Start Up Blog

A library card is the smartest card. You are going to need some new skills starting your business. If you’re a marketer, chances are your accounting skills could improve. If you’re an engineer…

Here’s what I do. I go to the business section at Borders.(any large bookstore / Amazon where they have a massive range). Find a book I want. Write down the Title and Author and request it at the library. They always get it for me. My library love great book requests. I’m their customer! 

I’m the first to read it and I’m getting value from my taxes.

A book is often the best consultant. Who said consulting was expensive?

The software group 37Signals have written a great strategy book – Getting Real. Including this strategic suggestion:

                              One downsmanship.

Instead of trying to be one better, how about being a bit less.

In a world of excessive choice, less can generate real cut through.

You may have a vision of selling out to the incumbent. The type of stuff that makes the front page of the business section. The reason you know about Google buying Youtube is that it doesn’t happen very often. We all need this sense of reality before we commence.

Having a successful business doesn’t mean someone (read here big ugly conglomerate with large cheque book) will want to buy you. Especially if you’re another, slightly more innovative version of them. They will think they can just beat you with a better version of your innovation later, or some flimsy brand extension. Consumers might want to give you money for what you provide – but this success doesn’t automatically give you a ’sell out’ exit strategy.

To put things slightly in your favour for a sell out to happen, your strategy can help. You need to have something they haven’t got and can’t build. You’ve got have the thing, they missed. Generally speaking incumbents only buy two things:

Distribution Systems & Brands

Widgets can be made, reverse engineered.

Pepsi bought Gatorade - Not because they didn’t know how to make a sports drink. They bought the brand.

Google bought Youtube - Not because they don’t know how to build a video sharing website, they bought the eyeballs the brand gives them.

Coke bought Neverfail Water - Not because they don’t know how to put water in a water cooler, but because Neverfail secured the distribution channel of offices.

Nestle bought Musashi - Not because they couldn’t find any food technologists to make a protein bar. They bought distribution in the health food channels, and a brand with health food ‘cred’. Something the Nestle brand can never be.

You can only sell something an incumbent hasn’t got and can’t build. This is never about the product.

If you want to sell out, build a brand that means something they don’t, focus on a channel that they forgot.

Copy cat from Ballarat, went to school and got the strap….

This limerick is well known in grade school locally, not sure if it transcends geography.

We’re taught from a very young age that copying lacks virtue and deserves some form of punishment. You could say it is viewed as some form of stealing. A start up or business for that matter is a complex set of interacting ideas and actions. Some of which may be original (your widget), some of which may be copied (your accounting methodology). These are simplified examples to make the point. Is anything truly original anyway? Every idea has been built upon something. Civilization is built upon man adding value to the ideas of others

Learning is copying. From breathing to eating, to building houses to modern transport, everything is learned. And if everything is learned, we’re simply imitating and adding at different locations on the copy scale.

If you don’t have an idea, maybe copying someone else isn’t so bad. Here are three ways to be a copy cat.

• Do the same thing in the same market

• Do a new version in the same market

• Do the same thing in a new market

If it’s the same thing in a new market, it’s a new thing to the people who haven’t seen it. You might just be rewarded by copying in a new geography or copying then adding.  

- The Ipod wasn’t the first MP3 player (new version – simplified)

- Windows wasn’t the first Graphical User Interface. (new geography – PC’s)

- Redbull wasn’t the first energy drink (new geography – western world)

A website worth checking out is springwise They espouse the virtues of the copy cat. You’ll be amazed at what you can copy from this idea pod. Some new start ups are literally asking for copy cats. (otherwise known as distributors)

I’m not doubting that a more original concept (relatively speaking) has a higher propensity for success, the big win. However it also works in reverse.

A copy cat may not make a billion, but it may get you out of your cubicle.

Isn’t success an internal and relative concept anyway?

Some things have a definite aroma. You can really smell them from a far. A home cooked meal. A fresh sea breeze. Freshly ground coffee. When you smell them, they immediately conjure up memories and emotional bias.

Faking it has an aroma.

If you don’t believe in your start up or your job for that matter, shut up shop now. Move on. You’ll save time. You can’t hide the ‘faking it’ aroma.

When seeking funds or trying to sell in to buyers, if your faking it, they’ll smell it. And when they do smell it all their negative emotional bias will come to the fore.  A me too, second tier product reeks of it also.

Seth Godin recently blogged about the power of enthusiasm. This has an aroma too, and people will want a bite.