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How to Create a DIY Kiosk on the Cheap For Your Small Business

As a small business owner you recognize the value of self-service because it allows you to serve more customers with minimal staffing overhead.

In this article I’m going to give you the components to piece together a very economical do-it-yourself kiosk for your small business or startup for under $1000.

This example will cover a single DIY kiosk deployment, but could certainly be scaled to support a handful of kiosks.

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The Biggest Mistake I Made While Launching My First Software Product

Honestly I had trouble coming up with the biggest mistake I made, because I made so many of them while launching our first software product in 2014.  Perhaps I’ll do another article with all the mistakes I made if I’m in the mood to relive the pain.

To give you a little background on our company, we specialize in custom software development for kiosks and self-service applications.  Our niche is retail and bill-payment kiosk applications.

A common part of the custom solutions we deliver include kiosk lockdown software which is essentially a security product to prevent malicious users from tampering with Windows and ensure the correct content is always displayed on the kiosk screen.

We’d been using the “other guys” kiosk lockdown software since about 2007 and I had the brilliant idea to create our own product which we’d bundle with our projects.  Aside from the fact that I didn’t correctly anticipate the amount of development work involved (it took us about three years to code) I made what I’d consider to be my biggest mistake.

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5 Tips for Staying Motivated and Doing Big Things in Your Small Business

If you’re anything like me, you’ve had rough moments when you want to give up on running your small business and go get a desk job.

The stresses of finding new clients and running the business begin to pile up and the idea of someone else telling you what to do doesn’t sound so bad.

Let’s be honest, if you have that entrepreneurial spirit there’s no way you’ll ever be happy working for someone else. At least I can’t imagine it.

The key to staying motived in your business is hope and vision for the future. Here are a few strategies you can use…

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How Do I Get Rid Of Fear as a Small Business Owner?

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Seth Godin wrote a blog post How do I get rid of fear? and it inspired me to answer this same question, but from the viewpoint of a small business owner.

First a little background.  My name is Andrew Savala and I’m the CEO / Owner of RedSwimmer a small software company specializing in kiosk software.

As a small business owner I have plenty of things to be afraid of.  The following list comes to mind:

  • Fear of not having enough clients
  • Fear of not adding the “right” features to our software
  • Fear of pissing off our clients
  • Fear of getting out of my comfort zone to learn about sales, marketing and social networking
  • Fear of attention
  • Fear that someone (or everyone) will quit
  • Fear of letting everyone down
  • Fear that people will find out how unqualified I am to run a business

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