Business

Time management is a JOKE!

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business, life
If I have the choice between getting something extremely important to me done or getting a good night’s rest, I’m choosing to get things done.  I want to use every minute I have to make valuable things happen. I love to work constantly on what I think is valuable. I find when I’m not happy about something, it’s because I am not working enough. Now, when I say work on things, things can be anything…a business idea, family, having fun, or whatever.  When it’s time for a vacation and I haven’t planned something that is exactly what I want, what my wife wants and what will instill curiosity and verve in life for my kids, I’m pissed at myself for not taking the right amount of effort on something so important. Or, if I am in Yosemite, one of the greatest climbing areas in world, and I haven’t been properly trained at multi-pitch climbing, I’m thinking, “damn it!” 
I’ve mentioned vacation examples, but it is extremely important to bust ass when it comes to work because work enables life.  You may or may not have to work, but more than likely it was someone before you busting ass to create that for you. If you aren’t working on something, then you need to make good shit happen and fast. I want to work on what makes me interested and enthralled. In order to do that, I need to come up with what should be done because I like coming up with ideas that work and driving them through to done.  That excites me. Being responsible is exciting. It requires a lot of effort to do this.  You have to walk uphill with a heavy pack and influence people to enable or help you. But, getting what you want takes work. If you don’t work for yourself, you will be doing what others want to get to done.  It’s actually a much harder life if you aren’t working on what you want.  It’s a much harder path to follow.  It may feel easier, but not when you look back and ask yourself if you have really lived the way you wanted to. If your answer is no, there is nothing worse than a wasted life. Doing what you want may seem like work in the beginning, but it changes. It changes to not feeling like work. That’s the ticket.

Lean Startup Crash Course

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps, Business, Product Management
Those of you who know me know that I am a fitness experimenter and product manager that works at Intuit (also a father of twins and a husband!). Well, I have to give a prominent shout out to Intuit, and Scott Cook specifically, for embracing the Lean Startup methodology and for putting innovation in front of everyone who works on products.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an Intuit-wide Lean Startup competition where teams were selected to come to San Diego and pitch ideas to Eric Ries, get guidance from Brant Cooper, and get judged by a combined panel of innovators at Intuit. The competition started on Friday and ended Monday which meant working over the weekend.  Competitors were judged by how many times they passed through the customer feedback loop.  This means conducting experiments with customers in a time-compressed schedule multiple times.

I had heard about the lean startup methodology before and was familiar with many of the terms like “pivot” or “persevere”. However, I didn’t really know the Lean Startup method until it was “game on” time. I can tell you that going through this competition was fantastic!  Why?  Because my teammate and I made many mistakes and learned fast.

Here’s a quick run down of how it went (leaving the idea specifics out at the moment):

  1. We pitched our idea to Eric. Eric said do something else.
  2. We tested the problem space with real customers, and it was ho-hum.
  3. We ran a survey on Facebook, bought some ads, and didn’t get anywhere.
  4. We ran a survey on Ask Your Target Market and got fantastic results that told us how 50 customers rated the problem, solution, and if they would buy. 
  5. We had a new view of the problem and a rating of what customers wanted and that they would buy it if it existed. We were so excited we decided to build a prototype.
  6. The prototype got finished “enough” but took forever. Worse, it didn’t directly help us answer the question we needed it to answer. 
  7. We had to switch to a landing page mockup and test the problem, solution, and buy question there.
  8. We used up our ad money and found out how ad bids really worked. We wished we would have saved money earlier on the Facebook survey. 
  9. We got the ads dialed in and kicked off a parallel effort. 
  10. We only had a few hours left and ended up running around with our half-built prototype and our landing page printed out canvassing potential customers to see if the would buy it.
We ended up winning the competition, which was great, but what was much better was the experience of really nailing down the questions we needed to answer so we could decide how to move forward.  On top of that there was another huge learning…when you know the right question, you then have to ask the second most important question.  How fast can you answer the question you need to answer?  We really had a lot of barriers about even going to that question, but being time-pressed, the barrier broke. 
I can’t say enough about how crucial it is to ask that second question. Instead of running off into a corner building something we don’t know if customers want, we now have a very good picture of what customers want.  We did it with 4 days and about 200 bucks. Given what we know now, I think we could trim it to 2 days and 100 bucks next time.

Business Plans and Venture Capital

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business

I got some advice (which I think will save me two years) from a friend recently with regards to starting a company from venture capital. As a result, I’m looking to get my business plan in order and take the venture capital path. Are there people out there who have tried and succeeded or tried and failed who are willing to share their experience? I’m in need of an expert opinion. Perhaps others are as well.

Thanks!
Abraham

Entrepreneurship

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business 3 Comments

As I was poking around on iwillteachyoutoberich.com, a site of which I enjoy the aspirations of entrepreneurship, I found a reference to Steve Pavlina’s podcast and blog. There’s quite a few interesting items to explore. Polyphasic sleep is one of those items. My only experience with it myself was watching Kramer on Seinfeld stumble hilariously through the episode. Anyway, there was quite a selection of topics of which I found interesting. Another was becoming an early riser; I aspire to such things.

I started reading his experience of briefly becoming an employee at a young age and deciding that was not his path. He later went on to write about his method of financial support and how much time he has on his hands. This is definitely something I’d like to learn about. I’ve been pursuing the subject now rigorously for about 2 years.