This is brilliant – in fact Paul Graham from Y combinator has summarized the startup blog belief system in these 13 sentences, which kinda makes me wonder how I’ve managed over 700 entries on this here little blog.
Click on the link below and watch Paul actually write about startups in 13 sentences. Just awesome
Here’s some simple advice when seeking investors for your startup.
Regardless of the uber successful business which follows these two words it just isn’t going to happen. For two reasons. The first is our probability of being this successful is almost non existent. Secondly if we are this successful, we wont be the next, but something new.
The main point is when people use the words the next, they lose credibility. And when someone says it to me regarding their new business venture, I find it hard to believe anything they say after that.
I stumbled across this fast food place – good food quicky place in New York. It’s called Dogmatic, and they serve really nice gourmet sausages in bread. Really that’s all they do. Oh, and some some home made sodas.
What I really like is how simple the back end of their outlet is:
Not only is the consumer end a great single minded proposition, the back end is too. Something few startups ever really recognize the benefits of.
Consumers only have 2 choices to make – Sausage type, and sauce flavour…. which are of the ilk of Pesto & Garlic – you get he picture. And so did I, so here they are:
This is the type of food idea with has a replicable formula. And it doesn’t have to be in a major populous like New York to work. It could work in pretty much any city.
The photo below is on the car of the guy I am staying with in Dubai. Have a look at the wheel cover on his 4 wheel drive, of which there are more than sedans on the road in said location.
You’ll notice that it has a cover on it for ‘Danube’ which happens to be a building materials company. Funny this is ‘Michael – the car owner’ doesn’t work there. He told me one day he returned to his vehicle to find it placed on his spare wheel. I asked him if it annoyed him, and he proceeded to tell me, it doesn’t worry him as it protects his wheel, and it is a bit of a hassle to remove. Yep, he hasn’t got around to removing it yet…
Subsequently I noticed these on many cars in Dubai. Seems the other owners of the hijacked cars haven’t bothered to remove theirs either.
It’s an interesting piece of advertising and media invention. It is giving an item of value to the hijacked, that is the wheel cover, but on the same token it’s very interruptive. If the cover get’s thrown away, it becomes a costly exercise for the advertiser. I’m not sure it would be tolerated in a western market, but it’s innovative non the less.
Some of the entrepreneurs of our time haven’t been the inventors we believe them to be. It’s not a criticism, entrepreneurship goes far beyond inventing and ideas. In fact some of our most revered entrepreneurs are simply good at cross fertilization.
Let’s take Steve Jobs for example. He didn’t invent the GUI (Graphical User Interface), the mouse, icons, paint, folders or any of the ‘user friendly’ things that Apple became famous for.
He ‘borrowed ideas’. By looking at related categories Jobs was able to adopt new thinking and bring it to his market in a way that made sense. He was a great normative thinker. The best example of Jobs in action was when he was invited into the Xerox PARC office for a study tour to ‘share knowledge’. In essence, they gave Jobs the key to their kingdom. This is where Jobs vision of the future of the personal computer grew from.
The first GUI was on a Xerox office workstation called the Alto. Closely followed by the Xerox Star in 1977 – see picture below.
Look Familiar?
The trip to Xerox by Apple computer’s Steve Jobs in 1979 led to the graphical user interface and mouse being integrated into the Apple’s Lisa and, later, the first Macintosh.
Jobs borrowed ideas, ideas born in a photocopier company.
Ebay took the excitement and quick sale of the auction process from real estate.
Craigslist made an electronic web based newspaper classified.
So the question begs to all entrepreneurs, what new technologies, ideas or systems can we borrow from adjacent industries?
Here’s a tip to save costs while bootstrapping a business. It’s a 55c courier service with guaranteed overnight delivery. Yep – it’s pretty amazing. They have drop off locations on most streets in convenient little red boxes See photo below). They have all sorts of packaging formats from enveloped to special DVD boxes. They also deliver direct to the door of your desired destination. Just awesome value. They’re called Australia post.
So why would any entrepreneur waste their most valuable asset (time) driving around to drop stuff off, or spend a ridiculous amount of money on a same day courier to deliver something which can most certainly wait a day, is beyond me.
