No, I am not talking about phones here, but I think this would be applicable on them as well

Few things to infer:

1. Product you are building is not what you want
1. Either you are not communicating well to your team about the product you want
2. You don’t have a great team in place to translate your idea into a functional product
2. Competitor have nailed it. They have a product which their competitor’s like.

What can you do now!

1. Work with your team and get their feedback. Do they feel good about competitor’s product too?
2. Analyze competitor’s product and figure out what makes their product better.
3. Before you start filling gap, think if you should continue moving in the same direction ( because customer have nailed it) , choose a new one OR augment your existing one.
4. Hire appropriate guys if you need to.
5. Do not let competitor’s product go out of site….you can learn a lot from them.

Have you been in love with your own competitor’s product? How did you dealt with it? Add your comments below.

You can also follow me at twitter @ruchitgarg

Here is a good piece of article which covers some tools which can help you create nice little prototypes. Most of them are paid but comes with trial versions. So be quick to create your prototype. Even if it leaves a watermark in there you should be fine explaining your idea ( unless you know that your audience wont like it and you might loose a big deal)

Prototype Tool Roundup

It tries to give answers to some of the interesting questions like:

1. To what social media sites do business people turn when seeking the information they need to do their jobs on a day-to-day basis? And what are they looking for?
2. What do people consider to be the most useful social media resources for business information (and, therefore, the most valuable social media sites on which B2B companies should participate in order to reach their target audience)?
3. What are the most popular types of social media initiatives among B2B companies, and is the impact of these initiatives visible in business results?
4. How do B2B companies judge social media success?

Its free to download, but registration required.

I am proud to introduce FounderWise a unique institute for founders in the Seattle/northwest USA to learn from the best of the breed CEOs and VCs who have gone through it and have taken the real challenge.

Below are details from mailer:

The Founder Institute ( http://www.founderinstitute.com) is a four month training program for both new and seasoned entrepreneurs. The Institute prepares founders to lead the next generation of world-class technology companies across a wide range industries, from the biotech to the internet. Weekly company-building sessions are guided by experienced CEOs, and they are held in the evening to allow participants to keep their day job or develop their companies during business hours. All of the program stakeholders, from the participating founders to the experienced CEO Mentors, share in the upside generated by the companies formed during the program. Participants also enjoy free services from more than three dozen Institute Partners, fundraising opportunities at fair market value, and a teamwork-oriented environment to build a company.

Sound good?  Potential Founders (students) interested in the Seattle winter semester of the Founder Institute can apply at http://www.founderinstitute.com/apply/5. Early Admissions Close on November 12, 2009, regular admissions are due by November 27, 2009.

Want to learn more about the Founder Institute program in the Seattle area?  Come to a special informational evening at the Boeing Auditorium on the University of Washington campus on the evening of November 2nd, 2009, hosted by the UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Registration for the free event is available at http://founderwise.com/events/.

FounderWise (http://www.founderinstitute.com) was launched to operate the Institute in Seattle and to be a founder-centric resource for simplifying the process of founding a successful startup, focusing on training entrepreneurs and establishing an extensive library of original and compiled startup resources.

Technorati Tags: founderwise,startup,seattle

Fair enough. This has been said so many times before, but rarely someone has talked about the fact that  one should prepare himself/team as if they really need to raise money from market.

Even if you don’t need to raise capital from VC ( which is good for you) there are certain benefits of mocking the idea that you need to raise the money and answering questions a typical VC would seek from you .

1. It brings discipline in you and your team: I have seen teams running or trying to run their business in a pot-luck style with no plans around why they are investing where they are and how long they will last with their current expenditure velocity. If you do the VC exercise, you and your team would know some facts about your own business and your money. Will help you to run your startup in a more planned manner.
2. It prepares the team to face and get ready to answer hard questions: VCs are tough nuts and they have to be because they are investing money without actually getting involved into your day to day operations. They pose tough questions and make you think outside all your emotions you have towards the product you are making and/or team you have in place.
3. It helps you validate: Once you are done with this exercise, I am sure you will end up with clearer vision, clearer milestones, clearer go to market strategy, clearer competitive landscape. ..you would have all your ideas flushed out clean and would be sitting in front of you in written. You can go back to it and validate how you are doing against it.
4. It actually prepares you ahead of time: Now that you have actually gone through mocking that you need to raise capital from VC, you are well prepared ahead of time( you never know). This would help you for your actual 5-15 minute session with the VC where he/she can figure out if this company has potential to go to next level ( they can actually figure it out sometime in 60 seconds).

I would love to know if there are people or teams which actually do this mock exercise. Also it would be good to know any professionals who can actually spend sometime with these startups and do a VC role play, pose tough questions and potentially guide them through actual fund raising from a VC.

Follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ruchitgarg

I could not get to attend this event as there was a huge waiting list (over 500 ) but then for some reason, Naked Truth decided me to be their ‘member of the week’. Below is the screenshot of the email I had received. Nothing attached with being member of the week, but its something unexpected.

You can read and see more about this event on Fred’s blog post.

What can help startups is, their relationship with people in the ecosystem.

Just as an example, One of the most talked about topic between wannapreneurs ( individuals who wants to be entrepreneurs) is how to reach a Venture Capitalist. Many a times this thought gets into head and mess everything up even before individual has actually thought through the product/company he/she wants to make. This is beautifully captured in this post How to approach VC

You can also Follow me on twitter.

Below is what I shared with her( and thought I should share it with you all)

1. KISS: Keep it simple and stupid. Your product name can be VeryGlorifiedWayOfMentioningSomethingVerySimple, but if its this complex, I am not going to remember about it.
2. Connect with Audience: Name should connect with users who are going to use your services and probably pay for it. e.g. I can keep name of my next webproject as httpWebRequestToFindBankAccountString, which might make sense to some technical folks around, but not for the people who might actually be using your product.
3. Follow your heart: At the end of the exercise if you are not confortable with what you get, whats the point? Go for a name which you think is the best. After all you should feel attached with this new name too.

Once you are done with name which satisfies both of the above requirements, you can design logo and add a punchline to it, to add to the whole story.

What do you think when you think about naming a product or a company?

Lets categorize leadership phases based on how people would react when a leader ( YOU) takes an initiative:

1. Laugh: People would laugh on you. Quite possible, because you are doing something different than others. What you are doing makes no sense to others, otherwise they would have done it before you did. Maybe.
2. Silence: When you keep doing all the stuff which made people laugh , but then which generated results, it shuts the mouth of people who are laughing. Its a silence phase when mass stops laughing and quietly observe what you are doing. They try to understand what you do and how you to doit.
3. Follow: As a leader you continue do all the great stuff and people would start following you. There may be some bright talent around you who may get inspired by you and starts his own leadership phase, but most of them would follow you. They would try to mimic what you already did.
4. Worship: This is an ultimate stage and I guess not so easy to attain. Most of the leaders we know may fall under phase #3. This is stage where people start worshipping you almost if not same as God. People can do anything for these leaders.

So now you know that when you take a new thoughtful initiative and people are laughing on you, probably you are on a leadership path.

This I learnt many years ago while I was still doing my studies, from a person I admire  Kunwar Shekhar Vijendra.

This article made some rounds/buzz in the circle as people around suddenly thought they now know a proven way of not investing in/for these geographical location, or even throttling out users.

I wonder why would you not want your users to use your service?? After all users are using your services in legitimate legal way! They did not hacked away your bandwidth, but using the content you wanted your users to watch.

Issue here is with the business model you have chosen and NOT with user base of a specific geographic location. There can be nothing better if you have a shop and you have customers lined outside., but my friends You can’t sell same thing to everyone in same way. You should know how to monetize your content.

As Ram Charan points out in one of his videos, you would need to think like a shopkeeper around the corner.

Another example I want to quote is of Twitter. Very famous, useful ( atleast for some) millions of users, revnues??? They may have some money making plans..but? On other hand look at another service SMS Gup Shup which is famous, useful ( atleast for some), around 20 million users, and revenue=$150,000 USD and expecting break even in couple of months. Importantly, GupShup is on the way to make profits by ‘selling’ to people in the same geographies.