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What is your product or service?

Date officially launched?

Janji, the new socially conscious business created by members of WashingtonUniversityin St. Louis’ cross country team, releases their running apparel on May 3^rd. The design of the shorts is based on the flags of the countries that the apparel benefits, countries like Kenya and Haiti. With each piece of apparel sold proceeds go directly toward nutritional medicines, a season’s worth of water, and other sustainable solutions.

Who is the person? What is the background?

What came about that made them help in social change? Why was this social venture created?

The idea for Janji began on the way to the 2010 NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships when teammates, Dave Spandorfer and Michael Burnstein, were motivated by the possibility of improving the global food and water crisis through the power of running. They knew runners, including themselves, often take for granted the food and water needed to run, but not everyone is so lucky: the food and water crisis kills one child every six seconds and affects nearly two billion people around the world. Therefore by producing unique high performance running apparel, Janji can raise awareness and fund solutions. They chose the name, Janji, which means ‘promise’ in Malay, because their organization is built on the promise to ‘run for another.’ Currently Janji consists of ten members including the two founders along with two graphic designers, social media personnel and interns. Janji also works closely with their partnering social organizations to make sure that every dollar we give is used toward sustainable and efficient solutions. Janji chose their partners in Kenya and Haiti based on the organizations’ ability to address food and water problems in the short term, as well addressing poverty through job creation in the long term.

Could others help you and how?

Janji’s mission is to raise awareness and provide opportunities for people to contribute in new, but profound and sustainable ways. In addition to sporting the Janji apparel line, others are encouraged to join Janji running clubs, sign up for races that give back, and help Janji’s partnering organizations with their great causes.

Since there is so much that needs to be done to fight the food and water crisis, Janji has such an ambitious mission, therefore they need all the help they can get.

What free online or offline tools do you use?

In order to get the word out about their mission Janji has utilized many forms of online tools and social. Janji uses free online tools such as Dropbox, Google Docs, and Skype to communicate easily within the team, which has been very useful.

Since free social media plays a huge part in communicating with our customers and spreading our movement Janji has a Twitter, Facebook, and blog (Twitter- twitter.com/runjanji, Facebook- facebook.com/janjirunning, RunJanji.com/blog). Learning how to optimize their presence on the web, improve their website, utilize search engine optimization, and improve social media connections, such as increasing Likes on Facebook, have been critical online processes that Janji continues to make great progress.

What is the best advice you never got?

The founders, Mike Burnstein and Dave Spandorfer have learned a lot since creating Janji just two years ago. Of course starting a business takes many trials and errors , but learning from those mistakes has been essential for success. Janji had received great advice from the very beginning, but ignoring that advice which has been their problem. Even though they were told, “everything takes twice as long as you expect,” they missed a lot of self-imposed deadlines. However Janji has since learned to adjust their timeframe on projects. Therefore learning from mistakes early on and being ready to face criticism would be the best advice Janji has received from others.

What is the one thing that you did right?

The one thing the founders of Janji agree they have done right from the beginning was keeping the overarching mission of fighting the global food and water crisis as the first priority. Spandorfer also says building a great team contributed to their start up success.

“Although we’re all young, each of us has been unwavering in our dedication to Janji and relentless in accomplishing our goals. I couldn’t be happier with the people we have on board,” –Spandorfer

What was the biggest transition you had to make?

Not only does starting a business require a lot of time, patience, and cooperation, but it also requires a lifestyle transition. The founders experienced an adjustment in their daily schedules by learning how to work without a set plan, or outline.

“School usually provides you with a syllabus to follow in order to succeed, but start-ups require you to forge your own path,” – Burnstein

These adjustments have been great learning experiences for the Janji team and have led to critical independent thinking, innovative and creative designs, and ambitious goals. Janji also utilizes help from others, such as the many resources Washington University in St. Louis had to offer. In fact, Janji was awarded a total of $15,000 at the 2011 Youthbridge Social Enterprise and Innovation Competition (SEIC) at Washington University.

“Competing in the SEIC offered us more than funding,” Burnstein says. “It allowed us to refine our concept from a small idea to a sustainable business. Without that experience we wouldn’t exist.”

Janji also won first place and $20,000 in the 2011 University of Colorado at Colorado Springs Sports/Outdoors Business Plan Competition, beating out 15 other teams. Janji took advantage of these opportunities by being proactive and aggressive in finding outside resources, which has greatly contributed to their start-up success.

What can you tell other potential social entrepreneurs who are deciding to make a difference?

What book(s) have you read that others should read?

Janji’s story serves as great inspiration for others who want to make a difference. Social entrepreneurs have the potential to make the changes we want to see in the world, and are therefore encouraged to take initiative. Spandorfer’s advice for other social entrepreneurs is, “As much as you might want to do it alone, we’ve realized that you need to have a great team behind you and a great group of mentors to guide you through the unknown. Building an organization that gives back is incredibly rewarding, but your own intentions are never enough.” He also recommends that other social entrepreneurs read Blake Mycoskie’s Start Something That Matters and the classic Great by Choice. 

To learn more about Janji and their solutions to fight the global food and water crisis through running apparel, visit their websitehttp://runjanji.com/

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Jonathan Bechtel

My name’s Jonathan, and I’m a first time entrepreneur.  I’m a 27 year old one-man company who’s started a health supplement company called Health Kismet.  It makes a condensed vegetable powder called Incredible Greens that combines 35 different greens, herbs, and probiotics into a sweet powder.

Small Beginnings

The specific idea wasn’t started by grand design, and was almost an accident. I had wanted to start my own company for a while, and originally wanted to develop a web application in consumer banking, which is the industry I originally worked in.  But as time went on I began to realize I didn’t have the web development skills nor the heart to follow through with all the complications of starting a finance company. The stakes were too high and I didn’t want to have doubts about my commitment.

So I turned to my second love, nutrition. I went to college for nutrition sciences and have authored quite a bit of research on the subject and I wanted to develop a drink my dad had made that he used to treat gout.  It was a complicated mixture that had over 100 ingredients inside of it, but it turned out to get a liquid like that manufactured would cost a minimum of $250,000. That was a bit much for my tastes, so instead I shifted my focus to powders. I found a manufacturer that specialized in working with startup companies and small order sizes, and decided the two of us were a good fit.

My initial order was less than 500 bottles, and my total budget for manufacturing, legal work, and equipment/marketing was a total of $2,500. Not that much for the industry.  The low startup cost was in large part due to the manufacturer having a stock recipe that was very similar to what I already had in mind. In general, this is an important aspect of keeping order minimums down in the supplement industry.

Growing Pains

Being a first time entrepreneur, I wasn’t sure where to  start with customer acquisition. I’d always been a talented writer, and started to blog about health and nutrition about 6 months prior to the product being released.  I had developed a small mailing list prior to release, and  a wee little bit of media coverage.

It didn’t add  up to much. I sold $300 my first week. Not exactly enough to pay the bills. But I kept trying to harvest leads, and things slowly got better.  I gradually began to accumulate links to my site,  continually sought out reviewers/bloggers to cover my product, and most importantly, people really liked Incredible Greens. Everybody agrees that it has a great taste for the ingredients included inside of it.

Month after month sales began to creep up, and the vital signs behind the company were always good. Everyone liked it, traffic to our website slowly began to creep up, and a lot of the seeds we planted eventually began to harvest.

Customer Acquisition

An important lesson  I learned along the way is which advertising methods worked for me, and which one’s didn’t. For the most part I decided organic acquisition channels were the most worthwhile. The customers had a stronger brand loyalty, and communicated more about why they liked  the product.

I tried using AdWords and buying up ad space on different websites, but the results didn’t count  for very much.  Traffic was sparse, the conversions were dismal, and I decided that it wasn’t worth the money to get good at traffic buying.

So instead I invested heavily in blogger outreach, my own content marketing, youtube, and a few offline marketing efforts.  This made the initial going a little more difficult, but I firmly believe it was worth it in the long run. I wrote thank you cards to every customer,  responded to every e-mail, etc, and it slowly began to pay dividends. We started to get a lot of facebook traffic to our product page purely through word of mouth, and I would regularly  get customers based off of customer recommendations.

However, when we first started out, I kept running into a problem with the novelty of our company.  We only sell bottles in one size, and lots of people wanted to know if there was a smaller sample that they could try, in case they didn’t like it. We also marketed our product to a lot of market segments that were previously unaware of a greens powder, and they were hesitant due to unfamiliarity.

Clever Marketing

So to overcome this objection we used a marketing technique that was fairly unique. We let new customers name their own price. As long as they told us how they found out about us and what they wanted to buy Incredible Greens for, we’d give it to them for the price they wanted as long as we still made money on it.

To  some this might come off as foolish, but I believe it helped a lot. During our first batch we sold about half our bottles this way, and the majority of our returning customers were from people who bought this product by naming their price. We also got lots of recommendations from friends this way as well.

In addition to this marketing  technique, we also offered bloggers a free bottle of Incredible Greens if they wrote up a review of the product  for us. Getting the attention of bloggers is something that’s been notoriously difficult for many companies,  but this offer worked surprisingly well, especially since we made it a point to pitch a lot of small-to-medium sized blogs to begin with.  The fact that I’m a blogger myself certainly didn’t hurt.  It takes one to know one.

What would typically happen is we’d have a review done, it would be positive,  we’d get a lot of referral traffic, some people would buy, some other bloggers would offer to review it for a free copy, and others would name their price, we’d send a thank you card to all of them, everybody would be happy, and traffic/referrals /sales would creep up a notch. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This allowed us to continually acquire customers with a very low cost of acquisition, generate positive word of mouth, and grow our customer base without paying for advertising.  The additional links also created a powerful link building scheme that eventually became self-perpetuating.

What Worked, What Didn’t

Overall, here’s a list of all the different marketing channels I used, with a brief summary of how they worked for me:

• AdWords – No success. Very hard to start up, big budget required to get right.
• Facebook Ads – Some success. Ads attracted some fans, a few of which became valuable customers and referred others. Cost per fan was  low, but I was unable to get a very high click-through rate.
• Blogger outreach/product reviews – Very successful.  Always generated quality traffic, quality backlinks, several sales, additional reviews, and was the least expensive of all the advertising methods.
• Facebook/Twitter (non-paid): Not good for sales, but good for customer retention/engagement.
• Direct Ad Buys: No success. I was disappointed here. I’d buy up ad space on niche websites,  but it didn’t convert well at all.
• Offline-marketing: Some success. It required a lot of ground work, and more muckwork, but was definitely a breath of fresh air compared to all the online marketing I did. In general I didn’t make this a first priority because it’s requirements were so different than working online. And I also didn’t like our label very much.
• SEO/content marketing – success. Slow at first, but once it develops it’s a powerful tool. You get a continuous stream of qualified leads delivered right to your doorstep that are typically very loyal to you once they buy.

Future Plans

So Where  Is Health Kismet right now? What’s in its future?

At the moment Health Kismet is firmly in the black, I’m still its only full-time employee, and it has plans to expand its product line within the coming months. If I had to set a road map for the company, it’d look like this:

• Expand our international shipping options. We do US and Canada right now, but would like to extend our reach into Europe.
• Develop a berries powder to go alongside our greens powder.
• Develop down our vertical. Offer Incredible Greens in smaller packet sizes. This is a big one, but also the most difficult. Packets are labor intensive and require larger order sizes and have smaller margins.
• Fine-tune our content marketing. We have a lot of material out there already, but it’s not aggregated very well.  I’d like to condense the content we’ve created into a variety of different guides and use it as a basis to further build our online community.

What are the biggest mistakes I’ve made?

Probably tolerating sub-optimal situations for too long. In my experience the situations that didn’t work usually presented themselves as such very quickly, and it’s better to make a good decision quickly than a great decision slowly. Because in the long run the ability to keep all the balls juggling at the same speed greatly increases your chances of success.

Technically Health Kismet is a health supplement company, but I’ve never actually viewed it like that. It’s a portal to allow people lead healthier lives, and Incredible Greens is the way I monetize my ambitions.

I’m definitely looking forward to making it happen!

For anyone interested in following our company’s progress, I invite you to connect with us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Name of SocialEnterpriseand URL?

Planting Empowerment

www.plantingempowerment.com

What is your product or service?

Planting Empowerment’s product is called the ForestInvestment – a responsible investment based on the production of tropical hardwoods in Panama. Our investors are passionate about conservation and sustainable development, and our investment aligns with their goals by producing measurable social and environmental impacts in addition to the financial return.

Date officially launched?

We incorporated the company in 2006.

Why was this social venture created?

We started the venture to reduce tropical deforestation and help impact investors meet their social and environmental goals.

My partners and I worked in development in Panama for several years and witnessed the drastic environmental and economic effects of  subsistencedeforestation in the areas where we lived and worked. There was this cycle of deforestation, exploiting the land for agriculture or cattle ranching, then selling the land and deforesting elsewhere.

When the farmers moved away, they would often sell the land to reforestation companies who planted a single, non-native species and didn’t really include the locals in the economic benefits produced by those projects. They were able to bring in lots of investors, though, because forestry investments have performed well vs. traditional equities.

We brainstormed on the success of the forestry companies and about the locals’ desire for more sustainable economic activities and decided that there was a business opportunity there. Our charter would be to leverage the increasing amounts of capital flowing into forestry investments to promote sustainable forestry and help locals gain more value from their land.

After discussing the idea with community members, we signed on our first communityforestrypartners in 2007.

How do you plan to scale the venture?

For now we want to establish our presence in the Darien region and make sure that the local communities are comfortable with our sustainable forestry model. There are thousands of acres of deforested land in Panama, and the global demand for sustainably produced tropicalhardwoods is steadily growing. We’ve already planted over 22,000 trees, or around 50 acres, with our community forestry partners. If we continue to be successful signing on more partners and can raise the capital, we plan to have around 250 acres under cultivation by 2015.

Beyond that, we think there’s potential throughout Latin America to spread the model to other communities.

Could others help you and how?

Right now we’re focused on establishing our position within the forestry investment community. Compared to our competitors we’re still small, but I think we’re starting to establish a niche among responsible investors because we offer a more socially and environmentally focused product.

People can help by seeing what we have to offer and thinking about how that might align with their investment goals.

What free online or offline tools do you use?

Even though we have a low-tech product, we’re actually a very virtual company. We Skype almost every week and use Google docs to manage documents, presentations, surveys and spreadsheets. I use Google Analytics to monitor our web traffic and MailChimp works well for our email marketing.

Do you tweet, facebook fan page, myspace friend or use any other social media to get the word out?

We use Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin to keep people updated and drive traffic to our blog, where we post quite often. I just started using Reddit, too. They’ve got a growing community of people interested in impact investing and social entrepreneurship.

www.facebook.com/PlantingEmpowerment

www.twitter.com/PlantingEmpower

http://www.linkedin.com/company/planting-empowerment

http://www.reddit.com/user/amparrucci/

Are you doing any type of Search Engine Optimization?

Most importantly, we want to create content that’s engaging and that encourages people to participate in a discussion. We target long tail keywords within our industry and optimize for those in our blogposts and webpages. Because we don’t have a big marketing budget, we really rely on content marketing to get our name out there. We’ve been working recently on developing more relationships with influencers to improve our offsite SEO.

What can you tell other potential social entrepreneurs who are deciding to make a difference?

Start with your user(s) in mind, and make sure that you design your product or service to meet those needs. I think most successful social enterprises respond to an expressed need, and there is a lot you can learn by listening to people talk about their needs. It’s doubly hard for social entrepreneurs because we have to consider the social and/or environmental impacts of our businesses, in addition to meeting traditional business goals.

What is the best advice you ever got?

Soon after we started the business we realized some of the gaps that we had in our experience. One of the best things we did―and something I would recommend to any social venture―was to form an Advisory Board. They provide fresh perspectives and can be more objective about our business needs.

What book(s) have you read that others should read?

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Provides an excellent dissection of the “industrialization” of our food supply that is causing significant health, social and environmental problems. 

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What is the name of your business and URL? 

Our business name is Sign in Blue and our url is http://www.signinblue.com 

A brief synopsis of the website / application:

Sign in Blue is a web application that allows you to send out your documents for signatures online. After signing up for our program you can send your documents out for signatures in just minutes.  Once all of the parties in your transaction have signed the document you are notified via email.

No more waiting on your clients or customers to have access to a fax machine or scanner. Documents can be signed from nearly all internet connected devices, including smart phones and tablets.  Not only do you save time when using our application to sign your documents, but you also have access to more information about when and where each party signs.

Why did you start this company? 

The company was started out of our own necessity. We operate several web applications and we were running into customer demand for an electronic signature feature. When investigating e-signature options to integrate into our product we ran into two obstacles, complexity and cost. Many of the existing solutions were cumbersome and did not provide the user experience we demand in our product offerings. Even worse, other solutions required a substantial initial capital expenditure that is outside of the budget of most startups and was outside of our budget at the time.

Was your company started on a shoestring budget or funded? 

Sign in Blue was started on a shoestring budget and has received no outside funding. The company was founded with a minimal initial contribution and has been profitable since month 4 of operations.

Who is your competition, and what do you do better? 

Our competition includes Adobe, Docusign and RightSignature. Sign in Blue was created with simplicity in mind and we feel we have done a good job of simplifying the process of electronic signatures. Users are able to send out documents quickly with a minimal learning curve.

Why would a small business, entrepreneur, freelancer, etc use your product?

All small businesses / entrepreneurs / freelancers should look into incorporating e-signatures into their current workflow. The timesaving and convenience alone are invaluable to this group of time-crunched individuals.  As an additional bonus, all documents they send out for signatures are saved in one location and are easily accessible from any computer or device with an internet connection.

How could you effectively use these tools?

One of the most convenient features Sign in Blue offers is our role templates.  If you have a set of documents that you have signed frequently, the role templates can save a substantial amount of time. Upload and save your documents, map all of the signature locations and the next time you have to send out the documents all of the required signature locations have already been completed.

This is a great way to manage forms that you require all of your clients or customers to sign. The process becomes as easy as sending an email.

Do you offer free online or offline tools?

We do offer a free product online.  It is a full-featured version of our application, however, you are limited to 3 transactions per month.

Are there different pricing levels?

Keeping with our mantra of simplicity, we did our best to simplify our pricing options. There are currently two payment options, a monthly subscription, which is $9.99 and an annual subscription, which is $99.99.  The paid subscriptions offer unlimited signature transactions and unlimited file storage.

Do you have a blog that keeps users updated?

Yes, we do have a blog that keeps users updated. We also outline new features and offer tutorials and do our best to describe multiple scenarios where e-signatures can simplify a users life.  Our blog is located at http://www.signinblue.com/blog

Facebook & Twitter

Yes, please follow and friend us below:

http://www.twitter.com/tweetinblue

https://www.facebook.com/esignatures 

Do you have a YouTube video URL that you can share with us? 

How long have you been in business? 

We have been in business for just over 2 years.

How do you see your company in the next 2-5 years (more products or services?) 

With the pace of e-signature adoption quickly accelerating we see a huge potential for growth and we are excited about our current positioning. We are currently working on integration with several cloud based service providers and we anticipate many more integrations in the near future.

Sign in Blue recently launched a Facebook application, which can be installed here https://apps.facebook.com/signinblue and we see further integration with social networks as a market that is largely untapped by our competitors.

How many employees do you currently have working with you and/or freelance contractors?

We currently employ 6 out of ourMiami Beachoffice and we work with freelance contractors as our workload requires.

Are you looking to hire more people or contractors? If so, what positions and skills are you looking for?

We are always seeking qualified contractors, especially talented web designers and user interface designers.  We are also actively seeking business development professionals.

What other web based products would you recommend to entrepreneurs, business owners, or freelancers?

We are fond of dropbox for cloud storage, pivotal tracker for product development and bug tracking, google apps for email and document collaboration and Highrise for our CRM.

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