In the future, everyone will be CEO for 15 minutes
As part of Tom Evslin’s ‘Blook tour’ concept, I’ve created a blog where I will serially publish my book - Stone Magic, one chapter at a time.
It’s a fantasy novel, set in the Stone age, and it is the adventure of a group of primitive men and woment witnessing the dawn of the age of magic.
(Think high fantasy, like George R.R. Martin or J.R.R. Tolkein meets Clan of the Cave Bear or ‘People of the Wolf’)
This Business Week article on entrepreneurship in India is interesting in its own right. But it is also interesting to think about how such ideas can be incorporated elsewhere. Generally speaking, I am much more creative and efficient in how I solve problems when I am constrained than when I am more-or-less completely unconstrained. So imagine, you want to set up a business, and you set a maximum budget for yourself of $25. That would certainly force you to come up with some interesting ways to solve problems. You might have to think way out in left field to make that work.
And if it does work, it potentially presents you with a tool you can use to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and possibly even find ways to take customers away from your competitors.
$25 may not be realistic, although I know that there are plenty of things you can accomplish with $25. But the next time you’re thinking about an idea, think about how you can put some serious constraints on your options, and see if that doesn’t help make for some interesting ideas and options you wouldn’t have thought of before….
These made me laugh:
Guy Kawasaki is churning up the blogosphere lately with his insights. I have to give him props - he’s writing a bunch of very useful articles. This one (The Art of the Bootstrap) is no exception.
I would divide his suggestions up into N categories:
What other tricks do you have for boostrapping? Discuss on the Picobusiness Forum
Technorati Tags: Small Business, Entrepreneurship, Bellygraph, Bootstrapping, Startup
I talked about the perfect being the enemy of the good here. Here’s another example on why waiting for perfection is a bad idea.
Or, as Guy Kawasaki says - Don’t worry, be crappy. Nothing is more valuale than feedback. Especially if you put something out and you get no feedback at all. It means there’s probably not very much interest.
I have worked with people who thought they knew exactly what the customer wanted, years in advance, and bent all of their energy to pursuing this ‘perfect’ solution. I have never seen that approach succeed, only fail to different (sometimes salvageable, sometimes unsalvageable) degrees.
Having spent a considerable of time doing both, usually at the same time, I think there are significant similiarities between starting and building a small multi-person business, and starting and creating a software system.
In agile terms, this is demonstrated by the tearing down of walls, the erosion of hierarchy, the daily meetings, the focus on results over protocol. The same is certainly true in business - you and your partners/friends must be completely in synch in order to have a chance at success.
No business plan survives contact with the real world. Neither does a software project plan. Constant regular tweaking, re-examination, re-evaluation is the hallmark of both disciplines. Daily meetings, risk evaluation and mitigation, coordinating and removing roadblocks, avoiding surprises.
When starting a small business, one of your most crucial goals is satisfied customers who will spread the word. In agile software development, customer collaboration is key to building the right software for the customer.
If you wait for your business plan to be perfect, you’ll never get started. If you wait for your software to be perfect, it will never ship. A good businessman (or woman) takes a pragmatic approach to their service - if they don’t have something to sell, it doesn’t matter how close to ‘perfect’ it is. In agile development, this is handled via iterations, which break the work into moderate-length chunks. Ideally, at the end of any iteration, the customer can decide to use the software as-is, rather than waiting for the “perfect” deliverable.
If you can’t trust your people, the rest doesn’t really matter. Entrepreneurship is an exercise in faith - that everyone is working towards success because they all want to share in the rewards. In larger organizations, this gets watered down as the fear of freeloaders and the diminishing rewards of success replace a culture of trust with a culture of paranoia. Agile development tries to reclaim that culture of trust, trusting that the developers and the testers and everyone involved is doing the best job they can under the circumstances.
One of the most critical jobs of the leader of a small business is to get distractions out of the way, to let his or her team do the best job they can do, unencumbered by annoying frustrations that don’t help the business succeed. In the Scrum agile methodology, this is the ScrumMaster’s job - get rid of obstacles so the team can succeed.
Obviously, not every business works the same way. Food services may have stringent requirements on health and cleanliness that require a lot more up front planning. Other businesses may not be served well by iterative approaches. Still others may be so encumbered by laws that simple open trust is not an option - layers of security and monitoring are required just to “get in the door”.
But in my experience, these restrictions are often just variations, flavors if you will, on a general theme of openness, flexibilty, hard work and collaboration. Without this general theme, small businesses rarely (if ever) succeed, and the same is usually true of software solutions as well. Agile software methodologies are not the only way to create a collaborative, open, flexible culture, but they are definitley one of the best ways.
Technorati Tags: Agile, Entrepreneurship, Scrum, Small Business
If you use an RSS feed reader (as I do), you’ll probably find this to be a very useful tool - create a ’schedule’ feed for yourself.
For example, I set up a feed for myself to update this blog once every day. I could do the same with my Bellygraph updates as well.
Hat Tip: LifeHacker
AlacraWiki is a business-focused Wiki. I’d feel threatened by it, but it seems to be generally more focused on larger businesses and more “MBA-type” information, which makes it seem more like a great resource for PicoBusiness readers.
Some example content:
No entry for PicoBusiness. Yet…
Courtesy of Startup Journal - Practical Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs
Here are the topics, you can decide if they’re worth reading.
Summary:
1) Provide good quality services that your friends, colleagues and relatives will be comfortable promoting
2) Be persistent in your sales efforts to find new customers
3) Don’t lie about what you do, overstate your capabilities or try to go after customers that are ‘too big’. You’ll just waste your time and theirs.
4) Try to get coverage in the local papers, either via press releases or actual interviews.
5) For “real world” businesses, try to leverage your local community as much as possible.
Hat Tip - TP Wire Service
I am not much for predictions, at least not for specific events. But I feel comfortable enough on this one to lay it down.
There is no way that BellSouth and SBC and Verizon will be able to get the two-tier Internet they desire. It is not going to happen.
Why?
1. There’s too much one-tier history at this point. Perhaps if they had started back when we were first talking about an Information Superhighway, but not today.
2. Given that they sell bandwidth to companies, they will be exposed to hugely complex racketeering issues, unless they completely shed any business services.
3. The infrastructure cost in maintaining , monitoring and managing traffic shaping at this level is hugely expensive (If I’m wrong, and they do manage to get political support for this, buy Cisco stock)
4. It devalues their existing DSL - day one, it’s worth X, and day two it’s worth .5X, because now most (if not all) of the sites one goes to will be slower. Few things piss off the american taxpayer more than paying the same price for something of considerably less value.
5. The technological complexities inherent in “guaranteeing” service to a company that does pay for more bandwidth are hideous - monitoring, reporting, determining where the failure points are, etc.
6. Public interest groups will eat them alive, demanding special access for all sorts of non profits, charities, governments, schools, etc. Tons of additional maintenance, monitoring and lawsuits, with zero additional revenue.
7. Courts, including the court of public opinion will look at this and say ‘what is the benefit to the consumer of this tier structure’? HDTV demands additional channel space, so it has clear need to be an additional cost. Radio-quality voice requires the same (an extra line, bound together). But there is no need or value here - just naked rent-seeking by the telcos
8. If the telcos suggest that they will be able to lower DSL prices because of the new revenue coming in from the content providers, that will set off a whole new set of “dumping” and “anti-competition” lawsuits from other ISPs.
The telcos will continue to float trial balloons. They may even get the opportunity to run a trial or two. But at the end of the day, this will die a quiet, miserable death.
The Startup Exchange contains a bunch of links and websites to help with (surprise!) starting up a new business. This is fairly focused on the VC and angel-investment funded startup, and therefore a little larger than a PicoBusiness, but if your PicoBusiness is successful, then this would be a great place to look at to help you grow.
In my experience, you want to delay going after other people’s money. For several reasons:
1) By bootstrapping your business, you demonstrate intelligence, creativity, determination and capable leadership
2) By having revenue, you make it hard for someone to argue that you have no business model
3) By having profits (even better!) you make it hard for someone to force you to accept a deal you don’t like
Once you do want to go after investors, don’t forget the 10 lies of the entrepreneur - avoid these at all costs.
(hat tip: Jotzel)
My observations:
1) He didn’t start out planning on writing three different websites and charging for them.
2) The grown was completely organic, based on his discovery of new needs and opportunities
3) He isn’t ‘done’ with any of them - they are all works in progress
4) The combination of the three ideas is what generates money for him - not one in particular - very much an example of a successful PicoBusiness suite
Congratulations to Mr. Ferrier on his success thus far!
I’ve come to appreciate Technorati’s watchlists to track the links to Bellygraph.
1) Go to Technorati
2) Sign up for an account (free)
3) Click on ‘Watchlist’ on the very top menu bar
4) On the form that comes up, type in the url. For example: http://www.bellygraph.com or http://www.undefined.com/ia
5) Technorati will automatically watch and track links to your blog or site, order them by date, give you some content snippets, etc.
Very handy if you want to track links to your website.
Technorati Tags: technorati, watchlist, web
This is just bad news all around (Hat tip: LifeHacker).
If you’re running a business in your spare time, this is probably something you’re going to get a lot, primarily because few people will respect it as “real work”
My strategies - I have a door to my office, and I close it when I really need to focus. My kids slowly but surely are learning to avoid opening it unless something important is going on.
My wife is less accepting of this concept 
Luckily, she has her own things, so she doesn’t interrupt me all that often.
Also, I will often get up at 5 am or 7 am, and get in 1 - 4 hours of interruption free work on the weekends, or 1 - 2 hours on weekdays.
When I’m struggling with a difficult problem at the office, I’ll either move into a conference room, or put a Do Not Disturb sign on my cube door. I rarely remember to turn off my cellphone, though.
New topic for the PicoBusiness Forum - What strategies do you use to keep interruptions at bay?
Technorati Tags: Work, Interruptions