Your Startup & Unfair Advantage

At the last HN London meetup I saw a talk by Evgeny Shadchnev of Forward. My understanding of Forward is that they are basically an internal incubator, with a big team of skilled developers ready to crank out business ideas to MVP stage, then continue building out the promising ones. This is part of a strategy that has seen them earn outstanding revenues, from £1m in 2004 to over £100m in 2010. Nuts!

Evgeny’s talk was engaging because he covered a lot of simple yet powerful points. It was quick too, he only had 5 minutes to speak.

The point I want to talk about is Unfair Advantage. This is a principle of the lean startup movement, which involves you considering what your single unfair advantage is.

Your unfair advantage needs to be:
1. Difficult to achieve.
2. Something you refuse to lose.

Some examples are:
1. An algorithm.
2. A rockstar team.
3. An existing client or set of clients.
4. Specialist knowledge of a particular industry.
3. Access to data that is typically difficult to obtain.

A lot of people approach me with business ideas and this is now the first thing I ask about. “What is your unfair advantage?” is a quick heuristic for figuring out how viable a business idea is.

The next step is to use a business canvas like Ash Maurya’s to sketch a representation of your business idea. There’s loads of stuff out there on how to use a canvas to record your business plans and if you’re in London the lean startup group is also a good place to get more info on this practice and to find others doing the same thing.

There were some other gems in Evgeny’s talk that I won’t cover here but hopefully there will be more speakers to this quality at the next HN meetup.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.

WeMakeWebsites launch The Matthew Elvidge Trust website

We’re pleased to announce the launch of a new website for The Matthew Elvidge Trust -  thematthewelvidgetrust.com

The trust has been setup by Hamish Elvidge and family in memory of their son, Matthew, who, aged 23, took his own life after a very short period of depression. The aim of the trust is help others who are, or may be, in a similar situation, increasing the awareness of depression and other mental health issues and preventing other young people from taking their own lives.

This work is part of an ongoing relationship with the trust which has seen WeMakeWebsites develop marketing materials for key fundraising events such as 1000 Miles for Matt - a 1000 mile cycle around the UK - and 13 Miles for Matt - a Half marathon run by 78 of Matthew’s friends and family.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.

Against the Big Joke

Consider these everyday occurrences:

• You’ve ordered something online and are allocated a delivery window 7am to 7pm. You have to stay in all day.
• Your superfast broadband won’t connect and hasn’t done for the past two hours, this has been happening for months. Countless hours are spent wasted on the phone to the telecoms company.
• The bank loses your application that has taken hours to fill out because of its numerous and often redundant sections. You call and are forwarded around 4 departments. You get nowhere.

This is what a friend of ours has named ‘The Big Joke’. We bet you know what the Big Joke feels like. But do you know what it is? We think we’ve figured it out.

As an organisation becomes bigger, it ceases to exhibit human behaviours like flexibility, responsibility and intuition. This results in mind-boggling frustrations of the sort described above. These organisations are part of the Big Joke.

On the other hand, small businesses haven’t been standardised so much that they have lost rationality. They still deal with your request in a human way and engage common sense on a regular basis.

So with the launch of our new website, we’d like to exhibit our new Anti-Big-Joke manifesto.

When you use us for a project we’ll be:

• Professional - You can relax knowing that we’re specialists in this field and we’ll guide you through the project, taking your business goals and website preferences through a refined process of design and development that will result in a robust and desirable website that will meet your business objectives.
• Responsive - Every so often we get a new client that has stopped using their old web agency, simply because they never responded to requests in a timely manner. Working with us you’ll always have an accurate of idea of when deliverables are due and if you have questions or work requests we’ll always respond the same day. We have a proven track record in this and it’s one of the things our clients value most.
• Web Experts - Every day our team read about what’s going on in web design and technology because we’re lucky to have passion in our work. We do what we love and we know exactly what we need to do with your website to let it meet your business objectives and we have the tools and knowledge to execute that vision.

These will remain core to our activities because they are the priorities we will consider as we scale. We’ll continually reject membership of the Big Joke and will continue to provide our clients with a sensible and satisfying service, this is a promise.

Alex & Piers
March 2011

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.