This has got to be the best headline I’ve seen in a long time…
The tone of the blog attached to this is a bit heartbreaking, but the headline had to be shared.
Fertilized by lies, I grew into a cynical plant
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Creating the road helps those willing to help themselves.
Keeping with the theme of providing free online business services, a question comes up:
If the quest is to make all sorts of online business tools available to the general public at no cost who is interested in this set of tools and are they worth helping?
How do you test the temperature of this kind of market?
I’m pretty excited to let you know that it can be tested but unfortunately at can’t tell you the results until the testing is complete!
Stay tuned and more will come related to the results and the tools used to test the market. (And, another business primitive will come out of this too.)
All online business tools should be free
All online business tools should be free!
If a musician spills his life into an album, the tools for the world to experience his life’s work should be at his disposal (even if he’s broke).
If a guy makes amazing surfboards by hand in his garage – shouldn’t the world be able to get access to his work? (Shouldn’t he have the tools to build a reputation, an audience, and a living – Doesn’t he deserve these tools?)
There is absolutely no reason why a set of tools for creating a reputation, building an audience, sharing what you have to offer an audience, and getting paid for it should not be 100% free for anyone to use.
Mailing list tools – Should Be Free!
Blogging tools - Should Be Free!
Forums - Should Be Free!
Social Media management tools - Should Be Free!
Customer Relationship tools - Should Be Free!
Sales Funnels - Should Be Free!
Landing Pages - Should Be Free!
Keyword Research Tools - Should Be Free!
And, having the workflows and guides to make effective use of these tools - Should Be Free Too!
This is the journey:
What would one have to put in place so these tools are FREE for the people who can use them to share the “amazing” they have to offer?
Creating a minimum viable product.
Balancing product investment against getting it in the hands of users.
Once you have a product, and know there are customers for it.
It becomes a waiting game while you’re building.
The key to reducing this wait time, is to start with a minimally viable product. Is the product useful to someone in it’s simplest state? Then release it to that crowd (small though they might be).
I’m in the first phase of building out the new system. There should be a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in about 30 days.
IT strategic planning once the market research is done.
A tale of two startups…
Bob has done his market research.
- He understands his market.
- He has a product he wants to create.
- He knows people are willing to pay for the service because he’s surveyed the competition.
So at this point he’s ready to roll up his sleeves and start working. He weighs his options. Should he trust some we hosting service or should be do implement his own systems. He’s got money to invest and like most unseasoned entrepreneurs he figures throwing money at a problem will get the job done.
He reasons that he can’t really be secure by letting someone else manage his infrastructure. So, he begins by purchasing servers, and getting a collocated data center to house his stuff.
He finances the servers and his total cost on the servers and colocation is about $500 per month. (Less than a brick and mortar store front, which seems like steal.)
Now he spends the next year developing his product on this platform. He spends $6000 on just the server financing and colocation, and he spends another $14,000 hiring people to manage the servers (setting up databases, application servers, and email servers).
All spent he’s spent $20,000 just to keep the roof on the building “so to speak”. Keeping in mind this doesn’t touch his development costs, and the fact that he’s not made a single sale yet.
Then Joe tells him about cloud hosting… and that he leveraged cloud infrastructure and did the same thing for his startup at a fraction of the cost. Joe had all of that for less than $800 for the year while he was developing his product. All that and the systems were easier to manage and use so he didn’t need to hire anyone for infrastructure management. He still had development costs, but he managed to do it all for $19,000 less than Bob.
Bob is bumbed… his strategy for how his information tech is going to work looks pretty weak.
IT strategic planning for small companies and cash strapped business startups:
Bob’s mistake was that he assumed that everything he was doing needed to follow some sort of standard (don’t get me wrong I’m all about standards… they just make sense in most cases). Occasionally something new comes along that isn’t a standard yet and cloud computing is really something that is becoming just that.
Had Bob known about using services like Amazon’s cloud services for his application hosting (PAAS – Platform as a service) he would have not needed to front the money for servers (which takes time, effort, and money to get implemented).
Had Bob known about using the cloud he wouldn’t have needed to setup a database (or hire a DBA) to get his data back end up and running.
Had Bob known about the cloud he wouldn’t have need to get someone else to setup his email services.
All of these cost him money and sadly… none of them will scale – what will happen to his customer experience when he actually starts getting busy?
Bob’s strategic position with regard to his information technology actually creates financial risk for him. On top of that it ensures he will have higher operational costs as he grows. As his sites get busier he’ll need to add capacity, then he’ll need to hire a guy like me to come in and setup the entire system to scale.
All this could have been avoided by using standard services with a non-standard implementation.
SMTP, Database, WebApplication services are all standard service and there are 2 ways to deploy them.
- By fronting the hardware and getting a datacenter.
- By leveraging someone else’s infrastructure to do the same thing at a much lower up front cost as well as lower operational costs.
When Joe uses the cloud he positions himself to be a one man enterprise.
When Bob uses the “traditional” IT infrastructure approach he positions himself to be trapped by his business. More costs, not scalable, and more time spent doing things other than what he is good at.
More competition analysis
So I’ve found 3 services so far that appear to be fairly promising.
http://ebizac.com ($19 to $49/month).
I really hate their name, and their site look… feels dated… but according to their sales page there could be something very promising here.
This system integrates really tightly with Adobe’s other products… looks promising if someone were interested in tying all of their business to Adobe.
http://www.getswizzle.com ($12 to $79 per month).
This looks pretty interesting. There is a moderate setup cost, and they seem to have a nice sense of style. No social media tools though.
Tight, Theory-Based, Loose, Empirical
Processes designed to execute the business of an enterprise should be tight and theory-based. Processes designed to develop the products of an enterprise should be loose and empirical.
In the best performing companies, this ridiculously simplistic BD00 generalization is true? In the worst companies, the opposite is true?
Couldn't agree more... great post... thanks for sharing it.
