5 Ways to Spot a $100 Million Idea
By BNET Contributor | January 18, 2011
By Robert Jordan
This post has been adapted from interviews I conducted in the book, “How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America.”
One hundred-million-dollar business ideas are the stuff of legends. Usually we read about them in the context of an entrepreneur who decided to follow his passion, or a founder who just happened to be the rocket scientist of his industry. Most of the time, however, this is not where great ideas or great companies come from. I interviewed 45 company founders, each of whom started, grew, and sold a company for $100 million or more, or took their company public for $300 million or more. Here are some of their secrets.
1. Fill a need, not a passion.
It’s a myth that successful businesspeople got into their field because they cared deeply about it. Success doesn’t follow passion, it follows need. Find something that no one’s doing that somebody should do. That’s what Dick Costolo, founder of Feedburner, did when he saw that publishers had content but no way to distribute it online to subscribers and syndicators. (Google eventually acquired Feedburner for $100 million.)
Don’t get me wrong — passion is critical. But what I’ve come to believe, based on the wisdom from these 45 home-run hitters who created $41 billion from scratch, is that need trumps passion and passion trumps skill. In other words, when you’re fired up with a great mission, you’ll become passionate about it. As for skills? Once you’re jazzed up about the great idea, skills can be acquired or hired.
2. Identify your customer’s big problem.
Where there’s a meaningful problem, there’s a reason to solve it. Cardiologist Donald C. Harrison came up with the idea for his medical device company AtriCure after asking himself how he could make a novel contribution that would help his heart patients in a major way.
One thing I learned after interviewing the founders is that, in most cases, their major innovations were not rocket science. They simply saw something, often very practical, that many other people simply missed. Successful company founders tend to be truly curious, and they don’t accept the status quo as being beyond improvement.
3. Get it from your hands, not your head.
How did a guy with a degree in supercomputing end up in the trucking biz? Internet Explorer billionaire Tim Krauskopf got the idea for a transportation technologies startup, FreightZone, after he learned to drive a semi and began to experience what was involved in the trucking industry.
So often, I discovered that $100 million ideas come from doers, tinkerers, and collaborators. Rock Mackie knew Tomotherapy was a viable concept only after three of his graduate students each made separate and important discoveries. Put together, his team’s ideas resulted in a new and remarkably better CT scanning technology for treating disease.
4. Make it sellable and fixable.
Do you think you have a great idea for a new product? It’s not a great idea until you’ve gotten involved in selling it. Jim Dolan of the Dolan Company, a newspaper and media publisher, advises that selling is the quickest way to find out what’s wrong with your product idea so you can fix it quickly and move on. When Dolan bought a 107-year-old legal newspaper publisher, he quickly figured out how to turn those fine-print bankruptcy notices that other newspapers overlooked into a $100 million product. If you can’t sell it, don’t make it.
Every one of the founders I interviewed had stories about the problems they wouldn’t have discovered had they not listened to customers, colleagues, and investors in the process of pitching their product.
5. Get help developing it.
Serial entrepreneur Mahendra Vora, who’s launched more than a dozen highly successful tech companies, warns would-be entrepreneurs not to be narcissistic about their idea. Instead, develop 60 percent of your vision, put it into the hands of trusted customers, and let them help with the remaining 40 percent of the idea.
Every one of the founders failed at one time or another along their entrepreneurial journey — sometimes spectacularly — before they found that $100 million idea. As a result, they learned humility. Many of them would argue that you can’t really build a successful business without it.
Robert Jordan has been launching and growing companies and helping other entrepreneurs do the same for the past 20 years. He is author of How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America (RedFlash Press,), a collection of interviews from 45 leading founders who created $41 billion from scratch. His newest endeavors are RedFlash project implementation team, and interimCEOinterimCFO, a worldwide network of interim, contract, and project executives.
MY THOUGHTS
what? what is that need that will rake in millions? on the other hand, why would i want millions if i cannot be passionate about the means to get it? unless my passion is the millions itself. which is not. isn't it possible to create the need? wouldn't that passion be great enough to come up with an idea that will make people need your passion?
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
How A Business was Launched in less than a Year
How We Launched a Business in Under a Year
By BNET Contributor | January 5, 2011
By Lee Clifford and Julie Schlosser, founders of Altruette.com
Last winter my co-founder Julie and I left our jobs as editors at Fortune Magazine, knowing little else than that we wanted to do something philanthropic and entrepreneurial together.
Fast forward to this December, and our company Altruette is up and running: We offer a line of jewelry charms, each representing one of 25 different non-profit groups that receive a share of the proceeds. We had terrific online sales this first holiday season, and our line is now available at Fred Segal in Santa Monica. And we’ve spent nearly nothing on marketing and advertising.
While it’s way too early to consider our venture a success, we did succeed already in one regard: We started a business, from idea to execution, in under a year.
And in fact, the question we receive most often is simply, “How?” We’ve culled through our collective experiences and come up with five things that helped us most along the way. Though we were essentially starting from scratch, these lessons would also be useful for entrepreneurs who are adding a new division or going into a new market.
1. Act like you’re in business (even before you are).
When Julie and I left Fortune, I’m not exaggerating when I say we didn’t know for sure what we wanted to do. We had tons of ideas — probably too many — but we had no concrete plan for any of them. Still, we knew how important it was to act like we were already running a business. The Monday after we left our jobs, we started our daily morning conference call, which continued nearly every day for the next year. At the start our husbands must have thought we were crazy, because we’d mostly just brainstorm for hours. But that rigid schedule ensured that no two days slipped by without us at least connecting and fleshing out some of our better ideas (and tabling some of our worst ones).
We also were tough on each other. We had an electronic “To Do” list, which we emailed back and forth and reviewed during our calls. We knew we had to face that list each morning or explain why we hadn’t yet attended to Item X or Y. By the end of month two we had decided on launching a line of charms that would each benefit a different non-profit. By then, our habit of talking each morning, and following through on the previous day’s agenda, was engrained.
2. Think like a reporter.
Our journalistic skills proved extremely useful for helping us solve problems quickly and progress from one business step to the next. Thanks to the Internet, these skills are easy to replicate without spending 10 years working as reporters like we did. Don’t know how to create a package for your product? We simply Googled “packaging expo” and headed to the next one in New York City. After spending an hour at the fair, we had four solid options.
Similarly, when searching for Web designers, placing an ad on Craigslist turned up dozens of great candidates, whom we then interviewed just as we might have interviewed a source back at Fortune. Asking tough questions early on — What penalties will there be if the project isn’t done on time? — helped us weed out unqualified candidates quickly. We ended up going with a boutique company called Mars Design, and they’ve been terrific partners over the past five months.
3. You must give yourself a deadline.
As anyone in journalism knows, without a deadline you’ll never get your story written. Yet so many entrepreneurs seem to take the “we’ll launch when we’re ready” approach. We didn’t know how long it would take us to design and produce charms, but we knew we needed a big, fat, scary deadline staring us in the face. Early on we got wind of an opportunity to give away the charms at a prominent conference in the fall of 2010. We knew there was a chance we wouldn’t be ready, but we signed on anyway. That October date — circled on our calendars — was a driving force for us throughout the summer.
At Fortune we had read that the Marines use a law called the “70% solution.” Meaning you’re never going to be 100% ready, but go forward when you’re 70% ready — that’s enough. Well, that’s about how it turned out for us. Our boxes were still en route from China on a freighter, our custom clasps hadn’t been produced, our website was weeks away from completion, but we improvised and got the charms out to 350 women at the conference. We’re convinced that had we not had that deadline looming over us, there’s no way we would have been up and running for the holidays.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Yes, you can try to do everything on your own if you have all the time in the world, but most entrepreneurs are in a hurry. Your business idea needs to get to market before competitors pop up or before more established companies get wind of what you’re up to. We sped up the process by turning to experts we know (and some we didn’t) for help. We probably do this way too often but we love getting input and assistance from friends and friends of friends. We’ve sought the advice of PR experts we interacted with at Fortune, parents, friends of our parents, friends of ours, former colleagues, and even emailed a few prominent CEOs we admire. If you don’t know which friend to turn to, post your dilemma or your question on Facebook. Chances are, you’ll get feedback immediately. And don’t feel bad about asking for help. We’ve found that for the most part people typically like to lend a hand.
5. Jump on good leads fast.
If someone gives you a tip about anything (a potential investor, a great manufacturing source or even a future customer), jump on it immediately. When Julie’s cousin told us about a shop at Fred Segal that helped nonprofits, she drove there the next morning to check it out, even though we didn’t yet have a company name, website, or a product. I know a lot of people might still, months later have, “check out that shop my cousin mentioned” on their eventual to-do list. Instead, Zero Minus Plus at Fred Segal became our first retail partner, and hosted our launch party in October.
Lee and Julie met ten years ago as reporters at Fortune Magazine. They sat across the hall from each other and bonded while working together on one of their first assignments at the magazine called Hot & Not. They became the arbiters of what was cool and what wasn’t in the world of tech, business, and pop culture in this biweekly piece.
MY THOUGHTS
now my friend and i have something to think about. she had this business idea. actually, she had registered the business. we've done some pencil pushing and actually spent hours (until 2am) brainstorming. we have it all on paper. it's been months and nothing has happened. and i know why. we do not think we are already in business. therefore, we do not act like we are. we have not set goals. so, we just talk and do something when we have the time. now it's time to shape up.
By BNET Contributor | January 5, 2011
By Lee Clifford and Julie Schlosser, founders of Altruette.com
Last winter my co-founder Julie and I left our jobs as editors at Fortune Magazine, knowing little else than that we wanted to do something philanthropic and entrepreneurial together.
Fast forward to this December, and our company Altruette is up and running: We offer a line of jewelry charms, each representing one of 25 different non-profit groups that receive a share of the proceeds. We had terrific online sales this first holiday season, and our line is now available at Fred Segal in Santa Monica. And we’ve spent nearly nothing on marketing and advertising.
While it’s way too early to consider our venture a success, we did succeed already in one regard: We started a business, from idea to execution, in under a year.
And in fact, the question we receive most often is simply, “How?” We’ve culled through our collective experiences and come up with five things that helped us most along the way. Though we were essentially starting from scratch, these lessons would also be useful for entrepreneurs who are adding a new division or going into a new market.
1. Act like you’re in business (even before you are).
When Julie and I left Fortune, I’m not exaggerating when I say we didn’t know for sure what we wanted to do. We had tons of ideas — probably too many — but we had no concrete plan for any of them. Still, we knew how important it was to act like we were already running a business. The Monday after we left our jobs, we started our daily morning conference call, which continued nearly every day for the next year. At the start our husbands must have thought we were crazy, because we’d mostly just brainstorm for hours. But that rigid schedule ensured that no two days slipped by without us at least connecting and fleshing out some of our better ideas (and tabling some of our worst ones).
We also were tough on each other. We had an electronic “To Do” list, which we emailed back and forth and reviewed during our calls. We knew we had to face that list each morning or explain why we hadn’t yet attended to Item X or Y. By the end of month two we had decided on launching a line of charms that would each benefit a different non-profit. By then, our habit of talking each morning, and following through on the previous day’s agenda, was engrained.
2. Think like a reporter.
Our journalistic skills proved extremely useful for helping us solve problems quickly and progress from one business step to the next. Thanks to the Internet, these skills are easy to replicate without spending 10 years working as reporters like we did. Don’t know how to create a package for your product? We simply Googled “packaging expo” and headed to the next one in New York City. After spending an hour at the fair, we had four solid options.
Similarly, when searching for Web designers, placing an ad on Craigslist turned up dozens of great candidates, whom we then interviewed just as we might have interviewed a source back at Fortune. Asking tough questions early on — What penalties will there be if the project isn’t done on time? — helped us weed out unqualified candidates quickly. We ended up going with a boutique company called Mars Design, and they’ve been terrific partners over the past five months.
3. You must give yourself a deadline.
As anyone in journalism knows, without a deadline you’ll never get your story written. Yet so many entrepreneurs seem to take the “we’ll launch when we’re ready” approach. We didn’t know how long it would take us to design and produce charms, but we knew we needed a big, fat, scary deadline staring us in the face. Early on we got wind of an opportunity to give away the charms at a prominent conference in the fall of 2010. We knew there was a chance we wouldn’t be ready, but we signed on anyway. That October date — circled on our calendars — was a driving force for us throughout the summer.
At Fortune we had read that the Marines use a law called the “70% solution.” Meaning you’re never going to be 100% ready, but go forward when you’re 70% ready — that’s enough. Well, that’s about how it turned out for us. Our boxes were still en route from China on a freighter, our custom clasps hadn’t been produced, our website was weeks away from completion, but we improvised and got the charms out to 350 women at the conference. We’re convinced that had we not had that deadline looming over us, there’s no way we would have been up and running for the holidays.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Yes, you can try to do everything on your own if you have all the time in the world, but most entrepreneurs are in a hurry. Your business idea needs to get to market before competitors pop up or before more established companies get wind of what you’re up to. We sped up the process by turning to experts we know (and some we didn’t) for help. We probably do this way too often but we love getting input and assistance from friends and friends of friends. We’ve sought the advice of PR experts we interacted with at Fortune, parents, friends of our parents, friends of ours, former colleagues, and even emailed a few prominent CEOs we admire. If you don’t know which friend to turn to, post your dilemma or your question on Facebook. Chances are, you’ll get feedback immediately. And don’t feel bad about asking for help. We’ve found that for the most part people typically like to lend a hand.
5. Jump on good leads fast.
If someone gives you a tip about anything (a potential investor, a great manufacturing source or even a future customer), jump on it immediately. When Julie’s cousin told us about a shop at Fred Segal that helped nonprofits, she drove there the next morning to check it out, even though we didn’t yet have a company name, website, or a product. I know a lot of people might still, months later have, “check out that shop my cousin mentioned” on their eventual to-do list. Instead, Zero Minus Plus at Fred Segal became our first retail partner, and hosted our launch party in October.
Lee and Julie met ten years ago as reporters at Fortune Magazine. They sat across the hall from each other and bonded while working together on one of their first assignments at the magazine called Hot & Not. They became the arbiters of what was cool and what wasn’t in the world of tech, business, and pop culture in this biweekly piece.
MY THOUGHTS
now my friend and i have something to think about. she had this business idea. actually, she had registered the business. we've done some pencil pushing and actually spent hours (until 2am) brainstorming. we have it all on paper. it's been months and nothing has happened. and i know why. we do not think we are already in business. therefore, we do not act like we are. we have not set goals. so, we just talk and do something when we have the time. now it's time to shape up.
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