How To Start A Tech Empire In 3 Easy Steps
Many of my friends love to take entrepreneurship coaching. They brag about it in their LinkedIn feeds. They often advise me to take one.
AltMBA, Seth Godin’s famous entrepreneurial coaching program costs $4450. It has supplied extremely bright executives to companies like Microsoft, Dell and PWC.
I have often seen AltMBA’s ad in my Facebook feed — marketing it as a Harvard Business Course alternative. Irresistible, isn’t it?
However, before it existed, most of us thought MBA is a must have if you want to be a career entrepreneur — despite numerous examples of successful dropouts.
Here goes the essence of what they aim to teach you in those schools.
(Of course, you can head over to other places, having taken the gist.)
#1: Build a barebones (tech) product yourself:
A startup for entrepreneurs is like a baby, and I have five babies so far — experienced father.
Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba
Many of my tech friends believe this step should be outsourced, just because it can be.
Children become more comfortable with their nannies than the working parents.
While everyone has the best idea of what they can/cannot build, we have often heard stories about children becoming more comfortable with their nannies than their working parents.
When you decide to outsource development, it is equivalent to having a surrogate mother.
But ultimately, it’s your choice.
Being a tech professional/student, you are bombarded with ideas everyday. Schools, Facebook groups, tech meets, Reddits, and online tutorials provide you with ample tech resources + ideas.
If you want to clone super popular tech products with minuscule twists in the business model & branding, you can get complete code templates that you could ship after modifying the assets.
With one month of dedicated effort, you could build a solution to a problem that is well-known in the tech industry. You could build an Instagram clone just learning from Youtube, host it for free on any cloud free trial, and get a 6-figure job in a tech company showcasing it (provided you crush the infamous interview hurdles).
It’s a lot easier today than it used to be five years ago.
Startup coaches also advise you to:
- Validate early
- Fail fast
- Not to optimize fiercely
All of that could be right or wrong, depending upon where you stand in your product creation journey.
The takeaway is, you begin with a product idea, and there are tons of resources out there to help you. You don’t have to be armed with investor money. You don’t even need a cofounder. And you can build it all alone, without a team.
All you need is dedication and perseverance for a limited time.
#2: Decide who should use it vs who should pay for it
Consumers vs customers.
This sounds counter-intuitive. After all, shouldn’t you begin with a customer in mind?
Wrong. You begin with a problem to solve. Then move your way up to who is in a position to pay the best bucks for it, under what circumstances.
Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.
Michael Dell, Founder, Dell
As you build it with the best of your abilities and resources, you know it inside out.
Once the barebones are built, open Google Earth.
Think about it for a minute: You are looking at 8 billion potential consumers/customers.
Now, think back about your product again.
Ask yourself two questions.
1- Who is destined to benefit from it the most?
2- Are they the ones who could afford it at your desired price + service duration?
I am not here to offer any conclusions. These questions are enough for you to begin soul searching. The outcome of this process may not just include marketing. It could also result in the redesign of your product.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the PageRank algorithm (Google’s brain), they could have sold it to company executives for $100/month/user. It could still be worth millions.
Instead, they decided to sell Adwords and offered free PageRank to searchers. On top of that, they also made it free to rank for keywords depending upon SEO quality.
Google effectively democratized the Internet. And reaped it 1000x — still counting.
If you have never used Google’s Adwords, try it once. Create a $1 SEO campaign that leads to your blog / Youtube feed. It’s complex at first — at least half a day’s ordeal.
But it’s enough to reveal how much Google knew its customers and consumers — even before it began to track them.
#3: Build Your Assets:
To build is the wrong word here. The right word is to feed. Nurture is even better.
Assets are comprised of anything that is likely to attract/retain customers. But they are much more than just that.
Products are what you sell to your customers. Assets are what you must build to enter and stay in business.
Yet, you might as well start by building your assets first, and it may be completely OK.
Irrespective of whatever they tell you in business schools, assets are not what you acquire by spending fortunes. They are not limited to buildings, real estate, or media presences.
Assets are comprised of anything that is likely to attract/retain customers. But they are much more than just that.
Again, it’s not marketing. It’s the most crucial part of your business model.
In Google’s case, free organic rankings for every website is the asset. It helped build its massive database of what users are searching for vs what they ended up clicking on. Later on, free Gmail too became their crucial asset to collect meaningful user data.
Assets provide opportunities of scaling up your one-time product building effort.
In Apple’s case, it’s the app store. Free and paid apps developed by millions of creative developers provided reasons to customers to buy a newer iDevice every year.
In the case of Facebook, unlimited friends networks and emotional exchanges are the assets that feed its advertising algorithms. Without them, not everyone on earth would flock to Facebook. They aren’t paying a dime to Facebook directly. But they help it with their sheer numbers.
This is about deciding to share your profits/offerings with the most meritorious out there
Thinking about the best asset you can build is the essence of any disrupting business. It causes you to think about the actors in your ecosystem. It directs you to walk on the way of empathy. It provides ample, unseen opportunities of scaling up your one-time product building effort.
This isn’t about hiring the best talent or finding the best channel to market your product.
This is about deciding to share your profits/offerings with the most meritorious out there, who live in the shadows and don’t have the means or courage to change the world in their own big ways.
Your assets help them do it.
It is what Amazon did for resellers. It is what Youtube did for video creators. It is what Udemy or Teachable did for online teachers. It is what Medium did for writers.
Conclusion:
Pave the way less traveled with utmost confidence and clarity.
Building a startup requires hard work. It is a roller-coaster that exploits the best & worst of your cognition and emotions.
Following this 3-step approach is less likely to reduce any of that.
But a lot of this hustle can be simplified if you learn from other people’s experiences — those are precisely the things that any Startup school sells.
Following this 3-step model will make sure you will weed out your obstructions faster, and pave the way less traveled with utmost confidence and clarity.
