2 free creative ideas for a business

I recently went to see my Tuina therapist.
She has set up a program to offer her services to businesses.
She had me look at her proposal and asked for my advice.

I told her that it was not clear to me who she was pitching to.

Human Resources, the CEO, employees directly?
The all speak a different language, have a different interest and different needs to fulfill. What may seem a benefit to one, is probably just a 'nice to have' for the other.

And what kind of businesses were her customers? Hotels, banks, shops,... What environment do people work in? That largely defines what their health problems might be that she has to address.

She told me that it is difficult for her to get an insider's view of how companies work, who decides what and what their needs are that she could address.

So in the lines of A wish is a niche, it made me think about a few business ideas that would cover her need and even take it a step further.

My Company Insider

A place where employees sign up to propose their insider knowledge. Not confidential knowledge that could interest a trader, but just simple things like:

• who in your company do I need to contact for X, Y, Z?
• what would be the best way to sell my product in your company?
• how does your company get rid of old computers and is there a way to recuperate them? 
• who is the decision maker for this?

It would avoid an overloaded company webmaster.
It would avoid many unanswered emails.
It would create interesting connections that could be useful.
It would connect the company to a community of people that are interested in them (on many different levels).

Competency market (for startups or non-profits)

We all have very diversified skills. We might even use all of them at work.
Most often we only use a select few. Because our job requires a certain set of skills and not another.
William Bridges says that it is a 19th-century contingency to “package the work that needed doing in the growing factories and bureaucracies of the industrialised nations”.
Today's job market tries to fit the best people into given jobs.

What if we explored the option of aligning what people can offer – their competencies – against the demands of companies, the community and other individuals?
Let's say you are good at building simple websites and want to start your own business. You 'advertise' your service and each time you 'sell' it to someone, you earn a certain number of points (depending on the level of service rendered).
Some weeks later, you need someone to look at your business plan. You find the person offering this service and pay with the points you earned.

Such barter sites already exists (although not so much in Europe) but they offer too many things at once.
It would be nice to have a site that deals with selected partners to offer all services needed for startups or non profits. I found one site that goes into this direction.
Lately I have encountered many wishes from non profits and startups for certain services, so a barter service geared towards them would surely be a success.

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Why you need to fail early and fail often

Whenever we have an idea, we would like to run it by some people to get validation.
We want to hear that our idea is great.

We don't want to fail. So we want others to tell us that we won't.
We want to make it foolproof.

Then again, we don't want others to think we (or our ideas) are stupid.
And we often lack confidence in our own ability to come up with brilliance.

So often enough, we keep our idea to ourselves.
We work away on it, trying to perfect it.

And when we think it's ready for the outside world, we often fall flat on our face.

We have invested time, often even money to come this far.

What went wrong?

Failing early, when your ideas are still small (as opposed to when you're in front of the management committee or the board) allows you to:

• get honest feedback (as no budget, responsibilities or egos are involved yet)
• change things that don't work quickly (as they don't cost anything or very little)
• see whether the idea has potential
• get new ideas (people love to give their opinion, for free!)

So in order to fail early, fail often. Here is how:

1. Make a short pitch about your initial idea
   - answering the 5W1H questions
   - try to present it like a story (with a statement, an unexpected turn etc)
   
2. Make a list of 3-5 people who you can test the pitch and idea on
   - people who would have to be involved if the project flies
   - people with special capabilities (creativity, business development, mentoring etc)
   
3. Rework the pitch and start thinking about a sponsor
   - ideally someone influential, known or important (but not a decision maker for this idea)
    
4. Prototype your idea - or run a pilot project
   - it's the only way to test for success and get rid of glitches or faults
   
5. Launch or abandon
   - by the time you're launching or presenting to management you have gained insight, experience, and feedback and basically know what your talking about and have gotten rid of first hick-ups
   - if you decide to abandon you will have learned a lot and gained information for a next project; and you will have shown those around you that you can ship your ideas

So, fail early, fail often.

But don't fail small! Don't leave out the good, special, weird, compelling stuff because it's safer to fail small.

That makes you settle for Good Enough...

And 'good enough' doesn't fly in business, in love or on your way to the moon,


For more insight:

Seth Godin: Random rules for ideas worth spreading

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What Oprah could do better

I like Oprah. I have for years. And I am not ashamed to say it ;-)

I think she is creative, lives with intention, does what she needs to do, is not afraid to admit mistakes and she knows how to market herself.

Being a reader, I especially like her O Magazine.

Living in Luxembourg however, does not allow me to purchase it in a local store. I have to subscribe to it. Which is pretty costly I have to admit.

So here is my marketing point of view of what Oprah could do better to sell me (or, come to think of it, anyone else) her magazine:

1. Make overseas delivery more affordable.
2. Tell me when my subscription starts and when it ends (this is not clear when you subscribe).
3. Send me a renewal reminder before the end of my subscription (funny enough, this is not the case!)
4. Make a European version of O (many articles are very US focused, all special deals are US only)

I guess if I were not such a paper fan, I could just subscribe to the new Ipad version of her magazine.

And maybe I will, whenever I find myself a few months without her magazine and realize that the subscription has stopped :-)

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