bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

I had the pleasure of being a Judge & Mentor at Auckland Startup Weekend, you can watch my overview on YouTube.

It was very interesting to watch, observe & take part in the weekend, a few notes I had as key takeaways:

– Keep confident in your idea, some that had early potential but lost it as they lost confidence and made the idea more complex. Always second guess adding complexity, does it add value to the idea or take away from it? The value is in what you’ve left out.  (Stop.  Read that sentence again.).

– Get to your idea fast.  Explain it in simple terms.  People switch off if they don’t understand what you’re doing, no matter what numbers or justification you throw on the table.

– Keep your idea execution tangible, how are you really going to execute against it

– Address how you are going to acquire customers.

When you are developing an idea, remember you are the curator, you curate everything around that idea.  It’s that curation that people buy into, what investors invest in and what excites customers.

If you’re a blogger it works by interviewing people & sharing the content on your blog.  You then grow your authority, networks & credibility.  Often then they will link to your blog & help you grow.

The other way is to integrate your website into lots of existing platforms (same metaphor) and let them promote your offering to their network.  I.e. integrating your project management software into Xero, or eCommerce plugins for PayPal etc.

Same frameworks just different scenarios.

Share this.

Share that.

Forward it to your friends.

If I load these share buttons over here people will share more.

OR

You could spend that time writing better content.  Better ideas.  Ideas that will compel people to share no matter how hard it is.

PTE. Planning Thinking Executing.

We spend our careers in two modes, doing planning, thinking and then executing.

OR more commonly planning thinking executing all at once.  Doing it on the fly.

Problem is lack of planning kills projects.  If you can pull just one or two projects across the other side into doing the planning & thinking upfront you’ll have far more success.

Speed, how fast are you going?

It’s all relative.

Your speed is relative to the context.

In New Zealand driving 120km on the road is a no no (it’s too fast).

In Germany on the autobahn driving 120km on the autobahn is a no no (it’s too slow).

It’s the context of the driving.  If you truly want to go faster change the context.

It’s not revolutionary, we all know what a service level agreement is.

But it’s an interesting service we offer at Young & Shand – a defined service level agreement.

It allows us to be agnostic on the tools & tactics to drive results whilst owning the execution.

It’s strategy, ideas & execution.

SLA’s are straight forward, transparent and hugely helpful for your customers.  It takes what keeps them up at night away.  Imagine a SLA for your car? Never worry about car maintenance (I’m sure someone is doing that).  SLA for your groceries? SLA for…

It’s interesting to see what happens when you apply a bell curve to human behaviour.

One I’ve noticed is traffic.

If I leave home at 7.00 am – traffic is bad.  If I leave home at 7.30 am traffic is bad.  If I leave at 8.00am… well I may as well stay home and have a coffee.

However if I leave at 7.20 the traffic is sweet and a quick breeze through, same at 6.55 (and a few other times I’ve tested).

My theory is this, we all set our alarms for the same times, 6.00, 6.15, 6.30, 7.30 etc.  Rounding up to the nearest 10 minutes or logical time.  What I do is set my alarm for obscure times 6.37, 6.40.

This means that at any point in time there is peak traffic generated from the 6.30 alarm, the 7.00 alarm.  If you catch that peak wave you have slow traffic like the rest.

Give it a try.

And then debating them.

That is constructive debate, what is the thinking behind them, why would they work? Why wouldn’t they work?

What would stop me executing them?

What would it cost?

How safe is this idea? How risky is it?

How disappointed would our customers be if we didn’t do this idea?

To those signed up to my email list and received a spam email.

This was the result of a hack, at this stage I am disabling email delivery till we isolate what’s going on.

Sorry again & thanks for your patience!

-Ben

For Seth Godin’s new book Poke the Box did a neat idea to support the early readers.

For every 5,000 people that signed up to his email list for the Domino Project and gave permission to be contacted he would reduce the Kindle pre-purchase price by $1.00.  By launch it had dropped right down to only $1.00.

Toyota is doing something similar in Australia with LikeMyRide, you enter the competition and like the page, for every like the price reduces by $5, the winner can then buy the new Toyota FJ for up to $20,000 off the purchase price.  Presumably (like Seth) they can then use the permission of the other thousands of people who signed up to to help them get their own FJ.

Nice framework for you to try, reward your early adopters, incentivise them to share and reward those recipients.  Also helps make your product launch a heck of a lot more exciting.

This is for those up & coming…

You have an idea but not a business, pick up the E-myth and get some business systems around your idea, if it’s not your strength?  Partner with someone who can do that. Behind every Steve Jobs is someone making sure bills get paid, hiring processes work, marketing channels & customer acquisition are going.

Pricing is too low, look at the value you give customers (survey them), sure it might be miles times your technology cost but once you build a business around you the costs get absorbed.  Some price too high but I don’t see this as much as too low.

No marketing resource, get someone working on your marketing, constant action in this area will drive your business.

Flitting from idea to idea, it’s a bad habit, stop it. stick with an idea through.

Absorb advice – don’t take it straight on, listen, absorb, synthesise and act (do this with this very blog post!)

If you don’t know something, ask someone who does.  People love having you ask them their opinion.

Read obsessively, if reading isn’t your thing, listen (audiobooks/video), you can learn from everyone elses mistakes.

Time is precious, don’t waste it, if you need to do something, do it today.  You are an entrepreneur you have no excuse for not acting.

Do not let failure stop you, forgive yourself, pick yourself back up and try again.

Surround yourself in a supportive eco-system, other entrepreneurs, people that are smarter, more experienced etc, always be looking up.  Hard to do but hugely valuable.  You’ll find your own benchmarks of yourself will only go up.

Then one day you’ll be having lunch with Steve Jobs wondering how you got here.

The neat thing about StumbleUpon is that once you train it (a half a dozen stumbles) it will take you to content that you are pretty much guaranteed to like & enjoy.  Whether it’s finance, arts, ancient history, writing, blogs (some of my personal favourites).  Just give it 15 minutes – it brings back that joy, that sense of discovery that we have lost with information overload.

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Amazon also does this for books.  Last.fm does this for music.  What could you do it for?

I was watching foundat.io/n earlier today and Philip Rosedale (founder of SecondLife) was on talking about a survey he runs every quarter.

The survey collects anonymous responses to these questions:
1) Do you think I should remain as CEO or be replaced?
2) Regardless of the above have I improved / gotten worse at my job?
3) Why?

Philip then relays the numbers of the first two questions back to the team. With the insight that at some point he should leave the role as CEO and at that point he probably won’t want to go but the trend of the numbers won’t lie.

Secondly he would sit down and review the Why responses (after a couple of drinks). It is easy to brush off feedback when it comes from someone you know but when (as he says) you get the same feedback from seven different employees who don’t know one another you can’t argue with that.

Are you brave enough to collect and take feedback?

It’s a classic case of just holding your breath and doing it. The feedback helps everyone, those you ask, you and your company. We do it for our customers and it was amazing to hear three different customers give us the same feedback. Like Philip said it is a universal truth when you hear it in that manner.

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Note: Foundat.io/n videos are released once a month, if you are a subscriber (like me) you get them early. Watch the Foundation Vimeo channel for the video to come out.

I’m talking about new unchartered ideas.  Ideas that are being executed for the first time.

They fit in at the head of the curve, where everything is new, the cost of change is low and change is rapid.  Indicative of new projects (can be within a large organisation), early stage and smaller companies.

Systems Ideas, ideas that have been executed many times & have a set of steps to build & demonstrate value fit in here.  The cost of change is higher, thus a systemised idea fits in & is more effective.  Indicative of maturing / larger companies.

As many of you know I live in New Zealand, Auckland in fact, miles away from the earthquake that hit Christchurch yesterday.  This isn’t the same for some of my friends & family (but they’re ok).

If you can, please make a donation to the Red Cross to help with the recovery.  If you head over to GrabOne you can donate $5, $10 or $20 – each and every incremental dollar makes a difference.

Thanks,

-Ben