This is going to be a little bit about the projects and a little bit about what I discovered about myself and my thoughts on business, so work with me here people….
First, it was a big honor to be picked to be a mentor to some of the groups getting projects up and running this past weekend in New York City. It was really cool seeing people spend their whole weekend brainstorming, coding, and trying to put together a project. As a fan of Seth Godin, I am a fan of shipping your projects and having a predefined time line pretty effectively deals with that problem.
In talking to a lot of these ‘startup junkies’ what I found was that they were very intently focused on getting projects started, which is pretty awesome!
But, the thing I found funny was that I only heard one conversation about making money. And, that’s where I found out a few of my thoughts on business…and that’s where I come in.
First, I have been a bootstrapper since the beginning. My first business, when I was 18, I started with about $300 in supplies. Two Kings Tickets was started with less than $3,000 and Always Great Seats was started with less than $3,000. What this means is that my focus has always been on getting profitable as quickly as possible.
Second, while there were a lot of bells and whistles, I asked the question, and posted it to Twitter, ‘What can your business do to improve the life of your customer?’
Now, I want to say this and let this act as where my thoughts are now….
I love the idea of Startup Weekend or people getting together to kick off an idea that may or may not become a company. I’ve had a couple of successes and a couple of roaring failures..so I am a fan of failing as long as you take the right lessons from it. But, when you are putting together your ideas or business concepts, think about these two things:
1. How are you going to improve your prospective customer’s life and why would they come to you as opposed to someone else?
2. How are you going to make a profit?