Elevator Pitch: Entropolis

Elevator Pitch is a regular feature on Lifehacker where we profile startups and new companies and pick their brains for entrepreneurial advice. This week, we’re talking with Tania Price from Entropolis.

In 128 words or less, explain your business idea.

Entropolis is a complete online business centre and workplace purpose-built for entrepreneurs. We are building a fully qualified and curated private business network and premium marketplace for business tools and resources to make it quicker, easier and less stressful for entrepreneurs to build their businesses in the real world. It’s a one-stop shop to help build ideas and power business success.

Our platform connects entrepreneurs with qualified experts, advisors and mentors across the globe and gives them access to best in class education and business tools.

We take care of the research, vetting, curation and quality control so that our Citizens can build trusted teams of advisors and collaborators quickly and get straight down to business.

What strategies are you using to grow and finance your idea?

  • Self-funded (strict budget limit) to full launch
  • Leverage founder expertise as much as possible to execute early stage
  • Technology cofFounder on product development for sweat equity to keep product costs realistic
  • Technology commercialisation partnership to reduce product build costs under control
  • Partnerships to deliver scale through population and vital resource input
  • Focus budget allocation on product and customer acquisition. Stay lean in other non-critical operations until we reach minimal viable citizens for a high functioning ecosystem
  • Bring forward start of subscription
  • Precinct sponsorship for large corporates with relevant assets and resources

What’s the biggest challenge facing your business?

Getting our first 1000 Citizens! Citizen acquisition and curating a successful two-sided community and marketplace is a ‘chicken and egg’ challenge. To attract and engage Citizens we need to deliver immediate value. But to deliver value we need a critical mass of active citizens. We are also having different conversations with multiple Citizen types so keeping everything on-brand, cohesive, meaningful and valuable is a challenge

How do you differentiate your business from your competitors?

We are building a custom online city for entrepreneurs to be owned, shaped and powered by the global entrepreneur community. It is not just another social business network but a powerful hybrid of vertical concepts like LinkedIn, Elance and Quora built on a curated open world platform.

By creating a one stop shop destination filled with useful and high value business building wisdom, tools and other vital resources, we are allowing entrepreneurs to connect the dots and create their own pathways through the entrepreneurship maze to deliver real-world business outcomes.

We believe we are pioneering a new way of doing business that is borderless, culture and gender inclusive, highly connected and meaningful.

What one phone, tablet or PC application could you not live without?

Skype. 70% of my core team are outside Australia so I use Skype chat extensively to communicate, conduct meeting and document all our communication threads.

What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?

Make sure you stay far enough away from unrealistic to be safe and close enough to savour the rush of standing on the edge.

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