When I came back from the Seth
Godin seminar on June 15th, I said I would publish my authentic story
here by June 30th.
Well, I’m not quite done
yet!
During my quest to define
my authentic story, I ran across a video that Guy Kawasaki posted about his book The
Art of the Start. The video and the
slides he used are available at his blog.
Guy’s prescription for
entrepreneurs:
- Make meaning. Improve the quality of life, right a wrong or prevent the end of something good. (“If you make meaning you will make money.” GK)
- Make a mantra. Forget about a vision statement, in 3 or 4 words define what you do for your employees (me!). This is your reason for being.
- Get going. Think differently (as opposed to “better sameness”) and don’t be afraid to polarize people. Find a few soul mates to balance yourself off.
- Define your business model. Be specific. Keep it simple. Ask women about your business model (This part was funny to watch – and rewarding!).
- Weave a MAT. Define milestones, assumptions and tasks.
- Niche yourself. What can you do that’s of high value to your customers and unique?
- 10, 20, 30 Rule. To express your business concept, create no more than 10 PowerPoint slides, covered in no more than 20 minutes, with no font less than 30 point!
- Hire infected people. They should be qualified, but they should LOVE your product. Always hire better than yourself.
- Lower barriers to adoption. Flatten the learning curve. Don’t ask people to do something you wouldn’t do. Embrace your evangelists.
- Seed the clouds. Enable test drives. Find true influencers.
- Don’t let the turkeys get you down!
Along with Seth’s
material, I’ve been concentrating on numbers 1, 2, 3, and 6 from Guy’s
video. I really want to do this right,
so it’ll be another week or so.
Thanks
for keeping me honest (as I requested!).
(The next Change
Resistors post will be published on Monday, July 3rd.)
Technorati tags: Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start