The pillars of Sustainable Quality of Life
Health.
Family and friends.
Hard, meaningful work.
A passive income.
Wealth
“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”
- Henry David Thoreau
Idea vs execution: are ideas worthless?
Where’s the local maximum, the highest hill? Photo: garry61
This is a favorite topic on the tech entrepreneur site Hacker News. It keeps popping up every other day, just recently in this thread about disruptive ideas.
The notion that “ideas are worthless” is sort of a counter reaction to the instinctive approach of most beginner entrepreneurs, who think that their idea is the best ever (and must be kept secret so no one “steals it” – aka stealth disease) and if only they could get funding, find a team, wait for the economy to bounce back, wait for spring to arrive and wait for the moon to be aligned with Venus THEN they will most definitely succeed because the idea is so good.
You might as well give them the exit money straight away because, you know, it such a great idea.
As you might suspect, I disagree. I do think that ideas should be treated as though they are worth close to nothing.
The article linked above, about disruptive ideas, describes different ways to find holes in existing markets by thinking out of the box. Aha! you say, see, the idea actually is important!
Well. I’d like to think of it this way: execution is the active searching of the problem space until you find a local maximum of customer value. The idea is only the starting point.
Sure, you can get lucky and find an idea that is already on a local maximum – but you wouldn’t know that without verifying it.
Simply thinking “what if you sold socks that didn’t match?” (an example in the article) is far from enough to prove that it’s a good idea. If you gave it just five minutes you would probably come up with a hundred similar seemingly weird ideas.
Some examples:
What if TVs were not boxes but bubble-shaped?
What if cars bounced like rubber balls? Would that make them safer?
What if pants had four legs? Of different lengths.
What if shoes were glued together?
What if I had an internet connected computer in my sight of vision constantly?
What if books never ended?
What if people could grow all their food, including meat, at home, in a box like a micro oven?
I can go on like this forever. How do I know which ideas are the good ones?
By testing them in the real world – searching the problem space for a local maximum – that’s the only way. And that takes execution and effort. Thus: the idea, by itself, is worthless.
“Books and apps” is the new “brick and mortar”
A “brick and mortar”-business is a business based in a physical store. It sells goods of some kind. The name comes from the building material used to build houses and the name represents something different than a virtual store, an e-commerce site.
I’d like to propose a third kind of store: “books and apps”.
A “books and apps”-store sells virtual goods that’s purely digital. Primarily e-books and mobile apps – thus the name.
A “books and apps”-store doesn’t have a physical store or even a warehouse because it doesn’t sell physical goods.
The cool thing about it is that you can start one yourself with minimal investment. Write a book, sell it as a PDF – or a mobile app. It’s never been easier and that’s why we will see plenty of small “books and apps”-shops where writers or developers work on their own to build and sell virtual goods.
A “books and apps”-shop is not a startup – or at least it doesn’t have to be. There’s nothing magical about it. Anyone can do it. It’s a new way to build a lifestyle business, made possible by the mobile app stores and the Kindle – with the added benefit that you can work on it from anywhere.
Books and apps – you can do it too.
What’s your SQL-index? [Sustainable Quality of Life]
No, I’m not talking about databases (SQL is a language used by programmers to fetch data.) I’m talking about Sustainable Quality of Life and how much of your income is coming from a meaningful, fun and qualitatively sustainable income. That’s the SQL-index.
Sustainable – as in, I can do this until I’m way past my retirement age. I can do this because it’s rewarding, meaningful and fun. Not work because I have to – work because I want to.
Sustainable – as in balanced. I have time to spend with my family and friends. With people who matter.
But also sustainable in an ethical sense. I’m adding value to society. I’m making the world a better place.
Listen to this TED-talk by Jane McConigal. At about 10 minutes in there’s a great quote. She says:
“We are optimized as human beings to do hard, meaningful work.”
Think about that for a second. It’s true – isn’t it? Hard work is the most rewarding activity you can do – if it’s meaningful! If it brings true value to yourself, your family, friends and society at large. Why spend your life doing anything else?
Making money is (relatively) easy. If you’re reasonably bright, strong or talented it’s basically just a question of quantity. Work a lot – make a lot of money.
The truly difficult part is doing it and keeping your SQL-index high at the same time. Making money and having fun and making meaning at the same time.
There’s actually a shortcut to achieve this: passive income – making money while you’re sleeping. But still, you have to produce something that generates the passive income and the optimal way to do this is while keeping the SQL-index high (because then you can produce a lot of it).
Don’t measure your life in the number of gadgets you have or the size of your bank account or the fanciness of the brand of your car. Those are just external attributes. Measure your SQL. That’s what matters.
Update: someone who decided to raise their SQL-index:
“I concluded that I’d rather live poor and hungry than work in a large, bureaucratic and political environment where I personally couldn’t see how my efforts created value.” – Bryan Johnson
Are you passionate about your job?
Of course you are. It’s the hot thing to be. This is the new status symbol. If you’re not working with something you’re passionate about, you’ve lost the game.
Worth noting, though: the word “amateur” means “lover of” or “love doing”.
Someone who is “professional”, on the other hand, is a person who gets consistently the same result from doing the same work. This is generally what people pay for.
Now would you rather want to be someone who loves what they’re doing or someone who’s basically a working machine?
Going from passionate amateur to passionate professional is extremely difficult. Just keep that in mind.
Wings in the air
What do you need to succeed with your startup?
You need persistence, because it will take a long time. Longer than you expect.
You need passion, to endure.
You need the right kind of money. Most often this is money from your customers. Not VCs. Not banks. Not your friends. Customers!
You most definitely need to get started.
But in order to succeed the most important thing is to get your wings in the air.
You know how ducks sort of run on the water before they take off and fly away? Running on the water takes a lot of energy. It makes you less agile – and you may run out of water to run on even if you don’t collapse from exhaustion first.
The duck running on the water is you.
It’s you running your startup without sufficient revenue to support yourself. It’s you without “porridge money” (enough money to buy porridge to live on).
Make sure you can take off and get your wings in the air before the water runs out. Once you’re flying things are completely different.
Nokia – too big to ask for help?
I’m sure you’ve seen the Nokia Plan B and all the follow-ups. There’s certainly not a lack of creativity out there.
It begs the question: what if Nokia, instead of selling their soul to Microsoft, simply would have asked their fans for help?
Yes, I know. Crazy. But, what if…?
What Apple did “wrong” with the iPhone
Apple is now the largest mobile phone device manufacturer in the world based on value. When the first iPhone was released, I worked for one of their competitors and it’s striking how much Apple did “wrong” according to the practices in the industry in 2006-2007. This list can probably get much longer.
The name. You’re not supposed to give your phone a name. It’s supposed to be called a letter and a number. Yeah, the RAZR was cool, but that was it.
One device. You’re not supposed to have only one device. That’s madness! You should cover every possible segment of the market with various flavours of the same platform. In fact, you should use many platforms and OSes just to be “safe”.
No buttons. Users don’t understand a phone without buttons. You have to have buttons. If you have a touch screen it has to use a tiny pencil. But the phone should still have buttons.
No MMS. When the iPhone was released I worked for a competitor with operator requirements for Java ME. The end user never sees this, but each major operator sends thousands of pages of requirements that the device manufacturer is supposed to live up to. MMS is one of the most important ones. The iPhone didn’t have it. It seemed to be not based on operator requirements at all. Insane!
No video calls. How can you make an expensive smartphone and not include the coolest mobile technology of them all: video calling? You’re not supposed to do that. What? No one uses it? Don’t care, it’s cool, OK? And the industry spent billions developing it.
Lousy camera. The mega-pixel race was on but the first iPhone contained a 2MP camera. You’re supposed to max out the mega-pixels. That’s how you do it.
Poor bluetooth support. Another telecom favourite technology that you’re supposed to implement in a smartphone but that the first iPhone didn’t do very well.
No 3G (first generation). Now this is truly insane! The first iPhone didn’t even have 3G.
The price. The iPhone was too expensive. Everyone in the business knows that in order to get volume you have to handle the price pressure. You have to have volume or else the operators don’t want you in their deck (they sell subscriptions and want your phone to be as cheap as possible so the customer can buy an expensive subscription instead). You also have to prepare for being able to sell your phones in Africa and then they have to be super cheap. Remember the key word: VOLUME!
The size. Too big. Phones are small, OK? Small with lots of features!
The AT&T deal. The device manufacturer is supposed to do what the operator tells them to. The operator is supposed to be in command. Not the other way around.
Installable apps. This one’s a favourite. As I mentioned, I worked with Java ME and we (as in “our team”) could clearly see where the market was heading: the phone you buy in the store is only a starting point. The buyer should be able to customize it and install new features developed by third party developers (aka “apps”). There were some attempts to go in this direction but when we tried to push this harder everyone said the same thing “there are no operator requirements for this”. Oh well.
Yeah, the first iPhone didn’t have this either but when they finally did it they did it exactly right and created a whole new ecosystem. So this is actually two “wrongs”: first, not having downloadable apps at all and then when they did add it they added it completely outside the control of the operators. They even implemented their own payment mechanism.
Insane…
2010 in review – this blog in numbers
This blog is hosted on WordPress.com and they just sent a summary over last years activities on the blog.
Hm. Only 14 blog posts. I need to speed up this year. Hopefully, that would increase the visitor count as well. Also, there seems to be a bug in the mail generator. I didn’t have 2 visitors on my busiest day, March 3, I had 2709 visitors that day (I was on the front page of Hacker News).
The WordPress.com stats mail below:
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2010. That’s about 31 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 14 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 136 posts. There were 3 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 379kb.
The busiest day of the year was March 3rd with 2 views. The most popular post that day was It’s going to take five years.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were news.ycombinator.com, reddit.com, Google Reader, twitter.com, and blog.inklingmarkets.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for kinds of money, different kinds of money, ola ahlvarsson, bredbandsbolaget, and blocket omsättning 2009.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
1
It’s going to take five years March 2010
9 comments
2
Build a system, not a product December 2009
30 comments
3
Different kinds of money June 2010
2 comments
4
Money is failure September 2009
4 comments
5
Your business idea as a promise August 2009