10 Awesome Startups You’ve Probably Never Heard About

http://www.newyourkey.com/

New Yorkers who have a hard time keeping track of personal items now have one less thing to worry about. For a modest annual fee, NewYourKey keeps copies of keys in a secure storage facility and can deliver them right away if customers find themselves locked out. Keys lost in a nightclub at four in the morning? No problem! NewYourKey will deliver spare keys within an hour any time of day or night, wherever a customer happens to be.

http://www.pickydomains.com/

Can’t think of that totally awesome domain name for a new website? PickyDomains is a risk-free domain naming service that got a lot of publicity and ‘blogtalk’ in Europe lately despite being only two months old. This is how it works. A customer deposits $50 dollars and describes what kind of domain he or she wants. Domain pickers then send in their suggestions of available domain names. If the customer likes one of the domain names and registers it, the service gets $50. Otherwise the money is refunded at the end of the month.

http://www.darknessradio.com/

Dave Schrader of Circle Pines and Tim Dennis of Burnsville are leading groups on trips to haunted hotels and spooky cruise ships. The two started an online radio show called “Darkness Radio” in January 2006. Within a year, their weekly broadcasts had made them celebrities among fanciers of otherworldly mystery.
They then began asking the stars of T-V shows about the supernatural to cohost weekends at haunted destinations. Among the locations are the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado — made famous by the movie “The Shining.” Travelers pay between 180 dollars to 250 dollars for the trips — not including transportation or lodging.

http://www.peasy.com/

Peasy.com is an online marketplace for parking spaces, enabling drivers to search for and book spaces before they leave home, and letting British homeowners monetize unused parking spaces by adding them to the Peasy network. To rent out a parking space, the owner needs to register and enter all relevant details, including price, when the space is available, and whether it will be rented out daily, weekly, or both. Those who require parking can then search for suitable parking spaces and securely book them online, or first negotiate a better price.

http://recruitmentrevolution.com/

Frustrated with the whole process of recruitment agencies Jamie Mistlin and Anna Taylor decided to design a new system where employers and candidates could communicate directly with each other. The site allows companies to book temporary workers directly via our bespoke fully-automated online system. Both parties can even negotiate the hourly rates directly online, as the service does not filter or distribute CVs. Instead candidates market themselves directly to companies via the website.

http://www.gaming-lessons.com/

Tom Taylor never expected to be a player in the business world; he just wanted to play video games. But as he got better and better, his passion for competitive gaming–and his desire to share his expertise with others–grew. Last year, Taylor, a top-five rated player in the pro-gaming circuit, started a video game coaching business to help others who wanted to improve their games. “I wanted to offer them a shortcut so they didn’t have to go through what I did to learn,” says Taylor, who started playing video games at age 7. Running his business, Gaming-Lessons, out of his Jupiter, Fla., home, Taylor draws dozens of clients from middle-school kids to middle-aged parents and from college students to celebrities. His fees? A whopping $65 an hour.

http://www.alchemygoods.com/

Two years ago, Eli Reich was a mechanical engineer consultant for a Seattle wind energy company when his messenger bag was stolen. The environmentally conscious Reich, who rode his bike to work every day, decided that instead of buying a new one, he would simply fashion another bag out of used bicycle-tire inner tubes that were lying around his house. Soon compliments on his sturdy black handmade messenger bag turned into requests. “That was the catalyst,” says Reich, who obtained a business license, gave up his day job, and quickly launched Alchemy Goods in the basement of his apartment building. The company’s motto: “Turning useless into useful.”

http://www.bagborroworsteal.com/

Got rich friends and need to look the part? Those that can’t afford to buy the latest Fendi purse can still sport it thanks to Bag Borrow or Steal, a designer handbag rental startup that allows customers to pay a monthly fee, pick and order handbags online, and borrow them for as long as they like. The service allows style-conscious customers access to the ultra-luxe and high-end products that they otherwise couldn’t get their hands on. Monthly memberships range from $20 to $175 a month

http://www.corporateinterns.com/

When Jason Engen was an undergraduate student at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, he and his friends knew the challenges students faced in finding worthwhile internships. So for one of his business classes, Engen wrote a business plan detailing a concept for an internship placement service–one that would interview and screen students and match them with local companies that needed interns. “We hit a nerve in terms of the marketplace and focused 100 percent of our efforts on students,” says Engen. “We started a week after we graduated, and it took off.”

http://www.heybuddyvending.com/

Started in 2005, Startup costs: $6,000

When July hit Miami in 1998, everyone seemed to be enjoying the dog days of summer–except the dogs. As owners took giant swigs from their 32-ounce water bottles, their dogs ran to and fro, wearily retrieving makeshift toys in the afternoon heat. It was on one sunny afternoon in July that Carlotta Lennox rolled by a park on a pair of rollerblades, noticed that the dogs looked tired and hungry, and realized how she could give the day back to the dogs. Seven years later, the first Hey Buddy pet vending machine was established in Bark Park Central, an off-leash dog park in Dallas. Lennox, 36, stocked the machine with dog treats, tennis balls, dog shirts, dog glasses–basically everything a dog might need for a walk in the park. And with its shingled roof and slated facade, the doghouse-inspired vending machine was hard to miss–which meant pets and their owners weren’t the only ones begging Lennox for more.

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Top 10 Unusual Online Business Ideas That Made Someone Rich

1. Million Dollar Homepage

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2. SantaMail

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer. Full Story

3. Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4. LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord. Full Story

5. AntennaBalls

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire. Full Story

6. FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that’s big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie’s company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. PickyDomains

Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? No way people would pay for this. Actually, naming domain names for others turned out a thriving business, especially, when you make the entire process risk free. PickyDomains currently has a waiting list of people who want to PAY the service to come up with a snappy memorable domain name. PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year. Full Story

10. Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

To see other businesses that have not made the top 10 list but came pretty close, visit Business Ideas Blog

How to Close a Sale in the First 30 Seconds

Tap into customers’ hidden wants to win their trust–and their business.

Those of us in sales are often consumed with one thing: the close. We’ve been trained to accomplish this by pushing those all-important features and benefits. From the moment we begin the sales process, our vision is focused on the end.

What if we’ve got it backwards? In my observation–and research bears this out–the outcome of the sale is determined within the first 30 seconds of a presentation. It’s during this key period that decision-makers often reach for the “turn off” switch.

Does this seem rational? Of course not. But buying isn’t purely rational; it’s greatly influenced by emotion. That’s why it’s essential to build a sales process around your opening gambit rather than your closing techniques.

You might use small talk to develop a relationship or position a benefit claim. You might ask prospects questions, such as “What would you like to accomplish?” You might even boldly announce your own hopes for the meeting and say, “This is what I’d like to accomplish today.”

But if buying decisions are made not in the head but in the gut, are these the best opening gambits?

In the book, You’re Working Too Hard to Make the Sale!, researchers William Brooks and Thomas Travisano examine how a buyer’s emotional triggers influence the sales outcome from the first meeting. After interviewing hundreds of decision-makers, buyers and end-users, they conclude that customers want to buy from people they believe understand them. Features and benefits barely enter into the decision.

Most salespeople encourage buyers to talk about their needs. But an insightful salesperson will also interpret buyers’ subliminal wants. Across the board, it appears that customers who share the same job role–say entrepreneurs, purchasing agents or chief financial managers–share the same underlying wants.

Take selling to other entrepreneurs, for example. Many people assume entrepreneurs are driven primarily by the desire to make big profits. As you probably know, that’s simply not true. Entrepreneurs are in business for themselves because they want to call the shots. Their true wants include being the boss, ensuring the company’s security and perhaps passing the company along to a successor.

As a salesperson, if you can subtly communicate to an entrepreneur that you understand his or her true wants and that you can help achieve them, you stand a better chance of closing the sale.

So as you prepare for a presentation, think about the person you’ll be presenting to and their role within the company. What are their wants? What’s the fear or pain they try to avoid? Remember, wants aren’t business goals. They’re personal, emotional desires that tend to be universal among buyers in similar categories. It’s to your advantage to prepare an opening strategy for each category of decision-maker you come in contact with.

Now, let’s consider the purchasing agent. In general, purchasing agents need to get up to speed quickly on products and services that may be outside their realm of expertise. They live with the fear that they’ll be overwhelmed with technical information they have no desire or time to master.

So when meeting with a purchasing agent, present your product or service in a way that’s easily understood. Avoid technical jargon; don’t try to wow ‘em with your in-depth knowledge. Play to the purchasing agent’s want–that your product or service is easy to understand and can be purchased safely–without delving into a mind-spinning education.

By immediately demonstrating to buyers that you understand their wants, you’ll increase their comfort level with you, which is the first step to gaining their trust. Once a base level of trust is established, the buyer’s inclined to keep an open mind, instead of closing the door.

A word of caution: This technique can be tricky at first. It goes against our habits. As salespeople, we’re trained to unearth the prospect’s need so we can solve the problem with our product or services. But needs are rationally based, while buyers are emotionally driven. So satisfy the wants first.

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