Entrepreneur's Startups Spring 2022

Ht’s a hard question to answer, but you’ll need to grapple with it over and over again. Because let’s be honest: As soon as you start a business, you are competing in a world of noise. There are competitors to differentiate yourself from. Marketing channels to stand out in. Social media platforms to gain audience in. You have signed up for a non-stop marathon of gaining attention and building momentum and competing for your consumers’ precious time — and you cannot even begin to succeed in this race unless you commit to answering this question. So once again: What makes you special? The answer may surprise you. You might think it’s a particular product or feature or branding scheme of yours. But if you talked to your customers—really talked to them—you might…

Q: I want to increase my sales. Does that mean I need to buy ads? —EDWARD, ST. LOUIS SURE, you can buy sales. That’s what paid media is—it gives you access to a large audience and helps you test your messaging. But there’s a downside to it. Paid media can trick people into conflating sales with demand. It can also make entrepreneurs with smaller budgets feel like they have no shot at truly connecting with their audience. I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. You can buy your way into sales, but you can’t buy your way into product-market fit—and that is the thing you should be most focused on. A company that has achieved product-market fit (PMF) is likely doing great with sales, but that’s not to say PMF is…

The company Parting Stone offers a novel service: It turns the ashes of deceased T humans and animals into pretty little stones—like river rocks. And when Justin Crowe founded Parting Stone in 2019, it seemed obvious who his first customers should be. “Our research showed that while 1.6 million American families choose cremation through a funeral home each year, there are already 75 million people in the United States living with pet and human ashes at home,” he says. In other words, Crowe planned to skip the hassle of persuading funeral homes to offer Parting Stone’s “solidified remains” as an alternative to traditional cremation. Instead, he’d sell his service directly to those 75 million consumers with an urn in the basement. But when the company launched, things didn’t go as planned. Crowe…

In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less.” So began an innocuous post on the otherwise obscure blog Nothing But Words in July 2020 that managed to make headlines from MIT Technology Review to NBC. Why? Because while scores of humans debated its content, it turned out most of the words weren’t actually written by a human at all. They were penned by an artificial intelligence model called GPT-3, and posted by Liam Porr, a student at UC Berkeley at the time. The way he saw it, GPT-3 is about to change the way we write, and this blog post became high-profile proof. Many people agree—and that’s now raising some interesting business questions. When software can write almost as well as a human, how will that alter the…

Water is the basis of life: It grows plants, it constitutes up to 60% of the W adult human body, and we can’t go longer than about three days without drinking it. So Liquid Death is probably the last thing you’d think to name a water brand. That’s exactly why former marketing creative director Mike Cessario founded the canned-water company Liquid Death in 2017. He abides by a habit of asking, “What’s the dumbest idea you can think of right now?” That practice sparked an idea for packaging water differently than anyone else: in a can with a skull on it, emblazoned with the punk slogan “Murder your thirst.” Cessario’s contrarian branding has earned flustered press, a deep degree of street cred, and a lot of social followers—more than half a…

Cardi B fans everywhere know these lyrics: Got a bag and fixed my teeth, C hope you hoes know it ain’t cheap. They’re from “Bodak Yellow,” the rapper’s breakout song. But they’re also validation for Cardi’s dentist, Catrise Austin, whose entrepreneurial ingenuity led her to fix those teeth. Years ago, as a way to differentiate herself, Austin had the potentially absurd idea of becoming a “dentist to the stars.” Then she did it, with a client list that also includes DJ Khaled, Busta Rhymes, Common, Toni Braxton, and A$AP Rocky. But… how? Not every entrepreneur wants to (or should) chase celebrities. But every entrepreneur does need to land desirable customers. That’s why Austin’s story is instructive—because, at the heart of it, she says, her tactics were driven by a relentless understanding of…