A startup is a company designed to grow fast. But how do we make sure we grow fast?

We had the pleasure of having some of the founders of Guide to Iceland to visit us last Wednesday where they talked to us about growth and how to get customers.

 They had an important message for us which was about first mover advantage. They said: 

"Don't let other market participants get you thinking that you are in a fight.  You should just focus on your product and make sure it's special so that you are not in competition with someone else.  We didn't copy what the competitors are doing good. We just do what we think adds value."

Now in order to grow they said you need a team. You need ridiculous amount of energy to achieve your goal and you need talented and devoted people. Having said that they also said you don't want to hire cheap. 

You also have to find the what motivates your team members, what makes them happy at completing their job?  You then need to know to let go of control, if you always wan't to be in control then you are looking for robots. You are looking for people who can improve the business, that can think outside of the box.

Xiaochen also talked about important things from the team member side. She said given that being a growing company you need people who are willing to sacrifice alot of work for the good of the company. If they are not looking for that kind of job then you and who ever do not have a future together. 

She also said that you need to be aware that you need different skills so you need to find different people. She also mentioned attitude which should never be tolerated, makes sense.

And for everything to add up from your resources she said you need to think big. You should not set up a single website and think that in 6 months alot of people will have discovered you through google. You need to get a marketplace social network which connects people to achieve. But I guess that depends on your business....

More about growth... Bala inspired us to read the book Traction trumps everything.

Paul Graham one of todays respected writers about startup's says: "A startup is a company designed to grow fast...the only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth."

Now if we think a little about the word traction, then we should agree that it sounds like a new word ;). What it really stands for and what the book will to tell us is for those who read it is: "Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don't have enough of are customers". The book emphasises that we should be aware that traction and product's development are equal important in weight. Like my previous blog's of Bala's lectures have indicated, getting followers is extremely important. Having wasted all your time and energy on your product not on customers is just wrong. You need to take the demo out there as soon as possible and see if people will love your visdom.

And why is this thought about taking the demo out there immediately so important? Because marketing takes time. You have multiple channels to get to your customers and getting their viral, mouth by mouth can be so helpful for you to achieve your growth and nicest of all you may not need much money to use these channels.

The book will help you identify the top channels you need to emphasise for your success. A valid point to keep in mind is that poor distribution is the number one failure of products, not the product it self and a common failure of entrepreneurs. The book even indicates that 50% of you time should be on your product and the rest on distribution (or getting out there and getting known, getting future customers). And if you manage to get one channel to work very good for you it may make huge success for you. The book will therefor help you evaluate and do tests on channels that may be promising for you business such as which channels give you the good customers and which channels only give you only bad customers who sign up and create no revenue.  

The 19 traction channels are:

1. Viral Marketing

2. Public Relations

3. Unconventional PR

4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) 

5. Social and Display ads

6. Offline Ads

7. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

8. Content Marketing

9. Email Marketing

10. Engineering as Marketing

11. Target Market Blogs

12. Business Development (BD)

13. Sales

14. Affiliate Programs

15. Existing Platforms

16. Trade Shows

17. Offline Events

18. Speaking Engagements

19. Community Building

In short.... Searching channels is easy, finding which one is gonna be the key to your success may be tricky. Not emphasing on the importance on getting known may be fatal for your product. This book gives insight into the framework of successful companies, how they tractioned ;).

The different views on competition and monopoly along with some words about our visit to Plain Vanilla

Now we've made some progress in changing our mindset more to Bala's vision of the world. Which I like.

My main things to discuss in this blog are competition and monopoly.

It seams that our world is still following the words spoken by Adam Smith too long time ago, which were "In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so." 

Bale said: "competition is only good for companies not becoming a bully or slowing down innovating(stopping innvoation). Other ways are bad thing."

Now if we revisit that thought of his, we can maybe say that it applies for some part of the economy. However our economic history is kind of short so we should not feel safe to apply that thought completely on our world.

And for startups? Competition is a really bad thing. If a startup has a big company which will bully it harshly, it's innovation will not thrive.

What about the development of your product? Will competition make it better? Or will it make you and your competitor more identical? If you get in the ring boxing with your competitor you are probably gonna wan't show the audience what they are used to watching, boxing. So competition really makes companies often stop innovating and even worse they start making the product the same way.

What about the profit? Competition will destroy profit.

But is a monopoly a good thing then? No of course not! At least if it is being misused then it's a terrible thing. But will a monopoly make sure I can develop my product according to my plans? Yes, maybe. But that's not maybe a good thing.

Now we did spend two hours at least talking about competion and monopoly. And Bala seems to have spent alot of thought on this issue. And my understanding was: Never feel that you are in a competition at least when you are a startup. Because if you are a startup you should be focused on how you can make your products 10 times better than someone out there who may feel like your competitor. And you should be focused on how your consumers would want to pay 10 times more for your product.

So don't mind the other company's trying to get you into the ring for a fight. Put your mind on your product unless you are gonna be in the copying business.


Now about our trip to Plain Vanilla. 
It was nice to see their place which was really cool, probably a great place to work for. They had apparently managed to attract some people across the world to come work for them.

They had a open meeting about Android development which was a bit technical, probably like understanding mandarin for most of the people there.

I found it interested how programming languages have been developing. I did some programming few years back mostly in Java and VBA. I was consistently thinking then how complicated this Java language was and what do you know? Of course some entrepreneurs had the same feeling at that time and have made new languages such as RX Java and Groovy which are way simpler and better. I might as well revisit that career.

From ideas to action with no hurdle

The fourth lecture is finished. Time passes fast but I that Bala probably among the few people in the world that I feel helped me adjusting my mind for better chance of achieving something amazing in my life.

This lecture did give me good ideas about how to express my mind in the future on my role in making them come true. These ideas are actually very simple but being that simple really affected me.

I think me and many others do get ideas regulary and decide not to implement them because they don't have access to a million dollar factory or the know how to build their own website if the product is in that form(for example if you want to build a social media).

This lecture gave me different view on that. You should actually make it your life motto to write all your ideas down somewhere and use at least one day a year to give them a little bit of chance of becoming alive.

Now you are probably wondering how that can be possible?

Well making the idea come almost a life can be done with the instructions here: http://keynotopia.com/guides-ppt/.

The other way is watching this video here: http://www.ideou.com/products/from-ideas-to-action

I highly recommend clicking on the second link and watching the video on ideaou about how an idea a a toy came a life.

And the crucial point to remember is that you can with a expression of your mind make billions. If you get that amazing idea and can make a demo if it even though it lacks all the engineering work needed for it to work properly. Just so you can just show your thinking can be among the first step of making your ideas come to life.

And one thing extra. I just realized that you can actually buy a out of the box social network similar to facebook or pinterest (you just choose which you prefer) and start your own social network. You may find some need for a platform for people to connect. For example if you want to connect couples with singles in order to do some interesting things together you could make that kind of website for less than $30 a month and your idea may be so amazing and helpful that you'll make hugh progress. Try taking a look at onsocialengine.com or googling similar products, there are plenty out there1

I hope this reading influences some people and helps them expressing their ideas in the future.

All my best regards to the world!
Atli

Refresher - Share your ideas, don't keep them hidden and away from become alive

The third class is over. Me and my group have made good progress with our idea which may soon become a startup. We are technically situated somewhere before the start. Maybe we could compare it to pregnancy. If so I'd say that we have just finished the sonar which tells us what we are expecting, more about that later. To early to tell (but actually not based on what I have learned) :).

The main things I took from the lecture was the meaning of the word"instinct" and how to deal with it, or more precisely the counter intuitive things we need to be aware off.  Instinct is our biggest enemy in order to become a entrepreneur. Our mind is very counter intuitive. You basically always have some inner demon or inner angel telling you something is not right, which you usually follow in life, but should not when starting a startup, at least regarding process... it's like skiing. Your instinct might tell you lay back to slow speed but it actually makes things worse, you go faster.

It's best to be inexperienced when it comes to process, it may help having some mentors on the side line but only if they have some experience of startups... don't waste time in unexperienced lawyers(meaning lawyers who do not have startup experience)... do not think that you need some experience at all other than your brain(it's not exactly what Bala said, but what he was saying the same in about 30 sentences) and it actually makes a lot sense. Think of Bill Gates? Did he have some experienced people to seek advice, did he rely on anything other than he's blank paper where he was drawing his vision of the future? Same story about Mark Zuckenberg and more. They were entrepreneurs not because they made a better version of other peoples ideas, they made the ideas nobody had figured they would need so much in the future. 

Now over to some other impressive thought... Bala said Icelandic investors think that picking winners is about playing chess... what he was meaning was that they are always working with some analytics on how the market is likely to respond next... and once again I tell my self yes, he is actually maybe right about that one,  even though it sounded like nonsense at first. But when I come to think of it Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and more entrepreneurs did not really have any chance of predicting what the next move would be from the consumers. And the solution might actually be what Bala is so obsessed with which is the "fanbase". The most perfect signal for an investor choosing a startup to invest in to see how many people are excited about this thing coming alive. For the investor to know that you have shared your vision with people and there are tons of people who are counting down the days for your vision to come true, that's promising for sure! Take for example Henry Ford. He knew that people were urging for a faster horse in order to get faster from A to B. He solved that problem but not with a faster horse but a equipment which would take you from A to B faster and would soon become one of the things almost everybody feels need of owning for decades to come.

And now ... could the world then may be more productive? I'm 100% sure! If everybody would just start sharing their ideas more in hope of getting as many "likes" on Facebook they would probably get noticed by investors or other useful people who might wanna support your idea coming alive. The previous lectures also pointed at this. It really matters do go out there with a demo of the product, even though it does not work and see if people like your thinking. And that's why me and my group are gonna reveal our secret idea before we've finished making the idea come true.

And finally how should my mindset be if I want to become a entrepreneur? Your mindset should be on a new vision of the future, not the past or a better version of the past. The future is on those who can see a way to make something that people will absolutely love and can't live without. The next Mark Zuckenberg will certainly not make as much history if he only makes a better facebook. The next Mark Zuckenberg will be the one who finds a totally different view of social media(or what ever it will be called) that people will absolutely love and won't be able to live without.