Startup = Growth

By Paul Graham via paulgraham.com   Article

“A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. …  The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. …

If there’s one number every founder should always know, it’s the company’s growth rate. That’s the measure of a startup. If you don’t know that number, you don’t even know if you’re doing well or badly. … It’s hard to find something that grows consistently at several percent a week, but if you do you may have found something surprisingly valuable. If we project forward we see why.

 

weekly	yearly
1%	1.7x
2%	2.8x
5%	12.6x
7%	33.7x
10%	142.0x

A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month. [10]“

Free entrepreneurial ideas

By Kim E Lumbard   Article

“As a former entrepreneur, I am continually coming up with ideas to create viable products and markets. Unfortunately, with my focus on writing the Pursuit of Happiness Series these ideas mainly languish doing nothing. So, I’d like to give them away to those other entrepreneurs out there interested in creating a business. There’s no strings attached, though I’d appreciate you letting me know how the ideas worked out if you actually tried starting a business with one of them.

I’ve classed the ideas according to projected markets. In general, smaller companies are easier to start, have less risk, and turn a profit quickly, whereas the bigger ideas would take a long time to execute, be much more risky, yet have a considerably larger payoff if successful. All the ideas are technically feasible, though some clearly require more technology development than others.

Enjoy!”

Kickstarter Sets Off $7 Million Stampede for a Watch Not Yet Made – NYTimes.com

By Jenna Wortham   Article

Start-Ups Look to the Crowd

“When Eric Migicovsky, an engineer, wanted to develop a line of wristwatches that could display information from an iPhone — like caller ID and text messages — he went the traditional route of asking venture capitalists to finance his company. But he couldn’t even get a foot in the door, let alone secure any money for what he called the Pebble watch.

So he turned to Kickstarter, a site where ordinary people back creative projects. Backers could pledge $99 and were promised a Pebble watch in return. Less than two hours after the project went up on the site, Mr. Migicovsky and his partners hit their goal of $100,000. “By that night, we were at $600,000,” said Mr. Migicovsky, who is 25 and a recent engineering graduate of the University of Waterloo. “We went out for a beer to celebrate, went home and slept, and when we woke up, we were at a million dollars.” As of Friday afternoon, nearly 50,000 people had pledged close to $7 million ….

Mr. Migicovsky and his partners did not have to give up any portion of their company to the venture capitalists. They still own 100 percent of it.”

It’s a big step from engineer to an entrepreneur

By Martin Zwilling   Article

“… the key business misperceptions of most engineers …

1. “Everyone loves ‘cool ideas’ and new technology.” Before investing a lot of time and money into any idea, entrepreneurs should assess the commercial viability. That means evaluating third-party market research, getting real customer feedback from prototypes, and listening to concerns of successful executives in the same business area.
2. “I need to go-it alone to assure quality and elegance.” Engineers assume that the business issues can be resolved later. Working alone, or with other engineers, is great for the average engineer introvert, gives them better control, and minimizes distractions. A team with diverse skills is harder to manage, but more likely to build a thriving business.
3. “Marketing is fluff and selling is black magic.” The old adage, “If we build it, they will come” came from engineers. In reality, building a solution won’t make it connect with customers, manage competition, or communicate and proselytize the offering in the industry. With today’s information overload, selling is always required.
4. “We need to get functionality maximized before we focus on customers.” The business reality is that you can’t engineer the functionality right UNTIL you focus on customers. Superfluous functionality, from a customer perspective, is a failure. The mantra for an entrepreneur today should be to ship fast, make changes, and iterate.
5. “A good engineer hates unpredictability and risk.” A good entrepreneur embraces risk as an opportunity, whereas most engineers are risk averse and cautious. The result is that engineer-driven solutions often are too little, too late, if they ever ship, in today’s fast moving market. Managing risk is good; eliminating risk is bad for startups.
6. “We can’t worry about making money until we get it built.” If you can’t make money, it isn’t a business. Business constraints, such as market size, customer demographics, manufacturing, distribution, and support costs need to be set, or there is no context for getting it right. Getting it right at the wrong cost will get you no customers.
7. “Outside funding causes loss of control and undue pressure to deliver.” Funding is like a turbocharger for a startup company, if used correctly. Investors love to fund growth and scaling of a proven business model for entrepreneurs, and they avoid at all costs funding research and development for engineers. Hence the pressure to deliver.”

Steve Blank vs. Steve Jobs

Seeing Both Sides Blog   Article

“I am co-teaching a class at Harvard Business School on entrepreneurship called “Launching Technology Ventures” along with my friend and colleague, Professor Tom Eisenmann.  The class kicked off this week with two cases:  Dropbox and Aardvark.

As I reflect on the class discussions, one of the interesting tension points that arose is the challenge an entrepreneur faces in selecting their primary product design approach.  Should they follow the Steve Blank, Customer Development Process school of product development or the Steve Jobs “vision” school?  In other words, should they pursue a user-centric design paradigm — setting priorities based on rigorous tests and listening excercises that determine what users want — or should they pursue a more top-down approach akin to Steve Jobs, who famously said: “It is hard to design by focus groups because most of the time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. “

Steve Blank’s book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, has become an instant classic in Start-Up Land for good reason.  Along with the complimentary book by Eric Ries, The Lean StartUp, it provides an incredibly useful guide for starting companies, testing hypotheses and creating products that users love.”

Steve Blank vs. Steve Jobs

Seeing Both Sides Blog   Article

“… one of the interesting tension points that arose is the challenge an entrepreneur faces in selecting their primary product design approach.  Should they follow the Steve Blank, Customer Development Process school of product development or the Steve Jobs “vision” school?  In other words, should they pursue a user-centric design paradigm — setting priorities based on rigorous tests and listening excercises that determine what users want — or should they pursue a more top-down approach akin to Steve Jobs, who famously said: “It is hard to design by focus groups because most of the time people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. “

Steve Blank’s book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, has become an instant classic in Start-Up Land for good reason.  Along with the complimentary book by Eric Ries, The Lean StartUp, it provides an incredibly useful guide for starting companies, testing hypotheses and creating products that users love.

… founders should never let themselves off the hook to applying the test and learn principles of Steve Blank to monitor their decisions and continuously validate them.  And the bar should be very high for such overrides.  As the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed:  “Talent hits a target no else can hit.  Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Founders who override their users are betting on genius.  Steve Jobs and Drew Houston have proven that genius pays off.”

Got what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

ByJeff Haden  Article

“You spend a lot of time personalizing your office. … Money should never be spent on anything that won’t touch the customer. You will be too busy chasing customers to worry about whether your office befits your stature or aligns with your personality.

You manage your fantasy teams at work. … Starting a business is overwhelming. Exit your fantasy leagues now. Spend that time thinking about how you’ll make profits.

You never empty your own trash. … If doing whatever needs to be done isn’t something that comes naturally, stay where you are.

You are sure you could be a lot more productive if you only had a new (insert hot new tech tool). … In your own business you’ll be lucky to get the “must have” stuff. Even if you have the funds, “nice to have” is money wasted.

You can’t get over the fact your department got shorted during the last budget cycle.Unless a VC comes calling or your dad funds your start-up, you won’t really have a budget. Money spent doesn’t come from an invisible corporate pot. It comes from your pocket. …

You passionately discuss work-life balance issues. … If you think a lot about the conflict between work and life and you feel work is winning the battle, just wait until you start a business. Work will eat life for breakfast.

You sometimes say, “Wait, I’ve paid my dues.” When you run your own business, you pay your dues every day. (The same should be true if you work for someone else: The only real measure of your value is the tangible contribution you make, each and every day.) Today, tomorrow, the next day: You earn the right to stay in business. No one cares about your experience or years of hard work. …”

One share, one vote?

By Randall Smith   Article

“Investors eyeing two hotly anticipated Internet listings will have to weigh an unusual quirk in the ownership structures: extra-supervoting shares, which could set a new standard for how company founders retain control over important corporate issues. …

After Groupon goes public, its three founders will have shares that each carry 150 votes, according to the company’s latest regulatory filings. Investors who buy ordinary shares in the IPO or in the market, by contrast, will receive one vote per share for corporate matters such as the election of directors or sale of the company.”

What startup life is really like

By Penelope Trunk   Article

“We raised money. We launched products, we pivoted 20 times. We were due to raise more money right after the markets crashed. So of course we couldn’t raise money. And of course I did what all startup founders do when they run out of money: I had a shit fit. And then I had a nervous breakdown. But the thing is, in a startup, everything moves at warp speed, even a nervous breakdown. So I recovered fast, convinced investors to put in more money. And we kept going. That cycle happened twice. Which is normal. Because startups are hell, and a startup is the perfect convergence of a brilliant idea and a founder just crazy enough to stick with it through anything.

At that point, I was exhausted. And I had to figure out: When is it time for a founder to step down? So I went through a time of personal assessment, which taught me a lot about when you know it’s time for a founder to leave:

Financial exhaustion
I had funded the idea with my own money for a few years before I launched Brazen Careerist as a social recruiting platform. I ruined my credit, I cashed out my 401K (don’t ever do this!) and I lost a baby sitter because she was appalled that we didn’t have any food in the refrigerator.

Emotional exhaustion …

Marital exhaustion
The dirty secret about startup founders is they can’t keep marriages together. …

Intellectual exhaustion
And it was time to pivot. … And really, you have to live and breathe the industry you are in if you’re going to rewrite the rules to that industry. …

Relationship exhaustion
While I was appearing on shows like 20/20 to tell the world how to manage Generation Y, I was having knock-down drag-out fights with my Gen-Y co-founder, Ryan Healy. Founder bickering is a common startup problem. Because if you have co-founders with different skill sets, which you should, then you are going to have different points of view, and inevitably, arguments about that.

Vision for where to go next
Fortunately, though, Ryan had not ruined his personal finances and he didn’t have kids. So he still had lots of energy to get the company to the next level. And after seeing all these issues listed on paper, I realized that even though I loved Brazen Careerist, I wanted to step down from the CEO position.”

Richard Branson vs. Steve Jobs

By James Clear   Article

Entrepreneurs Vs. Managers: Which Are You?

“Branson is an entrepreneur. His Virgin brand now encompasses over 400 different businesses. 400! When he succeeds with one business idea, he is on to the next. In fact, the following quote from Branson is one of the reasons I wrote this article.

“An entrepreneur is not a manager. An entrepreneur is someone who is great at conceiving ideas, starting ideas, building ideas…and then handing them over to really good managers to run the business.”

Steve Jobs was a manager. Last month, Apple had the largest market cap of any company in the S&P 500. Jobs built a $300+ billion dollar business by operating in a manner very different from Branson.

Jobs was famously a micromanager and a perfectionist. Employees have noted him calling out tiny details in design changes (all of which had to be approved by him), grammatical and spelling errors in company documents, and so on. He would even answer customer service complaints as the CEO on occasion.

Which are you?”

10 tips for intrapreneurs

by James Gardner   Article

“I spent a few hours the other day with a ultra-successful corporate intrapreneur. I was so impressed I thought I’d share her top ten tips for success.

1. The business as it stands now today is the business. Accept that, don’t fight it. It’s the thing that’s providing you a job. …
2. You don’t work for a start-up. You work for a corporate, so you need to behave appropriately. Appropriate behaviour means showing up to all the pointless corporate meetings, responding to all the pointless corporate emails and filling in all the pointless corporate forms. …
3. Just because you’re not a start-up doesn’t mean you can’t be nimble and fast. You just can’t be so fast you blow everything around you into bits.
4. Relationships are key to everything. Build them, cultivate them, love them. If they don’t love you back, keep trying till they do.
5. Relationships aren’t politics. Don’t play politics no matter how good an idea it seems. Politics always bite, and the bite really is worse than the bark.
6. Be satisfied with the wins you get, however small. You have to believe you’re on a journey not a cliff edge.
7. Be Zen about failure. Calmness is the key to turning failure into success.
8. Bringing in the money is going to be important, sooner or later. Best to plan for sooner because even the smallest amount of new money is evidence you’re moving forward.  …
9. Avoid creativity traps. Also be cautious around people whose primary value proposition is “creativity”. They are distracting to the main game of creating new business, a task which is only a creative exercise for about the first 5 minutes.
10. … Being an intrapreneur is a job which requires you to personally bring the mountain to Mohammad. If you’re going to last, you must love what you’re doing.”

Quirky: The Solution to the Innovator’s Dilemma

By Jennifer Wang    Article

Ben Kaufman — with Pivot Power, Quirky’s new take on the outlet strip — calls his company “The oldest-school startup.”Photography by David Johnson

…

“Kaufman launched Quirky, an online consumer products company with a social development twist: products for the people, created and designed by the people. “We’re making invention accessible,” Kaufman says during a whirlwind tour of Quirky’s offices, which occupy the third floor of a building in SoHo, one of New York City’s busiest retail corridors. “Ninety-nine percent of people are armchair inventors. They have great product ideas, but most don’t have the time or money or expertise to make them happen.”

…

Quirky’s online community (65,000 members, and growing by 20 percent every month) is at the heart of Kaufman’s effort to democratize invention. Each week hundreds of inventor hopefuls, or “ideators,” submit their concepts online. … To simplify the development process, product ideas must retail for less than $150 and should not require integrated software. The community, composed mainly of hobby inventors, students, retirees and product-design enthusiasts, votes on the submissions. The two most popular ideas are sent to an in-house team of engineers and designers to research, render and prototype. At every stage–design, colors, naming, logo–the community chimes in. The best suggestions are incorporated, earning secondary “influencers” a portion of future sales revenue. Finally, if enough units of a product are pre-sold, Quirky will manufacture it.

…

Kaufman puts the upfront costs of building a company around a single product at about $200,000–just to get the paperwork done and the first prototype out. Combined with the risk, most people never get their product idea anywhere near retail shelves. However, one of the hopes is that being guided through the process the first time might also jump-start the creation cycle.”

Continuously building skills of value in emerging market segments

By Rob Go   Article

The illusion of job stability

“I grew up in a fairly traditional Chinese home. There was a strong influence in my household to rack up fancy degrees, get nice jobs at brand name firms, and rise the ranks in an environment of “safety.” I certainly haven’t had the most non-traditional career (unfortunately!) but at almost every step, I faced resistance from my family, who were puzzled about why I was taking a risk in joining companies that were completely unknown to them (and most other people) at the time.

I was talking to the father of my partner Lee the other day, and he also jokingly remarked “I never understood why Lee left a steady job at Paypal to help start LinkedIn.  Why didn’t he just get a safe job like being a stockbroker?”

But if we’ve learned anything in the last several years, it’s that stability is over-rated. What seems safe today will not be safe forever. In fact, when everyone thinks something is safe, that’s probably the time when it’s starting to get too risky. Think about mortgages, municipal bonds, banking, etc.

For startups, this is actually great news. I agree with others that say that although working for an individual startup is risky, pursuing a startup career path is not so much. The great thing about this career is that you are continuously building skills of value in (hopefully) emerging market segments that will value your experience (win or lose) for a long long time.

So, with more and more excellent talent realizing this and opting out of “safe” and high paying roles in finance, law, etc., we are seeing more great talent flowing into the entrepreneurial world, and building innovative companies. Sure, that investment banker-turned-product manager may not be the best PM in the world initially. But the mere fact that she has chosen to embark on an entrepreneurial career path early means that there is a much much higher possibility that she will be a founder or an integral team member of a meaningful new venture that solves important problems and employs hundreds of people.

Maybe that doesn’t sound as stable as working for GE, but it sure sounds like a more meaningful career.”

Plan B

From the “Heart of Innovation” Blog   Source

“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.”

- James York

Photo

Analysis paralysis drives me f-ing bonkers

by Mark Suster   Article

Image

“I have often said that what separates real entrepreneurs from pundits and bystanders is a bias towards getting things done versus over analyzing things. My credo has always been JFDI. It’s the hardest thing to teach people who come out of big companies, out of conservative jobs. At the big consulting firms, investment banks and established large technology companies we’re taught to produce long reports, make sure that every document is perfect quality and that every possible bit of diligence has been done. Good enough isn’t. And so things operate on a CYA basis. That doesn’t work in a startup.

There’s a certain cadence that you can feel when you spend time hanging any well-run startup company. The management team has to have a bias toward making decisions. They know that a 70% accurate decision made quickly and based on sound principles is better than a 90% decision made after careful consideration. The startup entrepreneur knows that they’re going to be wrong often. They’re flexible and willing to admit when they’re wrong. …

In fact, analysis paralysis drives me fucking bonkers. It is not uncommon in a meeting for me to say, “There are three choices: A, B, C. My gut tells me that we ought to do B. But let’s decide as a group. I don’t care if my view isn’t selected. Let’s make a decision and move on.” Many people find this uncomfortable. The world is filled with people who don’t like having to put their neck on the line and say what they think. I don’t really care if I’m wrong as long as I’m not dogmatic if evidence later shows we need to change course.”

Give Yourself Permission to Suck

by John Jantsch   Article

A Tragic Death

**By David Pogue   Article

The Tragic Death of the Flip

“Day before yesterday, my jaw hit the floor, and I still haven’t managed to get it back up again. Cisco is killing the Flip camcorder. Let’s see if I can get this straight. Only two years ago, Cisco bought Pure Digital, the company that made the Flip, for $590 million. Then, on Tuesday, Cisco announced that it’s shutting down the whole division and laying off 550 people.

… why is it killing the Flip and not selling it? The most plausible reason is that Cisco wants the technology in the Flip more than it wants the business. Cisco is, after all, in the videoconferencing business, and the Flip’s video quality—for its size and price—was amazing. Maybe, in fact, that was Cisco’s plan all along. Buy the beloved Flip for its technology, then shut it down and fire 550 people.

But there’s a second part of the tragedy, too, something that nobody knows. That new Flip that the product manager showed me was astonishing. It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet. … And the FlipLive was supposed to ship yesterday. April 13. The day after Cisco killed the Flip. Nice.

I loved the Flip. I loved that its creators, year after year, resisted the urge to gunk it up with complexity and featuritis. I love that it never, ever let me down. I loved that this startup company created something that changed the world, and ultimately reaped the rewards in popularity and sales.

Unfortunately, it also reaped the rewards that come from selling to a megalithic corporation like Cisco. Yes, there was plenty of money to go around, but also the risk that always comes when you sell to a bigger company: that they’ll chop you up and sell off your parts. Or, in Cisco’s case, much worse: chop you up and leave you for dead.”  – Article

Use social networks to raise money

**By Dean Takahash Article

SEC may let startups use social networks to raise money

“The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising. The agency is considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise funding by tapping thousands of investors for small amounts of money, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The move is part of a larger review by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether to ease decades-old constraints on how companies can issue new shares to the public. The new funding techniques, known as “ crowd funding,” could usher in a new era of capital abundance for Silicon Valley’s startups.

The technique has spread from artists looking to fund their creative works to entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap companies without giving up control to venture capitalists. Typically, a company might raise $100,000 from an internet site where users could sign up to buy $100 worth of shares.

Crowd funding could be a cheap source of cash, competing with angel investors who specialize in giving seed rounds to start-ups. Since the amounts of money are small, the downside risk isn’t too bad for investors. But the trick will be in protecting the public from scammers who have no intention of following through on promises.”  – Article

Minimum viable product

**By Carmen Nobel   Article

“These are the days of the lean startup. “Most startups fail not because they can’t build the product they set out to build, but because they build the wrong product, take too long to do that, waste a lot of money doing that, and waste a lot of money on sales and marketing trying to sell that wrong product,” says Tom Eisenmann, a professor in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. “It takes a lot of time, time equals money, the money runs out, and the startup fails painfully. …

For starters, it [the lean startup] nixes the traditional idea of a company spending several months in stealth mode while perfecting a full-featured product and planning an expensive launch party at a Las Vegas trade show. Rather, the lean startup launches as quickly as possible with what Ries calls a “minimum viable product” (MVP), a product that includes just enough features to allow useful feedback from early adopters. This makes it easier for the company to speed to market with subsequent customer-driven versions of the product. And it mitigates the likelihood of a company wasting time on features that nobody wants.

“The MVP is a controversial idea because it can be perceived as something thrown together with shoestring and bubblegum,” Eisenmann says. “But through a series of MVPs, a lean startup can validate a specific and comprehensive set of hypotheses about what the business is, where it’s going, and what it has to do.”" - Article

Family, friends, and fools

**By Margie Mullen   Article

The mistake: Assuming that as a successful financial advisor with a very high credit score, I would not have trouble obtaining financing for my new business: making and selling a bike stand that requires kids to pedal their bikes in order to get the TV to work. …

What I did:“I really thought that as a successful business owner with a 25-year track record, having business credit that I have successfully used, having a very high FICO — I just assumed I wouldn’t have the same problems that other start-up businesses have. But I was mistaken. The banks that finance the Small Business Administration loans said that doesn’t matter. What  matters is: Do you have experience in this business that you’re starting, and is it at least five years’ experience?

What I learned: I had to go the other route, which was tapping mainly relatives. People who want to start a business should know that they’re going to end up having to use their own money, their already existing credit, the equity in their house, or borrow from well-meaning friends and relatives. And they may have to issue shares to give a part of the business to these people who are willing to lend them the money.”

The most important thing you wild do as an entrepreneur

**By Steve Blank   video

“Customer feedback simply cannot be outsourced, according to serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. Here he shares an anecdote demonstrating the importance of founders speaking directly to customers. Blank recalls how entrepreneur Alan Michaels was forced to listen to customer needs and altered his product accordingly. These changes turned single-digit sales into the thousands, and resulted in an eventual $400 million company sale.” - Article

Angels and investors

“They may be angels but they’re still investors. They want a return.” – Steve Palmer, Attorney, K&L Gates

Posted at 11:54 AM March 24, 2011 on Twitter

It starts to get scary

**By Spencer Fry   Article

“Startups are easy to conceive and launch, and oftentimes they attract a few hundred or a thousand users. Everyone’s friends and families are on the Internet. We have large networks of friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Friends are often supportive and won’t think twice about trying out your startup. …

Those were the days! It’s a team, all working together to solve a complex problem. Then if you’re lucky enough to solve it, you have to sell, market, and support it. It starts to get scary. Building a business is mind numbing when you think about it. You have to be a little insane to venture down this path. Your chances of succeeding are slim, and even if you do succeed you have to continue to innovate or you’ll be obsolete in eighteen months. …

The word startup has taken on a new meaning. It once meant an early stage enterprise in the research and planning phases, but now it has come to be defined as the way one builds a company online. Even companies that have been around for five years, generate millions in revenue, and have fifty employees are continuing to use this word to describe themselves.

Well, I want the word “startup” back! You build a startup to test an idea and then you build a company to execute that idea. Let’s get back to that distinction. No more romanticizing about how cool it is to be an entrepreneur. It’s a struggle to save your company’s life — and your own skin — every day of the week. When this bubble blows up — and it will — only the people who have been prepared all along to make a business out of their startup will survive.”  – Article

Little bets and billion dollar ideas

**By Peter Sims Article

Don’t Bet Big. Little Bets Are The Ones That Turn Into Billion-Dollar Ideas

“When I was in business school, one of the most common things I would hear people say was that they wanted to do something new—like start a company or take an unconventional career path—but that they needed “a great idea” first.  That always surprised me a bit, especially at an entrepreneurial hub like Stanford, since most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them.

Ironically, this would include the biggest business idea to come out of Stanford in decades.  Google didn’t begin as a brilliant vision, but as a project to improve library searches, followed by a series of small discoveries that unlocked a revolutionary business model. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t begin with an ingenious idea.  But they certainly discovered one.

Meanwhile, Pixar started as a hardware company that never found a market, and got into digitally animated movies by making a number of small bets on short films.  Twitter began as a side project within Odeo, a podcasting company that was going nowhere.  After asking employees for suggestions about what the company should do, Odeo founder Evan Williams gave Jack Dorsey, then an engineer, two weeks to develop a prototype for his short messaging idea.  People inside Odeo loved using it and Twitter was soon born.

The truth is, most entrepreneurs launch their companies without an brilliant idea and proceed to discover one, or if they do start with what they think is a superb idea, they quickly discover that it’s flawed and then rapidly adapt.”  – Article

Daring Prototypes and Ingenious Products

**By Carlye Adler   Article

How Kickstarter Became a Lab for Daring Prototypes and Ingenious Products

“The team had some manufacturing experience, but they had no idea how to bring a product to market. And money? They didn’t have that either, and it would cost $15,000 to produce a minimum run of 500 C-Loops. They considered pooling their savings (including Ben’s college money) and taking out a loan, but nobody relished that idea.

Then they found Kickstarter, a website where people post descriptions of their projects and anyone can chip in to help fund them. Ben had discovered the site after hearing about a couple of guys who wanted to manufacture a tripod mount for the iPhone 4. Ivan pledged $20—in effect preordering one of the gizmos. “I thought, that could be us,” Ivan says. Using Kickstarter was an appealingly offbeat approach, and there was no risk. Even if they couldn’t raise the full amount, they’d build a following and win some free publicity.

The C-Loop team started going through Kickstarter postings to see what traits made for a good project. They put together a video that described the device and conveyed their passion for it. Then they began thinking up rewards for various funding levels—for $5, contributors would get some stickers and their name on the new company’s website; for $35, they’d get a C-Loop in a microfiber pouch. And they set a fund-raising target of $15,000 in 42 days; if they didn’t hit that goal, none of the backers would be charged and no money would change hands. (This was a Kickstarter rule, designed to protect investors from sinking money into half-funded projects.) …

Two months later, the trio had manufactured and shipped 1,800 C-Loops. In addition to the presales they booked on Kickstarter, they have been selling the device through their own website; they say they’ve received calls from two dozen distributors around the world and are in early talks with some prominent camera retailers.”  – Article