Better, Impossible, and Unthinkable Products

2 comments February 16th, 2010

I think that there are better products, impossible products, and unthinkable products.

Better products follow an established trajectory in an industry. They are “15 minutes ahead” and the easiest to sell…for a while. Examples include:

• Faster computers with larger memory
• Cars with better gas mileage

Impossible products find a way to relax one or two constraints that designers of better products have taken as fixed. They are harder to sell, not so much because they are hard to understand but difficult to believe, prospects will ask you “What’s the catch?” Examples include:

• ATM Machines replacing human tellers to dispense cash
• Ethernet over twisted pair

Unthinkable products are typically developed by someone from outside the target industry or are the result of repurposing a product from another industry. Their developers were not handicapped by the mental roadblocks that come from following established practices and patterns in an industry. They can be extremely difficult to get prospects to understand–much less believe in–as they are almost always incompatible with current practices and infrastructure. But they can create an entirely new category of product. Examples include:

• IDDQ testing in semiconductors
• The Reebok Pump shoe
• Henry Ford realizing that a meat packing plant’s “disassembly line” could be run backward to assemble a car.

What are you working on?

• Customer Development Helps Entrepreneurs Assess the Value of an Invention

Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model for Expert Entrepreneurs

2 comments February 7th, 2010

Recapping ideas, papers, and books that had changed my life yesterday reminded me of Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model from her 2001 paper “What Makes Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneurial” (There is an annotated version on the Khosla Ventures site at http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/What_makes_entrepreneurs_entrepreneurial.pdf )

What follows are some quotes from “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial.”

Effectual reasoning, however, does not begin with a specific goal. Instead, it begins with a given set of means and allows goals to emerge contingently over time from the varied imagination and diverse aspirations of the founders and the people they interact with.

Effectual thinkers are like explorers setting out on voyages into uncharted waters.

All entrepreneurs begin with three categories of means

1. Who they are–their traits, tastes,and abilities;
2. What they know–their education, training, expertise, and experience
3. Whom they know–their social and professional networks.

In our “Idea to Revenue” Workshop we talk about three kinds of capital that startups begin with: intellectual, social, and financial. We don’t call out what she refers to as “human capital” or “who they are–their traits, tastes, and abilities” as a resource but instead encourage teams to “begin in phase two.” That is, to build on prior accomplishments and long term interests so that early customers view the startup as a continuation of earlier efforts and focus.

But I like this model of bootstrapping entrepreneurs as foragers: living off the land as hunter-gatherers until they can find a market to homestead. Bootstrappers have to start from where they are and search for opportunities. Pasteur advised that “Chance only favors the prepared mind” so you have to open yourself up to possibilities and be prepared to be surprised (which is another way of saying you have learned something new). Some more quotes from her paper:

Using these means, the entrepreneurs being to imagine and implement possible effects that can be created with them. Most often they start very small with the means that are closest at hand and move almost directly into action without elaborate planning.

Plans are made and unmade and revised and recast through action and interaction with others on a daily basis. Yet at any given moment, there is always a meaningful picture that keeps the team together, a compelling story that brings in more stakeholders and a continuing journey that maps uncharted territories.

Eventually certain of the emerging effects coalesce into clearly achievable and desirable goals–landmarks that point to a discernible path beginning to emerge from the wilderness

Seasons entrepreneurs, however, know that surprises are not deviations from the path. Instead they are the norm, the flora and fauna of the landscape, from which one learns to forge a path through the jungle. The unexpected is the stuff of entrepreneurial experience and transforming the unpredictable into the utterly mundane is the special domain of the expert entrepreneur.

One of the reasons that we run the Bootstrapper Breakfasts as 90 minute unconferences–where folks introduce themselves and put issues on the table they would like to discuss–is that it keeps everyone in an entrepreneurial frame of mind:

• When you hear someone describe a challenge that they are facing, it gives you much better insight into their thinking and allows you to evaluate what they might be like to work with.
• Often as not they are describing a common problem, or aspects of a common problem. Hearing their perspective just on the problem can give you new insights into how to solve it.
• It’s good practice to learn how to ask for advice and insight. Entrepreneurs need to do a lot of that in the early market especially.
• Explaining how you managed an issue or situation can deepen your understanding of you solution, it forces you to put it into terms others can use and understand. This is good practice for scaling up (e.g. adding your first employee).

Sarasvathy stresses the cooperative nature of entrepreneurship in the paper, a perspective that I share. Often an entrepreneur is attempting to obsolete an aspect of the status quo, but they have much less competition and much more opportunity for collaboration than is appreciated.

Markets are stable configurations of critical masses of stakeholders, who come together to transform the outputs of human imagination into the forging and fulfillment of human aspirations through economic means.

Effectual reasoning may not necessarily to increase the probability of success of new enterprises, but it reduces the costs of failure by enabling the failure to occur earlier and at lower levels of investment.

Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial, as differentiated from managerial or strategic, because they think effectually; they believe in a yet-to-be-made future that can substantially be shaped by human action; and they realize that to the extent that this human action can control the future, they need not expend energies trying to predict it. In fact, to the extent that the future is shaped by human action, it is not much use trying to predict it–it is much more useful to understand and work with the people who are engaged in the decisions and actions that bring it into existence.

She highlights three key differences between effectual reasoning and traditional startup management models:

• Risk taking
  • Traditional: expected return, work the plan to deliver results to your investors (“Ready Aim Fire” can become “Aim–not big enough–Aim–not big-enough–Aim…”).
  • Effectual: affordable loss, make many small mistakes as early and cheaply as possible to speed learning (“Ready Fire Steer“)
• Focus:
  • Traditional: competition
  • Effectual: strategic partnership (especially with early customers)
• Value Creation
  • Traditional: rely on pre-existing knowledge to aim for a known market you can dominate and exploit
  • Effectual: leverage contingencies; create opportunities as you map a new market

She goes into some detail on the “affordable loss principle” and offers extracts from an interview with an expert entrepreneur’s approach to a new market:

While managers are taught to analyze the market and choose target segments with the highest potential return, entrepreneurs tend to find ways to reach the market with minimum expenditure of resources such as time, effort, and money. In the extreme case, the affordable loss principle translates into the zero resources to market principle. Several of the expert entrepreneurs I studied insisted that they would not do any traditional market research, but would take the product to the nearest possible potential customer even before it was built. To quote but one of them, “I think I’d start by just… going… instead of asking all the questions I’d go and say.. try and make some sale. I’d make some… just judgments about where I was going — get me and my buddies — or I would go out and start selling. I’d learn a lot you know..which people.. what were the obstacles.. what were the questions.. which prices work better and just DO it. Just try to take it out and sell it. Even before I have the machine. I’d just go try to sell it. Even before I started production. So my market research would actually be hands on actual selling. Hard work, but I think much better than trying to do market research”.

In finding the first customer within their immediate vicinity, whether within their geographic vicinity, within their social network, or within their area of professional expertise, entrepreneurs do not tie themselves to any theorized or pre-conceived “market” or strategic universe for their idea. Instead, they open themselves to surprises as to which market or markets they will eventually end up building their business in or even which new markets they will end up creating.

This is also an approach that favors older entrepreneurs to the extent that they have larger social networks (based on more shared work experience with more people) and deeper professional expertise. The one caveat is that they have to be open to new possibilities and not be blinded by what they “know” to be true in the face of new information.
This 2001 paper offers another perspective on bootstrapping entrepreneurship that is independently derived and predates “Four Steps to the Epiphany (2003)”, “Blue Ocean Strategy(2005)”, and the “Sales Learning Curve (2004).” But all four are clearly addressing different aspects of the same core paradigm that takes a scientific or hypothesis driven approach to new products and new markets.

I will leave with two final quotes from the paper which highlights the value of establishing enduring relationships.

Expert entrepreneurs [...] are actually in the business of creating the future, which entails having to work together with a wide variety of people over long periods of time.  [They fill their future] with enduring human relationships that outlive failures and create successes over time

This is largely ignored in our entrepreneurship curricula which tend to focus on market research, business planning, new venture financing and legal issues. As far as I know no entrepreneurship programs offer courses in creating and managing lasting relationships or stable stakeholder networks, nor on failure management.

Related Posts

• Uncertain Times
• Cultivating Calmness In a Crisis
• Conserving Trust in a Downturn
• Paul Saffo: “Best Strategy is Ready Fire Steer”

Early Bird for Jan-2010 “Idea to Revenue” Ends Next Week

Add comment November 18th, 2009

Just a quick reminder, the early bird rate ends next week for our Jan 12, 2010 Idea to Revenue workshop in Redwood Shores, CA. If you are in formation or the early days of your startup this is a good opportunity to spend four hours on your business with your team members. We help you ask each other the hard questions so you can leave with a one page plan for your next steps. This will sell out, register now.

Update Jan-3: Sold out.

George Grellas on Insightful vs. “Window Dressing” Advisory Boards

3 comments October 25th, 2009

George Grellas is an attorney in Cupertino whose firm has specialized in business and corporate law for more than 25 years. He has a number of excellent articles on startup legal issues “Startup Law 101 Series” including “Ten Essential Legal Tips for a Startup Team in Formation” that any team of two or more entrepreneurs should read.

He posts on Hacker News from time to time and in response to a question “Should Your Startup Have an Advisory Board” posted a very cogent set of tips that have yet to make it to his website. So that his answer is not lost to bit rot I am including it here.

I have worked extensively with startups in Silicon Valley since 1984 and have seen every shade of advisory board, ranging from those set up for pure window dressing to those used extensively by founders for insightful continuing advice.

The latter usually arise from pre-existing relationships between one or more of the founders and the advisors. Normally, the advisor is someone who wants to assist the founders and whom the founders accordingly want to reward by small equity grants via the advisory director role. These types of advisory boards, in my experience, tend to be of significant value to early-stage startups and are well worth the small equity grants involved (which, by the way, tend on average to be more like .1%/yr of service rather than the higher number suggested by the author of this piece). The informal nature of the relationship also avoids many of the hassles associated with trying to have such an advisory board meet from time to time in some formal manner. In essence, what you have with such boards is a healthy working relationship from which all parties benefit.

The “window dressing” variety of advisory board is often as phony as an undersized glass eye that spins randomly with every blink. This often involves the so-called industry luminaries used to make the startup look much more impressive than it really is. In essence, such advisors hire out their names (and, yes, they will insist upon larger equity grants and often for some form of cash compensation as well, as for example for every meeting attended). While one can never say categorically that such advisors do not add value to a startup, their primary function is to add name-value and hence the value of their contributions apart from name value tends to be limited. There are exceptions but, in my experience, not many. In general, these types of advisors are a clear mis-match for most early-stage startups, though they often help later-stage ones needing “company profile” dressing for IPO, etc.

By the way, founders still occasionally confuse the role of advisory director with that of a board director. There is no connection whatever between the two roles. The former is basically an outside consultant only and has no management-level authority; the latter, of course, has tremendous management authority (and corresponding liability risks as well, which the advisory director does not).

Here are some blog posts where I talk about the value and appropriate use of an advisory board or kitchen cabinet:

• Nov-23-2008 “Unfamiliar Pain”
  If you don’t have a kitchen cabinet or board of advisers that you are accountable to, I would encourage you to create some mechanism for independent outside advice from folks with relevant experience. I have several other independent consultants that I compare notes with, we also take turns kicking each other in the ass encouraging each other to make hard decisions and do the things we know we need to do that are getting neglected. We having a meeting with all of our partners together for the first time in early December. I hope to use this as both a joint planning and joint accountability mechanism.
• Jul-16-2008 “Common Questions About Advisory Boards“
• Jan-21-2008 “Forming an Advisory Board“

VentureHacks has three relevant posts from 2008 that, while they are more focused on VC related issues than bootstrapping, are still worth reviewing:

• Lawyers are referees, not coaches
• Everything you wanted to know about advisors, Part 1
• Everything you wanted to know about advisors, Part 2

8 Tips for Evaluating Funding Alternatives

1 comment October 19th, 2009

Many entrepreneurs planning their first software startup get stuck on funding and ownership issues. Here are some simple rules of thumb that may help you reframe an issue:

1. Revenue, especially break even revenue, is never dilutive of your ownership.
2. The right co-founders, while dilutive, substantially increase your chances of success: they give you a smaller piece of a much more valuable pie.
3. Paying customers are real proof that there is demand for your product. Getting funded is proof that an investor thinks there will be demand for your product.
4. A software startup in 2009 normally doesn’t need more than 10-25K to get started, if the founding team can provide the bulk of the labor to develop and market the first version of the product.
5. If the founding team cannot provide the bulk of the labor to develop and market the first product, think about adding co-founders not seeking funding.
6. If you need a salary from day one of your software startup don’t seek investment. Instead keep working at your day job, save your money, lower your burn rate, and work on your startup part time. This is hard.
7. Your most important investors are your spouse, friends, and family who will provide you with emotional support on the entrepreneurial roller coaster.
8. Professional investors don’t want control of your business, they want a return on their investment.

Time is the Limiting Resource for Bootstrappers, Not Money

Add comment October 16th, 2009

I think a bootstrapper’s true scarce resource is time. Determining how to be most effective with how you spend your time is more important than spending too many cycles on trying to save nickels. As a side effect of cutting out ineffective activities you will tend to cut unnecessary expenses.

“Lost wealth may be replaced by industry,
lost knowledge by study,
lost health by temperance or medicine,
but lost time is gone forever.”
Samuel Smiles

Eleven Work Weeks–Or Less–Left in 2009

1 comment October 14th, 2009

I blogged about end of year issues last November in “6 Work Weeks or Less in 2008” and I thought I would issue the “Warning Dates in Calendar are Closer Than They Appear” a little earlier this year because a lot of new businesses need to take action in the next few weeks to get ready for 2010. Depending upon how you count it there are only about seven real work weeks left in the year.

1. Oct-19: normal work week, but what the heck, take a weekday off and join us Sat-Oct-24 for “Getting More Customers.” [Full Week]
2. Oct-26: it’s still possible to make sales calls that will lead to revenue this year. [Full Week]
3. Nov-2: accountants are not that busy–compared to say next March when business taxes are due–if you don’t have one, schedule some appointments. [Full Week]
4. Nov-9: If you have not incorporated, now is the time to get your paperwork in order. [Full Week]
5. Nov-16: the last full week before Thanksgiving, if you are trying to close business it can get much harder between Thanksgiving and New Years Day [Full Week]
6. Nov-23: a half week at best. We will have a Bootstrapper Breakfast Friday morning after Thanksgiving. [Half-Week]
7. Nov-30: normally a good week, if you are not chasing opportunities this can be a good week to look back at 2009 and extract some lessons learned. [Full Week]
8. Dec-7: normally a good week, if you have taken a look back at 2009 this can be a good week to look forward to 2010 and do some planning before the holiday spirit gathers full force. [Full Week]
9. Dec-14: unless you are chasing end of year budget this is can be a very slow. But there will be at least one Bootstrapper Breakfast this week (Tuesday in Sunnyvale, and perhaps Friday in SF). [Slow Week]
10. Dec-21: normally a good time to reconnect with friends and family; we will not hold a  Bootstrapper Breakfast on Christmas Morning. [Full Week only for hermits]
11. Dec-28: last chance to file paperwork with a 2000 deadline; and surprisingly we will not hold a Bootstrapper Breakfast on New Years Day. [Full Week only for hermits]

Some logistics issues you should take care of now instead of playing catch up in early 2010:

• If this is your first year in business get your accounting system (in most cases in the US this will be QuickBooks) in order now, schedule a meeting with your accountant (or interview candidates and select one) before December 11. If you are based in Silicon Valley we are huge fans of Ogden Lilly.
• Take some time to do both a recap of 2009 and a look forward for 2010, assessing what are appropriate goals in light of continued economic difficulties in most industries.
• If you’ve been working on a startup but haven’t incorporated yet, you may want to get all of your paperwork in order but postpone filing until the first week in January, in some states this will save you paying 2009 annual fees for a few weeks of operation in December and then 2010 annual fees. We like to see teams incorporate sooner rather than later if only because it gives you a vehicle to do business with that’s better than a collection of sole proprietorships.

Sign-up for Software Startup Checklist Seminar at Silicon Valley Code Camp

Add comment July 15th, 2009

With Athol Foden’s encouragement I have submitted the following session (links added) for this year’s Silicon Valley Code Camp:

Software Startup Maturity Checklist

This session is for both aspiring and active entrepreneurs. We will walk through a 36 point checklist that covers Product Development, Customer Development, and Business Operations. You will leave with a better understanding of where you are today and what some logical next steps are for each of these stages:

• Idea/formation
• Open for business
• Early customers
• Finding your niche
• Scaling up

Primary focus is on bootstrapping, there will also some discussion of what is required for a business to deserve outside investment. If you are thinking about doing a startup or you are underway and looking for a quick diagnostic on what to focus on next, this session will offer practical guidance based on the specifics of your situation.

This session does not require but will build on Athol Foden’s session on “From Code to Complete Product to Brand.”

Follow this link to indicate your interest in attending. It will be based on the Startup Maturity Checklist which is the first module in our “Idea to Revenue” workshop. Code Camp is Saturday October 3 and Sunday October 4 at Foothill College 12345 El Monte Road (Parking Lot 5) Los Altos Hills, CA 94022
As the description indicated, my session is a companion to Athol’s “From Code to Complete Product to Brand” which also looks good:

Before you can go out and market your code, you need to productize it. Whether it is for a small downloadable utility or an enterprise application, software seldom sells itself. Even for Open Source, it has to be packaged, promoted and presented correctly… and that is the start of your branding for the long term. For startups, product and company may both be dependent on this proper execution. This overview session will give you the highlights and a check list to do a proper product packaging and launch. For startups, continue this subject with Sean Murphy’s startup checklist talk

And follow this link to indicate interest in Athol’s.

Update Mon-Sep-2: The “SW Startup Maturity Checklist“  session is set for Sunday 1pm, Oct 4 2009 in Room 5501 at  SV Code Camp.
Register here: Session 201 Sun-Oct-4-2009 Room 5501

The Limits of “I Know It When I See It”

2 comments July 13th, 2009

Both engineering and entrepreneurship alternate exploration and verification cycles to develop a solution that satisfies a customer’s need. Both of these rely on the scientific method of “observation, hypothesis formation, prediction, and experimentation” to develop and validate testable theories, engineering solutions, and profitable products. Both require that a new configuration or an opportunity be recognized as distinct and worthy of experimentation/validation efforts and that you understand if you satisfied or failed to satisfy each constraint or requirement.

This is the basis for “I will know it when I see it.”

A key difference between the talented first level contributor and the effective manager, or the talented solo entrepreneur and the effective entrepreneurial CEO, is their ability to delegate. They must be able to orchestrate a shared understanding and common sense of mission around an idea.

Guy Kawasaki makes this point in “The Art of the Start” when he talks about “making meaning” and a team mantra. If you look at Apple’s success, it is because they are able to frame the requirements for a product in a way that everybody on the project can link their activities to the key goals of that product. They don’t have a hundred-page feature list; they do have a mission for their product.

“I will know it when I see it” also applies to engineering a new technology product. A new technology product is born at the intersection of entrepreneurship and engineering.

How do you make the leap from being a solo entrepreneur or a talented engineer to becoming an effective CEO or manager? The move is really one of doing the work, forming a hypothesis and verification, to being able to delegate. There are broadly two kinds of delegation:

1. The first kind of delegation is the ability to get it out your head in some way that you understand:
   • Can I write a program that does some of this?
   • Can I run a Google search?
   • Can I build a spreadsheet?
   • Can I construct a model of what I am trying to accomplish: e.g. a drawing, an analogy, a simulation or animation?
   • Do I know it well enough to define step by step the process that needs to be followed?
2. The second kind of delegation is the ability to form a small team and create a shared mission. If I am working on a small team or a medium-sized team, can we have a kind of two-pizza meeting with five or twelve people, and hash things up, run a whiteboard or a flip chart or some shared collaboration environment that we come to a common sense of mission. Once that happens, we get beyond the “let’s go see if the boss is happy with this” to actually acting around the objective.

On the engineering side, “I will know it when I see it” comes in a number of ways. In verification, as a particular detail, we have gotten very good at generating a whole bunch of tests. But, what we haven’t been good at is figuring out, what is the status of the test; are we getting closer or further away, where are we; are we making progress? “I will know it when I see it” is not really a good navigation method. We like to know where we are, and where we want to go. We also need to have at least a theory of a path that connects from where we are to where we want to go. There are three requirements for navigation: we have to know where we are, we have to know where we want to go, and we have to have some idea of a path that connects where we are to where we want to go.

One exciting startup that helps engineers with this particular problem is Achilles Test Systems.

“Achilles solves the problem that was created by the first generation of automation efforts. When trying to validate something, the first step was to generate a huge number of tests. We help with the fall-out of all of these automated tests by analyzing the results. There is the risk, if we apply computing power naively, to overwhelm the team with a mass of detail. Our tools address this issue of analyzing the mass of detail. There is no substitute for detailed root-cause analyses; we are not taking the engineer out of the loop.  We help the engineer visualize what is going on and allow him to focus on the critical issues,” explained Chris Kappler, CEO of Achilles Test Systems.

Achilles goal is augmentation, to free up the engineer to focus on the tasks where he brings distinctive value.  The question is how to alleviate 80 to 95% of the work that doesn’t require expert engineering judgment and analysis and free up the team to focus on the 5-20% that truly benefits from human root cause analysis.

“The first challenge is to prioritize the team’s efforts to where we deploy human expertise against the mass of detail. We run a classifier to categorize the outputs. In a list of a thousand outputs, we want to know: what are some cases are more likely the benefit from human expertise, what are some cases that are less likely; and where should we focus our engineering talent to do some debugging? The second challenge is how we debug or analyze these class or categories of outputs. If we know that we have cases that are similar, can we do root-cause analysis on a couple of them, and then make an inference about the rest of that population. For example we have three populations of problems: we have errors that are red, errors that are blue, and errors that are purple. In the naive process, we might start at one end of the errors, debug all the red ones, make changes to the design or change the approach, and rerun. A better approach may be to pick three or four representatives of red errors, debug them; three or four representatives of blue errors, debug them; three or four representatives of purple errors, debug them; and then rerun and see if we have actually killed the class or did we not get it right,” continued Kappler.

Whether you want to call it exploration and verification, whether you want to call it effective delegation, effective automation, or the need to blend human expertise with automation; this is a problem that engineering teams and startups wrestle with. At SKMurphy, this is a category of problems we have been worried about ever since we formed. We look for solutions that automate the “I will know it when I see it”.

Update Sept 1-2009: I will be giving a talk based on this post at the SFBAY ACM on Wed Sep-16-2009 at 6:30pm. See this page for details.

Athol Foden at Friday May 8 Bootstrapper Breakfast in Milpitas

Add comment May 5th, 2009

Athol Foden  of Brighter Naming is our guest speaker Friday May 8 for the Bootstrapper Breakfast™ at 7:30am at the Omega Restaurant in Milpitas. Athol has over 16 years of experience helping clients name companies, products, services, and taglines. Athol’s opening remarks will be followed by a question and answer session on developing the right name.

His website has a number of excellent articles on name generators, characteristics of good names, and naming biases and influences. His “Top 10 Characteristics of Good Name” is an excellent place to start. Brighter Naming offers a jump start program for early stage startups that takes into account their limited resources and need to move quickly, it’s worth contacting them. They also offer a self-service approach that you can follow if you need a good methodology.

The Omega Restaurant is at  90 S. Park Victoria Milpitas, CA, 95035. Turn to the right after you walk in, we are in the back room. To RSVP for the event sign up here: https://www.123signup.com/register?id=zdgrx We start promptly at 7:30am.
Related content

• Dec-15-08 “Last Full Work Week of 2008”
  If you are stuck trying to pick a name we suggest you contact Athol Foden at Brighter Naming, his team has a clear process that’s startup friendly outlined on his website. You can pick which steps you would like assistance on and which you want to do on your own.
• Dec-7-2007 “One Name or Two for Product and Company”
  Your startup is in competition for prospects’ awareness and attention. The reality for bootstrappers is that you do not have a lot of resources available to enter their awareness much less gain their attention. It’s twice as expensive to teach people two names instead of one…and to do name searches / trademark searches for two names. Pick one name for both the company and the product service. You can always rename the company or add a second product name later, but establishing the name in the prospect’s mind takes an enormous amount of effort: don’t double your workload. Also, finding one good name and agreeing on it is a challenge, finding two that are somewhat related and both acceptable is much much harder.
• Nov-30-2007 “If You Think You Have a Great Name, Think Again” an interview with Athol includes this exchange:
  Q: What do you think is more important, a name or a logo?
  In retail, a logo (or even more importantly a color scheme) are the most important when you are selling “off the shelf” via packaged goods. For items where the logo cannot be seen, for example fashion clothing, the name recognition is more important. In high tech, when selling via the internet or phone, the name is more important. In some cases, the icon (mini logo) may be also very important e.g. embedded in a website, cell phone, etc.