I was recently email some pics of Kulula Airlines livery. I’d describe it as eyeball worthy. Because it’s worth looking at, it’s worth talking about. There is no shortage of in cabin jokes from cabin crew while talking to passengers, but few have the courage to paint their personality on the fuselage like Kalula have. In an era of media proliferation, the trick any startup needs to master is the ability to be talked about. Nice work Kulula.
When I started rentoid.com a 5 years ago I had no idea it would grow into something much bigger. In fact, the entire industry has been written about by Rachel Botsman in her upcoming book “What’s mine is yours“. She coined the phrase Collaborative Consumption to describe what is happening in our hyper connected world. Rentoid is featured in the book and this little video below, which makes me a bit proud.
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/14408878]
It’s cool to launch a startup to make money. It’s cooler to be part of something bigger than your startup.
I don’t have a rich Father
I wasn’t left a sum of money from my Grandma
I didn’t go to Harvard
I don’t live in Silicon valley
I wasn’t funded at Techcrunch 50 or Y combinator
I’m not technical genius
I can’t code the latest killer app
I guess I’ll just have to build my startup the old fashioned way. Work my ass off, invent my own revenue, build a team and improve what I have to offer as I learn from the mistakes I’m bound to make. If you’re still around in 10 years, look me up.
A colleague sent me this quote that I just had to share right here on startup blog. Henri Federic Albert said:
“The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.”
And that is what we must learn to deal with in growth businesses – uncertainty. Our ability to decide based on a intuition and our personal world view is becoming a rare asset. It’s what we must move towards in a world full of data, but very little meaning. The other benefit decisions give us is real world feedback. If we get it wrong we can cross it off the list and move onto the next idea.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of being exposed to a great eco-system in someones backyard. And although it isn’t a startup business, it is one of the best startups I have ever seen. Let me explain.
After seeing an idea on television, Shane decided to build a food eco-system in his small suburban backyard. The concept is simple enough. Take tank water from the roof of the house. Build a two meter long 70cm deep fish pond in the backyard. Build a raised vegetable garden which doesn’t have soil, but gravel. Link all of them with some piping, and 12 volt pumps which are powered by some solar panels on the roof. In the fish pond Shane has placed 60 baby rainbow trout for winter. They’ll grow to harvest size by spring. They take freshwater from the roof and the vegetable garden beds. Water is then pumped back from the bottom of the pond with the fish poo in it to provide nutrients and water to the vegetables. Remember the vegetables are planted in a gravel bed. The vegetables then take all the nutrients from the poo, clean the water and aerate it and then it goes back into the fish pond to create clean water for the fish. It’s a wonderful system. It’s a self sustaining, edible example of what can be done with micro thinking. See the big picture photo easy below, and some closing comments under the pics:
I told Shane he should be selling this and start a business building it for other less scientific minds. But it also go me thinking about what the future looks like. Future solutions to energy provision and the food industry are not anchored in macro infrastructure, but selling micro infrastructure for self sustainability in home. Like what Shane has built; on roof wind generators, roof tiles made from solar panels, septic systems which clean and recycle the water we use from our tanks. This is the future entrepreneurs should be inventing.
I’m really loving the worldometers website. It’s a list of global statistics which are updated in real time
Not only is it a very interesting, but it is a terrific resource for entrepreneurs and marketers alike. No matter what your business you could grab some statistics from it to open the mind of your audience in a presentation. For example:
If in the distribution, health, food business we could present this statistic:
Undernourished people in the world = 1,026,904,563
Overweight people in the world = 1,153,103,026
Which shows that there ‘is’ enough food int he world, it’s just in the wrong places. It’s a distribution issue.
If in the eco energy, or environment industry we could share the following:
Energy used worldwide today = 422,173,999 (MWh)
Solor energy striking the earth today = 39,886,999,999 (MWh)
Showing that we have the 40x the natural resources needed, we just need to harness it.
In fact, the way we could use these statistics is limited only to our imagination. And when we are presenting to audiences, it’s their imagination that we should really be trying to inspire.
Humans love to count. Here’s a list of some somethings we count obsessively:
Really, we count almost everything. None of us are immune to this human symptom of counting. It’s the ultimate technique for organising and planning, in fact it’s what makes us top of the food chain.
So the question for startups is this: What are you tools are your creating that your people count and compete with?