New venture outsourcing blog

This fits in the bin of “so I have this (great) idea, is it worth pursuing?”

The entrepreneurs and inventors we work with are often trying decide how much time and energy to invest in their venture or whether it is worth investing any at all. Here are some quick tips we’ve found to be particularly applicable to web 2.0 and other online startups, but also apply to any good old fashioned brick-n-mortar:

1) Customer Feedback is Vital - It is one thing to predict how your customers might behave, it is another to know how they will behave based on experience, sales data, surveys or other interactions. The side benefit is that you will learn a tremendous amount and be able to strengthen your offering by engage your (potential) customers early.

2) Get a letter from a potential customer - especially if you are talking to partners or investors. There is little more impressive than a well prepared entrepreneur who has considered the posibilities, decided on a strong product/service offering, talked to customers, and has documented their feedback. Nobody is asking for a signed purchase order, but how about a non-committal letter stating that they would be interested in potentially, maybe, purchasing ____ from you.

3) Write a Business Plan - this is not optional. The greatest value of a business plan is to you! It is absolutely a vital tool to formalize your idea, figure out what it takes to get it done, an set out a plan to get there. This doesn’t have to be formal, doesn’t have to be 50 pages nor written by a Harvard-MBA. There are many great resources to help you get started if you, like many, feel overwhelmed by this…
4) Build a Strong Team - advisors, mentors, management team members, board members, consultants, vendors, and other are important to your success. Recruit the best you can, and get started at the lowest cost possible. A key determinant in the success of new ventures is the team (strong teams can overcome many challenges)
5) Get Started - the most important piece of advice we dole out on a daily basis is: ‘get started’. Edison talked about his mix of inspiration and perspiration, but more commonly, how many times have you heard “I thought of that X years ago”. What separates success from not is, sometimes surprisingly, getting good work done. This includes research, building your product or service, selling it, expanding your customer base, and generally making headway!

more to come…what do you think?

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By turning a problem’s definition on it’s head - the reCAPTCHA team at CMU has done a remarkable job of innovating a solution to two problems at once.

You know the jumbled up words you have to type in to a website if you forget your password or post a comment on some blogs?  Those are called CAPTCHAs.  Their designed to try to determine that you’re in fact human.  These are very common - there are more than 60 million CAPTCHAs being answered every day!  Here are some great examples from Greg Mori’s research on breaking CAPTCHAs!

(A really hard one)

  (A much easier one - Mori’s program, EZ-Gimpy, can beat 90% of ones like this)

The folks at CMU asked the question in reverse.  What problems are so hard for computers - that even at state of the art we’d rather have a person solve them?  The reCAPTCHA team thought that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) problems were the answer.

OCR is far from perfect - and the Internet Archive is scanning tons of books - some of which have degraded looking text.  Here’s a great example from their website:

So how can these be fixed?

The idea is two have a program generate a known random word and convolute it to make it hard for a computer to read.  Simultaneously, it selects one of these pre-OCR’d words at random (from the top line) that it’s having difficulty OCR’ing.  Then, the human is asked to correctly type in both words.  If the response is correct for the known word, then it’s assumed that the response was done by a person, and records the person’s answer to the second (unknown) word!

Now, people aren’t perfect either.  So in reality there are a lot of complexities here.  To name a few: more than one person is shown a particular group of characters to verify that they agree on what the correct answer is, the order of the known vs. unknown words are randomly chosen, the degradedness of the word images chosen is optimized to be most beneficial for both security & effectively leveraging the human work for OCR.

The project is called reCAPTCHA and you can learn more about reCAPTCHA by going to the project page itself.  Great job guys!!

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An inordinate number of hours are lost checking email every year.

In case this wasn’t self evident enough for you, studies are being done to support this conclusion.  AOL & Opinion Research Corporation conducted a survey of 4,025 Americans age 13 and over showing that the average email user checks their email 5 times per day.  This would be a pretty low average for the people I know.  AOL has a higher percentage of home & child users than say Outlook 2007 users.  When asked a question which probably skews more toward the work audience - the results were more in line with what I see every day.  Sixty percent of people who own a portable email device check every new email arrival! 

Here is a BBC article on Karen Renaud’s work on email stress confirming this thesis.  Some workers were checking their email 40 times per hour with more checking correlated to higher stress levels.  Their prescription was simple enough to say, “Check email less often.”  However, I’ve asked friends of mine if they could do it in real life.  Could you only check email a few times per day?  Half of the people I spoke with said they thought it was a good idea - but most said they probably couldn’t manage to pull it off.  The other half said they thought that unplugging themselves from the email fire hose would be more stressful, not less!

Productivity lost

Investigating whether or not one is missing out on productivity is an interesting idea.   There are basically three sources of lost productivity here:

1. Confusing urgent with important - You probably have fewer “high priority” emails than you think you do.  Most likely there is more important “real work” to be done that is actually a better use of your time.
2. Multitasking is a net loss for people - Computers can make great use of multitasking or “context switching” because 99% of computer tasks involve using many different resources (monitor, memory, CPU, disk, network card, etc.).  These different resources can operate independently at nearly 100% efficiency.  People, on the other hand, take about 15 minutes to recover from every “distraction” or context switch.  This means that if you are distracted by email, the phone, or anything else every 45 min (and the email takes you almost no time to answer) you’re operating at only 80%-85% efficiency!
3. Increased stress - The tax that stress imposes on your life of constantly having to be around to answer questions, discuss intelligently, or even just absorb information is well documented.  Learning, concentration, and decision making are all impared when under prolonged stress.  Additionally, acute & even long-term stress has been shown to lower your quality of life and health.

I think there’s something to this stress & productivity argument - so I’m going to try it.

I’ve chosen 4 times, roughly evenly spaced, throughout the day to check my email.  During those periods of say 30 minutes each - I expect to be replying & checking email continuously.  I’m processing email - so that seems fine to me to be handling new emails then.  However, when I exit that email time, I’m offline for email.  I have turned off the automatic send/receive option, I have turned off the email arrival notifications, and I have even shut down Outlook entirely for hours of the day.  I’ll report back in a month or so how it went - I’m giving myself time to go through email withdrawal - hopefully with good news!

Another interesting note, this is AOL’s third annual “email addiction survey.”  Definitely a bad sign!

Addictive?

This idea of checking every new email makes me think that perhaps this isn’t just a waste of time for some people - it can be an addiction.  Addictions have many things in common - behavioral & neurobiological.  I haven’t been able to find any - but I would love to see fMRI pictures of a CEO, middle manager, or consultant checking email.  I am pretty confident it would look very similar to the signature “sex, drugs, rock & roll” brain scan pictures that we’ve all seen before.  Lots of “bright red” where the pleasure centers of the brain are.  Who knows, it might soon replace chocolate - the AOL survey noted that women are 23% more likely to describe themselves as addicted to email (16% vs. 13%) - and check it 15 min more per day than men.

What can you do if you are addicted?  Try using similar strategies that you use when you face other addictive situations:

I can already tell this is going to be a tough battle…

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