I don't know the details of FB connect. I'll be working with it more over
the coming months so when I do learn this detail I”ll post it.

Cheers,
Ryan

2010/2/4 Disqus <>

The mere fact that we operate out of different universes is absolutely great, because I am firm believer that the greatest benefit of diversity is that we learn so much more from people who are different to ourselves – and what is after all competitive advantage but a mastery of creating differentiation in the market.

I think that if I can get my handle around the meaning of leverage, I can much more easily decide what my means are going to be – in other words that immortal phrase “strategy is tactics, tactics are strategy”.

Paul Graham says:

“What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.”

from: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

Leverage when it is a positive force accelerates achievement, but pick the wrong kind of leverage and I think it has just as dramatic an impact as the kind of leverage that one finds in financial systems, where margin calls rather than sales cycles are utilized.

Utilizing other people's money to make money is an accelerator but only when the underlying indicators move in the right direction. I see utilizing other people's help in making sales in the same way. Leveraging sales teams works for me if they are firstly have an additional incentives not to introduce customers which may be “bad margin calls”. Unprofitable customers are the fate of not paying attention to the input quality (assuming this input is for transformational rather than transactional clients).

What I like Graham's quote is the reminder that leverage can be used to great effect but it still comes down to people. I do like Steve Blank's reference to lean startups, I am absolutely for all for that kind of underlying efficiency because its principle is to base the flow of value from the perspective of customer demands.

The question then is, is the quality of customers or clients generated an issue for the startup or does one grin and bear the teething pain points of accepting any source of clientele because the goal is not to fuss over quality of customer but one of financial survival. The additional principle beyond agile startups is the principle of starting right.

The core question for me then is what does “starting right” mean?

A system is only as good as the abstractive, imaginative and reasoning qualities of the people who utilize it, I like to paraphrase Graham's remarks as “Good customers can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save us from bad customers” – because the greatest leverage beyond the source of sales teams is the relationship bridges with customers themselves. A sales team that brings real leverage to a business are worth their weight in gold when they inject opportunity into the system rather than customer life-time value problems.

There is one other problem in this leverage universe which is to assume that startups mean technology startups. Just as the value of the network is improved by the number of connected users in a Metcalfe way, the value of leverage is improved as we widen our attitudes as to what startups are, and embrace this greater universe of “startups”, because in welcoming that greater universe of non-technology as well as technology startups to these emerging leverage points, that is the real multiplier effect.

The multiplier effect here is then to reduce the long-term casualty statistics that all startups inherit, the failure rate is incredible, but “starting right” is one means of surviving the longer-term path for startup viability. That is how I view leveraging professionals (not just sales pro's into the startup eco-system).

No matter what system one uses, the biggest part of navigating the startup ecosystem is starting right. Your words help me get my head around that, but I would rather pay a lot of front-end thinking time to this question of starting right, rather than simply think about leverage as a tactic. For me the way I see it, the whole process of how we leverage is a really tough strategic issue, if I can work that one out, then the systems will take care of themselves, or at least I will start seeing in new ways the greater power of leverage here.

Anyway Ryan, you know I am so prone to thinking out aloud, so thank you again for orientating my neurals towards this direction today :-)

[Em]