You cannot beat the market. Whether you’re an investor or an entreprenuer the market dictates where money is flowing. Follow the money. Find it, ride it, and get off. Here are some companies that are fighting the market, and getting trounced.
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RIAA continues to believe in CD’s instead of MP3 and P2P sharing
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Microsoft missed the boat on Web 2.0 and are 10 years behind on their web product offerings, still clinging on to Office and desktop software.
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Blockbuster is getting eaten alive by Netflix and Hulu because customers want their movies now, with a smile. Nobody drives to a store anymore.
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New York Times is almost bankrupt because bloggers and twitterers are reporting news quicker. Citizen journalism at its finest.
Nobody can predict the future, so trying to strategize and prognosticate what the next trend is, is foolish. The key is to adapt.
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Amazon went from selling books, to selling everything on the internet
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Google went from search engines to ads. They invented a whole new market.
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Apple saw the shift towards mobile computing and brought us the jesus phone (iPhone).
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Honda and Toyota see that gas prices are unruly. Fuel efficient cars are on all of their product roadmaps.
Running a startup isn’t easy. Who would’ve thought there was more to it than just the development of the product? There is a whole, complicated, legal side to running a business too. Since most startups begin in bootstrap mode we aren’t always fortunate to have a lawyer handle the boring and costly legalities.
Enter DocStoc.
Need a non-disclosure form? Check. Need a non-compete form? Check. Invoices? Check. Did I mention this is all free?
Use legal forms to protect your brand or your trademark. The resources are available to you, and spending a little time securing your product will go a long way.
You might build the most functional piece of software ever, but it’s not functional if nobody is using it. Think about that statement. If you can cure cancer, but nobody is using it, have you really cured anything at all?
Social media solves this problem with virility.
Integrating Twitter, Facebook, and E-Mail is a good sure fire way to promote the content on your application. Are you displaying some news? Let your users share it. Does your app give you vital statistics? Let your users share it.
The tools are there for building. Start thinking strategically and baking virility into your software batter. The more users are engaged and sharing, you inherently are building a passive marketing campaign - without the full force of a marketing team. Job well done.
I’m involved in a personal project where I’ve inexpensively offshored the tasks that are not within the range of my expertise. Here are some thoughts:
Offshoring is NOT always cost effective
There is an inherent notion amongst entreprenuers that offshoring tasks is cheap. This can be true, but the market does not lie when the average iPhone developer charges $150.00/hr.
Communication is absolutely vital
Working around the sun means you need to wake up at odd hours of the day (3AM skype calls) to get status reports, discuss features, and everything else that is project related. Failure to communicate will indefinitely result in a poor quality product, unless you really nailed your business requirements. Let’s get real though, 62% of IT projects fail before they are even completed for a reason.
Political risk will screw you over
China blocked access to popular social networking sites on May 2, 2009 to prevent a backlash on the 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square. My project has elements of social networking, which can’t be tested offshore anymore. Always have a backup plan because anything can go awry. Political risk is HUGE when you are working with countries outside of the US.
We all have great ideas and can come up with features, but lets face it if we don’t document the who’s and what’s nothing will get accomplished. Even in agile groups requirements are kept, albeit at a bare minimum as to-do lists (see iceberg lists).
Good entreprenuers out-task what they aren’t good at. Whether you are building a bridge or a software application making sure you nail your requirements is absolutely critical when working with outside vendors. They don’t know your business, they don’t care for your business. You need to provide them with detailed functional and non-functional requirements in order to get your product completed and out the door. Good requirements turns into a good products, which means customers are happy, and happy customers are your bread and butter.
If you don’t have the cash to buy books, or are just plain cheap you can still consume knowledge from best-selling authors. The trick is to subscribe to their blogs. Savvy authors will post the same content in their books but in free-form. Here are a few authors/bloggers to get you started:
You have to be lazy. Yes, lazy. Because lazy people find the most efficient solutions to problems in order to get the job done.
Technology folks are pretty religious when it comes to the software they use. I’ve compiled a few of my observations in corporate America.
I don’t even want to get started on operating system wars or language battles.
I’m tired of registering my e-mail address to use a new web app or service. We live in a world where the majority of us are using Facebook, GMail, Yahoo, or Hotmail.
Startups that are creating their own authentication systems are re-inventing the wheel.
There are standard protocols like Facebook Connect, OAuth, OpenID and FriendConnect that will serve your purpose. Not only will you have authentication covered, but you instantly make your product “web 2.0” by allowing users to share content from your site via these protocols. Sharing is caring.
This post is long overdue:
- Hardly ever crashes
- Sex appeal
- Easy to use (sit with one for 2-3 months, after you’ve broken your windows habits and you’ll see what I mean)
- Actually goes to sleep when I close the lid
- Has a terminal, and is built off of BSD, so I still have some *NIX street-cred :)
Every engineer should know how to write a program. Every engineer should be able to write an Excel macro at the LEAST. Automation of your tasks is one of the most important things you can do for yourself because it frees up time, and as the age-old saying goes, “time is money”. I’m not saying you need to build a full blown web 2.0 application when all you’re doing is generating some reports, but if you can save time by eliminating a manual process, you are working smarter and saving dollars.
Delegation is the best way to do something you don’t want to. Managers do it all the time, and so can you. Delegate your manual calculations and reports to the computer. Programs are simply instructions meant to be followed. By boasting your productivity, over time, you will get a raise or a promotion and spend it however you please on geeky things.
For those of you who say “programming isn’t for me” you are wrong. As an engineer you are both analytical and methodical. Writing a program is a matter of thinking out loud and defining every step. Programming languages themselves are not complicated. You are simply learning the semantics of a language. Not only that, there is something called the application programming interface (API) which is the documentation on exactly how to use every aspect of the language. If English had an API I would be the modern-day Shakespeare. The true challenge lies in the definition of the problem, which should be natural to you after years of physics, math, and core discipline courses.
Lastly, you don’t even need to be Linus Torvalds at the workplace. In fact, as an engineer you can even settle to be a really bad programmer. Break all the rules and write sloppy code, as long as it works. Remember, you are basically creating a short term solution to a problem. I do encourage you though, to write clean and efficient code, because it can only help you in the long run.
You don’t want to be that guy doing a million things manually. To program or not to program, that is the question.
If we have the data, we can build it.
— some IT guru
I want that to be clear. Advertisements don’t generate enough cash-flow for your company or product to remain sustainable. Here is why:
1. Screen Real Estate - smartphones have 3-4 inch screens. You need to maximize every pixel for your app, not some ad that is going to take up 1/4 of your screen. The ad takes away from the application functionality.
2. Where my Clicks at? - are you looking for an accidental click when you put ads in your mobile app? People don’t click on ads when they are in the middle of playing a game. Accidental clicks will get you sub-minimal profits at best.
3. Mass Audience - advertisements only work when you have a mass audience. Sites that bring in tons of users will have a higher click through rate which brings in more money. Your application will nowhere near get the amount of clicks a blog or social media website can bring in. Face the facts, even if you are #1 on the iPhone App Store you won’t bring in the kind of traffic that brings in money.
There are plenty of other business models that can bring in sustainable cash-flow. Software as a service is just one of the many ways you can expand your companies bottom line. Cash flow should come naturally if your application is really a killer app.
