Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Sun Mar 22

15 Second Marketing

Here’s something everyone should consider in recession times: How to present who you are and what you’re doing in 15 seconds which is a really short elevator ride or time you typically have when you meet someone (new). Think about how you could stimulate fun conversations about what you’re doing and possibly create new relationships and generate new deals along the way. Think about increasingly short attention span of people who are thinking about something also every 5 seconds… OK, I might be exaggerating. ;-)

Here’s an excerpt of Steve Pavlina’s blog post about this self-marketing approach: “When someone asks what you do for a living, imagine they’re really asking, “What are you here to contribute, and why should I care?”

The mistake I made was that I used labels to describe my work (blogger, author, etc), but I didn’t convey the real value I delivered to people. If you tell people you’re a blogger, consultant, real estate agent, or salesperson, most people simply won’t care. Your answer doesn’t do anything for them. There are millions of people doing all of these things, and you’re just another professional with a boring job title. You may still get some business this way, but you could be doing much, much better if you had a more effective marketing message. This is especially true during a recession. ”

I would add that your 15 second marketing pitch should be delivered with passion. Watch Gary Vaynerchuck of Vine Library fame to understand what I’m talking about.

p.s. As it has been the case so far, I’m not promoting any online get-rich-fast schemes. I’m passing some interesting ideas to you, my dear reader. :-)

Sun Oct 26

Note to self: Make your work a work of art

An inspiring paragraph from a book I’m reading - “Talent (Tom Peters Essentials)” by Tom Peters of course. Supporting his idea of aiming for the top quality and grand vision, Tom quotes the book “The Art of Business: Make All your Work a Work of Art” from Stan Davis and Steve McIntosh. Authors argue tjat people must adopt these “four elements” of new business thinking:
See yourself as an artist.

See your work as a work of art.

See your customers as an audience.

See your competition as teachers.

I’d liken “business as art” approach to a female principle contrasted to male principle as epitomized by “art of war” philosophy (most prominently Sun Tzu).

Sat Oct 25

mynetworkvalue.com

Measure the value of your network - business contacts and friends.

Sun Feb 10

Forgetting the old dog tricks

Guy Kawasaki goes about pattern-seeking and writes about forgetting the dog old tricks in the search of inexperience:

Serial entrepreneurs try to prove that their first success wasn’t a fluke. Rather than starting from the basis of technology (“isn’t this cool?”) or customers (“there must be a better way”), the reason for existence is “I’m going to prove that I’m talented.” This is a bull shiitake reason for starting company compared to solving people’s problems or changing the world.
Serial entrepreneurs cannot distinguish between causation and correlation. The root cause of earlier success may have simply been blind, dumb luck, but few people realize this and even fewer will admit. Thus, they have the hollow arrogance of people who just got lucky instead of people who have been truly tested, and arrogance is a bad thing in entrepreneurs.
Serial entrepreneurs are likely to use the same methods again. How can you fault them for using the same methods that made the successful the first time? For example, if they built a high-end computer the first time, they build a high-end computer the NeXt time. If they used dealers the first time, they use dealers the second time. If they gave everything away to get eyeballs and sold the company to a bigger, dumber, richer company, they try try that “business model again.”
Serial entrepreneurs don’t (or can’t) work as hard. When you have a 5,000 square foot house, a second house in Montana, a car made by a company whose name ends in “i,” a spouse, and kids, attitudes change. Indeed, attitudes should change or people never grow up. However, it’s one thing to work to survive and another to work for fulfillment. They can say they’re just as hungry this time, but the point is that no one had to ask if they were hungry the first time.
Serial entrepreneurs don’t get smacked around enough. Life is good as a serial entrepreneur: they walk in, tell people that their last company was sold for a bazillion dollars, and now they’re starting another one, and it’s a privilege and honor to invest. Who’s going to poke holes in their strategy when Sequioia, Kleiner Perkins Tom-Perkins-Adventure-Capitalist Dec-07 , et al are issuing term sheets and ever lesser venture capitalist is sucking up? No one. And that’s too bad because they won’t get anyone checking their sanity.
Serial entrepreneurs fill new, unfamiliar roles in their next companies. For example, in the first company the person was an engineer who became the vice-president of engineering who became the CTO. Just because you were good at writing designing chips doesn’t mean you’re CEO material in your next fabulous fabless chip company. As Glenn says in his post, “This means that what I used to be really good at — designing software — I don’t do as much of anymore, and what I never had to learn how to do — manage people – I now do all the time.”
Serial entrepreneurs hire their buddies who were with them the first time. Thus, the entire founding team suffers from all the problems listed above. People who don’t know what they don’t know are few and far between, but a startup needs this kind of people to push the boundaries of what’s possible in what ways. Ignorance is not only bliss; it’s also empowering.

This thread started with a post on TechChrunch by Glenn Kelman (of Redfin fame) who duly noted that the greatest IT successes (Amazon, Apple, Dell, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo!) came from hungry, inexperienced under-30 technology geeks with an itch to scratch.

The history shows that, once you succeed, it becomes very, very hard to forget what it took to succeed and to repeat that success.

Serial Entrepreneur Behavioral Pattern

It appears that the most successful entrepeneurs follow the same path, where they:

create a startup that scratches your own each (or when you “eat your own dog food” if you’re a software developer writing software for other developers)
continue to be pationate about it
scale it
sell it (or merge it)
create a new startup in a higher role (tackle higher-level challenges while managing and mentoring youngsters doing the real job)
try to figure it all out
(reach this point if they succeed in 6)

It rarely happens that someone is both gifted to learn new tricks in a different role and daring enough to follow one’s intuition and passion to repeat the previous success.

Sun Feb 3

MySpace about to get serious about OpenSocial

MySpace Developer Program

A couple of days ago MySpace announced receiving pre-registration to their MySpace Developer Program a.k.a. MySpace OpenSocial beta. This is the greatest news coming out of OpenSocial community since it has been made public in November 1, 2007.

For those geeky enough to have heard of OpenSocial - it is an open standard that will enable web-based applications akin to Facebook application to show on any social networking web site (or any web site for that matter) data that are related to you and you choose to display. By data I mean anything, your photos, your favourite movies, your night life recommendations,

You-know-who competition

This move by MySpace (i.e. News Corp) comes as especially improtant as Facebook is planning to increase their stronghold on the market by syndicating Facebook apps (i.e. allowing Facebook apps and your data shown in them to appear on your personal website).

Friend, pokes, funwalls - OK, now show me the money

All the Generation Next’s favourite online games like broadcasting funny videos, tagging friend’s photos, instant messaging for everyone to see, exchanging pokes and what not - they’re all fun for users of social networking sites and social utilities. The question is why and how can these be profitable to these “social containers” and social application developers, or in other words: where’s the money? Especially interesting is how MySpace’s foray into OpenSocial will earn money for those creating OpenSocial apps and therefore MySpace itself.

It’s hard to tell anything specific. I do not know much and I bet MySpace doesn’t either. ;-)

What is apparent, some players from the Facebook ecosystem (Max Levchin’s Slide) are getting heavily valuated, so there’s fire behind the smoke curtain.

Not much choice

I guess it will necessarily be an ad-based revenue model. It is all about getting more eyeballs, more time spent on the site and ad rolls trying to attract customers while trying to be more relevant and trying to increase conversion. OpenSocial support is supposed to lower the barrier of entry for a tidal wave of applications that will make you spend more time on MySpace.

In my view, Facebook currently has by far a more consistent user experience and application ease-of-use which translates into Facebook’s immense valuation in the market of social networks/utilities. That is Facebook main value proposition to everyone - user, developers and future investors.

OpenSocial needs to iron out many technical hurdles in order to make it easy for significant number of developers to jump ships. In the case of MySpace, it will need to work actively with developers taking part in the MySpace Developer Program while ironing out their revenue model. Being a big company, MySpace (i.e. News Corp.) will almost certainly do both things at the same time, which always proves to be tricky as in such cases target (market and revenue model) is moving even more quickly.

Future, if any and the best way to predict it…

At the end of the value chain are the big name contracts (i.e. the true OpenSocial customers) which will come if OpenSocial makes it easy to develop and safe to use OpenSocial applications.

Also to have in mind is Google Social Graph API, that could be a part of the future online social networking puzzle.

Cards, some of them, are on the table and more chips needs to fly in for the greater developer community to jump the OpenSocial ship.Currently, OpenSocial is something to play with and MySpace Developer Program I expect to be a much better far-less-buggy environment then Orkut Sandbox.