Archive for the ‘Entreprenuership’ Category
The Lean Startup: Building Something People Want
I have the pleasure of giving a presentation on Lean Startups at CodeDay MEGA, a hack-a-thon for kids by StudentRND, and the slides for that presentation are below.
A Theory Called “The 2nd Order”
From last week’s post on thinking out side of the box, a commenter (also named Scott) left this very insightful thought…
I have a theory I’m calling the 2nd order, and goes like this. If I own a computer store, I don’t market computers, I market service you get after buying one. If I have a site about taxes, I market what you can do with the return $. If I have a problem I do a search for how to solve x. But when I land on a site, I’m not looking for x, I’m actually seeing if I might get y and z.
When I took karate as a kid, I didn’t aim to hit the front of the bag, I aimed to hit the back and when the front stopped my path it was met with a lot of force.
On the Moral Obligations of an Entrepreneur…
On Geekwire the other day, Bob Crimmins wrote an article about entrepreneurs who follow their own passion and scratch their own itch. His assertion, if I understood it correctly, was that while following your passion may be satisfying, it’s not necessarily the best way to actually create a successful business.
If you want to create a business (which I read somewhere is the point of being an entrepreneur) solving a problem isn’t, well, the problem.
Solving a problem in a way that creates value sufficient to justify someone paying money for the solution (an amount of money sufficient to sustain and grow the business) is the problem.
Thinking Outside of the Box is Neither Cheap or Easy
This is a good article about pushing boundaries for how a company is supposed to be operated. What struck me most, and what I think about Cheezburger often, is how “living outside of the box” takes intentional effort and commitment of resources. For example…
What [37Signals] learned is that adding a dedicated manager and creating a hierarchy is not the only way to create structure. Instead, we decided to let the team be entirely self-managed. There’s still a team leader, but that role rotates among the team every week. Each week, a new leader sketches out the agenda, writes up the notes about problems and performance, and steps up to handle any troubled customer interactions.
I will assert that this didn’t happen organically or automatically. 37Signals management intentionally thought about how they wanted their company to be operated, and was willing to devote the resources to develop, train and operate the company that way. I promise you that it was not easy or cheap. You get what you pay for, right?