Here are 7 P's I can believe in from James Caan from Start up Loans

In my marketing training courses, I laugh about how bad the 7 P's of marketing are.

They maybe a teaching aid - but not a great learning aid - and add very little to real marketing on the ground.

But.... Here are 7 P's I can believe in from James Caan who's start up loans company got Great Marketing Works to do a social media training workshop for their clients the other week.

Small world... the great 7 P's for starting your own business.... I wonder which ones we have at Justaxi - Manchester's taxi comparison app?

The full article is here... 

Perseverance

No one is going to become a millionaire overnight and there are plenty of entrepreneurs, including myself, who have suffered failures. If you fail the first time around then don’t just give up. Pick yourself up, dust yourself down and then start all over again. I believe you never stop learning and growing and even the low points have been important to my development.


Patience

Every journey has to start somewhere and businesses have to be nurtured and developed. It takes time and effort to build up a successful company and you should not expect to make huge profits immediately. The main thing you should be focusing on is getting a stable foothold in the market and making people aware of your brand. All the best companies take time to develop and you need to understand that Rome was not built in a day.


Positivity

There is a very thin line between confidence and arrogance but everyone who is successful in life has to have their fair share of self-belief. Business is about making people have confidence and belief in you and the service or product you are offering. If you do not believe in yourself then how are you going to get other people to believe in what you are doing?


Prudence

I have always been a big believer in keeping overheads to a minimum. Of course, being successful in business comes with its rewards but in the early days you should put as much back into the business as you can. When those payments first start coming in don’t fall into the trap of splashing out on expensive items that are not necessary; concentrate on the basics. The first rule of business is always to keep a close on eye on profit margins so you can build a company that is going to survive if and when the hard times come along.


Panache

Obviously, you don’t want to be the kind of person who stands out in the crowd for all the wrong reasons but there is no harm in having a bit of style and panache. Business is all about selling yourself as much as anything and I believe even in the business world, people like someone who has a bit of character and a certain sense of style.


Perceptiveness

If you understand what makes other people tick then it can be a great help when it comes to sealing that all important deal or landing a new piece of business. Making a successful pitch or presentation is all about being able to understand exactly what your client wants and then being able to deliver on your promises.


Passion

The most important quality of all. You should wake up every day raring to get out there and do business. It’s tough but it should never feel like a chore and you should have absolute belief in your ability and your business. If you want to be the best at anything then you have to really care and even make some personal sacrifices along the way. If you're not prepared to dedicate yourself to the business it then there is no point in setting up on your own.

-----------

Ok we have 5 of them.... I would like us to be a bit more perceptive and passionate. As I truly believe that with the right customer feedback, the right branding and marketing and the right app experience we can create some new and amazing for taxi rides not just in Manchester but in the world. So it's not just about getting the best taxi prices in Manchester but something else.

An app that could really help people too i.e be safer and be happier. Both more important that money saving, don't you think?  What do you think? 

Read this today and thought - goodness - I love what Hubspot are doing. The Power of Culture.

Read this today and thought - goodness - and love what Hubspot are doing. 

If you want the prettier version it is here.... which is full of amazing things. 

Here is the essence of it - according to them - read it and weep 

....for joy.... as we can do this too.

One screen shot I love so much I put it here. I live in the now :) 

Here are some of the highlights from the HubSpot Culture Code:

1) Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing.  

2) Whether you like it or not, you're going to have a culture. Why not make it one you love?

3) Solve For The Customer -- not just their happiness, but also their success.

4) Power is now gained by sharing knowledge, not hoarding it.

5) "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

6) You shouldn't penalize the many for the mistakes of the few.

7) Results should matter more than when or where they are produced.

8) Influence should be independent of hierarchy.

9) Great people want direction on where they're going -- not directions on how to get there.

10) "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without."

11) We'd rather be failing frequently than never trying.

(Can we do this in JusTaxi: Manchester's taxi fare comparison app - that's what I want to know) 

How Boris saved my job and how Dan sometimes wants to pivot toooooo much :)

This is a lovely Guest post written by Boris Wertz. Boris Wertz is founder of Version One Ventures, a Vancouver-based early stage investment firm. He was previously COO of AbeBooks.com, which was acquired by Amazon in 2008. So he knows what he is talking about :) And he may well have just saved my job... 

It’s no secret that building a marketplace startup is hard - really hard. The model works extremely well at scale – for example, Ebay, AirBnB and Uber. However, getting to scale is another story as young two-sided marketplaces struggle with the chicken-and-egg problem. If there are buyers but few sellers, the buyers leave. Yet if there are no buyers, what will convince sellers to sign on?

We have had this same hurdle with JusTaxi - a Manchester based taxi fare comparison app - as without the operators the model cannot work - but without the customers the operators lose faith.

With this chicken-and-egg problem of supply and demand, no two-sided marketplace is built overnight. For example it took Wattpad, a community for readers and writers, three years to get to 300,000 uploads; then it only took another three years to reach 10 million. The crowdfunding platform Indiegogo was founded in 2007, but its break-out year didn’t come until four years later.

If you are building an online marketplace, how do you survive the tough times when you’re trying to get traction and build out your supplier and consumer communities? Here are five tips:

• Don’t be too quick to pivot

This is an interesting one - as myself as the business development manager - I have been screaming out for a good pivot probably from day one (for the record my day one - was day 342 of the business's so it makes a difference)

As Boris says "If you don’t see signs of traction after six to nine months with a SaaS or e-commerce startup, you probably should reassess your market or model." BUT... as he realised "this timetable is too accelerated for most marketplace businesses. Considering you need to establish both buyer and seller communities, you will need more time to prove out your business when building a two-sided marketplace.

As mentioned above, it can take three years for a marketplace to get going. Network effects really start kicking in when there are enough products on the site to encourage buyers to return to look for products in other categories, when sellers start listing more products, and the growth of sellers and buyers is quickly accelerating. However, until you get there, start-up founders: stay focused on the core, and investors: stay patient.

• Keep the burn as low as possible

Given the slower pace of a two-sided marketplace, you’ll need to give yourself enough time to build your business. This means adjusting your burn rate downwards in order to lengthen the runway as much as possible."

We have done this a little at Justaxi - but as the marketing and business development manager I really want our outgoing to be cut down the minimum - but can people really work together without an office? Boris doesn't answer this - probably more of a question for 37 Signals and rework - but he does say...

"While spending big at the beginning can help some businesses ramp up quickly or become the uncontested market leader, money cannot buy speed when it comes to building out a marketplace.

Take a close look at your burn. There’s no need for a big team or offices early on. Most marketplace businesses only need two functions early on: people building product and people building the buyer and seller communities.

• Tighten your focus

With limited resources to build a sustainable marketplace, you need to narrow the focus of your business efforts. In most cases, marketplace businesses need to build traction in smaller verticals before expanding their reach into bigger markets. Or in the case of geographical markets, a marketplace should nail one location before expanding into others.

Indiegogo first went after the indie film market before opening up their platform to other categories. Ebay started with Pez dispensers before becoming the world’s largest online marketplace. Expanding outward from the niche often happens organically as sellers start listing items in new categories.

For example, Etsy sellers began listing craft supplies and tools and this category has become one of Etsy’s largest today. If growth outside the niche doesn’t sprout organically, you can help speed up the process by focusing on seller acquisition campaigns targeted for strategic categories and more prominent merchandising of new categories to consumers.

However, be advised that category expansion doesn’t always work as planned. When I was COO at AbeBooks, a marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books, we thought we could expand our site into new books. Despite a strong selection at competitive prices, the new books category never lived up to expectations, as most of our buyers stayed with their existing retailers (mainly Amazon).

• Focus on your most passionate users

Great marketplaces are built from the niche to the masses. You need to cement the experience for your early adopters/niche users before you can begin to appeal to a broader audience. By engaging your passionate users and catering to their needs, you increase the likelihood that they will tell their friends about the experience and your marketplace can spread outward.

AbeBooks catered to the seller community through seller-only forums, a seller advisory board, frequent 1:1 conversations with top sellers, and seller meet-ups throughout the country. Etsy has done a fantastic job of involving their buyers in the marketplace, creating a true social commerce platform. With tools to curate sellers and products, and opportunities to connect with other buyers and sellers, Etsy has turned into one of the strongest communities out there and is creating passionate users every day.

• Believe in your vision

It can be difficult to keep telling your story day in and day out without any external validation from the industry. Indiegogo co-founder Slava Rubin was often ridiculed when he presented his vision of a crowdfunding platform in the early days.

The market’s pervasive thinking back then was “Why would anybody fund someone else’s ideas?”

When trying to create a new marketplace or market category, you’ve got to believe in your idea even when no one else does. However, having faith doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to market reactions. You should continually look for small signals that you’re on the right track.

These include: increased word of mouth from your early adopters, increased repeat usage from buyers, increased listings from sellers, and positive user feedback.

Final thoughts


Building out both sides of the marketplace simultaneously can seem exponentially harder than a one-sided transactional model. However, once you reach scale, things truly start clicking and an established marketplace is hard to unseat due to the strong network effects at play.

 If you can give your business a long enough runway to build out both sides, there are plenty of market niches ripe for the next Uber, Kickstarter or AirBnB. Which is great news - as Uber are one of our competitors in this niche we have found as Manchester's taxi fare comparison app. 

Two books that each tech start up (or any start up needs to read)

This is a great blog by a chap called Geoffrey Moore. 

It is very relevant for us here at JusTaxi - Manchester's first taxi comparison app as it explains a lot about two key books for us. 

After these two books I would like to add a third - as I believe it completes the set and gives readers a real chance of making a difference. 

As Geoffrey puts it: "To the degree that Crossing the Chasm could have been called the go-to book for entrepreneurs in the 1990s, one could argue the same role for Eric Ries’s The Lean Start-Upfor the first decade of this century. Both books describe an emerging market dynamic and prescribe a very specific approach to capitalizing on it. Of course, that is all history. The really interesting question is, what is the book for the current decade?

Actually, I’d like to argue it is the combination of these two books, a one-two punch if you will. Here’s how I see it playing out.

The Lean Start-Up is all about compressing the early stages of an innovation cycle by engaging the target customer right from the start. A key ingredient in Ries’s prescription is theminimum viable product, something to put in the hands of early adopters for immediate feedback to help direct the next stage of an iterative, agile development process. Every chapter in the book vibrates with the energy of this kind of acceleration, whether to outpace a next generation of competition or to escape from the clutches of a past paradigm’s conventional wisdom.

For consumer products, particularly those that are digital end to end, this playbook can take you straight into the tornado—no chasms, no bowling alleys, just Zappos and you are there! More generally, for the user-facing portion of any enterprise system, this lean approach is excellent for keeping your development effort on a path to value. What it is not suited for, on the other hand, is doing the heavy lifting required to displace or engage with legacy infrastructure. That is where Crossing the Chasm comes in.

A key concept that structures that book might be called the minimum viable whole product.This refers to that set of products and services needed to fulfill a specific target market segment’s compelling reason to buy. In an enterprise crossing-the-chasm context, this means an end-to-end solution to a heretofore intractable problem that is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore, a solution that integrates appropriately with the customer’s surrounding legacy systems.

Such whole product solutions inevitably entail collaboration with other parties in the marketplace who provide complementary products and services, integration support, change management consulting, and the like. 

Securing this collaboration is only possible when the entrepreneurial vendor can provide ready access to an untapped market opportunity that promises material gains to the partners involved. This requires target market focus, specific domain expertise, and sustained effort, not to mention a target customer who is deeply motivated to stay the course. It is not for the flighty or faint of heart.

(This is one of the reason that we here at Justaxi - are doing more and more focus groups and are asking our customers, more and more questions about what we can do to excel their expectations - click here for my blog post of creating Manchester's taxi fare comparison app.) 

In short, the cadences and style of these two prescriptions are very different, so different one might ask why would you ever want to pair them? The answer is, because the world needs us to. 

For the foreseeable future (the rest of this decade and probably much of the following one), enterprises across the globe will be spending the bulk of their budgets deploying systems of engagement to digitize their business models. 

These systems must both delight their end users and integrate securely and reliably with legacy systems of record. That’s a lot of work, as in trillions of dollars, not billions. The front end needs The Lean Start-Up. The back end needs Crossing the Chasm."

Amen to that. 

For startups like Justaxi - a taxi fare comparison app based in Manchester -  I would add in another great resource and book - The Start up Owner's Manual  which I think compliments the above brilliantly. Not only that but the author Steve Blank - is a bit of a legend.  

Before You Quit Your Job, Do These 10 Things ... some very wise words and not from me ;)

After a weekend of doing workshops it sometimes is nice to read someone's else ideas on start up businesses and what to do. 

I particularly like this list from Entrepreneur website by Andrew Yang. 

While you're still working a full-time job, here is a list of things you can do on the side to explore an idea for a great new business:

1. Research your idea. Figure out the market, talk to prospective customers about what they would like, see who your competitors are, and so forth.

2. Undertake legal incorporation and trademark protection.

3. Claim a web URL, build a website (or have it built) and get company email accounts.

4. Get a bank account and credit card (most likely you'll have to use personal credit at first).

5. If appropriate, initiate a Facebook page, a blog and a Twitter account.

6. Develop branding.

7. Talk it up to your network. Try to find interested parties as co-founders, staff, investors and advisers.

8. If necessary, build financial projections and draft a business plan.

9. Engage in personal financial planning, including cutting back on expenses and budgeting for startup costs.

10. Create a mock prototype and presentation for potential investors or customers.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. Getting this done while holding down a job is a significant commitment. Yet, you’re just getting started.

There’s a big jump in difficulty when it comes to the next things.

1. Raise money. In my experience, fledgling entrepreneurs focus way too much on the money -- you can get most things done and figure out a lot without spending much.

That said, most businesses require money to launch and get off the ground. Finding initial funds is the primary barrier most entrepreneurs face, as many people don’t have three or six months’ worth of savings to free themselves up to do months of unpaid legwork.

2. Develop the product. Product development is a significant endeavour. Even if you’re hiring someone to build your product, managing them to specifications is a huge task in itself. You can expect vendors to take twice as long and cost twice as much as you planned.

This phase might require raising additional money as well.

3. Build a team. Most people don’t build a business alone and finding quality partners or employees can be time consuming and unpredictable. Your first employee is going to look to you for guidance and her productivity is going to depend on your ability to manage.

With partners, you’ll need to make sure you can work well with them, since they’re going to be with you from the ground up and for years afterward.

4. Get customers. Going to trade shows or trying to get your first handful of paying customers is typically a major time investment. This can involve web marketing, producing content and search engine optimization -- all of which take significant energy and resources to generate a return.

All which we are learning at Manchester's taxi comparison app company JusTaxi. 

Do you love your customers?

At Justaxi - the taxi comparison app for Manchester - we love our customers. 

We know we do and we plan to tell them this week coming up to Valentine's day. 

We also are asking them more and more about why they might love us back. but Seth Godin here has a good point about 'loving your customers....' 

There are two ways people think about this:

• We love our customers because they pay us money. (Inherent here is customers = money = love.)
• We love our customers, and sometimes there's a transaction.

The second is very different indeed from the first.

In the first case, customers are the means to an end, profit. In the second, the organization exists to serve customers, and profit is both an enabler and a possible side effect.

It's easy to argue that without compensation, there can be no service. Taking that to an extreme, though, working to maximize the short-term value of each transaction rarely scales. If you hoard information, for example, today your prospects will simply click and find it somewhere else. 

If you seek to charge above average prices for below average products, your customers will discover this, and let the world know. In a free market with plenty of information, it's very hard to succeed merely by loving the money your customers pay you.

Which is kinda why JusTaxi exists... we want to make sure people are getting true value for money in a world of symmetric buyer seller information. Just like Daniel Pink talks about. 

I think it's fascinating to note that some of the most successful organizations of our time got there by focusing obsessively on service, viewing compensation as an afterthought or a side effect. 

As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for people is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organization seeks.

Your customers can tell.

So the question for JusTaxi is how are they doing? Are they truly loving our customers? 

And perhaps more importantly - who really are our customers in the first place. The taxi drivers, the taxi operators, the taxi firms or the people booking a taxi in Manchester? 

Funny isn't it how it sometimes takes an "outsider" to make you realise something great about your home town.

A couple of days ago - a friend of a friend had some family from outside of the UK come and visit them.

So they did what you do. They took them on the "tourist" places are where they live. And they were amazed at how beautiful their town and the surrounding countryside really were.

This happens more than we think - and I believe that this same process (which I am sure has a clever psychological name) is what drives us to miss out on local opportunities and the potential of our young people (not just in this country but in the world...) i.e. we see them everyday and we take them for granted.

It's why we don't just book a taxi and go to a local hotel or tourist spot every weekend. However, "oustiders" not having this mental fatigue (which might be the term) they can see the opportunity and the brilliance that we miss every day.

The local dingy pub with weirdos in it, you always walk past, for someone from abroad might be an amazing cultural experience mixing with people telling stories and living the real British lives they read about in books.

Anyhoo, the point of this is not about cultures per se, it is more that a Swedish company (and I am rather proud that it is a Swedish company as I am genetically half Swede) has some to Manchester as, as their CEO puts is

"Manchester is a fast-growing, forward-looking city that has invested in developing its reputation as a global digital and creative hub."

This company  PlaygroundSquad, has come to Manchester and The Sharp Project, as "The UK is the centre of game development in Europe so moving our model over here is a natural step for us..... Manchester is
an exciting place to be and we are delighted to bring our specialist training to the city and reach out to the talented young people who live here. We want to mirror our success in Sweden and create jobs and employment in this growth sector here in the UK."

So the Swedes want to bring growth to the UK through teaching our young people how to make computer games isn't it amazing how it takes someone else to support the next generation of UK gaming creation.

By the by the gaming sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in the world, something that could help the UK economy and something I am rather passionate about.... so this is said for a reason.

All this is possible due to The Sharp Project director Sue Woodward OBE who is rather wonderful herself.

She is quoted in said: "It's fantastic to have persuaded Magnus to make Manchester the first overseas home for PlaygroundSquad. They were targeted as they are world leaders in gaming training. This is the final part of The Sharp Project jigsaw.

"Five years ago we planned to introduce a games facility to the building. It was always part of the plan, so it’s great to see it come to fruition. The Sharp Project is fast becoming a hub for gaming and skills associated with all kinds of creative digital content from network drama to forensics.

"Our talented tenants are producing material for a multi-platform world, a world that once was so fragmented but one we have created under one roof. That was the whole point of The Sharp Project - to shift the north from analogue content to converged media. Job done."

Job done indeed Sue, job done. It doesn't take an outsider to see that.

I wonder if they will be making mobile games? Now that is something Manchester needs to realise the potential of.... see a lovely blog about when I met Ian Livingston with Dojit games a year ago.

And perhaps more importantly what he is now doing since then.... spoiler alert he is starting a school.