co>innovative

When I first quit my job to see what I could do via an entrepreneurial project, I wrote down a set of general guiding principles to follow in running the project. As we have moved towards a knowledge/service based economy (and now connected/globalized/Internet economy) from an industrialized mind-set, work and businesses have been fundamentally altered. Employees and customers are no longer soulless commodities out of which companies must wring as much labor or money but more partners in the process. It is a fundamental shift, and firms that not only recognize this but implement policies, brands, and strategies along these lines will flourish. Virgin, Amazon, Apple, JetBlue, the list goes on. When dealing with solid, personalized brands that respect and solicit the opinions and experiences of customers and employees, business takes on a much more pleasant, useful, and satisfying tone. Thus, I would aim for:

1. Radical Transparency; internally and externally.
2. Simplicity
3. Flexibility. Owning as little as possible: software, infrastructure, inventory. Use SaaS. Outsource/Freelance. Light weight operations.
4. Continuous Iterative improvement.
5. Making life easier.
6. Authenticity.
7. Radical customer centricity. Worrying less about the competition or term strategy and more about what the customer is asking for. Soliciting ideas, designs, and help from everywhere: internally and externally.

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Given that I will be attempting to run this little project while in school, keeping on-going costs as low as possible is key. I will have no physical inventory and will be working almost exclusively online or on the phone. So my goal was to pull together a powerful set of software tools for next to nothing. Given the recent explosion of online tools and software as a service — and of course Google — it wasn’t that difficult. Most of this stuff is free.

Email, calendar, spreadsheets, docs: Google Apps (Up to 50 accounts free on my domain! And it supports Blackberry! Now I just need a Blackberry…)
Phone: Skype
Scheduling: Time To Meet
Domain/Hosting: GoDaddy (Okay, this isn’t free but it’s cheap enough for now.)
Project mangement: Basecamp
Contact management: Highrise
Blog: Wordpress, Feedburner
Conference calls: freeconferencecall.com
Wiki: pbwiki.com
Surveys: surveymonkey.com
Video: YouTube
Payment: Google Checkout, Paypal, Yahoo Merchant Services.
Fax: (Who faxes!?! But it’s free so, what the hell.) eFax

That’s not to say I don’t have a few programs up my sleeve that are just ridiculously expensive, but nice to have considering: Microsoft Office, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Quickbooks.

As for outsourcing of web development and other technical stuff out of my reach, I will be looking to elance.com, scriptlance.com, or rentacoder.com. At each of these sites you post your needs and coders/designers bid for the job.

Any questions?

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Well, I thought I would get an MBA from Duke starting this fall. In the mean time, I will be working on a smaller-scale project: an online design marketplace for laser etching of laptops and ipods. It is a tiny market, fits right in with the above interests, and is within reach of my technical abilities and resources. I hope to get that going before school starts, keep it going while in school, and develop further my original focus of leveraging social computing for physical product design and development.

I’ll also be posting here, which is really aimed at friends/family, my thinking being: instead of emailing folks who SAY they are interested, but are really just evil/soulless and secretly couldn’t care less, I’ll post everything here, and I’ll leave it up to you to check here if you’re interested or not. I plan to post 2 to 3 times a week and will be polling about stuff from time to time. Feel free to comment away and let me know what you think about all this.

To find out more about this whole laser etching thing: The guys from Make magazine who popularized it a few months ago; Some photos of etchings they’ve done. They’ve opened up the business model and technical specs and several other shops will likely be opening up in the near future in some other cities. There are only a few other folks who do this kind of etching, that I know of right now.
So in my first attempt at getting people involved: (Thanks to Rob, Sarah, and Natalie for the following suggestions that made the cut so far. If you have any to suggest, let me know.)

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For a long time I have had an intense interest in:

• Social computing/Web 2.0
• Crowdsourcing
• Great design
• Radically open business
• The world is flat/outsourcing/the ability for tiny companies to outsource/freelance what in the past only large companies could
• Entrepreneurship in general

One day, after following these topics over several years, I was struck by an idea about how I could bring all of these together. I was still waiting to hear from several B-schools, but I decided to quit my job anyway, in order to start a project centered around this. I had originally intended to work on how I could apply social computing and crowdsourcing to physical product design: what is the next step in terms of product configuration and design complexity along the lines of Threadless? Along the same lines, some other folks are working on just that: Cambrian House and Crowdspirit. Very interested to see how those two develop (Cambrian has yet to develop physical products, focusing instead on crowdsourced software ideas and Crowdspririt won’t be launching until this summer).

A few other examples of crowdsourcing type projects: A Swarm of Angels (movie financing), Sell A Band (funding to produce an album), Ringside Startup (funding and idea voting for an online startup).

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