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Clarity

Manolis Sfinarolakis

New Britain, Connecticut

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.

$1.00/min

7

7 Calls

16

16 Reviews

40 minutes
Avg. call

Entrepreneurship Lean startup Crowdfunding Crowdsourcing Real Estate Small Business Networking CRM

Call me to talk about

the 9 Stages of Crowdfunding Success

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.

3 Twitter Growth Hacking Tips for Website Traffic

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.

Real Estate Property Management & Leasing

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.

Answers 20
Reviews 16

Answers

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

Conflicting info- this is the prob w/ info overload... Should I go for E.funding/ D.funding/ C.funding... ? For a tech startup?

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?

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Start-ups

Fundraising

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

Would this be a good place to get funding for a tiny home community development?

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?

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Construction

Single Family Homes

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

What is the best way to break into Product Management?

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!

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Product Management

Career Development

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

Is this idea validation or harmful, good practice or a off on the wrong foot?

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.

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bootstrapping

New Product Validation

Networking

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

What is the best way to validate a B2B2C idea?

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!

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Value Proposition

Customer validation

New Product Validation

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

My team and I are putting together a crowd-funding project through Kickstarter. Question is: Is it okay for us to post it here on Clarity?

I personally would love to see it.

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Crowdfunding

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

How could I seek out a Mentor? Preferably a Mentor who's already had a successful Business.

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!

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Business planning

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

Torn. Should i launch direct in market or do i spend the time to align with women's groups that focus on women in business & use them as springboard?

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!

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Fashion Marketing

Brand development

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

If you were to build a business social Community, what will be the key ingredients to success?

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.

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Small Business

Social Networking

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

What is the first step to starting a business?

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!

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Start-ups

Entrepreneurship

Business Strategy

Manolis Sfinarolakis answered

Are new startups more successful if they are always new or high tech related?

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.

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Online Marketing

Reviews

Great call, Manolis is always on time, prepared for our questions and helpful with direction for our project!!!

Gene Rumley Source: Clarity

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

gene rumley Source: Clarity

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!!!

gene rumley Source: Clarity

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.

Gabriel Barros Source: Clarity

Awesome call. Excellent advice. I look forward to talking to him agian.

Glenn Stegall Source: Clarity

Manolis and his team produce exceptional results. When managing the CFIRA twitter profile he grew the following by thousands in under a month.

Joy Schoffler Source: LinkedIn

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.

AdaPia d'Errico Source: LinkedIn

Manolis is a strategic partner and a crowdfunding expert. I highly recommend working with Manolis.

Chris LaBonty Source: LinkedIn

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!

Eva Cohen Source: LinkedIn

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

Tom Jikomes Source: LinkedIn

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.

private private Source: LinkedIn

Member since November 2013