Strategies for a Successful Business Launch

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Welcome everybody. This is a little bit different. What we're starting to do is we have found that we've got a lot of content. If you haven't figured that out, check out Develop-a-Nor.com. We crank stuff out on a regular basis, but that takes time. We want to make sure that we are servicing our YouTube channel, our podcast, and the blog site itself with some of the content. One of the things that we've done over the years is we've got these mentor mastermind types of groups that we've had in various states. A lot of what came out of that turned into some really good content for our site. We're essentially turning the cameras back on ourselves and doing that as we're going through some of our basically revamping Develop-a-Nor a little bit and some of the focus that we've got. We figured it would be useful to a lot of you to hear an example of how that discussion would go, your branding and your avatars and things like that. Also, some of the tips and tricks of the trade that we're going to talk through that are the kinds of things you will see. It depends on who you talk to or where you go, but if you look at particularly content producer help sites and things like that, one of the things they'll often talk about would be the idea of a content stack. It's essentially the idea of having your short form videos, your audio, blogs, all of the different places you can put content, but getting it from a single source. What we're going to do with this is we sit down periodically and as we're going through some of the challenges that we and this is Michael and I and I'll introduce him in a second if you haven't already met him. But Michael and I do this on a regular basis, weekly basis, sometimes more often, where we talk through what are we going through, what are our challenges. It is a bit of a really a math kind of thing, but a little bit tighter because it's not a full group. Just the two of us and occasionally a few others will join us. What we do is, in doing all of this, we're going to record these things and this is going to give us what you're seeing. You're seeing this right now is our YouTube episodes and we'll still have some others mixed in here and there, but you're going to see essentially the same kinds of content that we've had in the past. We're going to tweak it a little bit and we'll be discussing that in this and further episodes. But then within that, we're going to take that same material and that's going to be a podcast. So, we're going to take for say a 20 minute, 30 minute session, we're going to talk about something and you'll be able to see it if you're from the YouTube channel and be able to see the video side of it. You'll probably get a little bit more, actually no probably, you will get a little bit more on the YouTube side because we'll have a little bit of preamble and postamble, I guess if a word around the podcast, that audio will then be moved out to a podcast episode. So if you want to hear it from audio, you'll get it. And then when you get into the blogs and things like that, we typically, if you haven't noticed, we usually have a blog article related to posts, whether it be out on YouTube or our podcast. Podcast has always had a little bit of a blog with it, some show notes and things like that. So you will continue to have that. So however you currently consume, that's going to continue. And now we're hopefully going to give you a couple other channels and easier ways to consume. Now, I have rambled on a little bit trying to give you a little bit of the here's where we're going and here's what we're doing, what we're changing as we go into continuing our twice a week at least posts out to YouTube. Also, this is going to start season 21 of the podcast, which seems a little crazy when it doesn't seem like that long ago that we were on the 21st episode, but now we're 750 episodes into this thing and over 20 episodes or 20 seasons. So I've mentioned him and now I'm going to flip it over to Mike. I'm going to let you give yourself a little bit of an introduction. I think you guys have heard him along the way. We've interviewed at one point, we've done a lot of different things, but now sort of like update on where you're doing and how you're doing today, Mike. Hey, thanks Rob. So, you know, like Rob said, we've been doing this for a long time, working together. Recently, I have switched focuses in my career. I was running another company called Malosh Consulting, doing pretty much the Internet of Things on the Web, and that kind of got a little exhausting after a while. So I've decided to change focus a little bit and I've started a new endeavor called Envision QA, where we're focusing on QA audits, assessments and trying to flip the discussion on QA and try to involve it from the beginning of the business. We're talking with the customers all the way through the software development, not just waiting until the end. And I'm excited with Rob to start this new video YouTube thread that we're doing and podcasts. So that's a little bit about me and I'll pass it back over to Rob. I guess I should come back and give a little bit of an update of who I am because I don't think I introduced myself since about 700 episodes ago. But this also is to set the tone, I think, a little bit and a little bit of the context around a lot of our conversations. As Michael mentioned, he is switching, changing his focus, altering his focus and really tightening his focus for his business. I'm also in a little bit of a change for the last probably six months to a year, maybe a little longer than that, where I've been adjusting my primary company, RV Consulting, and looking at some of the things that we essentially that we want to do and focusing more on like, let's get into things where we what is our strength? Where can we help our customers the most? And also, what do we enjoy doing? Not a lot of people enjoy some of the work, the specific stuff we do, so it makes it helpful to us. But it's also just something that gives us at the end of the day, a feeling that we've brought value to our customers. So that's a lot of what our conversations are going to be. We're going to talk about things like, in general, consulting, if you want to. We're going to talk about starting up because even though we've done this for a long time, there is a startup kind of phase, particularly for Michael. We've just gone through, really from scratch. And I think that's something we'll bring up here in just a minute. But this is one of those where we've been living this for a little bit, and we realized it probably helped to talk through for some other people, whether you've done it before, and it may give you a little additional insight, or if it's something you're considering, then it's going to give you an idea of essentially like a checklist of, oh, yeah, I need to do this and I need to do that. And I think going with that checklist idea, I think that's a good way to start this first sort of introductory episode. As mentioned, Mike, you just went through all of this. And I think if you can just sort of like walk us through a little bit, like what you did from to launch and vision QA, a couple of those steps and maybe some of the challenges. And if you've got some tips and tricks for somebody that's going through it, what would you recommend? Again, this is for somebody, just to be clear, Michael's done this a couple of times. It changes every time because technology and the services are different. But let's hear how your latest experience went. Sure. So one of the biggest things over the last probably decade with all the companies I've worked for and the different projects I've been on, QA has kind of been the lackluster. No one wants to do it. It's kind of been ingrown. So I again, changed focus and decided to close Mollusk Consulting and just start a QA type company. It took a little while to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up because QA can encompass many different things. There's a lot of QA services and focuses like that. So one of the big things I had to sit down and kind of come up with was what part of QA do I want to do and how is it going to be different than everyone else? So basically, I had to kind of come up with a niche. I had to come up with something, one, that I knew what to do and two, was something that could be serviceable, that customers would want to buy and need. That kind of led me to different areas of QA. Do I want to do testing plans? Do I want to do testing services? And then I came up with the idea of this QA assessment, QA audit. And from there, it's like, okay, I kind of have an idea. So what type of company do I want? So I kind of basically got to the point where I kind of had a mission statement or some type of vision. And then I went back through and I was like, okay, now what do I want to call this? So I started thinking about names. It's a little challenging because since I'm kind of putting a new niche on the market, there's not a lot of competition out there. There's a couple of companies, but they're very service based. So when you search the web to try and find competitors to try and get ideas for names and see what kind of domains are available, it was a little challenging. So I decided to jump on the AI bandwagon like everyone else. And I started playing around with chat, GPT, Bard, Gemini, and Copilot. And ultimately came up with a list of some names that kind of got me closer to what I wanted. And then I was like, okay, what's going to make it stand out? What's going to make me be different? And I kept thinking about it. And it's like, well, since I want to focus on QA assessments and QA audits, I was like, well, why not envision QA? I want to change the mindset of a company around QA. So that's where I came up with the Envision QA. From there, I moved into branding. I went on 99 designs because we've used them before in the past and went through an interesting process of about three weeks of trying to figure out different designs and brandings. And then from there, once I had the branding, I spun up a web page, I bought the domain name, got my email, and then immediately turned around and signed up for an LLC, my S-Corp, the EIN. And since I'm in the state of Tennessee, we now have to do something called a BOI. So I signed up for that as well. And where I'm at today, I started all this in January. So literally, we are now two months into the year. I've got almost everything up. And I decided to join a co-starter class through my local chamber and co-op and meeting and networking with local businesses to try and refine my business idea and also get my tech speech back down to the lower it down so I can talk to anyone within the company, not just technical people. There is, it's funny, if somebody's taking notes, they're probably like feverishly going through that if they're like, what do I need to do? There are tons of little things that came in there. But the interesting thing I think is, and it's been a challenge that we've talked about over the years, is that while we are technologists, we are hands-on keyboard kind of people. We can design stuff and we do that. But it's also like, push comes to shove, we're the ones that are designing solutions and then implementing solutions. We are not in marketing, we're not in sales, we're not in that kind of stuff. And yet here you've got a very much a IT service product company. And there's almost nothing that you've done that is related to that in the first two months. You've got the regulatory stuff, which I think is something anybody that's starting needs to look into is, what does your organization need to look like? Is it an LLC? Does it need to be a corporation, whether it's an S Corp or a C Corp? And look at what the costs are, the structures. It's one of those things that I think is very much an individual kind of an approach. I highly recommend doing one of those. You can be a sole proprietorship and just sort of like just make it a side hustle kind of thing. I think as we've both seen in the past, it's just so much cleaner to have that separate bank account, that separate business, that separate everything. So the business is its own entity. Even if it's an LLC, you can keep that separate, you can track everything. So at the end of the year, you can give your personal shoe box of receipts to an accountant and then your business shoe box of receipts to an accountant and get your taxes done at the end of the year. One of the things sort of as a wrap up just in this one was I spent a little bit more time on the 99designs, which is 99designs.com if anybody wants to go check that out. And also, Envision QA does exist, EnvisionQA.com. So you can go check out the results, the fruits of his labors. But let's talk a little bit more about that process. What was the 99designs process like and figuring out your logo and all of those kinds of things? So that was kind of an interesting endeavor. You had gone through it before with DeveloperNUR and had such a good result with it that you did RB Consulting. And I really liked what came out of that. So instead of kind of going around and trying new things out there, I just jumped in right to 99designs, which interestingly enough, I found out that I guess they were either bought or they're now tied to Vistaprint. So just long story short, it made getting the business cards, the t-shirts and all of these swag at the end so simple. It was a very cool process now. But the process of going through figuring out your brand, figuring out your design, If you really have no idea what you want, it can be daunting. Once I came up with the name and kind of the mission statement, I was able to put that out there. And then I took the chance because 99designs gives you the option to, I guess, go through your first round and get your money back. If you don't like any of the designs, you can click the option and you can get your money back. I went ahead and said no to that, which kind of moves you up a tier and gets you some higher level designers. And within probably the first four or five hours, I got a couple quick designs and I'm like, didn't really like them. But it started making me think, OK, what do people think of when they hear my company name? So some took the envision part and started doing eyeballs or some type of eye design with the QA. And I was like, OK, well, that's an interesting take. I would not perceive people that take envision and think eye company or eyeball. So that was kind of an interesting process to kind of get like designers or people that aren't in tech looking at at least a company name and saying, what type of company is this? Which for branding and logo design, I find is very intrinsic. They're really tied together, which is something I didn't think about when choosing the name. And as I started going through the process, some designers gave me some just off the wall designs. But then once after like three or four days, it got down to, OK, I started seeing a pattern of things that I liked. So then I started choosing those, filtering them out. They give you like a star system so you can go one zero to two is like low quality. You can do three to four or three to five as like good quality. So you can kind of filter out the good and the bad. And then you can then communicate back and forth with the designers to tweak the design a little bit to kind of get it to where you like. And it ended up taking me the whole time to figure that out because really at the start, I really had no idea what I wanted, which is why I went with 99 designs, because I had a lot of good things about them where the designers can come up with something from nothing and it kind of helps you envision where your end product wants to be. And then once I got to the end product, there was a couple of tweaks at the end. I got a very nice branding document out of it. I got a wonderful logo and I've been able to throw up some T-shirts, some polo shirts, some logos, business cards and all that. The whole process probably cost me with all the swag, probably about six, seven hundred dollars. So if you think about going through 99 designs, the initial branding process probably will cost you about five hundred bucks. And then you're going to need business cards, things like that. So figure about another hundred and fifty tacked onto that. So figure about six hundred and fifty dollars if you want to go through them. Now, if I wanted to go through a marketing company, my local marketing company was going to cost me a couple thousand dollars to go through them. So just kind of an apples to apples comparison on something like that. Yeah, I think you made a you brought up a good point. And I found this, which was actually very interesting when I did the develop. We went through the development process, but also when I revamped RB Consulting and its logo, I guess I should say RB is it's RB-SNS.com. You can go check that out and you can see. And of course, developinor.com. D-E-V-E-L-P-R-E-N-E-U-R. You can also see it in the backgrounds there. Both of these situations is I think I didn't go in completely blank. And it was basically because that initial interview process that they do in 99 designs where they sort of say, what do you like? What don't you like? And so that little thing and they just show you, it seems like it was hundreds of logos and icons. It's sort of like, what do you like? To get you sort of whether it's in modern or pastels or I don't know enough about those, but different families of designs and walking through those. And so I had some ideas, but it was funny like building better developers, I actually ended up purchasing two different, I had two people win and purchase two different sets. The one was because it was sort of what I originally wanted to go with or what I originally had in my mind that had to do with speed and learning quickly and things like that. But then ended up with the ones that we've got because it was more direct, it was simple, it was more iconic in a sense. And particularly when we're thinking about things like a podcast page, having that podcast logo and some of those things, it just worked better. And RB Consulting was the same kind of thing like you said, is that as I got into some of them, there would be these little bits and pieces of an icon or a logo that somebody would add, the designer would add. And I was like, oh, that's a really cool idea. For example, like I've got now, if you look at the RB logo, it's basically within a gear within it. That was something that was never a thought, but then somebody had something like that on a logo. And then we eventually talked my way through with the designers getting to that piece. I think it's a great learning process just to go through that. And yes, if you go with a marketing company of some sort, you're probably going to get more than just going through that process. However, it's a good deal more expensive, particularly if you're just doing a startup kind of thing. This is still, I think it's one of those, this comes down to it's one of those processes I think I recommend anybody that has an entrepreneurial itch at all go through it just to see what it's like. It's think of it as more like paying for education as opposed to an icon, but it's worth it to have an icon and a logo, even if you are just you. I think we've gone through that. We've talked about this before. And that was one of the things I think that you learned is that you went through and built something from Milosh Consulting that you had. It was definitely a look that was distinct to it. But I think you got a lot more out of this process and getting some feedback so that now I think you've got something that you're, I would say that you're much happier, but I don't want to speak for you. So what do you think about having gone through it twice, once without and once with, what are your thoughts on that? So luckily the first time I went through it with Milosh Consulting, I was able to outsource that to my wife and daughter. So I am craftsy and artsy to a point, but when it comes to actually designing things, I'm a lost cause. So it was very stressful, very daunting. But my wife had some free time and my daughter was very good at arts and crafts. And so we kind of found some ideas around. And actually what was interesting about the Milosh Consulting logo that we ultimately came up with was there was a binary stream of numbers behind the logo. Well that binary stream was actually Milosh Consulting in binary. And then we put the logo on top of that. So it was kind of an inside joke, but it was also very much me. So I really liked that logo. But this time around, I wanted something a little more brand-ish that people would recognize and it would stand out. So my old logo at the time, not thinking about like swag or hats or anything, you could not put that on a t-shirt with a heat print or print or with thread. It really would not work. In fact, even with the new design, there were some things I ran into with that where certain letters in the current font get cut off if they try to stitch it. So I actually have to make a slight edit to the logo to separate the letters slightly and then I'm going to try again with stitching. But right now it works for heat print. It looks really good. Business cards look great. So I'm pretty happy with it. That's a really good point as we wrap up this episode one. For a technology podcast, yeah, we've stepped into a little bit more on the branding side. But I think that's something that's sort of a... Those are some good lessons learned is that you may have something that looks really good on the screen or on a PDF or however you look at it. But make sure you look at it in a couple different places. A real brief story in the past, I remember we were working with a... I won't name it, but it's a multinational oil organization, oil and gas and stuff like that power. And their logo we had on a site we were doing for them, or it was their logo and their corporate colors. And this was many years ago when we had these lower quality monitors. Everything was a little bit fuzzier and colors were all muted. And we were like, oh, that looks okay. Well then we had one time we were demoing it and we went to... I guess when you first have HD monitors come out and we put it on the HD and it burned our eyeballs because the colors were so muted normally, but then they were suddenly so bright on the monitor. And we said, all right, we kind of crank that down a little bit or people are going to be like they're going to have sunburns looking at the site. So that's just sort of like that. That kind of thing is like... I don't think we always think about it, but it is much like testing in general where it's like you want to test if you're building like say a mobile app in particular, you got to test it on Apple. You got to test it on different versions of like iPhones and tablets. And if it's Android, it's all the different Android things and the different versions. And we need to do that with our logos as well. And that's the same thing I think you sort of touched on is it's like the technical crowd that may see it, but also our customers in particular, how are they going to view it? And then people that maybe don't have the same mindset as we do and need to make sure that they see it the right way or they get the things that we want out of the logo. They get that same, we'll call it that warm and fuzzy, these guys look like somebody I want to work with kind of feeling for it. Any last thoughts from you? The only thing I would like to end on is so if you've gone through what we've discussed today and have actually gone through and signed up your business, you have your business name, you have your domain, you're ready to basically go out and put your website up, take your branding and put yourself out there. Check out our Launch an Internet Business video series on YouTube and on the site, because we've actually walked through that process. And me and Rob have actually both gone through it again recently since I had to spin up a new website. And we found that everything we have out there is still relevant and still works. So please check it out as well. Rob, I don't know if you have it offhand, but it is on YouTube. So please check out our YouTube channel there. Yeah, it's definitely it's if you go out there, I can't remember all the channels we've got now, but there is a Launch Your Internet Business channel. There is also if you go to developerinouro.com, you can actually sign up. We still have that page out there that it's I think it's one of the primary menu items, options you can go in there and actually it will it was originally set up as an email sort of a drip campaign. So if you want to do it, set it up. I believe it's a 21 day process. It's 14 or 20. I think it's 21 day process. And it's basically 15 minutes a day, a little more early on because you have to wait for Amazon registration and some things like that. But it walks you from zero to a website, to having having your website. I believe we cover HTTPS. So you've got all the things you need there. It's a WordPress site. It's walking through some of the selecting your themes and some of those kinds of things. So if if you're not going, you're thinking about, hey, I want to try this out or if you're a if you're if your technical skills are not in server side stuff like going in and firing up a Linux machine and a virtual machine and running Linux and running stuff that's not on Windows or Mac. This is very helpful. There's a lot of little pieces. It's definitely a an introductory kind of thing, but it does hit all the key bases. And then it's something where you will find in a lot of this, you can go back through our site and through others. You can sort of advance those skills because that was sort of launching points for several things we've done over the years. So this welcome. Thank you for joining us for episode one as we've gotten into this, as we launch into our new season. For those of you listening, you can always check us out on our YouTube channel. For those of you on our YouTube channel, you can check us out wherever you get podcasts. We're going to have this as well, and we're just going to keep chugging along. And as always, feel free to shoot us any any recommendations, questions. You can leave comments, but also you can shoot something to info at develop a nor dot com and let us know if you have recommendations or questions about topics you want us to discuss, because we are more than happy to do so, because otherwise we're just going to sort of like go over whatever it is that we hit that week and sort of like a problem of the week. And we'll see where it goes. But that wraps this one up. Thank you so much for your time. And as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop a Newer Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.