A Dangerously Good Book

Tim Ferriss has delivered a provocative book: "The 4-Hour Workweek." This NY Times bestseller challenges assumptions about work and life.

The question. "Why work live a slave for 15-20 years?" Ferriss suggests that this work now for rewards later proposition is flawed. He recommends taking frequent mini-retirements and smelling the roses throughout the journey called life.

There is a saying, "work smarter, not harder." This books gives practical tips for delivering results with less effort and time. Through automation, outsourcing, batching, and intelligent delegation, Ferris has turned his nutritional supplements business into a cash machine while he pursues new advenures around the world. Ferriss has been a world-record holder in tango, a national champion in Chinese kickbooking, and speaks six languages. He uses unconventional methods to produce unparalleled results. Ferriss is one of a kind. He has the ability to have laser-focus for short periods of time, which he recommends as a better way to work.

The challenge. First you must know what work is high impact, and what work is busy work. Ferriss provides some ways to evaluate your work routine to analyze this. Once you do figure out what work is high impact, you must be disciplined to concentrate on these high impact tasks without getting drawn into the distractions of busy works and interruptions. Eliminate the busy work, outsource the non-essential, and automate repetitive tasks.

Working at a startup requires long hours, passion and intensity. However, even or especially an early stage company should be looking for ways to streamline and scale. Talk with any Sand Hill VC, and one of their key questions is "how are you going to scale this business." "The 4-Hour Workweek" provides answers to these questions.

Intern with Us!

GetQuik Who?

GetQuik is an early stage startup company in sunny Sunnyvale, CA. GetQuik is looking to improve people's lives by simplifying everyday purchases. More specifically, restaurant and cafe orders. Our Question: Why should people have to wait in line for 10 minutes to purchase a $4 latte or $5 sandwich?
Our Answer: They shouldn't.

Job Description:
Provide great ideas and work to accelerate GetQuik's growth.

Requirements:
- Positive mental attitude,
- Honesty,
- Big Brain,
- Willingness and ability to wear multiple hats,
- Excellent customer service instincts, and
- Ability and desire to work autonomously.

More on the GetQuik experience:

- Warning: Not the entire day is focused on product development, features and marketing brainstorming (although there is plenty). You WILL need to to handle customer service and heaven-forbid, data-entry work.

- If salary is your top job requirement, this is NOT your job. If you want to get paid a few bucks while getting a world-class on-the-job education, and have work responsibilty well beyond a typical intern or entry level position, consider working for GetQuik.

- Hours. If you meet all these requirements and we like you, we'll consider anywhere from 20-40 hours a week. Ideally we'd like to get close to 40 hours a week, but if this is not possible, we are open to working out a schedule that works for the right person.

Still here? Submit your resume to hr@getquik.com.

Plug and Play Tech Center Expo 2007

Today's Plug and Play Expo comes on the heels of the the TechCrunch40. Saeed Amidi, the mastermind behind Plug and Play, has positioned the Plug and Play Expo as the venue for early stage companies in contrast to TechCrunch40's later stage startup presenters.

Another twist is that Plug and Play Expo used a rapid-fire 2-minute turbo pitch format for its 37 presenters (GetQuik was one of the presenters). It is an interesting exercise to distill long hours and lots of sweet into a 2-minute pitch format. All 37 companies finished were presented over a 2-hour period. Four companies, Twiki, Zipidee, Gigya, and BlueGem Security were choosen to present encore 10-minute presentations.

My personal picks:

- ScreenerKey: Interesting Idea Award. USB device that allows parents to set time limit for watching TV, using a computer, etc. Interesting idea. Many questions left unanswers:

- How do you get your kid from pulling out the USB device?

- How easy it is to override?

- How do you configure the settings?

Seems to be an interesting way to assist a parent in enforcing house rules for kids and teens. Kids are really good at technology to the point where they can probably outsmart the device. ScreenerKey is early stage, so it will be interested to see if the marketplace will welcome this device.

- TechDirt: Best Preso Award. Subterranean Homesick Preso. Mike Masnick, CEO of TechDirt, quickly demonstrated why he is smarter than 99.9% of the bloggers out there. He zigs while others zag. Mike has figured out a way to monetize the blogsphere and give an entertaining preso that defies conventional wisdom. Hopefully Mike's preso was captured and will be available for people to see for themself.

- Xpree: Most Innovative "Wisdom of Crowds" Award. Tons of sites now have voting mechanisms to understand best photos, videos, etc. Xpree brings this methodology to the mystical art of financial planning. Can the collective knowledge of a corporation provide superior financial forecasting than traditional Financial Planning & Analysis methods? Xpree is betting on this. The challenge for Xpree will be in getting early corporate adopters to get their employees to participate in the surveys in order that this corporate wisdom is accessible.

- Twiki: Now We Just Need to Monetize Award. Twiki is a corporate wiki solution that has gained widespread adoptions due to its starting price point: free. They are now monetizing their customer base with premium and professional services. Looks promising. They should be able to turn a fair share of loyal customers into loyal, paying customers.

- Gigya: Simplicity Award. Gigya offers a simplified way for software developers to distribute widgets. Although dragging and dropping a little JavaScript is not too hard, Gigya's "click to add" tool (think Feedburner RSS feed interface) makes it that much easier to add widgets to a multitude of platforms (Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, etc.). Gigya also offers a revenue share solution if user's endorse sponsored ads.

The event was quick, clean, and professional. The Plug and Play team did a great job in hosting this event. Thanks to Plug and Play for allowing GetQuik to participate.

The Price is Right?

Setting prices for products and services is a challenging exercise. The goal is to maximize profits without pricing out of your target customer's budget.

The danger of low margin pricing:

- Lost Profits,

- Cash Flow Challenges, and

- Limited Working Capital for R&D, Customer Service and Marketing.

The risk of high margin pricing:

- Losing customers to competitors,

- Lack of supplier control, and

- Inability to gain significant market share.

Steve Jobs has great instincts for setting prices. His firm stance to price songs at $.99 on iTunes is a great example of this. iPod prices were also near perfect. Apple was able to dominate the MP3 player market, while still making healthy profits to fuel the continued dominance of the iPod franchise.

That is why the iPhone price correction is surprising. For months leading up the much hyped iPhone release, analysts were concerned that the $499 and $599 prices were far too high. Now that Apple has dropped the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399 ($200), it appears that Apple is looking to sacrifice profits in order to garner significantly higher market share. Conspiracy theorist are wondering if this entire price and reprice of the iPhone may be a well orchestrasted strategy by Jobs. Time will tell whether $399 is the sweet spot for the iPhone. Although Apple could have milked huge profits at the $499 and $599 price levels, those prices were clearly hurting sales volumes. Whether or not the iPhone price correction was a correction or a premeditated strategy, one thing is certain, prices matter.

Banking on Mobile Alerts

JP Morgan Chase has a new advertising campaign. A young female customer is kissing her boyfriend and is interrupted as she receives a mobile notification confirming that her deposit has been posted.

Online banking is gaining momentum. Now banks are beginning to experiment with mobile-banking. It is still early in the game, but consumers have shown interest. The initial use case? Balance inquires. Consumers prefer to handle bill payments and other more complex transactions from their homes.

We are a ways off before mobile banking becomes mainstream, but mobile alert services can be implemented effectively today. Customers are interested in getting notifications for daily balances, insufficient funds, low balances, and transfers. This level of financial visibility for consumers and small business owners would provide increased customer loyalty. Besides attracting new tech savvy consumers, mobile alerts are a good way to get customers more comfortable with mobile banking.

When the term Beta went Gold

In the packaged software world, software products go through the following stages of life:

- Pre-Alpha,
- Alpha,

- Beta,

- Release Candidate,

- Gold (General Release), and
- EOL (End of Life).

In our new web world, Beta has stolen the show. You do see sites listed with the "Alpha" name, but mostly you see "Beta". The term Beta also has two primary sub-divisions, closed-Beta and open-Beta.

Wikipedia has an excellent entry regarding the "software release life cycle". The entry talks more in terms of boxed software, and does not specifically reference the use of software life cycle labels as it related to web-sites.

So who first coined the use of the "beta" label for software? Wikipedia attributes the term to IBM, who first began using the term back in the punch card machine days.

The release cycle labels work well for boxed software, but with web software, the appropriate label for a site's development stage is much more difficult to determine. There are no standard guidelines when to promote a product from Alpha to Beta, and Beta to Gold. The result is a major difference in user experience from one beta site to another. Web companies are constantly improving and enhancing their sites, so there is never a "final product." Along the way, the company must deliver a gold product. Constant and vigilant updates are required to keep a site competitive and vibrant. On the Internet, a static site is as close to EOL as you can get.

Hunting the Right Game

The first rule for prospecting is to take action and stay active. Pick up the phone and start dialing or hit the road and visit with potential new customers.

This shotgun approach works if the activity level and frequency is high. However, taking a more thoughtful approach to sales can produce superior results.

Not all customers are created equal. Figure out which customers and prospects are likely to be the most profitable.

Sector 1) Low Profit/Low Conversation - Avoid at all costs.

Sector 2) High Profit/Low Conversion - Big game hunting should be reserved for those that can survive lean sales while trying to land the big one.

Sector 3) Low Profit/High Conversion - OK to stimulate activity and get the ball rolling, but beware spending too many cycles on these customers who take away time from the best customer segment.

Sector 4) High Profit/High Conversion - Spend most of your time targeting this quadrant.

The game plan to maximize your sales to Sector 4:

Step 1) Analyze and identify your targets.

Step 2) Get these customers to try your service.

Step 3) Spend extra time to find out how to get trial customers to become regular customers.

Step 4) Provide world-class customer service to these customers.

Step 5) Repeat Step 4 over and over again.

Despite your best efforts, you will still lose some of these premium customers. So the name of the game is to land and convert these customers at a far faster rate than your attrition rate. This works if you are targeting customers in quadrant 4, but can quickly derail if you spend too much time on Sectors 1, 2 or 3.

Happy Hunting.

Darwin Applied

One of the key findings in "Built to Last" (Porras, Collins) shows that companies who embrace change outperform their peers.

Once a corporation reaches a certain size, there is a tendency for the company to rest on its laurels and fight to protect the status quo. IBM took one of the biggest risks in business history when it bet the company on the IBM 360 mainframe computer. IBM won its big bet and was able to dominate the computer industry for decades. In the 80's the computer industry was in its formative stages, and IBM was well positioned to dominate. IBM had unmatched sales, operations, distribution and financial strength. The other thing that IBM had was a bloated corporate culture and a sacred cow - the mainframe. IBM survived after Lou Gerstner got Big Blue back on track and focused on transforming IBM into a service-focused organization. The story of the once dynamic company turning into a beauracractic, risk-adverse corporation is familiar. Insert dinosaur or Roman empire analogy here.

In contrast, 3M has instituted some ingenious policies in order to avoid this "big = bloated" trap. 3M allows technical workers to devote 15% of their time to their pet projects. Additionally, 3M has a goal that 30% of revenues come from products and services introduced in the previous 4 years. Profit sharing at 3M was introduced to key employees in 1916 and expanded to almost all employees in 1937. If this sounds a lot like the HP Way, this is not a coincidence. 3M was the company that Bill Hewlett admired most and used as a role model for HP. Even HP fell into the beauracracy trap before CEO Mark Hurd brought the company back in line. Today, the evolutionary-based approach to business is being applied at Google.

The keys to the formula:

- Hire the best and brightest (if only the strong survive, begin with a strong team),

- No sacred cows,

- Stimulate experimentation (reward for innovative solutions),

- Accept mistakes during the evolutionary process, and

- Empower your team.

No matter the size of the organization, this formula can produce amazing results. In a startup, bad hires and micromanagement can be fatal. Resources are typically severly stretched, which means that each team member must produce substantially more than an average corporate employee. The only way this can be acheived is to hire talented self-starters and get out of the way. The same formula used at 3M for over a decade. Hopefully the result will be a highly evolved corporation.

OK, I know - beating a dead horse. If you are starting a company or leading a company, read "Built to Last" if you have not already. A word of caution. There is a chapter on companies targeting BHAG (Big Hairy Audicious Goals). I would argue BHAG are more appropriate for larger stable organizations needing a major initiative to provide purpose and break the company out of an overly cautious growth plan. For a startup, the entire enterprise is a risky proposition, so the goal is to realize a more stable business entity and fast. Experimentation and evolution can serve this goal.