Feelin_tired

How website spread globally over time…interesting to see the reach of websites like...

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:00:37 +0000

How website spread globally over time…interesting to see the reach of websites like techcrunch
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=techcrunch&geo=US&cmpt=q

Part of a presentation done for Global Entrepreneur Week at...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:55:59 +0000

Part of a presentation done for Global Entrepreneur Week at Warwick, UK

The slides may seem a little small, if so please download the deck from www.slideshare.com/iqbalgandham

The Idea: What type of Business Am I

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:52:22 +0000

After another two month hiatus, which I hope has been put to good use, in developing your idea, I’m back with the the next step in building your billion dollar (maybe it should be Australian $, since the others are tanking) business.

So just to recap:

1. You now have an idea which has been validated by lots of intoxicated people down the pub.

2. You now have an idea which you can explain in two sentences to anyone who asks…AND they understand it.

Time to move on, we now really need to understand who our customers are.

Before we delve into trying to discover who our customer is, we need to understand a little more about Internet businesses, and also customer psychology.

How do companies make money on the Internet:

1. You sell something directly to the customer, and they pay for it, e.g virus software, subscription based models like Basecamp. You get the idea. Here the customer is paying. Let’s call this Model A

2. Someone else pays: Here you give your product for free, and someone else pays in order for that customer to use the free service. This is your typical advertising driven model. Model B

Which one is the model for your business?

Model A will allow you to obtain revenue straight away. It is perfect if you have little or no funding, and your business infrastructure, i.e manpower, hardware costs are high. For example, imagine a business where it takes you £50K to build the software. To support one customer you need infrastructure that will cost you £10K a month, or you need three technicians on the phone to provide support. i.e its not an iphone app, where people do not really expect support, and where the hardware to allow you to scale is provided by others.

Model B, we all know and use. They are free, hence customer signup is quick (if the product is useful…or if you are Google wave). The infrastructure costs per customer are minimal, i.e you could support 50,000 customers for the same price as 5000 customers. The development time frame is also not that large, and you possibly have spent less than £10,000 on the product. Hopefully much much less.

Model B will require funding at some stage, since you cannot start to earn revenues, or should I say enough revenue to cover your operational costs, until you have a “significant” customer base. To get to that customer base, will require time, and hence money.

So ask yourself, which model you wish to adopt, will customers pay for your service/product, or do they want free. If free can you support it long enough?, i.e are your costs low enough for you to obtain a large customer base, if not, then you either need to resort to Model A, have a rich uncle, or be on first name terms with lots of VC’s. Of course if all this fails, you could take out a loan, short banking stocks, and hope for another crash….but that is a last resort :-)

So now you know your business model….almost. We now need to know why customers will use your product. If you have ever been to visit a VC, there is one question they will always ask:

“What problem are you solving ?” Now I have no idea where or when this question first appeared from, but it is definitely written in the VC 101 question manual. To me this question is actually wrong, or should I say incomplete. NOT all companies solve a problem, I am still waiting for someone to tell me what problem Facebook solved for me…in fact I think it created several more. I now have to maintain networks in another place, and poke people instead of emailing. Also I am sure I lived happily before twitter, again they seemed to have solved a problem without me knowing I had one.

And this is why the question is incomplete. So let me attempt to complete the question.

Humans…or so they tell me, only ever do things (please refer to your psychology tutor on this one) because

a) It takes them towards a GAIN

b) It takes them away from a PAIN

So the complete question is “What problem does your idea solve, OR what gain/advantage are your providing to the customer ?”…Can VC’s please start completing the sentence.

Of course what is a problem solver for some, maybe a gain provider for others.

So the next step is to answer the question above. What is the pain point, or what is the gain. Again answering this will also give feedback to which Model you use above.

E.G If you adopt model A, you are charging people or companies. Both of these will pay for a service if

a) You save them money

b) You save them time…which again is money

c) You make them money

So the only real GAINs products/services provide are

a) increased revenues

b) decreased costs

If on the other hand you adopt Model B, you will most likely be solving a pain of some sort, i.e I cannot communicate with all my employees at once, or I need to backup my files, or I need to get in touch with my school mates. Of course some of these pain points will link back to a gains mentioned above…but you get the idea.

Please note, so far we have spent no money, and we have no business plan, and not even a demo of our product.

Summary

1. You should now have an idea of which model your business will follow

2. You should now know which pain/gain you are providing

Next time we will expand this to work out “To Whom”

Intelligence comes from the Latin root intelligere, of understanding. Just because I know a fact...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:11:03 +0000

Intelligence comes from the Latin root intelligere, of understanding. Just because I know a fact doesn’t mean that I can put it into a context. The more intelligent someone is, the more they can see a fact in terms of other things. The greatest form of intelligence is someone who can make big links between different contexts, such as the scientist F. M. Burnet, who applied the principles of evolution to the immune system. IQ tests might measure agility, the ability to see a fact in an abstract sense, but it doesn’t require a person to see the full background or to have an understanding of history, say, or economics.

Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at the University of Oxford and director of the Royal Institution

Those who read my tweets may have heard my ramblings about a crowd sourced weather system. Surely if...

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:59:41 +0100

Those who read my tweets may have heard my ramblings about a crowd sourced weather system. Surely if we tweet our location + sunny/rain + Clear/cloudy + wind direction (hard part), someone can map this onto google maps, and voila we have realtime weather, even some prediction, since we can see what the weather is in North london, and will know its moving south, and as it moves tweets will update this, Mr Met office get with the program you have big machines doing nothing…

The Idea : Creating the Marketing Pitch

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:39:33 +0100

Just when you thought it was safe to come out, I decide to write another blog post. So far we have:

1. Thought of an idea

2. Validated the idea

All with just a pen, paper and a bowl of cereal. We now need to take the next step, and this is fine tuning the idea, really boiling it down to its basic pitch. Some people call this the “Elevator Pitch.” I however feel this is wrong, mainly because I tend not to travel in elevators, but also I tend not to sell in an elevator :-). Seriously, I think you need to view it a little differently.

Imagine you were given a budget of £1 million to go and sell your product/service. The limitation was that you had to spend all this money on sponsoring football shorts, or on billboards. How would you tell the world what you do? This is what you need to create now, and that is why I call it a marketing pitch. You need to be able to sell your idea, explain your idea and get people all hot and excited, simply by using one to two lines.

Now many of you will say “Impossible, can’t be done,” my idea is so technical, its needs explaining. The sad truth my friend is, if it is that complicated, you will only get a handful of sales, which require 3 hour 1-2-1 meetings. Even those will be limited, since a cold call, or an email, which cannot explain what you do in a few sentences, will usually lose the person at the other end.

So if your idea is really going to get you that Ferrari, you need to create the “Marketing Pitch”….let us begin.
1. Write down everything your service does. Let’s imagine you are selling a collaboration project (a recent project which came across my radar)
a) Helps you store
b) Helps you work quicker
c) Share documents
d) Share and keep track of communication
Etc etc
You get the idea, everything it does, how it helps, everything.

2. Now organise all of this into a paragraph of text. Write long “story” like flowing sentences, just ensure that you have covered everything that you do.
Note: Another way of doing this is to record what you say to other people when you meet them

3. Get down the pub, have a drink, come back to this paper in 24 hrs. Do NOT skip this step, not because going to the pub is essential, BUT because the delay is.

4. You will notice, that some of the lines no longer make sense, or are not needed. If you can’t see this, show it to someone else. Ask them to cross out the lines which mean nothing.

5. By now you should be left with a distilled version of what you started with. Now get a dictionary and a thesaurus. Start to replace words, or collections of words. Remove those extra words e.g replace “However, we now offer” and change to “We offer”. Replace “More recently” with “Recently”. You know we all like to pad our English, change it. (I am sure I can write this blog post in 3 lines if I tried :-)). If you are no good at this, find someone good at English to do it.

6. Now your description should be much tighter. What we need to do now is to further distill one or two key ideas. To do this, you simply set yourself a boundary. Ask yourself “What if I could only bring to market two things, or even one, which one would I pick?”
So thinking about collaboration, would it be storage, or would it be “working together on documents in realtime.” Do you need to be different? Or is your service just better than others, if so why? This part is all about your entire business idea. Are you unique, is it groundbreaking, or just another me too, but with a difference. Scratch out the lines which do not fit anymore.

7. At long last you should be down to 1-2 sentences. This is your marketing pitch…almost. Put back on the shelf, down the pub again you go. This time for 48 hrs (No you do not need to spend all that time in the pub)

8. Come back, highlight in your sentence three key words, power words, something which tell you what you do. Do you have more than three, if so, pick the top three, the others need to go. Reword the sentence. You are home. It’s done.

9. “ABC.com allows you to…….”

Of course you can change the wording to suit your audience.
Now write this down, and memorise it. You are ready to go and validate this marketing pitch. Down the pub you go, find a couple of new people, or head off to the nearest tech meetup, pitch the line. If 90% of them get it, you can sit back and congratulate yourself, if not, get back to the text, and reiterate the entire process.

All this and still no spend, no website, no development, nothing.
Please note the marketing pitch has nothing to do with go-to market plans. This is still about validating your idea. Although, whilst writing it down, you will have had to think a little more about your customers, who they are, how they will buy.

You can now write down what you do on the back of a business card, hand it to people….simply the best marketing tool there is. Next step Building It….

P.S With all the references about going down the pub, I don’t want people to assume that you need to be intoxicated to build a great business (I am sure some may agree to this)

Seedcamp finalists...the 21..23 actually

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:46:03 +0100

Well the second round has happened, and a shortlist for the seedcamp week has been announced, and Vouchacha is still there, nice one Ben.

Advertag – London, UK -Advertag is a semantic, non-hierarchic, tag-based list and search system. It allows users to submit any advert-style listing in the vein of Gumtree or Craigslist to a self-ordering, semantic database that allows the extremely fast, accurate and user-friendly retrieval of those adverts

Boxed Ice – Bromsgrove, UK - A server monitoring app, seen lots of these

Brainient – Bucharest, Romania - Video technology, I think its there layered brain offering, which is really cool, layering info/ads over video

Codility – Warsaw, Poland - The software assesses tech skills, hence helps in pre-screening candidates

Comufy – London, UK -Allows you to link together all you different modes of communication

Erply – Estonia - No idea :-)

Joobili – Budapest, Hungary - They basically tell you where and when events are happening around the globe, so you can plan you travel better.

Kukunu – London, UK - Again something to do with making travel better

Loc8 Solutions – Edinburgh, UK - Their tech allows you to build mobile phone apps quicker and cheaper than software development companies

Patients Know Best – Cambridge, UK - Allowing individuals to connect into the NHS, I guess by viewing records, and interacting with specialists themselves. I just don’t understand the entire home page :-)

Petsicon – Berlin, Germany - A information source for dog health

Plug in SEO – London, UK - I think the name says it all.

ShoutEm – Zagreb, Croatia - Allows you to build your own microblogging social network

Pearl Systems – Bristol, UK - Web based accounting, crm.

Talasim.com – Amman, Jordan - I think its to do with entertaining content to the mobile phone. Would be great if someone could interpret the website

Teachable – London, UK - Teaching resources by teachers

Vooices – Wigan, UK - Phone controlled realtime, multiplayer application platform. In the “queens english” it allows you to control games and applications using your voice.

VouChaCha – London, UK - Location based voucher system for the mobile phone. No more lost coupons, all on a phone, when you want them, where you want them

Wondergraphs – Leuven, Belgium - I don’t know, but am guessing its to do with graphs.

World on a Hanger – London, UK -Web based software for clothes manufacturers do enable them to manage the end-to-end process.

YubiTech – Ramat Gan, Israel - Seems to ease the problem of developing apps for various mobile platforms.

Kwaga- France -Manage email better

Platogo - Austria - Social gaming network for browser based games.

And that’s it, no more. Good luck to one and all. My favourites in no order are

1. Vouchacha, the world really needs a popular phone based coupon system

2. World on a Hanger - A perfect niche market, not exciting, not something I would use, but a good business.

3. Brainient - Just like the concept

4. Yubitech - This is so needed

Several do not seem to at first sight have a clear customer set, which will be a problem, but then I am not privy to their business models, hence I maybe wrong.

Dropbox ycombinator application http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:44:01 +0100

Dropbox ycombinator application

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html

Seedcamp Round 2 - finalists

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:05:00 +0100

28 out of the 41 teams to make it to seedcamp interviews. NOTE this is NOT seedcamp week. I only have this list, if people know the other 13 missing from this list do let me know.

Skyforge

Codility - I don’t have a website for this just a youtube video…update - okay I have just been informed that the website is….wait for it codility.com. Wake up brain!!!

Preona - I need confirmation on this, hence if anyone knows @swizec ask him to tweet :-)….Update - Confirmed, I really like this one, way cool

Vooices

Emotionai

Globepinners - unconfirmed

Witsbits

Kukunu

Veevid

So if you are one of the 13 missing, or know who they are please tweet me on @iqbalgandham

Would be great to know who did not get in, and get public opinion on them, after all it is the public who will be using these apps/services/products and not the VC’s

Great summer/autumn party Bootlaw guys, but did realise that entrepreneurs dislike dancefloors, it...

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:07:54 +0100

Great summer/autumn party Bootlaw guys, but did realise that entrepreneurs dislike dancefloors, it seemed as if the room downstairs was being avoided like the plague…

The Idea: Validation

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:42:32 +0100

Okay, so a little delay between posts, but life throws curve-balls, and blogs must wait.

So we have a ground breaking, life changing idea. What’s next? We need to validate our idea. So it’s time to get dressed, and go out into the world…don’t worry this is not street level market research, we are too early for that.

First, we need a target list of your friends, peers, generally intelligent people (NOTE: if you have no friends, you really are working far too hard, and need to find some before your build something). Write down their names, and then see which one of them would use/buy your product/service. i.e if it’s an online product like Ebay, there is no point in asking your grandma (unless she is addicted to the web) since she possibly will not “get it”. On the other hand if its a porn site, your mum (and dad) may not be a good idea. If it’s a website which carries out semantic search, and you cannot explain why semantics will make search better, stay away from everyone :-)

Build the target list, as if you were going to sell, create 3 groups:
1. Intelligent people who live online, and try lots of different things.
2. People who may use what you are doing. e.g if you sell shoes online, your sister maybe a good one.
3. People who will not have any idea of what I am talking about, BUT are negative people, who will ask me really dumb questions, which I would not have thought about.

Now you have these 3 groups, you need to work out how-to reach them. It’s kind of like selling, maybe a call, maybe a email, or a drink down the pub (i.e face-to-face), but work out how-to reach them, and then find a cheap way of doing it. Is there a event where you can meet them all in one go like a barbecue.

All the prep is now done, you have the ingredients, your raring to go, you know your target group…it’s all so exciting….BUT what if they don’t like the idea. Okay this is important, you do NOT need to sell the idea, you are looking for FEEDBACK, so keep your mouth shut, and ears open. If they dislike it, just listen to them do not argue, do not persuade, just listen…..we are here to validate not increase the size of your ego.

The day comes when it’s time to meet. All you need is a pen and a pad of paper, nothing else, we do not want website mockups, (if you have done these you did not listen to me did you? you have wasted time, bin them).

Meet your friends, and tell them what you want to do, and why. Write down all what they say, good, bad and ugly. Note the reaction when you finish your first sentence…

Did you have to explain further?

Did they ask relevant questions?

Do they know someone else doing it ?

Did they compare to others ?

Spend no more than 30-45 minutes, and make sure you write it all down.
Now after this exercise you should have spoken to 10-15 people, classify the results into a simple yes/no bucket. People who get it, or people who do not.
The you further classify these bins into “People who would use it/ People who would not”

You can take this further, although at this stage I think its far enough.
If no-one gets it, either you idea really sucks, or you suck at explaining (remember not everyone is a salesman), or your pitch sucks. You need to work out which one, usually you will get some notion of what’s wrong from what extended questions they asked.
If this is the case you cannot move forward, and do not, do not IGNORE what people have said. You need to iterate over this process, you need to find another group of people, change the way your present, what you say, and see what people say, unless you get 90% of the people “getting it” and saying nice things about it, keep iterating OR accept you have a bad idea…and go back to bed.

Once you have reached the point where everyone (almost everyone) likes it, you are ready to move onto the next step ‘Creating the marketing pitch”….but alas my fingers are tired from typing, so you will have to wait…so far we have spent nothing on this idea, except a round of drinks….bootstrapping at its best :-). See you next time, and no, I still have not worked out how to let people comment.

The Idea: Startup

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:34:11 +0100

We all have idea’s, some of them good, some bad, and some just plain ugly. We all have an entrepreneur’s streak within us also. But how do we get from an idea to a startup to a “proper” business. That is what the posts with the “Startup” caption on this blog are all about, its a story or should I say a journey, of what to do, and how to build a startup. Some of it is from experience, some from what I have learnt from others, and a little bit just ‘je ne sais quoi’.

I am still a student in this mystic “art of the start” (Guy Kawasaki words), which I think is more a science. Hence some posts may get edited over time, as I learn a little more. Enough of the babbling…

So you woke up one day, ripped the covers of your partner, screamed and said “I have had the most amazing idea” or something to that affect. After being cursed for waking up the household, you continue to run round your apartment (hopefully dressed) just dying to do something….but not knowing what. Do you write something down? do you call someone? what if, what if you Google, and someone else is already doing it? All these questions run around your head, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes down you vest, it matters not. You have just discovered the idea that will make you the next Google…and you start to see the Ferrari.

Thats the hard part done, we have an idea, now to the easy part (I am joking here :-)).

What we need to do with this idea is to validate it, but right about now, what is starting to happen is your idea has started to grow, you are adding payment systems to the initial idea, you are going multilingual, you are scaling up infrastructure to serve the entire human population, and any animal which maybe able to read and write. Its getting complicated, and you have not even finished lunch (yes time has moved on).

Aaargh its dinner time, and your one idea has now become two, and then from no where, a third pops into your head. Now what, panic? You arose this morning with one really cool ground breaking, ferrari funding idea, and now you have three. Life sucks.

At this point you need to stop, sit down and do a big “fat” NOTHING (in other words switch the brain off…an easy way to achieve this, is to watch Eastenders ..Google it), and realise you have become a victim of the “Entrepreneurs Curse”. Now let me rephrase that, you have become a victim of Iqbal’s version of the Entrepreneurs Curse”

The original version of this curse suggests that an Entrepreneur (could they not find a word easier to spell than Entrepreneur) has too many idea’s, my version is a little more refined, I feel that the curse is not having too many ideas, BUT attempting to work out which one will be the next Google, and their my friends is the problem, you will never know until it becomes the next Google. Read that again, you will not know how successful your business will become until it becomes successful. Never ever try to build a billion dollar business.

We are at the point where we now have several ideas (if you are reading this and you are not at this point, go back to bed, and stay there until you have the eureka moment, and if you do not, give up :-))…next post we will start to validate the idea

(You may have noticed there is no place to add comments, that is because I have not worked out on Tumblr how-to do this, I think there is some javascript I can plugin, if anyone knows do send me an email :-)

After much recovering from some mysterious (some call it swine) flu and other bugs I can actually...

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:35:20 +0100

After much recovering from some mysterious (some call it swine) flu and other bugs I can actually start writing on this blog. My first port of call is “Building a Startup..The Science Of”. I plan this to be a weekly post, and archive it on other sections of the blog. The first post going out tomorrow will be “The Idea”

try out google new search, its supposed to be faster, and from what I can see, it focuses more on...

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:19:26 +0100

try out google new search, its supposed to be faster, and from what I can see, it focuses more on data which changes..i.e realtime http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

So Yahoo and Microsoft get into Bed. Now a little hint as to how to kill Google. Use the...

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:03:40 +0100

So Yahoo and Microsoft get into Bed. Now a little hint as to how to kill Google. Use the browser….Let me explain. In Firefox there is a plugin, which allows you to type in a “query” into the location bar. This looks up results from google, your history, wikipedia etc, which means you can search and goto google results WITHOUT going to google’s homepage. This means you never see the Ads. If Microsoft actually got out of bed, they could (assuming they haven’t since I do not use) build this and Bing search into the browser. No one would ever then goto Google’s homepage, hence no Ad revenue (except Ads on other websites)…its not hard Microsoft

Its Friday, and trying out my new dashboard widget for posting to tumblr, next week my first post on...

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:17:39 +0100

Its Friday, and trying out my new dashboard widget for posting to tumblr, next week my first post on my shiny new blog, all about howto build a startup…

My Shiny New Blog

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:07:00 +0100

Okay so I now have a new blog, Why? simple the old one was…well Old :-)

I got a little bored of reviewing startups, and realised I spent most of my time helping others via email, chat, coffee meetings, you know the story. Well after a while I figured I may as well put these thoughts down onto a powerpoint. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was giving gyan at some get together of would be entrepreneurs.

Since then, the powerpoint has changed somewhat, and I felt there must be a better way of “dumping” all this info for all to use. Whether its useful or not, I leave to the reader.

I decided to use Tumblr, the reason for this was, I Hate Blogging. I want things simple, I need to post in a few seconds, and just get it out of my system.

Of course I am still in the startup arena myself, just cannot get enough, hence although I have some advice to offer, I much prefer to listen to others profess what they know.

So enjoy the rants, but please add your tips…