startups Archives - Page 106 of 117

Direction evidence

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Talking to my business partner today he made a simple statement:

‘Your task list and calendar should reflect your overall goals’

And it’s statement worth assessing in a methodical fashion. We should think about where we want to be in 5 years, and see if any of the tasks we are doing today are moving us closer to our goals. Our entire day doesn’t have to be filled with task that lead to achieving long term objectives, but there should be ‘direction evidence’. If there isn’t any directional evidence of where we and any business we are involved in wants to be – then quite simply, we need to review our task list and make sure things are aligned.

Consumer language & leadership

Posted on June 27, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s one thing to be clear and succinct in our copy writing, and it’s another thing entirely to create language which means something to consumers. Language which paints a clear picture in the consumers minds that you can solve their problems. The best way to do it is to relate numbers to something we are all very familiar with…. ‘Join for the price of a coffee a week.’

In recent times some of the world leading websites have done this beautifully. Web businesses where scale matters to the end users, websites where this type of language can be the difference between a click out, and instant confidence.

Seek.com.au – A new job loaded every 30 seconds (Great this’ll have the job for me for sure…)

Elance.com – $201 million in provider earnings. (Wow, I will make money using this site…)

Flickr.com – 2744 uploads in the last minute (This is a safe place to store my photos…)

As soon as we read information like the examples presented above we know we are in the right spot. That we can do our business right there, right at that moment. And I know what you are thinking, this is the type of language that is limited to the successful few – not so, all it takes is a little bit of creativity to find some numbers which mean something….

We just need to work out what we are the most, best, biggest, quickest at, and there will be something. Maybe your site is the hyper local expert. Has more X from your city. The most members in Y community or the lowest click out rates for the industry? Even a micro website does something the best. And as soon as we work out what we are the ‘most’ at, we need to put it right there on the home page, no better yet, the top of every page on our website.

Web Economic Models

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

There are 3 major economic models we see with web businesses.

Option 1. Create value, and take a small percentage of the value they create (ebay / amazon)

Option 2. Create value, and take nothing. The free model (twitter, youtube)

Option 3. Take more value (either from VC’s or customers) than the value they create.

Obviously option 3 is what we’d call unsustainable. There are many dot gone companies under this banner. Pets.com comes to mind as does Kozmo.com

Option 2 ends up selling advertising, or to another internet company with deep pockets – Facebook comes to mind. We are not Facebook, we will never be Facebook. We don’t have the page impressions, loyalty or any of the stuff needed to sell enough advertising, or sell the entire ship.

Startup blog advice is simple. If you want to have a web business, have a price for your service. Call me old fashioned, but it’s the simplest way to make a living on the web. Sure, we may have to provide more than what we sell – have an augmented product, but the economics of ‘free’ aren’t enough for ‘us’. Free might work for them…. But if we’ want to survive, we’ve got to sell something. If people wont buy what we sell, then we have 2 options.

(A) Improve what we offer

(B) Sell something different

But be sure of this, we need a price and giving stuff away is a quick way to go out of business.

Don’t wait to know it all

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

As soon as we decide, we must begin. We must use what little knowledge we have and move forward. Put some of our litle knowledge immediately into action. We must not wait until we know it all. Especially as it pertains to entrepreneurship we must use what we know and let the rest be unfolded and revealed as we progress.

The analogy is simple: On a foggy night, if you can only see 100 feet in front, once we walk that 100 feet, the next 100 feet of the journey is revealed. And wanting too much knowledge will create inertia and ultimately fear to act. If I knew how hard it was to get rentoid.com up and running, I might not have started. But now I’m in and letting it reveal what needs to be done as I go. And I’m loving it.

fog

Startup philosophy

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I just had a great meeting with a Mick Liubinskas. He runs a business called Pollenizer. Nice guy.

The thing that struck me is that Mick has a really cool philosophy which is evident when you meet him. And it was exactly the same as the philosophy I imagined when I read the words on the Pollenizer website. Which is very cool, because all too often people don’t act the way they claim too.

Actually it’s a pretty simple business or startup philosophy. Are we what our customers imagine? Do we meet or beat expectations? Turns out this has little to do with technology, more to do with attitude and it has a lot to do with our ultimate success.

Boring and Stealth

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

There’s been a lot of conjecture as to my post below – that ‘boring is profitable’. I’ve been inundated with tweets from people providing examples of exciting yet profitable companies. And yes, exciting can be profitable. But that wasn’t the point of the allegory. The point is that Boring is Stealth!

Stealth bombers are about being undetected. If you can’t be seen, you can’t be shot down. Pretty simple concept really. The equivalent of stealth in business is boring. Because boring stuff is invisible to the majority of consumers and entrepreneurs. Given the way we are ‘attacked in business’ is by competitors, then the best way to avoid competition – is by being invisible. Which for startups is much more probable than developing a monopoly through competitive barriers or brand loyalty.

Community overload

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Today I had a discussion about an entrepreneur who runs a well know business in Australia. He commented about building a community, then working out how to extract revenue later.

Seems everyone is trying to build on line communities these days. How many auto generated emails are you getting? My inbox is full of them. Sure we know it works, we know it’s crucial, we know its all about the community. Interestingly when we say community we don’t really mean it. We mean bunch of people who we can do direct selling to. But here’s a thought:

There are only so many communities we can all belong to.

People are suffering from ‘Community Overload’.

The law of diminishing returns is not excluded from community participation. We only have 24 hours a day – something the internet hasn’t been able to revolutionize just yet. And just maybe some of our people / customers / community don’t care as much about what we do as we’d like to think.

It just might be time to flip our thinking a little here. Maybe we can just sell something instead. Maybe create a great product or service which people value – and just leave them alone. The ultimate community which matters is family and friends, and the best way we can serve that group is by not stealing time from it.