Business forum????

[Belbo]

No, Jan and Ian have made it clear that they want this site kept for property investment discussion only.

However, I'm thinking more along the lines of a "sister" site.

Why not? Broaden the brand, so to speak! But what woudl you call it?

Perhaps it could be called 'Somerhard'? No, scrap that, it'll attract too many weirdos.

How about, 'Somerbiz'? No, too cliche.

Possibly, 'Somersetupyourownbusiness'? No, too wordly.

Hey? What do you think of 'Somerfile'? Sounds suitably enthustiastic and ... no wait. Creeps again!

Oh, I give up!

 

[steveadl]

To be honest I think there are few business forums - and the ones that do exist are sparsley populated - because people creating and running real businesses for the most part (yes this is a generalisation) just put their head down and get on with the task. Not to mention it can be so time consuming, and if you know what you're doing you probably don't see the benefit of spending hours online sifting through rehashed info. from people who's "business" is selling $1,000 worth of stuff on eBay per month.

Over the last 3 months or so I've been setting up a new business and I've been so busy with all aspects that there's been pretty much zero time to surf business forums - any time spent doing that would be taking away from time spent on the business itself (or my maybe 90mins of spare time before sleep).

For example I doubt back in the day (if the internet was invented) that Linday Fox, Solomon Lew etc etc would have spent much time chatting to anonymous other people around the web. On the other hand, people who are looking to earn a side income they like to think of as a "business" would be the people you find on these forums.

But hey, that's just me. Maybe I'm way off - I haven't visited these forums.

 

[lizzie]

you probably don't see the benefit of spending hours online sifting through rehashed info. from people who's "business" is selling $1,000 worth of stuff on eBay per month.

Bit like SS in parts. After 8 years here I am very selective on what I read and skim a lot.

I think business forums are good for specific quesiton/answer sessions, as with the business I'm setting up - being a manufacturing and product based business - I am really struggling to find anyone for advicing and mentoring.

Everyone I know in business offers a service - sourcing, design, coaching etc - so I am on a massive and lonely learning curve.

 

[jacbmw]

In the online business space, this site http://techcrunch.com/ is great for staying on the pulse, seeing what others are doing and getting business/site/product ideas...

 

[Aaron_C]

Bit like SS in parts. After 8 years here I am very selective on what I read and skim a lot.

I think business forums are good for specific quesiton/answer sessions, as with the business I'm setting up - being a manufacturing and product based business - I am really struggling to find anyone for advicing and mentoring.

Everyone I know in business offers a service - sourcing, design, coaching etc - so I am on a massive and lonely learning curve.

I'm surprised at the lack of Frankston/Melton/Tarneit/Werribee/Hoppers Crossing threads nowadays. What happened?

 

[steveadl]

Everyone I know in business offers a service - sourcing, design, coaching etc - so I am on a massive and lonely learning curve.

Not me, I'm in brand name retail. Beautiful part is, brands already spend millions on marketing creating their followers - I just have to let people know they can get it from me.

 

[Corey Batt]

Business forum, now that would be excellent. When I have looked in the past I have found what others have already mentioned, sparsely populated forums which are quite useless.

 

[moyjos]

I am glad to see there is such an interest

I guess if we all jumped on freebusinesstips or aussietycoon it would push the forums along a bit and at least be able to bounce some ideas around.

 

[steveadl]

Hope the business is still progressing well Lizzie. Have you finally revealed what the product is yet???!!!

 

[RumpledElf]

Just to prove how slow it is, last time I checked Aussietycoon was for sale.

 

[Sim]

Okay - just because I already had a domain sitting there not being used, and because I wanted to experiment a bit more with the new forum software I'm using on my sites now (XenForo), I've set up a new business discussion forum - http://bizq.com.au/ (BizQ)

I want this forum to be not only for small business owners and entrepreneurs, but also for business investors - people looking to buy passive income streams and such.

Right now I've only got a couple of discussion areas on the site - I figured we'd expand it once the discussion gets moving a bit more.

As I said in a previous post, I intend this new site to be a "sister" site to Somersoft. I'll talk to Ian about things and perhaps look at rebranding BizQ if we think there is merit in doing so.

FYI - I do intend to migrate Somersoft over to use the same forum software running on bizq.com.au (XenForo) at some point in the near future. I'm just waiting on a few more core features to be added, plus some customisations I'm working on to try and match as much functionality of the existing site as possible. I suggest you check out this new software and start familiarising yourself with it. I've been using it on some of my other sites for a while now and I think it is a huge step forward in usability for forum software.

I'll also set up a test version of Somersoft at some point where we can experiment with various features before we do the final migration across.

 

[lizzie]

Hope the business is still progressing well Lizzie. Have you finally revealed what the product is yet???!!!

Sim - I'm there! Got tired of Aussie Tycoon very quickly as soon became apparent that people were posting their generic "blogs" on there en-masse or self publicising - very little help or info or feedback.

Steve - still ploughing away. It seems like every path we follow, with an end in sight, infact, leads to a concealed bend where we discover a better way - or more often tripping face down over a root and finding the rarely discovered, alternative and better-business pathway.

Have gone from buying in heat compressed plastic sheeting, to contracting to have our own manufactured via a third party that took some serious finding(fell over), sourcing the raw materials ourselves for pressing, to investigating buying equipment to shread and press sheeting, to sourcing directly the only heat compressing company in Australia (they don't advertise), to trying to source the raw materials, to collecting over 100kg of HDPE bottles from people's recycling bins, washing and delabelling 100kg of smelly bottles, to sourcing someone to shread for me, to having shreader look at my sample heat compressed sheet (made in my oven) and advise they can give the same effect but with injection moulding, still sourcing raw materials ... and now the injection moulding boss is in China for 2 weeks.

Throw in getting designs CAD drawn, proto-type modelled, redrawn, redrawn again for router cutting which is no longer required if we go injection, MYOB training, admin setup, trying to get made overseas with no success, packaging, marketing etc ...

May have to change our initial product to something different (already designed) during to marketing timing.

Throw in some house reno's and family stuff just to keep it interesting!


Ah well, better to do it properly than rush and get it wrong. Best thing is that, after being very cynical and negative at the start, hubby is 110% on board. He and my international sourcing/import/export agent monopolised a coffee meeting the other day with their brainstorming!

 

[steveadl]

Wow, very involved stuff when you're looking at making your own product!

Hope it all goes well from here. Any time line in site for launch of first product?

Launched a new business myself in July/August after 3-4 months of planning and work. Revenue is now exceeding our existing store which I'm very pleased with. This Christmas should be interesting considering I'm doing 15hr days already at the moment. But loving the challenge.

 

[RumpledElf]

We're re-twiddling our website and changing things so it is aimed more at what we're actually good at and want to do, it was a bit too mass-market before. Turns out we are actually *very* good at what we do and there's a reasonable niche for that kind of work and the pay is much better than mass-market.

This came about because I wandered into a support chat room on the internet almost a year ago now and have learnt an amazing amount in there as well as confirming that yes, I'm good at solving other people's technical problems (in this case mostly data design in Drupal). Not that I didn't already know that, I used to be a tutor at uni and data design has always been my biggest strength. Free online tech support is also a great use of all that free time between chasing babies around (and a surprising amount of people are happy to toss a few coins into your paypal begging bowl, without you asking)

End result is people in there know who I am now, I'm not particularly hard to google and crosscheck (someone added me on linkedin and asked about my partner by real name purely from my internet nick lol), and somehow I have lots of karma and even moderator status. Our current job came from someone I'd consistently helped in there and referred us to his boss because "you guys know everything" and there's a lot of Australian businesses in there who have loads of work and are looking for people to do their overflow jobs. International too, but its far easier working with Australians.

IMHO this is the best possible outcome from going into a chat room because you have too much free time and are too sleep deprived to do much Real Work. And we're no longer sleep deprived since we built a house where the baby has his own room!

 

[lizzie]

This came about because I wandered into a support chat room on the internet almost a year ago now and have learnt an amazing amount in there

I found that was my biggest asset - talking (and listening) to everyone! Following every lead as you never know where it will go.

Hubby used to get cross that I was talking to much - but conversing has lead me to just about everyone on my team, and to every new and positive turn in the journey ... I am just careful not to give away the secret stuff.

Launch? Was hoping for marketing to begin Jan/Feb 2012 - but this new twist means we might blow out further, hence the change of launch product. But I am a great believer in things happen a certain way for a reason ... as long as you engage and take action when opportunities are presented, fate is an amazing provider.

Now - I have to go and paint a wall!

 

[steveadl]

.

Launch? Was hoping for marketing to begin Jan/Feb 2012 - but this new twist means we might blow out further, hence the change of launch product. But I am a great believer in things happen a certain way for a reason ... as long as you engage and take action when opportunities are presented, fate is an amazing provider.

Now - I have to go and paint a wall!

Lizzie, has your product reached the market yet?

 

[lizzie]

Hahaha - no.

Have first run of prototypes made around 2 months ago from my self collected/shredded and sent to Melbourne to press HDPE plastic.... and they look sensational. We've had to do some design tweaking, and I've been conversing with a marketing guru (who also happens to be a friend of a friend) on what direction to take next.

Only problem is that now I am trying to source a commercial supplier of the particular semi-sorted HDPE with no success so far.

I thought I'd found one - again thru a friend - in Sulo grinding up their fault garbage bins (huge range of colours), and they are more than happy to provide granulated HDPE to me at a brilliant price ... only problem is that they don't pre-sort into colours. So it means that in one 1 ton sack you can have thick layers of yellow, burgandy, green (depending on what line they are granulating) but not a full bag of a particular colour - which is what I was initially after.

Was down their today talking to their supply people. I can buy the clean/faultly bins off them and grind myself if I want.

Also, have been unable to find anyone who does the semi-opaque milk bottle flake without contamination ... which turns the white into a tinged colour, almost a green/grey tinge which looks dirty.

Ah well - if it was easy someone would have already done it.

Anyhow - have a mixed sample from Sulo currently in the sandwich press to see what effect appears. May be another lane change coming up ...