I see you've got lots of auto-posting going on social media... have these efforts proven to be worth your while? Did you build up your followings organically?
None of the ones that Wordpress auto-posts have really done anything for me. Pinterest and Stumble Upon have to be submitted manually, but they seem to work out well.
I have been considering FastSpring (http://www.fastspring.com), which has recently added subscription payments as a feature. I'm interested to hear about anyones experiences with them.
It is a bundled payment gateway+merchant. You don't have to get PCI compliant and you don't need a merchant account (no min transaction volumes, fight chargebacks for you etc).
The down side is they only offer hosted payment pages and not suitable for everything... You need a finite set of goods/services you want to sell (eg monthly plans). You can't automate the process if you're building an online store where your customers can upload items for sale (eg AppStore).
SaaSy is a service from FastSpring, just to clarify. To see what people say about FastSpring, try searching online or you can view what they're saying here:
http://www.fastspring.com/clients.php
Some samples:
"I'm going to come out and say it: FastSpring is awesome. I haven't experienced customer service this good in my life. Every query I've had, from stupid questions to difficult questions to bug reports has been dealt with brilliantly."
- Daniel Kennett, kennetnet
“FastSpring is definitely the best company I have ever interacted with (note: the best company ever, not just related to e-commerce).”
- Ruman Stankov, Triland Inc.
I have several email accounts for different domains set up with google apps. One is the primary one that I am always logged into, and the others I have set up as an account I can send mail from (Settings, Accounts, Add another email address you own) in the primary account. In addition, I set up a filters for each of the email addresses that label the incoming mail according to what address it was sent to, so I can easily identify which of my identities is getting the email.
You must consider too that many entrepreneurs start several businesses through out the course of their lives. For each attempt, an entrepreneur would increase his/her chances at attaining wealth by 5%, no?
Well, if you wanted to be a real geek about it, given n attempts, your chances of a single success are 1 - (.95 ^ n)... but I'd also like to think that an entrepreneurial endeavor is not pure chance.
> I'd also like to think that an entrepreneurial endeavor is not pure chance.
Agreed, I don't think you'll ever succeed in your business attempts if you're not providing something new, original or just not established in the area. You'll make a killing opening a coffee shop in a moderate sized town - as long as there's not 3 Starbucks already there.
There's a lot to business beyond the idea, hence it's important to be a businessman once you've succeeded your entrepreneurial dream of getting a company started. You don't want your company to fail just because you fucked up and didn't file your taxes.
No... not if you are implying this because of a 95% failure rate, your odds improve with each attempt. Statistics have no memory. You are statistically part of the same group every time. You don't increase your chances of flipping a "heads" on a fair die by flipping tails first. The odds stay at 50%.
That's not to say that multiple attempts at starting profitable businesses won't teach you things, and increase your chances of success, your chances of picking the right strategy out of the gate, etc - but there is no simple "Hey if you list yourself as "entrepreneur" and keep trying, you'll end up rich.". Many people just end up wildly in debt and failure.
It's also not useful to take some aggregate 5% of businesses succeed so I have a 5% chance. Some business lack the talent, idea or plan to make it and have a virtually zero chance while others are way on the other end.
Sorry -- it randomly picks colors every reload, and I'm too lazy to change that at the moment. The big chunk is advertising, or you could keep rerolling until you found a readable set.
