100UE Fundee Blog: Ujamaa Deals

Founders: Tre Baker (left) and Lawrence Watkins

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January 5, 2012: Ujamaa Deals’ Resolution for 2012 — Improving the Overall Economic Climate for the Black Community

Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, Ujamaa Deals cofounder and COO Lawrence Watkins turned on the camera and outlined his and cofounder Tre Baker’s plans for 2012. Check it out:

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December 14, 2011: Present at the Creation — Ujamaa Deals Formally Launches!

Huge congratulations to Tre Baker and Lawrence Watkins, whose African-American-based daily-deals site, Ujamaa Deals, formally went live just after 2 a.m. on December 13. The tired-but-elated duo had the cameras rolling as it all went down. Check it out:

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December 13, 2011: Transforming the Endless Stream of Information Into Viable Business Knowledge

Ujamaa Deals formally launched this week — congratulations to cofounders Tre Baker and Lawrence Watkins! A few days back, just in advance of the launch, Watkins shot the clip below, noting that he was able to eat, drink, sleep and think nothing but Ujamaa. As he did so, it occurred to him that one of the greatest challenges any entrepreneur can face is the struggle of turning information — ceaseless, constant, in-your-face information — into actionable knowledge that can actually benefit your business. How are he and Baker doing that as they debut their company on the global stage? Check it out:

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November 21, 2011: When Good Is Good Enough for Your Business

How dedicated about getting the word out is Ujamaa Deals cofounder Lawrence Watkins? He video-blogs from the airport. Based in Atlanta, he was recently in Washington, D.C., having secured an invitation to a White House event thanks to one of his other businesses, Great Black Speakers, through which he was recently named to the Empact 100 list of top young entrepreneurs.

His in-flight reading got him thinking about the challenge of perfectionism in entrepreneurship — when the quest for utter perfection can actually cause harm to your business. As he puts it, when is good . . . good enough? Check it out:

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November 16, 2011: “The Lean Startup”: Putting Age-Old Efficiency Ideas to Work for a Web-Based Business

The ubiquitous Lawrence Watkins, cofounder and chief operating officer of Ujamaa Deals, offers his thoughts about a book he’s been reading: Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. In part, the book discusses how you can use precepts from the height of the manufacturing age to make your thoroughly modern, Web-based business a success. Want more proof of Ujamaa Deals’ commitment, by the way? Watkins shot the clip below at 10:30 this past Saturday night. Partying? The man was working. He’s got a business to develop, after all. Check it out:

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November 10, 2011: “The Green-and-Black Revolution”: Recycling African-American Business Dollars

When we last left Ujamaa Deals’ Lawrence Baker (see November 9 video blog, below), he was explaining his company’s executive summary — and preparing to shoot some promotional material for Ujamaa. Decked out in a basic gray T-shirt, he showed off the home-studio equipment that enables him and his business partner, Tre Baker, to save a pile of money on promotional clips. Now take a look at the below: Having donned a sharp black suit and an elegant green tie (his color choices will make sense once you’ve seen the footage), Watkins gets in front of the white backdrop and lays out the case for Ujamaa’s business model: making sure that black dollars help black-owned businesses stay afloat. Check it out:

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November 9, 2011: The Importance of the Executive Summary — and Assessing the Competition

Ujamaa Deals cofounder and chief operating officer Lawrence Watkins takes us on a three-minute tour of the company’s current thinking: the importance of the Executive Summary (a recent topic in 100UE’s mentoring program) as a means of articulating exactly what your company is all about and how it intends to make a profit; and who Ujamaa’s competition in the black daily-deals space is. He also offers a quick look at Ujamaa’s in-house studio where it can shoot video and other promotional clips. We’ll be posting some of those in the days ahead. Check it out:

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November 2, 2011: Making the Case for Supporting Black Businesses (With an Assist from Sam Cooke and Malcolm X)

Be The Change…Buy Black from UjamaaDeals.com on Vimeo.

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October 24, 2011: The Hidden Benefit of Emerging Competition

By Lawrence Watkins

They’re coming out of the woodwork. Who? The competition. We always knew that daily deals from black-owned companies made too much sense for a lot of people not to try it eventually — and eventually is now. We’ve just learned about two new direct competitors, which makes five companies (including us) that we know of in the black daily-deals space. And there are surely more to come.

After my brief fit of annoyance, I reminded myself that this is actually a good thing, for two reasons:

1) Our mission is to get consumers to support black-owned businesses and create awareness about black economic empowerment. More competition only helps the cause.

2) I’m 95 percent sure that none of our competitors have thought about the overall strategy of how a daily-deals site fits into a much larger strategy for black economic empowerment, and how to put the pieces together to execute that strategy. If you’re starting a daily-deals site just to be a daily-deals site, you’ll get lost in the crowd. When these competitors start dropping out, then, I’ll just buy their e-mail lists from them and continue to expand our base.

Although I’m confident in our ability to compete, we did decide to switch our strategy last week because we don’t like the idea of letting our competitors catch up to us. So instead of pursuing a city-by-city strategy, launching in one city at a time, we decided to start by running national deals, taking advantage of the huge e-mail lists and social-media networks we have access to. Luckily, we haven’t launched yet, so it wasn’t too hard to execute such a strategy switch, but it does require significant changes to our plan and how we will operate.

It’s tough to find a balance between being reactionary when it comes to competition, and being a trendsetter. This time we were compelled to react, but I think our new strategy is actually a better one and will help us grow much faster; I’m wondering why we didn’t start off with it in the first place. So I would actually like to thank our latest competitors for the inspiration that will ultimately propel Ujamaa Deals to the top as the No. 1 daily-deals site for black-owned businesses — and a nationally recognized leader in the movement for black economic empowerment! •