Preparing for a whiplash - or on being "venture worthy"

An excellent post from Fred Wilson today on taking investor feedback (which can, indeed, give "feedback whiplash" - as Fred nickname it! - and make you change too often without proper consideration and evidence). My favorite passage is this one:

Investors have their own agenda. They want to invest in "bigger ideas" and "larger outcomes". When they tell you that your idea is too small, they may be talking to themselves, not you. Do not make their problems your problems. This is your business, not theirs.

And to this I would like to add that you usually have only one company, while they have a portfolio. You have to decide for yourself if you want to aim out of the ballpark or if other strategies can give you a more comfortable risk/reward profile. Being the CEO of a nano-sized (now micro, maybe - we are a total of 7 FTEs now across Norway and Romania) for four years, I know my answer so far has been to play it just a tad more safe and being profitable every year since the start.

That being said, we are likely going to work on making TapBookAuthor.com more "venture worthy" ourself this autumn, with a month in a tech incubator in Palo Alto as part of the cure. 

Preparing for a whiplash.

Do not tidy up, just don't mess

I met a guy this weekend that was so impressed after inspecting a German factory that will produce machines for them. He asked the guy showing him around what was the secret behind tidying up so well.

He got this answer: We don't ever tidy up. We just don't mess.

And I think he was not even close to joking. Gotta love ze Germans.

In terms of project management and creating software, and maybe life in general - but that might be a tiresome effort, doing it right the first time is something we all strive for. Maybe thinking about not having to clean up the mess can make us get it closer to right, at least?

Bologna next week

Just a super quick note: I will be in Bologna for the children's book fair next Monday and Tuesday. I you would like to have a look at our TapBookAuthor authoring tool for iPad, Android and Windows 8, let me know and I will be more than happy to show you!

We have recently signed with the last of the four largest publishers in Norway and are more than ready to get a few international customers aboard!

This is the future

Last night I walked past a bus stop after checking that the next bus was in 6 minutes and that it would be better to walk to the junction 400m further down the road to take another bus from there.

But how did I check this? (I did not check the cardboard route table for sure and this was not one of the stops with the live digital display.) In steps, I:

• Pulled out from my pocket a device with four times the screen resolution of my first PC and the computing power of a full room of gear not that many years before that
• Started and began using an app in less than ten seconds
• Pressed "Nearby stops"
• Got real time data on the whereabouts of the bus while still walking past the bus stop

So even if there is a lack of flying cars, this is the future we were thinking about as kids - I am pretty sure of it. And it was only after walking hundred meters past the bus stop I did the reflections leading to this blog post, so it felt like a very natural and non-advanced use of technology. Almost Ubiquitous, if wanting to buzzwordify this post a bit...

Being a technology optimist, I think this everyday observation gives hope that we will find both useful and entertaining ways of using technology in the months and years to come. We have seen nothing yet.

Bet(t - ) it will be good

Bad wordplays aside, just a quick note to tell that I am going to Bett in London this week. Pocket full of nice new brochures, hoping to meet interesting people and more than ready to do a quick demo of TapBookAuthor.com if you are going there too...

So it better be good (OK, I will stop now). See you!

Happy Last Year

OK, two things first before writing the post: First and foremost, happy new year and best of luck for your projects, people, products and passions (the less known 4Ps?) in 2013! Then, if you have even a hint of allergy towards self-promotion, stop reading. Really.

Still there? I am going to share two great things happening to our product and team at the tail end of 2012. First, we got external recognition when we won an entrepreneurship price from a leading Norwegian legal firm. Apart from nice flowers and even nicer honors, this gives us some free legal advice which will be very useful when getting our first international customers.

Below are myself and partner at Wikborg Rein, Torleif P. Dahl - as well as those mentioned flowers.

Second, we landed two leading Norwegian publishing houses as new customers for our tool, making the total number of customers reach the great number of four (!). I am not joking, but I am also not joking about it being great. With these lighthouse customers secured, we are looking very much forward to demoing for smaller publisher as well as international ones. If you happen to be a potential user of the tool reading this, drop me a line to book a meeting.

Looking forward to a great year in 2013 as well - on our part we have lot of exciting things up our sleeve for the TapBookAuthor / ePekebok tool (push messages and Windows 8 apps prototype support are two items in the Q1 list of new functionality, with unlimited undo across sessions and interactive graphs and questions/tests on the list of autumn 2012 highlights). Happy last year. Happy new year!

Getting the heck out of the office

When teaching Entrepreneurship at NITH this semester, I am leaning quite heavily on Steve Blank's book The Startup Owner's manual (as a supplement to Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder, that is our main course book in addition to articles etc.).

One of the key phrases I particularly like in Steve's book, in addition to the definition of a startup as a temporary organization searching for a scalable business model, is the advice to get the heck out of the office (there are no facts or customers in there!).

Even if "the office" might be a metaphor for many startups, there are no subsititutes for actually testing hypotheses on customers.

So do I practice what I preach? Well, I try to - with tapbookauthor.com (and Norwegian variant epekebok.no) now up in low-fi version 0.5 to start describing our awesome app publishing/authoring tool, we are ready to get the first set of post-pilot customers! Next week we are demoing for potential customers and starting discussions with seed investors - getting (the h***!) out of the office...