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ZooLooVision #001
OpenSource Life
Building an OpenSource community.
If you haven’t heard of the term “open source” then here’s a quick introduction:
It’s a philosophy ” that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details”
So such software has been based on the open source principles. Good examples are the likes of VLC Media Player, Audacity, Foxit Reader and even Android. They all began and still run as open source projects. Why? That’s simple, it is because this process of development- works.
The implications of open sources projects can be simplified with one story:
Tammy is a Computer Science student at Wits and she has this dream of creating a mobile application that will help young girls do their make-up properly. Offering all the advice involving your skin tone; your skin sensitivity, your budget etc. So having learnt about open source development, she develops the application using the open source principles and licencing it as an open source project. Thandi is only in her second year at varsity, she isn’t exactly a Mark Zuckerburg type of programmer so she isn’t very good- but good enough to make it work and launch it.
Tshepo is also a Computer Science student but he is studying at the University of Capetown. Difference is: he is currently studying for his Masters and is often creating and re-creationg programs that he finds on the net and feels as though he could add his own input into the development. So he goes on an open source forum and finds out about Tammy’s application. He goes through it and thinks that it’s an overall great idea. But Tshepo is not a woman and neither is he an expert on female beauty, he is just a good and well experienced programmer. He decides to look at some of Tammy’s program’s source code and sees that he can actually make the app run faster by changing this and that; he also sees that he can add a necessary but difficult-to-code feature to greater the app’s abilities and he sees that he can code the program to be easier to use . Tshepo has now created a better version of Tammy’s application and he emails Tammy to show it to her or just “publishes” the application on the forum. By definition, because it is an open source project with open source licensing- Tammy could add all this code to her application and modify how she feels fit then publishes this ‘new’ version. So long as Tshepo’s contributions towards the project are noted and published alongside the program.
Now, let’s just take a look at what has happened here:
The target market in this case was woman that like to look beautiful using synthetic advice. That target market, or rather that society was blessed with the publication of Tammy’s application as it was relevant and it just made sense. After Tshepo had made his contributions towards the site this version was added onto that very first version of Tammy’s work and thus the application had become better.
Who benefits from these imoprovements?
-First of all, the community is delighted with the new improvements and acts accordingly
by downloading the application and donating to more improvements and most importantly: by
becoming our brand evangelists.
-This creates loyalty among your first ‘customers’ and thus more people are getting excited about this new application.
Time to monetize.
Point is this, the benefits that come from OpenSource development or OpenSource inspired projects( crowd funding, crowd sourcing) are infinitely immense as the contributions to the application just make it better thus bettering the lives of the community as a whole. So why not let go of the paranoia filled profit margins, secrecy and privacy.
Be open so that we can be open to use and improve your creations.
How open is your business? Or is secrecy your “kraal”?
Be OpenSource
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter:
@ZooLooConcepts
@HlengiKing
@TheCalm101
@AudioSkillz
Success, How Badly Do You Want It?
This video truly encapsulates what it take to be successful at whatever you do.
The key to success is really just a decision. A decision to sleep later than most and still wake up at the crack of dawn. A decision that you make to stop day-dreaming and get on your way to success. A decision to succeed.
Have you made your decision yet?
WaR (The Mission Statement- The Mantra)
You go in to war with all your necessary essentials: your weapons, shelter equipment, food etc. You head on to war with a clear set of strategies that you are certain will secure a victory. A victory amongst who?
The mothership, the company…. the troops. The war isn’t merely fueled by assets and ideas; its fueled by blood, sweat and tears- by man power. Man power which is fueled by The Burning Desire to be victorious. This is something that is only obtained through belief/faith in the company’s mission and vision. What the company wants to do for its employees, customers and owners. Every company needs a destination. A goal that is adequately comprehended by its customers, owners and EMPLOYEES. A call of duty. A mantra. A MISSION STATEMENT!!!
It is then the duty of the CEO to be the company’s strategic compass, he/she steers the ship towards the goal. That also entails being able to identify those that are a part of the team but don’t share the amount of faith that the rest have in the goal. Such components of the machine must be eradicated, for it is much better to have a man that is not so good at his job but is devoted to the company’s mantra than a soldier with all the right credentials but doesn’t believe in the purpose of this war.
The company’s mantra (traditionally known as the ‘mission statement’) is the company’s declaration of its common goal. It is what you are all there for at the end of the day. It is something that when thought about should bring meaning to every single function you act out as part of the company. Thus it has to be clearly defined in such a way that all those that read/hear it can comprehensibly adhere to and walk towards this ‘bright light’ at the end of the tunnel. Its that one statement you have all over your office, on your car as a bumper sticker, on your office fridge door, on all the computers, every wallpaper!!!
The importance of this lies in the theory of auto-suggestion. You repeat something so many times in efforts to sustain your faith and it eventually physically manifests itself in reality. The repeated statement of success gets entrenched into your sub-conscience and becomes a Burning Desire which will the manifest itself in everything you do. This is how a mission statement can be realized through a company– repetition. This repetition creates focus, this focus creates results and results create the company.
We pride ourselves in our ability to cater to the needs and desires of every member of our youthful generation. Through Innovation. Persistence. Resilience. And Consistency, we plan to grow into becoming the central hub for the life of a grown-ass-kid.
“Sometimes seeking for opportunities can get to you and not turn out the way … but hey… Keep going and someone will notice”
– #StayHumble
That’s our company mantra, have you found yours?
Follow #TheZooLooCamp
Stay Small. Get fat instead of Getting Tall.
#100
Recently I read an article about how Facebook and other startups started so well when they first entered the IPO stage and are now facing increasing defeat from the older brands (Apple and Google) on Wall Street as their stocks keep falling. These companies started very small and never lost focus on their niches. They then chose to go public. Suddenly the problems are bigger; the strategising is more pivotal. You lose focus on how, why and who you started this thing for.
Stay Small.
The first ten thousand users that flocked to your site, told their friends about you and made sure to always stay on and became your unsung heroes- your unpaid brand ambassadors.
They do get paid, they get paid with the service that you give them. Your on-time updates, your swift response to technical issues and your clear understanding of the people that you are catering to. Of course you get bigger and bigger thus you now have more customers to cater to but don’t let them redefine or steer you away from what your initial goal was/is. It is because of that vision that you are able to find yourself in the position to have a larger audience to satisfy- so why try and change that? Grow as fat as your conviction and the world allow you to but stay small in mind. Never forget user #100 .
Get Fat.
Getting fat happens when you have created a niche that has grown but has not grown out of itself. So, you basically spend your efforts making the barriers more malleable so as to get everyone in the niche to grow WITH each other (not segregating into their own niches), understanding the different purpose they each have in the development of this “great thing” and eventually successfully creating a community. Not a fan base, not a user base, not a customer list and not an email list but a community. A group of people willing to work together to assist you in constantly making their day that much more special with a new “Timeline” feature or finally managing to allow them to ACTUALLY delete photos from their albums.
Don’t be that company that suddenly becomes the man and develops a sense of entitlement to “his people”- don’t be tall. From the Führer’s altitude… its pretty hard to see user #100.
Stay Small. Get fat instead of Getting Tall.
Deadlines
Image credit: http://www.businessinsider.com
Eric Ries defines a startup as being designed to confront situations of extreme uncertainty and of the only ways to beat this uncertainty is by make productivity a number one priority. But instilling the traditional managerial methods to achieving productivity can be hard for startup; and here’s why:
You want to provide your team with a platform for creativity. A concept like creativity is hard to keep track of and even harder to harness during a set amount of time. It isn’t something that one can just summon at a specific time neither is it something that one can control.
How does one put a deadline on creativity? How can you expect to get the best out of your team by pestering them every so often about “something as silly as time”? Truth is: most of us get inspired spontaneously. Our creativity can be inspired by a specific event, whilst sitting on the couch watching the telly, in a club, when out drinking or even after taking certain mind-altering substances. So, you can not put a time on when creativity should begin and end. This is where the traditional managerial methods become flawed. Firstly, we don’t have an office. But most would agree that this isn’t the most likely place for creativity to be conceived anyway. Secondly, most of us (within the team) are either broke or dependent on a not so trustworthy income stream (our allowances)- this makes going to endless weekly meetings a drag and a bit of an inefficient impossibility. Thirdly, a startup is a hustle. It’s a hustle because we were doing a number of things before the idea was conceived. Some of us were working and others were studying – and we’re all still doing the very same things. We have other obligations that need to be met along with those of the startup.
Solution: deadlines.
At the end of the day, we still have goals and targets that need to be met. And unless we want to be building this startup for the next half-century- we have to know when to ship. This is where deadlines play an integral role in the managerial procedure as well as in the shipping of your product.
Simply saying that you can’t put a time limit on creativity can be an easy and detrimental cop-out in terms of your productivity. It can prompt you to actually never shipping your product at all. It can put you in the “startup” position forever without ever seeing positive and adequate results. Thus, the team needs to know what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by. At the moment I have a programmer in the team, Nic. Before joining us Nic was a private IT contractor. He would be commissioned to host, design and build websites for various individuals and companies- he did all of this from home. He is used to working in his own space and kinda prefers it that way. The problem with that is that it is pretty hard to keep track of his progress (as he also lives a distance from myself and Audio Skillz) and we can’t afford to be having telephone conversations every two days.
So by using the various productivity tools available online (Asana being our primary tool) , we’ve managed to keep track with each others progress by simply adding in what we want to acheive this week and then allocating the tasks to each other depending on who would be the most relevant person for the task to be handled. On Asana, a team member can comment on any difficulties he might be having with the task given to him whenever he comes across such difficulties. This then saves the time of any of the other team members as we don’t have to keep asking: “how far you with…” every time.
These free productivity tools help you a great deal in keeping with your deadlines as you get to “monitor” your team’s progress without having to hold a hundred meetings and without spending hours on the phone. They have, at least for us, become a practical alternative to traditional managerial methods.
The Minimum Viable Product
So how does one make certain that their product is going to succeed as soon as it goes into market?
The truth is: you can’t. We never really know whether our product is going to be welcomed by the market nor do we know whether anyone will be willing to pay for it (whether this be by actually buying the product or giving us the traffic we need to sell to advertisers).
What is certain, however, is that we can create a couple of ways to greater our chances of producing something worth producing. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, describes this as developing a minimum viable product. This is basically a beta version of you product. It’s built to serve as an experiment so as to prove (or disprove) some of your most important assumptions.
Instead of following the old model which meant that one would have to create boring and lengthly questionnaires that no one wants to answer, you create a beta product to test whether (for example): There is an inherent problem (as this should be the focus of any startup- to solve a problem)? Whether the problem is worth finding a solution for? And also whether your solution to this problem is indeed adequate enough for the market. So you release an “unfinished product” that basically conveys what you’re essentially trying to achieve through your product. You release this product to your market and design it so that they understand the product well enough to be able to give you valuable feedback on it- thus proving or disproving your assumptions. Of course, who you release this product to is also very important. Guy Kawasaki once said that the best “testing agents” would be women as they, normally, give truthful and constructive criticism and are generally open to helping you out and trying your product.
That’s what we’re doing this week. Audio Skillz will be spending the whole week meeting as many women (within our market) as he possibly can and trying to understand their specific needs and thus confirm or throw away some of our assumptions. The last thing you want to do is spend $100 000 developing a product that no one wants or likes.
#ProjectZooloo
@TheCalm101
@AudioSkillz
Weekly Report
This week was all about scratching for that startup change.
I’m glad to say that after being so doubtful about people’s (specifically my father) willingness to fund a project with absolutely no other investors involved or better yet- a project run by a 19-year old undergrad with dreadlocks- I was proved wrong, gladly.It turns out that the gates weren’t so hard to open. All it took was an email to my distant father with my “proposal” attached, it then became the longest 48-hour wait I’ve ever had to go through.
Everything depended on the response from this man so there was absolutely nothing to be done this week except for some coding of the site’s system (which I had no involvement in as I’ve only recently been taking an online course in Javascript- making me pretty useless). So I spent most of the week creating, editing and revising my 30-second sales pitch, catching up on some writing and vehemently pending a response that could just make or break our progress in terms of the deadline we had set for the project.
Two hours of practicing, 12-pages of writing and 48-hours later I couldn’t wait no longer so I reached for my BlackBerry and sent a text to my father: “Have you gone through the document as yet?”
His answer was so simple and yet so significant: “I… finally got thru it, it’s brilliant.”
My reaction was synonymous to that of an 8-year old after finding out that he’s getting a new bicycle! I was just so over-joyed. He then sent the document to my uncle and we’re now going to have a meeting to discuss exactly how much we need and what the way forward looks like.
Next week is going to be all about prioritizing, delegating and committing.
Stay tuned.
Follow me: @TheCalm101
Scratching for Seed Funding
Our focus for this week is primarily to start making door-to-door knocks to everyone we know and calls to our six different second-uncles in order to raise a seemingly measly amount (I’ll verify if that was the case in our Weekly Report on Saturday) of money to get operations running.
This money will be used to pay for our: website hosting, web domain, various documentation and the many trips we need to make in and out of the city to attend meetings. Seems like it shouldn’t be a hard task. Except that our team is made up of 3-people. Two of which are still students at the University of Johannesburg, so we have no real income. Furthermore, we have almost 5% support from our parents- so it’s all on us.
At first glance, the task seemed to be a hard one. But once I started breaking down the costs of all the things we NEED, I realised that the costs wouldn’t be as much as I had initially thought. Still I had a problem: I don’t know of anyone that could be willing to give me that kind of cash within the next 7-days. So I started jotting-down a list of people that I knew would want to assist us. This brought about a list of like 4 people. Instead of trying to get the whole amount from one person, I decided to divide the costs by the 4 people I know. The amount that came up was, as you might imagine, far more “askable”.
And the scratching begins…
Project ZooLoo 