Remarkable costs time and money and effort, but most of all, remarkable costs a willingness to be wrong.” – Seth Godin

Are you bold or boring? Is your business bold or boring?

I’ve always taken risks in business. After all, I’ve been an entrepreneur for 12 years. But, is that the same as being bold? I don’t think so…

Bold is being truly Passionate about your work.
Bold is being truly Passionate about your life.
Bold is baring your soul to perfect strangers, taking a chance and seeing if there is a connection.
Bold is launching a web site with no monetization strategy, just because you’re passionate about the idea.
Bold is asking for investment dollars from Angels or VCs to launch that site.
Bold is….

I could go on, and you surely have your own definitions of BOLD.

I’ve taken risks. But, I haven’t been BOLD in a long time. It’s time to be BOLD.

Are you BOLD or boring? What is BOLD to you?

Instead, I’ve been focusing on Outcomes.

An outcome is different from a goal. With a goal, you either succeed or you don’t. With an outcome, there is neither success or failure. There is just a result. No judgements.

After you’ve got an outcome, the next step is the action plan to get that outcome.

One of the neat things about working with an Outcome is that I don’t necessarily need to do EVERYTHING in that plan to achieve it. I might be able to skip some steps and still get my desired outcome. Hmmm, I like that idea.

Think about the 80/20 rule. If 80% of your sales, come from 20% of your customers… focus on those 20% of the customers.

Now for a real world example…

BuyTough.com. As you already know, I’m working on a re-design / re-development effort for BuyTough.com. And it’s had more than it’s fair share of setbacks. My to-do list to get this site live is @ 40 tasks. Ughhh.

When I start focusing on the outcome, things become a lot clearer: The outcome is to get the site live (as quickly as possible) with a new look and feel, improved content (easier for the layperson to understand), a handful of critical new features, and allow the visitor to purchase accessory items without the purchase of a laptop.

When I look at where we are in development, with this outcome in mind, my whole plan changes. Gone is the huge to-do list.

I still have a wish list of future features; but, as we all know a web site is NEVER done. So, let’s aim for launching the site quickly, and lots of mini-releases with constant improvement and cool new features. Besides every time I release a cool new feature, I have an excuse to reach out and touch my customer again.

So, my question to you is…. What’s your Outcome?

Well, here we are 34 hours from New Year’s.  And neither of my projects are ready to launch.

On the work front (the re-launch of www.buytough.com), we’ve had quite a bit go astray:

First, the designer delivered the finished design about 6 weeks behind schedule. She’s a friend and she most definitely took advantage of me.  Every week there was a new excuse.  My personal favorite was that her mom was bit by a rabid raccoon. (Hmmm….)

Then, after we finally got the design, we had to layoff a programmer due to the economy.  This altered my plan pretty significantly. I had to rethink our goals for the whole project. I had originally planned on a platform change from .asp to asp.net. But, that would change our page names, which could potentially change the way Search Engines rank us (SEO). With the slowing economy and sales down, I decided it was NOT worth the risk of losing our top 10 placement in Google.  So, this project (or should I say phase of the project) became more of a port: port the existing site to the new design with some important new features.

And most recently, my “boss” took a 12 day vacation (I’m coding, he’s supposed to be writing content). The site is coming along nicely, the majority of the coding is complete. But, we have a LOT of content to re-work / develop.  I hesitate to put a new “launch” date on this; because, the content is out of my control.  But, I hope it will be @ Febuary 1st.

On my side project, I have only myself to blame:

I was making great progress until Thanksgiving, and then, I let the holidays get in the way. On top of that, I have been having second thoughts on the platform I chose (Ruby on Rails).  And lastly, I have gotten involved in 2 other side projects.  All three of these side projects are true to my core beliefs and I am committed to getting them going early in the New Year.

(And apparently becoming an EXPERT in time management.)

Finally, I didn’t blog all that often, and for that I apologize. I will do better next year!

No time to post tomorrow, as I have a fabulous NYE party to attend!  Happy New Year!

I signed up for it, at the encouragement of a friend whom I had shared my desire to get more involved with the entrepreneurial community.  I had no real expectations; but, I was pretty sure that trying to build a startup in 54 hours was not necessarily going to be “fun” by normal people’s expectations. (Which may mean I’m not normal?)

The event went like this.  On Friday night, we all gathered, heard pitches on people’s ideas, voted and chose teams.  Late Friday evening, we met with our teams and had to start figuring out how to tackle the project: define the scope, choose the platform, decide roles, etc.  Saturday and Sunday – get to work.  Sunday evening – present your product.

I joined the GivingTi.me team.  The idea guy is/was Sanjay Parekh, a serial entrepreneur, and is being partially funded by the BMW foundation. We developed a website to essentially allow people (entrepreneurs) to barter time, one hour at a time.  We had 16 amazing people on the team, a blend of business (marketing, design, product management folks) and technology folks.  So, after defining the scope of the project, we divided into 2 teams.  I was on the tech team.

We had our fair share of issues.  We had a heated discussion on project scope. We chose Ruby on Rails as our platform, and then, lost one of our Rails programmers.  Leaving one senior guy and a bunch of newbies, until we picked up 2 part-time senior guys.  We chose HAML as our markup language (to create HTML) and only one person knew it. It took HOURS to get our development environment set up.  I was the only one with Sphinx installed, so I was the only one who could test “Search”.  We installed a “fix” 30 minutes for the demo, which broke a pretty critical piece of functionality.

I coded for about 28 hours in a language that I “played” with for about a total of 12 hours prior to this weekend.  I’m, now, almost proficient.  Certainly not an expert, but, past the curve…

I worked with a team of amazing people whom I consider friends.

For me, this past weekend was a reminder of what is possible when you get a bunch of talented and passionate people all focused on the same vision.  I haven’t had that for years, not since eTour.com (1997 – 2001).  Now I really miss it.

We spend most of our lives cutting down our ambitions because the world has told us to think small. Dreams express what your soul is telling you, so as crazy as your dream might seem—even to you—I don’t care: You have to let that out. ”

-Eleni Gabre Madhin
Eleni Gabre Madhin is director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Madhin studies market reforms, market institutions, and structural transformation in Africa, and works to create “a world free of hunger and malnutrition.”

Quote from Oprah.com

If you’ve been following this blog and my advice, you’ve done some of the necessary research to start your Business Plan.  But, do you need one?

I’ve written more than my fair share of business plans, and I do believe they are a beneficial exercise. That being said, I NEVER intend to write another one again.

I believe the main benefit of writing a business plan is the fact that it forces you to do your homework. It forces you to think about/define:

• your mission
• your market
• your competitors
• the “opportunity”
• your marketing plan
• how you make money
• how you fund the idea
• the team
• the financials
• your exit strategy

A business plan is also probably a necessary evil if you are seeking outside funding (which is highly unlikely in our current economic environment). 

But, writing a brilliant business plan also takes a LOT of time.  Time spent writing and re-writing, instead of taking the steps to actually launch the business.

So, I’m going to skip this step and instead I am going to write a one page executive summary, with a sentence or two about the above topics. 

My true intent for writing the executive summary is to provide me with focus and clarity of mission.  This will keep me on the straight and narrow when new ideas come up that may be distracting.

I have to be honest, at this point, if the idea is keeping me up at night, this step is more about figuring out what it’s going to cost me to build it, launch it, market it; versus how much money I’m going to make from it.

So, what’s it going to cost?  It’s time to build a cashflow statement.  Again, I usually use Excel or someother spreadsheet application and across the top I list the months/years.  Down the side, I list the monthly expenses and (potential/estimated) revenue streams.  I, then, calculate what my ending cash is. 

Expense Categories might include:

• rent
• salary
• taxes/benefits (if paying salaries)
• recruiting fees
• commissions (on sales/affiliates/joint ventures)
• credit card processing fees (for subscription or product sales)
• travel, meals, entertainment costs
• advertising, promotion costs
• conference, seminar costs
• consulting fees (accountant, attorney, other experts)
• dues/subscriptions
• equipment leases
• insurance
• postage
• repairs & maintenance (cleaning company)
• supplies
• software support
• telephone
• utilities
• capital expenditures (computers and equipment)

Income/Revenue

• Subscription Fees (based on estimated # of subscribers)
• Product Sales (based on estimated # of sales)
• Advertising Revenues
• Consulting Fees 

Lastly, document the assumptions that you use to calculate the revenue.  You may want to run both worst case and best case scenerios.  This is typically easy if you use formulas in your spreadsheet.

I usually do at least one year, just to see how it plays out.  If you are looking for funding, you need to do 5 years. (More about that next post.)

And yes, no matter how great your idea, you do have competitors. For a website you might consider a competitor any one that is in your space (ie. search, social media, blogging, etc.) or you might consider it as any site that competes with you for revenue. If you can’t think of any competitors, it might be that you don’t have a market it all.

I tend to make a competitor matrix using Excel or another spreadsheet type document. Across the top, I list all the competitors. And down the side, I list all the features, then the revenue model, investors, and other info. I typically sign-up for the competitor services, and try it out to make the feature list. Some of the things I look at:

• what are the steps to register for the service
• what types of information are they capturing
• what are the payment options, payment methods, pricing levels
• what features does the site have once you’re a member
• how do they support members (customer service)
• how do they make money
• how were they funded
• how much funding did they receive
• what do you like about their site
• what do you not like about their site

Yes, this is time consuming; but, the feature matrix is going to help you down the line, when you’re defining your requirements to the web design and programming staff.

Once you’ve got a thorough understanding of your competitors, you can start thinking about how to differentiate your site from their site. 

Question: What is your “special sauce”?

Well, that’s exactly what this blog is about.

The first step is vetting the idea.  It is about determining whether it is an idea worth pursuing.

My first step in vetting an idea is all about sleep (or lack thereof).  Is the idea keeping me awake at night?  Am I waking up in the middle of the night thinking about it, or ways to improve it?  (At the end of the day, this may be enough for me to pursue the idea – as it’s better to build and sleep, than not get any sleep!)

If an idea is keeping me up, it’s time to discuss with the people I trust.  This could be friends, mentors, co-workers, other technology entrepreneurs, etc.  Bottom line, is it’s people I trust.  There are no NDA’s (Non-Disclosure Agreements), just ideas and feedback.  Ideally, some of the people I share the idea with are in the target market.

If you can’t sleep and your friends like the idea, it’s time to really vet the idea.  More details on that to come….