6 things I learned in 2 years

Guest Post – Young Melbourne Entrepreneur Josh Moore has shared the thoughts from his young untainted mind!

Here is a list of lessons I have learned from two years in the entrepreneurial community:

1. Networks are everything: The most important thing in entrepreneurship is the people you meet. You will learn more by being willing to listen to others, which compounds your experiences without having to make the mistakes yourself. They can also help you to get jobs more easily, and can recommend you to potential clients. Don’t underestimate the people you meet.

2. Save: Entrepreneurial ventures are high risk. Having a buffer of cash will help cover you when income is bad. I’m in the process of stepping out of an active role in one of my investments as it drained my savings account by $6,500 in twelve months, as it was not paying me enough income and I had to fund the gap with something. Better to have savings to draw upon than to go back into debt.

3: Ignore the bells and whistles: You don’t need a fancy website. Steve’s blog is simple but gets the core message out. Find the core of your business and ignore the rest. If you don’t you may spend too much time and money on things that don’t matter. Don’t spend money on costly legal structures and don’t risk your money on untested markets. Spend time instead and invest money when you know you’re likely to succeed.

4: Have a timeline to failure: If you start doing something, have a timeline for it not to work. If you want to start a little side business on the side to make $1,000 in the next six months, then use that as your KPI. If you can’t reach at least 80% of that milestone then walk away before you invest more time and money into something that is not working.

5: Read: Reading is the only real way to gain an information advantage in your area. An information advantage helps you to be seen as a leader in your industry, and also allows you to make better investment decisions. Never invest in anything you don’t know better than the back of your hand.

6: Personal development: Continue to work on yourself every day. Practice, be willing to try things and don’t be afraid of failing. I wanted to learn about NLP and couldn’t swim, so I took courses on both earlier this year. I write in my spare time to clarify my thoughts and to reflect on what I’ve learned.

What lessons have you learned from your entrepreneurial endeavours? Leave a comment and help the community gain from your experiences.

Mixing it up

I’ve decided to run a few guests posts on startup blog.

I’ve never done this before and on the surface it my seem to lack purity. But here’s what I think.

The blog isn’t about me, it never has been. It’s about providing valuable information to those interested in the topic (startups, entrepreneurship, marketing). Which the guests posts will do. Heck, it might even facilitate spreading the startup blog word a little further and connect a few people…. Yep, that would be cool.

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How to build a community

We all want to build a web and or brand community. But we forget the most important fact. We need individuals first.

Only we please one individual can we please two. Only when we please two, can we please three….

There will never be a community unless we love our orginal individuals unconditionally. It’s the love we give someone that makes what we do worth talking about. There is never a community unless love is shared at the most personal level. One to one. It’s something we should remember in startup land.

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What they don’t tell you

It’s easy to get caught up in the brilliant stories of startups going viral to gain awareness, and the simplicity and usability of certain websites turning into large revenue streams. How cool the actual product is, the fact that the founders just built it and the rest just happened. This is the veritable entrepreneurial myth.

Here’s a few things to think about:

How many sales and business development people do you think Google has? Answer = around 5000. And we all thought their non human automated adwords system did it all.

What investment has Twitter made in Public Relations? You think Oprah and Obama just happened upon it? No they were pitched to heavily with a large investment in leading PR firms.

How many Youtube videos were posted by company created accounts? Answer = Hundreds of thousands.

Who seeds the quirky auction items on ebay? Answer = ebay started the game very early on and let the media know.

Everything is not as it seems. Push marketing is alive wand well, just the tactics have changed. It feels very organic and community driven, but the often the community is created by it’s founders and leaders. Nothing wrong with that, it is the job of entrepreneurs to invent said communities. But it makes for better business articles to talk of such things occurring naturally, so the real story is rarely told.

The question for startups is – what tactics can we employ to garner the same momentum?

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Building a web community

I was asked during one of my live twitcam sessions the title of this blog entry, with the number 3 in front of it. What are 3 things needed to build a web community. This is the answer I came up with right on the spot.

  1. Participate
  2. Share
  3. Keep costs low

Participate: Use the service, website and community you are building. Be an avid user and of it yourself, even though you own it or built it. I use rentoid more than anyone and love it. You are not part of a community if you are a spectator. You need to be involved in it. Listen, create, help, assist, but not rule over. It’s not a kingdom or a principality, it’s a community, which means that all participants are equal regardless of their status. It doesn’t matter, if you are the customer or the creator of the community, everyone matters. It should be evident in the organic dynamics that all of the community are valued. everyone has something to offer and add that we can all benefit from.

Share: Share not because you expect something back. Share because we are all humans, and this is how humans roll. We are great at being there for each other a providing support. Doing stuff for the benefit of others for reasons that go beyond the financial. it was once said that the perfect day is the day you help someone who will never have the chance to repay you.

Keep costs low: Not for any economic reason, other than building things of incredible value like communities take time. If you build an expensive infrastructure for your community there will be too much financial pressure on making it work quickly, and communities don’t work like that. They are organic and take time to find a balance and set of values and systems. If you have too much cost associated with what you are doing, your behaviour will become non-community like. It just wont work.

Startup Blog says, Start building.

Community overload

Today I had a discussion about an entrepreneur who runs a well know business in Australia. He commented about building a community, then working out how to extract revenue later.

Seems everyone is trying to build on line communities these days. How many auto generated emails are you getting? My inbox is full of them. Sure we know it works, we know it’s crucial, we know its all about the community. Interestingly when we say community we don’t really mean it. We mean bunch of people who we can do direct selling to. But here’s a thought:

There are only so many communities we can all belong to.

People are suffering from ‘Community Overload’.

The law of diminishing returns is not excluded from community participation. We only have 24 hours a day – something the internet hasn’t been able to revolutionize just yet. And just maybe some of our people / customers / community don’t care as much about what we do as we’d like to think.

It just might be time to flip our thinking a little here. Maybe we can just sell something instead. Maybe create a great product or service which people value – and just leave them alone. The ultimate community which matters is family and friends, and the best way we can serve that group is by not stealing time from it.

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