This blog is a platform that I use to share ideas and catalogue my thoughts. My main interests are in Entrepreneurship, Venture Investing, Hospitality and Economics.
We had our 6th Meetup @Cafe Solon last evening. We once again had a very good turn up, around 30 people. The topic of the discussion was Strategies to Test Business Hypothesis, which was a follow up from last week's meet topic "Business as a Hypothesis", here are the Notes to that meetup and follow up write up. Björn Brynjar Jónsson, give a 5 minute brief talk about a topic of interest that he wanted to share with the group. The topic that he talked about was from the book "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek. It was very interesting and inspiring. Björn talked about the Golden Circle from the book. The premise is that we tend to focus our effort our vision etc on the "What", whereas great leaders who inspire us usually start with the "Why", which refers to the Purpose of why we do the things we do. When we understand the purpose and communicate the purpose we can inspire people to action. He gave the example of Apple. Here is the Video of Simon talking in Tedx.
We talked about Strategies that were used in Clara to test their business model through the product Vaktarinn. Originally, Clara had not created the software that automatically sources all the digital content and provides the visualization that they do on Textual information. Gunnar explained how they got 10 of their friends to manually enter all the text from different sources into Excel Spreadsheets and then manually created the visualization look and feel on the data to validate if anyone would be interested to buy the product. Their first revenue was in selling that manual work, once they validated that idea they went on to build all the software that powers Clara Insight and Vaktarinn now. This was a quick and dirty way to see if there is a market for what you want to build.
The second example was from the company Buuteeq, how the team there validated their hypothesis that Independent Hotel Owners are willing to share their contact details and everything about their hotels to a third party and host their solution on a third party platform. They validated that by creating a Hotel Directory Service for Independent Hotel Owners called Wandari.com. Not only were they able to validate that business hypothesis they also created their customer funnel which they could target and convert into actual paying customers.
There was a discussion on a new business hypothesis that Safe Drivers would be willing to save money on their car insurance by allowing a tracking device to be installed in the car. We talked about how this hypothesis can be validated by just creating a web page with a simple button that says "Are you a Safe Driver? If you answered Yes, You can save 30% on your Car Insurance!" Sign up to be the First of the Safe Drivers to take advantage of the offer." Ok, I made the actual sentences up but that is where the discussion was going!
The 4th business hypothesis was about non-availability of Icelandic Candy on Souvenir shops. One of the participants wanted to create a business on creating an attractive wrapper around the traditional Icelandic Candy and sell it to the Souvenir shops. The group guided her to actually pre-sell the candy to the stores with just using Digital images and depending on the demand she could build up her business. I was so happy to see how excited she was about being able to launch her business by this weekend! Entrepreneurs find the way!
Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson shared the story of how they created a business to sell the Eyafjalljokul's volcanic ash. They sold this idea while they were stranded in the airport in London, they just used digital images to create a visualization of a fancy bottle with the Ash in it and they sold it even before the product was ready. Overall a fantastic meetup and the next meetup is going to be on Pivot Stories.
I will be speaking in the "Ferðaþjónusta og fjárfestingar" conference sponsored by Landsbanki and the Ministry of Industry, Iceland and organized by Promote Iceland. The words in Icelandic mean "Tourism and Investment" thank you Google Translate. I wrote about it when I got invited. The message of the presentation is "Apply the Lean Startup principles even before launching a hospitality development project". Especially validated learning, GoogleInsight for Search is a fantastic tool that I have been using for all our projects. I highly recommend that you do too. It can give you insights on anything that you are working on or plan to work on.
When we embarked on this journey to develop our presence outside of India in 2009, we wanted to build a scale able business which means we build teams around specific themes that we wanted to invest in. What we believe works well in Hospitality development is vertical integration of the value chain. What do I mean by this? Our company in India whose core business is to invest, develop and manage Hospitality projects owns a number of support businesses
We have invested in a company called buuteeq (pronounced boutique!) I know not the best of names but a kickass concept. The team at buuteeq wants to disrupt the traditional market of marketing and selling hospitality by independent hotel owners. These are the kinds of investments that we love doing:
1. Great team
2. Big market
3. Innovating the traditional way of doing business using the new infrastructure of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon (I have written about this earlier)
4. Executing on the idea (1500 hotels in 20 countries in 12 months, thats traction and scaling)
I have always been associated with the Hospitality industry, for crying out loud my Statement of Purpose to all my graduate school applications was written on the premise that I will eventually get back to working with Hospitality and Hotel development. I am glad to have come a whole circle in pursing that vision. I digress... here is a video that explains what buuteeq does, if you are an independent hotel owner or operator and want to run your property with the same infrastructure of big branded properties in marketing and sales buuteeq is the way. The second video is an interview of Forest Key, CEO of buuteeq on why they are switching to working with Silicon Valley Bank from a traditional bank. To all my banking friends in Iceland... you have a golden opportunity to serve the next generation of fantastic entrepreneurs here in Iceland, try to understand your startup clients and serve them well, if you do that guess what they are going to want to do business with you even when they become the next Google... just sayin...
