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What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?
Came across this brilliant paper which points out the difference between the way entrepreneur thinks and works and the way an MBA would handle it.
The main difference I saw was in the approach, Entrepreneur would jump into action with little analysis, and make the market carve out a roadmap, there is not a huge timelag or investment that is put in before entering the market, whereas an MBA typically spends a lot of time and effort into market research, competition analysis and logically designs the best possible product.
The difference is the cost of failure. Entrepreneurial thinking reduces the cost of failure and at the same time tries to create blue oceans. Blue oceans, cannot help but be a result of entrepreneurial thinking.
Of course for the success of a venture, experience and technical knowledge is a must, be an entrepreneur or a MBA!
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If you like this then please subscribe to the Four Types of customers
Every industry has four types of customers:
- Loyal Customers
- Soon-to-be Non-Customers
- “Refusing” Non-Customers
- “Unexplored” Non-Customers
You can gain a lot from each type of customer, if used properly. If one adds to your revenue stream, the other helps improve your product and strategy. You will need to concentrate different activities on each type of customer. This saves your effort from getting diluted, at the same time helps gets maximum out of every effort you put in.
Loyal Customers are the ones who are happy with your product/service and whom you can safely assume to stick on to your product in the future. Little effort is needed to retain them, but needed never the less. These customers can easily be encouraged to be your ambassadors and are the the ones who play crucial role in viral marketing.
“Soon-to-be” Non-Customers are the ones who are sticking on to you just because they haven’t found a an alternative yet. They will jump out once they spot an alternative. You will need to put effort to satisfy and retain these customers. As these customers are usually unhappy with certain features of your product/services, getting their feedback about your product/service will prove to be very valuable.
“Refusing” Non-Customers are the ones who refuse to buy your product. Eg: People refusing to buy mobile phones are refusing non-customer of the Mobile phone industry. Knowing why these set of people are refusing to buy your product/services can give key inputs to improve your product/services. Eg: People maybe refusing to buy mobile phones due to bad network. Solving the problem (improving the network) will help convert these “Refusing” non-customers into Loyal customers.
“Unexplored” Non-Customers are the ones, whom your have neglected or conciously not targetted. Eg: IBM thinking common man as a non-customer and not targetting them at all (in late 1979). By tweaking your product, and changing the brand image, sometimes you will be able to target this BIG market of “Unexplored” Non-Customers.
How not to lose a Business plan competition?
Last month I got a chance to go through about 25 business plans. All plans were in the idea stage and were written by college students. I am no expert in wrinting bplans, but felt, with basic knowledge on how to run a company and common sense, the bplans could have been improved many folds.
For a Business plan to be successful in real world, there are a few areas that you need to concentrate on irrespective of the sector of operation. In a bplan competition you will judged on the very same criteria. I will be talking on these few key areas in this post.
Say, you go to a investor asking him to invest in your company. What are the things he will see before investing in your company?
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Kick-Starting a Venture
Gave a talk on Kick-Starting a Venture at NITK, Surathkal. Practical things that are to be taken care of when starting/running a venture.
You can download the presentation here :Â kick-starting-a-venture.ppt
Google has a 3rd co-founder!?
Until now we knew Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the (only) co-founders of Google. But few months back a man is claiming to be the third co-founder of Google.
Hubert Chang claims that as an NYU Ph.D student in 1997 he was introduced to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin by Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani. He claims that he came up with the pagerank concept, developed a part of Business Plan and even the company name - Google!
When asked why he wasnt mentioned on the original Pagerank paper? He says, he chose to pursue his Ph.D instead (Note: Larry and Sergey decided dropped out of college to start Google)
When Google was asked about this, they did not deny nor call him fake. Instead they replied -Though many people were involved with Google in its early days, it has been well-documented over the past decade that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in September 1998.
Google truth, the truth of Google’s birth from googletruth
When starting a company, we take help from numerous people, but cannot call them all as co-founders. Even here, it may be the same case. But here(after seeing google’s reply) looks like Hubert Chang was involved.
Is something fishy here? We may never know. Having seen people who wont acknowledge their co-founders for stupid reasons like “inconvenience to mention”, I wont be surprised if what Hubert Chang says is true and Page/Sergy outright deny it!
Update: Techcrunch followed up on this, click here see the updates
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