Entrepreneur's Startups Fall 2018

Just 30 miles northwest of Detroit is the headquarters of a multimillion-dollar candy company called Zollipops. It’s housed in a plain-looking warehouse containing little more than boxes and boxes of sugar-free lollipops, hard candy, and taffy that’s sold online and in more than 7,500 stores, and is overseen by a team of six full-time employees and several independent contractors. But down a hall, fluorescent lights make way for the real magic of the place: a corner office decorated with sparkling pink dance trophies, paintings of smiling suns, and family trees made of construction paper—the handiwork of the company’s founder and CEO, 13-year-old Alina Morse. “ALINA HASN’T HAD FIVE OR 10 JOBS WHERE YOU HAD TO FOLLOW THIS RULE OR THAT RULE OR DO THINGS IN A CERTAIN WAY.” During the school year, Alina…

Welcome to one of the biggest headaches brought on by the digital age of apps and online services. Turn back the clock 30 years, and the idea of giving away your product for free was almost unheard of. Today it’s a staple business model, used in some form by everyone from Dropbox to The New York Times to Match.com . So first, let’s define the options. The paid model is simple. If a customer wants to use your product or service, they must buy it. The freemium model has several variations. You can offer free trials for a period of time, or offer an entire product or service for free while selling add-ons or upgrades. Generally speaking, freemium works in two scenarios. Number one: if it’s combined with the launch of…

Robert Glazer didn’t set out to build a 100 percent remote workforce. But in 2007, while forming his company, Acceleration Partners, he realized two things: One, fierce competition in hubs like New York and San Francisco had driven the salaries of even less-desirable candidates through the roof; and two, there was untapped talent in Acceleration’s niche field of affiliate marketing across the country. So Glazer began determining how to run a company flexible enough to hire workers who could work remotely. Back then, this was a rarity. Telecommuting was a concession you might make to individual workers, not a corporate strategy. There were few established protocols for making it work as well as, if not better than, a centralized workplace. So Glazer had to figure them out as he went along. Ten…

Before consulting, I made my living as an editor in media. Each job I held taught me the same lesson: Digital growth is not about manipulating tools like search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. It’s about using them to reach customers. Then it’s your job to create a sustainable relationship off of those platforms. I’ll give you two examples of how those tools can go wrong. My first big job was fitness editor at a men’s magazine. Facebook was relatively new, and we built our following aggressively. The result was lots of “likes” but little direct revenue we could track. That audience eventually drove significant traffic to the website—and that was traffic we could monetize. After I left, Facebook changed its algorithm, and posts drove only a small fraction of…

In 2003, before “fast casual” became restaurant industry buzzwords, Erik Oberholtzer, Matt Lyman, and David Dressler had an idea: combine high-end ingredients with fast-food efficiency. They bet that this would differentiate their company, Tender Greens, and customers would be willing to pay a little extra for quality food. Sourcing those premium ingredients would be complicated, though. Most quick-service restaurants use large distributors, which source from a network of farms and wholesalers—a strategy designed to maximize scale efficiency. But those networks generally don’t include the chef-to-farmer relationship—and the higher-quality ingredients—Tender Greens wanted. To solve the sourcing problem, Oberholtzer turned to a valuable contact. Before Tender Greens, he was the executive chef at a luxury hotel in Santa Monica. There, he had worked closely with Scarborough Farms, a midsize local grower with lettuces he…

Saima Khan had an epic string of luck. She was a banker in New York, and one day she ended up chatting with Warren Buffett at an airport. “We had a very personal conversation about love, loss, risk, home, and food,” she says. By the end, she’d offered to cook him a meal at her home. Buffett accepted, brought Bill Gates along, and ate well. Then the industry titans asked her to cook for their upcoming charity event, which she did—making large, shareable plates, harking back to how her Pakistani immigrant family fed guests. The event was a hit. More invitations followed. Soon, Khan saw opportunity. “People who were quite well-traveled were always looking for new dining experiences,” she says. So in 2012, she moved back to her hometown of London…