The Thomas Edison Strategy
In business, demand is invariably more important than supply. If demand doesn’t exist, supply is irrelevant. If demand exists, supply will eventuate.
I happened upon a quote from one of the greatest inventors / entrepreneurs in history Thomas Edison. Despite the simplicity of the idea, it’s very profound.
“I find out what the world needs, and then I proceed to invent it.”
This is some pretty good advice for any entrepreneur. It’s better to make what you can sell, than try to sell what you can make.
When to quit
This is the fifth of my crowd sourced blog entry ideas as suggested by Cameron Reilly. Cam wanted to get my thoughts on the following: When to call it a day. When to close up shop.
This is one of the most difficult propositions as an entrepreneur – when to stick and when to quit? My view is a simple analogy. When the startup or business feels like a bad romantic relationship you’ve had. The type of relationship you knew you had to get out of, but couldn’t. The type of relationship you had an unhealthy addition to, or found it too hard to leave emotionally, or was scared of the financial losses and asset split associated with leaving it. When your business feels like that, it’s time to leave. If you view your business as a relationship you have with it, then it will become clear if it’s over. Because we all know that feeling. And we usually know the truth deep down in our hearts when things are just not right. When your startup feels like that, it’s time to shut up shop.
Here’s some simple sentences that may also help you know if it’s time to quit:
It’s time to quit when, you’ve lost interest in the project, and your only doing it for the money.
It’s time to quit when, you only keep going because of the time and money you’ve already invested.
It’s time to quit when, you can’t sustain yourself or family on the income it provides, or the little time it leaves.
it’s time to quit when, you’ve had enough and would have a less stressful life in a job.
It’s time to quit when, you’ve run out of money, time or desire.
It’s time to quit when, you know who can achieve more moving onto the next project.
It’s time to quit when, your not quitting because the newness has worn off, but the business is genuinely not working.
it’s time to quit when, you achieved multiple set milestones set and they still didn’t pay off financially.
it’s time to quit when you no longer believe in what your doing.
It’s time to stay the course when none of the above applies.
ABC 7.30 report – Virtual Offices
I was fortunate enough to feature in a story on the ABC 7.30 report this week. The topic was on virtual offices and digital offshoring. My business rentoid got a nice little plug which is a bonus on a non-commercial channel. The opportunity arose from this newspaper article I was in on the topic in the Sydney Morning Herald. Which goes to show media exposure also has a compounding effect for your startup as well.
Although the story and offshoring in general has it’s detractors (unions love the status quo, unless it involves profit increases they want a share in). I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve worked with talented people in developing markets.
- My team get paid more than they’d get locally.
- I’ve helped team members get more work, and mentored them in building their own businesses.
- I like investing in developing markets because improves living standards.
It’s our job as entrepreneurs to create positive situations with tech innovations, and there’s no doubt in my mind having an overseas team does this, while building a business with beneficiaries locally (employees, revenue, community) as well.
We only have one
There is no career, only life.
If we think of our life and career as separate entities, we’ve got things terribly wrong. They are inextricably linked. If we want to be happy, we need to make sure what we spend our days doing is how we want our life to be.
Good Guys, Smart Guys
♫ Come in and see the good, good good guys. Pay cash and we’ll slash the prices… ♫
If you live in Australia, you’ve seen the TV advertisement and heard the jingle. It’s a pretty simple proposition. It encourages customers to negotiate a price. I went to the Good Guys to buy a fridge and negotiate like everyone else does.
After we cut the deal and agreed on a price, I proceeded to pay in cash, when the sales guy said; ‘Credit card is fine. We are not that strict on cash payments these days.’ So I paid using my card.
It got me thinking about the truth of the Pay Cash and we’ll slash the prices tagline / tactic. It is a simple point of difference and traffic generator. The idea of the cash payment is really something that can only work on a micro level. A large retailer couldn’t dodge the tax man through taking cash payments and justify provide an unusually large discount. The supply chain has too many parties involved. Rather, it is used to appeal the the customer who thinks they are getting a better deal by paying cash. It’s perception marketing. The insight for startups is this: if this works for the customer, that’s all that really matters.
Nice idea, but what’s in it for us?
I took this photo while shopping at Australian supermarket giant Coles yesterday.
I’ll start by saying not returning supermarket trolleys, or worse stealing them is not cool. It probably adds some cost to our grocery bills, albeit small.
But when I saw this poster up in my local Coles, I tweeted it and made the comment that it was reasonably amusing. Then Cameron Reilly, made what I thought was an insightful comment from a marketing perspective:
then I responded with this….
and Cameron finished it off with this 140 characters…
Which to be honest is probably the sentiments of most of Coles’ customers.
I’ll say it again – ‘Incentives shape behaviour’ – on this occasion there is no incentive for customers to care. How hard would it be for Coles to offer a shopping voucher for lost trolley returns? Or some other small incentive? In fact, it’s an insult to their customers to ask for help in a such a one sided manner. It’s very 1970’s marketing.
Startup blog says: respect your customers and reward the right behaviour.
Overcoming fear
This is the fourth of my crowd sourced blog entry ideas as suggested by Lani Pauli. Lani wanted to get my thoughts on the following: How to overcome the fear to take the leap and do your own thing.
I’ve written about this a few times. And I’ll start by pointing out previous entries on De-gearing, Quit your job and The number 1 reason being an employee sucks. But to make things contemporaneous here’s my thoughts on the topic today, off the top of my head.
Two important words come to mind when I think about the fear of pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors.
Having & Doing.
And as far as I can tell these two words are what we worry about when it comes to finance. We want to do cool stuff (like build a startup and pursue dreams), but in the short term it can have a big impact on our lifestyle and consumption patterns – the having part.
But most people don’t realize this important fact until after they have made the leap:
“The having is in the doing”
In my view we often replace our dreams and goals with consumption. And society promotes this ideal. We use money and steady income as a means of consumption based happiness. When in reality, we’d be much happier if we just did what we wanted to and had greater fulfillment in the hours of our days.
We have to make a decision on what’s more important to us; having lots of stuff and security, or doing cool things. I believe the latter creates a more enjoyable existence, and often leads to a virtuous circle where you realize how little we really need.
The real bonus is this: it’s easier to be successful when you are really into what you spend your time on. And when success comes to entrepreneurs we get the best of both worlds.
Startup blog says: Dream chase now!
Customer empathy
My cousin recently purchased a new home. For most of us such a large financial commitment is quite overwhelming.
During the settlement process Chris had a discussion with his conveyancer about the impending transaction and the issues in his mind. His conveyancer said:
“Look, I know this isn’t the type of thing you do everyday, but I do. And I’ll make sure it runs smoothly and you get looked after.”
Such a simple statement showed terrific empathy. It built confidence in the service provider, and eased the mind of the customer. It’s this type of language which creates conversations and can set apart entrepreneurs.
Language matters. What language do you use?
Borderless Venture Capital
This is the third of my crowd sourced blog entry ideas as suggested by Aida_Lee. Aida wanted to get my thoughts on the following: In today’s cheap, quick and global market, what do you see as the blueprint for a border-less venture capital to work?
There is no doubt Venture Capital has been a bit of closed shop historically. And although we’ve seen some opening up of business funding in the USA with vehicles such as the techcrunch 50 and Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, other markets such as Australia are lagging behind quite significantly. My views are the opinion of someone who has raised venture and angel funding before for new ventures.
In my view a thing things need to happen for the traditional structure of Venture Capital to change:
- A startup community must evolve in a tight geographic region – this often facilitates events such as those mentioned above in Silicon Valley.
- Disruptive technology must become available which breaks down traditional access barriers to outsiders.
Number 1 has happened in only a few locations, namely S Valley, but number 2 has happened all over the world and this is where I see the major changes. The thing that new internet technology has done is brought entrepreneurial communities together. Now we can find each other without having to live near each other. But the funny thing about raising funds for what is considered risky investments, is that it isn’t nearly as much about the idea or revenue potential. It’s about the ability to the team raising to sell themselves. And all real selling requires lots of face time. It’s hard to do this on line, or across borders. So I think that large capital raising wont change a great deal in the future. But, I do see an important capital raising revolution coming:
Crowd funding.
It’s been done already in a few markets, and some entrepreneurs and start ups have already used this technique to raise money for their venture. The idea has been well documented, but a true revolution, such as social networking has yet to happen. The main thing holding it back has been government regulation from the likes of the SEC and ASIC in Australia. What I think the next iteration will be, is a web based business which takes micro payments / investments (a little bit like Kiva) from a large number of punters (for lack of a better word) to fund the new business. Method of which would be like an on-line float for startups. The investors who then would become digital evangelists for the new company. There would be a synchronized ‘investment beta’
The key service of such a site would be to overcome the legal vagaries for all participants and be able to take investments in multiple currencies from multiple markets. There is no doubt this would leverage the quickly building on line entrepreneurial communities. It would also have an important impact the venture capital industry structure the same way digital freelancing websites like elance have respectively.
I’d be interested if there are any sites already doing pure crowd sourcing, and to hear what your thoughts are.
New start up
My new start up was launched on Wednesday. A little girl called Laura.
Investing all my time and love into her. Back blogging shortly.
Steve.
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