Guy Kawasaki said that the hardest part about getting started is getting started. So true! If you’ve been mulling over an idea in your head and don’t know where to start let me give you some pointers:

• Write a business plan or at least write the idea down if you don’t know how to write a business plan. The simple act of writing will force you to start thinking about the mechanics of the business and will give you more ideas than you can imagine. Its a powerful exercise.
• Start talking to entrepreneurs - tell them your idea and ask them for their advice on getting started.
• Start talking to people who know something about your industry or idea. You don’t need to tell them everything (a little caution is always good) but tell them enough to let them help you evaluate the idea. Ryan Money of Hirevue says to talk to 100 people (potential customers, etc) to finds out what the market need really is. That’s great advice. Remember, this requires a lot of listening and you must truly listen even if what you are hearing isn’t what you want to hear. I’ve saved myself a lot of money by simply asking and then discovering that my idea wasn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be.
• Find a potential competitor(s) and investigate everything you can about their business. This will tell you a lot about the viability of your idea.
• Find mentors who can help you and start looking for qualified people to fill management slots who are willing to help on a part time basis for free.

These are just a couple of ideas on getting started.  I am mentoring a young entrepreneur right now who is in love with his idea. He has spent and incredible amount of time working on the business plan and creating a great product. Two of my students have been helping him write a business plan.

I told these guys the other night that they need to put down the plan and start selling. I told them to go out and prove the model. I told them to put down the plan and start talking to people. I told them to start building relationships with potential clients. I’m basically telling them to get started. There’s million of dollars floating around in their heads now all they need to do is go out and get it.

So what are you waiting for? Start right now! 

I get the sense that some people think I’m unapproachable. I’m not, really, I’m not!  My wife thinks I can be “anti-social” and tells me that I need to work on my “people skills”. Don’t we all?

I really enjoy meeting new people and I especially love talking to students (in addition to the ones I teach every Monday and Wednesday night), entrepreneurs and small business owners. I am always available for an opinion or to bounce an idea off of FREE OF CHARGE. My fee for advice is $0 - talk truly is cheap. I also think professors who charge student entrepreneurs consulting fees should be hung up by their thumbs, but that’s for another post. 

The only time I ever charge for anything is when I am retained for a specific project. Frankly, those deals (and the time I have to dedicate to those deals) are rare. So if you’ve ever wanted to drop me a line or ask me a question or would like to meet for lunch please call me anytime. I’d love to hear from you.

I had a call with Scott Bourne of Twit, Bourne Media, Netradio, etc. The guy knows his stuff. He has really opened my eyes to some interesting things. He told me today that Adsense is like Motel 6. What do you think of when you think of Motel 6? Cheap? Convenient? Low quality? If you have great traffic and you are monetizing through Adsense, then you’re basically using the Motel 6 of Internet advertising to make money off your site.  The reality is that your site could be making way more money than Google is giving you if you went out and got real ad/sponsorship deals for your site. Ask yourself this: What is the value of your audience? If you have a high value/quality audience then your audience deserves more than Adsense and so do you. Think about it. Respect your audience and don’t compromise their value. Charge a premium to access your audience and tell Google to take a hike. 

Check out a couple of these Utah businesses that are riding the iPod craze:

BrokeniPods.com will fix your busted iPod. They’re located in Orem.

ShieldZone has a cool clear film that covers your iPod (and other mobile devices) protecting it from its worse enemy - you. They’re located in SLC. 

iFrogz has a cool iPod wheel cover design application. They’re located in Logan.

Its interesting to see this little cottage industry of iPod feeder businesses pop up in Utah…keep up the good work, guys.

What a great week!

I just got done reviewing the business plans my students have been working on this semester and overall I am very impressed. I have some students who could make serious runs with the plans they have written. Teaching this semester has been a challenge with work and many other commitments but all in all my class has been awesome. 

On Tuesday I moderated a round table discussion for Grow Utah Ventures on the state of entrepreneurship in Utah. What an amazing event! I want to thank Craig Bott and Colin Kelly for asking me to participate. Look for the round table article in Grow Utah’s new publication brought to you by Lumin Publishing coming out next month.

Grow Utah is just what Utah needs. They are doing more to promote entrepreneurship in the state than anyone else and they have amazing resources. Alan Hall and the GUV team are incredible people who truly care about Utah entrepreneurs and are making real commitments to help foster entrepreneurship in the state.

Podango is rockin! There is so much interest in what we are doing that its hard to stay on top of all the requests. Our model is amazing. I just hired a new Director of Sales and I am excited to getting him rolling on Monday. If you are interested in finding out how podcasting can help you or your business please contact me.

I had breakfast with Devin Thorpe of Thorpe Capital on Wednesday. It was great to meet Devin - we talked about everything under the sun. If you need financing advice for your business I would highly recommend talking to Devin. Also, check out his blog - I read it daily (by the way, thanks for the plug, Devin!). I’m going to try to get Devin hooked up with a Podcast on Podango. His knowledge and insight is amazing!

On a personal note, I took up lap swimming this week. What a great work out. I need to get my stoke down better, which I’m working on. Does anyone know where there are good swim instruction videos on the Web? YouTube’s got nothing!

I’ve had one of those weeks where you meet great people and have great conversations. It makes life grand to be surrounded and associated with so many wonderful people. Thanks to Craig, Jeremy, Nicole, Colin, Devin, Richard, Sarah, Kelly, Judd and all the other people I met this week that made this such an amazing week.

Also, I’ve been working on a small side project with Richard Miller of the More Good Foundation. Its a unique project I hope will help promote the LDS church on the Web. Watch for an announcement on this project sometime in the next couple of weeks.

We truly have something unique in Utah that we need to celebrate. We aren’t Silicon Valley and I think that may actually be a competitive advantage. Let’s not try to be Silicon Valley, let’s show them that we have something great in Utah that they should consider: a wonderful atmosphere, a family-like environment and people who believe in something more than 80 hour work weeks.  

By the way, no response yet from the TagJungle guys? I guess they have it figured out. I wish them the best of luck! Their service is really cool and I look forward to seeing them be successful.

I was first exposed to TagJungle at the RockyMountainVoice/PodTech meet up a few weeks ago. Phil gave me a demo of the product and it seems pretty cool. However, he mentioned that most of the “cool” functionality was still under development so I haven’t seen the finished product. However, I did just sign up to be part of the beta.

As my students have been writing their business plans over this semester, I have asked them to answer four simple questions:

1. What’s your product’s competitive advantage and how does it solve existing market pain?
2. Who are your customers and how will you market to them?
3. How do you make money?
4. What qualifies you to run this business (What I really want to know here is who is running sales and marketing)?

Ok, so that’s more than four questions but you get my point. In all the blog posts I’ve seen about TagJungle, I don’t think I’ve seen these questions answered. I could have missed something. Can you guys answer these questions?

Also, I’m not sure what to think when I see TagJungle dudes calling a couple posts on the Nimble blog “amazing endorsements“. With all due respect, I wouldn’t promote an endorsement from Jeff as “amazing”. Very nice but probably not amazing. If I were consulting the TagJungle crew I would tell them to be very careful about message control and PR.

I was also surprised to read that they were taking the business in front of a Utah VC at such an early stage. Remember, VC are typically not interested in start up’s with no revenue. If I were consulting the TagJungle team, I’d tell them to go to the angel groups like Grow Utah Ventures for potential funding. Congratulations for making the cut at Launch:Silicon Valley. I hope that brings you something great.

Bottom line: Who’s on the management team and what are their qualifications? Who’s running marketing? How much money do you need to get to break even? Who wants your stuff and why? When will you be out of beta? How do you make money? 

I’m sure you guys have already thought this through. So tell me to get bent if you’re way beyond what I’m talking about here.  I’d like to see you be a success (especially after the way things ended with Provo Labs) so I hope that you’ve answered these questions and I hope you have great success. Please let me know if I can help in anyway.

I just finished reading an article about world famous mountain climber, Ed Viesturs. Ed is only the 12th person in history to summit all 14 of the world’s 8000 meter mountains. I was first introduced to Ed in the book Into Thin Air, Which chronicled the 1996 Everest disaster. Ed was part of the rescue operation. I then met Ed at the Outdoor Retailers show in 2002. It was cool to shake the hand of a man who has accomplished so much in his sport. 

Ed’s new biography No Shortcuts to the Top is sure to be a classic. In the article I read this morning I noticed many similarities between mountain climbing, Ed Viesturs style, and entrepreneurship. Here are some of my observations:

• When involved in something that is already risky, there is no reason to add unnecessary additional risk. The line between calculated risk and gambling is very thin. In order to be successful, you must learn to recognize risk and manage it. Caution keeps you alive.
• Creating clearly defined and written goals is half the battle in war (example: I will summit all fourteen 8000 meter mountains).
• Family support can mean the difference between success and failure.
• Sometime we fail, sometimes we succeed. We are defined by what we do with our failures.
• Helping others will return more in good will and reputation than anything money can buy.
• Planning is everything. When Ed decided to summit all fourteen 8000 meter summits, his friend noted that Ed, “…approached this decision slowly and cautiously, and weighed the consequences.”
• Keep your emotions in check and be professional.
• See the beauty in what you are doing instead of the risk.
• “I manage the risk. I don’t seek danger. I’m not an adrenaline junkie. I figure out the safe way to go in and have fun so I can live with the risk.”
• Pass on what you have learned.
• The title of his book, No Shortcuts to the Top says so much about entrepreneurship in just five simple words.

I highly recommend picking up his book even if you don’t climb mountains. The parallel lessons in entrepreneurship are staggering.

For sometime now I have been wondering who is the best in Utah? Who is the best at sales, who is the best at marketing, who is the best at development, who is the best at operations and on top of all that, who would be the best to lead the best team?

Over the last year I had several conversations about entrepreneurial success with Mark Effinger - a Pacific Northwest entrepreneur and investor. Mark told me about a business plan competition he was once involved in (at least I remember that being the premise). Here was the process:

• The panel of VC judges would throw out the bad plans but keep the most qualified people from those plans “in reserve”
• They would then categorize the best ideas into groups
• They would then take the best plans out of the groups and match them with the best team members out of the submitted plans group. This might even include highly qualified people who had their initial plan disqualified.
• If you were part of a management team that submitted the best plan but another person had better experience than you - then you would be replaced by that other person. The goal being to put the very best teams with the very best ideas. Basically the VC’s would “fire” the unqualified management team members before the company got off the ground. However, if ”fired” members matched well with another team then they could be placed there instead. All team members know that this is the case before they ever go in.
• The new team would be paired with the best plan that fit that team
• The VC’s would sit down with the new teams and help them figure out a new strategy based on the best plan they were now paired with
• Once all was decided and looked good, they would then fund the team with the appropriate level of funding and support them in any and all way possible to success

Apparently this was an incredibly effective method (Mark, if I’m missing something here please clarify in the comments). 

I really love this idea.

If Utah really needs a home run (and it does) of billion dollar proportions wouldn’t it be in the best interest of entrepreneurs, investors, universities, and even the state government to get behind a project like this, build the right team, build the right company and then appropriately fund that company all the way to (preferably) a billion dollar IPO? 

Of course there are some things to consider here. Who is the best that’s available? Would the best guys work well together as a team? What makes them the best? What’s the idea and is it really that big?  What’s the value? Who will be the customers? What do they want and how do we deliver it to them?  What if they fail?  These are just a few of the questions that would need to be answered. But these are all questions that can be answered. Frankly, we should answer them.

Think of it as the UEC on steroids minus the undergrads.

Bottom line: Utah needs a series of home runs - one after another - this might be one way to do it. If it benefits all of us, what would we be willing to do to make it happen? How far are we willing to go? Is this an unrealistic dream or is this something that could work? 

This whole week I have been blogging about the good and the bad in Utah. I can’t get this issue off my mind. I slammed a guy I felt was being incredibly insincere about the state of the state. I noted some great things happening in Ogden. I tried to point out our marketing problem and solution and now this post.  Next week I have the privilege of moderating a round table discussion on the state of entrepreneurship in Utah. There are going to be some heavy hitters in the room and I am excited to be part of this discussion. The two big questions are this: what are we doing to promote entrepreneurship and what are we doing to kill it.

Everybody’s opinion counts (even Matt Asay’s ). What’s yours?

I just read Russ Page’s great post on entrepreneurs being marketers by the very nature of who they are. He references a post I wrote a month or two ago about everybody working in sales. Thanks, Russ. I’ve been stirring over this issue hard lately. Here’s my take…

I have noticed lately that the one component missing in so many start ups and companies in general is marketing.  To be more precise, the right marketer and the right budget for that marketer. Its the one big black hole that is hurting so many organizations. Podango has a great marketing consultant but she’s not with us full time. We recognize that we need to give this area more attention. 10Speed Media suffered because we didn’t have a full time marketing person that was simply dedicated to building brand, SEO, lead generation and even basic PR. With the right resources (and given more time and a real investment) 10Speed Media would be way farther down the road than it now is. I have a friend who runs a company that’s doing very well. I think his company could be driving way more sales if they were doing some simple Web marketing things that they don’t appear to be doing. Even if they wanted to do it - it doesn’t appear that they have the right staff in place to implement it.

Most start ups are missing the marketing person. Sure they have computer programmers and a biz dev or sales guy and maybe even a part time customer support rep or accountant but no marketing person. I find that in most start ups the CEO or the sales guy try to take on the marketing role but they simply do not have enough bandwidth, budget or experience in marketing to give it the attention it needs. Thus, it gets pushed to the side. Its really a simple formula: marketing = money that we don’t have so we’ll “bootstrap” it, which means we’ll get to it when we can, which means it will never happen. Remember sales and marketing are two very different activities - treat them as such. 

I believe that marketing is the biggest hole in our local talent pool. We need more good marketing people in Utah. Beyond that, the marketing people we have need to get up to speed on PR 2.0, SEO, podcasting, blogging, affiliate programs and even pay per click marketing.  In the last year I’ve met with tons of marketing people. I always ask them if they are using PR Web to increase their page rank or if they’ve implemented a pay per click program or if they’re up on proper home page layout and techniques for natural search optimization or if they’re running a simple affiliate program. Usually the answer to these questions is blank stares. That’s a real problem.

Folks, the Internet is not where marketing is going - the Internet is where marketing is! If you are not there now then you are way behind the curve.  It is so efficient. It is so effective. 10Speed Media did a video for the Winter at Westminster program that has had more than 4,000 highly targeted views on YouTube in just five short months. Because of the long tail, that video will promote W@W and Westminster College for years to come at no additional marketing cost to the school. What an incredible marketing tool!

My friend Sarah West who runs the Winter at Westminster program has become an expert in Internet marketing. When she started the program she asked me to help her figure out a Web strategy, which I did, but she executed it and she has been an amazing advocate at Westminster for Web-based marketing. Its a shift that is greatly influencing the organization and its one that is helping drive new students not just to the Winter at Westminster program but to Westminster in general. 

Several days ago I got an unexpected call from a former boss who had all sorts of questions about Web-based marketing. To his credit he is trying to get a strategy in place to take advantage of the single greatest gift ever given to marketers and business in general: The Internet.

Are you?

How do you know if your blog is getting popular? Here are a couple of hints:

• Comment spam is out of control
• Other people write blog posts talking about something you posted
• People from other states and other countries ask you to do a product review on your blog
• People considered “famous” in some way or another comment on your blog
• Local papers contact you for quotes  
• People you don’t know ask you to blog about up coming events
• People (including CEO’s from companies in other states) start conversations with you by saying “This is off the record. You can’t post this on your blog.”
• People you don’t know walk up to you at social functions with big smiles and say “Are you (insert name)? I love to read your blog!” 
• Local business magazine offers you a column
• You get Dugg
• You get speaking engagements
• Your boss starts to look at you nervously when you talk about your blog
• Random people contact you and ask if you’re consulting
• Even better - former bosses who fired you call you up and ask you if you’re consulting
• People you’ve always wanted to network with call you up and invite you to lunch
• Radio shows and podcasters ask you to come on for a segment
• Google analytics provides the evidence you’ve tipped.

Am I missing anything here? Maybe if you’re really popular you get offered a book deal or sell your company to AOL for $25M.

What do you think?