source: burnblue

When working on a new business concept or any project of depth and expertise, it’s easy to get lost in the minutiae. The details keep you up at night. They are a battleground dishing up emotional victories and defeats, fits of despair and ecstasy.

The reality is that most of these seemingly monumental problems are actually unimportant. To know for sure you have to look towards the audience. You have to think like your audience. For research projects, this change in perspective seems pretty straight forward, but for business plans it isn’t so simple.

In business the audience is first and foremost the customer and the customer is interested in the benefit. So it makes sense to think focusing on the benefit will yield a successful business or at the very least a successful product. There is, although, a problem with relying solely on the customer’s perspective: customers don’t know what they want and they certainly don’t know what they will hypothetically pay for. Market research surveys have shown again and again that customers will value all features high on the importance scale when asked directly and they’ll want the cheapest price possible. With the perspective of the customers you’ll avoid the minutiae and instead get drowned in features and low margins. Instead, I think the most beneficial alter ego to employ is that of the investor, more specifically the angel investor. Angel investors have a singular motivation, that is to make money. But unlike venture capitalist firms, angel’s have a more personal attachment to the money and the company.

Put yourself in the shoes of an angel. At what point would you put money into your business if you weren’t running it? What milestones would have to be reached? Where are the holes in expertise in the business? How can you leverage your contacts to make this business a success?

Use the angel investor perspective to apply fundamental analysis to improve your business model not the minutiae.

As it turns out the key was to just keep going.  I never should have let myself stop, because once I started again the vision came together, showing me the way.  The reason I started again without knowing where I was going, was procrastination on another project.  The only thing I could do to justify ignoring that project was to work on this painting.

I think I learned something here:  Have enough projects to procrastinate on so that… one of them gets done? …maybe not.

Art in Development

The process gets a bad rap.  Too often we rush to see a final product realized without appreciating the effort expended that gets us there.  Objects, ideas, people in development are beautiful.  Change is good.  When a company stops innovating, it is taken over by companies that do.  An unchanging status quo is stagnate. Although most ideas will never be fully realized there is value in the steps that were taken.  More so than the final project, that is motivation for taking a step.

“Other people view you the way you view yourself.” – Roxy Solis, Wellesley Undergraduate and Human Observer

I stole this motivation tactic from that very friend I had just pledged $10 to. He was more than happy to accept the responsibility of money collector. Saturday has come and gone and I’m now $10 poorer. The threat of losing that money did, however, push me to write 2 blog posts, but I couldn’t bring myself to publish either one of them. Reading over the posts, I found my tone to be arrogant. The writing was more prescriptive lecture than conversation provoking. I didn’t like it and it made me feel like a fraud.

After a little time away and analysis, I think I’ve found the problem. I was trying to “put my best foot forward” and communicate confidently. Not bad things in themselves, but through this self-editing I presented someone that I wasn’t comfortable with. So, in order to get things moving and for my own satisfaction I am writing this blog with transparency. In the words of Jason Fried, author of Rework, you’ll see me, “warts and all”.

This site will show failures alongside successes. And my character flaws will likely become apparent. And I’m okay with that… I think.