Welcome to Techguy’s Cambrian House and Entrepreneurship Blog

This was a great blog post about the difference between marketing, PR, Advertising and Branding. Take a look for yourself. I think this pretty much hits the difference on the head.

I recently had an email land in my inbox that was so insightful I had to ask the author if I could publish it on this blog. I guess you could call him a guest blogger. This was written by Ray, or most of us really know him as Doymarn. I first got to know Doymarn in the first idea warz tournament. He has an idea called Virtual Business Units that left its mark on idea warz tournaments. I’m just glad he lost in the semis and I never had to meet him head to head. However, from that experience I found a deep respect for Ray. When you read the following post, I think you’ll see why.

I have no dissension on the new design goal of CH… it’s a great idea but the execution is not so impressive.

I personally think that the initial emphasis on development and implementation should have taken place rather at the business facilitation end of the spectrum rather than the technical end… this is where there is a greater need of service facilitation and one where there is a lack cohesive tools and services elsewhere to use, other than the expensive use of auditing and legal bodies… unless there is and I just don’t know about them?

The seamless plug-in of a project into a clearly defined business model capsule where regulatory setups, logos, trade mark registrations, relationship agreements and all the administration tasks are handled ,will then allow the business to fly as soon as the project is ready for market.

I am not suggesting for one minute that we shouldn’t have source code depositories and project management tools but they are available in various shapes and forms outside of CH to use in the meantime.

If I look at what is needed to start a business and generally the skills that developers (and others) lack in general then that is without a doubt business administration, accounting, legal and marketing.

These tasks are very important for the success of a business but most of them are boring tedious tasks that do not attract the majority of people… In fact, they generally act as a deterrent to go into business for many people.

CH in my view should have spent time designing and implementing a business service that handles all the administration and accounting needs for a project including the regulatory, tax and legal stuff that so far little attention seems to have been given to. These tasks would be much more cost effective on a co-op basis and these tasks centrally administered would not hinder the startup and product development which could take place in parallel, as said already, using outside industry tools readily available.

Co-operative marketing is the other main area that I think should be given more attention, we all know it’s expensive and unpredictable but a co-operative platform should be given more thought as to how to pool resources so that each new project can use it as springboard and the cost savings here could be substantial.

Once these areas are well covered, then I think the attention should revert back to the definitive technology platform for the projects to be developed on in-house.

I love how Ray throws a completely different perspective on the direction of a business. I love the idea of a set of business services. I’ve often wondered if and when I should start up an LLC or corporation for my ideas. Is it considered a sole proprietorship or does it fall under Cambrian House? I think it’s a really interesting question that hasn’t really been answered. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that a group of programmers won’t be able to accomplish this.

The second part of Ray’s proposal is a co-operative marketing. I’ve been harping on this idea for a while. What an incredible value add Cambrian House could offer its projects! Any idea in their system could instantly have access to a group of crowd owned marketing resources. I’ve called it the Cambrian House marketing mob.

Thinking back to the various business plans I’ve written, the largest costs are business overhead, labor and marketing. Cambrian House is moving in the right direction to link up various labor resources. Like Ray, I agree that they could do a lot more to facilitate business and marketing resources.

I’ve decided to start making a series of posts about the popular 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups. My plan is to take the list and talk about how this list applies to crowdsourcing and in particular a few the ideas I’m developing using the Cambrian House platform.

Here’s Mistake #1

1. Single Founder

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.

What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That’s pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.

But even if the founder’s friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he’s still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.

The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks “I can’t let my friends down.” This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it’s missing when there’s just one founder.

This mistake really hit home for me. I have this really great idea. I won $20,000 in startup money for the idea. I guess to me that says that someone else thinks it’s a good idea. However, I still haven’t found the right person to help me build this idea. I guess you could say that I have Single Founder syndrome. I don’t want to be a single founder of an idea. I want to have someone else to share the burden and success of building a great business. I’ll keep looking for the right person.

The cool part about submitting ideas to Cambrian House is that you instantly have a crowd of people that are ready to comment and possibly participate as a “founder” of an idea. If you want to get some honest feedback on an idea, then all you need to do is submit it to Cambrian House. People pretty much will tell you exactly what they think of your idea. The power of a crowd looking at your idea is pretty powerful. The Cambrian House crowd pretty much knows if that idea has been done before or not. They are pretty savvy with their feedback on revenue models and ability to execute. It’s a really great place to throw out ideas and get feedback from the crowd.

However, the best part of Cambrian House is that by submitting your ideas, you might just find a future founder of your idea. I know. I’m currently working out a deal with a member of Cambrian House to develop one of my ideas. I’ll let you know more details when it happens.

Most importantly, Cambrian House completely changes the startup model. It has the potential for a company to say it has 100 founders. Talk about game changing.

During my regular online reading I found a really interesting blog post by Jesse Rasch. Essentially Jesse talks about his alternative approach to startup investing. Here’s his summation:

Put most succinctly, my early stage investing activity is a hybrid of angel investing and venture capital. Maybe that makes me a Venture Angel, or an Angel Capitalist. In the final analysis, the label is not important. There are easier ways to engineer financial returns in the capital markets - for me, angel investing is equal parts passion and business. We see ourselves as a true partner to entrepreneurs. We actively help to build an entrepreneur’s business by leveraging our knowledge, experience, and network to create a successful company.

This is his list of differences (excuse the caps, I was too lazy to change them):

FLEXIBLE INVESTMENT PARAMETERS

A GUT FEELING

FIRST ROUND FOCUS

SIGNIFICANT BOOTSTRAPPING EXPERTISE

AN ENTREPRENEURIAL PERSPECTIVE

COLLABORATIVE FUNDRAISING

WE ARE NOT VC TASKMASTERS

A PARTNER YOU CAN COUNT ON

SELFISH PERSONAL INTEREST

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

You really need to read the rest of the details. It’s a fundamentally different approach to investing in a startup. I would love to have him working and investing in one of my ideas like Jumble Lunch. Did you hear that Jesse?

Since I’m currently working in the health care industry, I’m pretty involved with the health care blogosphere including my EMR and HIPAA blog. In my participation, I didn’t really think I’d run across something that would pertain to entrepreneurship. Well, I was wrong. I recently found a very interesting article about finding the time to start a business. Of course it’s focused on a doctor’s office, but I think that many of the principles apply to starting any business.

One part I especially liked was the list of time you’ll need to start a business.

Thinking time - this is the time devoted to brainstorming, mindmapping, schmoozing with colleagues and friends to test out vague ideas, doodling, doing Internet or offline research, and daydreaming. You are setting out to answer the question of “What?”

Planning time - this time is spent mapping out business and product/service production processes, setting up systems, figuring out what to delegate, filling in spreadsheets, consulting a CPA or business attorney, designing and producing prototypes, pricing products or services, writing business plans, creating marketing plans, and having someone design logos and websites. This time you are answering “How?”

Doing time - no need to explain this one! During this time, you might be filing forms for your business name, approving a website design, purchasing supplies, organizing and setting up workspace, hiring staff, setting up your accounting systems, operationalizing your business and marketing plans, and actually delivering the goods.

Looking at that list makes me feel like I’m running out of time.

One of my best finds recently is a blog by the founder of Feedburner called Ask the Wizard. It’s a great blog because it focuses on teaching entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs good skills. I really love hearing successful people talk about their success and things they’ve learned that have made them successful. You can expect me to comment about this blog quite a bit in the future.

Isn’t blogging and the internet great? A simple college student in Las Vegas is able to “sit at the feet” of successful entrepreneurs and learn from their mistakes. None of this would have been possible even 15 years ago. The internet has provided massive amounts of information from experts all over the world. The real key will be filtering through the mass of information.

I must admit that I have quite a fascination with venture capitalists and venture capital funds. I first started learning about them in college at BYU when I participated in their business plan competition. Since then I’ve learned a lot more and think I have at least some idea of what venture capitalists are looking for and how they work.

One thing I find interesting about venture capitalists is that they don’t expect or plan to have all their ideas become enormous successes. In fact, quite the opposite. I’ve heard it said that if a venture capitalist invests in 10 companies then they expect 8 to fail, 1 to have reasonable success and 1 to hit it big. If this happens, then a venture capitalist is happy. Anything more and it’s a bonus. I see it as spreading your investment across a set of great ideas.

I believe Cambrian House has the potential to do something very similar with someone’s time. In a previous post I said that I think it’s a good idea for talented people to share their skills across multiple projects. Imagine that you are a venture capitalist and your skills and time are the assets you have to invest. Cambrian House gives you the platform to do so. By participating in 10 projects that you believe will be a success, then you are giving yourself a much higher probability of success. If even one of those 10 projects goes big, then you’ll be in a very good position.

Now, just imagine that something you create for one Cambrian House project can be shared with another project. All that is required to earn a share of the other project is the time to integrate your previous work. I’ll give two examples of work that I’ve done that could be integrated in other projects. I created the captcha image and google mashup for Robin Hood Fund. Both of these could pretty easily shared with other projects.

This type of interaction is something that could set the Cambrian House community apart from other communities. Projects can more quickly roll out new functions. Talented people can receive a share of multiple projects. That’s a win win in my book. The real question will be how the owner of the code will know that another project needs it.

In my book, Cambrian House has always been about creating a revenue stream and not just a one time payment. Cambrian House 2.0 has made this even more apparent.

Right now I see a major problem in the community that Cambrian House has created. Currently, I think that 99% of Cambrian House members are idea submitters. Ok, there may be a large number of people like my wife who participate in Cambrian House to support someone’s idea. They don’t count. They aren’t going to produce anything for a project and may or may not submit an idea. In my wife’s case, any ideas she has she’ll probably just submit under my name. Excuse my digression.

The point is that right now Cambrian House is a bunch of people interested in having their own idea developed. That means we have a bunch of bosses and no worker bees. If you are interested in finding a coder, a graphic designer or a marketer at Cambrian House, there is no one available. They are working on their own ideas. My hope is that Cambrian House will do a good marketing push once the “Help Wanted” job board is up and ready to go so that their is a more diverse community of workers and not just bosses.

In the meantime, I only see two solutions to the problem. Of course, there will be some sharing between projects. I know that I’m interested in working on a bunch of projects even if they aren’t my own. Watch for a future blog post on my personal plan for Cambrian House and you’ll understand why I think it’s very valuable to work on more projects. Sharing with other projects and the cross over of idea submitters to other projects is only going to touch the surface of the need that’s out there.

My second solution is for Cambrian House to hire some Cambrian House staff community members. I think we’d need a coder, a graphic designer, a marketer and maybe something else that I’m missing. These people would be required to rack up as many RPs in projects as possible. Of course they’d be paid by Cambrian House according to how many RPs they were able to get for Cambrian House. Essentially Cambrian House would be investing in the success of their product until they were able to build the community in a way that these specialists were no longer needed.

Of course, we could just wait for the Cambrian House community to become what it’s suppose to be. That’s what I’m facing now. For example, I have absolutely no graphic design skills. I can’t find another graphic artist in the community outside of the Cambrian House staff. How am I suppose to redesign the website without a graphic artist? I can’t. I have to either hope that a good graphic artist finds Cambrian House and wants to help with Spoil My Spouse or try and go find one myself.

Y combinator is a really interesting incubator for entrepreneurs and startup companies. I found that they pretty recently rolled out a simplified digg like news service for startup news. I found the news items really interesting. I think with a bit larger crowd participating, then it will become a really valuable resource for entrepreneurs looking to start a new company. I posted the Cambrian House blog post and video of Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics.

It looks like I’ve officially made this week transparency week. I’ve already got another transparency post planned. I wonder how long I can write about transparency in business.

My latest example was a town hall meeting that was held by the people at PayPerPost. Here’s their blog post with the entire transcript. Most of you probably won’t want to read the transcript, because you aren’t apart of the website. However, it is a great illustration of transparency.

I’m not sure how this was done before technology like Breeze, but it was really easy to just connect and participate in the online virtual “town hall” meeting with the CEO of the company. This time was really nice because we had one moderated question and answer section for the CEO while there was an unmoderated chat in one of the other panels. I personally found the unmoderated chat as valuable, if not more valuable, than the Q and A. Part of that could be attributed to the unmoderated chat having some of the developers and other staff available to answer questions and listen to your ideas.

One thing that did surprise me with this town hall meeting is how backward looking the questions were. Most of the questions surrounded people’s complaints with bans and Alexa.