Archive for February, 2008
February 18th, 2008
An excerpt from W. H. Murray’s 1951 book, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
I think that commitment fundamentally enables us to see possibilities. When Murray talks about “A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance” I think the decision to begin shifts our frame of reference, enabling us to see possibilities.
A variation on this theme is “burn your boats.”
One chapter that I have found very useful in the “Art of War” is “11. The Nine Situations” (bold added)
- Sun Tzu said: The art of war recognizes nine varieties of ground: (1) Dispersive ground; (2) facile ground; (3) contentious ground; (4) open ground; (5) ground of intersecting highways; (6) serious ground; (7) difficult ground; (8) hemmed-in ground; (9) desperate ground.
- When a chieftain is fighting in his own territory, it is dispersive ground. [So called because the soldiers, being near to their homes and anxious to see their wives and children, are likely to seize the opportunity afforded by a battle and scatter in every direction. “In their advance,” observes Tu Mu, “they will lack the valor of desperation, and when they retreat, they will find harbors of refuge.”]
- When he has penetrated into hostile territory, but to no great distance, it is facile ground. [Li Ch`uan and Ho Shih say “because of the facility for retreating,” and the other commentators give similar explanations. Tu Mu remarks: “When your army has crossed the border, you should burn your boats and bridges, in order to make it clear to everybody that you have no hankering after home.”]
Matthew 19:21-22 tells of a similar requirement for a serious commitment at the start of forming a team.
Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” But when the young man heard these words, he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth.
“Burn your boats” has two meanings for me: get your team committed and pick battles that are worth it for you to win and not worth the trouble for major competitors to engage in. At the time you are getting your team formed, you must get them to make a serious commitment to success.
The concept of picking terrain for a battle that you can’t retreat from but that your competitors can does appear in Xenophon’s Anabasis in Book 6 Section 5
“For my part, I would rather at any time attack with half my men than retreat with twice the number.
As to these fellows, if we attack them, I am sure you do not really expect them to await us; though, if we retreat, we know for certain they will be emboldened to pursue us. Nay, if the result of crossing is to place a difficult gully behind us when we are on the point of engaging, surely that is an advantage worth seizing.
At least, if it were left to me, I would choose that everything should appear smooth and passable to the enemy, which may invite retreat; but for ourselves we may bless the ground which teaches us that except in victory we have no deliverance.“
I think the challenge is to commit to your new team without damaging past relationships. Prior shared successes always prove useful in new contexts: even if it’s not the current team it will be with the opportunities that your next success (or setback) creates.
My shorthand for this is burn their boats but not your bridges.
Some quick closing thoughts:
- My old Stanford professor, William Linvill, used to define a decision as “the irrevocable commitment of resources.” In that sense you haven’t really embarked on your strategy until your realize that you are committed.
- From “Soul Proprietor” in the August 2000 Fast Company
“Strategy is all about commitment,” says Tyler. “If what you’re doing isn’t irrevocable, then you don’t have a strategy — because anyone can do it. That’s why burning the boats is so important. I’ve always wanted to treat life like I was an invading army and there was no turning back.
- My father always liked to point out that “to not make a decision is to make a decision,” which is also one of the lessons from Boyd’s OODA loop (Observe - Orient - Decide - Act).
And now to end where we began: the folks at the Goethe Society have determined that Murray was working from a very loose translation of Faust 214-30 by John Anster:
Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
which is also inspiring. Here is a poster of Murray’s quote for your office:
Caption reads “A reminder in the public interest from the do it now foundation www.doitnow.org
February 15th, 2008
Key paragraph (slightly formatted) from Paul Graham’s “Six Principles for Making New Things”
Here it is: I like to find
(a) simple solutions
(b) to overlooked problems
(c) that actually need to be solved, and
(d) deliver them as informally as possible,
(e) starting with a very crude version 1,
(f) then iterating rapidly.
It reminds me of Bob Bemer’s “Do Something Small But Useful Now”
- Do Something
- Do Something Small
- Do Something Small But Useful
- Do Something Small But Useful Now
But it’s a delightfully succinct encapsulation of entrepreneurial strategy. Graham believes that
This technique is successful (in the long term) because it gives you all the advantages other people forego by trying to seem legit.
But I think it’s also because it’s not what big companies do (and startups trying to act like big companies). Big companies can make long range plans, marshal resources for distant markets, and (sometimes) successfully complete the journey. Entrepreneurs mix ends and means, looking at the “adjacent possible” to convert a quickly achievable result into the means for a new closely adjacent target, incorporating ongoing customer feedback into interim course corrections. Hence the need for quick informal solutions that are iterated rapidly.
Graham outlines his reasons a little later in the essay which I have re-factored into the original list and adding some links
- simple solutions simple solutions are better (though they don’t seem as impressive as complex ones).
- to overlooked problems you’re more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition.
- that actually need to be solved [Graham offers no further elaboration on this, but it seems clear that people will only use and pay for solutions that are actually needed]
- deliver them as informally as possible saving all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive and avoiding the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience.
- starting with a very crude version 1 so you start learning from users what you should have been making
- iterating rapidly your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own.
Postscript Feb 17: There has been an active discussion thread on Hacker News. One comment by konsl offered an excellent snippet from “Innovation Hacker” a Jan 4 blog post by Gary Hamel that nicely elaborates on step (b) and offers four normally unnoticed items to pay close attention to.
Successful innovators have ways of seeing the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, usually by accident, a set of perceptual “lenses” that allow them to pierce the fog of “what is” in order to see the promise of “what could be.” How? By paying close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed:
- Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.
- Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible” assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms.
- Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinuities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones.
- Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address.
This is a great list and nicely expands “(b) overlooked problems.” In his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” Peter Drucker offered the following observation on the frame of mind need to spot opportunities for innovation.
“Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred but whose full effects have not yet been felt, and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires existing companies to abandon rather than defend yesterday.”
Drucker goes on to suggest seven places to search systematically for opportunities
- The Unexpected
- The Incongruous
- Weak Link In Existing Process
- Industry Or Market Structure Change
- Demographics: Size, Age Structure
- New Zeitgeist: Perception, Mood, Meaning
- New Knowledge
Time saving tip: software hackers reading Hamel’s full post will be disappointed to learn that the “Hacker” in the title is an allusion to the game of golf. An innovation hacker is ineffective in the same way that a golf hacker is a poor player. The excerpt I quote is all of the useful residue once a series of golf anecdotes are removed.
Two earlier posts on Drucker, innovation, and how to look for opportunities.
February 11th, 2008
Today Sean and I sat down with Frank Bailey, VP of Sales from Runtime Design Automation. RTDA offers automation tools that manage all design resources such as licenses and CPU’s in order to streamline workflow. RTDA products track all licenses in your network, capture all jobs in your project, and automatically dispatch the jobs in the farm, all with one-click simplicity.
Q: I understand that you have had to change offices three times. Can you share a little about your first experience in finding an office?
Well, when Andrea and I first started the business, we were each working out of our homes. Andrea lived in the east bay and I lived in Mountain View. I cannot speak for Andrea, but I did not find this effective because of the distractions from television, the telephone, and the ability to run errands at will.
You could say that our first office kind of found us. One of our early customers, Exemplar Logic, was nice enough to give us space in their facility. Located in Alameda, we utilized the free space for eight months until they were acquired by Mentor Graphics. After the acquisition, we were forced to move out. It was not until this point that we actually had to find a place.
Q: What were your three primary concerns in finding the right first office?
- We wanted to be close to our customers and prospects. We spend a significant amount of time on the customers premises.
- We wanted something that had conference rooms. By this time we had hired a couple of employees. Not all conversations should be heard, so we wanted something with private meeting rooms.
- Finally, we wanted something that was near places where you could get a quick bite to eat. We basically lived at the office so being able to get something that tastes good, but not unhealthy was an issue.
Q: How did you get started when you began searching for an office?
I pulled out a map and drew a perimeter from San Jose to Mountain View and tried to find a place that was central to our customers, accessible from various directions, and easy to find from the street. We found a place on Apollo Way in Sunnyvale. This was a great location because it intersected Central Expressway and Lawrence. It was also close to 101. In 1995 this was the heart of the Valley.
We were there for about three years before the property was acquired by another company. The acquiring company raised the rent, so we moved to a place in Fremont which was about half the price. What we at first anticipated was a bargain on space turned out to be a disaster. Our office building was right next to a probation office building who we shared the same parking lot. It seemed like there were always questionable people hanging around the lot. Often, strange people would walk in and out of our building in search for the probation building. We only had a few theft incidents, but there were several vandalized cars. This office did not have conference rooms so it made meetings with visitors difficult. I observed that our visitors were hesitant to speak out, since they were not sure who was listening. Another problem of being in Fremont was dealing with heavy traffic on 880. It took at least an hour to get to San Jose to visit a customer and an hour back to return to the office.
Q: How did you measure or asses the quality of the office?
We compared a lot of offices before we settled on one. We basically looked at the image of the facility compared to the price. By image, I am referring to the neighborhood, the condition of the building, the common areas, and the amount of outside noise.
Q: Do you have any words of advice or things to look out for that people might over look?
Be careful of who your neighbors are and what types of businesses they are in. One of the businesses in the complex was a delivery service. They took up about a dozen parking spaces with their delivery vans. I would also stay away from sub leasing. We had an issue where we were sub leasing from a guy for six months. Turned out that this guy disappeared and never paid the property manager the entire time of our lease. We were not held liable, but the paper hassles and police reports were time consuming.
Make sure you have a separate machine room. Servers are extremely noisy and radiate a lot of heat. You want a separate room where you can set up a cooling system and keep all the noise regulated. I also recommend a place for miscellaneous stuff. Otherwise your office will look messy and cluttered.
I would recommend using a broker. I found a broker who I used for the next two office relocations. I much rather let an expert deal with all the fine line paperwork. This lets me concentrate on business objectives instead of worrying about none strategic busy work. A good broker will catch liability insurances, and other contract requirements that fluctuate from place to place. I recommend Jeff Rogers from Colliers International.
How much was the cost of the move? How long did it take for you to become operational?
There were five people in the company in Silicon Valley: with furniture, setting up the IT infrastructure, and paying movers, the total cost was $10,000. I would say we were fully operational in about four to six weeks.
Where did you buy your furniture?
I went to Repo Depo. People think they save money by purchasing the low end stuff at Office Depot. However, I think even though that furniture may be brand new, it can break down before the well built high end items you can get second hand.
February 8th, 2008
A poem by Ted Mielczarek entitled 11/27/2001 (he dates his instead of naming them).
A man controls his destiny
Shaping it as the potter molds clay
His desires made concrete
So why do I so often feel
That I’m not the potter
But in fact the clay?
Successful entrepreneurship is an ongoing self-improvement project. But entrepreneurs must marshal more than their own resources and abilities to succeed. They need to involve other people with the necessary talents, experience, and knowledge. A successful startup is co-created not just by the founders, but in collaboration with other partners, suppliers, and especially customers.
February 7th, 2008
I originally wrote this on Wednesday November 28, 2007 in response to a set of questions posed by Mike Masnick to the Techdirt Insight Community. I had applied and been accepted into the community after it was announced at the 2006 Office 2.0 conference (I blogged about in “Born With a Face Made for Podcasting“). Those questions are in bold in the following text. Please note that under the terms of service, each blogger retained the rights to his own words.
Q: How to continue to grow the Community itself?
There is no substitute for a face to face meeting to build a real sense of community. I would suggest that you run a few events in 2008 (perhaps twice a year, perhaps quarterly) where they would be convenient for Techdirt folks and the blogger members of the Insight community to meet and get better acquainted. I think you might find that unleashes a lot of creativity around how to grow the community.
The competitive mechanism you have chosen doesn’t seem to foster as much discussion within the community on the topic. And frankly for the dollars you have put out there I am not sure I am as motivated as I would be by the opportunity for further on-line or face to face discussion with the blogger community you have brought together.
I also wonder if your Techdirt Greenhouse format might be appropriate for a set of your customers: have them present an issue, break up into smaller groups for focused discussion with two or three teams addressing the topic (perhaps two to three topics in parallel) and then come back to the main group for a summary and briefing. Obviously not every issue will be appropriate for this approach, but many of the “what’s going on in this market” or “how to you see things evolving in this technology landscape” questions that are more open ended or exploratory may be a fit.
Q: How to get existing customers to become repeat customers or regular users of the community.
What’s their perspective on the benefits they have gained from putting a question to the community?
One benefit a community model might offer is an ongoing surveillance of an issue from a variety of perspectives. In other words, instead of trying to reach a conclusion, use an insight community as more of a “what are recent developments in…” and let a number of folks submit links (perhaps rated/sorted/ranked/tagged by the community) in addition to their own comments/posts to provide their context. This might have the additional advantage that you could sell the same feed to several clients, and then sell a second tailored offering that addressed their particular situation. But ongoing surveillance of an emerging technology or market space is something that a community of interest does well.
Q: How to get more companies aware of what the Techdirt Insight Community can provide.
I think you have to use references/testimonials and find a way to offer a version of the service that is more general, such as the community of interest model I suggested above, so that they can get some idea of what’s involved.
Q: How to keep bringing in additional customers.
You have to expose some aspect of this “blogging ecosystem” on your site and in your ongoing marketing efforts. I worked on a project at Cisco about a decade ago to add a filtering/ranking layer on top of an incredible amount of analyst research that we purchased that was used by hundreds of marketing folks across dozens of business units. The challenge your clients may be facing is that they are getting too much insight and they need more sensemaking. I don’t know enough about your mainline services and how they are marketed and deployed to be able to comment effectively on how to generate additional synergies between the Insight Community and your other services, but it seems to be that you need to determine in your sales model what is the “portal” or “thin edge of the wedge” into a new customer and what’s the add on. Another way to think about it is how to re-purpose the existing content that’s been created over the last year, perhaps paying an additional success fee to the bloggers, to go after new customers. It’s a little hard to determine the “shelf life” or “half life” of some of the content, and longer half life content probably addresses different questions than gathering info to make a decision in a few months. I guess I don’t understand your current model to be able to suggest how to better integrate TIC capabilities and content.
One final challenge I have with your mechanism is that it does not foster interaction between the community members, I might have written this much sooner if I knew that other folks might read it, comment on it, and help me to evolve it. I think a wiki would be complementary to this forum of blog posts as refinery for issues that we all have a stake in, such as the continued health and growth of the Techdirt Insight Community. But I don’t think that it’s a technology issue as much as the natural consequences of the incentive set or mechanism you have established.
Postscript added as a comment to the forum “How to Improve the Techdirt Insight Community”
I guess I have reluctantly concluded that community is the wrong word for Techdirt Insight effort. The mechanisms established to make clear who owns each individual insight work against again real collaboration or shared contribution. It’s become a rolling essay contest more than a blogging community, which probably better suits Techdirt’s business needs but it’s not the reason I joined. I have appreciated the opportunity to take part and contribute.
Net Net: I have asked Techdirt to delete my account and donate the $18 credit I have earned from my contributions to the Salvation Army. At it’s root the Insight Community is a zero sum game, and this mechanism works against collaboration and community building.
February 6th, 2008
I will be speaking next Monday at the SDForum Marketing SIG on “Leveraging Your Social Network to Find Early Customers.”
Social navigation is networking with a goal. Entrepreneurs will spend social capital navigating their way to getting trusted feedback and early sales. Like Google and web assisted selling tools, social network tools can improve the quality of your conversations by providing you with background information and context. In the context of established relationships, tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and others allow people to connect with others and foster networks of friends or colleagues. I will walk through a simple social navigation exercise and also offer a model for how startup entrepreneurs and product introduction managers spend social capital to get critical feedback on product and business concepts.
I plan to mix some interactive exercises into the presentation to allow attendees to assess their social capital and social navigation skills. My hope is to keep it engaging and energizing. My perspective on Facebook and LinkedIn is that they are useful but no substitute for authentic relationships and real networking skills.
For marketing folks in both startups and established firms key elements of social navigation have less to do with “on-line social networks” and much more to do with face-to-face, phone, and E-mail conversations, each with their respective protocols and etiquette. My focus is more on leveraging bona fide existing relationships and not wasting the social capital that others are lending you to find prospects and ultimately early customers.
The Marketing SIG meeting starts at 6:30PM at DLA Piper DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary LLP on 2000 University Ave. (University Circle) in East Palo Alto. No charge for SDForum members, $15 at the door for non-members.
I hope to see you there.
February 5th, 2008
We have resisted doing webinar or phone versions of our workshops because there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to facilitate the pair discussions and highly interactive nature of the conversation in the room. I would like to see an integration between (VoIP/POTS) telephony and chat such that we could do the following during a conference call or webinar that has a related chat window:
- Let Someone Raise Their Hand and Speak: an attendee who wants to speak or ask a question can “raise their hand” in the chat window and then have their connection patched into the voice stream back to all attendees. This might require passing out a serialized password to each attendee (or on an 800 dial-in recognizing the number, or leverage Caller ID to determine who is who). This can be done on the honor system in a group that knows each other or is otherwise well-behaved, by using the chat window to control the queue to the mike, but often you would like to mute everyone but one or two speakers. Inspired by Clay Shirky’s wiki+chat+phone pattern (see below).
- Break a Larger Group Into Small Groups and Then Reconvene: as an example break a group of 12 into six pairs or three groups of four and then have them join back into a single audio stream. Their status could either be communicated via the chat window (which should now be restricted to “just those in their small group”). This was suggested by an observation that John Smith made in 2004 that “what would really make our CPSquare class conference call effective is the ability to break into small groups and then come back.”
- Automatically Manage The “Queue for the Microphone” during the Q&A segment: offer a simple way to “get in the line for the mike” that allows everyone to see the backlog of questions.
I welcome any feedback or suggestions on systems that already support this, or other ideas for how to go beyond the POTS conference call model.
We currently follow the wiki+chat+phone pattern that Clay Shirky identified in “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” with client meetings but this is normally less than 6 people
“But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I’m going to bring up a chat window at the same time.” And then, in the first meeting, I think it was Pete Kaminski said “Well, I’ve also opened up a wiki, and here’s the URL.” And he posted it in the chat window. And people can start annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.
So, suddenly you’ve got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated. So you can have the conference call going on, and you know how conference calls are. Either one or two people dominate it, or everyone’s like “Oh, can I — no, but –”, everyone interrupting and cutting each other off.
It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.
Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. “Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so’s work.” Or “You should look at this URL…you should look at that ISBN number.” In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out — “No, no, no, it’s w w w dot net dash…” In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: “Go over to the wiki and look at this.”
This is a broadband conference call, but it isn’t a giant thing. It’s just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern.
John Smith offers a well thought out set of “Conference Call Practices To Generate Knowledge and Record Learning” that refine and elaborate on Shirky’s wiki+chat+phone model. These are very applicable to any geographically dispersed team that is relying on periodic conference calls to keep a project moving forward.
February 4th, 2008
In response to requests from prior workshop attendees we’ve added an afternoon session to the March 8 Great Demo! workshop that will address advanced topics. You are welcome to attend if you have attended an earlier Great Demo! workshop, or you can register for both the morning and afternoon sessions on March 8. Lunch is included in the morning session so you can make a day of it with us if you like.
Peter Cohan’s “Great Demo!” Advanced Topics Session
Create and Deliver Surprisingly Compelling Software Demonstrations
“Do The Last Thing First” — the recipe for a Great Demo!
In response to requests for assistance on demo delivery we have added an afternoon session to our March 8 Great Demos workshop. If this is your first exposure to the Great Demo come for the morning and get a great overview of the methodology and stay for the afternoon if you would like an opportunity for more interactive training on advanced topics such as multi-solution, multi-player demonstrations, and vision generation demonstrations. The advanced topic session as covers real life issues like handling bugs, crashes, and time challenges.
This interactive workshop with Peter Cohan of The Second Derivative is only available to people who have already attended the basic Great Demo! workshop or who also attend the morning session on March 8.
When: Saturday Mar 8, 2008, 1:00 - 5:00 pm
Where: Moorpark Hotel, 4241 Moorpark Ave, San Jose CA 95129
Cost $40 After March 1 $60
Register Here
Agenda:
- 1 PM Advanced Topics
-
- multiple solution demos
- presenting to a mixed audience with different needs
- vision generation demonstrations
- handling bugs, crashes, and time challenges.
- 5 PM Wrap up
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Peter Cohan, Principal at Second Derivative
Community Web Site: www.DemoGurus.com
Peter Cohan is the founder and a principal of The Second Derivative, a consultancy focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results. In July 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus®, a community web exchange dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams improve their software demonstrations. In 2003, he authored Great Demo!, a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. The 2nd edition of Great Demo! was published March 2005.
Before The Second Derivative, Peter founded the Discovery Tools® business unit at Symyx Technologies, Inc., where he grew the business from an empty spreadsheet into a $30 million operation. Prior to Symyx, Peter served in marketing, sales, and management positions at MDL Information Systems, a leading provider of scientific information management software. Peter currently serves on the Board of Directors for Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and the board of advisors for Excellin, Inc. He holds a degree in chemistry.
Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manage and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.
February 1st, 2008
Any of these sound familiar?
- Are you an entrepreneur with a business idea that just can’t seem to get the support you deserve?
- Maybe you’ve completed a business plan but no one seems to want to read it.
- Or you’ve created a fantastic product that no one seems to want to buy.
- Perhaps you’ve pitched dozens of investors and no one seems to want to put money into your deal.
Will Schroter suggests you consider that “maybe your idea just sucks.”
In my direct experience starting companies and in working with a number of entrepreneurs, I think one of the key challenges an entrepreneur can face is knowing who to listen to. Most of us are surrounded by folks who prefer to be employees, and therefore most of the advice we get is essentially “be an employee.”
Moreover, many successful entrepreneurs can see their particular path as the only path, and they in effect tell you “stay on this path, it worked for me.” I think forming an advisory board from folks whom you trust and who have relevant business experience is one of the keys to success. You can’t just go it alone all the time, you have to be able to expose your plan and your thinking and get knowledgeable feedback. If you don’t have a plan, how do you know what to tinker with to evolve your business model (or what you are changing when things are not working out).
I think it’s easy to become fixated on an implementation or invention: it’s harder to go wrong if you focus on customer pain. Schroter cites a quote by Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart
“I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 in population cannot support a discount store for very long.”
Walton lists this as the tenth rule in his “Sam’s Rules for Building a Business”
Rule 10: Swim upstream.
Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: A town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.
Walton may have re-framed the problem as “folks in towns with less than 50,000 in population must be very hungry for a discount store. How could I build a franchise that would serve them?” If you can keep your focus on your customer’s pain then failure sounds like everyone telling you “I don’t have the problem or I don’t view that as a pain” instead of “I think you have an ugly baby (your new product).”
It’s much harder to get defensive when someone tells you that a particular situation is not a problem for them, or they say “I have the problem you have outlined, but I don’t think your offering represents a useful/viable solution for me.”
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