People are very time poor, or maybe just a little impatient. Regardless of which it is we have to be able to tell our story quickly.
Vanguard Investments do it in 2 seconds. Click here to see how they do it. (Watch the animation)
Even this chart below tells the story on long term ‘index’ investing. Of which Vanguard are the founding forefathers.
The recent downturn is a best a ‘blip’.
How long does your startup story take to tell? Here’s a tip – we’ve got a few seconds at most.
Here’s startup blogs top 10 reasons for outsourcing digital work offshore. Which we do for some work at rentoid with great success. I’m hoping the naysayers, will see by the end of this post as to why it is ethical as well.
Get out there and outsource, make conections, make stuff happen and make new global friends to boot!
Maybe you’re a great web designer
Maybe you’re a great coder
Maybe you’re a financial wizard
Maybe you’ve got a flair for industrial design
Maybe you’re a craftsman with unique skills
Maybe you’re great at managing and building a supply chain.
Maybe selling isn’t something you enjoy, like or even care about. Maybe making presentations is the part of business that really isn’t your thing.
Problem is this: There’s plenty of great ideas, businesses and people who never reached their full potential because the selling bit was missing.
Step forward the ‘Sandwich man’
Startup blog definition: Sandwich Man – a gun presenter and public communicator who presents the ideas and sells the dream on behalf of the business.
A sandwich man is called such, because he holds together all the good things like the bread does on a yummy sandwich. Without him all the ingredients, nutrition, ‘reason for being’ could all fall away.
A good sandwich man would start and close any business presentation to people like venture capitalists, suppliers, key accounts, customers and the media.
Quite often successful businesses are run by a team where one of the members is the tech genius and the other is the Sandwich Man. Who then communicates the ideas and vision to get people on board. Rarely people are lucky enough to have both skill sets. Regardless of which skill set we have, we always need a sandwich man. We can even bring one into the team on a needs basis.
But without one, we may end up with a great product or business which never gets the traction it deserves.
Just saw this amazing grab from the film ‘Network‘ circa 1976. Watch it, then think about the opportunity of the internet and our ‘own’ global communication channels we’ve been gifted. Then start something, anything, start something which makes the world a better place. Do this and the money will follow you.
[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=MTN3s2iVKKI]
While thinking about web front page design, yesterday Cyber Guru Ross Hill had this to say:
“To find a needle in a haystack, one doesn’t have to burn the haystack, just make sure the needle lies on top of it.
If our people can’t find it. Then quite simply it isn’t there. It doesn’t exist, and they may not return. After all that hard work to get them here, that’d be a real shame.
This is why our homepage designs must rock
Fly in airplane 
Drive car
Ride bicycle
Swim
Walk
Run
Motorbike
Bus
(insert your choice here)
Which one is correct? Well, it depends on a lot of things, like speed, budget and even why you are going…. Are you walking to Sydney on fitness or political campaign?
It’s easy in to judge strategy from the sidelines, especially when we don’t understand the constraints or objectives.
In startup land our paths will differ. What matters is if we get to Sydney, and if we did it in the manner which suited us.
Steve – rentoid.com
From a competitive viewpoint, imagine for a moment that our worst business nightmare came true.
Maybe Google decides to enter our market space. Or the Coca Cola Company launched a beverage with the same consumer benefit we’ve been bootstrapping. Or large company X decided to compete against “us” head on.
Well – you’d be surprised how that feels. How it makes us react, and how it very quickly changes our perspective on what is the most important element in ‘winning’. In competing effectively for our share of wallet.
All of a sudden many of the projects we are investing our time on seem far less important than they were yesterday. Maybe that front page redesign can wait, maybe the shiny new web 2.0 buttons are a little less important. Maybe our packaging will do for now and quite possibly every project we have on the agenda, excluding customer ‘centric projects’ can be put on hold.
Here’s an exercise worth doing with your team. Act as if. Act as if it has just happened. Have an ‘emergency session’ with your team on how you’d react if a more well resourced, financed and well known competitor came to play. Build your battle plan. Once your battle plan is drawn up – throw out your current business plan and work on that instead. Because they are coming, especially if your startup is in a fertile consumer territory.
After the intital fear, most entrepreneurs just get inspired, get angry and get on with it. A good scare never hurt anyone.
Steve – founder rentoid.com