Startup, What Problem are you solving? I've found the answer

How do you come up with business ideas? Any very savvy person in the startup would point you to Paul Grahams startupideas.html document.
The essay points out that it's much more easier to get good ideas when you think of problems that exists in the world. Problems are bad things and people would always want to get rid of them, so if you have something that solves such problems, going into business would be quite straight forward.

Problems get level. Big problem = Big idea, choose your level.

In startup context, I see the value of thinking from a problem perspective to generate ideas worth chasing. That's very clear. e.g Dropbox helps with the mess of having to copy your files from one media to another, but what problem does a game like angry birds solve?

This is a classic situation newbie tech entrepreneurs may find themselves in -"what problem is your startup solving"?

To get around this, I like to think of it as 2 and only 2 things you could do as startup:

1. Solve a problem (pain)
2. Meet a need. (desire)

If you are not solving a problem as it were, you are meeting a need. In the case of a game like angry birds, the need for entertainment.

But just a few minutes ago, I found a better answer to the puzzle and I realized that the issue has been the way we were framing problems. See the answer in the quote below:

Everyone is in search of progress (outcomes/reaching goals) and it helps to think of problems in terms of the obstacles that keep them from achieving this progress

We tend to frame only the obvious problems as the problems worth solving. Whereas, anything that limits us from reaching what we want can be seen as a problem.

That's insightful!

http://leanstack.com/no-problems-in-your-business-model-is-a-problem/

Explaining a Tech term to a non-tech audience:MVP

So I have the task of explaining MVP to a non- tech audience. First, MVP is probably not exactly a tech term. Let's call it a buzz word. The term is an interesting one, so interesting, I can't seem to complete this post about it.

So yeah.. here is my 1 min layman explanation of Minimum viable  Product.

MVP is simply an abrreviation for Minimum viable product.It is the least thing you could do as a startup to provide or be of value to your customers. 

There has been so many arguments on the definition of a MVP, and just like the many other startup topics, there is no silver bullet, no clear cut answers, definitely no asking "How do you know what minimum is". 

Some folks have tried to bring understanding to the concept by coining their own version of the same concept. An example is MLP... minimum lovable product. but there is the question of if the love can translate to $$. 

In my humble opinion, I would say, forget MVP, MLP and do MSP. Minimum sellable product. I may have seen this somewhere, but I agree we should let sales be the final judge. Thank you.

Good enough? 

Inspiration overload! The meaning of life by 3rd Graders

I just had to have this on here.

You run the Show... This is your life..you're in control.... you gotta do what feels right in your heart..... The difference between  winners and losers is persistence....

The bamboo story..I always love it........ 

You don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great. This is wisdom for startups. 

 

Post by via Facebook.

This is the one singular reason why 8 out of 10 startups will fail

One of the many tweets that sums up the fundamental principle of Lean Startup. Retweet if you agree with this.

[8] Most #startups fail because they try to find customers for their products, rather than finding products for their customers.
— ayo Dawodu ♛ (@tjwizking) February 3, 2015

You develop customers first. Not the product,not the app, customer development first. That's the riskiest part. It's hardly a technology problem, always a marketing one.

Don't sell what you can make, make only what you can sell, that's putting the horse before the cart - as it should be, Get it?

[Incomplete] Minimum viable Product. How to define what minimum is?

The concept of minimum viable product is relative. While this maybe an obvious truth, same may not hold for many newbie entrepreneurs (like myself). How do you determine what is minimum?

I think this would be based on at least 2 variables like the technology available to you and the knowledge of the idea available to you and you are sure off. Let's add a third one, your risk appetite.

Stepping back, the why of a MVP is to test. We think of it as an experiment and the outcome of this experiment is data.

Page 95 of The Lean Startup and read what Eric Ries says: “deciding how complex an MVP [Minimum Viable Product] needs to be cannot be done formulaically. It requires judgement”...

Still thinking about this... stay tuned.

ayo Dawodu's 2014 in Retro

A few accomplishments.

I started my first business officially. Here is the press release.


Successfully organized the first Lean Startup workshop in Lagos. Arguably the best startup workshop the Lagos startup scene has experienced in a while. Over 50 in attendance, for the 3 day period. Forever grateful to those who made it possible.

I added 7 more clients to 99digital.co with very little marketing efforts. Referrers, many thanks.

Failed with Quickchow, my mobile clock-in app and a proposal to a major mall in Lagos.

I literally traded Faith as cash, this is not your average "I have faith" situation. I should tell this story someday.

Got enrolled at Meltwater. Globally successful tech entrepreneur in the making. We are not joking here.

Went surfing.

Met everyone I met in 2014. You all are amazing. Thank you.

Lesson Learnt

I had goals and plans for the 1st quarter of 2014. Only accomplished about 35% of it. More or less, more of less.
It goes to say, no business plan survives first contact with a customer.
Whatever can go wrong, would go wrong. So why plan?

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Have a goal, be flexible how you get there, there are more ways to reach that goal than you know.

Secrets unlocked

If you think you can or you can't, you are right.
Speak what you want to see. Period.

To God alone be the Glory.

Cheers to a grander 2015! Clinkk!

THIS, MY FRIEND, WOULD CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT START-UPS

If you own a business start-up or plan to set up one soon, there is a good chance you have come across this statement: “Over 70 percent of businesses do not survive the first two years.”

Start-ups are challenging, and if we are focusing on the wrong things or applying mundane strategies, we are not just shooting ourselves in the leg; we would be using a semi-automatic weapon to do just that, thus crippling the whole thing even before the first step at progress is ever made.

So how do we focus on the right things? That question has so many valid answers and I am yet to discover all. However, I have a few and would like to share one that would help you understand what to focus on in your start-up sojourn.

Here is it: See your start-up operations as one of these two orientations majorly, transaction-oriented or engagement-oriented.

Transaction-oriented

Start-ups that fall into this category would want to worry about quickly sealing deals as it were, because that’s what actually brings in the revenue. Money doesn’t come from customers spending time interacting on your platform, money comes from them actually paying, so you would want to speed up processes that lead to paying and forsake any technology that slows that, no matter how “engaging” it may be .

Hotel booking online: a transaction-oriented operation

A simple example of a transaction-oriented operation is a hotel booking service. This is highly transactional; no time to beat around. I simply need to get somewhere nice and comfy to lay my head and perhaps have a few meetings. But then, a typical idea of hotel business meeting technology, of which online hotel booking is the most common, would miss this. This is because its executors would be more concerned about  engaging the customers via their great looking website (wasting time) rather than getting them closer to the goal (booking and paying ) as fast as possible – which is what brings in the dough.

You only win when the hotel wins. You do not win when online visitors look at the nice banner pictures of the rooms of different hotels, navigate around and read about this hotel and its facilities (so much of time wasting). Executing online hotel booking this way is a great ruin from my standpoint – it depicts an entirely different business model and should not be fused with online hotel booking.

Remember what started it: Customers that need to spend some time away from home, and have a meeting or two. How have they done it before you built your shiny hotel booking website? They walked into a hotel of choice and at the reception, they book and pay; they don’t check the rooms or ask about the history of the hotel (we assume they may know or may not; it really doesn’t matter).

They simply walk-in, book and pay. Transaction completed.

Replicate that model online, have the hotel know they have an extension of their business on the cyberspace and have them pay you for carrying out more transactions for them, then you can maintain doing loads of that and have a business; a tech business.

You’ll be getting paid for how many customers you bring in. Not how many of them clicked around.

Another classic example is a taxi booking service. It follows the same model as I have explained, but I would like to give it a bit more context as I have, in the past, thought of developing a mobile solution around it.

App for Metro Cabs?

Just like most techies today, light-bulb! What if people could get to book taxis online?

Yeah! Great idea.  Let’s do this!

I built the thing half way and I thought, “how do I even push this, how do I make money?” Now, this was a time when Red cabs, Metro cabs and co were all still shiny and new; they had just started business.

Eventually I discovered it was all a sham, since delivering value (getting customers to pay a cabbie) was going to be the toughest thing ever (My solution was mobile web back then, but it was pretty good).

Why was I going to fail hard if I had gotten crazy about it and continued with the development?

I was slowing down the transaction process via my app.

Most folks that need a cabbie would rather call or text one at best. Even the best apps that would pick your location via GPS and display a picture of the cab you have booked and even give you GPS tracking are not sustainable in my opinion. Online taxi booking service is not an engagement thing majorly; it is transactional, and it needs to be fast.

A sustainable solution would be phone call and SMS, which can deliver a good enough experience for less cost than a mobile app today.

My point exactly: For transaction-oriented start-ups, identify what delivers value and get that done ASAP and repeatedly.  Forsake “cutting-edge” technology and get it done the fastest way possible. Speed is the keyword in transactions.

Engagement-oriented

Start-ups that fall into this category are the toughest to develop into self-sustaining businesses, but when a good model is discovered, they return on a massive scale. Here, stakeholders deal with users mostly and not customers.  This is pretty difficult because users don’t pay. Only customers do.

So we find most start-ups trying to convert these users to customers, or trying to find another paying entity to sustain the business start-up.

Music services like Spinlet, Spotify, Jango radio, Deezer etc, all fall into this category. Stakeholders definitely want to worry about good interfaces for their applications and focus on things that would allow long lasting engagement with it. The aim is to maintain the interest of users and basically get them hooked.

Unlike transactional, it’s a much slower process towards capturing value so engagement is really the key here. In traditional business, I could liken this to a good customer service and experience.

Other examples would be instant messaging/chat services, social services and premium games.

In IM services or social services, users simply want to interact with other users, communicate, share photos and videos and gifs, comment, like, plus, tweet, pin, keek,  e.t.c. The ability of these platforms to do these things are what keep the users there, and because value is only created when users get on board, it does not sound right to make them pay. Without them your platform is dead. A social network cannot exist without people – this, my friends, makes it tough.

So how do these kinds of start-ups capture value that would be sustainable?

Most of them turn to advertisement, which makes advertisers the customers. Some offer extra services to users, in this case some of the users are converted to premium users (customers), and in other cases some turn to big data business.

The point here is start-ups in this category have to keep doing what they are doing to maintain the engagement between users. If the engagement stops, the show is over.

Whatsapp with a revenue model?

This is why I think Whatsapp may be having a pretty hard time monetizing its service. They have a good number of users which they are trying to convert to customer status; I am one.  I don’t know how far they have gone with that and since they are bent on not turning to ads, it may be really tough to make Whatsapp self-sustaining.

Paid advertisements, in some other cases, may be the sustaining model, since there is a good chance of making large impressions on the users. However it needs to be properly executed to yield returns, else they become intrusive and ruin engagement.a

By the way, ads are coming to Instagram soon. So far it does not generate any revenue. It would be interesting to see how that comes through.

Free games that have no in-app purchases clearly fall into this category and have potentials for very interesting money-spinning models.

Apart from in-app purchases or game currency, look out to Rovio (Angry Birds guys). Those folks developed a successful merchandise business from Angry Birds, and I hear there is a movie in the making – which just means more dollars.

There are some that fall in between; one need to apply a right mix of the way things work in both worlds to execute successfully.  e.g  E-commerce services.

So next time when you think about start-ups, try to place them in one of these two categories and hopefully it helps you understand how you should go about your execution and your potential for success.

I’m not exactly sure how this sounds to the average tech person, but if you see things in a different perspective, please let us get talking in the comment space below. Additions, subtractions, and feedback are also welcomed.

This article was published on http://connectnigeria.com/articles/2013/11/15/two-perspectives-that-will-change-your-view-of-start-ups and http://citewire.com/this-my-friends-would-change-the-way-you-think-about-start-ups/