hi there everyone. i'm j.j. ramberg. welcome to your business, the show dedicated to giving you tips and vase to help your small business grow. this happens all of the time. someone has a great idea, turns it into a company and then nobody's interested. well, the founders of flight car wanted to minimize risk. they had what some would consider a crazy idea that rethinks the entire way the rental car industry works. and so before spending too much time or money, they launched their company with the bare minimum to see what people would think. ♪ >> just four hours after they launched their company, the founders of flight car received a cease and desist order from the san francisco airport. >> it wasn't frightening. it was like this blows because you know, we just launched. now we had to change the model. he is part of the is founder team of flight car. he and his partners are disrupting the rental car industry. basically, they took a look at how things currently work and thought, there's got to be a better way. >> there are two parking garages at the airport. one where people pay a lot of money to park cars and another where people pay a lot of money to rent cars from. it doesn't make sense right now. there's a lot of inefficiency in the system. >> they put off college tellinging harvard it, m.i.t. and princeton they would be busy and set off to change an industry. here's how it works. instead of dropping your car off at long-term parking you drop it off with them for free. while you're gone, they'll rent your car out to someone else reggie chaing less money than companies like hertz and a vis and they'll give you a percentage of the fee. ♪ >> it's definitely a new way of thinking. it's part of what's been dubbed the sharing economy and the way they launched their company is modern, as well. instead of waiting till everything was perfect, they launched with as little in place as possible. with what's called a minimum viable product or mvp. >> well, if i'm going to do this, is i need to have some people who can help with the transactions, i need to have the insurance squared away. and you know, preferably a parking lot. it doesn't have to happen. >> that's right. they launched their company with no official place to park the cars they were collecting. in the beginning they would meet their clients at short term parking which is why they got the cease and desist order from sfo. >> you knew something like that was going to happen. why not skip that part and launch once you launched in a place where you knew you wouldn't get a cease and desist. >> then we would be launching like today or tomorrow. at that point, we would have given up a lot of time. >> the idea behind their strategy was to launch fast and lean. no employees. low overhead. they're one required large expense was insurance and few systems is perfectly in order. just get the idea out there and see how people react. >> imagine if flight car didn't work. then we would have spent three more months like setting everything up. we would have had done things like get land together, it's an very expensive and we would have spent all that time working on something we 0 could have tested easily and ended up not working. ♪ >> as it turns out, flight car is working. but it's already been through a few iterations and still very young life. now they have their own, paing lot but before that, they changed their drop-off point multiple times. >> how did you get people to trust you when you're not even telling them a place to come till they call you. >> it's talking to the customers being honest like we're trying this concept out and they understand. >> that culture of understanding is one of the key reasons the flight car team decided to launch the company in san francisco. jim newton was one of their first customers and he explains it best. >> in silicon valley there's a mind-set to be much more accepting to startups. right and give them a little slack. >> even jim who simply fried out flight car because he thought it sounded like a neat idea had a moment of hesitation the second time he signed up to drop off his car and they told him to meet them somewhere new. >> so it's like, well, i'm supposed to go where. you know? and i'm supposed to meet a guy? it was like late, too. it was like midnight or something like that. and i was like okay, we'll see how this goes. >> there are a lot of people lo might think this is crazy. your first interaction with a customer is your most important interaction with a customer. and so for them to see something that isn't perfect might hurt you down the road. >> i mean, that's why i think it's really been important for us to meet the customers. you know, when you tell them you're the founder, you give them the car. they get it. >> regardless of what was happening behind the scenes, the founders were adamant will providing a good experience. because for their customers, that's the only thing that counts. >> what's great about the start of a business is that there are so few customers that you can provide really, really good customer service. >> it was a good experience. >> it was easy. they knew who i was. they picked me up. >> since they launched their mvp, things have changed at flight car. now they have their own parking lot employees and systems in place. and it's represent applicable. they opened another one in boston. i asked if they use the mvp philosophy there, as well. they told me luckily they didn't have to. >> hopefully not. it's going to be crazy if we have to do this again and again. i feel like we'll age like presidents. i think we've locked down a good model. ♪ >> i find this idea of the minimum viable product fascinating and it's the way we launch things in my company. how can you pull it off and does it make sense for every business? let's turn to alfred edmund, it the senior vice president and multimedia editor at black enterprise and ensign barnes is a partner at first round capital and blogs at sneaker head vc.com. first round capital invested in flight car. great to see both of you guys. >> great to be back. >> i found out about this company from a colleague of yours and an-i thought it was a go story. this idea of the mvp, minimum viable product turns on its head the way people used to do business before. >> that's right that's right. and we met these guys and many of the prushs we meet and one thing we love is this idea of build, break learn and do that as many times as you can as fast as you can, turn those feedback loops into shorter and shorter and shorter loops and xwroe your business with as few dollars as possible and ultimately, that will lead to a strong foundation and to the biggest business you're capable of building. >> we do this in my company as i just said. it pains me to put stuff out there that's not perfect. we do it because we build it, get it out there, get feedback but when i get it, i think i want to trick tweak that and it's heartbreaking even though i know's the right thing to do. >> because you're not the person even though you're making it that's going to decide whether it's perfect or not. the final judge is still is the consumer. you can fool yourself into thinking it's not right, but you don't really know till you put it out there. it's better especially the wait things move so quickly now to get it out there and see what the customer thinks. >> i thought people will hate this and it turns out to be the think we love. >> we also put out thing we thought were perfect and they hate it. >> as long as you have a way to find out why they hate it or love it. your final product the one you go to the mass market with and you reach the most consumers with will be perfect in their eyes. >> minimum viable product, minimum but viable. how do you figure out what that is. >> as an entrepreneur, you want to maximize learning per dwlar every experiment su make as you think about the dollars you put to work against this experiment and then how much you're going to learn from that. you should optimize learning perpendicular. mime viable product sometimes that's something on paper and interviewing a customer. and other times you have to actually write code and put something out on a website or in the case of flight are ca, they needed to figure out how to get some cars in a lot and have people come and rent them >> he that was fascinating me. they started a place where someone is going to give them their car. an entirely new way of thinking and had no parking lot. one day they said drop it off here and next day said call us and we'll tell you where to drop it off. >> they not only started in a market where people are willing to take the risk but there was a reward factor to the risk. i can pay less money, not have my car sitting in a lot and maybe get paid for the process. it was a worthwhile risk for enough of a percentage of the marketplace for it to work. >> it's fascinating. i'm excited to see how the company does. i hope they do very well. so this is really sort of a whole new way of thinking, flight car. if we think back on old ways of thinking, a lot of them still work, too. i'm talking in particular about e-mail marketing which a lot of people think is very old school but helpful for a lot of companies. here now are five ways to ignite your e-mail list growth without ending up in the spam folder courtesy of mashable.com. one, make it easy. don't just position the facebook and twitter icons prominently on your website. two, don't stop at just one. add more opt-in forms throughout your site and various placements. test these locations to find the combination that works best. three, collect e-mails at your stores. ask your customers to are their information at your checkout counter or when requesting an e-mail receipt or make it mobile. make sure your mobile site also asks visitors for e-mail. don't ask users to fill outlots of forms. keep it short and simple. and five, consider implementing social signon. users can sign into your website using log in information from facebook or twitter instead of creating a separate account. a couple of weeks ago, i went back to stanford business school for my 15th reunion. things are quite different than when i went there. now there's a whole venture lab dedicated just to on campus startups. technology has changed everything making it much easier to start a small company. i shated with a bunch of professors and asked them what would i learn if i were sitting in that seat in your class today instead of 15 years ago. .garth was my strategy professor back then. today he's dean of the entire school. i asked him how running a small business has changed in the last decade. >> i think innovation is in the air even more so than it was 15 years ago. >> take it out of a university setting for a second. i am a dry cleaner cleveland. how important is it important for me in the same way that you guys intermix with other departments for that person to intermix with other businesses? >> i think it's very important for them to get new ideas and to have an infusion of ideas that maybe come from businesses that look a little bit unrelated but may have an idea that you can apply to your own business. just looking at your peers and being stuck in a i particular paradigm can be very limiting >> how do you foster innovation if you're not naturally innovative, how do you foster that kind of culture? >> i think within your organization, first of all you have to embrace experimentation that also means that you need to embrace failure. because when you experiment, not everything is goes well. you need to have a culture where you try things if they don't work, you actually celebrate those. so we have in my team, we have a little celebration where every time we pronounce something we tried dead, we clink on a little glass and we smile and celebrate it because we tried it. su also have to be good at shutting down things that aren't working. embracing failure a little bit paradoxically is a very, very significant part of success. >> how do you teach that? you have a bunch of very ambitious students here who want to be very successful, have been successful enough to be admitted to the school so far. how do you teach them that many failure is okay? >> we expose them to lots and lots of entrepreneurs. i think that's the key way you do it. we have entrepreneurs coming to is clas in all of our entrepreneurship classes the classes are written around people who started a business and some of those are written fairly early on. you don't know whether they're going to be successful. there are a lot of failures 37 what they say is yes, i failed in that business. if you look at my career, i struck out, i had a base hit in a baseball analogy and eventually hit the home run. it's about that kind of track record of your life. >> you have about 11% of the people who graduate here and go on to start something the next year and countless more years down the road. what's one piece of advice you give to people setting out to start something new? >> the way of starting a business has really changes. we encourage them to emphasize customer empathy. this is about focusing on your customer and their needs. you know, in old days you would sit in your lab and invent something you thought was a great idea and flesh it out and an tick it out to market and hope that it succeeded. that's not the philosophy anymore. it's much more about talk to the customer, figure out what you think they want. build something in a very very simple prototype. and then rapidly innovate on the prototype. >> ultimately it's all about the customer, not about what you think? >> you can think whatever you want. if this isn't satisfying a real customer need they're not resonating with your product and service, it's not going to succeed. >> i sat in your class 15 years ago. it was night to be there then and great to talk to you now. >> thank you so much, j.j. it's a real pleasure. >> how involved do you want your investors to be in running your small business? and dick yingling, the head of the pennsylvania beer dynasty talks about the importance of growing slow despite high demand in this week's learning from the pros. ♪ i'm a hard, hard worker every day. ♪ ♪ i'm a hard, hard worker and i'm working every day. ♪ ♪ i'm a hard, hard worker and i'm saving all my pay. ♪ small businesses get up earlier and stay later. and to help all that hard work pay off, membership brings out millions of us on small business saturday and every day to make shopping small huge. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. when america's oldest brewery opened its doors in 1829 in pottsville, pennsylvania, it was the first step in turning yingling into a household name. now 184 years later, the company produces more than 2 million barrels a year at three facilities and it's still run by the yingling family. dick yingling, the fifth generation owner talks about a good product at an affordable price, remembering your backyard and the next generation in this learning from the pros. ♪ >> i think any small business has to really watch their costs. i've always watched costs here from the time i was a kid when i was 15, 18 years old, i kind of did everything years ago but now we have plant managers and production managers and they're forever wanting more and more employees. i tell them you can't get too many more employees, yet you have to run efficiently and do it with what you have. sometimes it works. sometimes it doesn't. all il know is if we can run a can line with five people, that's what we have on the can line. we don't run as fast as the big breweries. they probably run 2400 cans a minute. we run 890 cannes a minute and do it with five people. that's for us that's good. that's as good as i could do and you can't expect better than that your best. ♪ >> we have a capacity problem and how much beer we can really handle. we don't want to sell more than what we can make because then you start running into product problems and it's not necessary for this company to operate that way. we probably haven't grown fast enough but you don't want a lot of unused capacity in your manufacturing facility. we grow in accordance with opening new markets. years ago, we had an opportunity to go into new england markets and just kind of throw our beer out there into any market that was willing to receive us. we pulled away from that as we started to grow in the pennsylvania market. we good good wholesalers growing into maryland, be new jersey, delaware and kind of grow in adjacent markets now. we build a brand, a reputation for that brand. the consumer likes it. then we move onto the next state where it's already known. >> remember our backyard just remember where you came from. we just kept this company alive by not forgetting where we came from and they've inspired us here and not just in our pottsville area harrisburg and philadelphia and we've sold beer in those markets for many, many years. i call us a local regional brewery. we depend so much on the local area we won't want to lose that. we certainly don't want to lose the support that we've gotten regionally. it's your backyard. this is the oldest brewery in the united states. ♪ ♪ we are the generation now >> you can't sell the yingling brewery to joe smith. so the you hope one of the family members takes it over. next generation is jennifer and wendy that there's a great interest on their part to learn and take over and i think they see some of the things that i do sometimes they don't understand why, but they're learning. and it's a learning experience for them. they're getting to the age that pretty soon, and i'm getting to the age also that pretty soon they're going to be running this. ♪ we are the now generation. >> it's time to answer some of your business questions. alfred and phin with back with us now. the first one is about courting potential investors >> should we consider investors who want to be really involved in our business or investors who trust us to handle it? >> alfred? >> there's smart and dumb money. smart money comes with advice, connections, mentorship and if somebody's investing in your business, chances are they know a bit more about the industry maybe than you do. i would say that all things being equal, you want the person who has an interest in your business to understand your industry. >> the key is smart. because if someone has an interest in your business and thinks they're smart but not helpful, it's more of a hin hindrance than a help. >> you definitely want to look is this a person that's invested in this industry before or run a business in this industry? not just somebody who i like your business. no, you want somebody who is smart money. >> you can bring it back to something very familiar which is hiring. and so when you chose your co-founders, when you choose your first employees you have a way you look at what they're going to bring to the table, to understand their skill set and know how they'll impact your business. do the exact same thing with investors. far too many entrepreneurs view themselves as on the sell side of partnership. they should spend more time evaluating their source of capital, is it going to add value beyond the green. >> unlike hiring, you can't fire them. once they're invested, they're there. >> here's what you don't want, someone you are beholding to because you have their money but who doesn't understand your business. >> or have the same goals as you. let's move onto the next one. this is a question about targeting a niche audience. >> how do i best reach small business owners in the urban community to provide them a service such as business management? >> so i think this is interesting. she's trying to reach one particular type of person. it's really a question how do you reach a niche. general. >> i think the best thing to do is to deeply understand your customer and walk in their shoes and to really know the way they view the world. then you have to figure out a way to deliver a wow. something that shocks them, something that goes well beyond what they would have expected so that they talk about it, they want to come back and i think you're delivering deep value for them. >> how do you figure that out? you want to reach these people. >> it's going to take research. you can't do this from 30,000 feet and say i'm trying to reach urban business entrepreneurs but business management services. that's a broadest description of the customer and the service. you want to narrow down here are the services i provide and identify is the types of businesses that need those services. that may be a very different person than the person you had in mind when you just thought urban. and the services they play want may be a different menu than you initially thought they might want. >> get out of the building and talk to them. >> boots on the ground. finally here is a question about incorporating your company. >> would the panel agree with me that any small business should at least be an llc if not a c corp itself and any business netting $200,000 a year or more should definitely be incorporated? >> would the panel agree with him? ? >> if you have $200,000 coming in, you can afford a lawyer and figure out what's best for your specific situation. so proprietorship -- there's lots of corporate forms. >> i agree. i get nervous around words like always, every, any, these absolute terms. the reality is, you should have an attorney, you should have a tax pro on your side and a shall if advisor to figure out what's best for your business. i think he's generally right. you really need to tailor it to what's right for your business. >> follow up is, what if you are developing an app? you don't know if it's going to turn into a business or not. you don't want to spend all this money legal hiring a lawyer, et cetera. do you need to turn it into a business right away or wait to see if it's successful? >> i think you can get something out in the market and see what happens as a so proprietor. but you should have in mind sort of certain objective milestones that say at this scale, i'm ready to talk to a lawyer. >> great you guys. a lot of good advice. if any of su out there have a question for our experts go to obvious website, open forum.com/your business. once you get there, hit some ask the show link to submit a question for our panel. open forum.com/your business or if it's easier for you, send us an e-mail. the address is your business @ @msnbc.com. alfred you september a tweet i thought was so inspiring i wanted to share it with the audience. fear of success is the fear of the unknown. too often we cling to failure because we are familiar with it. what inspired you to write that? >> my own life. i'm already big into trying different things and not an you log the fear stop me from doing it and not worrying about failing because failure is fiction and mistakes are migs. >> that tie is your line. >> when i did body building, i was into body building. i like trying to test myself and proving over and over again there's nothing you can't do. you have to decide what is it worth your time to do. >> i find twitter a great resource for inspiration and practical advice. we wanted to share with you some things people are saying about small business. small business consultant and your business guest rob basso asks are daily deals good for small business? they can be but the decision to offer one must be carefully considered. carol roth tweets the one thing you need for successful delegation, definitely set clear expectations. and "usa today" small business columnist rhonda abrams suggests is identify problems before they occur and save your small biz from unwanted surprises. so we will continue to follow all of those people and you guys and share them with our audience. you had great advice today. now we'd love to get great ideas from small business owners just like you. >> we started a customer appreciation program called our fabulous 100 where at random intervals we provide them with gifts, incentives and other little acts of kindness and this program has been so successful that will group of customers more than doubled in sales last year. >> my tip business owners is to take tips out there for free. you can use microsoft excel to make control of your stock instead of hiring very expensive software. >> one thing we like to emphasize is because of our small size we can communicate with our entire staff. a good way to do that is have friday lunch with your entire staff and bring everyone in and make sure you're open to casual ideas. you'd be surprised what you can learn about your business talking with your employees. >> between your e-mail inbox and social networking sites it is hard to filter out what's important from the rest. if that's your problem, like it is mine, check out our app of the week. clothes helps you prioritize only the messages relevant for you. the free app gives relationship scores to everyone you know based on when and how you communicate with those people. closze will make sure key people never get lost in the shuffle. alfred and phin, thank you so much for coming on. hope to see you both soon. >> thanks for having us. >> if you want to revisit some of today's segment at open forum.com/your business. we've posted web exclusive content. you can also follow us on twitter @msnbc your biz. and please don't forget to become a fan of the show on facebook. next week, should it stay or should it go? how do you know when it's time to stop selling a product? >> if there's a thick coat of dust, it's not moving. >> when it's down at the bottom shelf all the way to the left or the right, it's on its way out. >> we'll find out when the time is right to give your not so best sellers the boot. till then, i'm j.j. ramberg. remember, we make your business our business. is like hammering. riding against the wind. uphill. every day. we make money on saddles and tubes. but not on bikes. my margins are thinner than these tires. anything that gives me some breathing room makes a difference. membership helps make the most of your cashflow. i'm nelson gutierrez of strictly bicycles and my money works as hard as i do. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. tonight's lead, verdict watch in the george zimmerman trial. the jury's decision could come down at literally any moment. these are live pictures from the seminole county courthouse in sanfo sanford, florida, where jurors have been shut away in the jury room, deliberating for about 3 1/2 hours now. by this point, they've probably selected their foreman and are reviewing the evidence. after 12 days of testimony and 53 witnesses, these six women on the jury must decide whether george zimmerman is guilty in the shooting death of 17-year-old trayvon martin. this morning, they heard

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