Volume 91

05/06/2011

Would You Do What You Do if You Weren’t Getting Paid?

If you aren’t passionate about your business, you are at a severe disadvantage to those who are. Passion gives you the energy to do whatever it takes to become to become great at what you do.

Money Follows Passion, Not the Other Way Around

Start by doing what you love, as well as you can, and money will follow. Best of all, you will be happy to get out of bed each day.

Great, and often forgotten and sometimes very hard to follow words of wisdom. Money follows passion, not the other way around. (of course money can follow lots of things, insecurities, fears, etc)

One thing I do know is that making money is not the same as starting a business. For entrepreneurs, this is an important thing to understand. Most of us identify with the products we create or services we provide. I make software. He is a headhunter. She builds computer networks. But the fact is, all of us must master one skill that supersedes the others: making money. You can be the most creative software designer in the world. But if you don’t know how to make money, you’re never going to have much of a business or a whole lot of autonomy.

Amazing column this month in INC by Jason Fried of 37 Signals. I’ve met several people who I would say just have the skill of making money, no matter what they are working on. There’s no question it is a skill, but I realized reading this that I viewed it more as a born talent. That is, in the back of my head I always viewed making money as this thing certain people were just born knowing how to do. That doesn’t make sense…it can be developed and learned through practice like anything else.

Loved this quote from Adam:

The idea is 10% of the whole puzzle, day to day execution is the other 90%……Any successful company is just a mountain of little decisions, and so going and making sure you’re approaching each of those decisions with focus and commitment is the most important part of succeeding.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the next best time is right now.

—

Unknown

Plant a tree, start a business, quit smoking, start exercising, change your life…

Love this quote…start seeding your future now.

How to Find Out if Your Idea is Good or Bad

My main pieces of advice are:

• Build a very simple prototype for your idea and get it in front of potential users. You’ll learn more the day you talk to your first user than the months you’ve spent pontificating
• Don’t be afraid to do things manually at first like we did
• Build a landing page with screenshots that describe your future product and see if people will sign-up for your invite list. Dropbox did that before they had a product and signed-up 100K people.  Clearly, they were solving a problem people had!
• Cut every feature except for the core feature.  Seriously, you don’t need any of those extra features.
• 95% of startups are able to have a prototype built in less than two weeks.
• Don’t write a business plan.

It’s very likely your idea is bad. Find that out as soon as possible so you can evolve it to a better idea.

I believe almost any idea can be tested the way described below. I’ve often thought there is an opportunity to build a service that combines a CMS (content management system), multivariate testing (like a virtualwebsiteoptimizer.com), and quick, effective google adwords campaign management to quickly test an idea. I digress – I think Vinicius advice below is great for anyone who has that idea they think might be worth pursuing…

Lessons Learned

1. Every visitor to your website is an opportunity. Take advantage of that opportunity through website optimization and A/B testing.
2. Question assumptions. Everyone on the campaign loved the videos. All the videos ended up doing worse than all the images. We would have never known had we not questioned our assumptions.
3. Experiment early and often. We ran this experiment in December of 2007 and reaped the benefits for the rest of the campaign. Because this first experiment proved to be so effective we continued to run dozens of experiments across the entire website throughout the campaign. 

 

Lots of great lessons in this post on how the Obama campaign used multivariate testing to optimize. I’ve learned in my own testing that you can spend all the time in the world trying to get inside the mind of your users, and doing what you think makes sense only to find the exact opposite is what ultimately works.

In detail:

1. People. Hire people to help you. This will be your first instinct but it should really be your last resort.
2. Product. Build product to do the work for you. Every single product in the world is a type of scale. Facebook has taken this to the extreme through automation.
3. Capital. This is what VCs do. They raise billions of dollars, invest it, let their CEOs manage it, and hopefully profit.
4. Community. This isn’t a recent innovation but it might seem that way. Communities have been banding together for a long time to form countries, topple dictators, knit, save the environment and so on. But now they’re forming quicker than ever and building products like Wikipedia.

I enjoyed this post on Venture Hacks today. It actually reminded me a lot of a post I did a few years ago on the inputs of entrepreneurship.