Category Archives: entrepreneurship
It matters how you play the game. Not just being first.
A few weeks ago Techcrunch published an article about a startup that got seed money from a well know group of VC’s. And because this startup is working on a similar concept that my team and I are developing, it got my attention. I immediately sent it to my crew. Their reaction was interesting. Basically they thought that that was it for us. That we got beat to the punch. That we had spent a good amount of our time working on this and that now we got beat.
Ummmm….No.
Here’s the thing. We haven’t gotten beat and nobody’s won because even they don’t know what they have yet. Heck they’re still in beta. If anything, seeing that they got seed money and seeing the comments that people left on the article validates our idea (which also helps us show everyone else that we’re not so crazy!). Another thing is that their market entry concept is our minimum marketable feature concept. In other words we have a completely different vision but had to simplify it to create the initial prototype; which is what they have.
But there’s another reason not to get down…
It matters how you play the game.
There are countless stories or startups that came up with the original idea but were beat later on by a late entry. How many people remember Friendster? How many people remember MySpace? Where are they now and who’s the King of the Hill? Facebook.
Another recent example is Groupon, which has spawned thousands of copycats all over the world. Though Groupon has a lot of money in the bank and is the market leader, it’s dropped the ball in how it resolves customer issues and is having trouble making the business model work for customers. And, competitors such as LivingSocial have preyed on Groupon’s mistakes.
There is no clear view of how that business is going to play out yet.
Another late entrant was Apple. Everyone seems to think Apple was the first one to come up with the iPod. Well, they were not. They merely improved on the Sony Stickman, added iTunes and voila! A new platform is born.
So there you go.
Competition is rivalry between business models
What matters is getting the business model right. Sure, Google wouldn’t be Google if it didn’t have a better search engine than Yahoo and other alternatives. But it would not have gotten to where it is if hadn’t figure out the business model that powers it’s innovation engine.
That’s when everything changed.
The same thing is going with the business model experimentation that is going on with social networks. We’ve got a long way to go!
It’s more than just about technology
I have a friend who’s a manager at a Victoria’s Secrets retail store. She recently told me that VS is making some policy changes in how it deals with returns and how it hires people. They want to hire people who are friendly because the problem is that sales associates are not very nice with customers. These customers then call customer service to complain. She says that what customers complain about are things such as cashiers not smiling, not looking at people and talking very fast.
This is basic stuff if you ask me. Here’s another example from a few days ago.
Last Friday I was in Tijuana and stopped at a bank (foreign to my account) to withdraw some money. Apparently the ATM machines were not working properly, they were having trouble giving you money. I had to try two times to get money. The first transaction was charged to my account even though I didn’t actually get any money. I did this in front of an ‘executive’ who told me that I would not get charged. I asked him if he was sure to which he responded nervously, started stuttering and got red in the face; a sure sign he’s just following protocol.
I was skeptical and told him I would come back later after I had checked my account activity online. He was wrong of course. I did get charged. I went back to the bank to get ‘my problem fixed’ to no avail. I got ignored and was told to talk to my US bank to get this fixed. Frustrated, I called Bank of America to get some answers. The gentlemen who answered the phone was friendly and courteous. He asked me questions about my problem, a clear sign of empathy. He acted like a human. And though my problem is still not resolved, he answered my questions and told me exactly what I needed to do.
I got my problem fixed today. All it took was 5 minutes.
Perfect.
Situations like these are common and most of the time are the difference maker in the interaction we have with a business. Technology takes center stage as the killer app, but let’s not forget that humans (most of the time with no technological background) are our customers. Not robots!
Being first doesn’t necessarily mean being relevant
It’s easy to get caught up with emotions because some other startup appeared on TechCrunch before you did. It’s the nature of this thing called entrepreneurship. But just remember one thing:
Startups don’t become relevant by focusing technology, they become big businesses by focusing on being better humans.
And it’s the big businesses or the startups that seem to think ‘they’ve made it‘ that consistently forget this simple principle. So, this leaves us with: It’s matters less if you are first if you are not relevant.
Thoughts?
Thank you for reading The Game Changer blog
I want to thank you for reading, commenting, retweeting and adding to the discussions we’ve had here in the last few months. October was a record breaking month for the Game-Changer blog!
I also want to thank Ralph Ohr for contributing his valuable guest posts to the Game-Changer because he’s a got a lot to do this with this no doubt.
Again, thank you for your time.
Being creative has more to do with being fearless than intelligent
Being creative has more to do with being fearless than intelligent.
Fearlessness gives birth to new knowledge. It’s only by taking the unknown path, the road less traveled that you’ll find and create new knowledge. Don’t be afraid to be wrong, what’s wrong is not being open to new ideas, to change, to stumbling onto unfamiliar situations to being the best you can be.
I propose we cultivate fearless curiosity to explore our own potential. With that I leave you with a quote from someone who knows a little bit of being fearless:
“The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own – what makes you different.”
- 50 Cent
Don’t waste people’s time. Help them do more
The gap between what is right now and where others are become very obvious when you go from one extreme to another. This past week I spent a little time with a friend I’ve known since kindergarten as he just opened a restaurant in Mexico and I went over to see how he was doing. This is his second restaurant venture for him, his first one closed after a year and a half.
While I was there he was telling me how he’d just bought a new restaurant management software homemade in Mexico. The incentive for him was that the top Mexican restaurant chains, such as Sanborn’s, also claimed to use the same software to manage their operation so in his eyes it was good decision to buy. Nonetheless he asked me if I could give it a test drive to see if it was worth the buy…
Before I dig in I just want to say that with any kind of business if you have pitiful customer support you are in a whole lot of trouble no matter how great your product or service is. With that in mind, here we go…
What you see in the picture above is restaurant management software made by Nationalsoft. The software is still delivered in a package, the serial number is taped on the inside (post it note inside the CD) which registers a single computer. The software is less than 15 MB and takes less than a minute to install. Feels like you’re back at the end of the 90’s huh? Wait it gets better!
If a user loses their password (which did happen) they have to call support who then has them create a .dat file which they then have to send back to support by email so they can ‘do something to it’ to unblock it. After support does something to the file, they’ll send it back to the customer so he may add it to a folder and overwrite the previous one. Are you kidding me!? What happened to the ‘forgot password’ link that is not a default setting in any kind software?
If these people were doing business in the US they would be out of business. But wait, it gets even better…you have to pay them to get the software unblocked.
A modern software company not only provides support by phone but also provides customers with online resources such as FAQ, forums or wiki with answers to common problems. Seems Nationalsoft forgot to add this to their checklist because they’re nowhere to be found. Ironically they do have a Twitter account and a Facebook Fan page! None of which are used as customer support touch points. Promote first, serve later right?
There’s more but I think I’ve provided you with enough information to see how frustrated I was when I was seeing this happen before my eyes. The way this software company is designed to operate is to deliberately waste their customers time, not to help them get going as fast as possible.
Signs that you’re behind the curve
Businesses in Mexico still operate by the logic of ‘forcing customers to do what I want them to do’ not ‘I make it easier for my customers to do what they want to do’. The result of operating by this logic is that people who may be interested in your product or service have been programmed to expect ‘below average service’, they expect to be treated like crap. They put more obstacles in place for the customer, never taking into account that the customer is a human and therefore ignoring the fact that humans do make mistakes. In a world where software is as ubiquitous as water, the days of bloated software are over. Today every piece of software (including websites) are designed for humans, not robots. As an example see Facebook’s platform, which now 500 million people use, it epitomizes software designed for making social interaction as simple as possible.
Point: Design your operation so that every interaction your customer has with you helps him do more by making it simple. You’ll not only have happy customers but also angry competitors. Here’s how to do it:
Create barriers to entry not barriers to use
Barriers to entry is what you do to make it difficult for competitors to compete with you (like doing everything in your power to make your customers happy). Barriers to use (such as having weak customer support, no online Q&A, making customers pay because they lost their password) is what you do to impede customers from getting on with it and start using your products, and if all goes well they’ll be very happy and tell their friends about it.
Anticipate human stupidity
Humans make mistakes, in the online world it becomes even more obvious because everything they do online has to be done through a digital interface. As software has evolved from being used exclusively used on the desktop to be used on the web, it’s become important to focus on designing your software to anticipate the fact that humans need things to be spelled out for them just like children, therefore making it easier for them to do what they want to do. For example humans will also forget things, including passwords, so make sure you cover the basics.
Learn how Zappos treats it’s customers
No seriously I’m being honest. If you want to make competitors really angry and therefore put them in a disadvantage, focus your efforts on making your customers really happy by actually giving a damn about them. That’s Zappos secret weapon 
What do you think, is making customers happy an unconventional strategy?
What are your needs? Ask Twitter
Twitter is vast repository of information, conversations and individual thoughts. It’s hard to keep up and make sense of all of it but sometimes you get some concrete insights from people like Tom Peters telling you he’s underserved:
Disrupt yourself to change the game you play in
If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules. – Paul Arden
All a disruptor really does is change something from one state to another by breaking patterns. Google is a typical disruptor, they seek ways to ‘disrupt’ a familiar flow in how things get done to another and then change the rules by creating new ones that play in the new state.
Disrupt or be disrupted.
Like Google we must learn ‘to be disruptive’ starting with ourselves. We have to disrupt our own flow of how we do things, changing how we do them not just for the hell of it but because it’s the only way to stay relevant. This isn’t just for product development, marketing or sales, it’s looking at your business from 30000 FT and asking yourself: what can I change to be better and what can someone else change that could put me in a disadvantage?
A game-changer is a disruptor.
Where do you start.
- Be aware of governing schemas (mental models)
- Be aware of the patterns that shape behavior
- Be aware of the rules
- Be aware of trends
- Be aware of things that haven’t changed in awhile (rigid)
What do you do?
> Do the opposite
> See how you can change things from one state to another (ice to water)
> Blend it
> Find the in congruencies and make them congruent.
> Do the unfamiliar by making the common uncommon.
> Ask why?
> Ask what if?
A disruptor moves at a different pace than others, it constantly probes the system to get an insight because the faster this happens the more it learns and the faster it moves. Learn to fail fast and break away from everybody!
How are you disrupting yourself? How about your business? Who’s disrupting you?
Does your idea stand on its own?
So you got an idea and you want to communicate it.
Part of testing ideas is finding out if your idea is replicable and whether others can teach it.
We need to find out whether acceptance of an idea is dependent on its being associated with a particular charismatic individual (YOU), or whether it can stand on its own.
How many times have your heard some consultant show up and give a humorous and brilliant hour long keynote that gets everyone stirred up, but when the dust settles, nothing has changed.
The fact that some people can charm an audience and have people hanging on their every word is not a test of value of their ideas. The real test is whether a person’s ideas can in turn be presented by others and get the same positive results.
You might be communicating a great idea, but if it can’t stand on it’s own you’re not doing much.
So what should you do?
Easy! have someone else present your ideas and see what gets transmitted.
If you’re the magic sauce of your ideas and they only flourish in your immediate presence, your idea may not be sustainable yet and might need further development.
