1 (770) 807-7223by Richard Hooker and Steve Monas
Slingshot Product Development Group has been recently featured in a book by Richard Hooker, a Los Angeles marketing and advertising agency head, and Steve Monas, a San Diego-based "serial entrepreneur". Shoestring Venture: The Startup Bible is the most exhaustive set of practical resources collected to empower entrepreneurs to make the right decisions on a limited budget, from business concept to product development to Web marketing. Slingshot Product Development Group has been featured in Chapter 4:Bring Your Product to Market, where the authors speak specifically about Slingshot's Prototyping and Beta Analysis capabilities.
A portion of the introduction of Shoestring Venture: The Startup Bible is below. You can download the entire introduction here. Please take a moment to learn about how this book can help advise you with your next entrepreneurial venture:
If every brilliant business idea succeeded the way it should, most of us would be billionaires.
If every entrepreneur focused most of their energies on the things they're best at, nine out of ten new businesses would succeed wildly, rather than nine out of ten failing.
In 2006, I started ScourEvents.com. It was not the first business I built, but it was the first virtual organization I built. I focused my energies on what I did best and built an entire staff located all over the world to do the work that needed to be done. I control dozens of "employees" who perform hundreds of different job functions. And I made this all happen on a shoestring budget.
My virtual organization designed and developed a sophisticated Web site for ticket sales, helped launch the site in local markets through local PR blitzes, and developed all my marketing. With significant revenues pouring in and the site poised for an international launch, I got from start to finish in a few months time while still holding down a 9 to 5 job. And taking weekends off. And vacations.
To finance the site, I developed Web sites for other clients. Trolling Craig's List and other sites, I found clients throughout the United States. Once they hired me to build a site, I immediately outsourced the work to companies in India and China. Within 24 hours, I would have designs to show my clients. Within a few days or weeks, I'd have sophisticated, database-driven sites completed and quality-assured.
As for Craig's List Computer Gigs-- I was strapped for income, when a light went off. I wanted to test if I could turnaround web projects from outsourcing quickly, and make a profit. I went to Craig's List for each city under computer gigs for work needed.
I emailed each one with a small bio, and received several responses. Once I secured a contract, I went to elance, and outsourced. Within 24 hours, I would have samples for the client, who will later come back over and over again.
My profits ranged well above 70% of my costs. It's not that I didn't do anything: I built specifications based on the client needs, project managed the outsource company, and performed final quality assurance. But I didn't do the heavy lifting. And everyone in the picture - I, my clients, and my outsource companies - walked away happy with the value they received.
By concentrating on what I did best - strategizing Web sites, translating strategy into doable specifications, and project managing design and development - I spent my time on activities designed to bring the greatest value to my clients and to me. By outsourcing what I did not do better than anyone else - designing, coding, and programming - I made huge profits by finding people who could do these activities better and more cheaply than anyone else.
If I can build a powerful, successful business using only my laptop, then anybody can.
But I literally had to learn a million things to make it work. And so will you and any other entrepreneur. That's why we wrote this book, distilling all the knowledge, hard work, sweat, and mistakes that go into building a successful virtual organization into a reference that can help entrepreneurs like you make it there a little more quickly and easily.
Slingshot is one of the Southeast's leading product design and development organizations. The company's development teams utilize unique and proven strategies to rapidly launch products for clients in a variety of industries, including consumer products, medical, electronics, military/security, automotive, aerospace, toys, and other categories. Slingshot has developed products with dozens of corporate clients including The Coca-Cola Company, Plantronics, Conair, Kimberly Clark, CharBroil and Lockheed, as well as with innovation-based start-ups.
The company offers a full range of product development services including ideation, conceptual design, prototyping, engineering, design for manufacture, packaging and program management. Additionally, sourcing and manufacturer coordination services are offered through Slingshot's Asia office near Shanghai, China.
Slingshot Product Development Group was founded in 2001 by Sam Zaidspiner, President; George Hatzilias, Vice President of Engineering; and Noah McNeely, Vice President of Design.
