May 12th, 2008
In a concept lovingly stolen from www.idea-a-day.com I’m going to start sharing the business ideas I come up with each week (I have no intention of doing any of these). I would be delighted if anybody took any of these ideas and executes them. Be sure to let me know how you get on if you do!
Here are this week’s ideas:
- Wireless web cam hat - can connect to your mobile sitting in your pocket. Imagine a million walking web cams… scary!
- Free wifi in parks financed by local ads - wifi available in parks with scrolling ads over the browser that is paid for by businesses surrounding the park. Wouldn’t it be great to know there is a great coffee shop south of the park or ice cream in the north-east corner?
- Multi-sensory snack restaurants - imagine 20 tiny courses, a complete range of exciting tastes/ taste experiences, think a cheap version of the Fat Duck
- Unique blended wine - you want a birthday present for a friend. You want a completely unique bottle of wine. You want to pay £10 and for it to be red, spicy, full-bodied, oaky, gooseberries etc etc. You specify how much of each attribute you want and then your blend is made up.
- Speed reading training software which puts lines on either side of text, controls the speed of scroll etc
- Storytelling nights - a candlelit room above a bar with a bottle of wine on each table, around 30 people, 3 storytellers each telling a 15-20 minute story. £10 entrance fee
- A productivity application that removes links and distractions from web browsing e.g. disables wikipedia and youtube
- Don’t miss gigs! - massive list of bands each with a checkbox. Tick the bands that you would like to see live. Get e-mailed as soon as any tickets go on sale for any of them. Saves signing up to loads of spammy band newsletters.
Do you have any business ideas that you’d like to share?
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
May 7th, 2008
Recently there’s been a large rush of entrepreneurs setting up businesses using Pay Per Click (PPC) as the sole method of acquiring customers (mainly fuelled by the book the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss).
I’d like to show here with a worked example why these businesses are incredibly unlikely to succeed.
Assume you are a solo entrepreneur (no employees) and you set yourself a Target Monthly Income (TMI) of £3,000 a month . Take the average Click Through Rate (CTR) for an ad as 2%, the average Conversion Rate as 2% as well and the average Cost Per Click (CPC) is 10p/click.
From your TMI your target daily income (TDI) equals £98.75. To calculate the number of searches you would need to get per day to realise this income you take an average product selling price which gives you the product sales needed per day. You then divide product sales per day by the CTR and divide again by the Conversion Rate. This gives you the searches required per day which can then be compared to keyword data.
What you find is this:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p23JRG42t5Gyn9jN0fwJGMA&hl=en
The problem? Let’s look at some niche business ideas…
- Condiments - 1060 searches per day & avg price £10
- Rugby Tops - 33 searches per day & avg price £45
- Dietary Supplements - 814 searches per day & avg price £30
None of these niche businesses have enough searches or charge enough to get anywhere near the target daily income (even with a higher CTR or conversion rate).
Am I right here? Are there any flaws in my calculations? Would love to know what you think of this.
Further Assumptions:
- No competitors
- Equal specificity of keywords
- Not included any costs other than ads
- TDI does not include tax
Nick Webb |
Entrepreneur, Uncategorized |
May 3rd, 2008
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
May 2nd, 2008
1. Buy Materials (bought mine from the London Graphic Centre)
- Card (350gsm) - get a couple of bits in case you mess up
- White Spray Paint
- Black acrylic paint
- Scalpel & surgeons blade
- Canvas
2. Find Banksy image on the web & touch it up in Photoshop
3. Print image onto card & cut out with scalpel. Take your time and be careful not to cut out any ‘islands’. You have your stencil!
4. Paint the whole of your canvas black
5. Spray! Don’t do this indoors as I did. It makes a right mess and stinks you’re whole house out. For best results also get some temporary adhesive. This will give you a sharper stencil.
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
May 2nd, 2008
I have sinned. And in a particularly heinous way given the open source world I live in.
Every day I take notes. Stuff I’ve learnt, things I’ve read, ideas I’ve come up with. I also get through about a business book a week and write a summary. In fact, I produce a whole mass of content, tonnes of the stuff. How many of my pearls of wisdom do I share? Close to zilchio.
Well thanks to Jon and Simon I have seen the error of my ways. Things are about to get a whole load more noisy…
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
April 23rd, 2008
Yesterday evening I was at the British Library. I was there for the Inspiring Entrepreneurs series, a chance to meet famous entrepreneurs who are gurus in a particular field. Yesterday evening the topic was raising finance and one of the panel was the ex-dragon’s den business angel Doug Richard.
I managed to catch Doug after the event and have a chat with him and get his advice on entrepreneurship:
- Doug’s primary theme throughout the evening was storytelling. He said that, though it might be difficult to believe, even bankers are human beings and that every investment must be sold emotionally first. Why? Because you are pitching the future so by it’s nature it must be fiction. You must tell a story.
- He learnt storytelling by pitching to VCs. He pitched to 46 VCs before finally convincing the 47th to back what was then his first business.
- Brutal honesty. This is Doug’s personality and it was incredibly refreshing and entertaining. I couldn’t keep up with number of times he said no (including to me, when I asked him for 30mins of mentor time). He said no to pretty much everything but, importantly, he always gave his reason why.
- It doesn’t matter if you’re 2nd to market or 17th to market but you have to bring something game changing/world changing. Frequently the not-the-best product becomes the incumbent and you need to have something really special to change things.
- Big incumbant web companies aren’t slow. He instructs his product managers to look at his competitors daily, watch for anything new, and, if it’s any good, copy it.
- Outside the US, London is the best location for a creative start-up
- He spoke about the current obsession with user-generated content and how he thinks there will be a swing back to produced content and cited the statistic that most content (80%?) watched on youtube was the produced content which only accounts for 5% of the total content. He said that Joost isn’t the answer but anyone that comes up with a business making a web / TV intersection will make a ton of money.
- He hears 2-3,000 pitches a year and invests in 2 to 3.
- He runs his business with a daily cheatsheet with his 5 key numbers that he has e-mailed to him at 9am each morning (e.g.# of sign-ups and # of active members over the last 24hrs) then he has a weekly snapshot, does full monthly accounts and quarterly board meetings.
So meeting Doug was a fantastic education. The only thing that didn’t click for me was his investment approach. He really wanted to be sold to emotionally. That must limit him to only entrepreneurs that are good presenters and miss out on some great businesses. Seems irrational to me.
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
April 4th, 2008
JP over at Confused of Calcutta asked a great question today - “ If you could address the world for 3 minutes what would you speak about?”
I would speak about poverty.
I would use my minutes to try and persuade you to learn a little more about the world. I would ask you to give your time to the 5 points below:
- There are 3 billion people, almost half our world, living on less than £1 a day PPP (meaning that prices are equal to what £1 can buy us here). That’s 3 billion individuals each with a story. What would you do if you had to live off £1 a day?
- Do you know where most countries in the world are? Could you place them on a map? Do you know which country Darfur is in? Could you point to that country on a map? Use Seterra to learn the countries quickly - a fantastic game I highly recommend.
- Challenge your assumptions on the developing world by watching Hans Rosling’s talks at Ted + play with his fantastic statistical tool created from UN and WFP data.
- Learn about the fairtrade organisation and watch the videos on the site. Try to understand the impact that our consumption choices make.
- And listen to Mother Teresa speak about poverty of the heart. The unwanted, unloved & uncared for is the greatest poverty.
What about you? If you had 3 minutes to speak to the world what would you say?
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
April 3rd, 2008
Just found a little scrap of paper where I’d written a bunch of wacky marketing ideas when I was bored once at a conference. They’re kind of fun!
NB I take no responsibility if you do any of these (but I do want to see the photos!)
- Host a gondola race down the Thames
- Have a massive flag that you hang from all different sites around London
- Give out free branded brolleys when raining
- Have group of cheerleaders that perform around London
- Challenge competitors to a duel
- Wear hats that blow coloured bubbles
- Create grassed areas and beaches
- Change your name by deed pole
- ‘Pimpup’ your car, house, hair, suit etc into something wildly extravagant
- Fly the biggest kite ever in Hyde Park
- World record juggle, unicycle, pogo hop, leapfrog
- Hold a massive food fight where everyone is invited
- Drive a tank in company colours
- Hold a ferret race
- Make a message using lights in disused buildings
- Tattoo your head
- Give out free t-shirts
- Burn your logo into grass…
- Die the river near Buckingham Palace company colours
- Propose wild radical motions to MPs
- Start the biggest cha-cha-cha
- See how many people you can squeeze into a routemaster bus
- Sponsor the colour of the ball for the football team
- Dirt blast stencils
- Fake Jimmy Saville’s death…
- Cordon off competitors offices with ‘police line do not cross’ tape
- Create the biggest easter egg hunt ever/ morriss dance
Have you got any crazy marketing ideas to share?
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
March 27th, 2008
General
- Up until the early 1960s buildings were only allowed to be up to 100 feet high so that they could be reached by fire brigade’s ladders
- Natwest tower was the first skyscraper, finished in 1980, and looks like the Natwest logo from above.
- Tower 42 actually has 43 floors.
- The next big skyscrapers in London will be the London Bridge Tower or Shard Tower and the Bishopsgate Tower.
- The Savoy Theatre was the first theatre to be lit by electricity
- James Baird first demonstrated how the television would work above what is now Bar Italia in Frith Street, Soho.
- During the war the moat of the Tower of London was used to grow vegetables
St.Pauls
- Christopher Wren’s first three designs were rejected and the design that was accepted he went radically off plan.
- It’s 365 feet to the cross (one foot for every day)
- It was struck by a bomb in the Blitz and survived
Pater Noster Square
- Called this as Monks said the Lord’s Prayer as they walked through on the way to St.Pauls.
- It was completed in October 2003
Marble Arch
- It was originally built as the entrance to Buckingham Palace but it wasn’t used.
- On a traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road & Marble Arch is a plaque which most people ignore, marking the site of the Tyburn Tree, London’s main execution spot, where about 50,000 people were executed.
Covent Garden
- The name is a spelling mistake. It used to be the market garden for Westminster Monastery and Convent.
Nick Webb |
Uncategorized |
March 10th, 2008
Since the beginning of February I have been working for Osmosoft, a really cool little innovative subsidiary of BT. It is made up of a great group of guys who are all great TiddlyWiki specialists.
My role in the team is to run an experiment to test whether or not open source software is solely the domain of developers. My hypothesis is that it isn’t or at least shouldn’t be. The contribution of non-technical users is not just valid but vital to ensuring a great user experience. The second part of my role is to increase adoption among non-technical users and hopefully create a community that we can work with.
Given my background in entrepreneurship the ideal place to start was with small businesses and entrepreneurs. In my first month in Osmosoft I’ve met up with several entrepreneurs (although not as many as I’d like) including Justin Rhodes, founder of Elliot Rhodes, and Fraser Doherty, founder of SuperJam. Being entrepreneurs they are fantastically open to how a new approach can help their businesses and have been very quick to grasp the concept of open source.
The difficulties arise out of finding quality software to tackle their problems. Free is definitely a fantastic start for most open source software. Every business likes to cut its costs and that’s particularly true of small businesses who cannot really afford the proprietary software (e.g. £500 for Sage!). Unfortunately most of the software is inaccessible which means the time cost of setup is frequently high, particularly if the software has to be rejected because it doesn’t suit the needs of the business.
Indeed, most of the software I’ve encountered so far either seems to be designed for enterprises (presumably to get enough revenue through support) or personal use (so they tend not to be very flexible or scalable).
This has led me to two lines of thinking:
1. I should get in touch with larger businesses - I’m not keen on this. Entrepreneurship is my passion and I think it will be that much harder to form a community of businesses as they become larger. I also think the personal nature of dealing with entrepreneurs and being able to talk directly about the founders problems and needs really helps.
2. Develop an SME vertical edition of TiddlyWiki (the creation of Osmosoft’s founder Jeremy Ruston) that addresses the particular problems of one entrepreneur but is generic enough to help many entrepreneurs. This hasn’t been easy because I’m unsure of TiddlyWiki’s capabilities and I am pretty untechnical. Despite these problems this is my preferred solution.
My next steps now are to test these early hypotheses by speaking to many more entrepreneurs and learn more about TiddlyWiki/Open source software.
I really feel that getting more entrepreneurs into open source will make a massive difference to the quality of the user experience. I will continue to blog on this forum and share my results with you.
Very interested in hearing your thoughts.
Nick Webb |
Business, Entrepreneur, Osmosoft |