Smell the Sizzle now. Taste the Steak soon.
First, welcome to ActSeed! By reading this, you’re already participating in an innovative “community of common interest” that is dedicated to helping prepare great business ideas and connect the founders of those ideas with other people who will be necessary to turn the great idea into a successful business through preparation, execution and intensity. This part of ActSeed will always be open to everyone to read and contribute. This is ActSeed’s “SIZZLE”.
We hear all kinds of idioms related to steak and sizzle, such as “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” and “You can’t sell the steak without the sizzle”. From my understanding, we can thank the late sales guru and pioneer of persuasion from the mid 20th Century, Elmer Wheeler, for the original phrase. Simply put, the sizzle is the communication of the value proposition (sales & marketing) and the steak is the desired business value.
ActSeed’s sizzle isn’t a means to an end with a sole intent of getting you to join the coming business community. Our sizzle should stand independently as a valuable resource. We want every word and every recommendation on our home page to have value and meaning to you.
The Steak is coming.
To keep true to the sizzle-steak metaphor, if you like the aroma coming from our kitchen, just wait until dinner is served! [For our vegetarian readers, we did our homework, and there is such a thing as a tofu steak. Recipes here: http://bit.ly/3eUuBy See? We were thinking of you too when using a steak metaphor!].
Behind our online magazine content, a new “marketplace for the idea economy” is about to be launched. You can join the Community for free. Within the Community, we have five primary groups that have specific needs to address and resources to offer:
- Entrepreneurs – business owners who are building and growing a business
- Investors – people and institutions looking to put their cash to work by funding small, growing businesses
- Work seekers – people who are available to work and want to work with or for a small business. This includes people who want to spend a few hours a week advising a company that needs their core expertise and wisdom. This includes people looking for full time jobs and those looking to pick up additional hours (part time). This includes freelancers and contractors. This includes, essentially, all of us.
- Education and Outreach Programs – public and private organizations that are focused on facilitating and mentoring small businesses. Groups that carry a mission of new business creation and job creation. Universities, community colleges, SBA, chambers of commerce, economic development organizations, private incubators and even news organizations - they’re all included here.
- Service Providers – for-profit firms that provide needed services to small business, such as accounting, legal, management consulting, marketing, etc.
Some of the groups within the community are free and some have a membership. All have a very specific value to you depending upon your current professional situation and near term business goals. You’ll quickly figure out how to navigate through this community. It’s based upon contemporary social media / social network functionality. If you understand Facebook and LinkedIn, then you’ll easily follow. If you only understand web browsing and email, you’ll still figure out how to use our community with ease. Oh, and you can join more than one or ALL groups at once. Most of us hold more than one of these roles already, such as an entrepreneur starting a new business while looking for another 20 hours of work to supplement his/her income, or an investor looking for a company needing working capital and simultaneously looking for advisory roles.
Unlike most of the popular social media sites, ActSeed isn’t another venue to amass as many contacts as you can. We’re not another potential steady stream of information that you have to worry about digesting. Instead, ActSeed has a premise that you need to interact with the people who matter to you NOW as quickly and efficiently as possible, and those people may not be in your “six degrees of separation” network, but if you have defined your needs well, and everyone else in the community defines their skills and availability well, then you’ll be doing business much faster. And if you’re reading this, you likely already know from experience how a small business person has little margin for error in getting to the right people and remaining as prepared as possible. You also know that your needs are constantly changing, so it’s easy to appreciate that someone you might want to engage today is engaged by someone else tomorrow – thus they may be a good fit for your needs, but no longer available.
Whether you’re talking about an investor who has a pocket full of cash today and finds an entrepreneur tomorrow or an advisor with expertise and wisdom who’s available today but starts helping someone besides you tomorrow, a big part of small business building is timing. You want to be that person who finds the investor, service provider, mentor or worker when they matter to you and when they are available to you. Most social networks are designed for you to spend an unlimited amount of time achieving a never ending goal of expanding your network. ActSeed is designed for you to spend as little time as possible to engage only those who matter to you at any given moment.
We break ActSeed’s Community Application (our “Steak”) into two value propositions:
Value Proposition #1 = “Framework”: Structured Business Planning & Preparation
ActSeed has a self-profiling process that helps you focus on your preparatory progress in seven key areas. We don’t try to evaluate the efficacy of your idea or business plan or your professional skills or capital resources. We’ll make sure to include individuals, companies and outreach / mentoring programs that do that very well. We will help you score your “completeness of preparation” with an introspective look at what issues you’re confronting and which you have yet to confront. We’ll even give you a scoring report so you can track progress as your business evolves. We’ll also use this scoring methodology to help you “reach those who matter” in our community, which we’ll describe in our second value proposition for you, but first we recap our first value proposition:
- Immediate value delivered to each member, even before interacting with other members, through a comprehensive media library for entrepreneurs and a thorough profile process for everyone
- Methodical format for disciplined business planning, preparation and presentation
- Easy-to-use self-profiling tool; inputs converge on a valuable introspection: “Are you prepared?”
- Unique scoring of the entrepreneur’s completeness of preparation
Value Proposition #2 = “Dynamic Community”: Social Media Applied to Structured Business Interaction, Not Unstructured Networking
Preparation needs an outlet, right? All dressed up and no place to go doesn’t cut it. And if you’ve invested some preparatory time before stepping out, you expect others to do the same. ActSeed’s business “community of common interest” is designed to bring us all together to efficiently do business. ActSeed is designed to help you find others who matter to you at the moment when you need them and when they are available. ActSeed protects your privacy until you choose to reveal more information. A summary of the value we deliver within our second value proposition includes:
- Provide entrepreneur-centric environment for interaction among key resources
- Private messaging & workspace for collaboration & negotiation
- Advanced search / matching capabilities that include profile scoring on each role
- Build valuable knowledge base of user activity & community behavior
