My Way

Everyone needs a “thing”. Something they can rely on to get them going when they need pysching up; something that gives them pins and needles and makes them ready to take on the world.

As a startup founder constantly pitching, hustling and often punching above my weight I have found that I’ve been turning to mine quite a bit recently. It is a powerful song: Frank Sinatra and Pavarotti duetting on My Way.

Listen: here

  
Strong words and belted out. Best listened to loud.

The lyrics:

And now, the end is near

And so I face the final curtain

My friend, I’ll say it clear

I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain

I’ve lived a life that’s full

I traveled each and every highway

And more, much more than this, I did it my way
Regrets, I’ve had a few

But then again, too few to mention

I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway

And more, much more than this, I did it my way
Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew

When I bit off more than I could chew

But through it all, when there was doubt

I ate it up and spit it out

I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way
I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried

I’ve had my fill, my share of losing

And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing

To think I did all that

And may I say, not in a shy way

Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way
For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself, then he has naught

To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels

The record shows I took the blows and did it my way

Yes, it was my way

“You’re not re…

“You’re not really an adult at all. You’re just a tall child holding a beer, having a conversation you don’t understand.”

– Dylan Moran

AI and 3D printing in the future

 Bertha – the original 3D printer

I haven’t written a post in a while as I got caught in limbo between both focussing hard on my work and 2 blog posts that got a bit epic: one on how platforms like Quora will form the basis of AI, and the other about the kind of 3D digital sculpting environment necessary for 3D printing. Both turned into essays and needed more research to cover the holes in my arguments.

Think of this though:

Leap Motion type sculpting in 3D where someone can just reach in manipulate an object, like you would on CAD but in real-time with your hands. Various tools would be available for it. You could change the materials being used, to say: graphene, plastic, different metals or woods or whatever. You could change the surfaces of the objects to be rough, or smooth aerodynamic, or flexible or soft. You could change the internal weight ratios. You could change the atmosphere that it is in, to say: turn on wind, up the pressure like your underwater, go into space or on to Mars. And then – ok this is the hardest bit – you could print it out. That must be where we are heading.

As for the AI thing, well, people are asking so many questions on Yahoo Answers and Quora type platforms, that it just makes me think that we might be looking at AI the wrong way. Why not have a crowd-sourced, up-voted human answer coming out of a machine, than a synthesised artificial answer? 

Hopefully one day I will get around to publishing expanded versions of these ideas.

 

Increase Sales On-line

People say don’t sell by price; sell by perceived value. How much does this product/ service improve the current situation? How much is that worth?

If you can get that right, you will have the basics of a sales pitch. What else is there? This is my non-exhaustive list based on my experience of being a non-salesperson trying to sell my products:

– Knowing your competition and your unique selling proposition compared to them;
– “…..” (Insert name there) is using the product eg. Add credibility;
– ‘pre-selling’, which is to make people like you or your company, or that you talking in the same tone, with same viewpoint as them. That you understand them. Put pictures up oc yourself and a non-selling About Us page;
– removing friction from a sale- eg. Spelling errors, bad use of language or anything that puts a doubt in peoples mind about the quality of the product. Another point here is one that works for us, but not sure how many others- we took down our free trial – of which we had a 1/20 conversion rate, and experimented with static pages, text and images. This not only increased revenue (curiosity? Less distraction from the selling process?) over time, but it also meant I had more time to get on with my other jobs. It is likely we will put a trial back up when we have more resources to properly follow up the leads;
– awareness of what stage your product is at in terms of its life cycle, eg. Beta, early stage, full product- this will help you speak the right language to the type of customer you are dealing with (innovator, early adopter, mass etc), who all have different requirements from the product.

Hopefully I will add more here as I learn them.

Please give me some more tips!

A template for customer pain

Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, is a must read book for any tech start up. And as I have said before, maybe any product maker who intends to scale at all.  Maybe even all business owners full stop. The book is full of common sense/ business theory tactics on launching products. It is designed for high tech products but I think it lays out a general prescription for products of all kinds. This is just one example (taken straight from there), about your customers. Anyone who has or is going to start a business should know the results of this at the front of their working memory:

A day in the life of your customer (before sale)

Scene of Situation – Focus on the moment of frustration. What is going on? What is the user about to attempt?

Desired Outcome – What is the user trying to accomplish? Why is this important?

Attempted approach – Without the new product, how does the user go about the task?

Interfering factors – What goes wrong? How and why does it go wrong?

Economic Consequences – So what? What is the impact of the user failing to accomplish the task productively?

— I swap some of the words around to make it suitable to my industry eg. I turn “economic consequences” into “pedagogical consequences” as I work in edtech.–

 

A day in the life (after sale)

New approach – with the new product how does the end user go about the task?

Enabling factors – What is it about the new approach that allows the user to get unstuck and be productive?

Economic Rewards – What are the costs avoided or benefits gained?

 

This is the basics of business. What problem does your product solve? Know the answer to this scenario and  the empathy you are able to offer turns you into an instant sales person. Of course, it is hard to get accurate answers for, but we live in a world of social media so now anyone can use their brain and start asking clever questions.  

The book has so much more than this pithy blog. Read it.

 

MOOCs and Hype Again

MOOCs and Hype Again.

The guy who writes this blog has a real down to earth attitude as well as lot of experience in education. An interesting read.

 

 

 

How to build up a local sports club

I continued to have a great weekend today. Not only did my company website makes its tv debut but I attended my home town judo clubs first competition.

This time last year only a few kids were turning up to attend the classes after a crisis struck the club resulting in the head coach being landed in jail. We were downbeat and the club was loosing lots of money.

But we made solid decisions and today was an experience that proved that we have not just brought the club back from the brink, but moved it on to the next level.

How did we do it?

First of all, peace of mind. We always ensured training was on, that it was going to be a good session in a safe environment. Some of the members were heroic in their dedication to this.

To support this, we took the senior members through their coaching qualifications, child safety and first aid courses- and placed the certificates where everyone could see them, right by the entry door. We gave our members the peace of mind, that is essential for any lasting agreement.

Then we got creative. We got a huge print out of “Bearpark Judo Club” and placed it over the windows of the hall we use. This attracted the attention of passers by which certainly led to interest. It took our product from the back shelves of a store on to the front shelf.

We set up a website that was properly thought out to appear for any local searches for judo. We made a facebook group and ensured that it was filled with all the information people need before they came, and put up some videos and photos of us in action. Although I was wearing gi that was too big for me.

Once membership had started to climb, we began to take our members to local competitions to ensure they get good fighting experience which raises the standards of the training. Other clubs now know of us and come along to train with us, and we take our members to their clubs.

We now have 30 -40 weekly members (which fills the hall), a range of seniors and juniors, some excellent players who have great potential and are going out and winning trophies, a great family feel to the club (it is a no -profit, community club) and a healthy bank balance.

I am so proud of what we have achieved and excited about what the future holds. For both TimeMaps and Bearpark Judo Club.

What is a hero?

Here is a Skype chat my father and I had this morning. My dad is a historian and long in the tooth. Our day and age is full of icons and screen stars and celebritites, but really what are they worth? Are they just lucky? I am not saying my opinion is the same as his, but is may be an interesting perspective to you:

Jonny : dad – do you have a hero from history? i heard that quite a lot of people in powerful positions have a kind of muse from history, and when they don’t know what they would do, they ask themselves what so and so would do.. ?

Peter : hmmm, not really

Peter : my trouble is, I know that all hero’s have feet of clay

Peter : they’re just human beings, like the rest of us, who happen to have been in the right place at the right time, where their particular strengths have been shown to good effect. But in other situations they make the same mistakes as the rest of us

Peter : Mum’s over my shoulder, and said, “I thought Nelson was your hero”. Well, actually, if I do have a hero, it’s him. But I know all too well that he definitely had his weaknesses and faults

Jonny : people are not just in the right place at the right time, they make the place the right time and they have their eyes wide open to opportunities. Yes, maybe a lot of it is luck, but there is also ambition and drive and passion.

Peter : Yes, ambition, drive and passion – but you can have all those and fail. Examine any hero in detail and what you get is a frail human being like anyone else – but one with particular qualities that,in certain times, really come to the fore.

Peter. : Take Winston Churchill – he’s the great national hero, and quite right too – but, where it not for the Second World War, he would have been a failure of a politician – and, oddly, that would have been quite right too; because he really was a failure until very particular circumstances arose

Peter : Do you have a hero?

Jonny : only Alan Shearer but he doesnt do much good for my business and general life strategy

Jonny : Bobby Robson.. ?

Jonny : no, I have been looking for one

Peter : why Alan Shearer? Is he more than a very talented sportsman?

Jonny : he came to his home town club to try and win something and single handedly scored all the goals for years. and he didn’t give up when it was obvious it wasn’t going to happen. But it was just a bit of a joke comment

Jonny : the only other people I see are the Dirk Struan types from the Tai Pan and Shogun books who work everything out and play their cards in a subtle and totally accurate way – but that’s fiction

Peter : yes, sadly, that’s fiction. In reality, people only have a very limited capacity to truly shape events

Jonny : i think that is a defeatist attitude

Peter: defeatist and cynical, but nearer the truth, I feel, than the idea that individuals can make a huge difference. BUT – actually, not so defeatist and cynical. Firstly, I am overstating my case – I think individuals CAN make a difference, sometimes a very great one. And also, the corollary of what I’m saying is, we can ALL make a difference, little by little; and indeed we do – for good or bad

Fact and fiction, going bezerk and Invincible Lions

I wrote a blog for my company website today. I try and stay away from blogging on there as I am not the most clued up about history – other than knowing about what we produce through seemingly endless proof readin. But I thought I would throw one out there and see what people think. 

I passionately believe that to be the best you have to become the master of your realm (I have previously blogged about the difficulty in knowing what your realm is and the opportunity of Who am I). My realm is the weird world of history education. I am slowly learning a huge amount about world history via osmosis from our TimeMap of World History, and Topic TimeMaps. “World History” is like studying the framework on which local history sits. It is the overview, the context, the general brush strokes and trends of how the dynamics of countries changed, inventions had huge impacts, or civilizations rose or fell. So I don’t know too much about what the Roman’s ate, but I know what the main processes were that led to them create a vast and powerful empire, and why it subsequently collapsed. 

In order to catch up in my learning and attempts at having a grasp of my realm, in a way that doesn’t feel like I am working in my leisure time, I have started reading historical fiction books. The one I’ve just read was about the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses. In a nutshell, this guy was a decent bloke and had a massive pet lion. After a while he went to war with the Hittites who were big into going to war. During the fight he went bezerk which is a real life technical term for getting a almost godlike power and managing to slay loads of enemies. He nailed loads of them. But how the war ended is open to interpretation. 

Anyhow, here is the link and it might provide a decent read- TimeMaps History blog

Good things that happened today

Good things that happened today:

1) I beat the code I have been working on for ages. It has been a slog but now I know I have got it right, I can farm it out to someone else to add into our other products. How happy I am about this cannot be understated. It is a big update that we believe will attract interest.

2) Although I did not eat any breakfast or lunch, I have had abundant energy and for some reason have been hyper productive all day. I don’t know whether it is because I have recently eaten like a pig and now my body has had a chance to burn it all off without having to deal with my current load, or what.. but it has felt good.

3) Because of this extra energy I won an argument with a guy who I usually loose the argument with because he is so slow and boring I get tired of listening to him and just want to get off the phone. Using my extra energy I talked him into doing some work that will be hopefully be of great value.

4) This evening I went to the judo club that I set up with my mates before I moved to London. It is going incredibly well and they are both making money and have got excellent players on the mat. We worked so hard at this for years and all that is now paying off.

5) I discovered lots of awesome music on soundcloud.com .