Friday, March 20, 2009

Ideas for startups - How to get the next big one

This is an essay about how to get an idea for a startup.

Read through the entire thing and its really worth your time if you are looking for some startup idea guidelines.

The essay is comprehensive in the sense it is logical and encompasses all the bits and pieces of startup advice that you've been hearing everywhere.

Some excerpts:


"To generate such questions you need two things: to be familiar with promising new technologies, and to have the right kind of friends. New technologies are the ingredients startup ideas are made of, and conversations with friends are the kitchen they're cooked in. "

"
What these groups of co-founders do together is more complicated than just sitting down and trying to think of ideas. I suspect the most productive setup is a kind of together-alone-together sandwich. Together you talk about some hard problem, probably getting nowhere. Then, the next morning, one of you has an idea in the shower about how to solve it. He runs eagerly to to tell the others, and together they work out the kinks."

"
Another classic way to make something people want is to take a luxury and make it into a commmodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. And it is a very rare product that can't be made dramatically cheaper if you try.
This was Henry Ford's plan. He made cars, which had been a luxury item, into a commodity. But the idea is much older than Henry Ford. "


If these tidbits interest you, go ahead and read the article here.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

10 Tips to find Domain names

Ever faced the dilemma of a domain name for your startup ?

James Siminoff, a serial entrepreneur has 10 tips on how to search for domain names like a Pro.

The advice is pretty valuable for someone new to the field like me.
After reading the article, I've realized that my blogs must be anywhere close to the bottom 10% in terms of searchability. (Yeah, I coined this word.)

Beginners guide to Twitter

I did not know why Twitter was talked about so much in the blogging circle and startups, although I signed up for it. Guy Kawasaki used to talk about it a lot in his blog.

Jus found this Beginners guide to Twittering written by none other than the CEO of Zappos.

Finished reading it and it now makes a lot of sense to get hooked onto it and get all ur frens into it too.


Happy Twittering

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Soap box: A Japanese case study


An interesting case study…

One of the most memorable case studies in Japanese management was the case of the empty soap box, which happened in one of Japan's biggest cosmetics companies.

The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty.

Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason, one soap box went through the assembly line empty. Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soap boxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast but they spent whoopee amount to do so.

But when a rank-and-file employee in a small company was posed with the same problem, did not get into complications of X-rays, etc but instead came out with another solution.

He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soap box passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.
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Moral of the story: ALWAYS look for simple solutions. Devise the simplest possible solution that solves the problem

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Networking website for school goers





Recently my cousin, who is studying his 6th class, came over to my house for his vacation. He immediately ran over to the computer.
I was curious about his enthusiasm and followed him to find out what it was, that has evoked such a strong feeling of attraction. He opened the site: http://classteacher.com/horlicks/ He was very strongly influenced by the advertisement in TV which is aimed at school going kids. It just has a couple of games and a little relevant info, but it certainly caught my attention as a wonderful business model.

I see this is as a good opportunity in a relatively blue ocean market with massive potential.

We will build a portal aimed at specifically at school goers.

What do we provide:

  • Add online games which can be played along with their classmates. This is such a thrill, if u've ever played online pool with your classmates or other friends. (Directly buy the games from developers)
  • Add ideas for science projects, link things to www.howstuffworks.com. So they have abundance of ideas, whenever they need to work on something. (This is a huge plus, my little sisters keep wandering all over the place and net for ideas.)
  • Target the students from 4th standard to 10th standard. Pore through their books. Provide detailed info on every topic. Provide ideas for essays, school debates, etc. (Hire some teachers to provide this info on a pay-by-work basis.)
  • Keep interacting with schools to assess the needs of the students.
  • Post math tips in an animated way.
  • Provide a platform, where the kids can post personal experiences and award them with their day of glory by posting it on the homepage.
  • Provide tools to unleash their creativity and help them develop their distinct personal page, which they will be proud of and flaunt it to their friends.
  • Provide an online interaction-social networking platform similar to facebook, targeted at school-goers.
  • In short-make the site such an attraction that kids want to spend all their online time with the site because it provides both educational stuff and fun stuff. Cater to all the needs of the school goer.

Revenue making model: The primary advantage of this site is that you have a large saturated group of target audience withing the same age group and with almost similar tastes. So any advertising just hits the core group unlike an advertisement on a hoarding. I can see this primarily as a advertising based model. If you boast of a high number of registered users or everyday clicks, kid product companies would not want to miss this opportunity to advertise. Better still, approach leading kid based product companies like Boost, Maggi, chocolates, etc to sponsor the whole thing. It helps them build a strong bond with their target consumers.

I am still not convinced by this revenue model and open to ideas on how we could milk this cash cow. This is a largely untouched market segment.

Waiting on your valuable input