THE UNCOMPANY
Posted: January 30, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
All the posts about the unconference Social Sweden Web Camp (SSWC) got me thinking. If there are lessons to be learned for every business from SSWC, then what do you call a company that already knows these lessons and lives by their rules?
An uncompany, of course.
An uncompany has a community of ambassadeurs, fans and followers, not customers.
An uncompany sees itself as a platform for others to create on.
An uncompany lives by an ethos and values that its community shares.
What else does an uncompany do? Any thoughts?
TAKE A STEP BACK
Posted: January 29, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Photo by: F Delventhal
As an entrepreneur working with a startup at the early stage it’s easy to get fixated on one particular idea. The problem with this is that you’re basically laying all your eggs in one basket. If the idea doesn’t work, you lose the drive and the passion to move things forward. The startup dies before it even had a chance to get the wings in the air.
It is often a good idea to take a step and see the bigger picture. Your idea can be part of something much bigger.
For example, let’s say you have an idea for a location based game. You work hard to get the mobile app built and after months of work you finally release it. Soon you discover what most entrepreneurs discover when they launch after months of work.
Nothing happens.
No customers come running downloading your app.
No money come pouring in.
Don’t lose your spirit over this. Take a deep breath and a step back. Accept the fact that what you have done is just tested one possible direction out of many. What you need to do is find your larger mission. Maybe someone likes the app and tells you: “hey, I was looking for something like this for a birthday party for kids I was planning“.
This is an opportunity cloud! Making mobile apps for kids birthday parties – that sounds like a good, bigger mission. Now place your current app inside this box/cloud and treat as a part of a larger portfolio. Now you have a bigger arena to experiment in. Your goal is no longer to a build one app based on one idea but to become the leading provider of apps for kids birthday parties.
Of course you have to keep your focus and give the app some time to grow its user base but by having a larger mission you can go back and forward between different focus areas.
Some day you may have to pivot and choose another Big Mission, but until then, keep experimenting inside your opportunity cloud. And don’t let the disappointing user numbers of one particular app bring you down.
A NEW KIND OF WEB
Posted: January 28, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
This guy is getting it
After a few months with AngularJS and REST-APIs, I have to agree with this blog post. Yes, we’re in a new era of web development.
It’s funny how technology moves in cycles and this is apparent in how the center of gravity moves between the server and the client. For a few years now the center of gravity has been on the server. The client (the web browser in most cases) was just a dumb document viewer for HTML and media files.
With modern Javascript-frameworks, this is changing. The browser has become a first class citizen of the web stack, fully capable of managing state and most of the logic that used to be on the server.
What this means to people who are not geeks developers: expect richer, faster web sites much more like desktop applications than just documents. Expect an increased innovation tempo. Expect the web to come alive. Everyone working with the web (and that means basically everyone who does business in some way) need to grok this.
Look for cofounders, not ideas.
Posted: December 2, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
It takes two to tango.
One of the consequences of the 5P-model for startup evaluation (Product + Problem + Profit + People = Potential) is that finding the right people is much more important than finding the right idea. So important, in fact, that you might as well begin with finding the right people before you even know what to build!
Why? Because of the 4 Ps that make up the potential (Product, Problem, Profit and People), the people P is the hardest to change once you get going.
You can (and should) iterate and improve your product.
You can (and should) validate and test your problem.
You can (and should) experiment with different business (profit) models.
But once you start, you can’t change the people.
Of course you can always fire co-founders but it is a painful and expensive process, much more so than pivoting on your problem definition.
So, instead of waiting for the right idea, go look for someone that complements you and is equally passionate about building something.
Then find out what to build.
(Discuss on Hacker News.)
The Five P Model for Rapid Startup Evaluation
Posted: November 26, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentTL;DR: Product + Problem + Profit + People = Potential. Does your idea have what it takes in all five Ps?
Simon Klose presenting at the hackathon TBD Malmö held in February 2012.
Recently, me and a couple of friends in Malmö have started The Startup Dojo, where soon-to-be-entrepreneurs can come and pitch their idea and get feedback on how to move forward. (It’s a very simple concept and you’re more than welcome to organise one in your own Town!) I have been part of organising a couple of different startup events like that over the last couple of years.
Organising these events have taught me a lot about quickly building value at the super-early stage of a startup. If you only have a weekend to build something, what do you focus on? How do you decide what’s the best idea to build?
For example, the latest batch of entrepreneurs at the Startup Dojo were very interesting in how different they were from each other.
The first gentleman was an excellent speaker and pitcher and had no worries about breaking in to a new market through sheer selling force. He also had identified a clear problem with a big market. However, his product was a little unclear and he lacked the skills to actually build it.
The second entrepreneur was a true inventor. He had designed a new type of shower meant to be used outdoors. He had made drawings and even 3D videos showing how it would work. But, it was unclear if there actually was a real problem on the market that needed to be solved.
The third entrepreneur had a proven product and solved a real problem on the market by saving money for farmers. A winner, right? Well, the problem was that the money it could save was far less than the cost for the product. So the business model didn’t hold and he asked the Dojo for advice on how to proceed.
Hackathon Startup Sweden, Stockholm. December 2011.
As you can see the three different entrepreneurs had challenges in different areas.
One had identified a clear problem but lacked the product to solve it.
The other had a great product but was looking for an actual problem that the product would solve.
The third had a good product AND a clear problem yet lacked a business model that would unleash the full potential of the idea.
It seems a good and quick way to evaluate startups is to look on them through the same lens that we just looked at the these three potential startup projects.
You need a strong product that is technically feasible, sufficiently easy to use and scalable.
The product must solve a real market problem that sufficiently many people have.
The price of the product must be such that it leads to profit when costs are deduced.
Finally, and probably most importantly, you need the right people to execute the project.
Only when these four all work together will you reach the full potential of the idea.
So there you have it: the Five P Model for Rapid Startup Evaluation. The next time someone tells you they have a “great startup idea”, in 30 seconds you can pinpoint any holes in the idea and hopefully help the entrepreneur make it even better.
PS. The next Startup Dojo is December 13 in Malmö. See you there?
Five different flavors of a digital strategy
Posted: September 26, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Yummy. Digital strategy!
Wikipedia defines a “digital strategy” as:
[…] the process of specifying an organization’s vision, goals, opportunities and initiatives in order to maximize the business benefits of digital initiatives to the organization.
What does that mean? I have seen many different flavors of a digital strategy over the years. Here are a few. Do you know any more?
A community (social) strategy. How to build loyalty amongst customers. How to make customers help each other solve problems. How to make customers extend and complete your products. How to make customers love you. Skills needed: community management, social media.
A multi channel strategy. How to make sure the mobile, tablet, desktop, TV and whatever else experience of your digital presence fits together, both from a technical standpoint but more importantly, how your organisation can manage it. Skills needed: change management, IT architecture.
A media strategy. How to use video, blogging, microblogging, live streaming, Facebook etc. as media channels to build on online presence. Every company is a media company – but how? Skills needed: content marketing, (low cost) video production.
A conversion and growth strategy. How to make sure that you get as many visitors to your web site as possible and that as many of the visitors as possible do what you want them to do, like buy your products. Aka “growth hacking“. Skills needed: agile development (for speed of changes), search engine optimization, web analytics.
An innovation strategy. How to make sure you keep pushing forward and explore new business models, new products and new markets that digitalisation enables. Skills needed: customer development, business model canvas, lean startup.
Selling is about framing it right
Posted: September 13, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
In order to make a sale, you need to frame the product or service in a way that makes the benefit and value clear to the buyer.
An example, from real life. Trying to get my 2 year old daughter in the bath.
– Honey, do you want to take a shower?
– Noooooo!
– Do you want to take a bath?
– Noooooo!
– Do you want to bake foam-cookies?
– Yeeeeeaaah!
Sold!
The only skill you really need
Posted: September 6, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentI’m a software developer by training. This has given me some amazing opportunities to create just about anything that’s digital. Knowing how to program when software is eating the world is truly a gift and I highly recommend everyone to learn at least the basics.
I have however felt for a long time that I would want to be better at not only building software but also making it more, well, I guess beautiful is the word. My aesthetic ability is far from where I want it to be.
I even think that, could I start my career over again, I should have chosen to focus much more on design and user experience. I wrote a blog post a few years ago about making it work, making it pretty and making it fast – in that order. Perhaps I should re-prioritize, making it pretty is the most important goal for a new project. The reason: if you can’t get people emotionally attached somehow to your product it doesn’t matter how many features it have, it will fail anyway.
But, after having a few beers with a wise friend two things dawned on me:
- You can’t be good at everything. Accept it. Yes, you can learn but the more wide your skill set is, the less deep it will become as well. Obvious, yes, but worth reminding oneself of from time to time.
- If anything, there is one meta-skill (and, yes, it is a skill – some people are better at this than others) that you really should try to be better at: getting things done. Executing. Doing stuff. Getting other people to do stuff. Making things happen. Moving the needle. If you’re good at that, you can do anything.
Accept your limitations. Focus on getting things done. That’s it.
(Follow me on Twitter.)
Update: great post. Get disciplined, not motivated.
What’s it like to be a Venture Capitalist
Posted: August 28, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentNo. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Yes.
Repeat roughly 5-10 times per year.
(Inspired by venture capitalist Nikolaj Nyholms talk at The Conference.)
What makes SSWC so special?
Posted: August 22, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentYet another Sweden Social Web Camp has come to its end.
And it was as beautiful as ever.
This was my third year on the Tjärö island in the Blekinge archipelago (I had to miss one year due to the birth of my daughter – a very good excuse if you ask me) and as I read through all the love coming from the participants and my old summaries and thoughts about the unconference (This is the Internet and What your company can learn from Sweden Social Web Camp) I am left to ponder: what exactly is it that makes this happening so special?
What’s the secret SSWC-sauce?
Burning of the what!?
Because special it is. It’s almost a religious experience being there, including group singing, praising the almighty (web) and the burning of a wooden sheep(!). But, it’s all done tongue-in-cheek and the only reason to burn a wooden sheep in front of 440 people is of course so that you can tweet about it and share the experience.
But, it’s not just fun and games. As I wrote in What your company can learn from Sweden Social Web Camp I really do think there are important lessons for every business to understand what makes #SSWC tick. SSWC is a conference, but it provides more value at less cost than a traditional conference. More value and less cost is a sign of disruptive innovation, so let’s dig deeper into what makes SSWC so special.
- Tomas Wennström & Kristin Heinonen. We start off with the two persons at the center of the whole thing. Look up “nice couple” in the dictionary and there’s a good chance there’s a photo of these two there. Tomas & Kristin are the founders of the conference and form the very important function of community leaders for the whole thing. Their friendliness, common sense problem solving and warm humor sets the tone for the rest of us to follow.
Lesson learned: Set a culture and lead by example. - Not a product. A platform for sharing. This is the core of what sets SSWC (or any unconference) apart from a traditional conference. It’s not a prepackaged product with predefined speakers and topics. No, it’s a platform for the audience to become contributors and create the experience themselves. That’s why Joakim Green brings the SSWC flag each year. That’s why there’s an SSWC movie produced each year and even a book.
Lesson learned: Go from product to platform. - It’s on an island. The fact that the conference is mostly outside and on a small island leads to some interesting consequences. Everyone you meet on the island is part of the same experience. People also live in tents which forces everyone to be more down to earth (literally). There’s more sheep than suits and ties on the island. The island, the tents and the sheep make us all equal. The island is the big equalizer. (Note that this also repels certain type of people.)
Lesson learned: context and environment is important and you can use it to design how certain behavior is rewarded. - Swedish summer. August is the best time of the year in Sweden. Nuff said. Even when it rains it’s OK. We Swedes love this time of the year and being outside in nature to enjoy it. It’s part of our culture.
Lesson learned: Swedish summer rocks. - Tjärö. The crew. The food. The setup. Everyone working on Tjärö help out making the experience for every participant as great as possible. They thus become the extended arms of Tomas and Kristin.
Lesson learned: Hire people that share your values. - The long tail on the web. Of course an internet conference wouldn’t be an internet conference without blogging, tweeting, bambusing or facebooking. The internet enables us to transcend place and time and connect over physical boundaries. We can share stories – blog posts such as this. We can relive the moment, long after it’s over – and prelive it before it happens.
Lesson learned: Share everything. Be open. Create social objects that people can discuss. Use the web. .
That’s a few lessons from Sweden Social Web Camp. It may look like a weird camp for nerds but look deeper. There’s an important business lesson for any company looking to upgrade their business model to the 21st century hidden among the rocks, sheep and beautiful ocean water at Tjärö. The lessons learned above are lessons in modern marketing and business development. I highly recommend a visit next year.
The best way to understand what makes SSWC so special is after all to be there.
Opportunity Cloud 