I saw this
website snoop-around.com on the
SVEF awards night, snoop-around.com is a Photo/Interview website in
Reykjavik, where they visit creative people in their workshop or home and do a profile on them. The website won the award for being the Best Approach, Blog and Video Content category. It was really fascinating to see how creative one can get watching people doing
creative work. The vicarious feeling I get being around others who are doing fantastic things is infective, it forces me to act. Anyway, I have
written before about how having a balanced Creative and
Analytical skill set is critical for a team to increase the odds of success. When one things about the web, it is a balance of the creative and analytical sites that get the attention.
Apple is a classic example, I am writing this blog post in a
Mac Air and I keep thinking how much work should have gone into the creative side compared to the engineering side of putting this piece of machine together. It is a balanced engineering and design effort that I think is amazing. I believe that is the recipe for increasing the odds of success in any endeavor. If you are
web designer focus on form and function, beauty and analytical. I believe we are embarking on a new world where Art,
Creativity, Design has to in the front with all the geeky engineering and analytical discipline behind to make the thing work. The
Snoop-Around.com website is a good example of that. I think their
business model is built around
advertisements, I don't see the advertisement on the main view of the page... it is clean, shows what I expect it to show but when you scroll down you see the advertisements done beautifully. I want to compare that to another site whose business model is built on advertisement
mbl.is. I think mbl.is is a great website but the design side of it needs work, it is too messy, crowded, it actually turns me off when I go to the site. The actual content is probably 3% of the real estate and 97% of it is moving advertisements and nothing that really interests me why would I even bother going to the site? it is just poor design! What do you think?
There is a fundamental difference between a business model and business plan. A Business Model defines how you will make your product or service economically viable. A business plan describe how you are going to make your business model work. One does not always know how the plan is going to evolve, so building detailed plans although a great thought or intellectual exercise adds no real value because you are wasting time making assumption about the world out there and hope that your strategies or "plans" will address those assumptions and hypothesis. The truth could not be far from it. Most people confuse this with the product development road map and the classic example I get is people saying "hey, Steve Jobs did not go and interview his customers before he created the iPod, iPad, the Mac Air or any of the products that has come out of Apple..." to that I have only one answer, unfortunately there was only one Steve Jobs and how do we know that Steve did not do that? he had a keen eye for design and detail, he spend considerable amount of time in Silicon Valley being part of the information revolution and he had many fails to learn from. I try to remind those I am talking to that they need to spend 30 years in Silicon Valley, formed 2 or 3 multi-billion dollar companies, have the same network and experience of Steve Jobs before being able to compare themselves to what Steve Jobs did.
There is a simpler way, Steve Blank, has written books, taught classesand has done many things to showcase the Customer Development Methodology, which is nothing but a Business Model. If you approach problems with the Customer Development method, you can build a pretty good hypothesis and once you have an hypothesis, it can be validated and based on the results you can build a business. The trick is to get through that cycle as fast as you can and then execute based on the learning. It is never simple and straight forward you have change your hypothesis several times and build and re-build your business model that is why it is a startup.
