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When you’re passionate about a project you probably spend most of your day thinking about it. You decide your monetization plan, the product shipping schedule, what features you should have, and everything else about your business. However, often because founders are so deeply involved in their project, they lose perspective and become emotionally attached to failing ideas or practices without realizing their mistake.
As a business owner, you need to take a step back and listen objectively to the feedback you receive from your friends, co-founders, employees, and customers. Because unlike you, they haven’t spent the last couple of months over-thinking and over-analyzing your business, they will be more objective and not bring emotional baggage to the table.
For example, just because you’ve always imagined your startup’s website with a pink color scheme, doesn’t make it the best choice. Often, because you’ve spent so much time thinking about your website and it’s pink color scheme you change priorities or direction to fit that pink color scheme. For instance, you may even decide to change your target demographic to be women so that it more closely fits with your color scheme.
You can’t let your features or emotion affect your business decision making. Just because you like the color pink and have only looked at your project through the lens of having a pink color scheme, doesn’t make it the right choice. Often, it makes it the wrong choice. You need to listen to your friends, co-founders, and advisors when they tell you that they think the pink color choice is wrong. Even though, in your mind, you’ve already morphed your project to fit this pink color scheme, you’ve made a mistake in not thinking about alternatives and in making your project fit a color scheme instead of making the color scheme fit your project.
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs were able to recognize some weakness in their business model, strategy, or product and were willing to change direction. A great example is PayPal whose founders original business was in wirelessly transmitting money from one PDA to another via infrared. Even though they spent weeks and months believing in this concept, they were able to recognize that the future was in transmitting money via the internet and not via infrared PDAs. It was this flexibility and willingness to listen to their customers that helped them be successful.
So, although entrepreneurs are known for taking risks and sticking to their guns with great success, realize that it is a fine line between success and failure. Be open to outside criticism and don’t let your “features” become the master. Remember, a project is made up of features, but features do not create a project.
A Saudi Arabia columnist, in a rare expression of a pro-Israel view, wrote in the London-based Arabic-language daily newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that Arabs have wasted time and money trying to destroy the Jewish State. Mash’al Al-Sudairi’s column, translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), stated that although the “Jewish ‘occupation of a part of Palestine constitutes great oppression,’” the Arabs have a history of self-inflicted blows” resulting from opposition to the re-establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. “When, in the early 1930s, we were offered 80 percent of Palestine, while the Jews were offered 20 percent, we rejected the offer. In the late 1940s, we were offered 49 percent of Palestine, and the Jews 51 percent, and we rejected that [offer],” al-Sudairi wrote. He criticized the Arab world for exhausting all of its resources over the issue of “Palestine” and wasting money and time. I am positive, [and am willing] to bet and even to swear by Allah, that if only 10 percent of the money that the Arab countries invested in arming their forces during the futile fighting [with Israel] had been invested in what was left of Palestine and its people, the West Bank and Gaza would now be enjoying a living standard higher than that of Singapore,” he added. Sudairi also commented on Iran’s occupation of three Persian Gulf islands. “With all the turmoil over the Palestinian issue, we have completely forgotten that other Arab countries have been robbed of parts of their territories, in broad daylight, and we never uttered a word of protest,” the Saudi columnist noted. (Source: Arutz 7 News, Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu)
I recently came across this presentation by Bart de Waele. I think he has some great tips for aspiring entrepreneurs. Take a look:
Scientists at Penn State are leaders of a team that is the first to report the genome-wide sequence of an extinct animal, according to Webb Miller, professor of biology and of computer science and engineering and one of the project’s two leaders. The scientists sequenced the genome of the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant that was adapted to living in the cold environment of the northern hemisphere. They sequenced four billion DNA bases using next-generation DNA-sequencing instruments and a novel approach that reads ancient DNA highly efficiently. “Previous studies on extinct organisms have generated only small amounts of data,” said Stephan C. Schuster, Penn State professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the project’s other leader. “Our dataset is 100 times more extensive than any other published dataset for an extinct species, demonstrating that ancient DNA studies can be brought up to the same level as modern genome projects.”
Source: e! Science News.
So it looks like Google's voice recognition app uses the accelerometer and proximity sensor to detect when the phone is next to your ear and thus when you have started speaking. It then knows that you are done speaking by detecting if its next to your ear again. This is a great feature and I wish all iPhone developers had access to it.
Unfortunately, this is an undocumented feature (and as far as I know a "private" one). That means that Apple gave preferential treatment to Google and gave them access to a private method that is not available to other iPhone developers. Giving special treatment to big companies is not the way to treat its developers. After all, the iPhone is such a success in no small part to the App Store and all the hard work of the iPhone developers.
Moshe Ya'alon, a former IDF Chief of Staff who this week joined the Likud party, declared Wednesday morning that the "land for peace" policy he once backed has proven that giving up Jewish land to Arabs brings war.
He once stated that Israel could defend itself without the Golan Heights, which outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proposed giving to Syria. Ya'alon told Yaron Dekel, host of the It's All Talk Show on Voice of Israel government radio, "I was a believer in land for peace, but I have learned the past 15 years… it deteriorates our security."
Ya'alon was Chief of Staff during the government of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who made the unprecedented move of not extending his term of office because of Ya'alon's doubts about the plan to destroy all Jewish presence in the Gaza region and withdraw all IDF troops.
He said that the expulsion and the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, now Defense Minister, left Israel with Kassam and Grad attacks on the south and the Second Lebanon War in the north.
Ya'alon, who lives on a Kibbutz, explained that the values he grew up with no longer are represented in political parties he once identified with.
Referring to Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Ya'alon said that if he were alive today, he "would not choose Labor, Meretz or Kadima."
The new Likud member admitted that the decision to move into politics was not easy. "My heart said 'no' and my head said 'yes", he told reporters Tuesday. "The head won."
He explained Wednesday morning that he and his family will pay a heavy price for his entering politics, a path that is strewn with booby traps for the values he holds. "We need leadership in the face of the security, education and economic crises," he explained.
Asked if he wants to be Prime Minister, Ya'alon replied, "It is not an obsession. I did not even want to be an Army officer. I know people who wanted to be Prime Minister from the day they were born, but I am not one of them."
Source Haaretz.
Mogees seems like a really interesting service. It gives you an SDK that you can integrate in your iPhone/Blackberry/Android app so that users can buy your app from inside your app bypassing the appstore or android marketplace. Mogees then processes the payment and unlicks the app for the user.
I wonder if this breaks any of Apple's terms of service. I can't imagine they would permit this type of app once they were aware of it. Does anyone have any experince with it?
Andy Finnell writes that iPhone app developers must abandon the $0.99 price that many apps are selling for these days.
Andy calculates that a developer who wants to make a living off an
iPhone app (at $40k/year) must sell 196 apps per day to do that. He
also calculates that at $9.99 per app, you'd need to sell 16 apps per
day to do that.
Now instead of analyzing how much money we (app developers) can make off these apps. Let's just go ahead and make some great apps and focus on the money later.
There are some things, that with no explanation, will repeat over and over. It is simply the nature of the universe.
