1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
MediaReputations.com is a verified and deeply searchable reputation network for the media that provides users with trusted credentials in the form of an online profile, verified site badges, and a physical Media ID. Our network enables media companies…
(Source: newschallenge1)
1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
Cont3nt.com is a real-time network that connects media companies to photo & video journalists around the world and enables them to buy and sell breaking news through Twitter.
2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project…
(Source: newschallenge1)
Tim Walsh turned me on to this article about facebook’s new frictionless sharing, evidenced by everyone’s spotify playlist showing up in their facebook feed. At the end it makes a very interesting point: people saying it is “creepy” smells like progress.
As the nature of innovation becomes more and more about how we behave and relate to each other, I wonder if that “creepy” feeling some of these experiments give us isn’t actually a proof it will fail, but an indication they are exploring a social area we assume we had figured out. I’ll admit a lot of things that turned me off initially are now apart of my daily routine.
Eric Ries challenges us at the Lean Startup Machine in DC this weekend that the only experiments that matter are the ones you do on the things you really care about.
I took that to heart for our startup USEED, and realized I had deeper to go. There were questions I wasn’t asking, because they could prove me wrong. Then the fear hit:
It was amazing the firehose that rushed through my head.
To celebrate taking that plunge and going into the things we fear, I give you my favorite obscure 80s band, the Doves.
“There goes the fear… there it goes…”
As Tim Ferris challenges his readers in 4-hour work week, just ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? What would you actually lose?
When I think of that, hell yeah, I’d give it up to see if I could change the world by inspiring and enabling an army of student entrepreneurs to change the world.
Equity is an ongoing, difficult discussion I have with all my startup CEO friends. Sage advice from someone looking at it from the top of the funnel - IPO.
Having spent some time mentoring in the startup scene, I often run across individuals who:
And believe that those two things represent progress in their startup.
I love the thrill of sharing my ideas with people and having them buy in as well. I think that’s part of our DNA as entrepreneurs, to excite people about our ideas.
But a friend of mine at the coin loft, Zach Phillips from The Kitchen, pointed out that an idea isn’t an asset, its a liability. Check out the definition of financial liability courtesy of Wikipedia:
a liability is defined as an obligation of an entity arising from past transactions or events, the settlement of which may result in the transfer or use of assets, provision of services or other yielding of economic benefits in the future.
An idea requires you to spend money, time, etc. to create value. It is not, in itself, a creator of value.
That is a brilliant insight, and possible the savior of the coming startup bubble.
At the last LSM Startup bootcamp I went to in NYC, Charlie O’Donnell shared that sometimes he wishes they hadn’t built the startup community around investment. His frustration is that he spends most of his time being asked to talk with groups about “how to get funded” when he’d rather talk about how to successfully solve problems. His quote:
“Starting a company isn’t fun. Solving a problem is fun. Focus on solving the problem, and build a company if you have to.”
Here in Delaware we’ve made a conscious decision not to build our startup community around investment, even though it’s becoming easier to raise that capital every day. Our reason?
It sends the wrong message. It tells startup founders that all they have to do is make the “right” pitch, and investors will give them money to solve all their challenges in building a company.
Were it so easy. Not only does this version of startup rarely happen in the real world, its been proven time and again that it is a disastrous way to build a company. With a bank account full of cash, startups run out solving the problems money can solve, only to run into a brick wall when the problems it can’t solve finally catch up to them.
This bring us full circle. Whatever your idea is, however brilliant, it is a consumer of resources, not a creator. The creation of value comes from the execution of the idea, not the idea itself.
Your idea is a liability. You, as the entrepreneur, are paying the expense of creating an entity that converts that idea into a valuable executor, a valuable business. The valuation of that business through investment is the indicator that your turned that liability into an asset.
Want to learn how to do that? Go to the Lean Startup Machine DC where I will be mentoring next week and signup.
Now that I’ve stepped out to help the community of startups succeed, I’m gaining a perspective on my career choice I didn’t have before. Every where I go I hear startups say:
It’s like walking into a daycare. Only in this case, the babies who whine the loudest aren’t always the ones who get the help.
First, I want to applaud those startups for telling the world what they need. That’s an important step, and I realize for some people, it takes a lot of courage to do that.
I’d like to invite everyone in the community to take a “next step” in maturity: focus on how you create value for others instead of the value you are seeking to consume.
Your job as a startup founder is to Always Be Recruiting. Fundamentally a startup founder is not the person who comes up with an idea, but the person who recruits others to make that idea a reality.
A founder shouldn’t try to make it a reality on their own, as the Startup Genome project established.
So how do you recruit? Particularly when recruiting A-players is a must for success in startups?
Let me give you two examples of a recruitment effort.
Option A:
“We need a hard-working, passionate individual who can make it rain like a tsunami and build a sales engine and team that can win them over to our high-value technology.”
Option B:
“The leading cause of malpractice insurance is poor bed-side manners on the part of doctors. Our app provides a better process that corrects that, while fulfilling hospital regulations. We are offering 20% equity for a partner who can help us win our 1st 5,000 doctors. In addition, you get to work with a team with 50 years of collective experience, who love making patients happy, have fun and work hard.”
Option B is telling the prospective person what they can get vs what they can give.
Want investors? Want team members? The first thing you can do is the hard work of understanding why your idea matters and who it matters to. Maybe then go a little deeper and get really clear on who you are and what you are trying to accomplish in life.
This event helped me massively accelerate my process in doing both: http://www.theleanstartupmachine.com/
That will give you real world practice in putting other people’s needs first, and showing them the value you can offer.
Ash makes an excellent point. Your Customer Dev is only successful if it engages your interviewees in the same channel you would acquire customers. Otherwise, you may have proved that door-to-door salesman can sell your product, when your only way to scale is through Google Adwords.
After attending the Lean Startup Machine weekend in NYC, a friend and I had an opportunity to reflect on what we had learned.
What intrigued us was the profound difference lean startup had made on our own approach to developing and discussing ideas. Originally, we both would think of ideas, and then take them to other people seeking to get their “buy in.” If we were successful, we figured we had something good.
At LSM we learned an approach 180 degrees removed from that one. We learned to first ask our potential customers what was going on in their world, what they were looking for, and then to build small tests that sought to uncover if our ideas on solutions could meet their needs.
When we looked at the difference between those two approaches, we learned something new about ourselves. In a way, our first approach was really about validating our own insights. The second was about understanding the other person, and how they saw things.
Then it hit us. “How arrogant is it to think that we know what someone else’s problem is, and that we have the answer to it, without having taken the time to understand them first?” My friend pointed out.
It was a sobering thought. Often I just got so excited about my new ideas, I didn’t even consider how blind I was being to the obvious - I often didn’t know what I was talking about.
One of the great things about taking the time to genuinely understand others is we get an opportunity to better understand ourselves. Spending a weekend doing that showed me two things:
1. I love doing this. I love learning about other peoples’ world and their challenges, and seeking creative solutions to them.
2. Being great at creative problem-solving starts with taking the time to really listen. To do that, you must put your own agenda aside in the process.
In this way, what I learned at lean startup hasn’t just made me a better entrepreneur, its made me a better person. I’ve noticed that I now take more time to understand what other people are saying, before assuming I know what they need to hear.
One of the mentors at LSM said he believed that learning this new approach to validating ideas could change people for the better, and maybe change the world. I think he may be on to something…
My pre-lean way of testing the viability of the startup as a business was:
Find one customer for an idea, build it, and then seek other customers.
This is lighter-weight than “build it and see what sticks,” but still pretty costly as I’m now delivering several products to several customers, all for less than the cost of development.
My justification was that if one person wanted something, there was a good chance someone else would too. LSM @ NYC gave me tools to test that without all the upfront cost.
In simple terms, a market is a group of customers whose needs can be satisfied in a similar way.
In the past, my view was that the only way to test if other customers would actually buy something was to offer it to them to buy. So I concluded that if I could find one customer to pay me, I’d both learned that someone would pay for it, and earned some money to cover the cost.
With lean, I now have a much less costly approach, far more sustainable. Instead of building a product, I build the ad for the product and see who clicks to buy. Instead of learning the needs of my client by building what they think they want, I interview many people like them to learn what their needs are, and then test assumptions against those needs with MVPs.
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