Guy Kawasaki goes deep into uncovering what really goes on inside a startup, during its first 2 years.
Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup
The Art of Bootstrapping, by none other than Guy Kasawaki, is full of truths as far as I see them. Absolutely recommended reading.
I've decided to take a foreseeably long break from blogging, as I have no time now that I'm now neck deep into Business Development.Update: I have gone and started my own company, which is making things even worse. Expect nothing more than sporadic posts.
Things change, it's inevitable.
In November I took the decision to dive into a new professional challenge in Business Development/Marketing&Sales. I joined a a Barcelona-based company offering specialized consulting services in the software and technology sector.
One of the most important reasons why I accepted was my task: to start developing the Madrid market. Call it intrapreneurship or entrepreneurship. The fact was that we were 3, bootstrapping most things from scratch. A very interesting challenge, that thankfully forced me to "go into sales mode".The good side is that in 2 months we have managed to build a small but highly profitable customer base in Madrid, made the market aware of us and solidly implanted the company in this new market. Heck, we were doing so well that we even got acquired straight up after these two months! Profitablity and customer base, baby, that's the key.
The bad side is that my priorities shifted - hard Business Development is no joke - and the time I had allocated for blogging got drastically reduced.Hence the hiatus in blogging until now, which has included the holiday season.
I'm now re-adapting to this rhythm and hope to be able to accommodate some blogging into my "free" time.
Update: More blogging has NOT happened, and probably won't for some time.
Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin, gives us a guided tour of the Linkedin HQ in Palo Alto. It’s an excellent glimpse at pure Silicon Valley culture, well-worth spending its 5 minutes duration.
Courtesy of Loic Lemeur, at whose post you can also download the video and the sound.
Update: See what the blogosphere says about Reid Hoffman.
Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist and the driving force behind the brilliant gapingvoid business cards.
If nothing else, a cartoonist’s mission is to cram pearls of wisdom, social critics or just downright funny stories into a single panel (or 2–4 panels depending on the medium).
However, some of these pearls of wisdom come not in the form of drawings but in the form of blog posts. Here’s one of my favorite basic advice on blogging:
I’ve been saying this for a while: you don’t necessarily need a huge audience to be a successful blogger. You just need a good audience, relevant to which ever industry you choose to be in.
Niches are good. We like niches.
Yes, we like niches. But the Venture Creators Blog niche is not a niche, however. I’m not in a single industry. I don’t blog to be a recognized player in a given industry. I blog on all the industries as long as innovation, entrepreneurship and business are somehow involved. (And yes, I admit to a certain bias towards technology).
An initiative for raising awareness of the importance of the entrepreneurial spirit is being launched in France under the very catchy name of “100.000 Entrepreneurs”.
This initiative brings entreprepreneurs to schools, high schools and universities, where they give their testimony and inspire the younger generations. More info here.
According to an article published in the MIT Technology Review, 3 MIT scientists are working on a way to charge batteries without wires, using magnetic induction. This is something Nikola Tesla first theorized more than 100 years ago.
Pretty neat, but the real deal-killer may be in its applications, as one commenter points out:
I recall 2 earlier startups, Mobilewise and Splashpower, that tried to go after this market in some similar fashion. They both never got much traction. The basic difficulty is that you are solving a $2 problem (power cables) with a $100 solution (base station & receivers).
It might never make it into the commercial world for powered mobile devices. But a properly equipped ceramic cup might be designed that would keep your tea and coffee hot between sips all day long! Maybe in the entire Starbucks! Heck, even warm your ski boots and mittens while waiting in the lift line. Actuate all sorts of buzzing and beeping things as you walk by. The mind boggles.
Yep. The mind boggles. And the applications seem endless.
More from A View From The Bridge
Evergreen Innovation Partners’s own way of quick sizing a market:
Matt McCall, an investor in EIP and good friend (and fellow Kellogg MBA alum!), recently wrote a great blog about how VC’s look at businesses to invest in. See Scalability — P*Q
We run into exactly the same thing at EIP — how well does a product concept scale? And we recently updated all our product submission and public speaking decks to reflect how we evaluate market sizes for products. We see a lot of inventors that believe their product will take 1% of a big market and is therefore a huge idea. As Matt says, top-down models don’t work.
In our world, we ultimately take Matt’s model of P*Q down a layer and view it this way:
target market size * awareness * distribution * trial * price + [repurchase rate]
That is, how many people are in your target, are aware your product exists, can buy it somewhere, and what % of people indicate that they’ll buy it when you do some surveys with random consumers (never trust your friends and relatives). Then we factor in repurchase rates for products that are consumable. This can get highly complex and folks like AcuPoll and BASES will do a wonderful job making highly accurate forecasts.
But, I’m going to give every budding inventor a cheatsheet here. We can simplify the above to
X * R * 0.04
where X = number of customers that you think are target customers (US only) and R = price point of your product at the store times the number of times a year the consumer buys it.
I won’t bore you with the math, but trust me when I say it works surprisingly well (feel free to email me and I’ll send you the details). Using this model, if you can get over $30m a year, we’re definitely interested, as is almost any branded manufacturer…
This is quick approach to sizing a market wouldn’t differ much from others if it didn’t come straight from the horses’ mouth. In my experience, this is an extremely difficult task, well worth the application of reality-checking, quick-thinking, proven rules like these.
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