Mistakes are awesome

I’ve made so many mistakes since I started rentoid, but everyone of them has lead me to a new insight, idea of method. And I’m not alone, so of the greatest inventions, business and ideas are the results of mistakes or unexpected evolutions. The terrific photosharing website Flickr.com started it’s life as an on line game before evolving. The point is it’s worth letting things develop before trying to patch everything. See what path it takes us on. Especially for websites, where unintended uses often lead us to great enlightenment.

While watching this old school break dancing lesson on Youtube – one of the great forefathers of BBoy-ing Crazy Legs said something in the first minute of the video below regarding mistakes. Advice worth remembering in startup land.

Response to Quiksilver Diworsification

A colleague who gets Marketing strategy as well as anyone gave me this response as an email to the blog post on Quiksilver brand extension. I thought it was worth sharing:

Analogy.

I’m a Ferrari driver. It’s a badge that represents my success and status, and I’m proud to admit it.

Do I want to see the bogan or hodad driving down Chapel St on Friday night with a Ferrari key ring?

I earnt that Key ring.

Which stall at Vic Market did he buy it with his $7.99 VB T-shirt?

Like it or not, I’m now slightly resentful of the exclusive brand I thought I was a part of, and will think twice about the same brand next time around (Actually if I had a Ferrari I wouldn’t give a rats, but you get my point…)

As a surfer, I’m stoked that my exclusive board brand which bonded me to my boarding community, is now being slutted to mummies and daddies to dribble on every night when they go to sleep, who wake up wondering what that symbol on their pillow actually represents, and who are even more fascinated as to why they would also put that logo on surf boards which they see when they frolic in the sand down on the coast once a year….

That’s Diworsification.

PS What’s exactly is a Hodad?

(me – A hodad is a person who wears surf clothing but has never been surfing, or on a beach for that matter)

Diworsification of the year – Quiksilver

For many years Quiksilver had a tagline which served them well – ‘The boardriding company’. Although their roots are in surfing it allowed them to expand into related areas for their target market including skate and snowboarding. Makes sense, many surfers also skate and snow board. The brand could possibly be enhanced with such diversifications as the fit is a nice one psychographically.

As a surfer I never wear Ripcurl or Quiksilver clothing as I think they have been hijacked by bogans and hodads. But when I saw Quiksilver’s latest brand extension – they have clearly jumped the shark, the rot has set in. Justification by Steve Tully Quiksilver Americas president was something about allowing it (photo below) to further their vision of creating a complete lifestyle company….. I am calling it the Diworsification of the year – heaven help them.

Advice for startups – Brand extension should not be about what we can make, rather what we stand for.

Steve Sammartino

Radvertising – Honda Insight

The link you are about to click on below is absolute ‘Radvertising’ by Honda for it’s new Hybrid the ‘Insight’.

The thing I like about it most is the use of the media forum. In fact, that’s what makes the difference. Especially on line where the ‘audio visual’ experience is usually lost. Kudos to Vimeo and Honda for this. The ‘insight’ for startups is how Honda have managed to great cut through on a forum (video websites) which usually lacks it.

Yes it’s a bit artsy, but this suits the target audience and the creative idea is clearly integrated and not just an addendum.

Click here to watch. Enjoy.

Steve Sammartino

Quit your job

You should really quit your job on Monday. Yes tomorrow today . If you are working for a salary or wages  and have no equity in the business that is.

And here’s why:

You are living someone else’s dream.

You are exchanging the days of your life to build the vision of someone else. You are not doing what you dreamed about as a child.

The reality is this: once you have a place to live and food to eat, the rest is ego. Chances are you are working in a job just to feed your ego. I know because I was this person for more than 10 years. I had jobs I didn’t like – high paying ones, to buy things I didn’t need, to impress people I didn’t care for. It’s a pointless treadmill which the government encourages to maximise consumption, generate higher tax rates and PAYE deductions and enforce control through a passive education process which says consumption equals success. We must remove this idea of the power structure from our minds and remind ourselves that real wealth is defined by the cool stuff we are doing, rather than the stuff we buy.

Quite your job, de-gear your life and do something  of value. To further encourage this process I’ll leave you with one final thought I tweeted a while ago:

Cheers, Steve

5 things about startup blog

Here’s five things you should know about startup blog:

1. It is written by a person who used to be a corporate drone – but I scaped my cubicle 3 years ago
2. It make it my job to ‘have an opinion’ – if you want to be successful you should too.
3. The writer of this blog owns and runs www.rentoid.com
4. I always help my readers who ask for help or mentoring. Because it’s worth doing and I like sharing.
5. Startup blog is being released as a free e-book & iphone app with wisdom from 3 years of ‘de-corporatization’ of self.

Tell us 5 things about your business.

Radvertising by Nike

Often I have strong opinions on somewhat popular advertising which I lambast for being bad. In recent memory is the Cadbury Gorilla. But here is some radvertising by Nike. It’s a bit old but I only recently happened upon it. And it’s rad for the following reasons:

1. The idea is integrated to the category & product
2. It leverages sponsored personnel
3. It puts the consumer in the situation
4. Although it does category job – they are category leaders
5. It’s entertaining – which is an acceptable bonus – and should never be the only feature of the advertisement like it is with the Cadbury Gorilla

Enjoy

Great advice for web startups

Pieter Peach sent me this email yesterday. He’s just a great bloke who thinks about others. In doing so he shared some valuable insights he took from a web 2.0 conference. It was such a succinct and insightful email that I thought I’d share it here verbatim. Enjoy & digest. Steve Sammartino

Just came across an email I sent to myself from a session in W2.0NY last year.  Straightforward stuff, but a good reminder for me, thought I’d pass it along.

“Sitting here listening to a great speaker on developing next gen web 2.0 apps, will email stuff as I I hear it.

Just quickly

Requisites for successful 2.0 service
1.    Network effect
2.    Collective intelligence
3.    Lightweight business models
4.    Longtail (maybe)
5.    Encourage unintended uses
6.    Platform vs application
7.    End of the software release cycle
8.    Rich user experiences
9.    Innovation in assembly

Race to dominate remaining data classes.
Its hard to compete with those who have a head start in developing the network effect in a particular data class. “

Pieter

Magnation – great battle story

Last night Sahil Merchant the founder and CEO of Magnation (uber terrific magazine retailer) gave an inspiring talk at the Hive.

It was great to hear a great battle story, and not some story by an egoistical rich guy. A real battle story. His honesty was brilliant, and everyone loved it. Rather than re-tell it – I’ve used the power of twitter and and captured all the tweets with #hivemelb from last night which occurred while he was speaking in real time. It’s very interesting to see what caught peoples attention.

Read bottom up to see the tweets in order of occurance.

Steve Sammartino

The strategy is fine

Today I had a discussion with a fellow entrepreneur who was wondering whether to reduce his pricing on a new business. His point was related to the fact that his very new business hadn’t achieved a great deal of sales volume just yet.

Then I asked him if he had implemented any of the sales generating activities we had discussed last week – to which the answer was no. My response was straight and simple:

If you haven’t been out knocking on doors selling your product to the potential target market, then how is it possible to know if the marketing mix is wrong?

It was at that time he knew he had some boot strapping work to do and get out there and sell.

The point for entrepreneurs is that it is easy to get tempted to constantly revisit the strategy. To go back to the plans when things are not automatically falling into place. Instead of doing the really hard stuff – we look for a simple revision of ideas, the plan and all that shiny stuff. The thing we often avoid is the hard effort of selling and facing rejection. But until we go out into the market and try to generate revenue, it’s impossible to have real market feedback of what needs revised.

So before we re-design our plans and process, we have to test the current one in market. We do this by trying to sell what we already have at every possible distribution point. Until we have done that, strategy revision is just an excuse for not putting in the effort required.