I told the little monkey not to do it!
Months ago, (like last November), Joe Scanlon asked for my opinion on a web-based business idea. I was delighted to give my opinion, and told him it would never work. He’d never get the required number of users and it would never make money. My main problem with the idea was that it wasn’t different enough.
Several months later, and it turns out Joe has been busy.
LittleQuiz.com
Take a wander over to LittleQuiz.com – The fruit of his labours. Nice fruit eh?
Will it work? Not usually. But Joe has brought an amazing amount of energy and determination to bear on this problem. It is that energy will define the success or failure of the venture. Even “ok” ideas can be hugely successful in the right hands and good ideas reduced to muck by a lack of the right people.
The key becomes the person and not the idea.
Best of luck Joe.
(By the way, some background on the development of the gorgeous site is available here).#
Update: “Don’t worry if someone else is already working on your idea. I’m certain they are, but they are decidedly not you and it’s the you that makes your idea unique.” – Read this two hours after writing about Joe’s site. Its from the brilliant RandsInRepose blog.
The downside to a new business.
Anyone who has actually gone out and started a business will be well aware of the wonderful feeling of independence, the rush of doing something new for one’s self and the market, the hunger to do it all as fast as possible. Unfortunately it is the last point that can often lead to tears later on.
This morning I attended a presentation at the Cork OCC given by David Reilly, Solicitor, on some legal issues that face new businesses, especially those involved in software. It was illuminating and depressing simultaneously. And that is because starting a business, losing your entrepreneurial virginity, can be a harrowing exsperience.
It would be great to maintain the enthusiasm and avoid the boring work : finance, tax, compliance, legal and so on. But in so doing, you are only creating larger problems that will have to be dealt with later. As David put it so well, “I would prefer to get all the fights out of the way at the start, than have to deal with them later”.
A major point that David brought up was that of Copyright and Software. You may have a brilliant idea, and hire a contractor to express that idea through software – In which case, the copyright is with the Contractor. Try selling that amazing web app a few months down the line and see how far you get in Due Diligence without the appropriate agreements having been signed by the contractor. Messy!
Photo owned by Jesse Michael Nix (cc)
David has a load more good information on his site on Intellectual Property, Contracts etc… Good stuff.
Good Ideas, Badly Done = Opportunity.
No one knew we needed a better way of searching the web in the late ’90s when we had Yahoo and Alta Vista dominating the web.
No one knew Hotmail with its 2MB limit sucked so much.
And what happened? Google had the balls to say “We can do these things so much better”.
This isn’t a Google “love in”. In fact, as functionally advanced as Gmail was when it first appeared, it still didn’t give me the thrill that I got when I first opened a Hotmail account. Hotmail was the first example of a Web App that I ever saw, and it made me dizzy as I realised what the Web was capable of.
Photo owned by www.butkaj.com (cc)
This was the buzz my Uncle had when he first saw, in 1950’s Ireland, an Electric Kettle boiling, while sitting on a wooden orange box. From then on, for him, the world was different.
But of course, amazing innovation doesn’t guarantee first place. You can improve your chances of retaining first place through Constant and Aggressive Innovation. Such as Google Search and Gmail has done. But what about the other brilliant ideas on the web that have sat on their arses when they should have been regenerating?
For my money, that one ripe couch potatoe is Ebay. In my opinion, its an ugly, hard to search, hard to use, dissatisfying experience. It may have been impressive one time, not now. But that’s just my opinion.
What do you think?
And are there any other examples?
This recession doesn’t stand a chance.
Its not necessarily about massive budgets. It can be about using our imagination and cooperating with others for an amazing result.
1. BIZCAMP
The first Bizcamp took place yesterday in Dublin. I was lucky enough to be among the 200 attendees. The quality of the speakers was extremely high and I have not found a better explanation of Branding any why it is so relevant to small business on a day-to-day operations than that given by Gerard Tannam.
Outside of speeches, I met Emily Tully face-to-face for the first time. Emily, it turns out, is an extremely knowledgeable and generous person when it comes to her field of PR. This was the essence of Bizcamp – Meeting people, learning from them, and sharing our own experience. Did I share enough… probably not, still there will be plenty opportunities to correct that. Maybe at BizCamp Limerick on March 21st. I urge you to sign up.
Bizcamp was free to attend, and there was even some grub thrown in.
What do you expect for nothing? Well in this case, I came away extremely enthusiastic about my involvement in my own businesses and Irish business in general. Small business people, even tall ones, need to feel like this occasionally.
Another free initiative that only exists and thrives thanks to the co-operation of 15 to 20 small Irish businesses. Our own product MyMunster.com will be the subject of this weeks Tuesday Push. We should see around 15 blog posts written by established bloggers all about our “baby”.
I can’t wait.
And how much does this cost? All this publicity, constructive criticism… it costs NOTHING.
This recession doesn’t stand a chance.
Its trying to hit us in our pockets, but the game has moved on.
Where I will be tomorrow: BizCamp.
Another Unconference, by far my favourite type of conference. Its fully booked up. If you are not signed up, but nearby and want to meet me, Just tweet me @antgalvin
The more people I know, The better prepared I am.
“…Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
That is a quote form Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the USA. I love this quote because it sums up why the seemingly pointless task of generating Business Plans is worth while.
Business Plans are bullshit.
- As soon as they are printed, they are out of date.
- They are founded on endless assumptions.
Those two unavoidable facts render them pointless.
But the exercise of writing a business plan means that
- You have thoroughly assessed your business, your market, your service/product.
- When reality does kick in, veering off from your planned trajectory, you will have put in enough dedicated brain hours to be able to adapt to the changing circumstances. (You may even be able to bring things back on to your track by being knowledgeable enough and fast enough).
So when it comes to actually writing a business plan. Don’t treat it like a sculpture that will stand for eternity. The goal of the exercise is not to produce a book, the goal is to produce a strategy.
Don’t ever print off a copy for yourself. This may indicate that you think you have finished strategising for your business. By all means, print copies for investors, banks and so on. But keep your Business Plan alive as long as your business is alive, revisit it every chance you get, honing and improving.
One last tip – Don’t get bogged down in the perfect format/template for a business plan – There’s no such thing. The best template for your business plan will be written by you.
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