http://www.citruslane.com/

Citrus Lane is a new startup that specializes in ‘care packages’ for the parents. It uses the same business model as LittlePassports (or Dollar Shave Club that raised over a million dollars) , so the company essentially handpicks products for children based on recommendations from parents, then ships them off in theme packages each month.

The boxes are filled with four to five products tailored to the child’s age, from newborn to 3 years old. For example, last December’s theme box, “Home for the Holidays,” included a comfort-grip cookie cutter, organic body lotion and a fuzzy baby hat from baby clothing company Zutano.

For soon to be parents, Citrus Lanes offers a special ‘pregnancy box’ that comes with organic lotions and tummy rubs, foot petals, specialty candy bars and Amy Tara Koch’s famous Bump It Up style guide for pregnant women, among other things.

The service is $25 a month (less for a six- or 12-month package), and shipping is always free. If you are intersted in using advanced business models for your web-based business (subscription, freemium, risk reversal, etc.) I recommend you read Web 2.0 and Beyond: Understanding the New Online Business Models, Trends, and Technologies

[Via - Unusual Business Ideas]

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Moms Making Millions - Melody Hsieh/Mobo Cruiser

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1. Bitrix24.com

Effective communication among employees is substantial for the success of a business. But having corporate intranets are usually very expensive and could be unaffordable for small businesses. Set your worries aside because Bitrix24 offers a solution to that problem. With Bitrix24, a business with 12 employees or less can have the basic package for free. I will repeat it - fully functional CRM, activity streaming where every team member gets updates as events unfold, calendar, activity planner, sales funnel plus other features at exactly 0 cost to your business. Furthermore, if you have more than 12 employees working for your company, you will have to pay a very affordable price of $99 a month for the Bitrix24 services.

2. Logaster.com

A logo is a must for virtually business, online or not. Professional logo designers will charge you hundreds of dollars for their services. You can opt to use crowdsourcing sites to g et the logo you want, but that will still cost you at least a hundred bucks too. Do you want to create your logo for free? Logaster.com makes it possible without spending a dime. And what more, just pay a subscription fee of $4.99 and you can also get designs for business cards, letterheads, envelopes your business needs.

3. PickyDomains.com

Coming up with a company name or a domain for a website might seem like an easy task. But branding can actually be one of the most difficult steps in starting a business because it can make or break your company. There are already millions of registered top domains and this fact makes it harder for you to think of one for your own. That’s why you cannot blame other people if they pay somebody else to accomplish this task for them. With over 55, 000 namer contributors, PickyDomains’ clients do not have to ‘brainstorm themselves to death. All they have to do is register, pay a deposit ($50 for a domain, brand or name and $75 for a slogan), specify their parameters, then choose among the suggested domains. And a refund will be available in the event that the client approves none of the suggestions made.

4. JetRadar.com

Playing the securing-cheap-air-fare game has been changed forever, thanks to niche sites like Expedia, CheapFlights and Orbitz. So here comes JetRada.com, offering even cheaper tickets to people who love travelling or have to (which is common for many types of businesses). JetRadar.com uses a simple ‘trick’ - not all deals from airline companies are publicly available. Most air carriers post their exclusive deals only on their own websites to lure the customers away from price comparison websites. But JetRadar.com acts as a meta search engine that searches through every travel agency, every major flight site an d through the 728 registered airlines, getting the cheapest deals available through a single site.

5. iSpionage.com

Knowing your competitors is necessary if you are running a business. And online, it’s not just that other shop accross the street. iSpionage tells you what your competitors are up to - are they spending money on Google and Bing ads (and if yes, how much), which keywords they bid on, which keywords generate most of free traffic for them, and ton of other valuable data. For free you can do three searches a day, if you want to have access to everything, it’s $59 a month.

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http://www.mobocruiser.com/

Entrepreneurism runs in Melody Hsieh’s blood. Her parents operated an auto parts factory in Taiwan, where she once worked at the age of 8.

“I learned early in life that hard work and smart work are the essential ingredients to running a successful business,” she said.

So after college in 2000, Hsieh decided to start a company, with family money, that sold scooters. By 2003, sales at her ASA Products surged to $3 million.

But in the next three years, annual sales quickly plummeted to $300,000. “My mistake was that I had no long-term strategy to build my brand,” she said. “I was just pursuing a hot trend, and not paying attention to competition, customer service or marketing.”

In 2006, she took a hiatus from her company and went back to school for her MBA. In late 2006, she relaunched a new product — Mobo Cruisers — a line of three-wheeled cruisers for kids and adults. “This time I applied what I learned in school about marketing, operations and research before I launched the brand,” said Hsieh.

Today, Mobo Cruisers is sold through Target and Toys “R” Us and expanding into Canada. Hsieh, who’s a new mom to her three-month-old son, said she’s busier than ever now. “Women can do it. It’s hard but you don’t have to give up one role for the other,” she said. “Have a routine that works for you and stick to it.”

[Via - CNNMoney, HT - Easy Money]

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So you came up with an idea for an online business and started thinking of a great domain name for it, only to realize that all the good domain names are already taken. Then you tried automatic domain name generation tools, but most of the name they generated didn’t make any sense. What to do now? Well, just crowdsource your domain name idea generation to PickyDomains.

PickyDomains is a cool service that offers 100% risk free domain name and business slogan or tag line generation service. It has a proven track record of generating great domain names, and business slogans such as SEOBook for Aaron Wall, eMomsAtHome Wendy Piersall, and SurefireMarketing for Yanik Silver.

How Does it Work?

To get started, you have to deposit amount depending upon the service you need. For domain name suggestions, the fee is $50. For business slogan suggestions, its $75. You can use credit card, paypal or wire transfer to deposit the money. Note that this money is only a deposit, which means if you don’t like any of the domain names suggested by them, you get a full refund.

After payment, you send them more details about the site you are starting, and characteristics of the domain name you need, like preferred extensions, length, and hyphenated or not. After that just wait and watch as people start suggesting the names.

You must check the suggested names periodically and mark them Liked or Disliked to indicate your taste. Once you find the domain you like, just mark it Picked to complete your order.

There are more then 44,000 registered contributors at Pickydomains right now, which means you can get what you are looking for within a few days, or sometimes, within few hours!

Become A Contributor And Make Some Money

You can also join PickyDomain as a contributor and make some money. Just register as a contributor and log into your account. Then, check the available orders to see if you can come up with some good domain names for them. If you suggest a domain that is picked by a client, then you get 40-60% of the fee, depending on you rank, which improves with the number of suggestions you post.

To get great domain name suggestions and business name ideas, check out PickyDomains.com.

[Via - Hacktrix.com]

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http://www.personal.com/

“The world is not going back to analog. We are going to be digital until the end of time.” If startup Personal.com’s co-founder and CEO Shane Green is to be believed, indeed, the world of information technology is moving towards the cloud, and fast.

Personal.com is a Washington-based startup that aims to simplify the storage of personal data, such as passwords, alarm codes, birthdays, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, retirement account numbers, drugs or medications you or your loved ones are currently taking, security codes, passport numbers, emergency phone numbers, instructions on how to use a particular appliance, directions to and from your office, the list goes on and on.

Personal.com has come up with a cloud-based vault of sorts where users store bits of information about themselves in buckets, also called gems, and permissions are assigned on an item-by-item basis. The Android and web-based versions of the application have been available for download since November. The iPhone version was just added a week ago. The service is still in its beta release and is currently free. But the company is looking to implement a Dropbox-style model, where paid levels are to be added, the criteria of which are still to be determined, most probably usage.

Amid the ongoing digital privacy debate, Green emphasizes that his model can potentially change industries on a wide scale. The ultimate challenge is how to “get people to care about their data.” Green and his colleagues are also looking to find ways for users to monetize the data they have in their hands, one of which is in the area of advertising and marketing.

[HT - Unusual Business]

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http://www.hisshosushi.com/

When Philip Maung began a sushi-making company on his dining room table 14 years ago, a 46,000-square-foot headquarters with ping-pong tables, spontaneous karaoke sing-a-longs and smiling employees seemed like a distant dream. Yet, over the last decade and amid a struggling economy, Maung has built his business into a vibrant food service distribution company that currently manages over 400 sushi bars in high-end grocery stores, cafes, hospitals and universities throughout the United States.

A true embodiment of the American dream (he came to the U.S. in 1989 with $13), Maung saw a business opportunity in a practically destitute sushi market on the east coast. He chose Charlotte as the company’s base because of the number of banks the city had, but quickly learned they were hesitant to give him a loan without previous successes. Pooling resources with his wife, Maung says Hissho started with many sleepless nights.

Quality product and detailed service was what brought Hissho early success, allowing it to snowball into the franchise it is today. Hissho boasts 62% 3-year growth in an economic decline.

“We don’t advertise,” Muang explains, “People call us. Our business was built through word of mouth. Our success came because we built relationships with one partner at a time and we stand behind our product.”

Muang likens Hissho to Starbucks, calling his sushi an “affordable luxury.” The product is also in areas people who are no longer eating out usually tend to go: the supermarket.

Hissho’s mission to produce the highest quality sushi with the best ingredients starts at its hub in Charlotte. All of Hissho’s chefs spend seven to 11 weeks training at the company’s headquarters before relocating to a Hissho sushi bar in affiliated market places.

Despite his company’s dominance of the supermarket sushi culture (reporting $34.6 million in revenue for 2010) and an invitation last fall to hear President Obama speak to Congress, Maung is happiest about his company’s recent internal transformation.

“The first 10 years we didn’t have a company culture at all,” Maung says. “We worked so hard. I began to realize that money wasn’t everything and our people were tired. We’ve created a second home for our employees and we make sure they have fun. Nothing is going to happen if you don’t take care of your people.”

[Via - Unusual Business Ideas]

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OK, so in Parts 1 and 2, I told the story of my first steps with PickyDomains.com – namely getting publicity from bloggers and news sites for free. The next step was to buy some publicity – namely blog reviews. Back then (let me remind you, it was 2007) quite a few get-paid-for-review services appeared. ReviewMe.com as particularly hot and PayPerPost.com was getting a lot of traction as well.

I opted for ReviewMe.Com. I quickly learned that most reviews would cost me anywhere between 80 and 150 dollars (that is, if I wanted reviews to appear on blogs with PageRank and readership – there has never been shortage of cheap junky made-for-SEO blogs, especially on PPP). This was a lot of money, and ReviewMe.Com was partly to blame – they paid only 50% of the money to bloggers and took the rest. For the record, the highest I paid for a review was $500. I am never doing it again.

The idea to cut the middleman out was obvious. I started using ‘pay per post’ sites only to find blogs that offered advertising and approached owners directly. This approach cut my costs of getting published in half. I tried haggling some more and then an interesting thing happened. One blogger told me that $30 that I was offering was too low, because it would take him an hour to actually write the review and his time was more valuable than that. So I offered him to provide a written review and he’d publish it for lower price, provided the approved it. It worked.

After that my approach to buying reviews for PickyDomains changed. I felt that I could justify $30 for getting by blog reviewed. If blogger asked for more, I’d inform him or her that that was outside my budget, but I could provide review myself, if the price was lowered. Later we started advertising the fact that PickyDomains would pay $30 for review right on the site – so now I don’t have to spend much time looking for bloggers, as they approach me.

Finally, I found a way to get PickyDomains advertised on blogs for free. Yes, ZERO. And it’s very simple. Guest posts. A lot of blogs accept guest posts. Quite a few actually advertise this fact and have guest blogging or write for us section on their blog. All you have to do is provide a unique (meaning not published anywhere else) well written content. Believe me, you won’t have much competition, because most guest post submissions are pure junk.

Here are a few examples of my guest posts:

http://regulargeek.com/2011/06/20/7-sites-to-help-crowdsource-your-web-work/

http://growmap.com/domain-name-ideas/

http://byterevel.com/2011/10/22/9-wacky-but-successful-website-ideas/

Why am I submitting guest posts in this format? Because it’s easy to publish your guest posts this way. If I was to offer PickyDomains overview as a guest post – it would surely get rejected. But by making a ‘list’ guest post is no longer about just PickyDomains. The second, more important reason, is the topic. Some blogs are about writing or blogging. Others are about tech startups. There are blogs about bootstrapping. Or branding. Or crowdsourcing. The list format lets you tailor guest post to each blog you are pitching your story to. Finally, when you make a list, link to your site looks natural, because you are linking to every site you mention. Usually links are allowed in the signature of the guest post and not in the body. With my approach, I NEVER had any issues getting my link where it mattered (nobody reads the signature).

At first I did both writing and pitching guest posts myself. It quickly became a time consuming affair, since I was writing a new post almost every day and it quickly became ‘old’. I was getting tired. So I started outsourcing (I REALLY recommend this site) first writing and then placing guest posts. Obviously, it was costing my money, so the true cost was no longer zero, but it did achieve an important goal – now several blogs write about PickyDomains every week with very little effort on my behalf.

That’s it for today, but more is coming. And if you have any questions or have a service that you’d like me to promote through guest posts with PickyDomains, use PickyDomains support form to contact me.

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Every three months at Wall Street, companies conduct earnings conference calls. And in these conference calls, companies undersell their expectations via the term “conservatism,” and brokerage firm analysts not wanting to turn away corporate clients follow the lead and give out deliberately low estimates. Three months later, companies report their earnings again, and this time, they beat Street consensus, and their stock prices rise, albeit temporarily.

Estimize creator Leigh Drogen, a former hedge fund professional, is out to change this practice. With Estimize, he envisions a new form of crowd control to bridge the gap between the official analysts’ consensus and what the investment community really thinks about a company’s earnings. Estimize is an online platform where anyone can sign up for free. More than 4,300 people so far have already registered, 77% of which are self-identified as independent, 20% as buy-side and 3% as sell-side.

Once logged in, members look up a stock and then enter guesses for revenue and earnings per share. While there may be too little indication to come up with a conclusion, so far, estimates of the Estimize crowd have been closer to actual results 63% of the time.

Estimize not only aims to correct corporate spinning or guidance, it also aspires to open doors to newcomers and help spot unknown talent.

[Via - Unusual Business Ideas]

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http://pleasebringme.com/

For years now it’s been common for those travelling abroad to ask friends whether they would like anything brought back from their destination. Hoping to open this system of privately run imports and exports up to a far wider network, citizens can now request that incoming tourists bring hard to get hold of items from outside their own country through PleaseBringMe.com.

The Turkey-based site has a simple layout, with two options to click on depending on whether the user would like something brought in or are planning to visit a different country. Those heading abroad can fill in a form explaining where they are travelling from and to, the dates of their trip, and what they will be willing to bring with them. Locals wanting an item from elsewhere can pick their location and requested object, as well as what they are willing to offer in return. This can range from cash to a tour of the area, an item of similar value, or an offer of a meal. Alternatively, tourists can offer to bring something as a gift, with no repayment expected. Each post is then advertised on the site in a similar fashion to a bulletin board. PleaseBringMe.com aims to help users receive items that may be expensive or difficult to import. It could also contribute to reducing carbon emissions through travel by combining tourist and courier journeys.

Much like craigslist, Gumtree and similar services, PleaseBringMe.com is an online platform for arranging real-world interactions, but shifts the regional aspect to a more global approach. A supply-demand model that could be adapted specifically for businesses?

[Via - Webiot.Com]

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