“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” -Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs offered insightful decision making strategies to entrepreneurs in his 2005 Stanford commencement address. Every morning when you look in the mirror as you are about to start your day, ask yourself “Am I doing the work that I WANT to do today?”  When the answer is “No” for too many days in a row, it is time to change something.

Stay hungry

Hungry people take decisive actions with purpose and passion.  Hunger forces you to respect your resources and apply careful reasoning to their consumption.  Hunger keeps you searching.

                       Stay Foolish

Keep your dead-serious perspective in perspective.  Although your business is a serious matter, reinventing portions of your business in foolish ways can lead to discoveries, growth, and opportunity.  Remaining foolish keeps you enjoying your work. 

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."  Steve Jobs left these as his closing thoughts to the Stanford grads;  these words inspired many of his own decisions and supported his success over the years.  What will you do with this advice?

Make your business better than you!

Startup companies face a myriad of challenges every day; in order to deliver top quality solutions and products to your customers, make your company better with everyday decisions.

New Employees

“It’s hard to find good help these days.”  Good talent comes at a premium and can be hard to attract as a startup company.  With every new employee you hire, ensure they are better than you at something.  If you can afford it, hire someone who is better than you at most things, or everything!  With every brilliant new addition, the company’s institutional knowledge and skills multiply; your brainy employees will elevate the original company beyond what you thought was possible.

                                              Mentors

You should always be wary of business advice, especially from someone who doesn't have skin in the game.  To get good advice find a fellow entrepreneur who has emerged triumphant from the overwhelmingly dooming odds of the startup world.  Learn from their mistakes and successes as much as you can.  You may not be able to get Mark Zuckerberg to coach you, but there are plenty of experienced people who are waiting for you to ask for their help.  Search LinkedIn for someone who shares a similar background and has the business experience to help guide you.  Send them a short InMail, and you will be surprised at the responses you get. 

What's missing from your business plan?

Business plans and models help you structure and make sense of the startup business you're creating.  These living documents can reveal your strengths, weaknesses, and what your next steps should be, if you included all of the key components.  What did you leave any out?

Strategy

This hard to measure component should be the underlying motivator for all of your startup decisions.  Know where you are going in a very specific way.  You may plan on supplying your customers with a precious and  scalable product or service, but what key factor brings your target demographic to your front door? Thinking  BIG and planning strategically about an infant company is very difficult.  If you can understand where you are going, your startup partners can help you get there.

Marketing Investment

Don’t  invest thousands of hard earned dollars in developing an amazing new product or service and expect your old Facebook page and newly created twitter account to do miracles for you.  Yes, social media is important; it will enhance your marketing campaign, but give your company’s marketing campaign the  respect it deserves…. In dollars!  Understand how many marketing dollars it takes to get 1 customer.  Investors love to know this number!  It shows you get it.  Take advantage of Google adWords and Facebook advertising.  Seasoned marketing expertise turns this investment into revenue.

Intellectual Property

Guarding your technology and proprietary models with patents and trademarks is critically important.  Filing provisional patents on your ideas is an inexpensive way to achieve the “patent pending “status, while preserving a competitive advantage over your market opponents. Investors want you to do this.  Understand the time limits associated with your potential intellectual  property, if you miss the window on filing a patent, its gone! Your unique ideas will become free game, industry wide. If you don’t file, you literally give your best ideas to your competitors. Issued relevant patents are commonly evaluated at 1 to 1.5 million during an acquisition.  Make this a part of your business plan.

Patent Your Startup

 Should I apply for a patent?

In order to apply for a patent you must meet a few requirements.  Is your invention novel? Translated: Has anyone else done this before?  You have to have a unique invention in order to apply for a patent, that is not public knowledge.  Also, your invention must be “not obvious”.  It cannot be a simple combination of 2 other inventions that work in a predictable manner.  We don’t want people to have the ability the obvious.  If you can pass these patentability tests, you may want to apply for a patent.  For a utility patent your invention must also be useful.  This requirement is easy to meet; if your invention doessomething, it is useful.  Test Passed.

                                      How much will it cost?

Patents in and of themselves are not very expensive, legal fees are.  You can write a provisional patent yourself and file it today for $150.  It will be valid for 12 months and can be filed as late as 12 months after your first public disclosure (grace period).  Provisional patents are only reviewed to ensure the forms are filled out and the filer paid; that’s it!  The patent office will give you a serial number and that is all.  You have to file non-provisional application to get a “real” patent. Using a patent attorney, this is likely to cost between $30K and $200K depending how complicated your invention is and how many office actions the patent office provides you.  Also, it is common for the process to take 3-5 years to actually have the patent approved.

                                                                            When should I apply?

Since the new first to file laws went into effect in March 2013, the sooner you get a date on your patent application the better.  A good rule of thumb is you can file a provisional shortly after finding your life-altering invention, you don’t have to have the actual invention in hand to do this.  You should submit your non-provisional patent application shortly after creating your first prototype.  Tons of detailed information is required in the non-provisional patent application which necessitates the knowledge of creating a working prototype.  This is assuming you could actually create your invention within  12 months of filing the provisional patent application.

Send me your questions about how patents effect your startup! Itunes University has a great patent law class for entrepreneurs provided by Stanford.  

I have business idea.... What's next?

So you have a great idea for a new business, product or service and the itch is pushing you to take the next step.  What should you do?

       Talk about it

Some people hide their invention out of fear that someone will patent their idea after merely hearing about it.  You have to get over this.  (We will discuss patents at a later time.)   If you don’t have something firm to patent, there is nothing to patent. Talk about your invention.  Your friends and colleagues will provide the sounding board you need to make improvements and vet your ideas.  If your idea is garbage, these people will tell you!  You need this. The first time you hear your invention is horrible, crazy, or hopeless should not be after your second mortgage.  It’s ok to be nuts, but you should at least know about it.

                     Prototype it

Turn the idea into something real.  Focus your energy into a prototype.  Whether this is a software project on a development server or a physical widget, there has never been more resources available to make prototyping easy.  Tech projects have the best advantages; resources, software, cloud space, and processing power are getting cheaper and easier by the day (free in some cases).  If you don’t know how to code, online resources like the Code Academy (my favorite) will walk you through popular programming languages. Stanford and Harvard have great programming classes in their reasonably priced online extension schools.  For physical products, 3D printers allow you to create, iterate, and improve with one-off prototypes to get your hand on the product now.  These printers can be quite pricey, but there are now services that will print your 3D project for you, so you don’t have to drop 5 grand on a printer.  Having a prototype instantly adds value to your business and provides the "real" factor you need to move on.

                                   Make a Sale

Prove the concept that someone is wiling to trade their dollars for your product or service.  Put it on eBay, Craigslist, Amazon, or at a garage sale.  Trading your product for some cold hard cash is exciting and a major point of turning your idea into a business.  You may not be at your desired price-point, but going through the exercise of making this transaction forces you to establish a funding acceptance vehicle (an important step that is often overlooked).  Don’t worry about the prototype you just sold, there will be more. If you are lucky there will be millions more. Allowing your product or service to be used in the wild will reveal a lot about you and your product. People will use it in ways you did not intend. How will you react to this? Go with it, embrace it, and learn from it.

Cheaper, Faster, and Smarter: Top Business Education

Although people criticize business schools for an array of issues, everyone can agree the top business schools are expensive.  If you land a seat in a top B-school you could part ways with $175K!  I found two great ways to get a top schools without the tuition.

Completing one of these programs will support your startup operations while helping you edge out competing businesses when contending for venture capital money or angel investors. 

Harvard

Yes, Harvard! Harvard Extension School offers an open-enrollment certificate program in Strategic Management.  Harvard Extension School is one of the 12 degree granting schools at Harvard, just like Harvard Law. This little known school is waiting to deliver the rigorous curriculum for which Harvard is known.  Harvard makes many of its top professors and classes available in this program.  The Strategic Management certificate is shaped like a streamlined MBA with a focus on strategy.  Build strong foundations in economics, organizational behavior, and marketing just like HBS students.  The 5 course program is customizable, from classes on managing growth to social media and online marketing. Options to attend classes include live streaming video, pre-recorded lectures, or traditional in class options at the same price.  This program is humbly priced at $10K to uphold the school’s motto, “A Harvard education accessible to everyone”.

 Stanford

This prestigious institution is renowned for generating Silicon Valley’s top developer-entrepreneurs.  The Stanford Center for Professional Development offers an 8 credit certificate program in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.  This open-enrollment program is available exclusively online and includes an expanding spectrum of topics focused on prototyping, design, creating demand, and developing business models.  Gain the insight from top tech gurus in the Bay Area while learning to iterate your creations into a scalable, deliverable, and market ready product.  The program promises personalized “advice from Stanford’s team of innovation coaches” and understanding of the “most current research on innovation and entrepreneurship”.  This program is a steal at $8K.  It’s probably the cheapest way to put Stanford on your resume, with results engineered to add value to your startup. 

There are many other accessible schools that cater to budding and seasoned entrepreneurs, but nothing beats these programs when you compare cost, quality, and recognition.

Educationally "Fund" Your Startup

Learn first, then startup.  Mitigate the risk of being another failed startup with these proven educational resources.  

40 Hour Work Weeks
Getting out in the marketplace and running a part or whole of some ones else's business gives you "training wheels" in preparation for your own business.  Established businesses or franchises have (or have had) some level of success on which they have built sound business processes. Learn what makes these good and great by practicing their success models. Billion dollar newbies maybe an iconic wonder in the startup world, but customers, employees, and investors want a seasoned hand at the wheel.

Relationships
Your buddies', brother-in-law's, and colleagues' mistakes make more than just bro talk over some beers.  They will educate you on what they did right, what they did wrong, and where the decision point was that made all the difference (good or bad). Buy him another round, its worth the investment in your business.

B-School
Pay a lot of money to go to a business school?  These are often hit or miss.  Graduates may be out of touch with real people and real business practices or get the check in the box with little else to show for it.  However, the top tier business schools can take an above average person (like you and me) and place them in the right network to effectively use his or her newly purchased business vocabulary and elevate them to success.  You paid for the clout, use it!

"In the startup world, you're either a genius or an idiot. You're never just an ordinary guy trying to get through the day."

Marc Andreessen