got a great idea like an aquarium for jelly fish? we'll tell you how to get funding to kick-start your skp. and the ceo of protein snack clif bar takes the entrepreneurial road less traveled. that's all coming up next on "your business." >> small businesses are revitalizing the economy and american express open is here to help. that's why we are proud to present "your business" on msnbc.

hi there, everyone. i'm j.j. ramberg, and welcome to "your business." where we give you tips and advice to help your business grow. if finding money for your business has been a challenge, then maybe you need to take a closer look at the emerging world of crowd founding. part social media, part funding, there are new websites popping up every day that make it easy for entrepreneurs to pitch proud funding communities for money to support their venture. two entrepreneurs we met ran fruitful campaigns on the website kick-starter. here are the secrets to their success. >> my original goal was to raise $3,000. and we ended up raising $163,000. >> $5,264 people ended up

pledging for the project. which came out to a total of $364,600. >> they call it crowd funding. and for anyone who has had trouble finding the money to seed a new business, or find a new product idea, it's at the leading edge of a new world of nontraditional funding options for entrepreneurs. >> basically, these people are, you know, giving us maybe like 100 bucks apiece. and it really is more like a donation. >> there are tons of crowd funding websites out there. and they all work a little differently. but the basic premise of all crowd funding is to get financial support for a project or business by pooling money from a community of people who want to support it. >> what's great about kick-starter is, first of all, you get all the cash up front. so it's basically a preorder. so, customers are like, yes, i want this. here's the cash. >> crowd funding sites like kick starter that cater to creative projects work on a

model of donations in exchange for a reward. usually the product's promise is discounted, and the delivery date depends on how quickly they can get the product made after they receive the funding. >> my name is alex and i want anyone to be able to have their own pet jelly fish. >> for a $350 donation, alex andon's owners were promised his new desk top jelly fish tank. >> they can tell people like we helped get this company off the ground. and i have like one of the first desk top jelly fish tanks. so i think that just kind of cool aspect helps motivate people to don eight. >> capture lets you attach your camera to any strap or belt you own. at the same time your camera is immediately accessible via a quick release button. >> for a $50 contribution peter dering's donors are getting his capture camera clip which attaches an slr camera to a belt or a strap. after the kick-start the product

will retail for $80. >> i am just getting $32,000 in pledges in one day alone and kept on going from there. it was an amazing experience. truly amazing to just push refresh and see, oh, another person in glasgow, scotland, just pledged for the clip. >> both based in san francisco, peter and alex have become the stuff of legend in crowd funding circles having launched two of the most successful campaigns on kickstarter to date. how did they do it? we asked them to share some of their tips. the first step is getting through the application process. >> our application actually got rejected initially, and we had to reapply, and talk to them, and tweak a few things. so, you know, definitely put a lot of thought into the application process. they don't take just anyone. they want cool projects. they want genuine people. you know, stuff that's actually going to work. so they look for all those things in their applications.

>> after a few adjustments to his proposal, alex was ready to start on the most important component of a kick starter campaign, the video. >> a good video is really important. we went to a studio with good lighting. we hired someone who had good camera equipment. we spent a lot of time writing on a script and we did several takes and we made sure we had a video that looked really good. >> a successful campaign is the entrepreneur's personal story. for alex, when he was laid off as a lab tech at the height of the recession, he seized the opportunity to start his unusual business. >> jellyfish can't go in a regular fish tank because they get stuck in the filtration system. i couldn't find a supply of jellyfish anywhere or commercially available jellyfish tanks. so i had to make my own. >> peter also shared his personal story. >> finally last april i quit my job as an engineer and decided to create the solution myself. >> his kick starter is an all or nothing funding site, a project must reach a funding goal before time runs out, or no money

changes hands. both alex and peter recommend setting a modest funding goal that you can most likely meet, and hopefully exceed. another important element to the campaign is the reward. >> people also wanted tangible rewards. so, you know, we had maybe five or six different levels that you could donate and get a certain reward. and even if there is a small one, you know, you got like a t-shirt. or a thank you on our website. it was something tangible that people could point to. >> once you win funding, peter says staying in close contact with backers is essential. >> one of the most important thing that you do when you're running a kickstarter is you manage expectations. these backers are absolutely wanting to be your advocates. it's not like a normal purchase. they are almost like disciples, in a way. they really believe in what you're doing. yes, they're getting a product and they're pretty amped about that. but they want to be a part of the process. it's very key, though, i think, to have open and honest

communications, and if there was a problem, let people know. >> what's the bottom line on attracting contributors when you crowd fund? >> they want to see small hardware games, smart americans who have a cool idea, but just don't have the cash to do it. and they want to help them do that. >> kickstarter is just one of the innovative crowd funding options out there for start-up. let's turn to this week's board of directors. scott gerber is the founder of the young entrepreneur council. he's a serial entrepreneur and owner of sizzleit.com. and david s. rose, the first panelist ever to appear here on "your business" is back with us. he is the chairman and ceo of guff, which is a collaborative platform for early stage investing. great to see both of you guys. >> pleasure. >> i think this is such an interesting topic. because, as you were just saying in the break it's a game changer

for a lot of entrepreneurs. >> especially young people that might not be able to be, you know, finding the vcs or the angels out there that can give them several million dollars. you know, in many cases, in the donation world you can get, as was said before, tons of different people putting in a smaller amount of money. but if we start moving more towards things in this country like crowd funding as a means of raising actual capital, which is being talked about now in washington, d.c., it could be a total game changer, especially for young people. >> yeah, it was interesting. i did a story on the lending club awhile ago, which is where you get a loan from a bunch of people, and the guy said to me, it's different, when you go to a bank you need one person to approve your whole loan. when you go to a place like this you need a lot of people to approve a small part of it, and that's a lot easier to get in some cases. >> it's also a question of motivation. as you saw from kickstarter that is a new way of commerce and patronage, which is very, very different from investment and equity. >> right, yeah. >> i think the crowd funding is wonderful. i personally have funded half a dozen different kickstarter

projec projects and had an enormous amount of fun doing it. that's a different thing from my angel investing work. >> what made you fund the ki kickstarter projects? >> it was actually things that i had heard about through other channels and they were raising money. one of them, my hobby is letter press printing, like old style guttenberg type setting by hand. somebody had a project to create an ipad version of letter press printing. which sounds like a pretty much of an oxymoron. i thought it was really cool so i became the lead sponsor on kickstarter. the product was developed. it's a knockout product. it became one of the actual top grossing ipad apps in the design category. they have a mac version, as well. >> this is so neat. what you were saying is that you had instant customers, you're getting money. you're just getting prepaid for your product. >> what's really cool with our organization, young entrepreneur council we're going to put our first book that we've ever produced on indy go go to launch the book because we are such a

network community and all of our social influencers that we have in our network can push out the message even further. >> it's the cause. it is the ee advantagist. it's people doing something because they want to see it succeed. if you invest in the stock market, yes you'd like to have your company succeed because you'd like to make a lot of money on it. but it's a very different thing from supporting a product that has a patron in the arts. you could be de medici and supporting for your $600 contribution -- >> you're a jellyfish. that's to their point why the video and your personal store very is so important and you can't skimp on that. i think this is an exciting field and surely we're going to hear more about this in the upcoming months and years. thanks so much, you guys. in 1992, cycling enthusiast gary erickson got to work making a better tasting energy bar from his mom's kitchen. his efforts resulted in the birth of clif bar and the company named after his father clifford. since then it's grown to be one of the nation's leading energy bar companies. we sat down and talked with

erickson about staying in control, having a diverse background and taking the road less traveled in this "learnsing from the pros." ♪ i love this bar >> having a diverse set of skills, i feel really fortunate for all the years, not just business, because you go to business school, and you learn about numbers and marketing and so on. but i also had a short-term industrial engineering kind of degree. and i think also just being in the world of cycling, and climbing, where most people are eating energy bars at the time, and now it's broadened, also gave me an insight into the people that would eventually consume our product. so having this diverse background really paid off. ♪ don't give it away >> i don't believe in 50/50 partnership. i don't see the advantage of a 50/50 partnership. whereas i think i used to. the problem is neither of the 50% partner has really control. you kind of have control and you don't have control at the same time.

and so it becomes kind of like a consensus organization. i think the person that has the vision for the company needs to have control. where 80% owners of the country, which recently converted 20% to the employees. and it gives us what we desire on the control side. and the vision side. you know, people feel like now they have a piece of it. they have a piece in the growth of this company. and all the great things we do. and really, that's the bottom line, is they feel they're going to be able to get some kind of retirement benefit out of this. which they didn't have before. i just came back from riding over in the italian dolomides in slow vain yeah and austria. on the map we look for the white roads. they're the roads less traveled. the red roads are the busy roads, the white roads are the little roads through the beautiful villages and that metaphor, i brought that into

clif bar years ago saying, you know, we're not the traditional red road company, going from point "a" to point "b" all about just profit. and quick growth. at any expense. we do have destinations. but it's the roads we choose, so that's why we have the child care center. that's why we have a community service program. that's why we spend money on organic, because we want to travel that road, because if it was all about getting from point a to point b we probably wouldn't have these benefits and it would be back to growing this thing as fast as possible. still to come, sexual harassment claims are serious business. what should you do if something like a holiday party gets out of hand? we'll have some tips on how to make sure your workplace is a safe place. and we'll answer your small biz questions, including one about how to make your website mobile. shazi: seven years ago, i had this idea.

to make baby food the way moms would. happybaby strives to make the best organic baby food. in a business like ours, personal connections are so important. we use our american express open gold card to further those connections. last year we took dozens of trips using membership rewards points to meet with farmers that grow our sweet potatoes and merchants that sell our product. vo: get the card built for business spending. call 1-800-now-open to find out how the gold card can serve your business. it's that time of year when coworkers get to the at holiday

parties. but regardless of how large or small your company is, there should be some limits set on how inappropriate actions could affect employees or their positions. here to guide us on how to handle sexual harassment at a small business is kim zoler the founder and president of image dynamics. a group dedicated to business protocol and professionalism in the workplace. tell me how you deal with this. let's just say i am the owner of a small business and i have a group of, you know, three people who, they're 25 years old, they not only work for me, they're great, great friends, and their personal life it's fine for them to joke around with each other and say inappropriate things. do i have to say okay, that's fine, the minute you step through this door, you've got to stop? >> it's a really good idea to have conversations with your group. so i think that's when you mentioned that it's the perfect thing to do is pull people in, say this is what we -- this is what we do at our business.

if people get together where they really start dating, i would have a love contract so that it can't come back where someone's done something inappropria inappropriate. and it's having the conversation with people is -- is really -- it's important. it may make people feel uncomfortable but it's a good idea. >> so for somebody who hasn't done this early on, and they're about to have their holiday party, and they know there's going to be drinking there and everyone's going to get a little bit boisterous, do you really -- i mean, should someone have a conversation with the staff ahead of time, or is that a bit awkward? >> no, absolutely. pull everyone in, saying we're having a holiday party. and this is what could happen. this is what has happened at other companies. i don't want this happening here. and, this is what's appropriate behavior. we're going to have a great time, but let's not forget that even though it's social, a work event is a work event. and just important to remind everyone that especially people who are in their 20s, who really haven't had a position where

they haven't been in a very corporate environment, don't know what is 100% appropriate. >> i think that's a great idea. and that's a great way to say it, you know, somewhat casually but getting your message across pretty sternly. and then finally, you talk a little bit about social media and what's okay to post and what's not okay to post. >> yeah, so social media, the main thing, i think, as business is that you have two pages. like an facebook. you've got a work and you've got a social. people are -- people don't always realize that everything that they post is number one out there for everyone. number two, if you put a fun joke, or you say something, an innuendo about a co-worker posted on anything, on twitter, on facebook, on whatever, on youtube, that could really turn around and multiple comments like that could turn into sexual harassment. so, it's best just to keep things very clear. one is social. one is work.

and for the small business owner, they really don't want that line crossed, ultimately, because it could come back and hurt their business. >> all right. well kim zoller, thank you so much. great advice for the holidays and actually all year round. >> thanks so much for having me. new small business apps are released all of the time. but which ones are actually the most helpful? here are five apps your on-the-go sales people should check out. number five, gotomeeting is an app that lets you web conference from your smartphone. the app is free with paid subscriptions to the online service. four, camcard lite reads business cards and saves contact information internally or in your phone's contacts. three, square will mail you a free card reader that plugs into your phone and scans credit cards. you can accept payments from riis sa, american express, mastercard and discover credit cards for a flat fee of 2.7% using the free app.

two, use apple's keynote app to view and edit presentations made on keynote 2009 or power point. the app is available for $9.99. and number one, docscan is a free app that lets you scan and send multipage documents and other items. upload your scans to dropbox or google docs or just e-mail them as pdfs or zip files. it's time now to answer some of your business questions. scott and david are with us here once again. first question comes from brian, and he writes, i produce, maintain and update my own website. most major websites offer mobile versions. should i be looking to produce a mobile version of my website, and if so, how do you get that started? love this question, because your immediate reaction is yes, of course. but you have to step back a little bit. that's my opinion. >> that is the answer. the immediate answer is yes, of course. because we're heading to a world now of mobile. of social, of local. and if you are not accessible from a mobile device, you are

cutting off a large number of people who might be using your products and services. >> and you need to be where your customers are to david's point. in addition to that, it's so inexpensive to become a mobile soois, and create one, and you can do an exchange for having an optimized website that is done for you. >> what kind of fees are there? >> sometimes it's $50 a month, and there's also very inexpensive services that can amplify your business as well. don't necessarily invest right away, but see how it reacts to the market. >> before you invest so much into it, figure out your priorities. >> it's not that big of a priority. our questioner developed his own site. there's plenty of tools available and for free, and you can code that just as easy as a

desktop. >> and then joanna said the online search engines have made it very easy for disgruntled employees to destroy or online ima image. >> anybody that says they can delete bad things out of search engines for you is lying. >> but there are ways you can combat your folks. the first thing is getting your side of the story out there, your other people can tell your side. >> you have to engage. if somebody is on a forum saying

bad things about it you, being transparent is good. and getting good things about you out there, because the search engines will put everything at somebody's fingertips? >> sometimes is it better to not engage? there's one disgruntled employee that says one thing, and if you engage in the conversation, couldn't it backfire on you? >> that's why i think you need to have people speak for you, and if you use it as a brand and marketing moment, you will almost instantly get rid of any of the negative feelings because they are not as relevant. >> and people are good about reading tone. it's not going to be a battle, you are not going to fight it out, and if you are calm and collected and say here is the other side of the story, and don't engage in name-calling, and that does well for building

your brand. >> yeah, don't respond when you are emotional. in the last six months i franchised the business, and i wish to control the selection of my franchisees -- >> a franchise broker takes a piece of the action and a piece of the money you make for people to come and buy your franchises. the question inner has two needs, and one is for an adviser, and that's a fee basis, and you pay a fee to a cons consulta consultant, and you can outsource the sales, and they will take a little bit of the first payment but not a part of the long-term revenue.

>> if you want to do something slowly, couldn't you go to certain trade shows? >> yeah, i have a lot of friends that own franchise, and there are things like press, ways of getting yourself out there, if you are just back in the mom and pop setting again. it's not about getting somebody else to do the work for you, and it's about thinking strategically. and it's growing in accordance to that. >> but in franchising, like many other businesses, there are a lot of people who would love to take your money, so be careful and slow. >> yeah, and this last e-mail, from edward, over the past seven years, we developed a unique, feature rich stable online payment saas application that we successfully offered to our customers. assuming our software can support new markets, what

licensing models would you suggest? you know what i love about the question. he set out to do one business and he is finding there's another business. >> yeah, and we are doing that right now. we developed an entire management system for video editors and producers, and now people are wanting to do this exact same thing. we are doing revenue share agreements, or a seat agreement, and just taking a piece off the top. we are not starting equity arrangements, you use our product, and here is how many people are using it, and white label it so it's not a competitor and call it a day. >> there are many things which are white labeled. it's a great model. we need to think about this other party as a sales channel for you. the revenue slit that goes to

them and you, there's a number of factors. who is doing the first level of support? if you are doing all of the support and the customer is the end customer calling you but they are getting all the money, that doesn't work. the deals are between 20% and 50% of what the second person gets so you can retain 50% to 80% depending on how much you do. thank you. if any of you out there have a question for our experts, all you have to do is go to the website. the address is openforum.com/yourbusiness. there, hit the "ask the show" link. if you would rather, you can e-mail us your questions and comments. the address is yourbusiness@msnbc.com. scott and david had some really helpful advice about how to improve your business. now let's get some great ideas from small business owners like

you. >> it really helps to cultivate your network, the more you can cultivate your own personal network, the more success you have in funding and also in growing your business in general. >> what i have done is tried to keep the expenses to an absolute minimum. i advise people to learn to do basic book keeping on a computer. >> the one piece of advise that i love to give intrapreneurs, the biggest hurdle is there's so much trepidation to enter the marketplace, and people love to get up in analysis, and what that causes is paralysis. so just create a product and get it out into the marketplace, and that's really where you will get the best feedback, and you will see if your product will survive

or not. get out there with your product and see what happens. as a small business owner you are making critical decisions every day. to help make better choices, check out this site of the week. it helps you to size up your composition. sizup will show you where your greatest competition is located. it will offer suggestions for ways to save money. to learn more about today's show, just click on our website. it's openforum.com/yourbusiness. you will find all of today's segments. and don't forget to become a fan of the show on facebook. we love getting your feedback. or follow us on twitter, it's

this. >> find out how this woman grew her business by leaps and bounds and found ways of expanding her revenue base. until then, i am j.j. ramberg, and remember, we make your business our business. sam: i'm sam chernin. owner of sammy's fish box. i opened the first sammy's back in 1966. my employees are like family. and, i want people that work for me to feel that they're sharing in my success. we purchase as much as we can on the american express open gold card. so we can accumulate as many points as possible. i pass on these points to my employees to go on trips with their families. when my employees are happy, my customers are happy.