Steve Jobs narrating “the crazy ones” ad
Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
Image via Wikipedia
You often see the clichéd expression “ideas are worth nothing it’s the execution that counts.”
I fully agree but came across a great chapter in “Anything You Want“, written by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers.
The chapter is entitled “Ideas are just a multiplier of execution” I’m going to copy and paste this from the book:
AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20
NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000
Multiply execution by idea and that puts a fun value on the idea! Am I suggesting you take the figures seriously, no, I just think it’s a fun way to show that without execution the idea is worthless.
“Anything You Want” is a great short read, I’d recommend that you buy it. It’s written in the same sort of style as “ReWork” another of my favourites.
P.S.
Thanks to Seth Godin for recommending “Anything You Want”
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Bored Of Directors – Another JLM comment nugget
I’ve adopted JLM as my online mentor. His advice is priceless and he disseminates it through his comments on AVC. Here’s another cracker on Board Meetings, it’s a comment he left on Fred Wilson’s blog here :
Every Board has to have a leader, appropriate committees, charters Board, ethics, nominations, audit, etc and it has to have an “operating agreement”.
The Board Chairman has to be the guy who can develop, nurture and burnish the relationship w/ the CEO and it takes work to do that. He should have a bit of gray hair and more than a few rodeo ticket stubs.
If you think just getting folks to turn off their phones and shut down their laptops/iPads is an “operating agreement” then you are in first grade metaphorically speaking.
The CEO or Board Chairman has to develop a standard meeting agenda which includes the normal stuff but also time for topics like — education, what can kill us?, brainstorming.
It has to be time weighted — budget the time and have a time keeper who keeps everyone on track. Nicely, gentlemanly but firmly.
Brainstorming — focused on strategic issues — is particularly important but cannot be done justice if it is visited as everybody is thinking about dinner, rush hour traffic and is fatigued by the prior meeting.
The Board materials have to be in the hands of the Board 4 days before the meeting and they have to be comprehensive and include info that is NOT going to be discussed at the Board meeting. If the Board reads and understands the material in the book, then discussion becomes much more limited.
You have to keep a parking lot — the place you stick discussions that are not completed and which merit future discussion. Then you have to re-visit it.
Board members have to meet for part of the time out of the presence of management and have a quick checklist — how’s our CEO doing, we doing our jobs as Board members?
If you develop these disciplines before times of crisis, then when the crisis comes, you will have the personal and emotional capital to deal with things.
More importantly if you have an orderly process, an operating agreement and a good leader — you will have more time than you can ever imagine to spend on the important things.
Always eat together as it is a natural decompression mechanism.
Posted in AVC, jlm, Startup 3 Comments
GigaOM – “The Meme of the moment”
“One of the secrets of entrepreneurship is to have that unconventional, fundamental insight that the rest of the world hasn’t and be in the position to act on that insight. And by the time the rest of the world figures it out, you are king.”
– Mike Maples Jr., managing partner of Floodgate Capital
via GigaOM – good article on why Mike Maples won’t be funding any Groupon clones
That statement should have been tweetable
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When Free becomes ‘bait and switch’
I opened up my Spotify app yesterday to discover that as a “free” user I was now only entitled to play a track 5 times and to avoid this I should upgrade to a premium account. I would consider doing this if Spotify gave me access to every single band and track that I like but they don’t, their catalogue is missing quite alot. Anyway I prefer to “own” a physical copy of the music, old skool I know.
What really interested me was the negative reaction that this produced with many Spotify users which was akin to the reaction that LastFM had when they cut off free access to their users outside of the UK, US and Germany.
The question that springs to my mind is, is it a good strategy to launch your service as entirely free to your users only to put the pay wall up at a later date after you have gained traction? I understand it might be an easy way to gain traffic initially but by erecting a barrier at a later date you risk pissing off large numbers of your user base.
To me it seems a better strategy to adopt the freemium route, offering a limited version from the very beginning. I’d suggest a very limited version just so that people can get a small taste of what you are offering and that way nobody is disappointed from the beginning.
On a similar note Marco Arment the creator of Instapaper has a great post here about taking his free version of Instapaper for the iPad out of the App Store.
Related articles
- Freemium or premium: which way to go? (theglobeandmail.com)
- Paid Apps vs. Free Apps – Intriguing Insights by Marco Arment (Instapaper) (aldorf.wordpress.com)
- Spotify and the Freemium Music System Dynamic Conundrum (broadstuff.com)
- Spotify cuts back on free music (bbc.co.uk)
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Don’t bet the farm on someone else’s platform
Image via CrunchBase
Twitter’s @rsarver released an announcement giving new guidance to developers on the best opportunities to build on Twitter. Basically it says don’t build a Twitter client that consumes the Twitter stream. Existing clients will be fine as long as they adhere to the Twitter TOS.
So Twitter have figured out that their value is in their stream and frankly they want to own the eyeballs but they are happy for apps to feed the stream i.e. provide more content.
That’s all fine for Twitter, it’s their ball, they can take it away if they want to and therein lies the danger. For as long as I can remember they’ve been happy for other people to develop clients and distribute Twitter across the world, now they feel they have critical mass they are starting to tighten up the rules. Who knows what changes they will make next and how that will effect developers who have built apps over the Twitter platform.
Don’t bet the farm on someone else’s platform unless your Zynga and they are trying to diversify out of Facebook as fast as possible.
Related articles
- Twitter lays the hammer down on third party clients (edibleapple.com)
- Twitter angers third-party developers with ‘no more timelines’ urging (guardian.co.uk)
- Developing on Twitter? Shut up and listen. (thenextweb.com)
From Zero to a Million Users – Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned
Just watched the slideshow below by @drewhouston and @asmith
Very good overview of start up experiences and some great tips on how to grow your user base.
Posted in marketing, Startup, Tech Leave a comment
Monetising Disqus
Image via CrunchBase
The Techcrunch switch from Disqus to Facebook got me thinking about how Disqus competes and earns money. Mark Suster has suggested that Google should buy them which undoubtedly could be a nice financial outcome but it’s probably a little early for the visit to the “pay window” (attributed to JLM).
I’m a huge fan of Disqus, it helps to create a community on a blog. The thought of posting a comment and it turning up on my Facebook wall, out of context, is a huge turn off to me. Plus I’d be spamming my friends quite a bit with the comments I make on AVC.
Techcrunch say they switched in effort to stop the trolls, I think this is partly true, although frankly how hard is it to create a fake facebook account if you want to troll. I’ve seen a few people comment (my favourite is here) that the real reason is because Facebook will bring more eyeballs to Techcrunch and I think that’s also true.
How does Disqus compete with Facebook, well apart from enhancing community features I think they need to capitalise on the information in the blogs that use Disqus and the comment stream and do that from the Disqus website i.e.
- Search comments
- Trending/Hot Topics
- Comment Stream
- Enhanced Profile, including recommended blogs
- Blog directory/leaderboard (even premium listings)
Keywords/Tag inserts
A very powerful feature that I think Disqus should implement is to allow blog owners and those who comment to place tags/keywords into the Disqus stream. This makes it easier for people to search and find blogs and comments that they might find relevant.
The discovery of new and interesting blogs and comments is where Disqus can win. All bloggers want people to come and read their blog and if Disqus can drive that traffic via a Disqus search or link then I think that would be extremely attractive to them. Helping to create a community with a great commenting interface is important but driving the traffic is more important. Which I think will help Disqus beat off the Facebook competition and monetise faster.
A VC: Marketing
This blog is my scrapbook, it’s primarily for my reference but hopefully some of the stuff here will be of interest to other people interested in the VC and start up world.
Fred Wilson wrote a piece on marketing which turned out to be a little controversial. There were some nuggets in the comments as usual and typically one of them came from JLM:
Marketing is the 4 Ps — product, price, placement, promotion.
Almost everything Fred describes as an alternative to “marketing” is, in fact, marketing. When Twitter focuses on its logo, that is marketing.
One cannot develop a product without defining it. Marketing.
One cannot develop a product without defining the market for the product itself. Marketing.
One cannot develop a product without defining how it is going to be distributed. Marketing.
One cannot develop a product without pricing it. Marketing.
If you are thinking about any business endeavor without taking the time to understand the unique selling advantage/propositions, without conducting a focus group on a prototype or without plumbing the depth of the consumer pool — then you are just playing at it.
This is essence of business. This is marketing.
When Fred Wilson cloaks his comments in the splendor of his blog — Fred is exhibiting marketing genius.
Every single minute of every day, businesses are engaged in marketing.
Industrial design decisions made by folks like Apple are market and marketing driven.
via A VC: Marketing. ”
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Christmas Day 2011, the day I had to grow up
The chairman of our family, my dad, Norman Forster, officially retired on Christmas Day 2011 at 2.00pm, aged 87.
That was the moment I had to finally grow up. My mother and wife were downstairs cooking Christmas lunch and I went upstairs to check on my father, we knew the time was approaching but were hoping he would get through Christmas Day, unfortunately he had passed away. So I now had to go downstairs and somehow tell my mother, I walked into the kitchen, they both had their backs to me, chatting away about something or other, I walked back out and debated with myself about telling them after lunch but I knew I couldn’t do that really.
So I had to go back in and tell them. It was the very worst thing I have ever had to do, although my mother had cared for my father for the past 8 months and was fully aware that his time was coming I knew it would break her heart. At that moment we entered the most surreal world and despite having time to get used to the idea of him dying nothing had really prepared us for it. But the show had to go on, it was Christmas Day and I have a 4 year old son.
For all of my life my father was always there for me, always around to pick up the pieces. Always in my corner, the person I could go to and ask about anything and receive sensible unbiased advice. Sometimes it wasn’t the answer that I wanted to hear but it was pretty much always the right answer. He was my CFO (which was his career) and Chairman, always providing a guiding hand.
There were times I didn’t take that advice and when it proved I should have, which was invariably the case, my father never once said I told you so. He mostly allowed me to make my own mistakes and if necessary helped to dig me out.
I owe both my parents everything and yet they in return have asked for nothing. When I look at the complex relationships that some of my friends have with their families I realise how fortunate I am to have had a ‘normal’ relationship with my parents.
So I’ve had to do some growing up in the past week or so, which seems an odd thing to say at my age. It’s my turn to stand in my mother’s corner and I am happy to be able to do it.
Love you Dad.