100UE Fundee Blog: GZpoints

Founder: Kofi Frimpong

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November 4, 2011: Remembering the Importance of Branding, and Preparing to Launch Later This Month

By Kofi Frimpong

These last two weeks have been about going back and fine-tuning everything. Fine-tuning the Web site, our marketing strategy, our sales strategy and how we execute GZpoints.com in general. Waiting on school districts and their lawyers to look over our agreements has given us a chance to perfect our launch plan for later this month.

We’ve spent a lot of time developing our business plan. I know that we all like to believe we’re smart enough to plan everything out in our heads, but writing things down enables you to analyze possible changes in your strategy. Also, you usually end up thinking about new ideas that you might not have thought about before.

100 Urban Entrepreneurs’ mentoring program has really helped us understand the importance of branding, a topic that comes up in every discussion. Your brand is everything. One word changed in the tagline of your business could be the difference between landing a potential customer and not. A lot of startup businesses initially overlook branding to focus on product development or other things — but your brand is your company’s face. It’s the first aspect of your business customers are introduced to. Think about it: No matter how great a guy’s personality is, if a girl isn’t initially attracted to his looks, she might not even entertain a first conversation with him (sorry, fellas).

GZpoints’ goal is to launch and be profitable in November 2011 — that is, this month. We’ve used basic accounting and financial software to manage our funds with the understanding that we’ll probably need more robust software later on to manage our revenue. So far we haven’t had much to manage; we’ve put most of our funds toward Web site development and other necessary startup expenses. This month is going to be a huge learning experience for us — and we look forward to it.

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October 25, 2011: GZpoints’ Initial Demo — What It Is, How It Works

By Kofi Frimpong

Just as no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, few entrepreneurial ideas retain their original form as the business develops. First intentions are important, though, and below is the demo video for how GZpoints was configured as we began our eight weeks of mentoring with 100 Urban Entrepreneurs.