MiNeeds Blog

Have you ever tried to build a table without tools? Try running a company without some. In a startup, your resources are scarce, yet your workload increases by the hour. Before you know it, you’ll have way too many moving parts that you need to manage closely: technology, website, customers, employees, a million emails, marketing, funding, partnerships, bills, and much more!

Your ability to manage all the clutter will be put to the ultimate test. And in many ways, in order to execute and deliver on your timelines and keep everyone happy, you must be organized. In my previous blog, I covered lesson #1 to shipping on time: Shave you head. In this blog, I’ll go over lesson #2, which covers some tools and tips that saved our lives, in my company MiNeeds, in allowing us to constantly keep the ropes pulled together and stay organized.

1) Evolution is a Must

You have to continue to evolve your organizing tools as you grow bigger. The good news is: if you’re small now, you should be able to get away with using a few simple tools. Then continue to invest in using better organizing systems when things get busier.

2) Easy Organizing Tools

My partner Deniz and I, having spent 8 years in Microsoft prior to starting MiNeeds, immediately applied all the tools we used at Microsoft.

There’s no better email and scheduling client than Microsoft Outlook, I highly recommend not relying on web clients to organize your emails and schedule. Non of the available web clients today are anywhere close to what Outlook can provide for with.

A great folder sharing platform is Microsoft Groove. It allows you to create a folder system, just like the one you have on your hard-drive, and share it between you and others. Any of the collaborators can modify/add files and all updates will sync to your Groove view automatically. You can see who updated what and when. The only downside to this tool is that you must connect to the internet in order for your changes to sync to other collaborator’s views. You can work on any of your Groove files when offline.

We used Google docs for a bit too. The great thing about it is you can do real-time collaboration on documents. Which means that you and I can write a document together, without having to be in the same room, and we’ll be able to immediately see the changes applied as we type them. The downside of Google docs is that you have to be connected to the Internet to modify them. That usually caused us to abandon using this tool. That said, I read a few months ago of a plugin Google created to allow people to edit documents offline. But then again, the notion of a plugin or download sounds complex so we didn’t use it. I think Google should just download this offline piece to your machine when you sign in to docs without asking you to download it separately.

3) Growing More? –> Invest in Better Tools

One of the challenges we started having at some point after we founded the company was that the product, MiNeeds, and our team kept growing. So, we needed a tool that organized our thoughts, ideas, documents, bugs we found, and communication between the team so we don’t lose any important little details. My partner, Honor Gunday, created a phenomenal tool that did all we needed. It improved our efficiency at least 50%. The most important part is that all those little notes we were worried about losing before are documented and tracked now appropriately.

Fortunately, I feel very good about the focus and organization of our team at MiNeeds. It did take us time and continuous effort to create an organized system, definitely well worth all the sweat. We even created guides for new employees to ramp them up quickly on the tools we use. We’re now on target to reach our ship date for beta by the end of this week. Wish us luck!

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com: A New Way to Shop Local Services 

In my previous post, I gave a summary of the principles of a social epidemic from Malcolm Galdwell’s Tipping Point. The three principles are “law of the few”, “stickiness factor” and “power of context”. You can read more about them in my previous post.

How can we use these principles in engineering our own social epidemic? More specifically, how does it apply to an entrepreneur’s challenge of designing a product or a service and forming the marketing strategy?

In any epidemic, the first adopters of a new idea is typically the innovators. These people would like to take risks in adopting new ways of life or a new product. Though they are mostly concerned to live a differentiating lifestyle and like to feel good about themselves by living that way, any idea needs a chasm to be adopted with early adopters and to mass users. If forming a social epidemic is simple with a three-point plan, why do we not take enough advantage of it? Gladwell’s take on that is that we are “linear thinkers”, meaning we expect output to be linearly proportional to the input.

For example, imagine a sheet of paper folded in half, and then in half again, and so on for 50 folds. How tall do you think the folded stack would be? The thickness of a telephone directory perhaps, or the height of a refrigerator? No, says Gladwell, the folded stack would reach from the Earth to the Sun. It is this counter-intuitive power of geometric progression that allows little things to make big differences-small, well-directed changes can push your idea past the tipping point to create a full-scale epidemic.

How do we build the bridge between the three principles of a social epidemic and the concept above to form a three-point plan to engineer our own social epidemic? Gladwell touches that point in his book as well, however, I like how Dr. Paul Marsden, a research psychologist at the London School of Economics, worded it:

The answer, according to Gladwell, is simple. Translating the mathematical squiggle-babble of sociological epidemic models into clear, well-written English, and using entertaining examples from his experience as a journalist for The New Yorker, Gladwell outlines a three-point plan for engineering your own social epidemic in The Tipping Point.

• First, do not waste time marketing your idea to the masses: focus your energies on the trendsetters, the socially promiscuous and those with the power to influence. Place your idea or product with these people and, by the force of word of mouth added to an innate human tendency to keep up with the Joneses, your epidemic will snowball through society.

• Tweaking your idea or product to make it more infectious or “sticky” (Gladwell’s preference) is the second step. This does not mean major surgery to transform a mediocre idea into a brilliant idea-a cosmetic makeover will work wonders, so just “tweak and test” with a view to involving your target audience, telling a story, somehow making it relevant to them.

• Finally, get the context right. The human mind is wired to be receptive to ideas only in certain situations, so make sure your idea fits the context in which it will be adopted, and make sure it fits the context of a mind still primarily adapted to a distant hunter-gatherer past. There you have it, the three rules for a social epidemic: “The Law of the Few”, “The Stickiness Factor” and “The Power of Context”. Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds - A new way to shop local services 

As traditional advertising and marketing models are being challenged by not being as effective as they used to be, viral marketing has been one of the hottest topics lately and there are tons of books, studies and workshops on it. Viral marketing…word-of-mouth marketing…guerilla marketing…buzz marketing…Different terms for the same problem : how do we get the attention of the consumer in this world of attention deficit disorder, caused by the plethora of products and services in almost anything you can imagine. And, more importantly, once we get the attention of the consumers, how do we become sticky enough to jump start an epidemic where they talk about your business?

This week, my first post will summarize the principles presented in “Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. In my second post, I’ll outline an approach to engineer social epidemics using those principles and in my last post of the week, I’ll talk about how it inspired us and we used it in building product features and marketing strategies of MiNeeds, my new startup.

Tipping Point covers all types of social epidemics from revolutions to spread of diseases to even how fashion and trends in clothing take place. However, in Entrepreneur’s Journey, we’ll take a different slice of the book, looking at the principles from an entrepreneur’s point of view and outline how to use it for small businesses.

First, the 3 principles of a social epidemic according to Gladwell:

Law of the Few:
Gladwell defines three types of people: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Connectors are the type of people who know unusually large number of people, and thus are connected to separate and unrelated circles of social networks. These people are very enthusiastic and personable which makes them excellent at building networks.Mavens are the type of people who take a special area of interest to the levels of near-obsession who acquire such detailed knowledge of a product that others turn to them repeatedly for advice. These are the people who make massive amount of research just to buy a $500 TV set or would read everything about drive terrains and suspension systems just to make their next 4×4 car purchase. Salesmen are the type of people as the name suggests. They convince people on new ideas, turn seemingly complicated features of any product into understandable, affectionate and appealing product statements to convince people to sell the idea or product. 

Stickiness Factor:
How do you hold the attention of people long enough to deliver a message that really sticks. Sticks, in the sense that, the message is a memorable and remarkable one that stays within people. It’s like your friend repeatedly whistling “Deck The Halls” with a new blues twist, and next thing you know, you unawarely sing the same song all day as it sticks with you. In the modern world of constant exposure to advertising and ideas, attention deficit is a major issue and stickiness factor plays a huge role in re-defining or re-engineering the whole marketing message and the product around it to stick.The Power of Context
Power of context is about how people change behaviors in a given context. The context here could be the environment from a micro scale, say in a family, to a massive scale, say at the Nation level. Power of context also talks about how a certain idea could tip in a given environment while others don’t. Timing and environment are very important here. Think of a clean subway station where everybody tries to keep it clean, whereas at a nasty and rundown subway station, same people don’t seem to care as much. This is a typical example of how the same people would act differently in a changing environment.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds - A New Way to Shop Local Services 

There are several things you need to know when you file a patent that could lower your filing costs. In this blog, I’ll go over some tips that I found very helpful in bringing my filing costs down. Consider the following:

1) Provisional Patent:

Consider filing a provisional patent. This type is extremely useful if you have limited funds. It gives you a window of 12 months to file the full-fledged non-provisional patent. The cost of having an attorney prepare a provisional patent application is substantially lower than the non-provisional type. To read more about it, please refer to my blog “Types of Patents“.

2) Do it Yourself

You can always do a big part of writing up the patent application yourself. If you have the time, you can even file the patent yourself without the use of an attorney. If this is something you want to pursue, I highly recommend you read the details of how to do so on the US Patent & Trademark Office website:
http://www.uspto.gov/main/patents.htm

This would be something to consider when filing a provisional patent. On the other hand, if your patent is a more complex one, I recommend you hire a patent attorney or a professional to do it. The cost might be well worth it.

A note about the patent application queue:
It is important to know that when you do file a patent, most of the time your patent application sits in a queue for a while at the patent office. When they finally get to it, many times they will reject one or more clauses in your application. So, you’ll have to revise it and send it back. This is very normal so don’t let such an occurrence discourage you. Stay at it and respond as quickly as you can.

3) Patent Bar Professionals vs Patent Attorneys

Attorneys are not the only people that can file high quality patents for you. There are some great professionals out there that have passed the patent bar exam that could do a great job as well. The patent bar gives those professionals great knowledge in filing patents. And since these professionals are not attorneys, then most probably their cost for filing patents will be lower than attorneys.

Attorneys who have earned both their state bar and the patent bar are the most expensive in the market. They are of course attorneys and would have a lot to bring to the plate when filing patents especially with those two degrees. But just remember that an attorney with such credentials doesn’t necessarily do a better job than a non-attorney professional who passed the patent bar. Some of these professionals have a background similar to your invention (technology, biology, etc.), and might actually do a great job on your patent application.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com; A New Way to Shop Local Services 

There are several types of patents you can file for your invention. Knowing which one to file is important. There are also more affordable options available that are important to be aware of. In this blog, I’ll explain each type of patent. In my next blog, I’ll share some tips on how to save on patent costs.

Before I begin, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog titled “Should I Protect/Patent my Idea?“. If you’re contemplating whether or not to file a patent for your invention, I highly recommend you read that blog first.

Types of Patents:

1) Utility Patent (Non-Provisional Patent Application)

This is the full-fledged patent application you would file for inventions. As the name indicates, it is filed for a certain novel ‘function’ of the invention. Some examples are: In technology, this would be a new software algorithm, a mathematical model, an innovative circuit, etc. In Biology, this would be a new way to decode the human genome, and so on. In upholstery, this is a new type of Velcro material, etc.

Cost: $8,000 - 12,000. A general rule is: the more complex the filing application needs to be, the higher your cost will be.

Recommendations: Before you hire someone, do research online to find out how much should you be paying for your patent. I would research two things: the type of patent you need to file and the average cost of patents in the field of your invention. This will give you a good idea of your cost.

2) Provisional Patent Application (the affordable short-term option)

This patent application was designed by the USPTO (U.S. Patent & Trademark Office) to provide inventors a lower-cost patent filing option. This patent type gives you 12 months to file the non-provisional patent application. To make one thing clear, in order to get a utility patent for your invention, you must file the non-provisional application before the 12-month period of filing a provisional one has passed.

But does it make sense to file a provisional first then a non-provisional within a year? You’re right, the cost will be more eventually when you add the two. But, the great advantage of having the option of filing a provisional patent application is that: if you are short on funds, and you really want to protect your idea, the provisional option will give you the peace-of-mind that your idea is protected while not draining your limited funds. Also, within 12 months from the conception of the idea, you might not even want to pursue it. So, not spending that big payment on a non-provisional patent upfront might be a wise option to do.

Of course, if you have the funds and know you’ll still be pursuing the idea in a year, then it makes sense for you to go down the route of a non-provisional patent right away. Cost: $1,000 - $4,000. Again, depends on the complexity.

3) Design Patent

As the name indicates, this patent relates to the visual characteristics of a creation. It could be a certain glass design you invented or a design of a website, etc.

4) Plant PatentThis is used for inventors who have created or discovered and asexually reproduced a new variety of plant.

Declaimer: the cost numbers I shared in this article are based on my personal experience and research. The cost may vary from these ranges. Moreover, the description I provided is summary information of what I found useful to understand when filing a patent. For more information about the types of patents, please visit the US Patent & Trademark Office website at:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/types.htm

Best Regards,

Raed Malhas
Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com; a new way to shop local services 

Continuing on summarizing Peter Drucker’s strategies and grouping them into my own list. For all practical purposes, my goal here is to have a summary sheet of possibilities for you to really take a step back and reconsider your strategy.

I’ll be discussing 5 different strategy patterns to be used by entrepreneurs. These strategies have different flavors and can be used together. Once you have the 7 ways to look for entrepreneurial opportunities, which I covered in my previous post, this is how to harmonize those points into a strategy to execute.

○ “Being fustest with the mostest” which aims at creating a new market and customer. This is the one which aims at dominating the market it chose for itself. it’s considered riskier than other strategies, but could be very rewarding if executed successfully. It’s a difficult strategy to adjust once set target on and needs careful analysis before execution. Often times, coming up with a brilliant idea typically is not enough to do this, and more innovations fail using this strategy than succeed. It has the risk of failing because of poor analysis, not enough resources to execute, not enough concentrated and orchestrated effort in productizing the innovation. This strategy is typically good for established organizations with high capital.

○ Creative Imitation which is the perfection and positioning of an existing product or service. The terms sounds conflicting, isn’t it? How can an imitation be unique or creative? In this one, you exploit the success of others instead of inventing a new product or service. You perfect it and re-position it.Apple came up with the first personal computer. The idea did not exist before. What Apple did was a remarkable innovation, however it had its own weaknesses in terms of software support and distribution channels. IBM took advantage of it, using the same set of features as Apple’s personal computer, it created more software and distribution channels. It creatively imitated Apple’s first personal computer. Creative imitation doesn’t create new markets, but serve the markets the original inventor created. High tech is a good area to use this strategy. It’s less risky than the “being fustest with the mostest”, however it requires tremendous amount of alertness, flexibility and massive hard work.

○ Entrepreneurial Judo is the one where you exploit bad habits of competitors.
Is starts with a beach-head and once the opponent establishes his position on that limited zone, it moves up to invade the whole market. It’s always market focused and market driven. Typically, the established leader overlooks the unexpected change patterns in consumer’s reality or uses its monopolistic power to cream the market and does not innovate, giving small players areas to exploit.To use this strategy, you have to carefully analyze an industry with its consumers, suppliers. Study their habits, outline their policies and strategies. And then, to come up with an alternative strategy and hit the market on the weakest spot of resistence. However, there needs to be some innovation here. The new comer has to offer better service and better value proposition than the existing players in the market. What do you think of Google’s attack on Microsoft’s Office line of business with free spreadsheets and word processors? Looks like an entrepreneurial judo to me.○ Niche Strategy where the goal is to monopolize a small area. The 3 strategies discussed so far, aim at establishing a dominant position in the market. The Niche strategy aims at control, not dominance, in a smaller area. In fact this small area, typically created by a dominant player, is so obscure or small that the chances of receiving competitive waves in the market is pretty slim. You probably know major automobile brands, but few of you can name companies which build frames or brakes. This kind of opportunity is rarely found by accident and is typically a result of systematic survey of an industry and using existing relationships.

○ Changing economic characteristics of a product, market or an industry, which in essence is converting an old product into something new. Unlike the 4 strategies above, where there’s a new product or service hitting the market and the strategy is how to execute it, in this last strategy, product itself is the strategy. Sounds paradoxical, isn’t it? Let me explain. This is exactly what McDonalds or Starbucks did. They took an existing product and built a new experience with it by creating a new market and a customer. And thus, the innovation itself is the strategy.Entrepreneurship always needs to be market focused and market driven, strategy is where the entrepreneur makes the decision as the risk taker. It’s neither gamble nor exact science. It’s judgmental. Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds.com 

Continuing on the framework for innovative thinking…

I’m going to merge concepts from Peter Drucker with my own here targeting a more distilled and practical one to adopt. We have 7 different ways to look for innovative opportunities and 5 strategies to go after. Let’s start with where to look for innovative opportunities. First four of the seven innovative opportunities are within an industry or business:

○ The Unexpected - An unexpected success, an unexpected failure or an unexpected outside event can be a symptom of a unique opportunity.

Why is eBay failing against Taobao and Google failing againt Baidu in China? The failures are not by a small margin, we’re talking about a 60% market share versus 20% for search engines, it’s huge. What is the root cause of this? Is it the Chinese nationalism, different value proposition for search experience, usability, no listing fee approach or what? The answer to this question will lead to many innovative and entrepreneurial opportunities to do business in China, as well as importing concepts of what works there into America.

○ Incongruity - A discrepancy between reality and what everyone assumes it to be, or between what is and what ought to be, can create an innovative opportunity. The lately merging mobile phone and internet technologies are making the old concept of a phone obsolete. Looking at what Apple, Microsoft’s Smart Phone model and some of the hand-held devices do, and comparing them with internet service providers and wireless/wired infrastructure moguls’ services will lead to a lot of innovative ideas. What could that be in your industry?

○ Innovation Based on Need - When a weak link is evident in a particular process, but people work around it instead of doing something about it, an opportunity is present to the person or company willing to supply the “missing link”.Why are the Japanese more advanced in robotics? It’s not because it’s cool and they are more talented in designing robots, in fact, most of their original designs were coming from The US. The main reason for that is because Japan had the “baby bust” about 5 years earlier than America and 10 years earlier than Germany. It took them about the same time as Americans to realize the labor shortage problem. ○ Change in industry structure - The opportunity for an innovative product, service or business approach occurs when the underlying foundation of the industry or market shifts.What is happening as the online advertising and internet technologies converge and collapse? YouTube, MySpace, Microsoft’s offer to Facebook, Double Click deal and other countless headlines in the last 2 years on the news? There are innovative opportunities there.

and the next three are outside the industry:
○ Demographics- Changes in the population’s size, age structure, composition, employment, level of education and income can create innovative opportunities.Not to repeat, but the early advance of robotics in Japan is mainly due to this as I explained above.○ Change in perception or meaning - Innovative opportunities can develop when a society’s general assumptions, attitudes and beliefs change.Global warming and pollution is changing the way we design cars, houses, even the kitchen tiles are going organic or green.

○ New Knowledge- Advances in scientific and nonscientific knowledge can create new products and new markets.My favorite example here is the recent development that now human female egg can be frozen. We were able to freeze the embryo before, but with this late development, what are the possibilities? Women will not be forced to make career vs. family decisions and can have babies using the eggs they had in their early 20s and become mothers in their 40s or even 50s. What would the conventional marriage, motherhood, dating and women’s role in society be like? Welcome to the next sexual revolution! With tons of innovative opportunities. Try to think of these 7 terms in your industry, it will guide you to innovative opportunities and perhaps to your next entrepreneurial journey. You can combine these elements into 5 strategies:
○ “Being fustest with the mostest” which aims at creating something new.
○ Creative Imitation which is the perfection and positioning of an existing product or service.
○ Entrepreneurial Judo where you exploit bad habits of competitors.
○ Niche Strategy where the goal is to monopolize a small area
○ Changing economic characteristics of a product, market or an industry, which in essence is converting an old product into something new.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds.com 

Entrepreneur is the one who innovates. It’s not a personality trait, it’s not pure hard work, ambition or passion. It’s “innovation” that differentiates an entrepreneur from a regular small business owner. It’s a tool every successful entrepreneur uses, but can it be done systematically? Can someone be taught to think innovative ideas? What if innovation was a musical instrument…what would it be?

If you look at the dictionary meaning of innovation, it won’t help you much. American Heritage says “the act of introducing something new”, Webster will tell you “a new idea, method or device”, pulling it closer to “invention” in meaning. They don’t have the economic performance or value in the context of the explanation.

I like Peter Drucker’s explanation the best : “change that creates a new dimension of performance”. In summary, his point is that innovation creates a new resource. From an economic stand point, there’s no such thing as resource before men find a use for it that endows it with economic value. Penicillin mold was a pest, not a resource until Alexander Fleming realized that this pest could be used as a bacterial killer. Only after then, penicillin mold became a valuable resource.

In fact, Peter Drucker did a remarkable job in putting entrepreneurial thinking into a framework. I’ll outline it here and show you how it’s really an instrument with 12 notes, just like the piano. Once you know it you can start playing! Don’t expect to start improvising like Dave Brubeck right away, but everybody can be innovative by practicing this framework.

There are 7 sources to look for innovative opportunity and 5 strategies to execute. Strategies actually are built on top of the innovative opportunities, so a stronger analogy to the music theory perhaps would suggest that the entrepreneurial strategies would be the harmony, not just the notes. But, that would leave me with 7 notes, which would be a primitive instrument like the Neanderthal flute!

Yes, out of pure selfish reasons and since I invent my own analogy, I tweaked the music theory here a little.

First four sources to look for innovative opportunity are within an industry or business:

○ The Unexpected
○ Incongruity
○ Innovation Based on Need
○ Change in industry structure

and the next three are outside the industry:
○ Demographics
○ Change in perception or meaning
○ New Knowledge

The explanations of what they are and the 5 strategies are coming in the next post.

Best,
Deniz Erkan, co-founder of MiNeeds.com 

Right when I was forming my software startup, MiNeeds, I read a book called Purple Cow by Seth Godin. This author is one of the Gods of marketing; I wish I can hire him for just one hour! Maybe someday… Anyway, the book is an explosively inspiring read that I highly recommended for all the creative insane entrepreneurs who crave to be unique and different.  

The idea of the book is this: if you are a brown cow, then you’re no different from all the other boring cows. But if you are a purple cow, now that’s a view that’ll constantly attract attention!

Creating a purple cow business means you dare to be remarkable! This doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot to do so. It just means that you have to think smartly to be purple! This can be through a phenomenal customer service you provide, an innovative technology you build, a super cool store you design, and so on. What is that one thing that you want your customers to leave wowed by every time they visit your business?

I have 3 purple cow stories to share.

Car Chip Repair via Wi-fi!

If you’ve driven around Microsoft campus recently in Redmond/WA and you came across a van with an installed tent around some car, you know you’ve just met the purple cow of chip repair!

The van owner created a remarkable chip repair business by creating the following innovative business model: If you work on Microsoft campus and have a chip on your car that needs fixing, you send the van owner a picture of the chip via email. He receives your image instantly on his van through his laptop that has internet connection, I’m guessing through a broadband card. He then sends you an estimate. If you decide to work with him, he drives to your car that’s parked on campus, assembles his little tent to cover from our lovely rain, and repairs your chip while you are at your desk working!

Why do I have a feeling this person is more successful than a lot of the other chip repair shops in Redmond area!? He is very lean without the office costs. The sole existence of his van on campus is serving an extremely effective targeted marketing. His advertising cost must be zero! 

Dog Pictures in an Ivy League School Application!

Even if you’re an extremely bright kid growing up in Istanbul, it’s still pretty difficult to convince some of the Ivy Leagues to admit you, unless!!

What if that kid dumps the boring university applications and creates a little story book about the unique things in his life which also contains pictures of his house, dog, backyard, friends, etc.? What if he submits this little story book along with the deadly application to all the Ivy Leagues and top schools? What sort of crazy application is that?

The happy ending of this true story is that this creative kid gets admitted to 18 out of the 20 Ivy Leagues and top schools he applied for! He chose Stanford. The coolest part about this story is that this person happens to be one of my partners today at my software startup MiNeeds.com, this is Honor Gunday.

A Kids Coffee Shop! (this is a virtual story)

On Queen Anne hill, where I live in Seattle, I can count eleven coffee shops in less than a 2 mile radius! You have the commercial and the smaller ‘organic’ branded ones. Is there room for yet another coffee shop on this hill? Can a new café attract some of the regulars of the other cafes and convince them to stay? I think absolutely, only if that café is remarkable!

Queen Anne is an area with a good percentage of young married couples with kids, LOTS of kids! Imagine a new coffee shop opens up there that allocates a small space just for kids. Assume this café pays a high-school student $8 an hour to do face painting for kids once a week. Imagine the lines! Think of kids telling their friends about their experience! What a great word of mouth marketing those little fellows will create. A forceful one too since most parents can’t say no. What if the owner was even smarter and decided to gather emails of parents so the café can inform them of such activities. Do you really think those parents and their kids won’t stick to this café!?

Conclusion & Recommendations

To create a remarkable business, ask yourself: how can I be different and have people leave with something to talk about? How can I give people one heck of an experience? Think of all the shops you’ve visited and people you’ve worked with recently. Do you remember any of them? If so, why? What was so special about their business that stuck with you?

Start thinking differently, allow yourself to imagine the coolest possible business you would really want to go experience that is extremely different from anything you’ve seen. I recommend you keep a log and write all your ideas in it. After you have a few options, look at them and examine the cost within your budget. Start implementing the ones that has the most viral marketing effects on people and are affordable.

Being remarkable doesn’t mean building expensive things. It can be simple ideas that are extremely creative which can differentiate you from the rest.

Best Regards,

Raed Malhas 

Co-founder, www.miNeeds.com: A new way to shop local services 

Read my “Entrepreneur’s Journey” blog at the Seattle PI Newspaper: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/entrepreneursjourney/ 

Sin #1: Over Engineering! Solution: Cut, cut, cut!

Early this year, while I was still working at Microsoft, I took a class taught by one of the program manager architects at Microsoft. This person (and please forgive me for not remembering your name) has been at the company for over 15 years, and designed the first versions of Excel and Word, plus many other products. He started the class with his nutshell recommendation saying: “cut features from your product before you even think about them!”.

The class broke into laughter for a few seconds. But soon after he started sharing his experiences, all the program managers in the room fell into a mixture of reflection on their previous creations. Throughout my career designing products, software and other, I assure you that “over engineering” is one of our greatest sins as entrepreneurs! By nature we want to make our products/venues innovative and remarkable. But we seem to all fall in the same trap. Every time we think of a great idea that would add great uniqueness and value to our customers, we automatically add it to our work items. Next thing you know, you suddenly have a designed a monster with too many arms and legs. And the core goal of the product gets lost within its numerous features! Then good luck communicating all these values to your consumers in your 30-second elevator pitch!

How many times have you walked into a store and wondered “what in the world are they selling here exactly!?”. Then how often have you been to a restaurant and found the following on their menu: Sushi + Teriyaki + Chinese Food + Thai + even Hamburgers!! I’m sure you’ve used many software programs that till today you’ve only utilized less than 10% of the features they offer.

In order to avoid falling in this trap: first think hard and brain storm with your partners to answer this one question: “what is the core of our business?”. It has to be expressed in a few words, not more than one line. Once you nail that, think of what features/components will it take to make this statement a reality? You’re done, this is your List-A, and this is your product/shop that you can start building! Don’t add ANYthing to this list! I know, I know! the temptation to add this one really cool small feature can make all the difference right!? WRONG! This is the ultimate trap and one of our greatest sins as entrepreneurs! Do not add it to your List-A. For any such new idea, write it down on a different list that you call “List-B” of your creation. List-B becomes the additions/improvements you’ll introduce in the next generation of your creation.

It is crucial that you stay laser focused on your List-A only. Build it then launch it. After you have users visiting and using it, the feedback you’ll get will dramatically alter your List-B. All these ideas you initially thought were extremely important which almost made List-A but ended up on your List-B, you will soon realize that most will be cut because they are not as important as you thought. You now have a creation customers are using, which is your List-A, listen carefully to what they’re saying about it for a lot of their input is most probably your List-B!

Best Regards,

Raed Malhas

Co-founder, www.MiNeeds.com; a new way to shop local services

Read my “Entrepreneur’s Journey” blog at the Seattle PI Newspaper:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/entrepreneursjourney/