General advice is generally useless
March 20th, 2010 | Published in comment | 8 Comments
Barney and Caelen have been going through what they consider you should not focus on when starting a business. I really enjoy both of these blogs and but they reminded me of how useless general advice can sometimes be. What is good for the goose is definitely not good for the gander. Caelen advises against spending time developing a strong brand.
Logo: We still don’t have a logo and don’t have any plans to get a logo. We just typed out RevaHealth.com in a font that we liked and left it at that.
Piehole’s logo is key to getting us noticed and lets our customers know that we are different to the competition. Much to my chagrin, design, is key when making a first impression. As I keep repeating, Rob on Software’s “market -> marketing -> design -> product” approach to product development seems spot on.
Barney agrees with Caelen on business cards.
Business cards and your website are NOT the most important things to sort out on day one.
Crazy stuff. Business cards take about 20 minutes to order on moo.com. Well worth the time. Here is on reason why.
If you still have a full set of cards after 3 months – you are not doing enough sales/networking. Both profess to talking to your potential customer. You can’t be taken seriously if you haven’t met the basic hygiene factor of having some cards.
So who is right? Me or them?
Well, rather blandly, you could say we both are. It just depends. Obviously, an insurance salesman needs card and companies marketing to advertising agencies need brand. Cards are useless if you are selling stuff on ebay and Google doesn’t consider how cool your logo is when pushing traffic to your site.
So here is my advice.
Find someone who has what you want, and copy what they did.
Which advice you listen to is critical. Building a world-beating health index website? Read Caelen’s blog posts. Boot-strapping a piece of webapp software? Subscribe to Barney’s blog. Want to drink ridiculous amounts of red wine in a Mendoza, Argentina? Visit troutandwine.com.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:10 pm (#)
What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander?
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
I think it goes without saying that you have to think about whether any piece of advice should apply to you and your business, no matter how important it was or is to someone else’s.
We often point that out when talking about the results of any SEO experiements we run. Maybe we need to point it out more often in Caelen’s business posts too.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:30 pm (#)
Nah.
I wouldn’t bother. You guys write blog posts based on research in a way that is pretty rare online. Most of the time posts are just pulled out of no-where. Conjecture and bs. Especially when it comes to business advice. From all reports, even 37signals ‘Rework’ falls into the same trap. If they can do it – surely anyone can. Damn it – I find myself proffering advice I really shouldn’t. Maybe I need to ad a ‘conjecture’ tag to some of my posts.
Reva’s day job isn’t selling consultancy hours, and perhaps that is why you guys can be as blunt as you are with your findings (good and bad). What gets my goat are opinionated blog articles where there isn’t really anything supporting the advice being offered other than a desire to big themselves up and look good in front of potential clients.
Is it just me or am I cranky today?
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:59 pm (#)
I don’t know – you sounded much more cranky in the original post, so maybe things are looking up?
March 22nd, 2010 at 3:24 pm (#)
Hi All.
The context of my post was “things that need to be done to get your business up and running” and it was based very much on my own experience.
James et al, you are quite right when you say what suits some may not suit other. When I started up, I had not done enough of the fundamentals i.e. check out the market etc before I threw myself 120% into starting the business up. In this context, the business cards are not the right things to do first – sure I had nothing to sell to anyone
. Having said that, if I’d done alot of the other things like market research, started product development etc before I had established the business formerly, then the sequence would be different and business cards would have been required because I had more than a basic thought/concept to demonstrate to people.
Rambling a bit – but hopefully you get my gist. I was not trying to “big myself up” or the bloggertone blog where this was posted, it’s just some insights that I have that people can take or leave as they see fit if they find themselves in the same scenario.
All blogs are written from personal experience with a personal view on a particular topic – people may choose to take something from them or not.
Cheers
Barney
March 22nd, 2010 at 5:12 pm (#)
@phil – you should have seen the first draft.
@barney – I wasn’t referring to you at all in terms of ‘bigging up’. There are a lot of opinions out there. I wasn’t specifically thinking of you guys although I did tend to pick on you a bit. I guess its that I don’t subscribe to opinion heavy blogs which are light on specific learnings. Please don’t take it the wrong way.
March 23rd, 2010 at 6:40 am (#)
@thegoose – no offence taken at all so not taking it the wrong way. Sometimes writing does not reflect the mood
March 24th, 2010 at 7:37 am (#)
[...] that they can then use to help them, hopefully, make better decisions. A word of caution however. General information can be misleading. What applies to one, may not apply to another i.e. may not work for [...]
April 7th, 2010 at 10:24 am (#)
[...] in on your team (perhaps). But how useful is something so hypothetical that it ceases to be true? Goose has a good article, albeit on an entirely different topic, almost saying the same thing: generalities are useless. The specifics of a project changes the [...]