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52 Business and Startup Starting Points

  1. Copy a successful model. Differentiate on features (“embrace and extends”) or (“embrace and remove”), quality or price.

  2. Apply a successful model to new market segment.

    • “Product X for Kids”
    • “Product X for the Elderly”
    • “Product X for the traveler”
    • “Product X for women”

  3. Fix a successful model. Find an in-demand product but with low satisfaction. This is the case of the developer in one of the podcasts for Startup - he found a high demand product where he felt the implementation was poor — in this case, it was Spanish language bible software in the Apple app store. He created an improved version of such software and the product was successful.

  4. Domain analysis. Map customer experience. Find gap within the domain.
  5. Copy successful models or concepts from different domains/geographies into chosen domain.
  6. Apply self-service to existing model or domain.
  7. Apply peer to peer sharing to existing model or domain.
  8. Apply DIY to existing model or domain.
  9. Look for thought leadership in a domain. What are they pointing to/predicting?
  10. Look at “do-leaders” — those who are quietly executing but not very public — and follow their model. Example: Sriacha sauce.
  11. Look at emergent trends. Create or find models that take advantage of new consumer demands and patterns.
  12. Look at emergent platforms. Create or find models that ride on that platform.
  13. Look for popular platforms. Create plugins, themes or templates that ride on that platform
    • Wordpress: plugins, templates
    • Apple Pages, Microsoft Word: templates
    • Apple Motion, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop: plugins, templates, themes
    • Fonts, icons, avatars, frames
    • iPhone messages: sticker sets
    • Cloud Services: BI, big data, machine learning, AI.
    • Communication platforms with plugin marketplaces: Slack
      Business workflow platforms with plugin marketplaces: Jira, Trell
  14. Look at new technologies or capabilities unattached to a domain. Fit the model into a new domain.
  15. Look at trend reports.
  16. Look for invisible trends. Go counter to the Hype Cycle
  17. Look for trend migration. What’s happening else where that’s yet to hit in your location? Look for trends in other countries/cities that have not yet migrated to your geography. Food trends, for example.
  18. Look for Niche Trends. Trends that go under the radar, viable for small businesses but too small for larger orgs to focus on
  19. Look for Disruptive Openings. Trends that collapse the status quo by creating significant reorganization/realignment of resources, often cutting out middle layers, or subverting value creation
  20. Read science fiction and fantasy books and comics. Watch science fiction and fantasy. Watch anime, particularly the weird stuff. Play video games. Steal ideas.
  21. Review history of movements and try to discern what the next historical step would be.
  22. Apply Ikigai. Start with an analysis of What you’re good at/What you love/What the world needs/What you think would make money.
  23. Make personal observations on what you would want to learn, what problems you want to overcome, what fears you have that you’d like to surmount. Journal.
  24. Your community is your market? What do you consider your community? What problems exist there?
  25. Create your own exhaustive, personal knowledge graph. Sort through it for business ideas.
  26. Consider “Where Good Ideas Come From” seven generators.
    1. The Adjacent Possible
    2. Liquid Networks
    3. The Slow Hunch
    4. Serendipity
    5. Error
    6. Exaptation
    7. Platforms
  27. Look at social philosophies and their embodiment within a product. Products are often the expression of a philosophy.
  28. Look at emerging scholarship.
  29. Look at emergent movements.
  30. Active Brainstorming. Coppola vs. Brando “Hearts of darkness” method — get good at hacking small sites together and create sites with lead funnel in the time it takes to fully research an idea. Faced with the constraint of star Marlon Brando arriving onset without learning lines and with a tight deadline, Coppola decides best odds to create “magic moments” is to freely improvise with some prompting instead of going by script. Basically, spitball.
  31. Pivot from Zombies. The Twitch example — goes from passion project to zombie to unicorn.
  32. Wait for the chasm crossing (success: PDA —> Smartphone/iPhone, Tablet; fail: early VR -> Oculus (still not there?), self-driving car (google started 10 years ago, new ML paradigms may beat them to the punch)
  33. Find and read white papers. Business studies and case studies.
  34. Plan from a funding point of view. Who is getting funded and why? Look at accelerator, angel and VC funding, amounts, and success stories.,
  35. Plan from an exit point of view. Who and what is getting acquired?
  36. Take a commodity, make it premium.
  37. Look at startup services for businesses.
  38. Look at repair services for existing products.
  39. Look at maintenance and support services for existing products.
  40. Look at industry vs. enabler plays
  41. Rummage through past ideas of the future to revive discarded ideas in a new context. “Retrofuturing.”
  42. Look for new vocabulary (“domain argot”) to discover where innovation is happening, for example: “3D printing” –> “4D printing” —> “passive self-assembly systems” —> “swarm robotics” —> “buzz: an extensible language to program robot swarms”
  43. Google on useful trend spotting terms
    1. “<your phrase> adoption trend”
    2. “<your phrase> purchasing trend”
    3. “state of <your phrase> report <year>”
    4. “<your phrase> outlook”
    5. “<your phrase> purchasing behavior”
    6. “<your phrase> study”
    7. “<your phrase> predictions”
    8. “<your phrase> statistics”
    9. “<your phrase> usage statistics”
    10. “future of <your phrase>“
    11. “<your phrase> decline”. If you see decline, consider: “<your phrase> phase out replaced by”
  44. Design innovation through addition of properties into unexpected products.
  45. Consider unconventional business models/monetization models.
  46. Brainstorming IOT. Similarly, blockchain, machine learning, AI, etc.
    • “wireless ”
    • “connected ”
    • “Speech recognition driven “
  47. Review quotidian/daily/mundane activities
    • Which are manually intensive?
    • Which are repetitive?
    • Which are most difficult/painful?
    • Which might be automated?
    • Which might be accomplished with paid help?
  48. Discover pay-for-forum ideas by searching for \”<your-forum-topic> forum”
  49. Listen to friends and family for life and business problems. Have you heard this 12 times?
  50. Talk to your existing customers.
  51. Go counter to prevailing trends, look for unsexy but functional needs. Sriracha sauce, timepicker jQuery.
  52. Consider and draw a 2x2 diagram. Steve Job’s model for the iPhone — easy to use but also highly capable — “hard to use|easy to use”, “smart|not so smart”)

Additional Lenses/Filters

  • Vitamin pill or pain killer?
  • 2x2 diagram
  • Personal motive (4 circle venn)
  • Stories and Usage patterns analysis within domain.
    ○ Where is value created?
    ○ How is value/can value be extracted?
  • Minnow/Dolphins/Whales?
  • “Ether” — it’s everywhere

Blockers/Filter for things that might NOT work

  • No competitive advantage
    ○ how would you gain some?
  • Too much competition
    ○ Everybody else is doing it/trendy (food delivery solutions)
  • You but nobody ELSE wants it
    ○ Find niche?
  • Depends on “getting a lot of people doing at once” (two-sided markets and starting communities are notoriously difficult)
  • Too complicated
    ○ Inobvious
    ○ Too many steps
    ○ Don’t know where to begin
    ○ What’s the point?
  • Too easily replicated
  • Too many people find a standard workaround acceptable
  • Too expensive
  • No differentiation
  • Audience but not enough of it
  • Audience but unwilling to pay
  • Poor/unscabele funding model
  • No traction
  • You’re uninterested in the audience/market/product/solution * Interest is often not necessary, just successful numbers (spanish bible software example)
  • Unsustainable/can’t replicate (works once/“hit model”)

Common patterns

  • Education/tutorial
  • Plugins, add-ons, rational defaults
  • Services — customization, setup/installation, maintenance, teardown, disposal, security

Skills to get good at to test quickly

  • Rapid prototyping
  • Value proposition copy
  • landing page design
  • Marketing funnel (facebook ads, or social marketing channels)
  • Mailing list follow-up and conversion, and mailing list design and analytics
  • Web Analytics, ioncluding search engine and social media
  • Marketing Platform analytics, like Facebook marketing, Google ads, etc.

Why Do Startup People Do What They Do?

  • It runs in the family
  • They had a life changing experience
  • They trained for it/were educated to do it
  • They saw an opportunity
  • They had a vision
  • They accidentally stumbled on it
  • They repeatedly tried and failed until they were successful
  • They attained success in one area of life and wish to explore another
  • They were backed into it
  • They had a problem they personally confronted and believed others also wanted a solution
  • They had enthusiasm about a subject

Check trend checker sites

Recent additions

  • Open an old yellow pages book for random niches

Posted on Edited on In

A short “so you want to do Agile” cheat sheet.

Edit: Since I wrote this, I’ve gotten Scrum certified (PSM), so I’m in the process of updating my recommendations. Also, I’ve been reviewing Kanban practices as a possible better fit for technical development (especially in continuous integration environments), and non-technical environments with workflows that don’t seem like a fit for the timebox model of Scrum.

The Sprint Process

Do as a one time act. Put your planning board together

  1. Create master task list, aka ICEBOX.
    • New work can only enter through the ICEBOX.
  2. Rough task estimation.
  3. Break into themes:
    • EPICS: cards in a set amounting to more than a single feature or attribute, usually more than one sprint of work
    • STORIES: within epics, clusters of cards that are basically features or other concrete deliverables that can be completed within a single sprint, 1-2 weeks.

Do weekly (or bi-weekly) at start of SPRINT:

  1. Identify cards amounting to about a week or 2 weeks tasks from your planning board. Try to grab complete STORIES.
  2. Put cards in the TODO column of the SPRINT.
  3. No new work should enter the SPRINT while it is underway. New work or discovered always enters the ICEBOX and is reviewed for assignment at the end of a SPRINT

Do daily:

  • A short, daily check-in. ONLY 3 things discussed per person in 5 minute daily meeting:
    1. What was done since yesterday. (move DOING card to DONE. 1st day, there are no DOING cards). “What did I do yesterday?”
    2. What we plan to do by tomorrow. (move TODO card to DOING column, or move BLOCKED card to DOING column) “What am I going to do today?”
    3. What are blockers, if anything. (move DOING cards to BLOCKED column). “Are there any blockers?”

Do weekly at the end of SPRINT

  1. Weekly or bi-weekly DEMO of completed work
    • Work must be accepted or rejected by the client
    • If rejected, enter as adjusted new work in the ICEBOX.
  2. Do a RETROSPECTIVE or review of what went right and wrong in the past week or two.
    • Consider making adjustments to your process based on your review.
  3. Add, sort and prune items in the master task list — that is, review and revise your EPICS and STORIES. This is where new work enters.
  4. You’re now at the start of a new SPRINT.

Suggested every 12 weeks

  1. Review the process in a deeper way, business objectives and accomplishments, master task list
  2. Decide if you need to pivot or make major changes to your plans.

Suggested Tools

Trello

  • Weekly Sprint board

    • Columns
      • todo
      • doing
      • blocked
      • done

  • Planning Board

    • Columns
      • Icebox — master task list where all possible new tasks start
      • Epics — list of standing big features or products the org plans to deliver
      • Stories — one column per story — each column represents less than 1-2 weeks work - A story column can be moved to the sprint board at the start of a sprint acting as a todo list

Slack

  • One channel for the #project team for communication about the project itself. Bugs, scheduling, clarification should all go through here.
  • One channel for #retrospective
  • One channel for #deliverables

Freeconferencecall.com

  • Daily check-in is face to face at the same scheduled time every day.
  • If can’t face to face, by phone with shared board works.
  • Limit is 5 minutes. If going over 5 minutes, you’re doing it wrong. Say, “Okay let’s schedule for a meeting to discuss this.”
  • Stick to the Do daily rules. See above.

Typical add-ons

  • Planning poker — for estimation
  • t-shirt sizing — for estimation
  • burn-down chart — for velocity tracking and estimation

Opinionated add-ons

  • Allocation for bugs — dev team is some times the same group needed to squash bugs. Making an allocation for bugs as a story within the sprint to account for paying down tech debt.
  • Discovered — oftentimes, actual work will exceed estimate or extremely time-critical work needs to be started mid-sprint. Instead of breaking the sprint, place work in a column called “discovered” (or make the “blocked” column into “blocked/discovered”) and see if velocity during the sprint permits team time enough to do work within the same sprint. If not, discovered task goes back into the master task list/icebox and is handled normally.
  • Separate bug collection tool. Icebox and planning board can be cluttered with too many bug type tasks. Consider a separate board or tracking system for bugs and review along with other task lists.
  • There’s lots of debate about the function of “sprint zero.” My opinion is it’s fair to do a Sprint 0 that is focused on environment setup and process training/agreement and understanding. The debate, which I feel is a pedantic one, is that Sprint 0 should REALLY be dedicated to building a micro-feature to get the team up and running (practically a hackathon). I would still say that for most new teams and efforts, the environment setup and process training is equally important, so this suggests a Sprint -1 and followed by a Sprint 0.

Posted on Edited on In

Pre-mortems vs. post-mortems

A gamestorming exercise brought to my attention by Kathy Louv while research Agile practices.
The post-mertem: Conduct an exercise where you pretend a project has failed so you can review risk elements BEFORE the start of project.
In our Agile for Life discipline, we might want to modify this practice slightly to suit our individual tasks.
I would contribute that review of risks should go alongside review of BEST practices for the subject area you’re working in. My observation for weight management, for example, is to know but not to emphasis foods I shouldn’t eat, for example. If I simply list the menu I SHOULD be eating, it tends to crowd out the bad actors.

Suggested usage of the Spark Board within Agile for Life

Specialize for a domain, e.g., blogging, nutrition/fitness, full-stack development.
Brainstorm good and bad practices in that domain, practices for project success and failure.
Sort.
Find the top five risk items, list them on your risk board.
Find the top five good behaviors, also list them.
On-going contribution, like an icebox but instead of tasks, list behaviors
These cards become the basis of a review meeting conducted before sprint kickoff to create your risk/better practices list.
Should be reviewed and pruned periodically.