Start Up Blog

Everything you have ever read on this blog is wrong. All of it. None of it’s true.

The reason none of it’s true is that in business, no less entrepreneurship every rule has an exception, sometimes quite a few exceptions.

On average the principals remain correct, true or usable, but every now and again, they’re proven wrong. That’s the thing with averages, they can be misleading. And principals are a bit like averages, they give us a read, some guidance - but they’re not infallible.

So whenever you read something on this blog. There’s a chance it wont hold true for you, your start up or your circumstances, even though on average - it will.

Some of the entrepreneurs of our time haven’t been the inventors we believe them to be. It’s not a criticism, entrepreneurship goes far beyond inventing and ideas.

In fact some of our most revered entrepreneurs are simply good at cross fertilization.

Let’s take Steve Jobs for example. He didn’t invent the GUI (Graphical User Interface), the mouse, icons, paint, folders or any of the ‘user friendly’ things that Apple became famous for.

He ‘borrowed ideas’. By looking at related categories Jobs was able to adopt new thinking and bring it to his market in a way that made sense. He was a great normative thinker. The best example of Jobs in action was when he was invited into the Xerox PARC office for a study tour to ‘share knowledge’. In essence, they gave Jobs the key to their kingdom. This is where Jobs vision of the future of the personal computer grew from.

The first GUI was on a Xerox office workstation called the Alto. Closely followed by the Xerox Star in 1977 – see picture below.

Look Familiar?

The trip to Xerox by Apple computer’s Steve Jobs in 1979 led to the graphical user interface and mouse being integrated into the Apple’s Lisa and, later, the first Macintosh.

Jobs borrowed ideas, ideas born in a photocopier company.

Ebay took the excitement and quick sale of the auction process from real estate.

Craiglist made an electronic web based newspaper classified.

So the question begs to all entrepreneurs, what new technologies, ideas or systems can we borrow from adjacent industries?

Let’s keep it really simple this time.

It’s this; What’s in it for them? That’s it.

So here’s my top 2007 stimulus list to help:

• Profit

• Savings

• Environmental benefits

• Ego

Feel free to add yours.

When I run my own company I’ll realize that compromise is a fact of entrepreneurship.

Money and water behave the same way. They both find the most efficient path. So an important part of any start up must be both the revenue streams and storage devices.

Ray Croc stumbled upon McDonalds at the age of 53 and took over and expanded at age of 59.

Colonel Sanders although cooking chicken for sometime didn’t open his first franchise until the tender age 62. (Pun intended)

Lesson: You’re never too old to follow the entrepreneur inside.

Physics and business once more…. Markets and motion.

Law 2: Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration The rate of change of momentum of a body is proportional to the resultant force acting body and is in the same direction. 

Start up blog interpretation; Your brand or start up will only grow by the force of the energy that you and your evangelists (passionate users / early adopters) put behind it.

If we want our start up to grow, that growth rate (or decline) will be directly proportional to the effort we put into it.

Conversely a competitor pushing us backwards with more force has the same impact.

A start up won’t just grow. Organic growth is a hoax. Organic growth is your customers or passionate users pushing it for you. In this case we’re lucky, we’ve managed to create an idea worth spreading…But it’s very difficult to do.

In the end, the growth is always our responsibility. We need to be the force acting and pushing.

We are so busy telling our audience what we do, it’s easy to lose focus. Sometimes the easiest way to position our brand, is to tell our audience what we don’t do.

A flip in our thinking is all we need.

Here’s a good example.

That’s the actual name of a person. Faith Popcorn, although she was born as Faith Plotkin….

Faith has a bit of a reputation as a Nostradamus of marketing. Given her uber cool book“The dictionary of the future” from 2001 is now much like the story of the present, she just might have some insights for us budding entrepreneurs.

Swiped directly from trendhunter.com here are Faith’s latest predictions.

Identity Flux Technology has enabled us to experiment with different personalities, leading to a much more fluid sense of who we are. Having tasted the nectar of virtual liberation, we’re beginning to reject the singularly defined roles we’re expected to play in society.

The Future: Gender-neutrality goes mainstream. People list skills on their business cards rather than title, and dress up in various costumes depending on who they feel like being that day.

Liquid Brands Today’s consumers are capricious and non-committal. Brands will have to become more liquid to keep up with their constantly moving targets.

The Future: Chameleon-like brands focus less on communicating a static message and more on being the right thing for the right persona at the right time. Constantly morphing retailers carry products until they sell out and never restock.

Virtual Immortality Consumers globally are creating fully fleshed out existences in the virtual world-dressing up their avatars, making friends, having affairs and buying property for their pixilated alter-egos. And now that people have multiple lives, who says you can’t live forever?

The Future:  While some let their avatars drift away to online purgatory, many more leave behind specific instructions on how their virtual selves should proceed. Services offering avatar surrogates flourish, and we bequeath avatars to friends and family in our wills.  

EnvironMENTAL Movement Like the movement to combat environmental pollution, the next consumer-led reaction will be against the mental pollution caused by marketers. With every corner of the world both real and virtual becoming plastered with marketing messages, bombarded consumers are starting to say they’ve had enough. The current attack against marketing to kids is just the beginning.

The Future:  Companies are expected to reduce the amount of damage they are doing to our minds. Savvy companies sponsor marketing-free white spaces in lieu of polluting the environment with models and logos.

Product PLACEment  In the globally networked age, consumers are much more concerned about the consequences of consumption. Is my garbage poisoning someone in a developing country? How much fuel was burned in order to get these strawberries to my local supermarket? The Future:  Enviro-biographies are attached to just about everything, letting consumers know the entire life story of a product: where the materials were harvested, where it was constructed, how far it traveled, and where it ended up after being thrown away or recycled.  Brand-Aides The government has let us down when it comes to providing the social services we had once expected from it. Brands are stepping in to take over where the government left off. Companies are already finding there’s profit to be made from providing affordable healthcare to the masses.

The Future: Socially responsible brands make a buck while providing desperately needed services. Communities are revived by Target daycare, Starbucks learning centers, and Avis transportation services for the elderly.

Moral Status Anxiety In today’s increasingly philanthropic climate, expect conspicuous self- indulgence to go straight to the social guillotine. The globally conscious consumer regards altruistic activities as a necessary part of self- improvement.

The Future: A person’s net worth is no longer measured by dollars earned, but by improvements made. Families compete with each other on how many people they fed while on vacation, and the most envied house on the block is not the biggest, but the most sustainable.

Oldies but Goodies

Our culture is suffering from an experience deficit. With the availability of online knowledge, we’re claiming expertise based only on secondary experience. Now that everyone’s a web-educated know-it-all, we’re secretly longing for authority figures to guide and assure us with indispensable nuggets of wisdom that could only come from having actually accumulated life experience.

The Future: Respect for elders makes a comeback in the form of Ask Your Grandma hotlines and the proliferation of online video clips by seniors showing us how to tie knots and concoct home remedies.

How can your start up get ahead of the curve using these mind jams?

Rolling Rock Beer Ape commercial

Not a big fan of TV advertising, but hey, this was on youtube. In fact it shows how good creative removes the need for media spend.

I love the jump into the pool with the flying V electric guitar.