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As an avid podcast subscriber I have dozens of audio and video programs feeding into iTunes daily, but one recent submission from the TED Talks video podcast caught my eye because of its parallels to lean startups. Tom Wujec, author and fellow at Autodesk, presented at TED 2010 back in February, and his talk, “Build a tower, build a team,” is now available online. Wujec conducted a team building experiment with all types of people, from business execs to kindergartners, and the results he presented were surprising, to say the least. Sponsor The activity, known as the marshmallow challenge , was borrowed by Wujec from Peter Skillman, VP of Design at Palm . Small teams are given 18 minutes to build a free-standing structure made of dry spaghetti, one yard of string, one yard of tape and a marshmallow, which must be placed on top. The team wins by creating the tallest structure of all the groups participating. What Wujec discovered is that this simple game revealed some fascinating insights into how groups collaborate. Wujec has conducted this experiment with over 70 groups of “students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50,” he says. Most teams quickly break into roles and plan their structure, and then spend the remaining time building it before quickly and gingerly placing the marshmallow on top as time expires. More often than not, the structure pitifully fails as the marshmallow is added, leaving the team with a pile of spaghetti and no time to try again. “So there are a number of people who have a lot more ‘uh-oh’ moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. They lie, they cheat, they get distracted, and they produce really lame structures,” says Wujec. “And of course there are teams that have a lot more ‘ta-da’ structures, and, among the best, are recent graduates of kindergarten.” “Design truly is a contact sport. It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand.” – Tom Wujec Wujec says that business school grads are taught to seek out and execute the one correct solution their challenge, while kindergartners practice the iterative prototype and refine process, much like the methods of lean startups. The kids would build, test and repeat until they found a structure that worked, and most times, he says, they built the tallest and most interesting structures. Another interesting fact uncovered by these experiments is that incentivizing the teams didn’t improve their structures, it actually made them worse. When Wujic offered the winning team a $10,000 software prize, not a single group was able to create a standing structure; however, when we returned to the same students later, they understood the need for iteration, and produced structures well above the average height. What startups can take away from the marshmallow challenge is that bigger teams and higher incentives are no substitute for having the right skills and the right process in place. Wujec found that larger teams performed increasing worse than smaller teams, and incentivizing them with a reward did not make up for the fact that they were not using the right process. As Wujec adds, every business challenge has its own “marshmallow,” so consider bringing some kindergarten-minded people onto your startup team. Photo by Flickr user John-Morgan . Discuss
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Marshmallows and Spaghetti: How Kindergartners Think Like Lean Startups
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Today I spoke with a diverse group of new entrepreneurs as part of my ongoing Online Strategy Roundtables . Together, this group illustrates how a business depends on how sharply the target market is defined. One entrepreneur is well on her way and another needs to focus more on his strongest market segment. Like many entrepreneurs, the other two are clearly accomplished people, but don’t come from a business background. For such entrepreneurs it is often worth looking for a cofounder who can fill in with expertise in areas where gaps exist. Sponsor Guest author Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy . She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. Julie Goldman did a nice presentation of her company The Original Runners . In 2003, she was the first to offer non-slip, high-quality fabric aisle runners for weddings and special events. Through her website she offers gorgeous hand-painted runners wholesale, and business has been growing to a revenue of $700,000 last year. I really like how tightly focused this business is. Niched wholesale businesses are great! Her main concern is that two dozen lower-quality copy-cat competitors have popped up over the years. To stay ahead of her competition, whom she describes as mom & pop at-home operations, I suggested she work with bloggers who are influencers with wedding planners (her main customers) to help specifically articulate why her product is superior. She has already relocated the business from New York City to New Jersey to reduce costs. To further counter the pricing pressure she is feeling from her competitors I suggested she look at relocating somewhere where it will be even less expensive for her to operate, like Vermont perhaps. She plans to launch a new brand as an accessory line and we discussed how it is only when she markets this new brand to her list of existing runner customers will mentioning “from The Original Runners company” hold any weight. New customers will not recognize the name and its association with quality products. We also spoke about SEO and search engine marketing, on tightly focusing pay-per-click campaigns on higher-end markets rather than going broad with a worldwide campaign. So far Julie’s is a great case study of a growing niche business. Next up was Sonali Roychoudhury presenting for Pursue Natural . Sonali is a scientist who is working with a team that is conducting research to find and bring natural medicinal plants to market that are not in the mainstream. Like many entrepreneurs who do not have a business background, Sonali is risk averse, unwilling to make assumptions, and uncertain as to what the next steps should be. We discussed the natural breath freshener that they have produced. It seems like the cost of entry into this small niche market is too high for this to make sense. She then explained how a small but loyal customer base has grown for this product through their process of testing the marketplace. By just setting up a direct Web sales business targeting their existing fans and the extremely high end natural product boutiques, I believe she could build a very nice small business selling small quantities month-to-month. As long as it is profitable, a small business is more than worth building. Lorenz Lannens and his company Online Design Bureau started as a consulting business that grew into to a Web solution for small and medium sized companies that helps them to develop their Web marketing strategies. His product and service enables clients to set up their Web marketing system, and he has metrics from early customers showing the system works. As we discussed his current customers, it became clear that his service is not really for startups, but more for businesses that are not Web savvy. I believe if he goes after companies that are not doing Web marketing as his segment and targets the verticals that his current clients fall in (like architecture firms), his list of customers will grow. I liked this presentation and clearly there is a need for this service. Many entrepreneurs who have pitched at these roundtables could probably use Lorenz’s help. In fact I suggested that both Sonali and Felice tap into his expertise. Lastly, Felice Gerwitz presented Scholar Square , a beta site targeting the homeschool community. She is an educator and author who specializes in homeschooling and hopes to sell a wide range of presentations and seminar classes through this site. As Felice explained her ideas, it became apparent that she is trying to do too many things for too many people, the classic “spray and pray.” I may have been a bit hard on Felice when she told me she did not go through the Clarify Your Story questionnaire as she was asked to on the roundtable registration page, but I think it needed to be said. There are no shortcuts when you are an entrepreneur. You need to do your homework. Felice needs to focus on the segment of the home school market that she tackles the best and is passionate about, and let the other ideas go. This should help her site find its center of gravity and its customers. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. If you are an entrepreneur working on an idea or an early stage business, I am also very interested in hearing what you are looking for from 1M/1M. Please weigh in here . We are crowdsourcing the design of 1M/1M, and requests that have come up include Receivables Financing as a way to bridge to a validated business without giving up precious equity, I would love to hear your thoughts. You can find the recording of this roundtable session here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . Photo by Nick Cowie . Discuss
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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Well-Defined Niches Work Best
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As part of my ongoing Online Strategy Roundtables , I met yesterday with four new entrepreneurs, all at the early stage of validating who their customers are and building their businesses. Entrepreneurs who are just starting out need to ask themselves some hard questions in order to develop a crisp go to market strategy. I pulled together a list of such questions that you can find here and in my Positioning book to help you “Clarify Your Story”. Up first was Martin Calle and his company OraQuel . Martin worked for years on product development for companies like Procter & Gamble and FritoLay, but eventually wanted to create a product that would be his own. Sponsor i> Guest author Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy . She has a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three books, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , and Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market are all available from Amazon. Her new book Vision India 2020 was recently released. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative. /p> After researching what type a product would be best to get behind, Martin came across research showing a strong correlation between gum disease and heart disease, and came up with a heart-smart oral care product. Since large retailer stores won’t work with a “little guy” in this category, he has started to approach social media groups like mommy bloggers and TwitterMoms to try to build up a grassroots following. I believe Martin’s product does answer a real need, but he has positioned this as a product just for kids. I think he will get better pickup if he positions this as a product for the entire family – a much larger segment of the market. Martin will need to do some controlled experiments to validate whether or not my hunch is correct, and then move forward with his social media PR campaign. Nick Quay presented for BluNami , a mobile marketing company that has developed a technology to help clients connect to Bluetooth users in a certain proximity. Nick and his team have been working with a wide variety of clients looking to use their technology a many different ways, from a city using it to make emergency announcements to restaurants offering deals to lure in customers. (As soon as I hear anyone is trying to work with a government entity, especially a startup venture, I immediately want them to stop wasting their time there. Unless they are paying you upfront as some type of consulting situation, most startups need their cash flow and can not sustain the government’s slow 12-24 month sales cycles.) Like many entrepreneurs with a versatile technology, Nick is trying to do too many things right now – the old “spray and pray.” While there may be many different segments interested in the product, each requires a unique go-to-market strategy. The best way to scale this business is to figure out what is the best value proposition and the easiest segment to sell to, and then focus time and energy on that while continuing to bootstrap your way to profitability. Later there may be time and money for exploring other avenues. Frederic Guitton gave a nice presentation for ActivSalesAgent , a business that combines its software with call centers as a way to help convert visitors on client websites into better qualified sales leads. This business is further down the road of validation than the others, and is profitable. As I questioned him about price point, Frederic was ready with metrics to show that what they are doing is indeed working. We discussed how using solid statistical information along with references from early customers is the best was to convert potential customers into clients – and those reference accounts do not need to be the biggest clients. Small business references work just as well. That’s how Salesforce.com did it. I think this business has legs, but urged Frederic to be open to doing some type of offshore chat centers down the road because I think reducing costs will become a bigger issue as this business continues to scale. Then Linda Muncy, who is just starting out, presented her business idea. She is hired to provide photo-related entertainment at events. Guests are creatively photographed and given the image in some form as a giveaway. She has started reproducing the images onsite on a material similar to Skinit so guests can attach the image to their handhelds, laptops, etc. She would like to develop a product kit so other event planners can do this as well. Linda has yet to truly validate her product and service. I always tell entrepreneurs to validate your idea before building any product. I think Linda will be amazed by what she learns after calling 100 event planners to get their feedback. This may only be a small business, but that is perfectly okay – as long as it is profitable. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. If you are an entrepreneur working on an idea or an early stage business, I am also very interested in hearing what you are looking for from 1M/1M. Please weigh in here . We are crowdsourcing the design of 1M/1M, and requests that have come up include Receivables Financing as a way to bridge to a validated business without giving up precious equity, I would love to hear your thoughts. i> You can find the recording of this roundtable session here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . /p> em> Photo by Svilen Milev . /p> Discuss
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Startup Strategy Roundtable: Early Stage Business Building
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In the emerging Internet of Things , everyday objects are becoming networked. Clothing is no exception. It’s still early days for Web-enabled clothes – the best example so far is the Nike+ running shoe, which contains sensors that connect to the user’s iPod. But expect to see everything from your shirt to your underwear networked in the not too distant future. In the following list of ten ‘smart clothing’ items, we showcase Internet pants, a proximity sensing shirt, a heart sensing bra, biosensor underwear, a “thought helmet”, and more! Sponsor Motion Detecting Pants Now, we’re know what you’re thinking – it’s already pretty easy to detect ‘motion’ in pants isn’t it? Nevertheless, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg has developed a pair of pants “that detect movement and let a computer know your every move.” These smart pants work via a loom that helps sew the wires and fabric together. Sensors embedded in the fabric measure the speed, rotation and flexibility of the pants with every movement. Wireless signals are sent from the pants to a computer to display the activity. The scientists at Virginia Polytechnic don’t yet know why this activity would be useful (to a computer), but we’re sure that use cases will arise. Proximity Sensing Shirt The Locked ON Proximity Sensing T-Shirt is currently available at the ThinkGeek store . It features a “radar screen” on the shirt that scans for matching shirts. If you get within a few meters of your counterpart wearing the same shirt, the radar on your shirt “locks on” and detects the other. This could be useful for love or war – the video below shows the latter scenario. Heart Sensing Bra The Numetrex heart sensing bra uses electronic modules and silver coated electrodes to pick up a person’s heart rate and transmit the data to a watch worn on the wrist. Says NuMetrex Marketing Director Meg Burich, “It’s a comfortable way to wear a heart rate monitor, because we knit flexible heart sensing fibers directly into the fabric of the garment. There’s no hard plastic belt to strap around your chest.” Smart Running Shoes Nike+ running shoes come with a sensor that tracks your run, then sends the data to your iPod. It even has its own social network and can automatically tweet and post a status report on Facebook. See ReadWriteWeb’s review of the Nike+ shoes . Networked Jacket According to a report from GizmoWatch a couple of years ago, Lunar design’s BLU Jacket is a futuristic concept that could make walking billboards a reality. Lunar Design used organic fabrics containing semiconductors in the BLU Jacket, in order to display your moods through signs and colors. This BLU Jacket also has a GPS module built into it. So if someone asks you directions, you could theoretically project a map onto your jacket’s sleeve through it’s flexible display. Or, asks GizmoWatch, “how about getting paid for displaying advertisements on your jacket?” Next Page: Neuro Headset, Thought Helmet, Biosensor Underwear, iPod Watch, Nanofibers. Neuro Headset The Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset is for gamers and is available for $299. It’s described as “a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset.” The headset uses a set of sensors to “tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions and connects wirelessly to most PCs.” According to the company , the headset can detect emotions such as anger, excitement and tension, as well as facial expressions and cognitive actions like pushing and pulling objects. Thought Helmet Let’s get very futuristic for a minute. Six Revisions references an article in Time from September 2008, which claims that the U.S. Army is actively pursuing “thought helmets” for secure mind-to-mind communication between soldiers. The goal “is a system where entire military systems could be controlled by thought alone. While this kind of technology is still far off, the fact that the military has awarded a $4 million contract to a team of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland means that we might be seeing prototypes of these systems within the next decade.” Image: Wikimedia iPod Watch Back to the now, and there are already a range of iPod watches available from different manufacturers. These watches let you control your iPod using your wireless watch. Biosensor Underwear RSC Publishing reported recently that US scientists have developed durable biosensors that can be printed directly onto clothing, to allow continuous biomedical monitoring outside hospitals. The aim is to enable constant monitoring of blood pressure and heart rate: “Joseph Wang and colleagues at the University of California San Diego, La Jolla have developed a method for printing biosensors directly onto clothing. To form the sensors, Wang screen-printed carbon electrode arrays directly onto the elastic bands of mens’ underwear. The tight contact and direct exposure to the skin allows hydrogen peroxide and the enzyme NADH, which are both associated with numerous biomedical processes, to be monitored using the sensor, explains Wang.” Nanofibers To round out our list, we go a level down the clothing chain and look at next generation fabrics. Delta Farm Press reports that Cornell University’s Department of Textiles and Apparel aims to develop fibers that have computing devices in them. An example use case is a shirt “made of cotton threads coated with a thin layer of semiconductor polymers and nanoparticles that conduct electric and can power your cell phone or iPod or monitor your heartbeat, brainwaves, and other functions.” The University is also investigating “textiles that can act as sensors that could be used to detect the presence of hazardous bacteria, such as E. coli or anthrax.” A further example is smart clothes made of fibers that can change colors – “one appropriate for daytime business environment, a different one for nighttime socializing.” One thing is for sure with all ten of these examples of ‘smart clothing’ – at least some of the clothing that we wear in the future is likely to be networked, in one form or another! Thanks to Deane Rimerman, who provided research for this article. Discuss
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Three years ago we reviewed Martha Stewart’s women’s lifestyle website, marthastewart.com . At that time, April 2007, the site had just undergone a web 2.0 facelift. Martha Stewart 2.0 included more videos, blogging and general community features such as recipe swap functionality and message boards. It planned to add further personalization and community features over 2007. We thought it would be interesting to take another look at Martha Stewart’s website, to get an indication of how mainstream websites have evolved over the past 3 years. Sponsor The design of marthastewart.com hasn’t changed much since we last checked. It has the same pastel green color scheme and is organized in much the same way, around lifestyle categories: Food, Entertaining, Holidays, Weddings, Crafts, Home & Garden, Pets, Whole Living, Community. However if we look more closely, several things have taken more prominence on the site compared to 2007. Martha’s Blog The first is an increased focus on Martha’s personal blog . In 2010 Martha has a daily updated blog, called The Martha Blog , with the tagline “up close and personal.” This marks a change from 2007, when the main blog was called Bluelines and was written by the editors of company magazine Blueprint. The Bluelines blog was shuttered in July 2008. The Martha Blog was started in August 2007 and began to be regularly updated in October 2007. The content on the blog appears to be written by Martha herself, although one can never be sure with celebrities. Regardless, it showcases the power of blogging – which allows average people and celebrities alike to speak in a personal voice to the world. There are other topic-focused blogs on marthastewart.com, including a light-hearted one authored by “Martha’s two adorable French bulldogs, Francesca and Sharkey.” Twitter & Facebook Of course, it’s 2010 and so that means Martha has to have a Twitter account and Facebook Page . Martha’s Twitter account has nearly 2 million followers (1,909,707 as of today, including this author now). She seems to be a regular Tweeter, which is great to see. Many of the tweets are promotions of her TV show, but then we’re all guilty of self-promotion ( ahem ). You can see that the tweets are genuine though, for example this one about a late guest on her show: “who could this person be?- so irresponsible when he/she knows the show is live at ten!!! it’s 9:39 we are all apprehensive!!!! oh my.” TV Show Promotion Another change from 2007 that we noticed was an increased tie-in with Martha’s TV show . It is given prime real estate on the homepage of marthastewart.com, with previews of the latest show and links to the archive. Despite the TV show being a big focus, the website doesn’t have a lot of multimedia content on it. The videos that are on the site are largely promotional. This section includes ‘how-to’ articles that complement the TV show, for example this article on how to make a Tie-Dye-Effect Scarf (as featured on a recent TV episode). Evolution of Martha’s Website Martha Stewart’s website is clearly meant to be a complement to her main media businesses, the TV show and magazines. So you won’t find much ground-breaking use of the Internet – there’s little or no original video produced specifically for the website, for example. There also wasn’t a lot of personalization, which was promised in 2007. The community functionality in 2010 seems much the same as in 2007: message boards and the blogs. Although, Twitter and Facebook are both being used to enhance community. It’d be nice to see more Web native content and personalization. The Web isn’t Martha’s main media presence, so we can understand why those features are lacking. However traffic seems to be on the decline, so perhaps Martha’s web team should consider upgrading again. 2010 Martha Stewart website 2007 Martha Stewart website 2005 Martha Stewart website Discuss
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Martha Stewart 3.0: The Evolution of MarthaStewart.com
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