The Entrepreneur's Minute Blog
Month: April 2014
Doing something that’s never been done provides the creativity. Not having enough money provides motivation and simplicity.
Together you get innovation.
Sometimes it’s the boundaries that spark the imagination but they also eliminate noise. If you can’t move right or left, the only way is forward. Another way of saying it is, the things you can’t change may point the way to the things you can.
Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson
It seems like entrepreneurship is sometimes like moving from one crisis to another. Either you’re running out of money or the big deal with the key customer is falling through or perhaps the product still has to many bugs to ship. And there’s always another week to put off starting the SBIR grant, until there’s not.
Urgency leads to desperation which is rarely attractive. If people sense you are desperate, it’s a sign your company will not be around much longer, which only aggravates the situation.
There’s this list of things you should “always” be doing:
There’s no easy answer. There are great tools and concepts that help manage time. Two I like are Jim Collins’ “Stop Doing List” and Steven Covey’s “First Things First” and of course the old fashioned To-Do list. Learn to recognize the things that are urgent but not important.
There is also your team. A great leader picks great teammates and delegates important tasks. It allows the opportunity to focus.
The chaos never goes away though. It is the nature of startups. So there’s one skill you’ll have to master and be comfortable with:
Fake it till you make it!!!
Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson
Another version of this quote is “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
One trait of any successful person is the fact they are life-long learners. They constantly study their craft and they search for new things to learn. They look at how others solve problems, understanding their frameworks and trying to determine if there is an application they can apply. They read, they meet with others and they teach others. If you really want to learn something, teach it to someone else. Successful people constantly challenge themselves for what they think and they regularly reinvent their view of the world as they grow in learning and wisdom.
There are still places in the world where learning is reserved by those in power to control people and manage the populace. In the free world, learning is no longer limited in any way. World class universities are offering curricula online for free. Successful people freely share their stories in books and blogs and for entrepreneurs, local, regional and state sponsored entrepreneurship support programs offer great training.
It’s out there. It’s free. It’s your responsibility.
Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson
Coming up with good ideas is the easy part. Get a group of smart people in a room and you can fill up a white board with the precipitation of a brainstorm.
The ideas are worthless and the time wasted if there is not a plan to implement. It means someone has to take responsibility and lead. It also means others must collaborate to accomplish the task.
This is the essence of being an entrepreneur. There are plenty of problems and plenty of ideas for solutions but these benefit no one unless the idea is put into the hands of a customer.
Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson
There are two lessons here. One is that VC’s consider patent protection a check box. But a patent doesn’t ensure commercial success by any stretch. What’s more is that it won’t keep anyone from stealing your idea if they really want to. This is why Samsung and Apple are suing each other and they have a lot more money than you do. Lawsuits are very expensive and out of reach unless you’re Apple or Samsung. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t protect your IP. Just understand that a patent is not a key to your product’s success in the market.
The second lesson is this. Sometimes people are introduced to us and want to talk about their business idea. Immediately after the business cards are exchanged, out come the NDA’s (non-discloure agreements). Well-meaning business attorneys encourage this. But this is a bad move. It shows a level of immaturity when it comes to pitching your idea. And the bottom line is, business advisors, incubators, mentors, investors, bankers and pretty much anyone else who’s out there to help you – will not sign them.
As a startup, you need more help than you can imagine. In order to acquire this help, you need to pitch your company… A Lot! The secret stuff you can keep secret; like how you make your ‘secret sauce’ or who your investors are. What business advisors are interested in is your business model and evidence your product works and that people will buy it. There should be nothing confidential about this. When it’s time to reveal your financial details or your design specs to a design partner, of course you want the protection of a good non-disclosure agreement.
Patents are a good thing and there is a time and a place for NDA’s but neither will protect you from competition. And you still have to figure out how to make your stuff, sell your stuff and get paid.
Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson
There’s great debate now on the value of a “formal” education when it comes to startups and entrepreneurship. There is a popular feeling that you’d be better off putting the money it takes to get an MBA into your first startup. Win or loose, you’d get a better “real world” education. That perspective has validity.
I live on both sides of the issue. I have gotten tremendous benefit from my formal business education because of the way it taught me to see the world and think about things. On the other hand, I didn’t leave the the perfect formula for success in business. But that’s ok because there isn’t one. If nothing else, I left business school at least knowing what I didn’t know. I knew the right questions to ask.
And that’s the core issue. Many first time entrepreneurs don’t know what they don’t know. They are “Unconscious Incompetents” and therefore suffer through the school of hard knocks. That’s in part why the failure rate of startups tops 90%.
Your job IS to get an education and today, there are more resources than ever before. Many of them are free. Steve Blank put his excellent Business Model Canvas course on udacity.com for free and it exceeds any MBA program you could find in entrepreneurship. There are countless blogs and wonderful accelerator programs all over the country. And there are evermore entrepreneurship programs in B schools across the country.
There is no terminal degree in startups. You can’t know everything and if you could, it completely changes every 3 – 5 years. This doesn’t mean you stop reading and learning. It’s ongoing.
Make time in your impossible schedule to take a class or seminar. Go through and accelerator program. Read, read, read!
Start with Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.
Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson
Most of us have low expectations. Perhaps it’s because of the way we are treated by the cable company or the airlines. Perhaps it’s the lawyer commercials late at night. The constant barrage of advertising tends to desensitize. There is so much noise we can’t hear anything.
I’ve gotten used to standing in line to order a $12 salad and then having to buss my table even while they are sweeping the floor around my feet. That’s why it’s really something when the server actually makes a recommendation without the standard “Well, it depends on what you like.”
The good news is people are primed for positive experiences, and they don’t even know it. If you can solve a problem in a way people don’t expect, at the very least they will give you some of their attention. If your product or service happens to inject a pleasant surprise, something the customer did not expect, then you will likely have a customer who will pass their excitement on to others.
My first iPod came in a brightly colored box that was a 6″ cube; a very unusual package in a world of plastic blister pack that is impossible to open. I slipped off the sleeve and the box opened in half. On one side read “Designed by Apple in California”. The other half simply said “Enjoy”. Of course I opened that side first and there….. there it was, my first iPod. It was pure white and shiny.
I remember this some 12 years later because it was a beautiful surprise. What is it about a product where the memory of opening the box outlasts the product itself? And I have just passed that along to you.
Blogging Gazelle is published daily by Shawn Carson
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