trendpreneur

What do you think indicates the success of an entrepreneur? How hard you’re willing to work and how forgiving your family is? How long you can last eating nothing but instant ramen? How many people you know who wear a suit regularly?

It’s a mystical formula, and every successful entrepreneur will seem like an outlier, with some unique background or opportunity that you can’t possibly identify with. I even found myself saying the other day “Well, if I’d chosen to go to Stanford for grad school, and I were a few years older, and…”

Having said that, successful startups have certain qualities in common among their founders, and this triangle — which I stumbled across in Simon Middleton’s excellent “Build a Brand in 30 Days” book — totally resonated with what I’ve observed and learnt, so I decided to share it with you.

(Derail: The aforementioned book is terribly named. I randomly saw it in Borders, as part of my regular management/business porn browsing, and a quick flick through redeemed it. It’s not a 30-step “learn PHP in 24 hours!!” style brand intensive so much as a guide for small business owners and entrepreneurs on how to figure out what you’re all about, and how to present that to your potential customers. I haven’t got to the online section yet, so I may change my mind…)

The triangle of success

Here’s Simon’s exercise. It can work for individuals or teams.

First, write down your talents. What are you good at? What do you have a proven track record in? If a stranger read your CV, what would they think? What do your friends and business acquaintances say you absolutely rock at?

(Your friends might laud your event planning skills to the skies – you’re the one who always gets the trips and parties together without any stress or fuss. Your coworkers or boss might have no clue about that, but describe you as a deeply logical and analytical person. It’s interesting to get both sides, and I have always been surprised as to how people describe me.)

Second, write down your passions. No matter what they are, how silly or idealistic, just get them out. Are you a die-hard scrapbooker? A World of Warcraft fanatic? Are you drawn to helping others, working with children, preserving the environment? If you won the lottery, what would you do? Make a list of the hobbies, side projects, volunteer activities and events you have been involved in over the last year (or whichever time period makes sense) – do you notice a surprising theme?

Now look at both lists. Is there a magical connection? Are you by any chance a deeply skilled database engineer and also fortunate enough to have a true passion for data storage? Is your talent in visual communication and design, and you really love creating new illustrations and flowing presentations? Maybe you’re the go-to party planner among your friends, and you happen to have a deep love of the romantic, especially weddings.

If there’s no obvious connection, maybe there’s a more subtle one – you’re really good at solving hard problems and allocating resources, and you’re passionate about your business idea, so your talent will come into play while actually running the business. Or you can develop the skills and credentials needed to follow your passion, such as doing a degree or course, getting more experience, or simply giving it a go and learning. If you have a solid track record in a field but aren’t sure how to connect that to what gets you really motivated, the next point may come in handy: turn it on its head, and think about the problems and solutions that relate to both areas, and maybe you’ll discover something interesting.

The final step is: assuming you have a business (/idea), what is the evidence of a market? What problems and solutions do your potential customers face, and what supports the theory that your idea is The One? A great situation here is when you are your market, and you have a strong belief you are not an outlier; many technological projects and companies have been started simply to scratch a personal itch.

Combine these three elements and you get:

If all three are aligned, you’re in an awesome place, better off than most. But even if two are aligned and the third needs work, you’ve got a great foundation – and you know what needs fixing! You can now answer the question “Who’s the first hire” with confidence. If you’re over in one corner of the triangle, don’t give up, but use the answers above as a base for your next steps.

Which is the least important? This is totally arguable and there are counter-examples of just about any configuration.

Highly skilled people without a true passion for the idea, but with a great market demand and obvious direction to go in, can get caught up in the process of running a startup and develop a passion — often because their customers have one, and after a while, you see everything through your customers’ eyes. Whenever I see a really dull-looking startup I chastise myself for judging, and realise that to those knee-deep in that particular problem, it’s probably surprisingly interesting.

People driven by passion and a need, but without the skills needed to excel at it, can still do pretty well. You can buy in a lot of skills, finance and legal being the obvious two. The issue with this setup is getting the initial traction – why would people come to you, trust you over others, or invest in you? Assuming that everyone is good at something, you might be surprised how your apparently useless skills have a way of making themselves useful later down the line. (The number of times I end up using skills I learned from improv in the totally unrelated world of software is frightening.)

If you have passion, and skill, but no market, you could be in a sticky situation — but especially if you have passion, there are likely others that do, which means there are customers, and you just have to figure out what they would pay money for. It’s wise to use customer development strategies and rapid iteration so you can try stuff out, figure out if customers would buy it, and pivot (which is just trendy-speak for ‘change what you’re doing’) if they won’t.

So that’s the triangle of success, and a quick three-step self-evaluation process. Make it your smoke test before you dive headfirst into an idea you care little about, with no guarantee anyone else ever will, and lack the ability to execute.

In the past, I may have lamented the slightly smaller worldview that’s a natural side-effect of starting a business outside the Silicon Valley bubble. (Balanced, of course, by a heightened awareness of how the world works outside California and the US, in places without early adopters and device penetration and AT&T.)

However, idly musing on my longer term ambitions and ideas, a thought crystallised. While thinking big is definitely the path to changing the world, thinking too big can stop you even getting off the ground in the first place. Businesses evolve and rewrite their raison d’être on a constant basis – start with something safe, something that will a) work, b) get built, c) launch, d) have customers and e) get bigger. I’ve seen startups with grandiose dreams stuck at all stages of this iterative cycle without the rocket fuel to propel themselves around again.

In other words: execute! But to execute you need to pick something executable in the first place.

On a more individual level this thinking leads me to the conclusion: there’s no shame or harm in creating a small, successful business and then doing your Big Idea. In fact, while a lot of the media successes are focused on first-time college kids, there are plenty of serial entrepreneurs who aren’t learning everything for the first time, and doing jolly well as a result.

‘Safe’ is a curse word in a world where risk is everything, and I don’t advocate starting a franchise of Subway or anything like that. Even things like starting up a coding or design consultancy, selling handmade jewellery on Etsy, or becoming a paid blogger all – to me – count as baby steps on the entrepreneurial ladder. Course, I’ve done two of the three so maybe I’m biased. (I had an eBay shop, not Etsy.) Depending on your day job, a lot of the relevant experience might already be yours – but don’t underestimate the differences between flying solo and with a harness.

If you’re burning with a big idea, the time and team are right, and you have money to play with, by all means go for the gold. If not, think of how many of today’s successes started as small, experimental, safe side projects – “let’s build a website to scratch that itch” rather than “great idea, let’s raise $5mm” – and just get out there trying stuff that can give you a winning formula to base your future efforts on, or fail quickly enough that it doesn’t matter.

I’m personally going to try out idea iteration – spending two week cycles on each idea in my ideas book, long enough to build a prototype and do some acid testing, short enough to avoid tunnel vision. The test? If after two weeks I don’t want to change tracks, I’m on to something ;)

Really interesting debate/blogpost over at TechMeetup as a result of yesterday’s Engage Invest Exploit in Edinburgh. The main points I’m reading is that Edinburgh/Scotland needs more early stage risk money, more mentors/advisors, and a more flexible ecosystem (people willing to join startups, support networks that enable this). And yet someone has to gain; the investors, professional risk-takers, can’t see a return in 3-5 years investing £1m in 20 startups, so they won’t. Guys, Y Combinator took a long punt on funding hackers with ramen money, and it’s paying off.

Also in today’s reading, two lovely nuggets of wisdom from comments on a Fred Wilson piece on the ‘hopes and dreams’ phase (a phase that Scottish businesses either get stuck in, or never experience):

The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.

If you find yourself driving off a cliff, stop driving.

Contradictory, and yet not; there’s a difference between thinking you’re driving off a cliff, and actually doing so.

I recently idly tweeted an idea which flitted through my head while considering the pros and cons of “E-School”, the Founder Institute. People asked for more, so here it is!

To build a business you need to build a product. While technical types often find the process of knocking up a quick demo webapp a walk in the park, one way a non-technical person can quickly gain feedback and respect is to build a prototype themselves.

If you have an idea for a web application – whether it’s a shopping site with a twist, an iPhone app that shows you nearby tweets, a game to teach children about finances, or a global treasure hunt – chances are you can build an early version to get the idea across quite quickly, even without much of a background in computer science.

Today’s tools are accessible and almost universal, but they can be really daunting if you don’t know where to begin. The value of creating your first prototype yourself in terms of feedback, understanding the problems you’ll have, and even the exercise of trimming down the feature set and figuring out the MVP (minimum viable product) is far, far greater than the time saved outsourcing it to the Philippines.

But where are the tools to teach you how?

There’s stuff to turn hackers into entrepreneurs, but connecting entrepreneurs with the tools hackers have at their fingertips seems much less common.

Here are some of the ideas I have around creating a resource (offline workshops? week-long intensive? online course? incubator? unconference? wiki? website/blog? book?) to help people without a technical background build a prototype of their idea quickly, and get feedback on it.

Methods

• How to design, structure and plan a web application (see below for how to build)
• Rapid prototyping, iteration, and agile development (i.e. build it quickly, get feedback, change it)
• Minimum viable product and how to figure out what should be in your prototype
• Ways to test out your application; how to find initial users and get feedback (Real stories)
• Feedback channels for prototyping before you’ve written a line of code
• How to pull off an awesome investor demo (Interviews)

Technology and Tools

• Product and feature design techniques
• How to make the most of paper prototypes
• What’s wireframing and why should I bother? Won’t the designer do that?
• Designing an awesome user experience
• Visual design basics (Analysing/Breakdown of beautifully designed prototypes)
• How to make things look good and feel polished without a degree in graphics
• Readily available tools and products you can use to speed this along

Getting Help

• Ideally, build everything yourself; it really helps your credibility and teaches you a hell of a lot along the way. If this isn’t an option for whatever reason,
• How to outsource the building of a prototype
• How to find a developer and/or designer
• Once the prototype is built and you’re happy, how to find the right rockstar lead developer to take it forward

I’d love to hear some feedback on this idea and information on areas you particularly want to learn more about (whether I included them or not) — and how you’d like to consume the information.

Cheers,
Jen

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to change my mind.

The Founder Institute’s Bay Area semester is coming up, and I initially started frothing at the mouth at the chance. After all, it’s opportunities like this which drove me to Silicon Valley in the first place… right?

Maybe not.

The Founder Institute’s programme looks fantastic. And very useful. Educational. Focusing. Intensive. An invaluable way for an entrepreneur to get a full picture of the business side of startups, the real driver behind the roadmap, etc.

It also looks extremely familiar.

In Edinburgh I have to admit I was a training junkie. I did EPIS, NESTA, the Ken Morse workshops, Ignite Cambridge, and Astia (UK and US). Plus some fantastic one-off sessions such as Bill Joos’ pitch training workshop which will undoubtedly be the reason I successfully raise capital.

But at some point, the wheels have to come off, and you gotta put all the training to work.

Reviewing the Founder Institute’s curriculum, there’s stuff in there I’ve seen time and again in the past. (Which is encouraging, rather than offputting.) There’s actually sessions missing that I think would be interesting, such as focusing on lean methods like customer development and metrics-based iteration, though a lot of it is common sense once you know the basic principles.

The main value of doing a programme like this one – especially this one, as it’s compatible with a day job – is forcing you to put aside time and focus on your startup, to make it a reality. And, primarily, the fantastic networking (and investment) opportunities. But, you know, I have those through Astia – and I haven’t used them yet, because I’m not ready to.

So, for me personally, the only real gain I might get from the Institute is a cofounder and mentor. I could definitely use a mentor, but there are ways to reach out to people that don’t involve a fee and equity, and a huge time commitment that I would rather not have right now.

So, dear Founder Institute, don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not you, it’s me. Maybe we can catch up in a year or so? Great. I’ll call you.

(Aside: If you’re not me, especially if you have a solid idea and little real exposure to the business side of things, you really should do the Founder Institute or something similar. It looks to be very useful, for the right person. And if you think I’m deranged and should change my mind, feel free to comment.)