What I learnt from Sylvester Stallone

There’s more depth to Sylvester Stallone’s story than what the movies that he starred in would let you think.

Sly knew what he wanted to do in his life since he was very young: he wanted to be in the movie business. But having little acting experience, a partially paralyzed face, and a slurry speech, he was turned down by hundreds of agent offices. To get one of his first acting jobs, he literally stayed overnight in one of the agents offices. After that nothing more came out for a while. He kept moving forward, rejection after rejection. Meanwhile he was starving, married, broke, jobless and desperate. He refused to get a regular job, to avoid being caught up in the rat race, to avoid being seduced with the comfort of a salary. He wanted to remain hungry for achieving his dreams.

He finally realized it wasn’t working, he changed his approach, he decided to start writing. He wrote a bunch of screenplays, but still, rejection after rejection, he kept trying until he sold 1 screenplay for 100$ (Paradise Alley that was shot a few years later). He kept going. At that time, he barely had 50$ on him. He was so broke he couldn’t even feed his dog anymore. He went to a liquor store and sold his dog for 25$. He was so attached to his dog that he went out of the liquor store and wept like a kid. It was the lowest point of his life.

Get off your chair and start selling!

Whether you started your business because you have a particular skill, a certain passion or out of frustration from your 8-5 job, you need to be constantly wearing the salesman hat; Why? simply because the lack of cash will kill your business. Cash is the oxygen to your business, once you run out of it, you run out of business. And constant selling is one of the best way to secure the cash.

As a founder, a business owner or a business partner, your job is to constantly secure enough cash for your business. Business won’t show up to your door. Users will not turn into $$ with a magic wand. People do not care about you. So get off you chair, go out and sell.

Put a target to meet 10 prospects, 20, even 50 per month. It’s a numbers game, out of 10 prospects, maybe 1 will become a customer (so 10% acquisition rate), maybe 2, or 5. You will only know by trying. And the good news is, your acquisition rate will eventually get higher with proper focus, constant learning, and practice.

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Protect your revenue base with the long tail strategy

In short and simple terms, the long tail strategy consists of selling a huge number of items in relatively small quantities. Items can be products or services. Quantities can also refer to prices.

As an example, Amazon.com and Netflix.com generate most of their revenue by selling a huge variety of products that are in low demand or have low sales volume. Google makes most of its advertising revenue not from large advertisers, but from the hundreds of thousands of small advertisers.

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The importance of laser beam focus

I can’t stress enough the importance of business focus. Lack of focus can literally make or break your business, especially as a young fragile startup, with limited resources.  It is very important to focus on your core strength, on your unique selling proposition, on a specific feature set, on your specific target audience, core product… whatever it is, just focus all your energy on that one thing and become the best at it.

When laying out the business model, and the financial forecast, it is easy to assume that out of all your potential customer base, you will get x% and project some monthly revenue numbers around them. However, when it comes to starting up a business, although focusing on revenue is a great thing, it is still not focused enough.

Consider focusing more by asking: which target audience is it best to focus on? which sector or industry? which product will you sell? Once you identify your target audience, sector and product, my tip is to go even a level deeper: Focus on getting 1 customer first, just 1 customer. Focus all your efforts, resources on getting that first customer. Hustle, follow up and do anything to close that first deal. Then, and only then, move on and focus on getting the 2nd customer, then 5 customers, then 10 and so on…

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What is your exit strategy?

As a startup founder of www.loomni.com, I wonder what are the possible exits for my company in the future? It’s a topic I think every founder should really think of. How many other Maktoobs can we really have in the region? It took 10+ years for the exit to happen. And it was a foreign company who acquired an Arabic company. I think it is a bit sad to see that the biggest web acquisition in the region was a foreign acquisition.

Although it was a really awesome story deal for the Maktoob team, it was great to place Arabia on the world map, It gives hope to young founders, but should the biggest web acquisition in Arabia, sized at around $175M (I do not have the accurate figure) – a relative average deal based on US standards – worry Arab founders? Did the Yahoo-Maktoob deal set a valuation ceiling for future acquisitions? Can local Arabic companies hope to exit their companies for higher valuation deals?

The other questions would be, who are the potential acquirers of web startups? Should founders rely on foreign corporations for their exit strategies? Can startup founders hope for any big exits from within the MENA region?

I wonder…

What Is The Best Business Advice You’ve Ever Received?

I thought it was about time to do another crowd-sourced post experiment where I throw a question out there on social networks, try to gather different people’s feedback and bits and pieces of their shared wisdom, and then share it with everyone here.

The question I asked this time was: What is the best business advice you’ve ever received?

And the replies I got were very interesting ones, both on Twitter and Facebook.

From Twitter (in reply to this):

  • Do what you want to do, complete your goals and don’t compare yourself to the others. (Saud Al-Hawawi)
  • Never get into the gold rush business, get into the business of servicing the gold rush business. (Bin Mugahid)
  • Don’t shit where you eat. (Kay)
  • Partnership due diligence. Be very selective with who you partner with. (Mohamed)
  • If you are selling something people don’t need, you are invisible – Seth Godin (Osama A. Dwairi)
  • Always be prepared to leave. (Tareq Abedrabbo)
  • Give more than half your business to somebody else. (Bin Mugahid)
  • Nobody really cares about your grades in school. This is ain’t school boy. (Bin Mugahid)
  • Business is connections; the more you have the more your business will be successful. (Rami Khader)
  • If u have your full time job, look for branding, marketshare & influence of your project & don’t look for money (Tarek Kassar)
  • Do one thing at a time. Focus, Focus, Focus (Tariq Al Asiri)
  • In life, you should never wait to receive blows to deal some. (Mehdi Lamloum)
  • Learn to delegate. (Houeida Anouar)
  • Be an innovator and a leader. (Mehdi Ladjemi)
  • A freelancer should know that the brand is the product, the product is the company and the company is him. (Aniss Bouraba)
  • If you have no work to show, find a charity that needs your service, or do free work for friends or family. (Aniss Bouraba)
  • Listen. (Khalil)

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The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)The Dip is a great little book by Seth Godin, that tackles a simple idea, which is simply that winners do quit, and quitters do win.

The book talks about how every project (or job, hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun, but then gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point—really hard, and not much fun at all.

At points like this you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.

The book argues that what really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt—until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. In fact, winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. If you can become number one in your niche, you’ll get more than your fair share of profits, glory, and long-term security.

Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip—they get to the moment of truth and then give up—or they never even find the right Dip to conquer.

This is a well written little book that should come in handy for everyone, and provide pointers on how to figure out if you’re in a Dip that’s worthy of your time, effort, and talents; or if you should quit, so you can be number one at something else.

[Amazon: The Dip – Seth Godin]

Just Get On The Bike…

The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike… is to stop thinking about ‘there are a bunch of reasons I might fall off’ and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.

Dick Costolo ; founder of Feedburner.com

The Nine Deadly Startup Diseases

VirusesBuilding a successful startup is no easy feat; There are a number of problems that founders can face and that can hurt their startups, even fatally.

A really interesting article was published on Sitepoint recently about the nine deadly startup diseases and how they can be cured; I thought I’d share the nine points here in my own words.

The list of deadly diseases goes as follows:

1. The Imaginary User Syndrome: Having no idea who your target audience are will only lead to a lack of direction for your startup, many problems marketing it, and even possible failure. A core target audience has to be defined and reached out to.

2. The Frenetic Distraction Pox: Where time and effort is invested in the early days of a startup is very important; the obvious choice is on building the product, attracting users, reaching objectives; other non-essential tasks can wait for later.

3. The Wrong Hire Infection: Hiring the wrong people at the initial stages of a startup could prove very problematic and even fatal for it; a certain caliber of employees, commitment, skills and passion are really important.

4. The Implicit Promise Fever: Basing your startup on implicit agreements and assumptions with the co-founders and members without anything written down to clarify things like share percentages, voting rights, what do if there is a disagreement or if things don’t work out too well, can only lead to a bunch of problems that could haunt the startup.

5. The Stealth Product Delusion: Waiting as long as possible before starting to show the product to people for feedback under the pretext that it should be perfect is a mistake; the earlier people start giving feedback on the product, the earlier and easier you can factor their ideas into the product and know if you’re on the right track.

6. The Wrong Platform Fracture: Choosing the wrong platform (language, framework, technology) to build your product could come at a very costly price if at a later stage it turns out that it doesn’t fulfill all your needs, isn’t able to scale or isn’t flexible enough; so the decision should be a very well researched one before taking the leap into development.

7. The Other Interest Disorder: Working on other different projects or startups in parallel could prove fatal for a startup, especially in its initial phases of its life, when it needs all the time and effort it can get and more. Focus and dedication are of utmost importance.

8. The Perfection Hallucination: Perfectionism could hurt a startup more than it helps; it has to be balanced with a good deal of pragmatism to know just when the right point is to put the product or new feature out there for users and continue tweaking, enhancing and factoring in feedback later on.

9. The Marketing Blind Spot: The idea of ‘Build it, and they will come’, as enticing as it is, doesn’t always hold true; relying solely on word of mouth marketing could cost the startup its life; every startup needs a certain specific combination of marketing techniques to get through to people and builds its user base; all those techniques and options have to be explored.

You can read the full article with more details here: Nine Deadly Startup Diseases – and How to Cure Them.

Ideas Need Immediate Action

Most ideas are stillborn and need the breath of life injected into them through definite plans of immediate action. The time to nurse an idea is at the time of it’s birth. Every minute it lives gives it a better chance of surviving. The fear of criticism is at the bottom of the destruction of most ideas that never reach the planning and action stage.

Napoleon Hill ; ‘Think and Grow Rich