Start Up Blog

“These are your development opportunities….”  We’ve heard these before. Probably at an end of year review. Maybe when our cubicle neighbour was promoted. “You need to focus on your weaknesses so you will be a well rounded marketer, sales person, engineer, janitor.” - Right?

Should we try and improve? No doubt. But to focus on your weakness is to ignore your given talents. Imagine if some of our revered entrepreneurs heeded the advice of the Conglomerate Manager? What then?

Walt Disney - Improving his maturity and ignoring his inner child.

Richard Branson - Searching for a cure for dyslexia?

Donald Trump, well he would still be at the barber!

What they don’t tell you is that anyone who has ever achieved anything, did it via leveraging strengths. Focus on strengths, outsource weaknesses.

I went to the Apple website to view a keynote speech by Steve Jobs on the iphone. I needed to download Quicktime. Only problem, was I changed my mind and went to click out. Unfortunately I couldn’t click ‘back’. I was locked in.

Isn’t this the equivalent of locking the doors on a retail store? It’s bad form.

Note to web entrepreneurs: If a customer wants out let them. It also means you need to revise something.

Below is a photo of the first Apple computer – the Apple 1.

Wood. I didn’t expect this either. Some classic bootstrapping by Wozniak in 1976. Radical logo here too!

No product benchmarks? Truth is, other PC’s like the Datapoint 2200 and the Xerox Alto were selling up to 6 years earlier. These didn’t have wooden cases. They weren’t built with second hand parts.

Doing gives you the opportunity to enhance later. Perfecting and planning opens the gate to nimble entrepreneurs. Innovation is quite forgiving.

A great example of driving for success over perfection. 

Launch now, improve later.

Tom at Panther House points us to Espresso Art. I know I keep raving on about theatre at transaction…

Theatre doesn’t have to be expensive. In this case a net cost of zero.

Theatre always allows premium pricing. Theatre spreads.

Do any of my readers know the address of a coffee house in
Melbourne that does this? I heard there is a place in
Richmond somewhere.

Talking with the launch team today, we were reminiscing about what we should’ve done 6 months ago. It’s true we’d be much further down the track if we knew then, what we know now. 

Then we flipped it to what we don’t know now and tried to work a reverse hindsight theorem. We couldn’t work out what we are doing wrong right now.

We’re certain our current path is correct…

We’re certain we’ll be wrong…

The irony of this is that there are no short cuts on the journey. Mentors, books and blogs will provide insight, but they’ll never give us hindsight.

The only path to the knowledge of hindsight is doing.

You need believers in your value chain. When engaging potential suppliers, many won’t get it. Sure, they’ll book a meeting with you and discuss supplying their widget. But invariably, ‘Joe Salary’ will find a reason to shut you out. Maybe with a minimum order or a credit history you wont have. You’re not going to help him make his budget this year. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t have to.

Dreams are hard to sell. That’s because so many people have had theirs stolen.

You want a short cut?

It’s much easy to build a value chain with suppliers who were you, 20 years ago. Entrepreneurs that had a dream, and got it up. They will take you seriously. They live in family run firms and SME’s. If you dig deep in the supply chain, they’re out there.

Is 911 a brand?

Sure it is. As soon as I mentioned it you had a bundle of attributes, images, prejudices,  and memories fly into your mind. You probably remember where you were the second you found out about it. You know what it represents both to the producer and the target. (victims)

The 911 brand has massive awareness. You don’t get launches much bigger. It dominated the airwaves for 2 weeks with unpaid media. This is exactly what 911 was. It was a launch. Albeit of a terrorist cell.

But what does 911 mean to you and me? It means fear. What does fear do? It builds prejudice. Isn’t this what marginalised minoroties are fighting against?

When you launch, be clear with your message and what that builds. Once a brand takes meaning in the mind it is very hard to change.

The Poor, Middle Class and the Rich all have different ways they approach money.  

(By the way, the word ‘poor’ here doesn’t refer to people lacking opportunity, education or health. Moreover parts of the general populous with equal talent, opportunity and potential as you and I, but have financial difficulty.) 

The Poor spend money

The Middle Class invest money

The Rich invent money.

Entrepreneurship is about inventing money, this is why successful entrepreneurs become rich. They don’t buy something and wait for it to appreciate. They build their finances conceptually. They get Tony to design something, Paul to pay for the project, Mary to provide the widgets and Joseph to build it. They do this because they intuitively know that Lisa will pay much more for what they invented than it cost to pull together.

Inventing has never been about being a technical genius. It’s about vision and creativity.

Vision and creativity are core for us entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is about inventing mini economies. We co-ordinate the factors of production, factors of production that aren’t currently linked. We’re inventing transactions.

If we’re good enough, we’ll invent money too.

A friend and I were discussing an imminent launch I am working on. There’s a lot of nervous energy. There are so many factors, reasons to hesitate, be cautious, ensure everything is tight. On the flipside, reasons to zoom ahead.  

He came up with a great analogy for any start up. It’s like the movie Speed.

You can’t drop below a certain speed or you won’t stay alive. You can’t go too fast or you might crash on a difficult corner. It’s a real balancing act of momentum & due consideration.  

At some point we all approach an unfinished bridge and we just have to go for it!

I am about 70% of the way through The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

This book possibly defines a new economic order. I’m inspired. 

I think it really explains where the opportunities are for entrepreneurs in a web 2.0 environment and why.  

It also demonstrates how broadband cables and the digital networking of niches may just save the world from bland homogenization.