Moosicles

It’s been awhile since I’ve had the motivation to post anything on here, but I’m making a comeback. I’ve got some (in my opinion) crazy awesome ideas for useful webapps or general software, but first, some background info:

I want to make a personal inventory system to keep track of all of my crap. I just bought some new Choco sandals for $80 – those things are known to last years. The guy that sold them to me had his for 13 years and repaired them only occasionally with some shoe glue. Now this is the first time I’ve spent that much money on footware, normally I would go spend $10 at Walmart for flip flops, which is what I did last summer, and they broke less than a year later. But let’s assume these Choco’s last me 10 years. That makes them just $8 a year – and these are NICE. They are comfortable and great for hiking. After 10 years, the Walmart flip flops will have cost $100 assuming they break every year like this year, and then they are not as nice to begin with. Oh yeah, one more thing – think of all the time and gas money it would take to have to go to the store to get more flip flops every year. Unless you love shopping, which I hate, it’s pretty much to your advantage, as well as the environment’s, to get something that’s going to last as long as possible. It used to be that lasting long was something that was looked for when we bought things perhaps 40 years ago, but now, Walmart has changed this. Now you are seen as being wealthy and loose with your wallet if you buy quality items instead of going to Walmart. Why can’t we learn to invest in the long-term when we make purchases nowadays? I think this should change, in order to increase our own quality of life and address the social and environmental problems that are occurring in the world.

With that said, I think that for me, the main reason that I don’t think about making things last as long as possible is that I forget about things quickly. I’ve got a busy life – I’m in college. I don’t have time to keep track of my crap, to research everything before I buy it, and to do a cost-benefit analysis of stuff before I buy. What I want to do is create a personal inventory system that is aimed at helping people make their personal items last as long as possible and get their money’s worth out of them. Maybe something like this already exists. If it does, please show me! But I want the system to be simple: just input items that you buy and expect to last longer than… let’s say six months. You will input the date of purchase, the place you bought it from, the price, and the target amount of time that it’s supposed to last. Then, you will know what you have, how much it’s worth, and if your small investments in simple objects are paying off or if they are ripping you off. This will also help people to know when it’s worth it to repair an item and when it’s worth it to buy a new one.

What do you think?

After touring five local companies and hearing about five more local entrepreneurs give speeches about their successes, I’ve drawn some entrepreneurial conclusions. These are very likely existing business concepts, but I have never taken a business class, so bear with me. I’m just making connections from what I have seen and heard.

There are two types of entrepreneurship: precedented and unprecedented. In precedented entrepreneurship, you are simply creating a business based on ideas that already exist and on a business model that has already been proven effective. Precedented entrepreneurship is important as it fills needs that society has – it is purely a reaction to a demand. Any perfectly competitive market, such as web design, web hosting, marketing, restaurants, or accounting fits into this category of precedented entreprenurship. Precdented entrepreenurs start new businesses, but not new ideas. This is not to say that precedented entrepreneurship does not ever fill niches or involve creativity: even businesses within a perfectly competitive market are all slightly different and try not to overlap 100%. With that said, there is a little secret about precedented entrepreneurship that I will let you in on: its easy to get into because it’s based on products of high demand, but it’s also highly competitive and highly standardized. If you start a precedented business, based on an existing model, with an already well-defined market, you better be ready to compete with those standards. You obviously don’t have to be the best at what you do starting off – nobody ever is. But you should at the very least offer a product of comparable quality to your competitors and you should meet the industry standards. Upon starting a precedented business, be prepared not to come up with new, innovative ideas, but rather to try to be the best at what you do and to simply offer a damn good product or service. Don’t expect to get very big.

In unprecedented entrepreneurship, you are trying to create an entirely new idea, or connect existing ideas in an entirely new way. There is no precedent for you. You have to be able to innovate and constantly be open to new ideas and constant change. You will likely be creating a new technology that you might not even know how to apply in an economically feasible way. You may have no idea how to even create a business plan for the product. In fact, the product may simply not be profitable or demanded. With a new idea comes a new market. You will have to define a market that might not exist yet – you will have to even create a demand through advertising and demonstrations. If you are successful, it is very likely that you will get big and have little or no competition. Many huge corporations started, and often continue to be of this nature.

Both types of entrepreneurship are important to society. Precedented entrepreneurship brings prices down, brings quality up, and satisfies our basic demands. Unprecedented entrepreneurship  changes the way that society operates by creating new technologies.

There is a bad kind of entrepreneur. While entrepreneurs are largely credited with taking important risks in moving society into new territory and trying to bring to life risky, new ideas, not all entrepreneurs provide a fairly-priced, quality product. Occasionally there will be the entrepreneur that is impatient and goes after money with no understanding of his market of choice. Here is how I came to these realizations:

Back in February I got to my Entrepreneurship Initiative class one day and we were presented with a guest speaker. Our speaker told us of how he started a huge trucking company and how he had recently dropped out of college with one remaining semester to pursue his new web design firm that he had started. He had no background in web design and he didn’t know how to even go about it at first; but he quickly became motivated, learned a little bit about the industry, and hired a friend of his with a little bit of web design experience. The overall attitude of the teacher and class toward him were praise and respect for having crossed lines into a new industry and starting something new, even though he didn’t know how. This lack of experience and learning how to do something you don’t know how to do based purely on motivation were praised, and I don’t blame the class one bit for praising him. I was one of the people that thought it was very respectable what he had done. In fact, I offered him my resume at the end of class to see if he needed any help given my web design background.

But then I went online and saw his company’s portfolio. I was shocked. I was offended that a company would pay someone thousands of dollars to create such a basic, mediocre, web 1.0 website. I honestly do not mean to be overly critical of the firm: they were good businessmen and they knew how to find their clients well. Perhaps even too well. I could have made websites of far better quality in just a few hours, for far less than $10,000.

A couple months later, the speaker emailed me saying that he needed help and was looking to hire. I thought I might be able to help, though I wasn’t really looking for a job. I rather enjoy the web development job that I have now.  I got there and talked to the speaker and his buddy that did the web design portion of the sites. It turned out that the speaker/firm owner still had no knowledge of even basic web development. From the moment we got into talking about web design, the main guy didn’t really appear to have a clue what I was talking about when I got into the technical skills. The web designer kept claiming to have been in my shoes four years ago, and said he saw himself as me in four years, yet he didn’t seem to understand half of the technical stuff I was talking about. I’m sorry buddy, you may be four years older than me, but you have no idea how to make a high quality website. At this point I realized that their egos had soared high above their levels of skill, and I had no more desire to even help out.

I had discovered that starting a business completely outside of your field of expertise is not always the best thing for society. While people may offer you a lot of money for it, you have to understand that you might not yet be up to the industry standards. You might actually be ripping people off with inferior quality due to your inexperience.

I am a huge supporter of entrepreneurship and I do recognize its importance in society. I recognize that every success did start as nothing more than an idea. Often even a sketch on a napkin. I get that. I know you have to start somewhere. But this guy’s firm was trying to enter into what economists call a perfectly competitive market. In such a market, standards of quality are well defined and there is a certain level of quality that should be kept if you are to provide your customer with the best product that is possible. Other web design firms have proven that a higher quality website is possible to make for far less than $10,000. Your customer may not be aware of this, but it is your duty to inform them. This is not to say that the speaker’s firm was not purposefully ripping off customers. This is only to say that you must be careful, especially in a perfectly competitive market, that you have a good understanding of what the standards are, and you make sure that you are providing your customers with just as good a product as the next guy.

Now I do love that he was trying. I love his entrepreneurial spirit, but he really ought to have surrounded himself with some people that had strong web design backgrounds, knew the market well, and understood the standards of quality.

For the last few weeks I have been working my ass off developing a new web service, SpotPlot.net that allows users to visually graph their daily lives. My friend Quinten is handling the marketing while I am doing development.

The way it works is such that you create “studies” in different areas of your life… say sleeping for example. Each study will have its variables, just like a scientific study. In the example of studying your sleeping habits, the variables might be sleep, stress, caffeine, and sociability. Each day, the user logs in and is prompted to enter the simple information… how much sleep did you get last night, how stressed do you feel, how much caffeine have you ingested, etc. The numbers, often based on a scale of one to ten, are then plotted on a graph and shown to the user so that they can visualize how different aspects of their lives affect eachother. Essentially, users are attempting to discover correlations.

We have big plans for this project which I cannot release yet, but I can say that we are focusing primarily on versatility and social media, with later plans to reach the psychological and therapeutic market.

So anyways, I’ve been spending long nights coding and researching and it is the most time I have ever put into a project. I am trying to keep my grades from slipping but it feels inevitable. I am not afraid of failure though – failure can only enrich me with more experiences. I’ll keep you posted with our progress. I encourage you to follow us on Twitter.

-Moose

1. He was afraid of failure.
2. He did tell anybody about his ideas.
3. He underestimated his ideas.
4. He was afraid to spend money.
5. He did not jump on that opportunity.
6. He was too shy to introduce himself and his idea.
7. He was worried about what others thought about him.
8. He did not know his own weaknesses.
9. He did not know his own strengths.
10. He procrastinated.
11. He was afraid someone would steal his idea.
12. He did not trust his business partner.
13. He trusted his business partner.
14. He did not plan ahead.
15. He spent too much time planning.
16. He did not have a buissness card, portfolio, or resume ready.
17. He clung to his current job.
18. He was afraid to take a break from school.
19. He did not step back and relax.
20. He did not keep in contact with his potential clients and buissness partners.

In 1998, Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google out of their garage. By 2004, it had already reached an estimated net worth of $23 billion. At the same time that Google was estimated at $23 billion, Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes were busy launching Facebook, and within two weeks of the launch, many Boston schools were already using the site. Today, both Google and Facebook are known as some of the fastest growing companies and have net worths in the billions. Both businesses were started by average people with an idea – not the CEO of some existing company or rocket scientists.

In addition to Facebook, Google, and the lesser-known but still useful websites, all businesses must begin their entrepreneurial journey somewhere. This “somewhere”, in all cases, is a place deep inside the skull where a few rebellious but ingenious synapses fire to form an idea. Not all ideas are created equally however. Some ideas prove to be failures, others become instant successes, and yet others are insanely innovative ideas that never come together because their creators don’t recognize their beauty. These neglected ideas never reach their potential and their thinkers never reach the success that they deserve. Why?

Most of us entrepreneur-minded folk formulate ideas constantly. We often don’t even have time to write down our ideas because they come up in the middle of work, movies, books, or conversations. These inconvenient situations cause us to say “I’ll try to remember it and think about it later.” Usually by the time we sit down and try to remember the idea, the light bulb in our minds is burnt out and our inspiration is lost. The ideas are still just as good as they were when the thoughts that led to them were at hand, but we rarely recognize this though the lost inspiration.

With that said, there is a deep, itching need for a website or physical business that allows people to share ideas and critique them. A website of this sort would be best formatted like an online bulletin board, so that people could post a new idea and other entrepreneurs could reply with their own thoughts. Moderators could keep spam and insanity out of the picture. By allowing users to comment on each other’s ideas, they will not only receive criticism from other entrepreneurs, but they will get feedback from average, everyday people from all sorts of backgrounds and trades. They will find it far more useful to receive these ideas at the idea-formulating phase of entrepreneurship than once they have already begun the venture and started investing time and money.

The home page would have lists of the most popularly failed ideas and the most successful ideas, along with variations of such ideas, and the most recent ideas. Users would be able to vote for ideas and rate them. Ideas would exist as threads that are continuously being revised, updated, and reviewed. Comments would accumulate with accounts of first-hand experiences, giving users a wealth of examples and knowledge. This website would serve as a the first place an entrepreneur would go to further investigate his or her ideas.

In addition to average people with ideas, “Professional Reviewers” could eventually be added to analyze ideas for a reasonable cost and give feedback as to whether the ideas are viable or not. Such reviews would include financial information from the perspective of an accountant, legal advise from lawyers, and structural or mechanical advise from engineers if need be. The company quickly begins to resemble a business consulting firm of sorts – and perhaps it would become one. The unique quality of this website is that the business could serve individuals that are not sure if they even want to pursue their business seriously or not. This is no website for someone who knows what they want and knows it will work – it is a website for the person who continuously asks himself, “is this a good idea or not?”

Hopefully this service would also prevent people from wasting time on ideas for which there is simply no demand or that are not even close to economically feasible. My professor in Entrepreneurship Initiative once gave the class the example of a beer delivery service. She receives more business plans for such a company than any other type of business, yet not a single person has ever come up with a profitable scheme. There are always the problems of legal issues and the fact that people tend to be cheap about buying beer – especially near a university campus which the prime location for such a business – but perhaps such a website would allow would-be business failures to become aware of the obstacles they are about to encounter and overcome them as a group. Just as computer programmers and web developers have “code review” sessions where they sit around and review each other’s code, and just as writers and editors often have their own review sessions, entrepreneurs need a club to hang out in and review ideas. This website is that club.

The one and only major criticism to this website waiting to happen is that these business philosophers would be reluctant to share ideas in fear of the ideas being stolen and their credit lost. But this is an irrational fear. The first rule design students at any reputable university are often taught is to share their ideas with each other, and not to fear their idea being stolen. Any idea worth creating has likely already been thought of in some form, and most people do not steal ideas – the average entrepreneur has his own ambitions and interests, and will not have the disrespect to take another person’s idea. It is evident that the wisdom to be gained by the free exchange of ideas has already been demonstrated with democracy and open source software. So yes – people are hesitant to reveal their plans. This will make this website challenging, but not impossible. The key to solving this problem is maintain an open, positive, and respectful attitude within the forum. If a web developer can overcome entrepreneurs’ fears, there is no question that this website would become an instant success.

With so many failed businesses and ideas for new innovations floating around in the modern world, there is no reason for a young entrepreneur to fail at a plan that has already been failed at for the same reasons it has failed before. But just as there is no reason to repeat others’ mistakes when their failures have been so well documented, there is no reason to miss an opportunity for a spectacular idea because they didn’t recognize its potential.

-Moose