Met with a cofounder of a very successful company today to discuss an event that we are organizing. It was a good and refreshing meet, and had a few key takeaways:
+ Key differentiating points
Or rather, what makes you so special about the guy next to you? What is your competitive strategy? Why should anyone choose you? This applies not only to personality, job applications, but also in startups (duh) as well as events. I was also chatting with my NOC mate yesterday that a website/startup must also have a sticky feature. This sticky feature is what keeps visitors from coming back. Sticky feature compliments the main features, and also serves as the key differentiating factor. For example, Techcrunch, the main features is that it publishes the latest updates of the tech/startup community, but the sticky feature is that Michael who was the cofounder would blog about his personal thoughts and will not be moderated(used to be). This is what people want to read, and what makes people come back and stay around. So yea, in whatever that we do, must always bear in mind what is the differentiating factor and what is so special about the things that we do.
+ Metric to measure success
In whatever we do too, there must be a metric to measure our success and milestones. Specifically, how to define how successful we are? The metric could be monetary, or personal metric. It applies also to events, and startups. I remembered sharing with a junior of mine a quote from Jack Ma, that “its good to know that there is a gap that exist between you and someone else, but its scary to not be aware of the existence of any gap between you and your peers”. While this is true, how do you measure the gap? And how to you measure the difference between you and your peers from around the globe? The same applies to events and startup. How do you measure how successful your event/startup is? The number of turnups on the event itself? How many people your startup impacted? At the end of the day, its really up to each individual, but what is important is that there must be a metric to measure the success/milestone, to not only keep the progress in check, but also to check for improvements. If there are no metric/target to measure your achievements, then there is no point doing whatever you are doing. If you are running an event, you must know what do you want to gain out of it and how do you measure it. If you are running a startup, must set milestones for yourself to keep things in check.
Definitely a refreshing day.
Filed under: Entrepreneurship Tagged: Competitive strategy, Definition of Success, differentiating factor, Entrepreneurship, Jack Ma, Metric to measure Success, Michael Arrington, NOC, Sticky feature, Techcrunch
