I’m writing this from the office of www.rescueargentina.com. Rescue Argentina is run by an Irish priest who was posted to Oberá, Argentina over twenty years ago. Although Argentina is a rich country, at one point the seventh the richest in the world, it is also huge. There are parts which are in dire poverty and where there is poverty there are people who are left at the margins to die in filth. Sounds emotive, but this is the language needed to divert the money from your Xtravision account, to something more worth while instead.
So here is the thing. The first time I was here, feeding clothing and just keeping company the abandoned residents, I was way to embarrassed to admit it. There was nothing worse than a do-gooder bigging up themselves and it seems icky to be talking about my own supposed benevolence.
Ana appears to be directly connected to the intwebs, and particularly Twitter these days. She is pumping out an unholy amount of links and tid-bits. This one I really liked.
I’ve also started listening to Dan Benjamin’s Pipeline podcast which features interviews with tech entrepreneurs. Neil Patel of KissMetrics and CrazyEgg was chatting to Dan about how he had no problem blogging about his failures as much as his successes. What a good idea. So here we go, lets bring these two beautiful concepts together and run down my bias mistakes. Read the rest of this entry »
I applied for a technology voucher some time last year. The process roughly runs like this …
You apply for a voucher, outlining an area of expertise you would like assistance for from the University Sector. In my case, I applied for a review of the literature related to medical compliance.
Your proposal is approved or denied. If you don’t have someone in particular in mind to help you then you are given a list of contacts in the major universities to whom you can send your proposal to. I sent off a modified version of my proposal to about 10 designated contacts. They then distribute the proposal internally and if someone is interested, they contact you directly. I received one reply, although there wasn’t a fit in terms of what I was looking to have researched.
The Enterprise Ireland co-ordinator of the Innovation Voucher scheme is currently helping me to dig a little deeper and see if we can’t find someone who might be willing to help. So far its been a pretty painless process.
Barney and Caelen have been going through what theyconsider 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.
In 1997, a freshly minted Saatchi & Saatchi were handed a brief by the Conservative government to discourage teens from smoking via the all-powerful medium of advertising. Setting about the task, running focus groups and unleashing their creative juices, they started to realise a basic flaw in the traditional model.
Millions upon millions of pounds were spent, worldwide, telling young’un’s that “Cigaretets Kill”. Something we all know but mostly only those in their 30’s or older pay much attention to.
Telling young people that they will die from smoking contravenes a rather self-evident truth: young people don’t die. Certainly not in general and you would be unlucky to have reached the age of 13 (when most people start smoking) to have known anyone in your peer group that had passed on.
Saatchi & Saatchi changed tack and instead started running advertising pointing out how gross your breath smells after a cigarette. Something that rings true and is oh so important when your still trying to get off your mark with Priscilla in 6b.
So here is the rub. Entrepreneurs in Ireland don’t make it big. We don’t really celebrate the successes and I think there is a tendency to expect failure. This is especially acute when it comes to funded businesses. At least two founders who raised multiple millions of dollars have both told me that they tell their founders that there was a 90% chance of failure. Accurate and laudable as it may be – the intention can’t be helpful towards achieving success.
How can we plan on building world-class ‘google’ type businesses when there is no precedence for it? It doesn’t make sense to encourage people to startup when the expectations for success are so low.
Contrast this with a plumber/accountant/solicitor/carpenter setting up a new business. While they may be more ’self-employed’ than ‘running a business’ – it seems far more real and natural that these types of business make it. We all know successful people in these fields. Meanwhile I’ve been trying to build an online business for the last 10 years and I’ve met only a handful of successes (and believe me I had to dig to find them).
To encourage startups and avoid talking out of both sides of our mouths, we need to reset expectations of indigenous startups towards success. Online businesses have a heritage in high risk funding backed ventures, but things have changed and the web has become more mature. There is no reason that 90% of ventures should fail. The business models that work are out there and available to be exploited. Beyond that, even if individual ventures do not succeed, subsequent ventures by the same entrepreneur can and probably will.
I was listening to the excellent Pegram Harrison talking about Building a Business in a podcast series released by the Oxford University. Pegram was going over how to evaluate ideas. All very good stuff. One throw away comment did prick my interest though …
“Unless you have the cure for cancer, there probably isn’t the need for your product you thought there was”
“I know how to cure cancer”, I thought, “maybe I should do something about that”.
Now, I am perhaps being a little dramatic for effect, but there is an opportunity for someone to literally prolong and enhance the lives of millions of people. Lets run through some stats and see if you can guess how.
One fifth of patients don’t fill out their prescriptions
125,000 American’s die annually by virtue of not taking their pills properly
60% of patients cannot identify their own drugs
1 in 4 people in nursing homes are there because they can’t figure out their own meds
If we can just get 1% of our visitors to convert …
Never have more dangerous words been written in a business plan. It sounds plausible only because humans are mind-boggelingly bad at understanding percentages. Even if you were a complete wingnut in school you probably still managed to get 10% in the honours math exam. A 5% discount is nothing. A doctor telling you that you have a 1% chance of not waking up after an op is hardly worth losing any sleep over.
However, I don’t see a lot of discussion on the chances of a 0% conversion rate in your business. Read the rest of this entry »
Although I hate the term, you could roughly describe me as a entrepreneur. Like most entrepreneur’s my Mother despairs at the fact and really wishes I’d just get a proper job with a carreer path. With that in mind, I thought I’d try and put one together. Read the rest of this entry »
I was talking to a pretty technical friend of mine a couple of nights ago. He was all aglow after coming up with a killer application idea for the iphone. This guy is smart. He runs a successful company and has raised funding the past. Yet, he makes the same mistake I do, you may do, and pretty much any technical person does. He thinks
technology > design > marketing > market
in that order. When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and nerds love hammers. I liked the idea of building a Spanglish button for Firefox of a Irish Twitter SMS gateway. The idea and challenge of getting it to work is so entoxicating that you just can’t wait to jump up and get started.
We’re handicapped by the fact that we can run off and start building things. We don’t have to pay someone else to do it. As such, we don’t value our own time and make an honest judgement on whether it is worth the investment.
That is all fine and well if fudging around with stuff in your spare time but there is a real opportunity cost. Rob on Software’s excellent post on the correct order to come up with opportunities
market > marketing > design > technology
While we may consider our technical ability to be an advantage, it is actually our biggest handicap. Outsourcing might not be as much fun as coding it up yourself, but it does force you to stop and think about whether its a runner. If you had to spend your own hard earned cash on something – would you still do it. I’d argue that maybe you should fire yourself as CTO if you ever really want to get over your technical handicap.
I was listening to the excellent Pegram Harrison talking about 