Overnight success

It’s seems facebook has taken the title as the latest overnight success. It’s a choice whether or not entrepreneurs become jealous or inspired. We ought to take the inspired route.

 facebook-mark-zuckerberg.jpg 

The thing about most overnight success stories is that they’re usually a few years in the making. And so it is for Facebook. Facebook actually launched in early 2004 and has been almost 4 years in the making. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t whip it together a few months ago. You can get a little history here.

What this means, is that you might be working on the next overnight success -now, it’s just that no one knows it yet. If so, you’ll be all the rage in 2010.

Stay the course. Be patient.

Clustering

Here’s a live example of niche marketing in action.

 

At rentoid we are currently implementing a niche strategy by ‘clustering’.

 

As blogged about, rentoid is the place to rent anything. To make this true, we need people to have a great user experience. Therefore we are focusing our global website on one town. The town rentoid was founded in.

 

We think it makes sense for these reasons:

  • We have many items for rent in this town

  • We can implement old school awareness campaigns like letter box drops, and hand outs at the local train station

  • We can leverage local contacts & friends

  • When people first visit the rentoid, they’ll see many items in ‘their’ suburb

  • People want to rent things locally where possible

  • We can rent items off new members and provide a great user experience

  • It leverages a growing sense of ‘community’ in small suburbs

  • It has a higher chance of users telling their friends – who also live there

  • Membership will grow geographically to the next suburb, and so on – virally

  • We can test what works on a micro level before investing on a larger scale 

You get the picture.

 

So our niche plan is to cluster geographically, and grow from their. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Motivation

If you’re like me, every now and again it gets tempting to goof off.

In times like these, 2 minutes of youtube can be our best friend. A little bit of a motivational pump up session can be just what we need to regain focus. A simple youtube search should find most of the revered movie scenes, speeches from thinkers like Steve Jobs or Seth Godin, or maybe a simple sporting montage of victorious moments – whatever you prefer.

A few suggestions:

Rocky running up the steps

Al Pacino – Any Given Sunday

Wall St – Gordon Gecco – Greed is Good

Ben Aflec – The Boiler Room

Go on, get psyched!

Quirky fact 4.0

Warren Buffet’s first money making venture was selling Coca Cola he bought from a grocery store. Under the age of 10, he bought a 6 pack, broke them up and sold them at a profit, other kids in his neighborhood were playing jacks and hopscotch.

 

coke-logo.jpgbuffett-cartoon.jpg

He’s now the biggest shareholder in Coca Cola.

Start small – think big.

Badvertising

As a follow up to radvertising…

TOOHEYS EXTRA DRY HARVESTED
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORfkh0OojxY]

Here’s why I think this creative is bad:

  • It’s contrived & try hard
  • The idea isn’t linked to the core values of the category or consumption environment
  • There’s something dirty / semi disgusting about the story – Do we want to think my beer is the spawn of a rednecks strand of hair? (I beleive it’s just a bad idea with anything you put in your mouth)
  • Seem’s like some brand manager and advertising creative is trying to get a trip to Cannes.

Your thoughts?

Theories in action

Here’s a link to my new startup www.rentoid.com:

rentoid-logo-blue.jpg

 

As the name would suggest it’s a renting portal. At rentoid we:

  • Unlock your idle assets – like ladders, bikes, lawn mowers, anything…

  • Connect communities & satisfy your temporary needs

  • Reduce unnecessary consumption

Laymen’s terms: We rent stuff off each other. That’s it.

 

The About & FAQ’s will fill in any gaps. Why not check it out? It’s free to join and list as many items as you please.

 

As the blog title suggests, a few of my theories in action.

The problem with strategy

The biggest problem with the perfect strategy is this: It’s pretty hard to implement the plan, maybe impossible. That’s why business plans can be overrated. The simpler the strategy and therefore plan, the greater the chance of implementation.

 

Here’s the start up blog view:

Create a 1 page mud map, and make up the rest as you go along. That way we just might keep up with the world.