Entrepreneurs Learn To Operate Their Business On The Bitcoin Standard

Here’s how the co-founder of a Middle Eastern restaurant convinced his colleagues to upgrade their franchise to the Bitcoin standard. Entrepreneurs Learn To Operate Their Business On The Bitcoin Standard

The Canadian restaurant franchise Tahini’s serves Middle East-inspired food with a Bitcoin-inspired twist.

Since August 2020, when the price of Bitcoin (BTC) was under $20,000, the group has operated on a Bitcoin standard, with any profits it makes swept into BTC.

MicroStrategy: The Consummate Example Of How To Run A Business On The Bitcoin Standard

Bitcoin Fixes This #76: English Football with Peter McCormack

The Business of Football And Bitcoin w/ Peter McCormack (BTC179)

Nas Selling Rights To Two Songs Via Bitcoin Music Startup Royal

Israeli Startup That Allows Offline Bitcoin Transactions Secures $4M

SEC Approves Blockchain Tech Startup Securitize To Record Stock Transfers

Bitcoin Startups Get Partial Green Light From Washington

This Startup Wants To Sell You A Slice of A Rental Home

Canadian Startup Wants To Upgrade Millions of ATMs To Sell Bitcoin

As More Millennials Rent, More Startups Want To Lend To Them

Bitcoin Startups Combine As Wall Street Blockchain Effort Falters

The Tahini’s Twitter account has since argued that Bitcoin is the “most Islamic” thing Muslims can do with their wealth, and the group educates its customers on sound money.

It has even become a niche bear market meme, with Michael Saylor famously saying he might apply to work night shifts at Tahini’s during January’s price correction:

May apply for night shift at @TheRealTahinis to stack more sats. #NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/ZrirLojvrq

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) January 23, 2022

Cointelegraph spoke with Ali Hamam, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Tahini’s, to understand the whys, hows and unintended consequences of operating under a Bitcoin standard. Hamam was the driving force of the Bitcoin adoption in the Middle Eastern chain.

Hamam first learned of Bitcoin in 2016 or 2017 but discarded the innovation as a Ponzi scheme, or “rat poison,” as he was dissuaded by its negative press. It took the COVID-19 pandemic and its real-world consequences for Hamam’s Bitcoin lightbulb moment to take place.

“In March of 2020, we got hit with the lockdowns and the fear. Our sales at the restaurants dropped like 70% in a week. And yet, there was more money flowing around with our employees, our fellow Canadians. Everybody just had more money.”

Inspired by the writings of Robert Breedlove — a Bitcoin influencer and entrepreneur — sound money in the form of BTC dawned on him. Hamam said that he and his company needed to find a better way to store value. “Money is going to be worthless,” he said.

“It sort of clicked for me that this is a once-in-a-multigeneration type of breakthrough and invention. The idea of absolute fixed money is something that we’ve never seen in history.”

Hamam was hooked. He went all in, devouring Bitcoin-focused books, podcasts and, in some cases, not sleeping as he educated himself and fell deeper down the rabbit hole.

“It grew into a way of life where it’s like, okay, this is something that I should be integrating with every single aspect of my life, from my kids’ education funds to my business.”

Armed with freshly acquired knowledge, Hamam met with his business partners at Tahini’s to pitch the idea of running the business on a Bitcoin standard.

The argument behind having the “Bitcoin standard” — a term popularized by Saifedean Ammous, author of the eponymous book, The Bitcoin Standard — is that not Bitcoin is not just a better reserve currency than the U.S. dollar, it’s actually a superior currency.

Consequently, the business should carve out a route with profits in Bitcoin in mind. For Tahini’s, that means keeping a working capital of roughly six months of expenses on hand. According to Haman:

“Anything beyond that number is considered treasury, and we sweep into Bitcoin. So, some months we will buy a little bit more aggressively — when the price is down — and then the months after that, we will slow down a little bit. But we kind of have depending on how much the company makes.”

To the doubters, Hamam said, “We always try to manage it in a way where we never have to sell any Bitcoin. That’s the key part.” Hamam claimed that while he has gifted BTC to family and friends, he’s never sold it.

Tahini’s is working to put in place the infrastructure required to accept Bitcoin as payment, but the process is challenging — not due to regulation or payment processors but because the franchise wants to hold the Bitcoin it accepts.

“Even if you’re going to accept Bitcoin, work it out in a way where you never have to sell it,” Hamam explained.

Today we met at Tahinis #HamOnt with @shakepay and @Innocente_Brew and an amazing group of bitcoiners from all over Canada. We all have one mission. To make #Bitcoin the Standard pic.twitter.com/nLhGlHojzd

— Tahinis Restaurants (@TheRealTahinis) June 2, 2022

The inevitable publicity bump that comes from jumping on the “Bitcoin accepted here” bandwagon is attractive, Hamam said, but “If you’re selling your Bitcoin immediately after you receive it, then you don’t really get Bitcoin, in my opinion.”

Hamam mentioned the Strike Lightning Network integration as an attractive proposition, as it would eliminate the high fees charged by Mastercard, but it’s still “pretty early” to explore payment options when the priority is growing the business.

Ultimately, in a developed economy like Canada with comparably high levels of trust in institutions, Bitcoin is primarily a savings tool.

Equally, Tahini’s is not currently exploring paying salaries in BTC, as the franchise does not want to force Bitcoin onto its staff.

But that hasn’t stopped Hamam from persuading Canada’s Conservative leadership candidate, Pierre Poilievre, from buying shawarma with Bitcoin on the Lightning Network after Hamam “orange-pilled the heck out of him.”

It was the first Bitcoin transaction made at Tahini’s, performed by an increasingly pro-Bitcoin politician.

Conservative leadership candidate @PierrePoilievre buys chicken shawarma from @TheRealTahinis using bitcoin Lightning Network. Transaction cost was one satoshi, which the consumer covers. This was the first bitcoin purchase at Tahini’s. pic.twitter.com/T5hVlY4fy0

— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) March 28, 2022

On a personal level, Hamam and the more devout Bitcoiners among the management team raise questions such as: “Have you heard about Bitcoin?” “Did you know you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin?” And even “Maybe you should think about putting a few dollars into a Bitcoin retirement plan.”

Inevitably, the orange-pilling is far more successful when the price is on a tear. If the price is dropping, it’s a bit more challenging. When China cracked down on Bitcoin, for example, some of Hamam’s management team “freaked out a little bit.”

Indeed, the 300% gains Cointelegraph reported earlier this year have begun to melt away.

Hamam said that his conviction was enough to steer the ship and settle his colleagues’ nerves. Running a restaurant on a Bitcoin standard comes with a side of zealotry.

While Hamam sings Bitcoin’s praises, there’s also a community of passionate BTC aficionados who back Tahini’s investment decision and continue to offer support:

“The amount of love that I have for the Bitcoin community is — I can’t even describe it. People that have never even tried our food.”

However, Hamam said that the Bitcoin community has not directly impacted sales, as it’s still a tiny, albeit vocal, community worldwide.

Nonetheless, the business kept its head above water during the 2021 market turmoil and plans to expand to over 25 franchises in 2022. Hamam is resolute in his decision to put the profits into Bitcoin — even in the face of a tumultuous economic backdrop:

“You’re still going to gain the same benefits anyone else would gain, or Michael Saylor would gain, or Elon Musk would gain.”

The company has “aligned itself with the mission of Bitcoin” while, of course, serving “great food” to anyone.

More and more companies could follow their lead and operate on a Bitcoin standard, while Hamam joked there might be a Middle Eastern dish that riffs on the Bitcoin hitting franchises soon.

Updated: 9-23-2021

Husband-Wife Team Worth $12 Billion After Latest Canva Funding Round

Melanie Perkins’s and Cliff Obrecht’s Australian startup Canva is valued at $40 billion.

It all began with millennial angst at user-unfriendly software.

While teaching design programs part-time in 2008 when she was at university in Perth, Australia, Melanie Perkins grew frustrated with the clunky desktop-based tools she was helping her students understand.

“Facebook was taking off at the time — people could jump in and use that so easily and yet design tools took years of training to learn,” Perkins recalled in a Medium post in 2018. “I wanted to make design software simple, online and collaborative.”

It was a winning formula. A funding round last week valued their graphic design company, Canva, at $40 billion. That gave Perkins, 34, and her husband and co-founder Cliff Obrecht, 35, a fortune of $5.9 billion each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The latest funding round makes the Sydney-based firm the fifth-largest startup in the world, according to data from research firm CB Insights, and Perkins the richest self-made female billionaire under the age of 40. Among Canva’s investors are Franklin Templeton and Sequoia Capital Global Equities.

‘Right Direction’

Perkins and Obrecht, who married earlier this year, said in an interview this week that they aren’t slowing down. “We want to build one of the world’s most valuable companies,” said Perkins, who is chief executive officer. “We’re moving in the right direction, but we’re not there yet.’’

Canva users have created more than 7 billion designs, but Perkins wants it to become ubiquitous. That includes ultimately replacing PDF resumes with responsive web-based tools.

She and Obrecht own at least 30% of the company, Perkins disclosed in a Medium post that accompanied news of the company’s valuation. A former Google employee, Cameron Adams, is also a co-founder, though the size of his stake hasn’t been disclosed.

A Canva spokesperson, Lachlan Andrews, declined to comment.

Canva is popular with bloggers, students and marketers who can select templates and then customize them to make logos, resumes, flyers or even T-shirt designs.

Its tools are used by more than 10 million students and teachers, as well as companies including American Airlines Group Inc., Zoom Video Communications Inc., SkyScanner, Intel Corp., Salesforce.com Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Marriott International Inc., according to Perkins. Canva says that it’s on track to surpass $1 billion in annualized revenue by year-end.

Tech Billionaires

The pair’s new fortune makes them the 9th- and 10th-richest people in Australia, according to the Bloomberg index. While the country’s fortunes have long been linked to commodities industries, Perkins and Obrecht join a group that’s topped by fellow tech founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar of Atlassian, a software-development company.

Perkins also becomes Australia’s second-richest woman after Gina Rinehart, 67, who has a net worth of $17.9 billion derived largely from an iron-ore business.

In her latest Medium post, Perkins vowed that she and Obrecht would donate the vast majority of their Canva equity. The couple plans to direct its giving through the Canva Foundation, and announced a program with nonprofit GiveDirectly that will distribute $10 million to the poor in Southern Africa.

“It has felt strange when people refer to us as billionaires as it has never felt like our money,” Perkins said in a statement. “We’ve always felt that we’re purely custodians of it. It’s long been our intention to give the wealth away.”

Updated: 9-24-2021

How I Quit And Started a Company: Steve Silberberg, Fitpacking

The owner of an outdoor guiding service traded his computer programming gig to lead excursions 13 weeks a year.

Steve Silberberg is living the backpacker’s dream. He gets paid to take hikers of all fitness levels on one- to two-week trips in some of the most stunning landscapes of the U.S. national parks through his Hull, Massachusetts-based business, Fitpacking. Silberberg, 60, credits his 16-year-old company’s survival to rookie confidence. “I thought, ‘Oh yeah, for sure this is going to be a success. Who wouldn’t want to go backpacking all week?’” Here’s how he made the leap:

Old Job: Programmer. “I was writing code at an investment firm for 17 years. There was a time when I loved programming, but as with most things, it got hard to remain passionate about it.”

‘Ah-ha’ Moment: “I’d just turned 40, and didn’t see myself sitting in a cubicle for the rest of my life. I wondered if there was a way to get out into the wilderness and pursue my true passion. Whenever I backpacked, I’d come back and my clothes fit better and I felt better.”

Transition Time: Three years dreaming, one year transitioning. “My company was very kind to me, and allowed me to work for nine months finishing up projects on a part-time basis until I went full-time into my venture.”

Financial Trajectory: “It took two to three years before any reasonable amount of funds started coming in.” In the meantime, he took coding jobs in the winter during the off season for hiking in the U.S. “The business didn’t stop just because I had a 9-to-5, so it was like working two jobs.”

Staffing Up: Silberberg took a slow and steady approach to hiring. “It took a few years to get people to participate in a new venture. But the third year I started hiring part-time guides.” He now has 10 guides, plus his “right hand” coworker in Orlando who runs the company during the trips Silberberg is on, as well as part-timers who handle logistics like hotel booking and park permitting.

The Challenge: Wearing all the hats. Silberberg easily launched a website and built databases. “Then came the tricky stuff like marketing and dealing with customers and accounting. While none were completely foreign to me, I noticed that I did not have quite the same acumen.”

New Job vs. Old Job: “I used to sit at a desk in front of a computer all day, and now I sit at a desk in front of a computer all day,” he says with a laugh. “But I just got back from two weeks guiding in Yellowstone, and next month I’ll wake up in the bottom of Grand Canyon.” He guides 13 weeks a year, and is pivoting toward wilderness experiences that might be lost with global warming.

Pro Tip: “Make sure that your heart’s in your company, and that you really like to do it.”

Updated: 9-25-2021

Designers Try Selling Clothes First, Making Them Later

Rebecca Minkoff and other labels test on-demand production, hoping to avoid piles of unsold apparel; ‘That’s what really kills brands’

Some items on fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff’s website, including a $158 Gigi top and $248 Darcy dress, don’t exist.

They are part of a new way of making clothes that attempts to solve a problem bedeviling the fashion industry: Most brands produce too many goods, which leads to heavy discounting to clear unsold items. In addition to hurting the bottom line, the overproduction adds waste as unwanted merchandise ends up in landfills.

Ms. Minkoff doesn’t produce a single item in her eponymous brand’s “sustainably made” collection until a customer orders it, according to chief executive and co-founder Uri Minkoff. The designer, along with about 25 others, is using a system created by Resonance Companies Inc., one of a handful of on-demand manufacturers and technology providers trying to rethink traditional garment production.

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the shortcomings of the established model, which requires brands to place large orders with overseas factories as much as a year in advance. Retailers were stuck with piles of unsold clothes last year, when stores shut temporarily as consumers sheltered at home—pushing some chains into bankruptcy.

“The industry has to change,” said Lawrence Lenihan, the chairman and co-founder of Resonance, which has raised $45 million since its 2015 launch. “Brands can’t be stuck making decisions 12 months in advance.”

Resonance prints fabric digitally at its factory in the Dominican Republic. The fabric is then cut robotically into pattern pieces, which are sewn by humans at the Dominican site, at a sewing facility Resonance opened in New York City in September or at another New York plant owned by a third party. Those facilities then ship completed garments to customers in packaging specific to each brand.

Every item is stamped with a QR code that shows how much fabric, dye, water and other materials were used in production, the amount of power consumed as well as who made it and where. Shoppers receive their items one to two weeks after placing orders, although shortages of raw materials have caused some delays recently, Mr. Lenihan said.

‘When you eliminate the 999 dresses that you would have had to make to sell one, that is where the profitability comes in.’
— Lawrence Lenihan, co-founder of Resonance Companies

Retailers from Gap Inc. to Kohl’s Corp. have been racing in recent years to shorten lead times to better match supply with demand. But even fast-fashion chains like H&M Hennes & Mauritz AB have at times wound up sitting on piles of unsold goods that dented profits and highlighted the environmental impact of throwaway clothes—so named because many consumers deem them cheap enough to wear only once.

Amazon.com Inc. has held a patent for on-demand apparel manufacturing since 2017. While brands from New Balance to Calvin Klein have used the method to customize sneakers and underwear, only a small portion of apparel and footwear is currently made this way, industry executives said. Peerless Clothing International said it plans to use the method for its Hart Schaffner Marx menswear brand starting in October.

Large brands would have to fundamentally change how they design to produce items one at a time, and the standards necessary for making products at scale this way don’t yet exist, some of the executives said. Unlike automobile production, which is mostly automated, apparel manufacturing still requires humans to sew clothes, adding a layer of cost and slowing the process, they said.

Mr. Lenihan said that Resonance’s system is scalable and that the company is looking to automate more of the manufacturing steps.

‘We aren’t mired by all this inventory that would put us out of business if we didn’t sell it.’
— Fashion designer Robert Tagliapietra, about on-demand production

Designers Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra were a hit when they launched their Costello Tagliapietra brand in 2005. Vogue nicknamed them the “lumberjacks of fashion” for their penchant for wearing plaid shirts, and their jersey dresses were sold in upscale stores like Barneys New York.

“We did all the right things, but we were always treading water,” Mr. Tagliapietra said. They closed Costello Tagliapietra in 2015 and a year later launched JCRT, which sells shirts, trousers, coats and other clothes. Resonance owns 50% of the brand, as well as stakes in other brands that use its system, including Kit and Tucker.

“We aren’t mired by all this inventory that would put us out of business if we didn’t sell it,” Mr. Tagliapietra said. “That’s what really kills brands.”

JCRT is on track to have about $2 million in revenue this year, less than the $8 million Costello Tagliapietra had at its peak. But JCRT is more profitable, the designers said. It has only two employees, Messrs. Costello and Tagliapietra, compared with 15 at their earlier company. Plus, markdowns don’t eat into margins.

“We never go on sale, because we never have excess inventory to clear out,” Mr. Tagliapietra said.

Another benefit of the on-demand model is that it gives brands the option of making some goods domestically, essentially eliminating the time-consuming and expensive effort of shipping goods from overseas factories. That is more appealing now, with skyrocketing shipping costs and backlogged ports.

Ziel Inc. PBC, an on-demand manufacturer of activewear, has a facility in Newburgh, N.Y., that makes items for Everlast Worldwide Inc., Dia & Co and other brands. Gooten, another on-demand player, makes 70% of its orders in the U.S. at 23 factories, from New Jersey to Oregon.

The cost of manufacturing domestically can run multiples of the cost of Asian production. But brands save on shipping and warehousing, while earning more on each sale, because they don’t have to slash prices to clear excess inventory, some of the executives said. As a result, the prices the brands charge consumers are similar to those of goods made the typical way, the executives said.

“By producing on-demand, we are getting equal if not greater margins because we don’t have to discount,” Mr. Minkoff said.

On-demand production doesn’t require minimum-order guarantees, a standard practice at large factories overseas. Even for big brands that can afford the minimums, the system is imperfect because it produces a set number of sizes for every batch. That leaves brands with too many sizes they can’t sell—for instance, too many extra-smalls or extra-larges and not enough mediums, according to industry executives.

“When you eliminate the 999 dresses that you would have had to make to sell one, that is where the profitability comes in,” Mr. Lenihan said.

Updated: 9-25-2021

Hoping To Use Your IRA To Start Your Own Business? Think Again, Says New Bill

If you were thinking of starting a business with money from your individual retirement account, you might want to put that idea on hold for a moment.

Ditto if you were thinking of using tax-deferred retirement accounts to invest in a startup run by a friend or a member of your family.

The new tax bill on Capitol Hill is planning to ban those moves. Worse still, it will effectively act retroactively — so if you’ve made such investments before it becomes law, you’ll have two years either to sell them, or remove them from your IRA.

Selling could involve a loss. Getting them out of your IRA will hit you with taxes.

The bill is currently being considered by the Senate. It is expected to become law, in some form, within weeks.

Under the current proposals, no one will be allowed to invest their IRA money in any company where they are an officer, or own 10% or more of the stock—which would make it very hard indeed to invest in your own business, or one being started by a friend or family member.

(The new law will also bar so-called “accredited investors” from using IRA money for investments in private placements and higher risk ventures. So you won’t be able to tap third party “angel” investors through private placements either.)

These investments have previously been possible so long as you ran a so-called “Self-Directed IRA,” which allows you to invest your retirement savings in assets other than stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

The new proposals come after revelations earlier this summer that PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel was able to accumulate a $5 billion IRA over almost 25 years through some controversial tax maneuvers and a big slice of luck.

Steve Rosenthal, tax expert at the liberal Urban Institute and one of the leading proponents of the change, explains the rationale for the new proposals. “Too many tax expenditures [i.e. tax breaks] go to the richest, whitest households, [and] reward those who don’t need rewarding,” he says.

But the law doesn’t just crack down on the super rich, says Adam Bergman, CEO of self-directed IRA provider IRA Financial.

“I just spoke to someone earlier today,” he tells me. “He lives in Connecticut, he has a good job, he has $100,000-something in his IRA and he was going to make it into a small business that his friend is the CEO of in California, with 45 employees, and he calls me up and he says Adam, I’ve read this bill. Should I do it? Because if I make this investment today, and this bill passes, now I have two years to get rid of this investment.”

Bergman notes that mega-IRAs are already being limited through a separate clause of the same tax bill, which would cap tax-deferred retirement accounts at $10 million. (Very few people in America have IRA balances over $25 million. Meanwhile, Bergman says, “Ninety-nine percent of our clients have less than $1 million.” The average balance, he says, is $125,000.)

Tax expert Marcia Wagner of the Wagner Law Group in Boston finds the proposals surprising. “It is not entirely clear why this particular provision was included in the House Ways and Means Committee markup,” she says.

“There are a number of provisions that are directed at very wealthy individuals with very significant amounts in their IRAs, but this proposal will affect a different category of individuals — perhaps upper-middle class.” She adds: “The category of individuals who qualify as accredited investors is not an uber-rich category.”

(Legally an “accredited investor” must make $200,000 a year as an individual or $300,000 as a couple, or have $1 million in assets, or qualify as a financial expert.)

It’s too soon to know whether these provisions will end up as law.

On the other hand, for ordinary Joes and Joannas hoping to start their own businesses there may be a silver lining to these provisions as they currently stand.

If you use your IRA to finance your business, and the business fails, you’ll lose the money.

But if you use credit cards or bank debt to finance your business instead, if the business fails your IRA money is safe. That’s because IRAs and 401(k)s are sheltered from creditors, even in bankruptcy, under federal law.

Updated: 9-28-2021

How I Quit My Job and Started a Company: Lisa Lane, Rinseroo

Seven takeaways from an entrepreneur seeking a better way to hose off the dog.

When Lisa Lane introduced a portable slip-on faucet extender in 2019 called the Rinseroo—it fits sink or tub faucets and helps with tasks like hosing down your dog—she expected a gradual climb to profitability on the sluggish trajectory shared by most small businesses.

Six months later the 56-year-old veteran of medical marketing positions was turning a profit from her New Jersey home.

Sounds like a quick success—but getting it right isn’t easy, so here are a few useful lessons Lane picked up along the way.

Her Aha! Moment: “I was at a beach house with 15 of my extended family members and four dogs, constantly rinsing sand off people and cleaning dogs and filling this bucket over and over. I thought that there must be a better way and that it would be useful to anyone with a shower. So, mass-market potential.”

Transition Time: Getting everything right took two years. “I didn’t jump ship until I had a product in hand and was ready to launch,” Lane says. She logged long evenings and weekends researching how to craft effective Amazon listings and develop the product. “I learned everything I really needed to know from The Mom Inventor’s Handbook,” she says.

Financial Trajectory: “Thankfully, my husband was also working, and my product was not very intricate, so I was able to fund it all with my own hard-earned dollars. I was willing to risk that.”

How It Went: Exceedingly well. Rinseroo swiftly ranked on Amazon, then was picked up in a BuzzFeed article. Rinseroo now sells on Amazon, Chewy.com, and Walmart.com, and Lane expects sales to hit $2 million this year. She hired her son full time to handle the tasks she enjoys less, such as e-commerce and logistics. “I’m terrible with unloading trucks,” Lane says.

The Challenge: Knockoffs. “We had a lot of infringers—they would literally copy our exact listing and use the images of me and my dog,” she says. An even bigger problem was that the copycats’ quality was inferior, so Rinseroo started getting bad reviews. The solution was to hire a company called Red Points to chase down the scammers. “They took down 6,000 infringers in one year,” she says.

New Job vs. Old Job: “This is more fun. I’m able to be creative every day, and I just love finding new ways to sell.”

Pro Tip: “If you have a product idea, first look at what’s already out there and then come up with improvements. Create a better mousetrap that will dominate the market.”

Updated: 9-29-2021

Six Apps To Help Small-Business Owners Build Their Brands Online

Social media can be a time suck. These tools make it easier to boost your company’s presence across platforms.

When last year’s lockdowns spurred small businesses to close up shop, many shifted online. While that helped them find more customers and weather the pandemic, it also introduced a new challenge: managing a digital presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Turns out there are myriad apps aimed at simplifying tasks such as scheduling posts, analyzing engagement, and tracking purchases. We talked to digital business advisers about their favorite tools for social media management. Here are their top picks:

Hootsuite

The app lets you create and schedule posts across networks, monitor what people are saying, and analyze why your content works—or doesn’t. Hootsuite is “a very smart shortcut and time saver,” says Alisa Cohn, a coach for startups and chief executive officers. $49 a month for one user, up to $599 a month for a companywide license

Ripl

For business owners in need of content creation and engagement monitoring, but without the budget for specialized staff, Ripl can keep costs down. The company offers templates for brand promotion on social media and allows you to schedule posts and track how users engage with your content. $15 a month or $120 a year

Buffer

This platform allows users to set up tweets and Facebook updates from any device or browser, and an extension called Pablo offers a quick way to create images and graphics for social media, making it a good fit for businesses without a lot of resources to devote to social media. “The free option can be a great way for the most budget-strapped small businesses to start out,” says Vicky Wu, CEO of Vicky Wu Marketing. Free, with add-ons from $5 a month

Sprout Social

Lets users schedule posts across platforms, coordinate and code campaigns for future reference, and monitor what competitors are up to on social media. The tool “provides detailed metric reports on performance and engagements that can be compared across specific ranges of dates/times,” says Brooklyn Holt, a marketing specialist with Rice University’s Doerr Institute. $99 to $279 a month per user

SocialPilot

Helps you schedule posts, analyze performance, and discover and share content that’s trending online. Integration with Facebook Ads can make SocialPilot stand out from peers if you’re running ad campaigns. $30/month for a basic plan, up to $150 per month for additional user access and services

Grin

This tool pairs influencers with businesses to help brands better target customers. “You can get massive word-of-mouth traffic,” says Cohn, the startup coach. “And if you tap into influencers who have diverse networks, you can reach a lot more people.” Pricing dependent on the influencer

Updated: 10-3-2021

How The Founders Of A Famed But Failed Ice Cream Chain Plotted Their Return

A year after selling and exiting their Ample Hills business, Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna decided to give another ice cream shop a go.

When Brian Smith and Jackie Cuscuna opened their first Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn in 2011, they sold out of ice cream in four days. Ample Hills flavors mix in peppermint patties, cakes and cookies and more — it’s almost a pure expression of childhood id. The company grew slowly at first, but then Bob Iger, then chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company, ordered some pints and fell in love.

He shared the ice cream with friends; enthralled celebrity endorsements soon followed, as did the prospect of mass-distributed Disney-themed ice creams and scoop shops, including at Walt Disney World. That required an ice cream factory and money. By 2018, Ample Hills had brought in $17 million in equity financing.

The possibilities quickly overwhelmed the small company. Smith and Cuscuna had little business or technical expertise to guide them and no sense of how much money they were spending — until it was about to run out. Ample Hills filed for bankruptcy in March 2020, the day before Covid-19 shut New York City down.

Eventually, the company sold for just $1 million to a West Coast precision machinery manufacturer. Smith and Cuscuna concluded that their future lay elsewhere.

So the couple did the only thing they could do: they started another ice cream parlor, a few blocks away from the original Ample Hills. The Social opened on July 25 with a distinct Seventies vibe. Smith sat down in The Social’s party room one August afternoon to talk about the experience, which included a turn through personal bankruptcy to get free of the guarantee on a $3.5 million company loan.

“People like second chances,” he said, “but there aren’t a lot of stories about third chances.” Cuscuna sat a few tables away hunched over a laptop with an employee. She joined Smith for part of the interview, which has been edited and condensed.

How Did You Go About Building The Social From The Ashes Of Bankruptcy?

Smith: We went in fits and starts down a couple of different paths trying to cobble together enough money to open up a small footprint, just to get back out and do something. But then we decided, ‘let’s build the perfect idea and see if we can find somebody who’s willing to pay to help us build that.’ And that wasn’t the 500 square-foot space.

It was a space like this, 2,700 square feet with a party room and we can do birthday parties, classes, maybe fondue nights. But we needed a concept to build around it, to give context and meaning to the space, and that was the ice cream social. If we could get all that into a tightly knit narrative and story, we felt we could raise the money.

How Did You Hope To Finance It?

Smith: Originally, we were going to follow what’s called a chef or small restaurant model, in which friends and family invest in a single location, and they’re paid back in full based on the profits of the business. Once they’re paid back, then there’s some split percentage of the profits each year for the life of the business.

It forces one shop to absolutely be profitable, and not be focused at all on growth. And that was totally fine. But to be honest, we hadn’t gotten all the way there. It’s a lot of meetings to get $10,000 from each person.

Venture capitalists frequently talk about betting on the jockey, not the horse. But as Ample Hills’s jockey, you basically took $20 million and turned it into one million dollars. So what’s the pitch?

Smith: I think you’re seeing it through the prism only of the financial guardrails and the money. The intangible part that people are willing to pay for is building a brand. The brand was as strong as ever on the day we filed for bankruptcy. We didn’t fail because people didn’t like the product. I still had a beautiful horse.

We have an investor that is not a traditional venture capitalist. He was a businessman himself, but I think the key is nobody obviously would see what we did and invest in us without making sure that the guardrails were in place.

How Did You Find Your Investor?

Jackie Cuscuna: It was just this random Zoom class on pivoting during the pandemic that a business therapist taught in conjunction with another business educator. And it was free. And I was free. I was doing a lot of introspection about all the things that led us astray and how to make this right.

These two people who taught the class worked with the investor. He, too, went bankrupt, and was able to rebuild a $140 million company. They suggested that I talk to him and just get his advice.

Smith: So we met with him a couple of times before he said, “I don’t think you should do this restaurant model. Why don’t we work together?” I think he really responded to second chances and stories.

Cuscuna: When we met him, we were in a very precarious spot. We knew we had something, but we were also fresh from coming out of a loss that was huge. He was very understanding, empathetic, and I would call him to talk me off the ledge, because he went through it. It’s also nice to have a successful businessperson tell us that this kind of thing can happen, you can bounce back.

How Are You Running The Social Differently?

Smith: We have an outsourced finance team that’s running the reports from the beginning. Before we ever opened, I sat down and went through what my COGS — costs of goods sold — were for the different flavors of ice cream. When we started Ample Hills, we were taking bags of money, uncounted, over to the bank. I didn’t even know the term “COGS” when we opened.

Cuscuna: Same for me for labor costs. That wasn’t something that I was personally involved in. Now, I’m pretty obsessed.

Has Your Approach To Growth Changed?

Smith: Yeah. Our plan is to try to open up a couple more shops, either next year or the year after. We’re going to be much more focused on the brick-and-mortar experience. We were chasing wholesale pint distribution with Disney way too early.

If you’re an ice cream business starting out and trying to grow, pints are the quickest way to the deathbed, because the margins are so low. It only works with really high volume. So we need to establish a strong business in our stores, and eventually have that turn to pints down the road.

Ample Hills’s brand doesn’t seem to have depended on you — lines were around the block at their new shop in Brooklyn. How important is brand identity and how much of it is just that if the ice cream is really good, the rest takes care of itself?

Smith: I do think that for a good portion of people, if the ice cream is really great, then all the rest of it is window dressing. But I don’t think people really know why they respond to something — they’re responding to a whole package whether they know it or not. And we have to get up in the morning and want to go to work. And that’s all wrapped up in a package — it’s not just ice cream.

Updated: 10-4-2021

One Food Delivery Startup’s Cost-Saving Trick? Bulk Meal Orders

In Toronto, ZipLunch’s streamlined process keeps prices down and emissions in check.

ZipLunch couldn’t have launched at a worse time. The startup introduced its food delivery service, targeting Toronto’s downtown corporate lunch crowd, in March 2020—just four days before the city went into pandemic lockdown and its office towers emptied out.

The company quickly adjusted its business model, and less than four months later ZipLunch drivers were bringing meals to white-collar workers at home rather than the office. The pivot let ZipLunch grow while remaining true to its original concept: meals from quality restaurants at reasonable prices and with a minimal carbon footprint.

Founders Majdi Alnabih and Maj Qureshi say meals from ZipLunch are 55% cheaper than similar offerings on other apps, and that the environmental impact of the company’s deliveries is 95% lower. That, they say, is because ZipLunch buys in bulk and passes the savings on to customers.

The company offers limited, curated menus and coordinates drop-offs to minimize travel distances, keeping its costs and emissions down. It doesn’t charge customers a delivery fee, but lunch or dinner orders must be placed before specific cut-off times, and menu items can’t be modified—allowing restaurants to fulfill bulk orders quickly.

Each driver delivers 30 to 50 meals in a particular area, and customers are given a 30-minute delivery window, with a few minutes’ warning so they can meet the driver at the curb. “We’re not an on-demand platform,” says Qureshi, who is head of operations. “If you’re a busy person and you’re a foodie, you like variety. Our platform will work for you.”

Alnabih and Qureshi, who met in high school, set out to improve the food delivery model by fixing problems they’d encountered: high service charges, long wait times, and the dilemma of deciding what to eat.

They wanted to offer an eco-friendly option, particularly for corporate clients looking to reduce their employees’ environmental impact. And they were keen to feature cuisines from a variety of cultures, reflecting Toronto’s diversity.

When Covid-19 restrictions shut down indoor dining and threatened the survival of some of the platform’s 100+ restaurants, ZipLunch temporarily cut its service fee in half, to 10% of the order. Now that dining out is allowed again, the rate is back up to 20%—though that’s still below the industry standard of 25-30%.

Using ZipLunch costs about the same as it would for a restaurant to hire a dedicated driver, but the service is worth it, says Aashwin Jeyakumar, general manager of Ravisoups, a family-owned chain in central Toronto. “ZipLunch is not like other platforms, they’re more personalized,” Jeyakumar says. “I know that the food is being taken care of, especially with soups.”

As employees slowly head back into office towers, Qureshi is seeing business from corporate clients pick up. Qureshi says one of the biggest regrets he has from the past 18 months is not having been aggressive enough. When the company shifted to home deliveries, he says, it could have grabbed more market share by starting out with several neighborhoods rather than just one.

“There were too many unknowns,” Qureshi says, “and we were trying to be cautious.”

ZipLunch is vying with at least four rival delivery platforms in the Toronto area, and industry margins are tight. The company is focused on winning market share, and often discounts menu items below the prices the restaurants charge, absorbing the costs to boost orders. To survive long-term, it’ll have to prove it can become profitable without losing too many customers.

Revenue has been growing an average of 22% month-over-month, and in the first six months of this year was double all of 2020, Qureshi says, putting ZipLunch on track to become profitable toward the end of next year. The founders are seeking more funding to spur growth in Toronto and to eventually expand into other North American cities.

“We are incorporated in both Ontario and Delaware, and while we are primarily targeting venture capitalists in Canada and the United States, we have received significant interest from international investors,” Qureshi says. “We expect ZipLunch to be entering into a new era soon and we are very excited about it.”

Updated: 1-10-2022

Bitcoin And Businesses: What Is Your Bitcoin Strategy?

How can you implement bitcoin in your business, and what benefits can such a move have for business owners?

With the mainstream coverage of bitcoin increasing radically in 2021, more people are realizing that bitcoin is a savings technology unlike anything seen in their lifetime.

As such, it opens up new avenues of thinking that allow you and your business to allocate capital differently than anyone previously thought possible.

In an interview with Michael Saylor, Ross Stevens, CEO of New York Digital Investment Group said that the most important job of any CEO in this inflationary environment is capital allocation.

Bitcoin Strategy And Your Business

Why risk your hard-earned capital on stocks or put them in bonds with a negative (real or nominal) yield when you have bitcoin as an option? For those who have not yet done their homework, bitcoin appears to be an extremely risky asset – this article is not for them.

This is for the person or leader of an organization who has done enough homework on bitcoin that they see much greater risk in having zero allocation to bitcoin.

As Lyn Alden Said On The November 23, 2021 “What Bitcoin Did” Podcast:

“People have different numbers for how much bitcoin is right for them, but zero is not the right number for most people anymore. For people with high conviction, they don’t want to own anything but bitcoin. And they’re willing to accept crazy drawdowns and crazy doubling and tripling in price. Whereas others with less conviction and volatility tolerance, it’s about putting bitcoin into their assets at non zero.”

Businesses Of All Sizes Need To Ask Themselves The Question:

“What Is Our Bitcoin Strategy?”

There Are A Few Main Areas Where Businesses Can Benefit From Bitcoin:

* Bitcoin on the balance sheet – which allows the business to have an appreciating asset of bitcoin rather than a depreciating asset of cash on hand.

* Implementing a payment and marketing strategy with rewards cards that reward in sats.

* Accepting bitcoin as payment – which allows businesses to cut out or reduce high merchant account monthly and transactional fees.

Giving employees the option of being paid in bitcoin.

These are some implementation options that require a Bitcoin strategy to make bitcoin work for your business.

This article will focus on some aspects of a bitcoin strategy for the first item on the list: capital allocation towards bitcoin.

Bitcoin Strategy For Business

If you are the owner or CEO or even part of a partnership of a company, what is your bitcoin strategy and what are the pieces of a bitcoin strategy for your balance sheet?

Let’s Start With A Few Pieces Of Strategy:

* Educating Other Owners, Stakeholders, And Sometimes Employees
* Doing The Math On Capital Allocation To Bitcoin And Determining Your Percentage Allocation To Bitcoin
* Deciding Whether To Use Cash Or Loans For Bitcoin Allocation
* Determining A Strategy For Buying Bitcoin

When putting together your strategy, you can start with these areas and put some plans in place.

Bitcoin Strategy: Getting And Keeping Bitcoin Buy-In

Education About Bitcoin Is Key And Is Not Just A One-Time Effort.

* What Is Your Strategy For Educating About Bitcoin?
* What Is Your Strategy For Managing Expectations And Volatility (If There Is A Drop After Purchase)?
* What If One Or Many Stakeholders Are Not Aligned With A Bitcoin Strategy For The Balance Sheet?
* How Do You And Any Stakeholders Decide Whether To Sell Or Hold, Or Buy More Bitcoin?

Bitcoin Strategy: Do The Math When Thinking About Cash

How do you and the stakeholders do the math to help determine your capital allocation to bitcoin?

How much purchasing power are you losing or gaining each month?

Assume that inflation is somewhere between 6 and 16% at the time of this article.

If your cash is earning 0% interest and essentially losing 6 to 16% value due to inflation, should you be thinking about the math as follows:

* A Collateralized Loan You Are Paying 6 To 16% Interest On (But Can’t Write The Interest Off)
* A Depreciating Asset Where You Cannot Write The Depreciation Off Or Sell It Above That Depreciated Value
* A Credit Card Charging 6 To 16% Interest.
* Technically Cash On Your Balance Sheet Is A Liability Not An Asset

When thinking about strategy and allocation, run the numbers with your cash and actual and presumed inflation numbers.

Next, run the numbers next to bitcoin appreciation over the last ten years.

These numbers can help you look at the reality of the true purchasing power of your cash on hand, and the loss that is occurring next to the possible appreciation of Bitcoin.

Understanding these numbers can help you realize the risk you are taking by leaving your money in cash.

Bitcoin Strategy: Risk And Allocation

After you’ve looked at the numbers, you need to decide on a percentage allocation to bitcoin. One factor here is risk.

* What Is Your Usual Risk Appetite For Other Assets?
* What Is The Risk Of Even Higher Inflation And More Loss On Your Cash Assets?
* What Is Your Time Horizon?

Bitcoin Strategy: Cash Need And Allocation

Bitcoin in the short term can be volatile, and so an allocation should take future cash needs into consideration.

* How Much Cash Do You Need To Be Liquid?
* When Do You Foresee Needing To Sell The Bitcoin For Cash?
* What About Unexpected Expenses? Are There Other Means Of Paying?

Bitcoin Strategy: When To Buy

When You Are Ready To Buy, Part Of The Strategy Is The Timing Of When You Buy:

* Do You Dollar-Cost Average?
* Do You Buy Your Prescribed Allocation Immediately?
* Or Do You Do Something In Between Over A Prescribed Business Time Period?

These questions also bleed back into your risk tolerance.

Business And Bitcoin Strategy: A Note About Taxes

One thing to keep in mind here is that engaging in all this Bitcoin activity has the potential to generate some tax liability. Of course, you’ll need to account for that, and a good, bitcoin-knowledgeable CPA will be an important part of your planning.

But consider that even paying taxes on the USD gain of bitcoin sales (if you make any) will not significantly impair the benefit received by preventing the loss of purchasing power due to inflation.

Business And Bitcoin Strategy: Make A Plan

The questions and numbers in this article are part of a bitcoin strategy for your business. Just like a business plan, it’s important to have a bitcoin strategy plan.

In future Bitcoin and Business articles, we’ll talk about options for your business to buy Bitcoin for its balance sheet, as well as how businesses are getting creative with perks by allowing payments that generate bitcoin rewards.

It all starts with a strategy and a plan.

Updated: 8-4-2023

How To Start A Bitcoin-Focused Business

Key Takeaways

This guide will give you some fast-track tips to help you start or start shifting into a Bitcoin-focused business.

I have managed a few companies of my own in the past, from eCommerce to local. I have been a founder twice, and in the last few years, I have focused diligently on Bitcoin only, not crypto.

With my background, I feel I can bring you up to speed with the tools and things to consider when starting or evolving into your own Bitcoin-focused business.

Bitcoin has fostered a unique culture, it has grown into something compelling that I confidently believe will help transform your business’s outlook if your business values align with the values, truthful principles, and a higher standard of quality.

While this topic could be a long-form novel in itself, let’s dive in.

What Does A Bitcoin Business Mean?

A Bitcoin business could be one of many things.

Do you want to sell Bitcoin-focused consulting services? Bitcoin clothing, Bitcoin hardware?

Maybe you want to integrate Bitcoin directly into your product or service offering to create additional value for customers and revenue for the business.

Bitcoin is not a one size fits all for businesses. There is a way for the non-technical and the technical alike to find creative ways to integrate Bitcoin into their business either on a payments or tech stack level.

This write-up will consist primarily of integrating Bitcoin as a payments rail, a marketing tool, as well as a long-term balance sheet and savings technology to weather economic storms to create resiliency for your business and brand.

Technical education and know-how will be saved for another write-up. For now, let’s dive into how your business can integrate Bitcoin and build a more Bitcoin-focused business.

Understanding The Bitcoin Circular Economy

Before jumping feet first into starting your Bitcoin business, are you aware of what the Bitcoin circular economy is?

In the Bitcoin circular economy, we pay in Bitcoin and receive the products and services we need.

There is a growing group of Bitcoiners who live on a Bitcoin standard (saving and spending in Bitcoin) as well as a group who love keeping a lighting wallet on their phone loaded up with some sats whenever there is an opportunity to support a Bitcoin business.

If you bring value, the Bitcoin circular economy is there, and users will rally around and support your mission.

One business that is truly helping create a circular economy is Oshi. Oshi empowers businesses to offer bitcoin rewards to customers. These incentives are often far better than a small % back or $ off coupon, especially to the growing base of Bitcoiners in the world.

Supporting small businesses and local service providers is one way the Bitcoin community likes to make an impact. To learn more about the Bitcoin circular economy, read this write-up from BTC Mag.

Establishing Your Businesses Bitcoin Payments System

The first and probably most important step to becoming a Bitcoin-focused business is accepting bitcoin payments.

One of the most popular ways to accept Bitcoin payments is BTCPay Server.

BTPay Server is an open-source project that allows for non-custodial payments.

Open Source – simply means the code is auditable and can be reviewed by anyone.

Non-custodial – means you do not have to rely on a 3rd party or centralized service provider to help handle your payments.

Non-custodial solutions mean you also do not have to be subject to 1-4% fees for processing payments, thanks to the lightning network.

There are many ways that a business can start to accept bitcoin. We have made a simple BTCPay integration option available.

You can find a video walkthrough of how to set BTCPay on Voltage, here, if you prefer a faster setup to follow with images, check here.

If you are open to using a centralized provider that charges a small fee, OpenNode is a great option.

OpenNode reduces the complexity of accepting payments with nice integrations, at a sacrifice of data, and at a small cost.

Below is a breakdown of using BTCPay on Voltage compared to other service providers.

Incentivizing Bitcoin Payments from Customers

While global Bitcoin adoption is growing at a healthy rate it is still very early in the adoption curve of bitcoin as a payments technology.

While most consumers do not carry a Bitcoin wallet around day to day, you can incentivize customers to pay via bitcoin with cost savings or discounts. We mentioned the Oshi app earlier which is a great grassroots tool to extend % discounts to consumers.

Other apps that make bitcoin spending easy for the average consumer is Cash App and Strike.

Cash App is a commonly used payment app among friends, and Strike is a newer app primarily focused on Bitcoin.

Each of these apps is fast and easy ways for consumers to pay your business with Bitcoin or the Bitcoin payment network.

Marketing Your Bitcoin business

Getting any business off the ground and scaling is a daunting task. Luckily in the Bitcoin community, there are many great tools and resources available to create awareness to educate others about your product or service.

* Twitter: While Twitter is not the first tool new business owners think of, it is chuck full of Bitcoin believers who intentionally seek out well-principled business owners with their bitcoin.

* Square Merchants can now convert up to 10% of sales to Bitcoin Via Cash App

* Oshi: allows you to offer Bitcoin rewards to consumers. This powerful platform replaces stars, punch cards, and the myriad of apps out there.

* BTCMap: Everyone knows Google Maps, but have you heard of BTCMaps? This platform allows all businesses that accept bitcoin to be listed! Showcase if you accept on-chain payments, lightning payments, or contactless payments.

* Zaprite – Making bitcoin invoicing, project management, and expense tracking.

* Apollo – allows you to gather reviews and users who leave reviews get compensated in sats.

* Stacker News – This is a FAST growing news website that is powered by the Bitcoins lightning network. Showcase your product or service updates with a deeply involved community to earn new raving fans.

* Stakwork – If you are starting with a small budget and need help with business automation, Stakwork is a great resource that uses AI and the global workforce to help automate tasks. At Voltage, I use this to transcribe video content we create.

Bitcoin Standard: Balance Sheet, Treasury & Mining

When considering your balance sheet and treasury strategy, be sure to consult with a professional CPA and attorney.

None of this is financial or strategic treasury advice.

While the legacy banking and payment rails do not make it easy to save and spend in bitcoin there are tools available that can help empower brands to start thinking and operating on a Bitcoin standard.

* Microstrategy: put together a Bitcoin playbook that businesses can model after for crafting their balance sheet and treasury strategy.

* Deloitte has an article written that breaks down CFO insights when considering a Bitcoin balance sheet strategy.

* Swan: Offers brands the ability to buy bitcoin at the lowest costs to start building their balance sheet. Swan also offers an employee plan that allows business owners to create incentives for employees with monthly payroll rewards in bitcoin!

* River: has created a great platform for buying bitcoin with low fees, and enabling you to manage remote mining solutions. Their platform enables purchasing and mining from one simple interface.

(Talk To Your Accountant About Section 179 Of The Tax Code To See If You Can Write Off Purchasing Miners For Your Business)

As of October 13th, FASB recommends that firms should use fair-value accounting methods for Bitcoin.

This allows companies to report losses and gains immediately giving Bitcoin treatment just like other traditional assets.

This is a great accounting update that makes it more palatable for organizations to start saving in Bitcoin or operating on a Bitcoin standard.

The Takeaway

Creating a bitcoin-focused business, or integrating bitcoin payments into your established business is becoming easier by the day.

We take pride in helping technologists and business owners integrate Lightning payments every in the easiest fashion.

Consumers want quality cost savings, business owners want less counterparty risk and reliable payments.

Bitcoin is giving optionality to everyone globally.

If you are a consumer wanting to help educate more businesses to adopt bitcoin payments, check out Bitcoin For Local Business.

Updated: 3-26-2024

Latinos Are Starting U.S. Businesses At A Torrid Pace

It is a matter of necessity for some Latin American immigrants.

Latin American immigrants are starting businesses at more than twice the rate of the U.S. population as a whole.

The jump in Latino entrepreneurship has driven up the overall share of new businesses owned by immigrants, who accounted for 36% of launches last year compared with 25% in 2019, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data.

New-business creation by white and native-born Americans has slowed in the past two years, following a broad surge early in the pandemic.

Deisy Vivas worked as a dentist in Venezuela and later as a dental assistant after moving to the U.S. in 2016. Vivas lost her job during the pandemic and launched Venezuela Food with her husband Wilmer Vera, who had worked in a glass-window factory.

The pair used $5,000 in savings and a small grant to purchase a tent, a gas stove and the kitchen equipment.

Vivas and her family now make arepas, empanadas and tequeños that they sell at farmers markets and other events. “No one else was making Venezuelan food,” said her 18-year-old daughter, Maria Grecia, who designed the tent canopy, handles paperwork and serves as translator.

She added that the family’s goal is to start a restaurant.

Entrepreneurship activity of all types swelled in 2020 as Covid-19 left people with more time and different priorities, while changes in consumer behavior created business opportunities.

One reason Latin American immigrants have maintained their entrepreneurial momentum is that many of the businesses they started are in services, food and delivery, sectors that have experienced increased demand since the onset of the pandemic, said Robert Fairlie, an economist at the University of California Los Angeles, who analyzed the census data.

“Those kinds of things are exactly the kinds of industries or businesses immigrants have done well with in the past,” said Fairlie, who focused on new ventures that are their owners’ primary source of income. “Covid has put us on a different trajectory.”

For many immigrants, entrepreneurship is a matter of necessity. Limited proficiency in English can make it hard to find a job; credentials earned outside the U.S. often aren’t easy to translate into professional opportunities.

Entrepreneurship is an especially attractive option for undocumented immigrants because it doesn’t require work authorization or a Social Security number, said Iliana Perez, executive director at the nonprofit Immigrants Rising, which focuses on the undocumented.

The unemployment rate for Latino and Hispanic workers hit 18.9% in April 2020, compared with 14.2% for whites, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It dropped to 5% in February, compared with 3.4% for whites.

About half of Latino business owners are immigrants, compared with 7% of non-Hispanic white business owners, according to an analysis by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, which studied businesses with employees and at least $10,000 in revenue.

Food is an obvious choice for many immigrant entrepreneurs because it requires minimal capital investment or proficiency in English and offers flexible hours. Fellow immigrants are often eager for foods that remind them of home.

But there are hidden obstacles. “We have the perception that we can just make it, open the door of my house and start selling,” said Jeannette Flores-Katz, a Salvadoran immigrant who sells pupusas at farmers markets in Atlanta and leases shared pop-up space to food startups, many immigrant-owned.

“There are all the hoops you have to go through just to be a city vendor,” Flores-Katz said.

Evelyn Gutierrez opened her first Mi Cafesito coffee shop in Fresno, Calif., in 2021, inspired by the business plan her son created for a high-school class.

Not a coffee drinker herself, Gutierrez attended a two-week-long coffee school where instructors told her all the best beans were grown in Africa. She decided she would focus on coffee from Latin America to prove them wrong.

She now operates two shops, which are staffed mostly by family members and sell coffee from beans grown in Latin America and beverages inspired by Mexican sweets.

There have been fits and starts. Plans to open the first Mi Cafesito ground to a halt after a driver crashed into the building. Another location closed because the well supplying the shop’s water went dry.

“I thought it would be easier,” said Gutierrez, who came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1994 and taught school before leaving the workforce to raise three children.

Women are driving many of the new ventures, said Yerania Olivares, chief operating officer of the Fresno Area Hispanic Foundation, which provides loans and training to immigrant entrepreneurs.

“It’s the fastest-growing segment,” she said. Many of these ventures start out as side gigs and then transition to full-time businesses, she said.

While Latino-owned businesses are mostly mom-and-pop operations, they also include venture-backed firms. Venture-capital-backed startups with Hispanic founders tend to be concentrated in financial services, healthcare, commerce and shopping, according to Crunchbase, which estimates that these firms receive less than 5% of venture funding.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based MiSalud Health offers employer-provided healthcare services to Spanish-speaking employees in industries such as hospitality, agriculture and construction.

The three-year-old company has raised $9 million in early-stage financing.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Cindy Blanco said she came up with the idea for pairing Spanish-speaking workers with Mexican doctors after returning home to Mexico to have her wisdom teeth extracted during the pandemic.

The initial idea was to have Mexican physicians provide medical care. Instead, to meet licensing requirements, Mexican doctors act as healthcare coaches and mental-health counselors, with U.S. physicians writing prescriptions and making medical diagnoses.

MiSalud has 10 customers, with operations in California, Arizona, Florida, Texas and Mexico. “People are looking for something that would be aligned with their culture,” said Blanco, who previously helped U.S. tech companies find talent in Mexico.

Access to capital is a common challenge. Forty-two percent of startups with Hispanic owners were denied credit, compared with 25% of startups with white owners, according to data from the 2022 Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey.

Hispanic startups also tend to be smaller, the study found, with 46% reporting more than $100,000 in annual revenue compared with 62% of white-owned firms, according to the analysis, which looked at firms in operation for five years or less.

Many immigrants, regardless of their status, have thin credit files, weak banking ties and few assets, said Luz Urrutia, chief executive of the nonprofit lender Accion Opportunity Fund.

“A lot of our microbusinesses don’t know English, don’t have a computer, are afraid of the system,” said Kersy Azocar, CEO of Greenline Access Capital, a nonprofit lender in Philadelphia.

Oso Adventure Meals, a Denver-based maker of enchilada bowls, huevos rancheros and posole for backcountry travelers, turned to Kickstarter to raise $21,000 in initial funding.

Co-founder Felipe Vieyra, who was 2 years old when he joined his parents in Colorado, said he got the idea of freeze-dried meals inspired by his grandmother’s cooking during a pandemic-era hiking trip.

Colorado last year awarded Oso a $250,000 advanced manufacturing grant, but the startup couldn’t raise the matching funds that would allow it to access the funds.

“One of the biggest obstacles there was this expectation to already be bringing in a large amount of revenue as a company,” Vierya said. “We were just not there yet.”

Updated: 5-5-2024

Why It Pays To Start Companies In Recessions

A study suggests that when jobs are hard to come by, the best workers are more available—and stay longer.

Could a recession be the best time to launch a tech startup?

A recent study suggests that is the case. The authors found that tech startups that began operations during the 2007-09 recession—and received their first patent in that time—tended to last longer than tech startups founded a few years before or after.

And those recession-era companies also tended to be more innovative than the rest.

“The effect of macroeconomic trends is not always intuitive,” says Daniel Bias, an assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, who co-wrote the paper with Alexander Ljungqvist, Stefan Persson Family Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Drawing on data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the authors examined a sample of 6,946 tech startups that launched and received their first patent approval between 2002 and 2012.

One group—about 5,734 companies—launched and got their patent outside of the 2007-09 recession. Of those, about 70% made it to their seventh year.

But the startups that launched and got their first patent during the recession—about 1,212 companies—were 12% more likely to be in business in their seventh year.

These recession-era firms were also more likely to file a novel and influential patent after their first one. (That is, a patent the researchers determined was dissimilar to patents in the same niche that came before it, but similar to ones that came after it.)

So, why did these recession-era firms outperform their peers? Labor markets played a big role.

A widespread lack of available jobs meant that the startups were able to land more productive and innovative employees, especially in their research and development groups, and then hold on to them.

More important, the tight labor markets also meant that the founding inventors—the people named on the very first patent—were more likely to stick around rather than try for opportunities elsewhere.

For startups started during the 2007-09 recession, founding inventors were 25 percentage points less likely to leave their company within the first three years.

On average, about 43% of founding inventors in the entire sample left their startup within the first three years.

“Our study really highlights the importance of labor retention for young innovative startups. Retaining founding inventors cannot only help them survive, but also thrive,” Bias says.

Bitcoin Information & Resources (#GotBitcoin)

Funding For The Affordable Connectivity Program Is Running Out And What You Can Do To Help

Scariest Clip On The US Economy You Will Ever See

Black Americans Are Embracing Bitcoin To Make Up For Stolen Time

‘Jim Crow’ Land Ownership Spurs Black Farmers’ Appeals To Biden

The Weaponization Of Tax Collection ($600 Billion Robbery) Against Black Citizens

Ultimate Resource For Bitcoin’s Inflation Rate VS Gold And The U.S. Dollar

Riddle Me This Batman. How Can Bitcoin Be Money, Property And A Commodity?

TL;DR: The US Is Broke And It’s Brokeness Is Resulting In A Global Fiat-Currency Collapse!!???

Why Car Insurance Keeps Getting More Expensive And What You Can Do About It

Americans Are Paying Billions To Take Drugs That Don’t Work

Ten Countries With Bitcoin Holdings Worth $38 Billion: (Spoiler Alert! US Government Is #1)