I think therefore I am!

Well, eventually, Mr. Descartes was sitting alone in a world where everything may not be as it seemed but then, instead of looking outward, he looked inward at himself, and realized that at last, there was proof.  The fact that he could think, that he had thoughts running through his consciousness, those thoughts proved he existed.

He came to a powerful conclusion.  ”I think therefore I am.”

Around about now I’m sort of expecting a big “So what?” from people reading this…

So what right?

Descartes thought he existed, therefore he existed.

Being an entrepreneur and a successful one at that, starts at exactly the same place as our half crazy Mr. Descartes.

He thought he existed, so he did. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur you need to have that inward belief too. You need to know you are a kick ass, no holds barred, no obstacle to stop you, world shaking, entrepreneur.

You will have failures “guaran-damned-teed” and we live in a culture where failures are looked down on to the point where we deploy spin to prove they weren’t really failures but success….sometimes we even fool ourselves. Spin, dodge and weave but in reality, a failure is only truly a failure when you fail to gain education from the experience .

Maybe you hate failure, but how do you feel about education?

Probably pretty good huh?

Thomas Edison made over 9000 light bulbs that exploded and failed to workone after another

The 1^st light bulb *POP* failed!

2^nd light bulb *POP* failed….dammit!

Now you and me, maybe after 10 pops, perhaps 100 pops maybe even 250 pops we’d have raised our hands and said “I’m a failure! This is never going to happen!”

When Edison was asked if he minded having 9000 failures rumor has it he answered,

“I didn’t have 9000 failures, I learnt 9000 ways not to make a light bulb…”

So as you start your business seize onto those failures, both small and large, and understand them, dissect them, know them even more intimately than your successes…they may not keep you warm at night but it’s the lessons you learn, that help you to be a stronger entrepreneur and lead you towards your success.

And if you really want to gain the best education from these failures make sure you OWN them.

Make them yours.

What do I mean by that? If something goes wrong,  if there’s a failure don’t push responsibility for it onto someone or something else.

That makes you a pawn, a person pushed around by forces beyond your control.

That is not you…that is not an entrepreneur.

YOU are responsible for your successes and your failures. You are COMPLETELY responsible. WOW – doesn’t that take a weight off? Now you don’t have to worry about who to blame?

And now you also own the education and learning you get from these experiences.

So now you can use those thoughts to move yourself towards greater success because…

“You think therefore you are”

…So if you believe you are going to create your own success…

You will. Mr. Descartes proved it more than 350 years ago and a dead Frenchman can’t be wrong.

Do you think I’m half crazed? Let me know with your comments – does any of this strike a cord with you?

Descartes

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Startups Should Focus

The definition of a startup means you have very few resources to employ and little time to get them to do something valuable. The clock is always ticking, and the money (if you even have any) is running out by the day. With so little to leverage, you need to make sure that the focus of your company’s product offer is as razor sharp as possible.

Don’t be all you can be. Be as little as you can be.

Most startup companies fail because they try to be too many things to too many people right from the onset. They think of every possible option they could load into their product offer. While this may give them the feeling of being one of the “big boys,” the grim reality is they are not. In fact by trying to be too many things from the start, these companies often end up delivering no real value at all.

Instead of trying to be all things to all people, try being one thing to all people. Think of PayPal, the highly successful startup that allowed users to e-mail money over the Internet to each other. PayPal could have chosen a million options for their offer. They could have become an on-line credit card company, an auction site, a loan provider and so on. But what made the company successful was their focus on only one offer – e-mailing money from one person to the other.

PayPal did one simple thing so well that the industry giant eBay purchased them for $1.5 billion in 2002, even after eBay had already built the same service themselves. PayPal is a great example of a company keeping a sharp focus one doing on thing right even when so many great opportunities could have easily distracted them.

Bite off less than you can chew

Delivering your product to market is an amazing feat to begin with. Even still, a common problem among small companies is their inability to predict what it will take to actually support a product once it has gone to market. It’s easy to conceive complex products with lots of features. But actually bringing that product to market and supporting its use with customers is a whole different story.

Instead of trying to roll out everything and the kitchen sink in your approach to market, just roll out the sink. If you find that you can support your product just fine after it’s been successfully selling in the first year, then go ahead and add to it. It’s a lot easier to add features along the way than it is to support features you don’t have the resources for to begin with.

You have ten seconds to get it right

Your customer has a life, even if you do not. They are being constantly bombarded with marketing messages from the latest movies releases to the newest type of shampoo. They don’t have the time or energy to stop their entire day to focus on just your product. So if you are lucky enough to have ten seconds of their attention, you had better make good use of it.

The exercise of developing your value proposition in ten seconds is a great way to distill down your feature set to those items that will get people’s attention right away. If it’s not going to add value to the ten second pitch, it’s not critical to your product’s success. If you can’t get your customer’s attention with the one key benefit to your product, the rest of your features will never see the light of day to begin with.

Stay on target gold leader

Your product launch is just the beginning of keeping your focus. Once you have brought your product to market and enjoyed some early success, it may become even harder to stay focused. Now you have customers calling you and recommending (or demanding!) features to be added and services to be provided. All of these distractions make it even harder to keep you and your team focused on a single goal.

Fortunately the process of keeping your resources focused post-launch is entirely the same. You need to pick your battles and allocate your resources toward the few initiatives that will be best served to do the one thing right that is truly driving your company. Serving the needs and whims of every customer sounds great, but it can also be a terrible detour when trying to keep the forward progress of your company moving.

If at any point during your journey you’re unsure whether or not you’re spending your time and resources effectively, just ask yourself one question, “Is this driving the core benefit of our product?”. If the answer is “yes”, you’re headed in the right direction.

About The Guest Author

Wil Schroter is a serial entrepreneur, author, and public speaker. His latest book “Go Big or Go Home” was available in 2005.  Will is the founder of Go Big Network.

++

Thanks to Will for this article. What do you think? Should a startup be absolutely lazer focused? Getting your feedback would really help us to focus in on what you want to see. What is your one question on startups today?

Consider joining my email list for more startup tips and help.

Andrew

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I came up with the idea for the World’s Smallest, Safest, Strongest Fire Escape ladder and brought it to market with Kevin Dodge and Aldo DiBelardino.

Here’s a video about the company and the experience…I decided to move on after the battle but Aldo stuck around…

Let me know what you think….

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1. 10 Things to Remember When Starting A Business

I don’t know the answer to this post yet or really understand where it will go but perhaps, through the act of writing it…I’ll figure out the right answer.

So…what’s the question?

You have started a business….Yippeee!  It’s the earliest days of a new baby venture.  So here’s the question – when do you stop what you are doing and determine what kind of business you want to build?

Maybe that sounds like a stupid question to you – maybe you want to create a products business, a software company, a recruitment agency – whatever your heart tells you to go out there and build. But that isn’t quite what I mean…

What I mean is – what are the core values of your company?

Core values – what are they?

Good question Batman – my personal definition (and I’m sure everyone has their own…) is the core values are those beliefs that help to structure the culture of your business and how it treats its employees, its customers, partners, the locality it’s a part of and perhaps, even the world.

And the second part of my question for you and myself too is ‘Can a company afford to have strong core values until its has cash in its bank account?’

Does a business have a responsibility to have a strong set of core value no matter what or is it all about the money at the beginning?  I.e. is it possible, smart or insanity to be concerned about being ‘Good’ when you have little money coming in to survive?

Is it only the rich who can truly afford to support a charity or do we all have to do what we can?  If you are starting a business, do you start off with little core values…maybe recycling the coke cans or do you go for the Big, Hairy, Beastie Core values and hope they don’t tank the business? Do core values have to have a negative effect on a business or are their important principles all businesses can adopt that should be core to their culture no matter what? If so – examples please…

Do you business have core values in your business? And if so, are they just words on a page or do you and everyone in the company live by them? How do you make sure that happens? Really….how?

If you were to start a business, when would you create your core values and when would you implement them?

My hope – my personal hope, is that I would have the smarts, the conviction and the courage to create them from day -1 but if I cared passionately about the business – I don’t know how I would do actually living them…especially when the shinola started to hit the fan…

As an example – I’ve thought about being a vegetarian – but as long as bacon sandwiches with HP sauce exists – that will never happen. So I could have the principles, but living by them is a near impossibility for me.

Can core values pay for themselves through your market or does it never really pay off?  Any examples anyone?

I wish I had the answers to this one – all I know is that core values are important to creating the right culture…but if you don’t survive then neither does that oh so good culture. The trick…if there is one…is probably to find a way that they are not mutually exclusive.  Is that possible or just wishful thinking? Should companies, like people, have a higher purpose?

Can a startup afford to have core values or can it afford not too?

This is one posting where input would be extremely appreciated…

Bacon Sandwich with HP sauce

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Huge swaths of new businesses don’t get past their first Anniversary – not one candle on the cake to be blown out.

And it doesn’t matter how great your business model is or how passionate your first few customers are – much of the early success of a start-up can be put on the shoulders of a company’s early founders – you have to be passionate, driven, nearly manic – sometimes to the exclusion of what most would consider logical or any degree of common sense. Even people that love you (the girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands and parents) will not be shy about telling you how crazy you are and how unlikely it is that you and your baby business will be anything more than a complete and abject failure.

And despite it all, you, the founder need to have a supreme confidence, deep in your gut and your chest – even when almost everything (and everyone) seems stacked against you.

Any of this sounds familiar?

Now here’s the one caveat when it comes to being passionate and confident, manic and closed minded about your new business – Be Confident, Not Stupid.

Huh?

Let me explain what I mean…

Be confident, know that some way or another, you and the people that decide to come on this startup journey with you will overcome the challenges and obstacles until you create something of which you can all be proud.

Did you notice the most important element of that sentence?

“…you will overcome the challenges and obstacles…”

Being the founder of a startup is NOT ignoring the weaknesses in your own business, it is not being blinkered and unaware of the challenges and the obstacles – I’ll write that again – being a founder is not being blinkered and ignoring the obvious issues, if anything, it’s being SO self aware that you know exactly what the business suffers from…even more so than all those nay Sayers on the outside who are telling you, you’re going to fail. You know even better than those doomsters, just how close you are to failure and what you need to focus on to be able to overcome these challenges and obstacles.

So, as a founder, be passionate, be focused, even be a little blinkered – just as long as you are self aware and know exactly what you need to do to take a potential catastrophe and convert it into a real business. Like I said in the beginning –

Be Confident…Not Stupid!

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Supposedly, it’s body is too big and its wings too small to keep it vibrating in the air.

How ever you look at a Bumble Bee…it shouldn’t be able to get where it wants to go, unless its prepared to walk. But, stop working on your startup for a few moments and look outside and during these bright days of summer, you’ll see small miracles occurring all around you.

Start-ups are not too dis-similar from this humble but miraculous insect…you start a business and in the beginning its little more than a concept in the heads of a few people. In fact, its probably not well designed to do what its supposed to do either – and do you know how you get where you want to go?

Every day you make incremental gains, small beats of fragile weak wings trying to raise an entity into space…and you keep beating those wings, until you get some momentum.  In fact, in the very very beginning you don’t even really have much in the way of wings.

In the beginning…and here’s a small secret…you fake it!

But even though you do fake it, you still believe one day you’re going to fly and one day, those slight wings make the body shake, they cut through the air just a little bit better than moments before and then they get some small degree of strength until, to your and everyone elses surprise, you don’t need to fake it anymore – you beat against the air and then…one day…

…You’re FLYING!

Bumble Bees and Startups

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Well, I’ll tell you what I tell them…

If you look down towards the bottom of this page…yes, way down the bottom…scroll….

…You’ll find a Google ad.  That’s it – that’s the only ad you’ll see…

Do you know how much cash I’ve made from that so far? Less than a Starbucks coffee in a week…

So hopefully that is a hint!

I’m not in this for the money – now perhaps that makes me cracked and certifiable but I LOVE the entrepreneurial, startup, creative, building ‘stuff’,  process – it is a natural, healthy RUSH! Truly! Even more so than that Starbucks coffee I mentioned.  I like helping other entrepreneurs to build amazing companies and perhaps some of the ideas in this blog can help too – but do you know what?

This blog has connected me with some really smart, driven, funny, focused, varied, interesting people – and that, my friends, is more important than getting a few hundred bucks from Google ad words every month.

So do you know how you can help? Both me and others?

Well, there are three ways that come to mind…

1) Contact me and let me know what you want to see here – I get some great emails and they help me figure out what to write about:  So – Email (through the contact me page), add a comment, whatever – tell me what would help you.

2) Add yourself to my mailing list – that way I can let you know about new postings and other good stuff, so you can decide if its worth coming back and reading an article that could help with something you may be grappling with.

3) Take this 45 second survey I just created: Click Here to take survey (then come back again to this page…)

So – virtually no ads, no affiliate links pushing you to buy something, no expensive memberships – just a polite request for you to connect so you can let me know what you need from this blog.

Is that too expensive for you? No right…so, there, top right corner – add your email and we can start the conversation…and I’ll even send you a free blueprint to help you start a business…can’t say fairer than that…

Thanks!

Andrew

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The first posting “Product Development: Creating A Winning Idea For YOUR Startup (Step 1)” included techniques to create your own winning startup idea, and the second “Product Development: Qualifying YOUR Winning Idea For your Startup (Step 2)“ gave some tips on how to qualify the idea to make sure it’s really the one that you should be investing your heart, soul, blood, sweat…well, no need to labor the point, I’m sure you get the idea…

So what do I do next when moving a Winning Startup idea forward?

If the idea has really grabbed me, my temptation is usually to start figuring out all of the pieces that are needed to move it from idea to a real business.  This mean thinking about the people I’ll need to find, figuring out how to test the idea, how much money it’s going to need and the 101 other moving parts.  It starts to expand like one of those towel tablets you would put in the bath as a kid.

It’s at about this time when you need to figure out a few things before you really start getting carried away.

Like what? Well – Normally at the top of my list is how do I fit in with this idea? Sure, I had the initial idea but is that justification enough for driving it forward? Every day, you need to ask yourself, “Am I the best person to drive this business forward?”

What’s important is giving the idea ‘life’ – so always try to keep that at the forefront of your mind and try…(and its tough) to put ego in the back somewhere…

Products and Services tend to have a different approach – For a product let’s consider just a few of the different steps in the process from idea to real, actual product:

• Developing product drawings (Engineering Skills)
• Developing a prototype (Engineering skills)
• Prototype testing (Engineering etc)
• Determining how to produce it in larger quantities (Engineering)
• Testing the Market (Marketing)
• Determining Price Point considering the margins required by the different sales channel (Marketing & sales)
• Sanity checking the numbers (Production costs vs. price point to sales channel) (Finance)
• Understanding and selling the product into the sales channel (Sales)
• Marketing the product to retailers and the end consumer (Marketing)
• Managing the invoicing, customer service, tracking cash (Finance etc)

These are just a few incredibly broad steps on the road to making a product idea real – It’s by no means all inclusive.  The point here is that there are multiple component parts necessary to build a business whether it’s a product, service or website.  When you are sure this idea is the one, begin to map out what the idea needs and to overlay that with your own strengths and capabilities.  This will act as a pointer for you ~ it should help make obvious who you will need to find to join the team either actually or virtually.

One of the common mistakes with most first, second and third times entrepreneurs is not knowing what you shouldn’t be doing – the temptation is often to try to do it all yourself – either to cut costs or because you are so passionate about getting it done, that you take a shot at whatever the task might be, instead of looking for the expert. Your job, oh founder, is to go FIND! Find the people who know what they’re doing in each area (Marketing / Sales / Engineering etc) and if you trust that you have the right people – trust them to do their job properly once you’ve mapped out the objectives / targets.

Thankfully whether your winning startup idea is a product, service or website there are some relatively fixed ‘categories’ that need to be considered whatever the business – product or service.

Here are some of the key categories and a few thought jogging questions, there are many more:

The Customer:

• What are their needs?
• What are they prepared to pay for? How Much?
• How do they buy products like this? A store / website / telephone / television? 

Competition:

• Where do customers currently buy or go to use products like this?
• What products or services do they offer?
• How much do they charge?
• How do they sell and market their products?
• How many competitors are there?

The Product:

• What does it need to do?
• How will it be much better than what the competition offer?
• Who can prototype and build it?
• How much does it cost to produce?
• What is necessary to produce it?
• Who will produce it?

Sales:

• Where will you sell this product?
• Who will sell it for you?
• How will you pay them? Salary or commission or both? Yes, there are sales people who will work for just commission (Blog Post to come)

Marketing:

• How does it meet the customer need?
• How is it better than what the competition offers?
• How much can we reasonably charge?
• Are we looking for volume of customers or a select group of customers?
• What do customers need to know that will make them want to buy it?
• What are the ways to tell potential customers about the product?
• How much do they cost?
• Are there any ways of telling potential customers about the products cheaply?

Some of these questions may not work for your idea but most should.  As you go through them more questions should pop up. And don’t worry if you don’t know all of the answers, you won’t. Fact.

But you will probably be able to make some really good educated guesses in the areas that relate to your personal strengths and won’t have a clue in those areas that are too far out of your own skills and experiences ~ another good pointer towards the types of people you will need to go find to flesh out the idea and really start the tactical planning of “How to Launch Your Winning Startup Idea” and turn it from an idea into an actually, living, breathing Startup. But again, that is the subject of another blog posting.

I hope this posting helps. Again, questions, comments, relevant rude remarks always welcome and ‘Yes’ this posting could have included much more, in fact, it could have gone on for at least another 50,000 words but like most entrepreneurs I have a tendency towards A.D.D. and another 50K words would take a good six weeks or so to write.

Let me know where I should dive deeper and I’ll do my best! Honest!

How did you like this post? Any comments?

Andrew

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