You often see aspiring entrepreneurs reading books by Jack Welch, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, etc. I can see how their advice might be valuable if you’re steering a business that’s got tons of cash and thousands of employees, but how much does what they write really apply to small businessmen and entrepreneurs?
When you’re coming out of the gate, megamanagers and celeb CEOs aren’t the best guides. How much do they really remember about starting out anyway? Is it really valuable to learn about Six Sigma techniques or when to layoff 10% of your workforce if you don’t even have a running business yet?
At this stage, what you really need to figure out is how to make it out of year one alive. Everything else is cart in front of horse.
Find stars in your own galaxy
A better idea: Find a star in your own galaxy to emulate. Seek out a company that has some valuable similarities to what you do and watch. The ideal candidate is a person or company that’s 1) done great things and 2) actually resembles you in some way.
So if you’re starting a t-shirt business, follow people like Threadless. If you want to open a kick-ass food store, pay attention to Zingerman’s. If you’re a design firm looking to sell products on the side, watch Coudal. Compare and contrast yourself to pioneers in your own niche rather than the world at large.
None of the users had heard of OpenID before, and none of them even noticed the OpenID sign-in box displayed below the traditional email/password login form on the site. In many cases, the test subjects entered their Yahoo email address and Yahoo password to try to log in. We had told the test subjects that they could sign into the site using their Yahoo! account without having to register…Certainly there is a lot of work to be done on the OpenID UX (user experience) front.
There is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.
In “Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User,” David Pogue points out the difference between common knowledge and universal knowledge. (The piece, which includes a list of seemingly obvious tips, was the most emailed article at the NY Times site for a few days.)
One of these days, I’m going to write a book called, ‘The Basics.’ It’s going to be a compendium of the essential tech bits that you just assume everyone knows — but you’re wrong.
(I’ll never forget watching a book editor at a publishing house painstakingly drag across a word in a word processor to select it. After 10 minutes of this, I couldn’t stand it. ‘Why don’t you just double-click the word?’ She had no clue you could do that!)”
Many readers chimed in with other “basics” that they assumed every computer user knew — but soon discovered that what’s common knowledge isn’t the same as universal knowledge.
It’s easy for those of us immersed in the tech world to forget what it’s like for normal folks to use a computer. For example, it’s tempting to think “we should just do this in Twitter” while forgetting that most normal people have no clue what Twitter is (...or 37signals for that matter).
And if you’re only trying to reach a tech savvy audience, it’s fine to write these folks off. But the bigger an audience you want to reach, the more you need to remind yourself that a large part of your target group is missing knowledge that you think is obvious.
Aaron Draplin talks about shitty signage at a funky motel.
Here’s what this Burger King cup says on the side:
Maybe you want a lot of ice. Maybe you want no ice. Maybe you want your top securely fastened, or maybe you want to go topless. Hmmm? Maybe you want to mix Coke and Sprite. Maybe you want to let your cup runneth over (we wish you wouldn’t.) Whatever you do, make sure to have things your way.
Alex Bogusky, partner and executive creative director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami, Burger King’s lead agency says the burger chain decided “to create a dialogue with the consumer” using the immense amount of white space available on its current packaging. The packaging is an extension of the “voice of the brand.”
Voice of the brand, eh? Funny, because the whole bragging about things you can get anywhere (e.g. “Maybe you want a lot of ice. Maybe you want no ice.)” sounds a lot like the fast food version of Saturday Night Live’s First CityWide Change Bank:
Maybe Burger King should end it’s cup copy with this: “We can handle special requests like that, usually in the same day.”
Man, has Hulu nailed online TV viewing or what? First off, they have a huge library of content that people actually want (e.g. SNL, Family Guy, Daily Show, Colbert, Kitchen Nightmares, etc.). And then they really execute on having a usable, effective UI.
You do have to watch ads with Hulu. But just one at a time. The timeline lets you fast forward to anywhere in the show and also displays where the commercial breaks are located. That means you can go to any part of the show you want as long as you watch one ad first.
A timer lets you know exactly how long you’ve got to go when ads are displayed. Watching the single ads Hulu shows takes the same amount of time as fast forwarding through a whole normal commercial break on DVR. Result: You actually wind up watching more ads on Hulu than you do on a DVR but it takes the same amount of time.
As we deal with the fallout from so many executives making such terrible decisions, the simplest advice seems the most appropriate. Figure out what you care about and devote yourself to that purpose. Stay the course, even when your colleagues wander off course. And never forget that if something sounds too good to be true—from no-money-down-mortgages to instant riches with a hedge fund—it probably is. “When you run with the pack, what you generally see are other people’s backsides,” Arkadi Kuhlmann says. “We know why we’re here, and it’s not to copy other people’s bad ideas.”
