Up and Running:

I want to recommend storing this somewhere for future reference when people fall into the trap of overemphasizing the idea in the success of the venture.

Last week Business Insider published 10 huge business successes born from early failures. In my experience, these aren’t exceptions to the rule, they are the rule.

Oh, and the successes? Have you heard of them? How about AOL, Twitter, Intel, Microsoft . . . and those are just the first four. Microsoft (the example shown here to the right, an early picture of Microsoft, with Bill Gates at lower left) started doing a BASIC compiler for the Altair 8800, a computer that ceased to exist before the company made any money.

The point is that most businesses evolve. Business plans evolve. You don’t blindly follow the plan; you keep reviewing and revising the plan until you figure out something that works.

(Illustration: from the Business Insider post, 10 huge business successes born from early failures.)

One of the real core values of business planning is filtering ideas to pick out the opportunities. Ideas are of little or no value, and opportunities are potential businesses only if somebody actually makes it happen. In “Beyond Eureka” at BusinessWeek.com, Amy Barrett has an excellent summary of how that process really works in actual cases. She explains:

On the pages that follow, we outline the methodology followed by successful entrepreneurs to find, vet and develop their ideas. We’ll show you how to outline your goals for the business, brainstorm possible concepts, screen opportunities and test your ideas’ viability. Sure, you could wait for a bolt from the blue–but isn’t it better to create your own?

The story breaks it into five steps. For each, the story goes first for the theory, then examples in practice. The following is just a bare summary:

1. Set the stage: Basic parameters, such as lifestyle vs. high-end high-tech, establish your strengths, and directions.
2. Brainstorming ideas: Quantity first, sorting for quality later.
3. Picking a winner: This is selecting from those ideas–based on more research and planning–the one that has the best chance of working.
4. Feasibility: Answer three questions: Can we do it, do they want it and what will they pay.
5. Prototype: Make it real, put it up, get customers, get feedback, get going.

The rest of the story is a good review, step by step, with examples from real people and real companies. And I like this different angle on business planning, which goes right back to some of the core concepts. You might notice, as you read the details, that the planning is very much there; but there’s no talk of the actual plan document.

More food for thought, on different ways to do things. Meditate on this for new business ideas. I just read 4-Way Narrative: HBO’s Video Cube Installation on PSFK. The post includes this picture:

(Photo linked to the PFSK source)

The explanation, in part:

It’s a unique new effort that offers four different perspectives on the same scene simultaneously. In telling the same story from four distinct points of view, each side of the cube stands alone as an engaging film, and as a piece of a larger puzzle. As viewers move around the cube, they watch the story unfold from different perspectives, forming different perceptions of the characters and plot.

This resonates for me. Everything comes in different points of view, beginning with stories. Did you see the movie called Vantage Point, from 2008, that presented the same 10 to 20 minutes from five or six points of view?

Every story has multiple points of view. You just have to figure out how to tell it.

For years now I’ve been following e-books and e-book readers. I’ve read e-books on cellphones and laptops. I bought an early Rocket e-book reader for a daughter. I bought a Kindle for myself. I like e-books because they make sense to me.

So now, as a Kindle owner and Kindle reader, I love the Apple iPhone Kindle reader app. It means even without carrying the Kindle around, I always have access to my books. The synchronization works perfectly.

What I need now is a Kindle reader on my laptop. That’s one for Mac, one for Windows. Since I travel with my laptop anyhow, why not plug it in at night and use it to read my books.

Whoops–that’s a business problem for Amazon.com, right? Messes with its Kindle sales? I suppose, but the iPhone does that already. And it would mean I’d buy even more books.

Just a suggestion.

(Image: Helder Almeida/Shutterstock)

The good news here is that this post–the actual title is 7 Steps to Creating a Winning Coaching, Consulting or Service Business–is done by a true master in the field, John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing. And he’s not recommending anything that he hasn’t actually done himself.

However, that’s also the bad news. John makes it seem easy with his step-by-step guide, but then he’s not just a master of this, he also started early in the blog world, he’s really smart and he really works hard, too. For every successful expert blogger, author and coach like John, there are about 10,000 other people trying to do it, but not getting there yet.

John’s seven suggested steps (very abbreviated here, by the way . . . John offers much more detail on his post):

1. Turn your service into a product. Selling services is a little like selling air.

2. Develop a suite of tools and systems. Making it up over and over again with each engagement, writing proposals and reacting to client demands is a very tiring business. When you can guide a client logically through the path to success with a professional process, your business will become more profitable with each new engagement.

3. Build a brand that’s easy to talk about. It’s crucial that you can tell a story worth repeating and make that a foundational marketing element.

4. Push out lots of expert content.

5. Lead generate from multiple outposts. To build a winning practice, you need to generate awareness and trust by appearing everywhere. This means speaking, writing, advertising, PR and referral generation.

6. Perfect your lead conversion close. I’ve found that writing proposals and reacting to what a client thinks they need can drive you nuts. When you take the tangible product approach married with the expert content approach, lead generation is more about getting in front of the right prospects and explaining “this is how we do it” in a way that addresses what you know they need.

7. Construct a killer network. A strong network is also a powerful business tool for the solo entrepreneur to use as a sounding board, sanity check and social outlet to replace the interaction that often comes with working with an internal team.

Going back to the bad news, as I read this, I’m very much afraid that John has skipped the first step: Know what you’re talking about. Get your credentials. Be a real expert. Without that, John’s recipe won’t work.

And perhaps I’ll finish by rocking back over to the good news side: If you do have that kind of expertise, John has packaged his steps exactly as he recommends you do, and you can buy that from him at Duct Tape Marketing to make it much easier to implement. And John isn’t the only one; several others are doing the same thing. For example, Pamela Slim, with her Escape From Cubicle Nation book and workshops, is also sharing huge volumes of good advice on how to do it.

That is, if you have expertise to share.

I just read How To Set Up A Google Store In Minutes by Lisa Barone on Small Business Trends. Lisa lays it out in very simple steps.

Last week, Google released yet another gadget that may win them friends with small-business owners. It’s called the Google Checkout store gadget and it essentially allows you to use Google Checkout and Google Docs to to easily create your own online store in a matter of minutes. What makes the gadget especially interesting is that because it’s tied to a Google Docs spreadsheet, small-business owners can keep product inventory without having to use another third-party program like QuickBooks. Something many of us can probably appreciate.

I’m not a store user myself anymore, but I went through this hassle early on in my Web days, working with an Amazon.com store first. Our company grew beyond that and we ended up with a much larger system, but it involved a lot of programming by one hard charger in the beginning and a team of four within a year. Happily, we had revenue to match, so it all worked out.

Since then I’ve often recommended the simple turnkey store option to early-stage entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. Without it, the hassles are enormous. Yahoo! had a good option even 10 years ago, Amazon.com does, I’m told eBay does (but I hear different things on this one) and Lisa Barone’s post makes the Google store option look very good, too.

The simple store option let’s you start selling quickly. Link the store into a simple site and see whether people will buy what you’re selling. And if people do buy, then a store is the best possible market validation.

Lisa lays out the steps very well, and also comments on some tradeoffs:

I don’t think you can call the new Google gadget a PayPal killer any time soon, but if you’re looking to get an online store up and running quickly, this may be a good way for you to go. The gadget does what Google does best–simplifies Web activities so that even us regular people can take advantage of them.

Do practice some caution, though. The gadget is still in beta so we don’t fully know what Google plans to do with it. You don’t want to launch a huge online store, only to have Google decide to take it down or make adjustments to it without telling you. Still, I think it’s worth experimenting with, especially if you’re simply looking for a quick way to get started in the world of e-commerce.

Well written, and very useful.

Somebody I know sent me the address of a new website along with the question of whether  I thought it was a good idea and did I think there was a need.

I clicked and visited the site. I found a very nice-looking site. I’m not sure I’d use it, but I am sure that the look and feel were all positive. I wasn’t sure I’d pay the subscription price, but that’s not the point.

The point is a reminder that a good idea and a market need; necessary but not sufficient conditions for a new business. You can’t make it without that. But having that doesn’t mean you are going to make it. Lots of good ideas with market needs fail.

Of course there’s nothing in any business plan that guarantees success; but the idea alone means nothing without the management team, marketing strategy, financial plan and product/market focus.

Lots of great products, services and website businesses have failed for reasons beyond the basic need or idea.

Are you looking at social media startup opportunities? How are you going to make money?

There’s a good practical list of Five Common Business Models for Social Media Startups by Jun Loayza on Mashable. A good reminder that business models–how you get paid–are part of the game. All five will seem familiar: There’s freemium (give a standard version free, charge for more users or more features), affiliate, subscription, virtual goods (add-ons to free games, like swords and shields and such), and the old standard, advertising.

Facebook, for example, uses advertising to get revenue, and gets relatively little per user. There are a lot of freemium sites, and fewer examples of affiliates and subscriptions.

One of the business plans I reviewed recently had an interesting explanation of why freemium wouldn’t work, and it went subscription only. I worry about that, because there are so many fremium sites.

There’s another common model that this list doesn’t include: Raise investment money, get traffic but no money, raise more money, increasing valuation, get more traffic, raise more money . . . all in the hope that there’s money at the end, when some bigger venture acquires all the stock. Actually, I think we need a tricky word for that business model . . . kite-up? Musical shares? I like that one, because, so often, whoever gets caught with the shares at the end loses.

(Image: Flickr cc image by Chego101)

Adeo Ressi says entrepreneurship is getting a lot harder.

“Compared to when I started my first company, in 1994, things for the entrepreneur founders have gotten exponentially worse. There’s steadily more regulation, less liquidity, more difficult labor situation; things are always getting harder.”

“When I was a newbie in 1994 it was complicated, stressful and difficult. But it was significantly easier than it is today. The only reason that I could easily start a seventh and eighth company recently was that I have 15 years of experience starting and running companies under my belt. If I were like at ground zero, in today’s market, I couldn’t do what I’ve done.”

Ressi should know. As you probably already gathered from the quote here, he’s been around this block a few times. I posted about his newest venture, The Founder Institute, on my Planning Startups Stories blog last month. And he is the founder of theFunded.com, a site where entrepreneurs can review investors.

“Honestly, I think more and more, these days, the entrepreneurs get a raw deal. They are victims of a lot of predatory and exploitation behavior. A lot of this is on the part of investors, taking advantage of their position with founders looking for capital. But it’s not just them. It’s the whole gamut of service providers, regulations and so on.”

In what feels like ironic understatement, he says TheFunded.com “has tried to address some of the problems of the predatory and exploitative things that happen when founders are seeking capital.”

He goes on quickly, though, to point out that schools aren’t teaching entrepreneurship well. Legal regulations keep pouring on new obligations and the life of a would-be funder gets tougher. Reflecting on The Founder Institute, which offers a three-month educational program backed by some big names in startups, he says:

“If we could eliminate all the headaches that modern bureaucratic layering adds to start a company, and allow these founders to focus on the core business challenge, the likelihood of success increases dramatically.”

And this is not about the depression. At least, not specifically. Asked whether that was the reason for starting his new institute, he told me:

“Why now? Well, now is the only time to do it. When things are good, help isn’t all that helpful. When things are bad, the ability to do something like this can have a bigger impact. Hopefully we can help people get companies off the ground that wouldn’t make it otherwise. And everybody knows that what really drives this economy is small business and entrepreneurship.”

So there’s a point of view for you. I hope he’s wrong, that things aren’t harder–at least not in the long term–but then, what do you think?

(Note: from time to time I stumble upon a product I’d like to buy that doesn’t exist. It’s sort of like occupational therapy to post it here where anybody who reads it can make it happen. Tim.)

I really like the Amazon S3 storage service. I’m using the S3Fox Organizer by Suchi Software on my Windows and Mac computers, and it works well enough. The S3 storage is convenient, cheap and reassuring. Keeping files there seems a lot better than storing them on an old USB drive or burning a DVD.

What I’d like is something easier to use, more automatic, more drag-and-drop, with a graphic user interface, to help me organize the S3 storage into a hard-disk metaphor I could use from any computer.

I’d like to be able to script automatic backups of selected folders at regular intervals, timed for predawn morning hours. I’d like it to work as a standalone application, not dependent on Firefox.

Maybe such a thing exists. If so, tell me about it. And, if not, create it, and sell it to me.

Do you have a start-ups group where you live? I think it’s a pretty good idea. I’ve watched how three interested people got one going where I live, I’m seeing it working now, and it’s definitely a good thing.

Specific example: Yesterday around 5 p.m. I went over to a local hotel where we had our Eugene (Ore.) Smart-ups group meeting. There was some milling around, then some welcoming, a talk about an upcoming local angel investor contest with $150K to the winner, then a panel discussion on bootstrapping–with two people who are up and running as bootstrapped ventures–a presentation on basic financials and then, at the end, two five-minute elevator speeches chosen from business cards drawn out of a hat.

While this may be of specific interest to you if you’re in the lower Willamette Valley area of Eugene and Corvallis in Oregon, I post it here because you might want to look at your own local groups.

If you don’t have one, start one.  What’s interesting to me is that Smart-ups is the kind of thing you could do in a lot of different places. Here’s how they did it here in Eugene:

1. Smart-ups was started a couple of years ago by a small group of people who missed having a start-ups organization where they could get together every two or three months and hear experts, watch presentations, share experiences and keep up with what’s going on in the local area.
2. They connected with the local chamber of commerce, which has been a strong supporter, by talking to the chamber leaders. The chamber has helped them organize meetings, offered online registration, speakers and organizational help.
3. They set up a group name and a website. They started talking about what kind of events they could do.
4. They connected with the local Small Business Development Center by talking to the SBDC leaders. The SBDC has become a supporter in a number of ways.
5. They started with events, which they called “pub talks,” including some start-up presentations, workshops, etc.
6. Then they connected it to a statewide entrepreneurs network and a statewide software association, by talking to the leaders of those groups.
7. By now they have connections to both the University of Oregon and Oregon State faculties (one in Eugene, the other in Corvallis).

Last night they had a full room at the local hotel, maybe 150 or more people, and a good program. So Smart-ups is up and running, the local area is better off, the organizers are proud, and people are looking forward to the next event.

I posted an iPhone app success story here a couple of days ago. Following up on that, if you want, you can now get an iTunes video podcast version of a Stanford University course on how to build iPhone apps.

To find it on iTunes, go to the iTunes store, search for Stanford, find the Stanford University main page, and look in the “What’s New” area on the right, about the middle, for the course on programming the iPhone.

And my thanks to TechCrunch for catching this and posting it in “Stanford Course On How To Build iPhone Apps Will Soon Be Available On The iPhone” a few days ago.