Entrepreneurship 2.0
Date: Tuesday , December 01, 2009
In the past two years, recession has dramatically changed the functions of entrepreneurs. They no longer need to spend heavy cash to establish a successful company. This viewpoint is of Guy Kawasaki, who is the Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures. He is also a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine and author of nine books. This ex-Apple employee was speaking at Nasscom Product Conclave 2009. Here are the excerpts for you. Entrepreneurship 2.0 has my eleven key points about what entrepreneurship should be like these days; all these are going to be opposite to what venture capitalists will tell you.
1. Build what you want to use: You should build a product, service, and a company that you want to use. Great companies are built because engineers wanted a product to use. 2. Pay zero rupees for tools: In the software business there are three to four key things that you need to create the software with. Now you can use every tool you want for free, from Mysql and php and many others.
3. Pay zero rupees for marketing: Tools are free and now I believe marketing is also free. Marketing is free due to the stuff like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. 4. Suck down, suck across: It is most important that regular people, who are not famous, embrace your product. Because when they embrace your product and tell their friends about it and then they tell their friends, that’s how consensus is built about a very strong product. So instead of sucking up, you need to suck down or across.
5. You truly need to use Twitter: Twitter is the best marketing platform ever. If someone tells you that he is going to create a platform and this platform is fast, it’s instant, millions of people are using it, and it’s free, you would have said it is impossible. The second product is a company called tweet me. That’s the company that puts up green buttons on websites and blogs. I think that is the most powerful button in the world. When people see that button and click on it they send a tweet to everybody following them, saying that I like this website you ought to look at it too.
6. Pay zero rupees for people: One of the benefits of the recession is, there are lots of people available for free. If not for free, at least virtually inexpensive. You will be amazed at the amount of work companies extract out of interns, for example.
7. Put everything in the cloud: If you have created a website with a lot of traffic, what would you have to do then? You put everything on the cloud. Just for mere 500 rupees you get terabyte of storage and infinite bandwidth.
8. Ship, then test: The days of writing a perfect software with every feature and everything debugged are long gone. Ship something that is revolutionary and has an element of crappiness to it. You ship it and you let customers hammer on it and then you fix it.
9. Forget venture capital: You have free people, free marketing, cheap cloud, and free tools, so you don’t need the venture capitalist much. The role of the venture capitalist is to help you expand, scale up, and take advantage of new opportunity. It’s not to get you started.
10. Niche thyself: For all the entrepreneurs who despite marketing, I am telling you marketing is very easy. All you have to do is create a unique product, which is of great value. 11. Do not let the bozos grind you down: As an entrepreneur, you need to understand bozosity. If you listen to a person who says this can’t be done and shouldn’t be done, then you will fail because you will never try. |