Relentless resourcefulness: the What, Why and How

 Reposted from my new Blog, The Business Co-Founder

The most important quality of an Entrepreneur is relentless resourcefulness; even Paul Graham agrees. In this post, I will cover
1. What is relentless resourcefulness?
2. Why is it important?
3. How do you build it?
So let’s start.

What is relentless resourcefulness?
The dictionary defines resourceful as ‘Able to act effectively or imaginatively, especially in difficult situations.’ Relentless resourcefulness is simply resourcefulness + perseverance - or applying resourcefulness continuously, without giving up.

Why is it important for Entrepreneurs?
In startups, you will continuously come across situations that pose novel, difficult problems, for which there is no easy, obvious solution, and which force most people to give up. Only if you are relentlessly resourceful will you overcome these challenges, and not give up. This might take various forms e.g., your funding round did not come through - how do you become creative and bootstrap for another three months? OR your customer development interviews showed that your target market has no need for your product - how and where do you pivot?

How do you build it?
This Life Hacker article gave me the following equation, that makes complete sense
Resourcefulness = Necessity + Creativity + Persistence
So the only way to build resourcefulness is to build each of the constituent qualities.

Necessity
Though not a quality, necessity signifies that you are most resourceful when you need to. This is why people often tell Entrepreneurs to quit their job; when you have no fallback, you become more resourceful.

Creativity
You might not consider yourself very creative, but there is a big difference in the different kinds of creativity. As a blog post I wrote a while ago, Conceptual Creativity is what you need to be successful in Business. There are several interesting books you can read on this topic (list below). But here are my favorite tactics:

• Question everything - try to look at the underlying assumptions and see what happens if you reverse them
• Look for outliers and anomalies
• When generating ideas, start with one idea - any idea, no matter how stupid. That gets your mind going
• Think of ideas alone before and group sessions - group sessions encourage group think
• Have fun and believe that you are creative

Persistence
While there are several ways to be persistent (and tons of articles and Quora Answers on persistence/perseverance), I believe in one way more than any other way: Invest in the process, not the Outcome. No matter how much we believe in our qualities, our ability to change the world, the truth of the matter is that several circumstances are outside our control. ‘Luck’ plays a part - a huge part - in the success or failure of any endeavor. Market dynamics change, unforeseen things happen. The idea is the be emotionally tied to the process, and not the outcome. That way, you will not give up when you are faced with obstacles, because you did the best you could, and be truly, persistently, persistence


Further Reading: Creativity
The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity
The Riddle: Where Ideas Come From and How to Have Better Ones
Further Reading: Persistence
Are You Ready to Succeed? Unconventional Strategies to Achieving Personal Mastery in Business and Life

Mark of a great idea

In my opinion, the mark of an idea is that it seems obvious once someone has done it/mentioned it. A great example is this - whenever I have gone to a Yoga class, I have always felt that I was one of the handful of guys in a class dominated by women. Did I really belong here?

Enter Broga Yoga - a Yoga class designed specifically for men. Now that I think of it - its an obvious way to solve this problem. But only now is it obvious - not before it was created.

Another similar idea is Hipmunk - why should flights not be displayed in a calendar format? I want to quickly see which flight will match the times I want to fly? But it took over a decade after online ticketing had gone mainstream before such a concept appears.

Great ideas are obvious in hindsight, but it takes a flash of brilliance to get the idea.

The diaper shift blog post

Ideas come to us in the craziest places. And the craziest times. Most of my ideas occur to me between 4 and 5 AM. What I am doing up at that time? Doing my duty on the diaper shift.

Every night, our daughter Simran gets up at this time from her first shift of sleep, to eat. Now I cannot feed her; what I can do is the 'diaper changing and putting her to sleep' part. She is awake some of the time; but then gets very sleepy, and as I rock her to sleep, my mind wanders.

For some reason, this is when thoughts start occurring to me - thoughts related to ideas that I was thinking about the day before. And its not just disjointed thoughts - thoughts often come in as a coherent whole. I try to jot down these thoughts in my notebook before I go back to sleep, as I can often translate them directly into a blog post. There is a blog post that I will write soon titled Skillshare vs. Sidetour - I have the entire outline, with all major points ready. And that thought came to be - on the diaper shift.

The rise of the subscription model

It seems like there there is a new E-Commerce website with a subscription model on Tech Crunch every week! Just one week ago, Lost Crates expanded their subscription model to includes verticals other than what they had started with first: boutique stationery goods. There is a pretty good list of subscription services here. I started wondering: what is behind this new trend?

Let's first consider what job customers hire these websites to do? In one word - curation. Consider the example of Bespoke Post, launched by my Kellogg classmates, Rishi and Steve.

Bespoke Post sends you hand-picked goods, which enable you to 'Turn into a gentleman. One box at a time.'  And they send you a new box of 'Awesome'. Their marketing message is simple and brilliant. Their persona seems to be - wait for it - 'Barney Stinson.' For people who do not watch the show 'How I met your mother,' Barney is his early thirties and almost always wears a suit. He picks up women - all the time. And always has an opinion. And uses the word Awesome and Legendary a lot! Hence Bespoke Post's marketing message reads (at least to me) if you are a classy gentleman who like the fine things in life, subscribe to our service, and we will send you products that help you maintain your classiness. And it's all curated by us, so there is no effort on your part. And by the way, their products are super awesome!

Next let's consider, what is behind the rise of so many subscription model E-Commerce businesses?

1. Subscription models have been around forever; these businesses are online versions of traditional subscription businesses.Wine of the month club comes to mind.

2. Such businesses can start producing revenue quicker than let's say a marketplace. What do you need to get started? A cool concept, a good website and some amount of inventory and a clear value proposition. Layer on the marketing on top.

3. There is a good amount of predictability. Only order a little more than you think you need for that month - since you are seeing numbers month to month, you can predict the demand for next month to a reasonable degree. If you under order - back order the goods, please the order with the supplier, and have them shipped out a little later.

4. Most of them are buying from small suppliers, so they have enough negotiating power to get good margins, and also shift some of the risk over to the suppliers

5. The cost of customer acquisition is lower in this new era of social media marketing. And then there is affiliate marketing - just offer your customers $10 off for very friend that signs up, and you have another channel going

6.  As the number of such businesses will show, there are enough number of niches to be filled

7. On the customer side, another value proposition is surprise. As an example, Birchbox sends 4-5 samples/month for $10. What the samples would be? That's a surprise that's eagerly awaited by customers

8. The perceived price from a customer's perspective is lower; Psychologically speaking, $19.95/month seems much lower than $240/year.

9. I think the biggest factor is that these businesses give the founders a chance to share something they are passionate about. For example another friend Gautam, from the same Startup Leadership Program batch as I, launched Naturebox, which sends healthy Snacks daily. He passionate about healthy food, and the startup enables him to share this with his customers.Read this excerpt from his blog:

"As a co-founder of NatureBox, I’m especially pleased to introduce you to our company and thank you for your visit. The NatureBox mission of helping you eat healthier without changing your daily routine, has great personal meaning to me. I grew up overweight – weighing more than 200 pounds at the age of 12 – and struggled with obesity for most of my life. As a child, I would come home from school and spend hours eating junk food. My weight struggles were preventable if I had healthier options and better eating habits. Through hard work and dedication, I lost weight by focusing on healthy foods. Now I am dedicating my life to helping others discover a healthier you."


But as the number of these business rise, what will enable each one to be successful?

1. Scale - is the market big enough? Probably boutique stationary goods is not!

2. A clear marketing message - as in what do you provide, and who do you provide it for? Can the customer easily recognize that the service is ideal for them?

2. Trust - do your customers trust that you will send high quality items? Startups often prove this by showcasing examples of things they have sent before

4. Additional revenue sources - even with a large number of customers, the business model might not support a large company. Additional revenue sources come in handy here. A prime example is Birchbox's marketplace - if you like the samples they send, you can purchase a full size version of the product right from their website.

So go on, find the subscription service right for you now!

Punchtab

One of the best ways to be innovative is take something that works in one field and apply it to another. Punchtab aims to do just that; it provides a loyaly program for websites similar to hotels or airlines.

I was able to sign up and setup a reward for my blog in seconds. I was also able to setup rewards very soon e.g., 10000 points = $10 gift card for amazon. What I was able to figure out is how to setup feedback for actions e.g., if someone leaves a comment, how do I make sure that they get points? The only points that get automatically setup are for Facebook shares and likes. Then when I went back to the site, I wasn't able to log in. In summary, seems like an excellent idea, but not executed well so far.

Innovation

Matt Scheinker, VP of consumer experience at AOL gave a Keynote speech at the Kellogg Tech Conference 2011. His topic was innovation, and his message, in the most simple terms was "Don't Innovate; just solve problems. He gave several fine examples of how some of the best innovations come from people recognizing and solving problems. The twitter feed from the speech can be viewed at http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23kelloggtechaol

However sometimes the needs and problems are not obvious. An example I was jut reading in the book 'The Riddle' by Kellogg professor Andrew Razeghi suggests looking at needs/problems/opportunities in terms of what cannot be done in a particular context. This is because needs are not always obvious to people.

An example he gives is as follows: If you ask soldiers hiding in foxholes what they need, they would likely come up with sources of food, water, blankets etc. However if think of what they cannot do, then things change. They cannot execute orders at night, because they cannot read the orders, because they cannot light a light, because if they do, they will get shot by the enemy. So they need a way to read in the dark;

This is how "Ecriture Nocturne" (night writing) code was invented, which ultimately evolved into the Braille code.

All types of creativity are not equal

Just started reading 'The Riddle' by Andrew Razeghi, a renowned Kellogg Professor. Already came across two key insights:

1. There are three kinds of creativity: artistic creativity, scientific creativity and conceptual creativity. They are very different from each other.

2. Conceptual creativity is the creativity we associate with solving problems and with business creativity. Prof. Razeghi's definition of conceptual creativity is what makes a dog paddle; once the barking stops, the swimming begins. When we have to figure things out, we do.


So far, the book is exceedingly interesting and useful at the same time.

NYU Stern and Mercedes Benz Case co-opetition

I wanted to participate in a case competition before I graduated from Kellogg, so last Thursday to Sunday, I participated in the NYU Stern Mercedes Benz case co-opetition. What's a co-opetition, you say? Oh its competition + cooperation, in the sense that rather than competition as a team from your school, you compete in mixed teams with students from different schools. I had a team of five people; one from Kellogg (me), NYU Stern, Chicago Booth, Cornell Johnson and a Mercedes Benz employee.

The competition was an awesome experience for me, for several reasons:

1. Forming mixed teams instead of teams from schools was an awesome idea; I got to meet and work with some great people. Working with this team was great; we were able to take several ideas and mold them into a cohesive story. I was proud of our output.

2. The problem we were tasked with was not a theoretical case that we needed to analyze; its a real, near-term issue that Mercedes Benz is faced with. I am confident that several suggestions that teams suggested would be incorporated in some way or another in the near term.

3. The organizers took care of all food and accommodations; and we were very well fed throughout the competition :)

4. We got to test drive a Mercedes Benz car!

5. Another big part of the competition was our faculty advisor, Professor Luke Williams from NYU Stern. Luke is a Professor of Design and Innovation at NYU and a fellow at FROG Design. He gave us sound advise on how to think about the problem, how to structure our presentation so as to easily communicate our ideas to the judges, and how to be innovative. We also got signed copies of his book Disrupt, which I have started reading (and seems to be pretty interesting so far). As an example of an innovation, Luke talked about how you can combine disparate ideas to come up with something new. The video below shows this: it is a combination of a voiceover by Eddie Izzard and a video made using LEGO blocks.

TED Talks Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Ever feeling down and uninspired? Need something to energize you? For me, watching to a TED talk is often the way to re-energize me. Recently, I watched a TED talk by Steve Johnson, author of the book 'Where Good Ideas come from.' Here is a quick summary of the talk:

1. An idea is not a single item; its a network

2. Ideas are the combination of two or more 'plain old things'

3. Ideas come together in chaotic environments where people from diverse backgrounds come together. Thus your work place should be just a little chaotic, with people sitting close to each other

4. When people share their mistakes and thoughts with others (e.g., around a conference table), it is likely to generate a lot more ideas

5. While great ideas might seem to come in this one magical moment, they have long incubation periods. They have been there in your mind: you just realize it around that one moment you might think of as the 'Eureka' moment

6. Allow your hunches to connect with other people's hunches. The value of protecting Intellectual Property is overrated. We should spend more time sharing ideas than protecting them