Motivation

Understanding what motivates people to progress is my tip of the day for all of you trying to prove your business to the world.  Like my boy Andy Swan told me, finding people that align with your interests are the key in moving your idea/passion/business forward.  The only way to grow is to make sure more and more people know about your bad ass product/service/company and want to help you grow it.  Find the right people in your niche that can help you get there and go for it.  Bring them on board quickly and don’t look back.

May29

Everything is Negotiable

navsmusings:

“I love (and live) this one, and have ever since I was a child.  My father took unique pleasure in every opportunity to prove to me that everything in life is negotiable.  He is an expert salesman and marketer who would show me, half for amusement and half for educational purposes, that you could outsell any seller.  The hardest part is initiating a negotiation where there is no appearance of one.   The best tool of negotiation is recognizing that everyone wants to feel as if they have achieved something of equivalent value in the transaction.  Often, your greatest wellspring of value is intangible, like goodwill, loyalty, reputation or catering to the very ephemeral trappings of ambition I detailed in an earlier post.  When you approach everything as if it were negotiable, you see each exchange as an opportunity to do something a little better, a little faster, a little more affordable, and hopefully, a little more valuable for everyone involved.” - gbattle:

More awesome gbattle-izdom.

March12

Get going

Haven’t posted in a while, been extremely busy with the new product launches at TALLULAH cosmetics.  But, while working so hard, it hit me that I really need to tell people as much as I can that they really should be doing something they like.  I tell this to Amy quite often, and have started to tell her 23 yr old sister that life is way too short to do stuff that you don’t like.  We all have choices, no one is forcing you to do whatever it is that you don’t like.  So like the title says, get going on whatever it is that makes you happy.  Nothing else matters really.

March05

Twitter Revenue Idea

This is actually a comment that I posted on this TechCrunch article

It’s interesting I’ve been thinking and talking to friends about this concept over the past few days and started a decent conversation on Twitter today about it.  Twitter’s value is the data that it is collecting from an exponentially growing number of diverse users each day.  The data is the reason that Twitter raised an additional $35 million from an extremely intelligent and sucessful group of investors.

My original Tweet today was “I still think a viable business model for Twitter would be to charge me access to a non-production replicated database to write SQL against”

I have to disagree somewhat with John Borthwick though because I think partnering with Google would only expose Googles interpretation of the Twitter datastream, through Google’s algorithms and potentially reduce Twitter’s competitive advantage over Google in this category.

I say sell the data at a premium to companies who have figured out that the only way to understand our generation is to participate with us in the conversation.

The data in it’s purest form (directly from Twitter) is what I beleive will eventually lead to larger businesses wanting to license non-production, but replicated Twitter database instances for them to write their own custom queries against.  No matter what UI you put on top of any data source, it still isn’t as powerful as being able to write SQL directly against a database.  No APIs, Firehoses, whatever….just a datasource and a team of analytics guru’s finding trends by writing SQL.

As I pointed out to someone who replied to me today on Twitter “agree APIs are nice (free) but bigger companies have full analytics/reporting teams and money, want to sit on all of the data”.  I know this because I’ve spent many years working with this contries largest provider of real estate data.  Big companies want the data and they will pay big money for it.  I think Twitter and it’s investors know this.

I think Twitter’s challenge is doing enough homework to show these bigger companies that the data that they have is valuable and will gain them access to our generation of consumers.  Why?  Because not all companies GET IT yet.  They have to convince big companies that the data that they want is not only in their possesion but that it’s growing at unbeleivalbe rates.  The second biggest challenge I think they have is how to handle the growth if unfiltered access to the data tips.

What about costs?  Like I said on Twitter today, “Twitter should probably start at $100k/month to find the companies who were really serious about partnering with them IMO”

I beleive that the unpaid “product” ambassadors on Twitter are far better than the ranks of big corporate marketing and community departments.  Eventually big companies will get it and join in.  When that happens, Twitter will get to pay some investors.

February15

Real Economic Stimulus

Mark Cuban - owner of the Dallas Mavericks, venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur and now angel investor has gone out on a limb and introduced a concept he calls “open source funding”.  I REALLY love the idea. He wants to see all pitches that meet 13 basic criteria that he has drafted under one condition: you have to publicly post your business plan on his blog or put it up on slideshare or Google docs and link to it from a comment on his blog.  Either way, Mark wants the “world” to see peoples business plans and he clearly points out that if HE isn’t interested in it, someone else who is reading might be.

When I first saw Mark’s post a few days ago there were already over 600 comments. Today the comments have climbed to over 1200.  If you skim the comments; all are not pitches, some are critisims of Mark for 1) not being interested in seeing deals where revenue is from ads and 2) asking people to post business plans or ideas publicly instead of sending them in email.

I respect Mark for sticking to these two criteria because I agree that revenue from ads is a very tough business to actually make work without extremely viral, original and frequent content.  Secondly, you can tell that Mark thinks ideas are free without execution; a point I’ve written about a few times and totally agree with. Most people worry about somebody stealing their idea, but I say who cares, it doesn’t matter.  If you really are passionate about something then you need to execute on the idea instead of telling Mark Cuban that “I’ve been thinking about doing X for a couple of years”.  I can tell you this…the probability of Mark Cuban or any other angel guy trading you cash for equity on a deal that you have been executing is much greater than them giving you cash for equity on “an idea”.

- Entrepreneur Rant - Wannabe entrepreneurs (WEs); please understand that you have no skin in the game until you actually do something…execute on your idea, and then you can get someones attention if you need help.  Without any execution WEs have 0 leverage with angels, VCs, Mark Cuban, your rich uncle or whoever is assuming all of the risk in your deal. No one owes you anything.  By executing on your idea you will start to learn so much about what is right and wrong with your idea.  You will get valuable feedback from your users/customers.  If you still need cash to grow, take your questions and challenges to an angel guy then and watch their interests perk.  That’s almost guarunteed to get you a meeting (at least an email) as long as your deal is in their sweet spot. I realize angels and VCs go in on deals that are at the paper and spreadsheets phase, but my rant is to help entrepreneurs increase their chances of closing a round by bringing angels and VCs real problems instead of theory and ideas. You gain leverage (value) as an entrepreneur by trying to prove your business idea, not by wishing someone with cash would take a chance on you. - End Entrepreneur Rant-

I’ve said this all before, and got off topic in the rant, but my point is that we absolutely need more Mark Cubans during this economic shit storm.  Two posts that you should go read right now along the same topic are Fred Wilson’s post on When Greed is Good and Howard Lindzon’s rumor post on Twitter filing for an IPO. Both are solid reads beyond these two posts.  Fred and Howard know what they are talking about and have the portfolios to prove it.  It’s nice to have guys like them be so transparent with their business; it helps me in running mine, and I’m sure others feel the same way.

February14