Category: Ideas

Top 10 movies for entrepreneurs

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

While goofing off watching cable, a great entrepreneurial movie came on – it reminded me of life in a cubicle. So here’s the startup blog top 10.   

  1. Startup.com (great documentary)
  2. Pirates of Silicon Valley (cheesy but insightful)
  3. Office Space (the motivation to escape)
  4. Fight Club (bootstrapping, viral marketing)
  5. The Corporation (don’t act like ‘em)
  6. 7 up Series (life’s journey, dreams & failure)
  7. Prison Break (strategy, contingency, alliances) only TV exception!
  8. Jerry McGuire (the courage needed)
  9. Wall Street (the game – politics of money)
  10.  readers choice…

Feel free to add what number 10 should be in comments.

(in case your wondering the movie was Office Space)

 

Secrets

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I used to think that it’s better to keep your business idea a secret. Then I read that “secrets kill you” in the Bootstrappers Bible by Seth Godin. It’s very true. You can get a copy here.

whispering.jpg 

Firstly – no one is going to steal your idea. The idea is the easy bit. The execution is the hard part. Truth be told it is more likely that someone else will start doing what you are if they don’t know it’s already being done.

 

Proof – how many times have you had a great new business idea only to find out it has already been done. Then you simply move on.

 

By keeping it a secret – it not only chips away at your confidence, you remove the potential for your circle to help you nurture it and bring it to life.

Motivation

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

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!

The problem with strategy

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

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.

Viral Marketing example

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Granted, The Simpsons is a well established brand. But here lies an example of something with a strong propensity to spread virally.

As an on line promotional vehicle for the new Simpsons movie, create your own Simpsons avatar. Click on the donut.

donut.jpg

It makes this website really sticky, the really clever thing is that your avatar then appears randomly through the website. Very cool. I just spent quite an amount of time making up avatars for all my friends and family members.

How did I find out? Word of mouth, multiple times.

Fear of knowledge

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Probably the worst phobia entrepreneurs can suffer from is ‘fear of knowledge’

Epistemophobia, as it is clinically known sounds so ridiculous it’s hard to believe it exists. It does, and we all suffer from it to varying degrees. Sometimes we simply don’t want to change our world view.

As entrepreneurs we quickly learn that introducing something new to the world requires our audience to overcome their ‘fear of knowledge’. When people are comfortable in what they believe, they’d rather not know there’s a better way to do things, or a more logical thought pattern to embrace. Think about the PC and the years it took for it to penetrate households.  

Like consumers, we entreopreneurs don’t like to acquire knowledge that contradicts our goals, methods or ambitions either. The trick is knowing whose turn it is to ignore the fear of knowledge; ours or the consumers.