If there was any doubt that Geek is new Cool – it’s just been strongly confirmed at techcrunch 50 this week.
Even Ahston Kutcher is in on the act with his startup www.blahgirls.com
Celebrities out there throw your fragrance & bling business plans aside, buy a mac and get on board. I wonder which lucky web developing mofo got to charge him $3 million to build it! You can read more about it in the Age here:
The reason most entrepreneurs fail is that they give up too quick. Forget the old nag ‘you only fail when you give up’ – I don’t mean that. I mean that they forget that the “context” is very different as an entrepreneur versus being an employee.
From our first job flipping burgers or whatever we chose to do while still studying we had – “Instant rewards”. Instant pay for a job done at the end of the day, week or month. It teaches us a really bad habit. We expect instantaneous benefits for effort rendered. For every bucket of water we carry we get a piecemeal wage.
As entrepreneurs we are building a pipeline. It’s a large project of capital works which takes a long time, and usually much longer than we ever expected. There are no payments along the way. In fact we get nothing until the pipeline is complete. We may run out of resources before we finish….But if we stay the course the water can come gushing.
Unfortunately we can’t know how close the pipeline is to completion. We need a bit of blind faith. But if we go the distance, we’ll never have to carry a bucket of water again.
Here’s a truth all entrpreneurs must know, embrace and accept. Our selling skills are more important than our technical genious, web wizardry, or financial footwork.
If we can’t sell we better find someone who can work with us. Running a succssful startup requires the dream to be sold – for someone to buy our dream. Until we’ve sold this dream we are nothing – We do not exist.
Good news – we can always learn or outsource it.
Unless you are from the US – you have never even heard of any of the 10 oldest businesses in the USA. Nope, not one. There’s not a sexy brand among them. They include boring industries like, banking, ingredients, manufacturing inputs and insurance.
You can check it out by clicking here.
The important insight for Start Ups and investors is this:
The boring stuff is almost always more profitable than the sexy.
Why: Because exciting, sexy stuff attracts lot’s of competitors and people want to play there. They want to play there because it’s fun, it’s in the papers, it’s featured in business forums and leverages over-riding social trends. Then it gets busy and the cream disappears – (read here abnormal economic profits) . It’s no different to the house prices rising in popular suburbs and the yield declining. Simple economics discovered centuries ago.
So what? It’s vital we know the difference between sustainable & exciting. The most important factor for survivial is profit – end of story. Sure, profits can be made in any industry, but chances are there’s more profit in the areas everyone else forgot about.
If you ever sell your startup and make a good amount of money, you should be happy. Even if it wasn’t the billion dollar payday that the Youtube or Skype founders had. But the reality is the buyers think they can do more with it – make more money out of it. And just maybe cause you a little anxiety.
Here’s where it’s often worth getting some Emotional Insurance:
Startup Blog Definition: Emotional Insurance is the small percentage share of a business you hold onto in case it goes ganbusters when you’re gone.
It just might help you sleep at night once you sell your success.
Tonight I was speaking with entrpreneur David Eedle who sold his start up www.artshub.com.au for some big money in 2006. When asked what matters for web startups he said the following:
The same principals which matter to any business. The principals never change. He also said these things in particular matter:
And startup blog agrees with every word.
On first thoughts we’d assume that green grocers and web developers are in an entirely different business. But upon closer expection there are quite a few similarities. Similarities which can’t be ignored.
First of all – it needs to easy to find what your after. If it’s not obvious, if we can’t see it we’ll assume it isn’t there.
Secondly – we need things clearly categorised.we need to be able to sort the apples from the oranges. So it makes sense to have them in different sections. Not all bundled up in the one place in a rainbow of colors.
But most important of all things need to be fresh. They need to know it and we need to show it. There is nothing worse than a static website – not only do we want, but we ‘expect’ frequent change.
Clue number 1 – the refresh button.
Clue number 2 – it’s software – it’s made to be malleable.
People want to see what ‘we’ and ‘they’ the members / users are up to. What members are doing, what’s changed, that it’s live, that the site represents what’s happening in the physcial world. This matters for every website, that is any business which happens to have a website. Not just businesses with the web as it’s primary forum. Youtube does it with it’s most viewed by the day, feature videos and promoted videos. Flickr shows a different photo everytime we click in it. Most cool sites let us register for updates or run a regularly updated blog. It isn’t hard – just important.
Start blog says – change things up a little a lot