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CSUF Entrepreneurship

Category: Atul Teckchandani

  • Pop-up Stores: The Perfect MVP

    An important milestone when attempting to start a new business is to create something that can be sold (or at least offered) to customers. The goal is to get something in the hands of your customers quickly and then continue to refine the product or service based on their feedback. In lean startup lingo, this…

  • Yelp – The Bad

    As discussed in our previous post titled Yelp – The Good, Yelp has proven itself to be a powerful marketing tool that can help businesses promote their products and services. While it would be great for any business to have a five-star average rating on Yelp, the reality is that getting negative reviews is unavoidable.…

  • Yelp – The Good

    Social media is becoming an increasingly powerful force that business owners – especially small business owners – cannot afford to ignore. There is an increasing body of work suggesting that online mentions and discussions about a particular business can meaningfully affect the business’s revenues. For instance, studies have shown that chatter on Twitter about a…

  • Why Human Resource Practices are Important

    While it is fairly obvious how marketing, sales, product development and manufacturing contribute to an organization’s success, the link between human resources and firm success has been much more ambiguous. Measuring how the sales department affects a firm’s revenues is quite simple. But it’s much harder to measure the effects of changes in hiring, training,…

  • The not-so-surprising failure of no-tipping restaurants

    Bruce Buschel, who ran a well-respected restaurant in the Hamptons and documented his experience in an excellent collection of posts, says that the hardest part of running a restaurant is “getting the food from the chef to the guest in a timely and polite fashion by a timely and polite staff.” This comment struck me…

  • You get what you pay for

    We all know McDonald’s pays its employees minimum wage. But did you know that Apple Store employees make about $25k a year?  And that full-time employees at Costco make $40k a year? While both stores are seen as being exceptionally successful, they have very different operating philosophies when it comes to how they treat their…

  • Dads: An Untapped Market

    In the spirit of Father’s Day, I think it’s time that entrepreneurs looked more actively at the dad market. Mothers are increasingly more educated than fathers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in the household (Source). And that means more stay-at-home dads. So why then are so few companies reaching out to these dads? The…

  • Make Your Customers Smile

    Recently, I was on a plane and paid $3 for a Vitamin Water. When it came, I discovered – to my surprise – that the bottle was half the size of the one that can be purchased at Target for $1. After realizing that I had just paid 6x more for the Vitamin Water than…

  • Diana Ho Designs makes Strategic Changes

    About a year ago we first brought you the story of Diana Ho and her boutique clothing company: Diana Ho Designs. Instead of going into a written explanation of what it is she set out to do I’ll just post a couple of pictures. As you can tell from the above pictures Diana definitely has…

  • You Should Think like an Entrepreneur

    Entrepreneurship is not just a topic of interest for someone starting a business, it is a mindset. In fact, this mindset has been so crucial that I recommend that every college student should take at least one entrepreneurship course – regardless of whether they actually want to start a business or not. Why? First, entrepreneurship…