Iarfhlaith Kelly – Code agus Craic

A well funded business doesn’t have to focus on profits, or in some cases even revenue. I believe this is a risk, which can damage the potential of a business and prevent it from learning important lessons early on that could cost it huge amounts of money down the line.

Many startups are rightly encouraged to launch early and then iterate like crazy, constantly listening to their customer feedback, honing their product into something ready for sale. This makes sense for bootstrapped businesses, and often it’s the only way they can operate since they’ve no choice but to chase revenue in order to keep the business going.

You’d think that a well funded business would follow the same approach. Sure, they don’t need the revenue quite as early, but the value they’d get from the customer feedback could save them millions of dollars later on.

Case Study: Segway Inc.

Take the case of the Segway PT, the innovative ‘personal transporter’. This is a great example of how a well funded startup can get it wrong by not testing their product in the wild first. The company was founded in 1999 by an inventor named Dean Kamen. Born in New York, Dean’s history is an interesting one. He’s a great example of the modern day inventor and the more I read about him the more impressed I am with what he’s achieved. But all his great inventive abilities and personal success couldn’t help his new plucky startup get the basics right.

The first Segway was unveiled in December 2001 to much fanfare, and was announced as a revolution in personal transportation. The company had announced an annual sales target of 40,000 units in it’s first year and expected to clear 100,000 in the subsequent 13 months. But things did not go according to plan. In fact, things went so bad that between 2001-2007 there was less than 30,000 units sold in total – not exactly a revolution.

Nowadays Segway are extremely coy about their financials and many believe that they are still not profitable. To date, Segway have received €151M in funding so it’ll take a while for them to pay that back at the rate they’re growing now.

The problem with the Segway, as most people know, is that you look like an idiot when you’re on one. There is a zero coolness factor for having one and you can probably expect to be slagged by your friends if they see you using one. As a result, hardly anyone buys them.

This could have been easily avoided, but with their well funded manufacturing plant in New Hampshire, Segway steamed on ahead producing thousands of units without getting proper feedback from their customers first. It’s my view that if Segway was a bootstrapped company and not a well funded one, they would have been forced to start selling earlier, and getting feedback from their customers. They would have realised that yes, the Segway was not cool, and making a vehicle that people actually looked good while they used it was as important as all the other benefits.

But this didn’t happen. They had their heads buried in the sand, or in this case, in the lab. Their funding was the catalyst for their mistakes. Without it, they would have been forced to launch earlier, and they would have realised their design flaws well before they’d spent millions in production.

Segway are still operating today, but they’ve moved into different markets and mostly focus on corporate sales. They might get it right in the end, but not before the’ve wasted millions of dollars on poor decisions that could have been prevented by getting early feedback and iterating like crazy.

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I witnessed the benefits of this approach first hand on thedebs.ie this month. We’re a bootstrapped startup that’s now well and truly trading. We’re learning new things from our customers everyday and we’re constantly changing our plans, our strategy, our revenue streams and our business models as a result.

A bootstrapped startup is a crazy roller coaster ride, but because we have no other choice then for it to be profitable from day one, we’re open to making those changes as soon as they need to happen. That’s an important lesson for me, and I’m sure for everyone else out there trying to do something new.

If you’ve got a great story about launching early and iterating quickly, why not drop a comment below? The more people that learn this lesson the better.

UPDATE: It seems that in 2009, Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame wrote a very similar post to this one.

Tonight at 61 South William Street myself and some friends are launching a new art gallery 61 South. We’re hosting the opening night of the Michael Kieran’s ‘Lifeline’ exhibition.

Lifeline is a rare opportunity to this very private artist’s  last decade of work in his first return exhibition to Ireland from France.

Produced over the last 10 years, this show is a very personal exploration with the artist, inside his influences and thoughts as he moved from a studio in Ireland to his atelier in France where he now resides.

Lifeline provides us with a rare glimpse into the change and affect that this has impressed on one artist.

The exhibition will open on Thursday, 9th of December at 61 South Gallery on South William Street, Dublin 2 at 7:00pm. It will run until Thursday, 23rd of December.

For more information visit www.mikekieran.com and www.61southgallery.com

When was the last time you had an original thought? Something 100% your own idea. Think about that for a second before you answer.

I bet it’s harder then you expected (it was for me). Chances are, most of the opinions you formed and the recent decisions you made were heavily influenced by media, friends, family, preconceptions, and past experiences.

Sometimes it’s hard to form your own opinion. With the constant barrage of news, blog posts, tweets, ads, TV, radio, billboards, and sponsors it’s no wonder your own ideas on what’s good and bad, right and wrong all get completely squashed. Our point of view is programmed into us.  We’re influenced on conscious and sub-conscious levels. It’s inescapable.

But, if we can find a way to push past the subliminal messaging and ignore the biased reviews of the media (as hard as it is), we give ourselves a great power, and an opportunity to think clearly.

This year I’m going to make a large effort to form my own opinions. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m sure I’ll be happier for it.

If everyone made more of an effort to form their own opinion instead of following along with popular belief then I’ve no doubt we’d all be a lot better off.

Ever watched The Truman Show? The 1998 movie with Jim Carrey as a man who discovers his entire life is a reality TV show. I watched it again recently and it struck a deep chord with me. Partially because for a movie made over 12 years ago (before Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or even Google was storing tons of our information) it highlighted the issue of privacy, albeit in an entertaining way. But mostly it resonated with me because like Truman, without ever questioning it, we have accepted the world into which we have been presented.

The movie begins by showing how Truman Burbank became the first human baby to be legally adopted by a television network. And the network producers decide to run a reality TV show where Truman lives out his entire life in a mockup town constructed under a massive artificial dome in the Hollywood hills.

Everyone except him is an actor, everything around him is fake, and his entire world has been constructed by Christof, the omnipotent creator of the show.

For 30 years Truman lives out his daily life of routine without ever questioning his surroundings or the rules of his own world. He doesn’t push boundaries, challenge himself or others, and makes no attempt to break out of the mould into which he has found himself. Does this sound familiar to you?

Relating this back to our own lives I can’t help but feel that the same attitudes exist all around us, especially in our professional lives. For the most part, we believe what we see and we take it as gospel. We don’t question the state of the art, we don’t challenge it, extend it, or try very hard to disprove it. We simply accept it as fact.

This is a dangerous reality. How can we ever hope to do great things if we settle with for our present state of life?

For Truman, he starts to question his reality when an outsider named Sylvia, infiltrates the show and raises doubt in his mind about the circumstances of his life. From thereon in Truman begins to notice things. He begins to see behavour in people that doesn’t make sense, he begins to recognise patterns that don’t seem normal (even though he doesn’t know what normal is), he starts to question his surroundings and begins to push the boundaries created for him by Christof.

It’s this new heightened awareness that brings Truman to realise that his entire world is a lie and leads to his eventual escape from the artificial dome.

But without that element of doubt given to him by Sylvia, Truman may have spent the rest of his entire life trapped in a world where nothing is as it seems. For myself and for everyone reading this I think we should all try to be a little more like Truman, challenging our surroundings and questioning everything, because when we do that we can do truly remarkable things.

It struck me recently that I’ve never really defined who my heroes are. Unsure if this is a good or a bad thing, I’ll have a crack at listing a few of them now.

But before I do, I just want to make a quick observation I have on the significance of a hero through the eyes of the beholder.

To put some perspective on this, I want to include a quote by Oscar Wilde of which I was recently reminded. He wrote that: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”.

The relevancy of this quote in relation to our heroes is pretty clear. If you define your hero, do you unwittingly replace your own hopes and dreams with those of your heroes?

It would seem so.

But that said, I have to say that I strongly disagree with this. Without getting too academic, I believe that admiration of success is a necessary ingredient in new success. In the same way that the evolution of language is based upon an existing set of definitions, personal success is based on an existing set of definitions as well. To put it one way, if we don’t know where we are in the world, how can we reach for the skies?

So, now that I’ve argued the relevancy of having heroes, I’ll have a go at listing mine in no particular order:

1. Ewan McGregor
2. Richard Branson
3. Barack Obama
4. David Heinemeier Hansson
5. Eric Cantona
6. Sean Kelly
7. Richard Feynman
8. Billy Connolly

These are my heroes today. Tomorrow could be different, but for the cynics and elitists in the audience, I make absolutely no apology for any glaring omissions or vulgar inclusions they might think I’ve made. We all look at the world in or own way, no matter where our influences come from.