entrepreneurship Archives - Page 152 of 235

The Feedback Trap

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I recently heard an interview with the Drummer from band Midnight Oil, Rob Hurst. He was asked how he felt about a particular record which made it to number 1 on the US charts. His response was this:

‘We were too busy touring, putting on shows to follow the bands progress.”

It sounded as though serving the fans they already had was more important than gaining new ones. And guess what happens when we do that? Our reputation grows and more fans arrive, they find us because we are delivering something special to those who already appreciate what we are doing.

The formula for success is to continue to focus on delivering good stuff to those who already believe in you. To improve our delivery to them. Just like Midnight Oil was continuing to perfect the live performance of it’s songs. They weren’t worrying if their songs were good enough, they weren’t focused on external feedback from sources like sales revenue or chart positions. They ignored all feedback, except that from existing fans (customers). They didn’t get caught in the feedback trap.

So what are the feedback traps of the modern entrepreneur?
–   Website traffic
–   Google analytics
–   Facebook friends
–   Twitter follows
–   AC Nielsen data
–   Market share statistics
–   (Insert feedback mechanism here)

These tools can be useful, but they also tempt us to change tack. They tempt us into believing we are strategically wrong, because the feedback is so instant. Where as the benefits of our strategy is never so instant. Strategy takes time to work, it takes belief and patience, more over it takes ‘the real feedback’ cycle to spread before we can truly know if we have something. And the real feedback cycle is what our current customers have to say, and if they spread the word.

Startups out there – don’t fall into the feedback trap.

Humans aren’t resources

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Something I put on twitter referring to any business I ever run, including rentoid.com – which is certainly worth sharing with my startup blog readers:

picture-9

1 versus millions

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s easy for us to be taken by the one in a billion websites like Facebook, Youtube and the like and think we need millions to make what we do work. The reality for most of our businesses is that we don’t need huge crowds, just a handful of good loyal people who dig what we do.
Sure some of us do need the zillions, like my business rentoid.com does… but the large majority of us don’t. We don’t need global awareness and brand recognition. What we need is a small group of dedicated fans, much like what Kevin Kelly has espoused in 1000 true fans.

But it’s often hard to get our heads around this, to believe this could really be all we need in the social media millions focus. So here’s what we ought do. This about how long it takes to have a decent conversation with 1, 10 or even 100 people. To imagine lining up 100 people, all of which are interested in what you do. To imagine them all in your living room or backyard at a BBQ. Your house would be very full, very busy, and chatting to all 100 people individually would take a week or so. In the real world it’s a lot of people.

And the internet is ‘the real world’….

The real world we are doing business in, not a virtual one. The real world where each customer matters and is always the start of our journey towards potentially millions.

Digital Mentors

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s never been easier to be mentored on a specific subject, from experts, for free. There are even live feedback mechanisms from other interested experts. It’s called blogging and you may think this is a ridiculous entry giving you’re reading one right now.

It’s only ridiculous if we fail to leverage the blogosphere to it’s full potential. Many of us don’t. We’ve got to get involved. Not be passive, ask questions, link, re-post and share with our crew.

The real power of such social media is dialogue. My favourite blog has 25,000+ readers a day. The publisher has his email address listed on it. When I email him a question he gets back to me within a day or two with an answer, a link, a blog entry or if I’m really lucky a free PDF copy of his latest book.

In fact some of my most valued mentors are colleagues I know in a similar space, or mind frame who write excellent blogs in their own right. I trust and value their opinion and so they are mentors to me also – even though – better that, they are half my age. Like Ross, Steve and Ben. Who are all as good or better than any celebrity business blogger you follow.

Go on, ask me a question!

No 1 reason being an employee sucks

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

The number one reason being an employee sucks is this:

You can’t sell your job.

No matter how good you are at what you do,

–   you don’t own your output
–   you are building other peoples brands and empire
–   you are at the risk of hierarchy
–   you are not servant to customers, but wage earners (the fundamental issue)

What this means is that as an employee you are not serving those who actually pay your wages – your consumers. Instead you become servant to people who are best at ‘internal politics’. So for you to succeed in this environment, you too must excel at internal politics. Which takes you always for important real world skills entrepreneurs develop. And then the final reality is that at some point in your ’employee career’ someone will not like you, and dispose of you. At this point you instantly lose any good will or employee equity which was built. Even if you are a stock holder, you still have no decision making authority.

employee-silhouette

The point is, if you want to build assets, being an employee makes it difficult because you lack control. If you want control, then you must have the courage to build something independently, like entrepreneurs do.

Entrepreneurship vs Investing

Posted on March 13, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a few simple words deliver in a top down linear fashion to describe the difference between Entrepreneurship and Investing:

picture-24

No doubt there is some cross over.The ultimate hope for entrepreneurs, is that our ventures eventually become investments.

Zero Cost Advertising & Social Media

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I’ve blogged before many times about how to generate brand awareness with limited or zero budget. The list of tools available is pretty long actually. No need to list them here – you know what they are. But to use them effectively takes two important ingredients:

Ingredient No 1: Frequency
If we think are are going to start a brand blog, a youtube channel, twitter account and all our communication problems will be solved over night, then we have really not understood what has happened with social media. If I was to summarize it it succinctly. I’d say – we’ve gone from a ‘produced’ world to an ‘organic’ world. The produced world took large capital investments. The organic world is free, but not everything grows, and those that do take time. It’s a lot like nature, free but time & frequency of events is the asset.

The more often we return to our crop and nurture it, the healthier the return we’ll get. Occasionally something will just click. We only have to do something ‘once’ and it will grow astoundingly with little input other than the raw ingredients. The market will take get hold of the communication and we’ll crack it – it’ll go viral. This is the anomaly – it happens so rarely, that we know about it every time. Best advice is to assume it wont happen to us.

Ingredient No 2: Patience
We don’t have to buy the communication asset. They’re here, we have been given them, but we have to work them. We need to allow time for our compound effort to accumulate. Be patient and trust that our continual effort and focus on frequency, will work in the long run.

Patience has something on its side that the old media world didn’t – digital foot prints. Our stuff stays on line forever. So when a passionate web surfer finds one of our things they like – they can do a back catalog on our stuff. This is when things can work, even months after launch date. A TV ad on the other hand has one shot at the eyeballs. If it’s missed by the target market, it’s all too late.

No doubt, we need to build great stuff for people to care, but in the new world of zero cost communications, Startups can can get it wrong and learn as we go.