Chris Busse

Categories

130814 Growth Map 1200
Posted on August 14, 2013 by

A key learning from Paul Graham’s Startups = Growth essay

Paul Graham published an excellent essay in Sept. 2012 titled Startups = Growth which outlines the distinctions from his view point between a “new business” and a “startup” – the key being the rate of growth of the business. Reading this essay, it drove home something I’ve been thinking on for the past few years…

In the Startups = Growth essay, Graham states:

For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. Barbershops are doing fine in the (a) department. Almost everyone needs their hair cut. The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail establishment, is (b). A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. And even if they did the barbershop couldn’t accomodate them. [1]

Writing software is a great way to solve (b), but you can still end up constrained in (a). If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarian speakers, you’ll be able to reach most of the people who want it, but there won’t be many of them. If you make software to teach English to Chinese speakers, however, you’re in startup territory.

Most businesses are tightly constrained in (a) or (b). The distinctive feature of successful startups is that they’re not.

Then, all the way at the bottom of the essay, he adds the footnote [1], which for me was a very important point:

Strictly speaking it’s not lots of customers you need but a big market, meaning a high product of number of customers times how much they’ll pay. But it’s dangerous to have too few customers even if they pay a lot, or the power that individual customers have over you could turn you into a de facto consulting firm. So whatever market you’re in, you’ll usually do best to err on the side of making the broadest type of product for it.

Whenever I fly along the East Coast – which I did a fair bit of the past three years for business between Richmond, VA and Newark, NJ – I like to look out the window of the airplane at all the towns and houses below me. So many houses. At night, so many streetlights and porch lights.

Then I start thinking, what could I make to sell to all these people?

This is the kind of thinking that Graham is talking about. Next time you’re on an airplane – or don’t wait, “fly over” a bunch of towns in Google Maps – and ask yourself the same question. That kind of literal “high-level” perspective can be helpful to get the creative gears going.

Always be linking
Posted on August 12, 2013 by

ABL is the new ABC: A, Always, B, be, L, Linking

“Always be closing” is a sales mantra popularized by Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross during his epic and infamous sales “motivation” speech. If you haven’t seen it, watch it here. (NSFW, language). While “closing” is as important as ever, “Always be linking” should be a new mantra for today’s always-on business environment.

Twitter, Facebook, and most other social networks make the sharing of links and other media very easy, but they only do so among the connected users of your social graph. Email, despite its age, is still a hugely effective tool for sharing content with the people who really matter – in a business context – your clients and potential clients.

There’s a number of ways to do this effectively. Tried and true methods of building email subscriber lists abound, but the power of the one-to-one email link shouldn’t be discounted either. If you see something online that you think a client will like, shoot them a  brief email with a link and short description of why you think it is applicable to them – or more importantly, the work you’re doing together.

Likewise, if there’s a sales lead you’re trying to develop over time in to a client, an occasional email with a link relevant to what you know their goals or pain points to be can be effective in starting up an otherwise stalled conversation.

Where this gets really interesting is when clients start sending you links back. That’s when you know a level of trust and dialog has been established – they value your opinion and time enough to engage you around what they find interesting.

Sure, email isn’t a sexy “social network”, but done right it can be used to share links and deepen connections just as well, if not better than, Facebook or Twitter.

So, go send a few links to clients or sales leads today, then you can get some coffee.

Coffee is for linkers.

 

130811 Deep Sleep
Posted on August 11, 2013 by

Jawbone UP sleep debug: Sleeping on the couch, the same as insomnia?

I recently purchased a Jawbone UP to track my activity and sleep. I had a Nike+ band about a year ago, but the charger died and I eventually stopped wearing it. The UP is a bit easier to deal with, but more importantly it is starting to help me debug my sleep.

I have occasional (at least once a week) bouts of insomnia and the UP is supposed to be able to tell whether you’re in deep sleep, light sleep, or awake.

Sure enough, the second day I used it to track my sleep I was up from about 1:30am – 5:30am, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. I had slept a little before, and managed to get back to sleep and stay asleep until about 8:30am that morning. The UP logged much of the awake time as “light sleep”, probably because I was still or moving very little. In total it logged 2h 34m of “deep sleep”.

On a good night, I seem to be getting just under 8 hours of total sleep, with 4 to 5 hours of “deep sleep”.

Last night I feel asleep watching TV on the couch (thanks Shark Week). Even though I was asleep overnight, the UP only logged 2h 48m of “deep sleep” – similar to a night of insomnia.

I have a bad habit of falling asleep on the couch like that, sometimes three nights a week. As part of my sleep debug, I see that I need to consciously stop doing that. It’s just one data point, but it’s enough to drive a change in behavior.