The thoughts, adventures and learnings of Nikolay Piriankov – CEO @ Taylor & Hart
Last week I was fortunate enough to be featured on the Grad Factor TV show. (watch below from 11:44 onwards)
I would really appreciate it if you could help out and vote for me to get to the finals in London:
If you’re on Twitter just click the link below and THAT’S IT, your vote is counted!
This month I came across two really, REALLY cool online services that made it just that much easier doing business online (and a lot more enjoyable).
The first of these was Zapier. Credit to Google who somehow knew that I was looking for a service just like the one Zapier was providing – to link two otherwise unlinked online services through their API, without being a developer. Zapier lets you link several dozen services by creating a “zap” between them.
In my case I wanted to make sure that every time a customer fills out one of our Wufoo forms, our Desk account automatically not only received the e-mail, but also used the information from the form to create a new customer profile (complete with name, e-mail and phone number). This makes contacting each customer just that little bit faster and easier; over time leading to an increase in our efficiency.
Then thanks to Zapier, I found out about Kick Off Labs. I had been trying getting our graphic designer, Martin, to design us a landing page for Diamonds in Africa and while we had the design ready I was still dependent on the developers who needed to actually turn that design into a working page. When it comes to landing pages I can safely say I may never need a developer ever again; and here are two example why:
These two landing pages took less than an hour to create. What is equally impressive is that you can use Zapier to then link these landing pages to a range of other services we use such as MailChimp to manage the database of e-mails we collect for future marketing purposes.
Finally KickOffLabs also has a really cool feature. Even though it only asks the visitors to your landing page for an e-mail address, it then looks through the various social media sites to identify the name, age, location and other social networks linked to this e-mail address. You only ask for their e-mail, KickOffLabs gives you their identity. What more can I say?!
P.S. The 5 Diamond Secrets You Need to Know landing page leads those who sign up to this Diamonds in Africa report (just in case you were interested).
Two weeks ago we launched the 50 Day Challenge, to help young people at university start their first online business. The challenge costs nothing, but requires passion, endurance and creativity. The 20 or so students who come every week have now completed 25% of the challenge and are well on their way to building their first online business.
See why I am doing the 50 day challenge and my thoughts on entrepreneurship below:
The 50 Day Challenge is based on Ed Dale’s famous challenge and encourages people with little or no internet marketing knowledge to complete 7 weeks of video training on how to research a market niche, develop a website, get visitors to the site and right at the very end, make their first sale online. Every day, after completing the video, the students then have to act on what they have just learned.
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| Week 1 – “We’re all in this together” |
Two weeks into the challenge and we’ve got some interesting business ideas brewing in the classroom. I love how even students with very little money are thinking both BIG and BRAVE. Some ideas are for social enterprises and are not financiall motivated. Two groups are looking into developing charities. Others are helping promote some local businesses such as Pie Boy Clothing. Some students are thinking about developing affiliate businesses by creating video and written content on topics they find interesting and hopefully earning money from the adverts they put up.
As we break for the holiday I want to keep this momentum going so next week I will be hosting my first ever Google Hangout and doing a live stream of week 3. Stay tuned for more…