The importance of health
Today I can hardly move. I injured my back severely while surfing on the weekend, and pretty much had to crawl out of bed to get myself to a physician.
More than anything I deserve it. I have been neglecting my health recently. Finding a reason not to go to the gym, putting off exercise and doing that little bit of extra work. Putting ‘that’ above ‘me’ is a bad mistake. It’s an immediate reminder of this: Without your health you have nothing. No amount of money or success can replace it.
If you want to start anything worth doing, start looking after yourself. Your health should be number 1 on the priority list at all times. Above any goal, any project or any material desire. And that means scheduling in exercise and eating well, regardless of what it must replace. If your job or startup is impacting your health, then you need to to quit and start something which is more complimentary to long term living.
Stay healthy.
Transaction Friction
I’m currently in the midst of improving the usability of rentoid.com. We are quite certain that it will improve things dramatically from where we are today. easy to follow steps and visuals to first time users.
But in truth it really won’t be enough to be game winning. After this website improvement, we’ll need to continuously iterate what we have. And if I am to tell you all a secret here on startup blog it’s this… Some the new changes will need to be replaced in a couple of months, and so on in perpetuity. The reason is that I get phone calls all too often which sound like this:
Customer: ‘Hi I’m ring up about renting that double bed you have listed on rentoid.com’
Me: ‘Sure, are you new to rentoid? If so let me explain very quickly how it works…..
(I say we don’t own items, rather have a website that people use to rent items to and from each other. I tell her how to join / transact)
Customer: So it’s some random person?
Me: Usually things like beds are rental business – it will be identified as such saying’rentoid business partner’
Customer: Ah, no sorry… It sounds just too hard sorry…. thanks.’ Hangs up phone.
* If the first contact was with the owner, things may have been very different.
There’s too much friction. As a little reminder this is the definition of friction as it pertains to physics:
A force that resists the relative motion or tendency to such motion of two bodies or substances in contact.
The bodies in this case are the customers and the website. And transaction friction occurs whenever these bodies interact.
Currently, there are too many interactions before a transaction can happen. The reason the system has been designed this way has been to ‘protect revenue’, as all my readers will know I don’t believe that “Free” is a business model. But the question I am seriously asking myself is ‘How much revenue are we losing because of friction?’
It is free to join and list on rentoid.com and we take 5% revenue of each rental. Which means both the renter and the rentee need to do quite a few clicks before the transaction is complete. Both parties have to deal with significant fraction in order to transact with each other.
The owner has a lot of friction listing the item
The person renting also has a bit of friction when paying the 5 % deposit on rentoid to get the owners details.
This process protects our revenue, but slows things down and is painful.
There is no doubt it that turns many people away – how many we just can’t know. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to make it ‘free’ – but maybe it’s time to make people pay to list. Which we have avoided to reduce barriers to entry for listers, as listings (having the most items for rent in one place) is game winning. That said, listing already has a lot of friction in any case…. it takes time & effort, maybe asking for a few dollars up front isn’t really a problem? Maybe people wont mind if it creates more rentals for them because their phone number is on display for the renter to call them immediately and get renting? There is only 1 way to find out the answer to this question and that is to implement it. But friction has to be balanced. We need the minimal amount of friction to to move things forward, but enough friction to make so money as well.
The other benefit of changing the system is that it will bring the money forwards and reduce complexity of the site mechanics. But it does open to other competitive risks like screen scrapping, and listings being stolen.
I’ll let you know which way we go…. In the mean time think about this in relation to your business or startup:
“How can I reduce transaction friction in my business?’
David Elsewhere – 20 years in the making
You may have heard the name David Elsewhere, he’s an incredible dancer who has a style all his own. I wanted to feature him here on start up blog for a few reasons.
- There is nothing more niche than what he does (a dance style called liquiding)
- He’s been doing it for 20 years
- He didn’t stop when rap dancing went out of fashion
- He does it because he loves it. No other reason.
- He has now made a career out of it, and is an internet superstar. (Just youtube his name)
His major collaboration video has been viewed more than 200 million times. But the internet and youtube didn’t make him famous. His dancing did, it just so happens that the vehicles to promote his amazing stuff came along some 15 years after his preparation began. So here’s an interview to pay homage to staying the course, passion activities and the uber niche. Big ups from startup blog.
Patience pays.
Thought starter
Quite often I’ll be looking for a business solution. A solution to a problem. But most times I really don’t know what I am looking for until I find it. But when I see, hear it, or touch it, I know it’s exactly what I need. If I waited to start until I knew what I wanted, I think rarely would I find a solution at all.
I know it sounds crazy, but I really think we should get started before we know what we are looking for.
Collective Intelligence
You are in a room full of people.
You are speaking to them on stage and have their full attention.
You tell them to pretend all the people in the world are in this room
You ask the people who believe they have ‘above average intelligence’ to raise their hand.
All the people in the entire room raise their hand.
The fact is, exactly half will be above and half will be below… we all assume we are the smart guys, the good guys, the people make things better…. we all believe we are adding positively to the collective intelligence.
But collective intelligence has a slight nuance. It only works when we let people with specialist knowledge fill in our own knowledge gaps and or take the lead in areas of expertise. If instead, we take the average viewpoint of the collective audience we usually end up with a pile of crap. Collective intelligence can only occur when we segregate and allocate information requirements, not when we aggregate. The latest proof of this is Youtube.com
Once upon a time youtube was a reliable source of cool and important videos. Circa 2005 the most viewed, most discussed for the day, week or month was an intelligent reflection what mattered. Now it’s a mish-mash of over produced pop songs, inane comedians, and soft porn. A sad failure of the digital ‘Wisdom of crowds’. Youtube is still incredibly valuable, it just takes a little more digging these days.
The point for entrepreneurs is this: The crowd is not always right. Taking all advice from the crowd on how to iterate your product, service or website could result in a very average product. Intelligent design is usually the work of intelligent people.
Office Blind
One of my favourite business quotes of all time is from marketing Polymath Al Reis who was co-author of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (A must read for all entrepreneurs) and it is this:
‘An office is a very dangerous place to watch the world from”
pic by Altus
This is really a key for anyone no matter what our life is. Decisions from the desk are rarely as insightful as decisions made from the filed. For all the reasons we are aware of such as message dilution , the grape vine et al.
I have been witnessing this first hand as I have invested the past few weeks out on the road visiting my business customers for www.rentoid.com. Put simply I’ve learnt more in the past few weeks than I have in the past few months. Incredible insights as deep and wide as web usability to asset management.
I’ll I can say to startups is this. Get out there and press the flesh and make sure you are not ‘Office Blind’.
Selling Potatoes
As entrepreneurs the natural temptation is on inventing new markets. Creating dramatic change and going for the trophy ideas. This stuff is incredibly difficult, which is why when we do it well the financial rewards can be significant. The interesting thing is that by being optimists with big ideas we really develop some amazing skills just trying. Regardless of our success or lack of.
Creating markets is much harder than getting a share of an existing market. There’s so much more to do to make it work. Things like building an entirely new supply chain, accessing unique raw materials, developing distributions channels and educating consumers of the benefits of this alternative.
Imagine for a moment that we focused our skills on something simple. Something for which there is already existing demand. A market with which there has been very little innovation for a long period of time. Imagine for example…. selling potatoes.
Selling potatoes would not be as difficult as inventing entirely new markets. Sure there would be incumbents in the game, maybe some very powerful players. But the one thing we can be sure of, is that people do business with people they like. Every industry has room for new players. Every business has some suppliers which they are not happy with. Imagine bringing some new world thinking into the potato trade. Integrating some Cluetrain ideas into this business, and really winning over some customers by doing things just a little differently. There is a new business waiting to happen in boring old market.
pic by Peter VanAllen
I often think that we ignore old areas because they are sexy enough, when all we need do is bring some new ideas in to sexy it up. And there is nothing more sexy than financial success in start up land. In addition our probability of success is certainly larger in an existing market than developing a new one, even if the financial gain is smaller. Maybe we can garner some success Selling potatoes first, before we try our trophy idea. It’s easy to be better than it is to be new.
Maybe your next business should be selling potatoes.
Insights for Entreprenuers
Yesterday I caught up with Fiona Boyd who is an incredibly successful internet entrepreneur who started and sold www.artshub.com.au
She gave me some great insights into entrepreneurship and here are some of the sound bites I was so compelled with I had to write them down.
“When asking for input into your business or startup, never ask for more that 2 pieces of advice. Ask them for advice which is both perceptual and low cost.”
‘Think about your business in terms of the sequence of events. This is more important than the model itself.”
“The right words, in a certain order, make people do stuff.”
“Free creates lose caboose behavior. Think of your business like a nightclub. Free entry makes us feel as though what’s inside isn’t as valuable as when there is a cover charge.”
‘What can you do to bring the money forward? It might be as easy as asking your customers.”
‘What are the steps to money? How can you reduce the number of steps?”
Absolute gold as far as startup blog is concerned. Fiona has also written a book called ‘Niche Content Millionaire’ which I’m guessing (I haven’t read it yet) is full of awesome ideas…. simply because she has the runs on the board and has done it.
Startup blog says: Only take advice from those who have the done what they espouse.
Quote of the Year
“We’re living in a hyper accelerated era where advances in technology have doomed our culture. Before anything interesting can develop it’s blogged to death, marketed and raped until the next hot thing comes along, then repeat process”
Annon – As found in the comments section of www.nowtoronto.com
3 comments