Manolis Sfinarolakis is the Founder of Reality Crowd TV Media Corporation whose mission is to inform, educate, inspire, and motivate entrepreneurs worldwide to start small businesses through crowdfunding and provide a blue print on how to crowdfund.
As a student of crowdfunding, I have studied, interviewed, and helped dozens of campaigns in their crowdfunding goals as part of Reality Crowd TV’s coverage of the industry. During this time, we tried to dissect these campaigns to determine the anatomy of a crowdfunding campaign from start to finish. The following blog post details the 9 stages that we have identified during this year and a half long journey: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/9-stages-crowdfunding-success-manolis-sfinarolakis?trk=prof-post
If you are interested in a more in depth conversation after reading that blog post, I would be happy to consult you on your specific project.
In this consultation which should last no longer than 1 hour, you will learn three twitter tools that I use regularly to growth a targeted following by approximately 5,000 every month. I charge $500 a month for the accounts that I do this for as a contractor, and after this consultation you will essentially be able to do the same on your own account or on the accounts of others.
Ran a property management and leasing company for 1.5 years and rented out 85 apartments during that time. I can help you determine a business model for how to rent out over 10 properties per month, including identifying listings, process to market them, running background checks, and the application signing process.
Would need to know a heck of a lot more about your company, product, or service before I can give you advice on this :). Can you elaborate please?
I actually just came across this article from Real Estate Crowdfunding Platform Patch of Land about how tiny homes are going to be very innovative and popular: https://patchofland.com/blog/growing-communities/2015/01/28/innovation-online-residential-real-estate-investing-patch-of-land/. In terms of the funding, Patch of Land focused on the debt side of the equation and usually focuses on fix / flips. You might be better off trying to raise equity for this type of construction through real estate crowdfunding avenues. Have you looking into those avenues for your funding?
Hi Aiden, although I am not specifically a Product Management guy, I am a business development guy that has left his corporate job to create a small business so I can share with you my experience from that perspective. The first thing you should begin to do is ultimately attempt to consult others on a part time basis. In this fashion, you would ultimately learn how to sell your services, learn from any feedback you receive good or bad, and adjust your sales pitch accordingly. If you wanted to start from the perspective of setting up a company, one website I recommend to organize your thoughts into a "Lean Launch Model" would be http://www.startitup.co.
From the perspective of where you would find the leads, LinkedIn is the most amazing B2B platform and with the right targeting of keywords to find the decision makers in the companies that may need your consulting advice and the development of a template, you can easily send out messages that are customized to your connections and generate opportunities in which you can pitch what you have to offer. It works for nearly every service offering too, so long as you strategically target those who would be interested.
In summary, start part time, organize your business thoughts via http://www.startitup.co, and use LinkedIn as your primary driver of business development. Hope this helps!
I would love to share a quote that this reminded me of, "If Someone Offers You An Opportunity And You Are Not Sure You Can Do It, Say Yes - Then Learn How To Do It Late" - Richard Branson and my latest tweet :) https://twitter.com/AverageJoeVC.
You are doing everything right! You are not sketchy at all and the truth of the matter is, they likely receive a lot of these types of inquiries. What you are potentially doing for them is presenting them with additional business for their endeavors, almost like providing them with additional deal flow. If you can firm up exactly what your offering is, how it would be fulfilled, the costs associated with fulfilling it, and ultimately come up with a price for that offering, you can then go work on the customer side of the equation to match the customer with the provider who would fulfill the solution and essentially broker the deal. Looks like you may be building a Marketplace of some sort and I encourage you to keep on moving :). Good luck.
Looks like an interesting service for sure in the form of a browser extension. I guess my first question would be, are you validating it to raise capital eventually? Do you need capital now to ultimately create it? From the sounds of it the best way to validate it if you have the option is to create it and have people use it.
If you don't have that luxury, is there a way you can validate it manually? Sounds like a stupid question but sometimes you might be able to validate an idea through manual means first then develop the technology around the process to replicate the result automatically. Hope that helps!
I personally would love to see it.
Great question! I recently came across a mentoring website called http://www.micromentor.org/ which could be a great place to start. Additionally, I like this site as well: https://www.dreamseedo.org/. One final way you can approach this especially if you are looking to start a business is to do the e-learning route through a website I found called http://startitup.com. It is completely free and takes your through an interactive Lean Launch Program so you can better articulate what your vision and dreams are. One final mentor source that I have found to be most valuable, read inspiration and motivational business books. They will ultimately create within you a thirst for knowledge. Think and Grow Rich is my all time favorite and is a timeless classic. Good luck my friend!
Looks like a cool concept that would be perfect for a crowdfunding launch. I understand your question on either or, but I think you can ultimately do both at the same time. As part of the 9 stages of crowdfunding which occurs 3 to 6 months before you ever launch a campaign, you ultimately will be marketing through social media, reaching out to media contacts, and bringing together your traditional network in order to execute a successful launch of your business and products. Here is a blog post I recently did on LinkedIn that might help you understand the process better: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/9-stages-crowdfunding-success-manolis-sfinarolakis?trk=prof-post
If you decide to do one or the other, I think the best way would be first to go direct to market and prove your concept with individual customers. Once you have some testimonials of individuals who are excited about your business, you then have something to show the women organizations who would be more willing to take a risk on a new business if they see customers using it who are happy. Hope this helps!
Excellent Question! One that I am currently working towards in my efforts to build a social community around crowdfunding.
A great book I read is by Seth Godin called Tribes. I found this slide share presentation that gives a good summary on the book and the elements described therein should help you on that: http://www.slideshare.net/hhoefele/notes-on-seth-godins-book-tribes-presentation
From my own experience:
1. Needs a structure for the community to communicate to collaborate
2. Needs a common purpose where the members can both further a cause or help each other if that is the cause
3.. Must reward members for positive behaviors and deter members for negative behaviors.
For my own site, I am using http://www.socialengine.com which is a white label social network that is working really well for us. To review what we have built you can check out incubator.realitycrowdtv.com and see the engagement and community we are building.
The business plan or the business model would be the first step. I personally find this website is a great place to start in order to follow the lean launch model: http://www.startitup.co. Best of luck!
I would need to know a little more about your product or service but it sounds to me like you are making an improvement to an existing product or service and that to me sounds like a viable business model. If you can package whatever the specific service or product is in a scale-able way through technology and prove the concept and gain some traction, then I think you could raise funds using a platform like Fundable or other platforms for that matter. I would be interested in learning more so I can give you more specific answers to this question.
Great call, Manolis is always on time, prepared for our questions and helpful with direction for our project!!!
Our call was excellent with Manolis, we covered a lot of fine details re: a Crowd Funding project we will start in Sept 2015 We also received notes and additional details covering samples of other projects that had a non-profit status. Mission4Orphans.com Gene Rumley
We had an excellent call with Manolis re: our Crowd-Funding project. A list of questions were sent in advance so we were all prepared to cover the "Key" points that was needed to set up and begin our C-F Project. This will be a first for our Mission For Orphans Company, so we want to make sure we achieve the max results. The information and knowledge we received will help us prevent some of the mistakes we have heard about with Crowd-Funding. Very pleased with our call & the professionalism!!!
Manolis is very knowledgeable and helpful at what he does. He provides clear and insightful training that can be useful to start-up companies. He not only teaches you step-by-step about the process, but he also gives lucid examples and helpful strategies as well. I'm very satisfied with Manolis' walkthroughs and look forward to have more of them.
Awesome call. Excellent advice. I look forward to talking to him agian.
Manolis and his team produce exceptional results. When managing the CFIRA twitter profile he grew the following by thousands in under a month.
Manolis has passion, dedication and commitment to what he does and it comes across in his work. He's helped our company grow its social media audience, while spreading the word and educating the public on the benefits of the JOBS Act, Crowdfunding and the New Real Estate Financing. He can think strategically, execute tactically and is a great team player.
Manolis is a strategic partner and a crowdfunding expert. I highly recommend working with Manolis.
Manolis is extremely knowledgeable about all aspects of crowdfunding, from advance planning to campaign analytics. He is very outgoing and helpful, and I learned a lot from him that will be very useful for my Fused Society campaign. I highly recommend Manolis and what his company has to offer for anyone interested in crowdfunding!
I am very impressed with Manolis and his expertise with social media.
Sincerely, Tom Jikomes tjikomes@gmail.com Executive Producer onedaytwolegends.com The day The Beatles met Elvis
After an initial introduction at Kickercon Crowdfunding Conference in Houston, our team at RealtyWealth used Manolis and Reality Crowd TV Media Corp. as a resource for our launch. His assistance was very valuable, as was his insight into, and network within the Crowdfunding community. We recommend him and his organization unreservedly. He is an asset to the community.
