trendpreneur

I’m doing the Ignite course in Cambridge this week, sponsored by Informatics Ventures (thanks!). It’s been a mixed bag so far for me, and although checking email during sessions has been banned, I’m going to try and take notes and blog a few things from the course.

Yesterday was about marketing — establishing who your customers are and how you’re going to get them. Businesses typically go through two stages: initially, you are pre product-market fit, so you spend your time figuring out how your product will fit into the market or vice versa. Then, once you have that fit established, it’s time to ’step on the gas’ and sell to the market — and go supernova.

An initial step, though, is to define whether you’re an aspirin or vitamin.

Aspirins cure pain. Vitamins enhance.

There’s room for both, but knowing which you are is important — and not just from an internal point of view, what you’d like to be, but from a customer’s point of view.

Do you solve an acknowledged problem?

Do you solve a problem the customer doesn’t know he has?

Do you make the customer’s life better?

Another interesting division is whether you’re a new idea, or better-faster-cheaper than something that exists. It’s possible to be a bit of both, but the key camps here are ‘very risky, have to establish the market’ versus ‘existing market but competitors’. If the latter, what will your competitors do when you launch? (A side note, something I was told a while ago: very few business plans/presentations consider competitor response as well as simply competitor existence.)

If the former, are you really a new idea? What do people do now? Is your technology disruptive? Is it defensible? If you’re a tech company, can you productise as well, or are you better off licensing? How do you fit into the existing picture?

This is possibly the most valuable part of the course so far, having time to think about the larger scheme of things and where we fit in. Interesting.

A city where nothing ever changes.

A city where, in just over a year, an entire shopping centre can materialise out of nowhere.

A city that goes to sleep at 6pm and, despite a heaving throng of tourists, appears amazingly visitor-unfriendly.

Cambridge is all of these — and more.

Coming back to my old haunts, I realise quite how much of my life here revolved around social activities and my PhD because there really isn’t much going for Cambridge as a city. I’m spoilt now; I’m used to Edinburgh and its coffeeshops that actually stay open, the fact there’s more to do there in the evening than eat and drink.

Nomadic entrepreneurs, web workers, freelancers etc can plug in and get to work anywhere, but it’s hard when the city seems to be actively fighting against you. Plug outlets? Well, I found some in Borders Starbucks, but it closed before I was even a third of the way through my tasks for the day. (OK, argue that I should work normal hours, but this oppressive weather is playing havoc with the old sleep cycle.) Printing? Sure, if you want to pay a near-obscene premium at Starbucks.

Knowing people locally helps — it’s easy enough to scavenge a hotdesk, even — but without an ‘in’ it’s pretty tough. But what do we need? Starbucksen that open late? A city-centre hackerspace in every major UK location? (Yes please.)

I do have a vision for a network of drop-in entrepreneur-friendly business centres that don’t charge the earth — basically cafes with free wifi, printers, tables, power sockets, whiteboards, printing, fax (some people still use it), etc. A room for meetings. Maybe even a relaxation area. Membership of one would guarantee use of all, and a day rate would cover non-members. I even have the location of the first one in mind, in Edinburgh — an office I’ve had my eye on for a while, wishing I could afford.

Ahem. Let’s make the current startup a success first, shall we?

I’ve seen a bit of discussion about funding models recently, and have been playing around with an interesting experiment in crowdsourcing products called quirky.

For creative or product-focused businesses, it seems crowdfunding is really taking off as a concept, though I’ve yet to hear much in the way of actual success stories. The idea’s fairly simple: get loads of people to chip in when you need cash, and cash out later – either by owning part of an artwork, or by getting a discount on future products, etc.

It reminds me a lot of the way our Young Enterprise company was funded; we sold shares for a pound each to friends and family, then they got their dividend and return when we closed up at year’s end with a profit. But that was back in the nineties and so cool words like crowdfunding don’t really apply, non?

Quirky has more of a central-organisation take on stuff. Armed with designers, the ability to rapidly prototype, and some way of actually making real products, you pay to submit an idea – then cash in if your idea gets picked by the community. If you contribute along the way, either to your idea or to other people’s (you don’t have to ever pay or submit an idea yourself, mind), you gain Influence, and are rewarded based on your influence when the product finally sells.

For example, I voted for a product that turned out to be the community winner, so I gained a tiny bit of influence. I submitted a product name that wasn’t chosen, so nothing there. I answered a couple of market research questions, gaining a bit more, etc.

What’s nice about this is the company in the middle is doing a lot of the legwork but is also able to profit from zero creative outlay. I assume the funds paid by each round of idea-submitters cover the costs of internal development on those products, if not now then at least in future. Plus you’re guaranteed a winner because the community chooses the product.

Organisations are taking the middle stance in other industries as well. From brokering fashion investment to putting together crowds of art backers, there’s already several places you can go to find people willing to back you. It’s a bit like Kiva for the first world, or Zopa for businesses; Colectivo seems another name that springs out of Google (as I can never, ever remember Zopa’s name). Maybe one of these will become the place to go, especially for more traditional web or product businesses rather than creatives, where philanthropism is partially a factor.

I can totally see a hacker’s Quirky emerging, though. Almost like SiCamp in a way; people submit a ton of ideas, the crowd votes for the favourite, then the hackers split off and make the thing happen. Those who were involved get credit, dividends, returns when the business is sold, etc. But software doesn’t quite work so easily, and the middleman will need a lot of glue — plus, would you invest in a business with two thousand minority shareholders?

I’ve run across several young entrepreneurs lately who are starting up businesses in Scotland (well, Edinburgh specifically). I keep mentioning the same resources to them, so it’s about time I put it all in one place.

• EPIS at the University of Edinburgh is a great opportunity to get started with a safety net. A loan from Scottish Enterprise, office space and hosting within the University, access to academic resources and mentoring, and tons of help and advice to boot. The programme won’t be accepting new applications for much longer, so get in fast.
• Scottish Enterprise is a fairly hard nut to crack. There’s a lot of support available and I, at least, found it hard to research online. The easiest way to get a rundown of the grants, co-investment and support (mostly financial) available is to get in touch with a human being; you might need to go through Business Gateway, who are dubiously helpful.
• PSYBT, if you’re under 25, is a nice source of very practical advice (eg. a bookkeeping course) as well as grants and loans.
• If you’re doing something disruptive with digital media, 4iP could help. They’re worth contacting to hash out ideas as well as to try and get financial backing.
• 38minutes is 4iP’s social network, which is a great one-stop place to find out what events are on and what’s hot in the world of social media. For example, it tells you about…
• …Edinburgh Coffee Morning, every Friday at Centotre. I am notoriously bad at going to this, but if you want to hobnob with social/digital meeja, startups and web devs, it’s the place to be. You might also enjoy…
• TechMeetup, now in both Edinburgh and Glasgow flavours. A monthly hackerfest with the odd spinoff gathering and a mailing list that cool stuff occasionally floats across.
• If you’re interested in more structured events, Informatics Ventures often throw great educational and networking-heavy events, from courses to expos. Recent highlights have included Guy Kawasaki and Doug Richard.
• A shameless plug for a new site started by startup types here: StartupCafe (which, when I visit it, has as its first post a listing somewhat similar to this one!). Any site with a competition to win pancakes is good in my book.
• Related, Edinburgh Uni’s E-club and Launch.ed — both a little dormant now due to the end of the academic year — are good organisations with great people. Events, networking, advice, support, etc.
• And, totally unrelated to the above, Hacker News is an excellent morning read, and applying to Y Combinator’s funding rounds is a very educational process. There are a couple of Edinburgh startup types in its irc channel (#startups on freenode) and others from the UK.

Enjoy, and do let me know if there’s more stuff I’ve missed!

Something Sirallun said this week in a recap episode of The Apprentice has stuck with me, almost like a mantra, for the last few days.

It goes to show that even in this economy, anyone can make money by just picking up a bucket of water and a sponge and going out there.

(Paraphrased, of course.)

There are two ways to make money. You either start off with money or you start off with time. With money, you can breed more money – it’s almost like a fungus. But with time, precious time… you can really turn nothing into something. Just pick up a bucket and a sponge.

(Of course, something the ‘all you need is time’ camp don’t count is that somewhere, somehow, someone has to pay for the damn bucket.)