
Lutke tweeted that “I’ve never worked through the night.” “The only time I worked more than 40 hours in one week was when it was a burning desire. 8 hours sleep is what I need each night. It’s the same for everyone, regardless of whether or not we admit it.
Forbes estimates that Lutke is worth $3.6 billion. He built a company valued at about $48 billion through “treating everybody with dignity and not falling in to the fallacies or trappings of any orthodoxy,” he stated in a Twitter thread.
On Twitter, he added that he was home by 5:30 every night. Although my job is amazing, it’s just a job. My priorities are family and my personal health.
Lutke isn’t the only billionaire who supports enough sleep.
In 2016, Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, stated to Thrive Global that eight hours of sleep makes a huge difference in his life. He also stressed that he tries hard to make it a priority.
Bezos stated, “For me that’s enough to feel energized & excited.”
Bill Gates agrees with the importance of sleeping well and avoiding late nights. However, he stated in a blog post Dec. 10, that he used to believe that sleeping was lazy during his early days at Microsoft.
The self-made billionaire said that he used to work all night when delivering software. “Once in a while, I stayed up for two nights straight,” he wrote.
He realized later that his all-nighters and infrequent sleep of eight hours a night had taken a toll on his health. He also said that it was vital for good health and focusing at work.
