As we’ve worked on Business Model Guru we’ve learned a bunch of things. Neither of us are short of startup experience, but there is always this big gap between what we read in the books, and articles and hear in conversation and the messy sticky thing that is called reality.
Distilled wisdom on a page or a screen makes it so easy. The nuts and bolts are usually hidden behind commercial secrecy, but that is often where the learning lies.
So Leander has a bee in his bonnet about the difficulty of getting good business cards. I wasn’t convinced to start with, to be honest, but after we’ve gone backwards and forwards a few times I think there are a bunch of possibilities that we can explore.
So the big plan is to disrupt the global business card industry and make a tonne of money in doing so. That’s Plan A. Plan B is to show you how we worked and how we translated entrepreneurial theory into bootstrapping reality. Our monetisation strategy for that is to have a paypal donate button and hopefully get a free late once a month.
We’re going to take Ash Maurya’s book Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works and start at Page 1, or rather page 35, and update you with crystal candid clarity about what we are doing and how we are doing it.
Now there are a bunch of risks, the biggest of course being that our initial idea is a 50kg nugget of pure gold that everyone proceeds to steal. The largest gold nugget ever was the Welcome Stranger which was apparently 72kg or about $2.8million.
Now if the idea is any good, it’s probably worth more than $3 million, but as they say it’s all in the execution. So feel free to copy and let us know how you get on, and do link back to Business Model Guru if it makes your fortune too.
Next week we’ll kick the process off with our initial business model and a no-holds barred analysis of what’s good, what’s bad and what we need to do next.
