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Archives for March 2020

Why Covid-19 numerical models overlook the reality families face

March 19, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

It all started innocently enough.

As I’ve been working remotely for a few years, I felt I hadn’t been taking much advantage of it. So when my mom invited me to Cancun with my daughter who’s in preschool, I figured “why not?” As long as my team had everything they needed and were clear on priorities, I could go. Moreover, I could just work from abroad. The only real difference was my time-zone availability. Beyond that, nothing changed for them.

For me, it just meant getting up for 6 am meetings. But being much closer to the equator helped rationalize this. Particularly since I already had a team member in Columbia, even closer to the equator with 6 am sunrise, 6 pm sunset.

While there were a few news reports about Corona virus in Wuhan province in China, there didn’t seem to be much to be concerned about. My wife bought a box of face masks for our flight just in case. My daughter was excited about the face masks, at least initially. Kind of like Halloween.

You can probably guess where this is going.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

At the airport, when we were walking around with our face masks, people gave us somewhat awkward looks. Although we weren’t the only ones, we were one of a handful of people with masks. Both in Warsaw and later in Zurich.

When we got to Cancun, the world went #CovidCrazy. Suddenly, borders started closing, starting with the Polish one (for everyone except citizens) but we still had to get there in order to cross the border. We almost boarded our return flight but decided not to, as there would be two changeovers and a bus ride across the German-Polish border, with hours of backlog. Not ideal for travelling with a lot of luggage and a preschooler.

Then to get back to Poland, all of the connecting flights became impractical, because those countries shut down their borders. Even though we’d only be changing flights, we’d have to cross the border at the airport to pick up and drop off our luggage while changing airlines.

Finally, it looks like the Polish government looks like it may organize direct flights via the national carrier back to Warsaw. But still waiting on confirmation for this. Without it, we’ll be in Mexico until the international lock down resolves itself. Or more accurately, in self-quarantine so that we can travel at a moment’s notice.

We live in volatile times. It’s funny how I recently penned a few posts about proactivity, while remaining flexible and not locking into a rigid plan, as the optimal strategy. Clearly this is a mindset which helps now.

Like a number of friends with split up families with dependents around the globe, both kids and seniors, the realities of the advice that comes out of mathematical models are a bit more complicated than it would have been for me as a single or even childless young couple. Kids can spread the disease but not have much symptoms. Grandparents face the risk of death due to lack of absolute numbers of ventilators. All that said, I am happy that I am quarantined among family and able to take care of them and myself. I’m hopeful that this situation will play itself out eventually.

There must eventually be some kind of way to restart flights using some type of nearly automated pre-certification of health/lack of Covid-19. The Chinese have some kind of device that measure body temperature from a few meters away. We just need to start thinking through what we can change in order to continue containing the virus, while giving people some ability to remain mobile.

Also, there have been a number of efforts among makers to come up with technical solutions to the expected shortfall of ventilator masks, like that of my friend Sal: https://diyventilators.com/. If you are interesting in helping out, join the chat at that site and say hi.

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: personal Tagged With: covid, numbers, story

Disproved: Stealth mode helps me crush my competition starting from day one

March 11, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer 2 Comments

Ahh, the late nineties.

A few guys in a basement or a garage. A desktop sitting next to you as the server. Slinging code and trying to get it to customers. At my first startup, we didn’t even have an internet connection – we developed on a local LAN, and transferred the deliverable to the clients via FTP from home, or sometimes even via disk. We got a few customer and rented an office space, and then had 6 guys in 3000 square feet of open space with a few folding tables. Later, we were able to build out walls, hire more people, and make it a real office….Post launch, we quickly went public, had lots of paper numbers next to our names. And then it all crashed. [Dave Armstrong]

All of the pre-launch effort was done in “stealth mode”. Namely, company officials made sound like they were doing something absolutely groundbreaking, largely to get as much PR as possible (for free). So if you read the glossies about what these guys were doing, the picture in the press would have been totally different than the above. This hyped up a product they were working on, often while still figuring out what they needed to build in the first place–but in a vacuum of feedback.

The emphasis rested on information about what they were doing, especially around the competitive threat this implied. The assumption was that anyone could potentially catch wind of their idea, and replicate it, and take the market before them. So it was better to not let anyone know what is going on.

In fact, overfocussing on your competition wastes a lot of your attention and resources in places that aren’t particularly important at the early stage. It’s largely a distraction, unless if all you want to do is license an invention. And in that case your “competition” is basically your client, anyway.

The fact is: most early stage business fail due to internal factors, not external ones. There’s lots of data points on this one:

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Venture capitalists in one survey attributed 65% of failures within their portfolio companies to problems within the startup’s management team, according to Harvard’s Noam Wasserman in Founder’s Dilemmas.

Or premature scaling: over 40% of startup failures are caused by building something nobody wants. Corporates have a similar track record on both counts. Both of these from CBInsights’ picnic in the innovation graveyard.

Notice how competitors are conspicuously absent from the above.

What is competition exactly and why does that matter?

Your competition is defined by who you are selling to. They are selling roughly the same value proposition to the same people. It’s not everyone with a pulse. That’s a really common early stage prioritization problem, which the Hero Canvas is meant to help with.

And this can vary significantly by product type or sector. For books and lower $ value products, many people buy a few items at once. Like a books on a new topic they’re exploring. So authors don’t really compete with one another, at least from the perspective of selling books. From a business model perspective, they can become partners, a distribution channel, a complementary offering. You name it. Of course, not every industry is like this, and I don’t want to be suggesting this is the only way to do it. But it’s useful to think this way in completely disparate industries like power turbine engineering, based on discussions with my clients and friends.

There is a very human tendency to compare yourself to others doing similar things. But for a totally new type of product, before you have:

  1. validated the product
  2. confirmed the market
  3. made sure that people are happy enough with your product to recommend it to others

The competition is largely irrelevant. Yes, you need to get through these steps, and then once you are thinking about growth, then competition starts to matter more. Until then, just get everything lined up first.

So what about stealth mode is a bad idea?

Filed Under: innovation, release planning Tagged With: stealth

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  • About Luke

    Luke Szyrmer is an innovation and remote work expert. He’s the bestselling author of #1 bestseller Launch Tomorrow. He mentors early stage tech founders and innovators in established companies. Read More…

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