Guest Speaker Eric Hanberg

     Eric Hanberg spoke on Thursday about his experience as an entrepreneur and the businesses he has been involved with and started since leaving his job. He talked about the advantages of being an entrepreneur (like being able to play chess with a friend at 8am) and the disadvantages (like stress and working long hours into the night at times). He also showed a graph of his earnings before and after becoming an entrepreneur and talked about how an entrepreneur's earnings are mostly peaks and valleys as opposed to the stable salary you would earn working for a company.

     Eric also had some sound advice for people who had never attempted to create their own business before. He talked about his experience writing novels and said the biggest hurdle is completing a novel from start to finish. In business terms the biggest hurdle would be taking your idea and working on it until you have a complete product ready for release.

     He also said that there are things in the business world that are just out of your hands and you can only worry about things that you can control, and be prepared to fail several times before you can succeed because a successful entrepreneur often fails more times than he succeeds. Those are two pieces of advice that I had heard a million times before about baseball when I used to be a college baseball player.

What I want from this class

        I want to learn how to take my business ideas and begin building a business around them. I want to learn how to avoid the pitfalls of other unsuccessful businesses so that I can avoid them. I want to create a business model that will lay the groundwork for a profitable company. I want to lean how to thrive as an entrepreneur so that I can be my own boss. I want to know what makes a successful entrepreneur and what makes a failure. I want to know what steps I can take to fund my idea. I want to hear stories from successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs about the challenges they have faced and how they dealt with those challenges.

Business Ideas of Interest

Business Ideas of Interest

          My first business idea is quite simple, I want to create a good quality free to play game for phones and tablets that would generate revenue though advertisements or a $1 game. I notice a disturbing trend in free to play casual touch screen games where the game developer will try to squeeze money out of the customer any chance they get. Most of these games even require you to pay money or wait a certain amount of time to continue to play the game when you lose. Another issue is the quality of these games, especially on windows phone. Almost none of the games offered are worth playing, even $1 games (unless you are still entertained by angry birds). I believe there is a market on tablet and phone for more than just rip off and low quality games for casual gamers. My idea is to create a set of episodic RPG games based around player decisions that affect the game story, like many popular handheld Nintendo games. Each game would build off of the decisions the player made in the previous games and the theme would be sci-fi or crime drama.

         My next idea is to create a website that would host high budget videos (like tv shows). I feel that television will become obsolete in the near future because of the greed of the cable companies making you buy 500 channels to get the one you want. There is no reason why you couldn't create a cheaper alternative and still have high budget entertainment through a subscriber system. It would operate much like Youtube but with a few major differences. Most importantly, the channel would have a much greater say over the monetization of their videos. For instance, a channel could choose to charge $5 per month to subscribe and watch their videos and take home $4 of that. This is important because it will finally make it possible for big budget shows (like walking dead, breaking bad, game of thrones...) to thrive on the internet and it would only be a small fraction of the cost of cable. Instead of paying $300 to Comcast for the 6 channels I watch, eventually I could just subscribe to 6 shows of the same quality online for $30.