Wanna tell her what you think?
Sometimes I see a valiant attempt to do something well and all i want to say is “dont bother”. A misplaced attempt at customer feedback at my local coffee shop in Atlanta is just one example and it reared it’s head this morning. It’s simple you would think, place a ‘comments’ box with a small pad of tear-off comment cards and pen within easy reach of customers and the feedback will start rolling in. Wrong!!! So the guys at Aurora Coffee in Little 5 – or i should say manager Mark because it’s his name on the little sign – has created one such “point-of- feedback” on the counter within eye shot and handy reach of every customer right next to the espresso machine and cash till. Bad location, bad implementation. My coffee was poorly made with a heavy dose of attitude this morning. I wanted to give feedback to manager Mark and reached for the comment pad. Now, I’m not normally backward about coming forward but i thought better of this and jaded removed my hand: the glaring eyes of the attitude ridden Barista was too musch (not because i was frightened of his wrath but i was more worried about how remake-2 of my cappuccino would end up if had followed through. Plus i have to come back tomorrow). My point is, that 99% of customers wanting to give feedback would have and probably do back-off giving it because of the way the feedback loop is set up. I’ve been observing this as a common occurrence in many retail businesses.
Someone please come up with a system that facilitates a better feedback loop and experience for customers and business owners. My feedback to businesses is find a better way to get feedback, afterall we do live in the day of SMS, iphone apps and email. I smell a product idea but surely it already exists!
Take a sea creature about the length of a car that’s partial to eating micro aquatic life, run over it with a steam roller (found at any good equipment hire store) and let it loose in any coral lagoon (preferably in the Indian Ocean).
Pretty much what you’ll end up with here is a very hungry, exceptionally motivated and astoundingly efficient eating machine called a manta ray. These strange looking creators about the size of the island in my kitchen, with a mouth bigger than Janet Street Porter (need to be English for this one) are the planets best filtering systems – think a vacuum cleaner with fins. The volume of water based material they get through just to stave off the munchies is quite amazing. Well, that’s just where i am at the moment with my exploits to find my next great business. The amount of possibilities out there can be pretty over whelming so the art is to know how to filter. There’s 3 essential ways that i’m looking at the landscape with regard to making my choice of start up business:
1. Start my own thing from scratch (my idea, my team etc).
2. Find someone who has already created a product but hasnt yet got it out the door and starting selling it.
3. Join a business with an established product and team (still an early stage business but it’s up and running)
Each of these has a different risk reward profile and different life style implications but it’s an interesting start point.
Today, i attempted to come up with some kind of scoring / ranking process for ideas. I have a spreadsheet which i can use to score one of 15 attributes of a business idea. I have weighted some attributes as more important than others (each is scored 1-5, with 5 being important). While this is not going to provide the definitive way for me to make a decision, at least it’s a reference point.
I remember going through a similar exercise when trying to decide what house to buy. Funnily, the house that scored best was not the one i lumped for. I had a huge negative reaction to the winner in favor of the runner up. Most importantly, the winner was clear.
I liked this video. Simple but effective way to do A / B testing on your web site. I wish someone would invent A / B tests for life. I say W and my life plays out to X : i say Y and my lifes plays out to Z. Alas, i couldnt find anything.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v7m9BFqTJ0&hl=en&fs=1&]
Compliments to http://jasonprance.com/ for this one.
I have an on going struggle.
In fact, I have a lot of them but one of the main ones is about how to share my time between digging around online, looking at new areas and translating that into specific activity. I’m paranoid about getting analysis paralysis; you know, becoming so insular and heady that trying to start a new business becomes an intellectual frenzy rather than something real life and practical. I got talking to an older successful guy yesterday and he told me he doesn’t use a computer, never has and never will. My God, how does he do business. Simple, the answer is relationships – picking up the phone and talking to someone (such a novel concept).
I just finished reading the auto biography of Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnet bloke from the turn of the nineteenth century. Don t even talk about computers, the guy wore a top hat and tails and used horse power for transportation. And no, he didn’t have a phone. So he did his networking and business face to face. There ’s a rare concept. I remind myself of this every day. I’m reminding myself of this now because even writing here is making me ansi – it’s 9 am on a wednesday morning and i’m sitting here with a coffee and my dog on my southern wrap round porch stuck in my head writing something nobody else is probably going to read. Go and phone someone!! If I’m not careful I find myself on the mouse wheel of continually looking at new business ideas (an addiction) and never moving anything forward. Your training gurus would probably tell me to spend more time setting my goals around a specific area and working towards solving problems around them.
True but here’s the deal so pay attention. I respond well to the randomness of immersing myself in a topic area. There is something organic and essential to letting myself just wander (same reason why people stand memorized in front a weird painting in a museum) . It does something inside. Normally, reading a book or magazine article to focus my efforts on will start the process because reading someone else’s thoughts or experiences normally gets me to come up with my own questions (I’m currently using the book Wikinomics). This immersion allows me to become a domain “amateur” (the “expert” part can follow later). By learning just enough to be dangerous, I can create a good platform to speak with some type of authority when evaluating businesses. Most importantly, it lets me come up with the right questions when looking at opportunities. Questions are key to life. If i’m not coming up with the right questions when evaluating a business it normally means i’m not finding an intuitive fit for an area or the people i’m looking to get involved with. No questions = no chemistry = not a good business for me. When I went for lunch yesterday with a couple of Professors from Georgia Tech to talk about an elearning product, I had a stream of questions – a feeding frenzy. These are good signs.
Here’s my list of things to investigate today. They are mostly based around the online learning and the growth of peer to peer & collaborative learning:
1. Check out the California open source text book 2. Set up meetings with the advisors of the elearning service I’m evaluating (face-to-face, very old school). 3. Research some the collaborative news services out there. How they came to be and what makes them work.
Why, what about, where and who cares anyway. All these are good questions crammed into a single sentence (i’m sure some literary type can tell me the name for it). I’ve pondered a lot why i dont blog, if i should, what should i write about and who would care about it anyway (and why should i care who anyway). Like anything in life, when something has a purpose and a focus it becomes more meaningful because it has a context that makes it relevant to a given group of people, no matter how small or large. So far i’ve never gotten this raison d’être for writing and much of this has sprung from an acute case of subject idea ADD. At the end of the day, it comes down to relevance and picking something. I would rather be relevant to just one person by concentrating on just one area than irrelevant to the everyone by rambling all over the place.
So, as much for myself as anyone else (there’s my guaranteed one person at least) i want to talk about what it’s like to go through looking, finding and building a new business. I’ve already had the one smash hit: building and selling a .com in the frenzy of 2000 when Monopoly ceased to become just a board game (see my linkedin for more), almost done it again with a second startup (work in progress at Vocalocity) and had a smattering of other projects (like Fizzbee) but since last October i’ve been full on looking for my next thing. Is it a case of once you’re lucky, twice you’re good (the book)? Hmmm, we’ll see.
Without doubt, starting your own thing is not something conjured out of thin air. The major universal force working against you, is that most good business ideas come out of organic growth and a real life a-ha when doing something while sizing up the fruit in Wholefoods; they are not manufactured synthetically inside our own cerebral boxes. So given that, here’s some of my experiences of trying to do it again. It’s stimulating, frustrating, rewarding, demoralizing and interspersed with moments of utter clarity and complete confusion (sometimes shared between breakfast and lunch); i’m great; i’m crap; this is it, no it’s not. You’ll get the idea and hopefully it’ll be enlightening and maybe useful for the army of others going through the same…
