Remarkable

Seth Godin @ TED '07:

The thing that decides what ideas get talked about, what gets changed, what gets built is "is it remarkable?". Remarkable is a great word. We think it means: "Is it neat" - but it really means - "Is it worth making a remark about". And that is the essence of idea diffusion. 

Takeaway: Marketing a product is a whole lot easier if the product itself is remarkable. 

Also, interesting is the practice in the entertainment industry to have a "One Sheet"

from Wikipedia:

 one-sheet or one sheet is a single document that summarizes a product for publicity and sales. Often comprised of both images and text, one-sheets typically serve as a way to introduce the unfamiliar reader to a particular artist. The name of the artist (and perhaps the title of the release) will appear prominently.

Man in the Arena

"Man in the Arena" is a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris, 1910. 

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Here is the full speech: Link

I spend a lot of time commenting on other companies and critiquing them. It is important to remember the importance of being in the arena. 

------

Thanks to Mike Arrington's talk at Startup School '08 and Yossi Vardi -- the Israeli VC for highlighting this passage. 

Dr Vardi btw is an extremely successful VC - He cofounded Alon (Israel's largest energy company) and Tekem (Israel's largest software company for a while). He also backed Mirabilis (The company behind ICQ). His VC is called Pitango - One of Israel's largest VC firms. 

Publicity for your Startup

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch gives interesting advice about obtaining publicity for your startup in his talk at Stanford for Startup School 08. Other interesting speakers here are David Hansson of 37 Signals, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Paul Graham of YCombinator.

1. Criticism

First time entrepreneurs can't deal with criticism. Embrace your criticism (not trolling). e.g: Ning's realtionship with TechCrunch went from being trashed to getting great coverage and raising money on a $500m round of financing. 

2. Bloggers

• Make friends with big-name bloggers by providing them leaks.
• Maintain a blog + twitter
• LinkBack to your coverage.

3. Signals vs Noise

Don't barrage people with information; You will become background noise. Analogous to training a dog - you need to make "one single impact" instead of constantly badgering people with information. 

4. Disruptive Technology

         (Mobile Platform, Wikipedia, etc) gets attention from the press. Like Seth Godin's analogy of the Purple Cow.

Here is the full Video

Here's TechCrunch's coverage of the event: Link

Experiment #1: WPR

Today, we launched our first web service. 

Using the most basic, off-the-shelf products, and tools available to web-designers / web-marketers: iWeb, Google Ad-Words, Google Analytics, Google Checkout we made a website that allows people to buy a web-delivered service that we don't know yet how to provide.

Here is the interesting part:

We plan to figure out how to provide this service should someone choose to buy it. 

We plan to refine the design of the web site if we find that people come to the website and choose not to purchase it. 

The internet really makes this kind of business model possible. A business model where entrepreneurs can find out whether their 'idea' is feasible before heavily investing in terms of  technical, marketing or sales effort. 

Here is a breakdown of our costs so far:

--------------Cost Breakdown-------------

Domain Name:  

$10

Google AdWords Campaign:  

$10 Spending Limit 

+  $5 Activation Fee

Google Checkout:    

$0 Setup Fee

+ 2.0% plus $0.20 per transaction

Google Analytics:  

$0 (Free)

---------------

Total: $25 

We sell our service at a sufficiently high price that we will make a profit even after selling to our first customer. $10 of AdWords should bring in around 100 Visitors at $.10 CPC. We hope that at least one of those users click to purchase the service. 

When we go to sleep tonight, we can playfully entertain dreams that we will wake up the next morning to find our bank-account full because of overwhelming overnight demand for our service. :)

Introduction

For a long time now, we (Mickey and Tarun) have been exploring various technical ideas. We talk a lot about the technical parts, and have more recently begun trying to understand the rest of what is necessary for an idea to become real: marketing/advertising, business strategy, market analysis, accounting, finance, economics, how to get good human resources, and the rest of the business stack. This will be a log of some of our experiments along the way, and other things that come up as we try to become young entrepreneurs in today's tech world.

The ventures catalogued here are primarily experiments. Hence, there is some specific experience we seek, or some hypothesis we are testing. We consider these ventures to be of a very different nature than those which have the primary purpose of being successful, and will not discuss the latter on this blog.

As to not influence the results, we will avoid explicitly giving the assumed name of the experiment here. We do not want this blog to be a search result when someone looks up that name.

We launch this blog in conjunction with the launch of our first experiment, which we will describe in the next post.

-Mickey and Tarun