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Aaron Strout

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The Process of “Ideation” and Validation before Starting a Company

August 16, 2011 By Aaron Strout 5 Comments

This is a guest post from Mukund Mohan, CEO of Jivity, a social commerce and brand merchandising company.

If you’re like most entrepreneurs (I fall in this bucket), who want to start a company, you probably get 100 exciting ideas in one day and none that excite you for the next 100 days. I know enough entrepreneurs who will wait for the right idea and spend months agonizing over if it will be the one that “changes the world order”. That made me think and question my personal process of coming up with ideas and what steps I follow to get my idea to see light of the day.

First a caveat: I fall into the “good ideas, good execution, but not world changing” bucket. If I were a baseball player, I’d be the “safe bet” to get singles and doubles, and a rare home run. My ideas won’t work for everyone. They are purely in the “discipline, structure and process bucket”, not the stroke-of-genius bucket. So here is a condensed version of the process I follow:

  1. Keep asking questions: It’s been well documented that good entrepreneurs are perennially curious. They like asking questions. Most of my questions have come because I have the discipline to train myself to have a heightened sense of observation. I like to notice everything around me and think. A combination of reading (blogs, books) and listening (to anyone, starting with the person sitting next to me at the airport, to my dad) helps me constantly formulate and process things around. I send text messages to myself with good questions and save other questions in the drafts folder of my cell phone. I try to keep a constant list of questions that bother me daily, many I have no answers to, but would like to ask others.

    My questions fall into 2 buckets: a) “Why” questions and 2) “What if” questions. e.g. When I was thinking of BuzzGain the question was “Why does engaging a PR firm cost so much for a startup and how can I reduce the cost”? With Jivity it was “Why does it cost so much to build a brand and can we do it in a less expensive fashion”? With my first company Interfinity it was “What if we could reduce the time to configure a Cisco router by 2 hours”?

    These questions usually translate into ideas that can help answer the question.

  2. Formulating ideas and seeking answers: I found that I get the most ideas from others, while asking them their opinion on a question that vexes me. They may not hand me the ideas on a platter, but many have helped me by asking the question differently or looking at the problem in a very different way. Many questions I asked were ones that were incorrect in the first place or those that I don’t really care about getting answers to.

    For BuzzGain the outsiders were practically any entrepreneur or small business owner. I talked to about 200+ people over 2 months primarily by attending 4 events – a BarCamp at SocialText, a Demo event at AdMob, Web 2.0 SF and lunch 2.0 at Oodle. I was not pitching the idea to outsiders, but asking the question that I was seeking ideas for.

    Usually at this stage I develop a set of “filters”. I tend to write down 5-7 filters and they are the lens I use to determine if the question is worth answering and if the idea is worth pursuing. A filter might be “Are others also thinking these are questions worth answering”, or “Can I get someone to help me understand how prevalent this problem is” or “Is this an idea that answers the question in a very different way”? At this stage none of the questions are really about market size or determining the size of the opportunity, but more about whether I am asking the right question and if the idea is the one worth pursuing. Another good technique I followed was I sent a 5 question summary using a free online survey tool to 200+ entrepreneurs and people I knew. I even offered a few Starbucks gift card to 5 winners who participated in the survey. It provided enough incentive to get a 53% response rate.

  3. Validation: As opposed to the previous stage where I reach out to practically anyone, the validation process is usually one that I test with experts. I have found that it is always better to go to experts after I go to the “outsiders” since they tend to give me more simple answers. Outsiders don’t necessarily think of the idea in the context of existing solutions, whereas experts or “insiders” do.

    I pitch only those ideas that have passed my filter criteria and it was not unusual to have 3-5 different ideas that I would tell the insider and ask them which one had “legs”. For BuzzGain, I had the opportunity to speak to over 20 insiders. Many immediately shot down 3 of the ideas but told me to refine 2 of them that they thought had potential.

    When I did talk to the “insiders” I went with a mockup. Initially a set of 7 PowerPoint slides, which I had a friend convert into HTML (he later taught me how to do it with Dreamweaver) and took 3-5 minutes to walk them through it. I had 3 mockups for each of those ideas and showed all 3 to my insiders. They ended up picking some components from each to help me draw a new idea that was what felt was different and really addressing question in a unique way.

The questions I initially kept asking needed serious “thinking time”. I found a routine that works for me. Thinking time for me tends to be “alone”. I have heard several people ponder and think while they are in the shower and others when they go for long walks. I have tried the approach to set aside time for thinking and have enough questions to think about. The time that works best for me is while doing laundry or doing dishes (yes I did that when I was in America), and back in India, since I have a lot more time, travel time or while playing tennis is my best time for thinking. I also like to talk to others when I am advanced stages of thinking, so many times, I will take someone that works with me on a walk to discuss questions that need some ideas.

“Power to the People — and Profits to the Company”

December 19, 2008 By Aaron Strout 2 Comments


Nigel Parry)

Cisco CEO, John Chambers (photo courtesty: Nigel Parry)

Nearly every Sunday night, you can find me on a Jetblue flight heading from my home just outside of Boston, MA to my soon to be new home, Austin, TX. During these nearly four hour flights, I’m able to catch up on a lot of reading including. This includes a large number of blogs I try and keep up with but a couple of times a month, it also includes FastCompany, the magazine.

Last night happened to be one of those nights where I read FastCompany. I was feeling particularly “Sponge-like” as I had just had a beverage with my friend, Peter Kim, in JFK airport (the stopover for the evening flight from Boston to Austin). I was particulartly interested in the title article that focused on Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers and how he’w in the process of “socializing” one of the largest and most successful companies in the world.

What got me excited about this post was the fact that Cisco has gone to great lengths recently to turn themselves into a socially minded organization – not social in the “let’s do good” sense of the word but rather as in social media/social networking. To that end, Chambers truly practices what he preaches and keeps an internal blog (currently ranked no. 2 out of the thousands of other internal blogs at Cisco). He also regularly encourages people to contribute their ideas to the corporate wiki and if so moved, upload videos to Cisco’s version of Youtube called “C-Vision.”

While I applaud Chambers focus on getting his company to adopt social tools, the thing that really resonated with me was Chamber’s rationale behind  these tools i.e. getting his company to think “collaboration.” And not just with each other but with their customers and their partners.

I also liked the fact that Chambers gets the fact that the day of “command and control” leadership within an organi
zation is dying. New leaders must change or face being phased out of the company. To make his point un-missable, Chambers has tied the compensation of all his executives (their are nearly 500) to one another’s success. One fails and they all fail.

This new approach has netted Cisco some pretty big successes like his $4 billion+ financing business . It’s also netted Cisco $26 billion in cash which gives the company an almost unheard of advantage in today’s crappy economy. It’s also earned Cisco a ton of positive press in addition to the Fastcompany article including Time Magazine’s top 100 execs of 2008 among many others.

How do we know this isn’t just a bunch of corporate b.s. that many companies spout off? For one, my former CEO and CMO at Mzinga worked for Cisco and they regularly raved about Chambers innovation and passion for collaboration. I also know because while I was at Mzinga, we ran a community for one of Cisco’s eventual acquisitions, WebEx. As a result of that relationship, I know that Cisco has launched at least five other community initiatives (probably more at this point).

What can you do to be more like Cisco? For starters, get your internal house in order and get your employees collaborating. By collaborating, I don’t mean just updating a corporate wiki with HR documentation. I mean real collaboration via microblogging tools like Yammer (see the guest Mashable.com post I co-penned with Joe Cascio on Enterprise microblogging). You should also encourage as many of your employees as possible to blog — maybe not all externally — but at least internally. You should also rally around a public facing social network like Facebook, LinkedIn or Plaxo. If you are really ready to see results, you may even think about creating a branded online community.

Is your company collaborating with it’s employees, customers and partners? Let’s hear how or why not in the comments  below.

 

NOTE: The title of this post comes from an excerpt in the Fastcompany article written by Ellen McGirt

Cross-posted from http://theengagedconsumer.powered.com

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