It was suggested to me by the ever clever marketer @sammartino that brands are, for the most part, cognitive shortcuts. Shortcuts that evolved to simplify choice in a world where information was both difficult to find, and then consider properly with our limited brains.

The question is this. What role will branding play as technology progressively compensates (as it already has started to), for these cognitive limitations? Will certain decisions based on functional criteria (financial decisions) become brand resistant, leaving those decisions with image/fashion criteria for the marketers to play with?

This is concentrated lesson juice from the 10 First To Market Products That lost out to Latecomers from Business Insider.

“1. Friendster took money from a number of large venture capital firms very early on. They promptly filled the board with VC all-stars who had grand visions for Friendster’s future, but little concern for the technical problems of its present. (Friendster vs Myspace/Facebook)

2. Even when you’re a market leader, keep iterating and improving your product. Don’t just make your next product better than your last one, but dream big, and make it better than anything your rivals could come up with. (Palm vs iPhone)

3. If someone bigger and stronger decides to enter your market, you may need to radically alter your strategy. Don’t pretend you can out-muscle them. Find your niche and shore it up. (Netscape vs Microsoft)

4. Always be thinking about whether there is a better way to do what you do. You can be sure someone else is. (Webcrawler vs Google)

5. If your product is popular, but could very easily be merely a feature of someone else’s, you have a problem. Find a way to stay relevant, or convince the makers of the uberproduct that the cheapest way to incorporate your technology is to buy you. (Tivo vs DVRs)

6. If you are selling a platform for content, it’s incredibly difficult to compete with someone who can sell that content to users directly. If you can’t do the same, get out of the way. (Rio vs iPod)

7. Consumers might have a different plan for your product than you do. Adjust your design to fit their needs, not your ideas about what the product should be. (Betamax vs VHS)

8. Keep innovating. Especially if you are in the technology sector, you can’t kid yourself that your product will stay appealing forever, or that serious competitors will never come along. (Atari vs Nintendo)

9. Sometimes your customers’ needs won’t sit well with you; what they want just isn’t the sort of product you wanted to make. If you can afford to fail, stick to your guns. Otherwise, get with the program. (Everquest vs World of Warcraft)”

What you get is a company providing anti-corruption services to people experiencing roadblocks in their dealings with bribery ridden government departments.  This is gold.

This social enterprise is the brainchild of Shaffi Mather and his partners out of India, and I saw him present their idea at TEDIndia in November this year.  Shaffi’s legitimacy in this space includes his qualification as a lawyer, property developer, and founder of 1298 Ambulance, a cross-subsidy model social enterprise successfully making ambulance services available to the people of Mumbai.

He had realised that the cost of providing people with help in tackling bribery, utilising existing Right to Information legislation, was significantly less than the cost of the bribes being requested. Instant business model, with a ready market (~$1 trillion). Just add chutzpah.

Best part is this. On stage, his flippant remark “We could call it something like bribebusters.com…”, led to an email that night by an international paper requesting an interview with him about this “BribeBusters.com” they’d seen mentioned on the twitter backchannel of the TED event.  1. He hadn’t registered the domain name.  2. He didn’t know whether a company with this name already existed. 3. He immediately registered the (surprisingly) vacant domain name once he recovered from his brief panic, fearing a defamation suit from an existing company.

Whether it will be called Stop Bribery and Prevent Corruption, or BribeBusters.com, its a great story. Listen to his talk below.

Advice from the many corners of the web seems to be polarised on how free you should feel to talk to people about your “big idea“. Both sides make valid points and take an extreme position to prove a point. Is there a middle ground?

Share-widely camp.

1. Without the idea there is nothing, but execution is everything. There will be plenty of people in the world with the same idea, and success will come to those that have the passion, capacity, and persistence to execute on it. Also, beyond trying your smartest and hardest, much of a venture’s success will just be up to timing or dumb luck.

2. You’re idea won’t develop without talking about it. You need early validation, either from your customers (ideally), or peers (often not critical enough). You will reinforce internal biases if you keep on talking to nobody but yourself.

3. Don’t bother with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Investors won’t sign them anyway. They won’t take the liablity exposure by signing your NDA on the off-chance they’re already incubating the same idea with another one of their ventures.

Keep-it-to-yourself camp.

1. You’re idea is valuable and unique. If it wasn’t, then why hasn’t it been executed on before now? The answer may be that it’s a dud idea, it may be that it’s servicing an only recently realised painpoint, or it may be that the market/technology has just evolved sufficiently for it to work. Why risk letting someone else benefit from your ability to generate a good idea? Good ideas are not a dime a dozen.

2. Bother with NDAs. An investor who knows enough about your idea to be interested (and probably enough to realise they’re not invested in a similar space) will bother signing. Anyone else is not interested or serious enough and you should look elsewhere. Here is an example of a VC that signs NDAs, and why.

Devil in the detail?

There is undoubtedly a middle ground as there are plenty of examples where protected ideas have contributed to sustainable competitive advantage, and examples of valuable companies built on branding, story, and customer/distribution networks alone. Most straightforward web-startups with no novel technology to patent probably fit into the latter category and are much better off just getting on with it and executing.

If its not a straightforward web-startup, get questions about protectable intellectual property (IP) answered quickly. How protectable is it? How much will it cost to protect? Are you better off just spending the money on getting your product out? A brief chat to a patent attorney will likely help you get this answer (although consider their vested interest in the patent path).

Getting early advice from people more experienced doers that are currently doing in a related space will no doubt help you refine your idea. Should you lose faith if they don’t get it? No, just work on your pitch. If they do get it, listen and incorporate their feedback as objectively as possible. You will likely sound like an idiot at the beginning. Don’t care, you soon won’t.

As we’re repeatedly told, there is more to IP than patents, and there is more to a business’s value than IP.

The best advice nobody disagrees with? Just go out and do it already.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this. Any experiences to share?

Twitter @ppeach

Our team managed to get a bitofpluck.com up and running by the deadline.  Creating colorful, engaging connections between strangers with similar interests based on location data.  The frenzy of rapid development over the weekend makes for some frenzied learning.

Story cards
The 1. I am (user)….2. I want to (action)….3. So that (outcome) story cards really helped us frame the fundamental value proposition of the site, from both the business and the development side.  It helped us keep the feature set as simple as possible so that the developers had a realistic target to meet and had everyone moving in the same direction.  We were talking pretty big at the start and this really helped us pull our heads in.

Ideas abound
I can’t believe I ever thought there were not enough new ideas.  The process of getting together with people in that environment just seems to bring the creativity out.

There are some great people in Melbourne
Genuine, intelligent people just seem to be congregating and this is just one example.  Not just people who want to start a business, but people who seem to believe that a business has more to offer than just a revenue stream.

Its not the last we’re going to see of this kind of get together.  Thanks to Maxim Shklyar from Kisla Interactive for letting us use his fantastic studio, and Bart Jellema of Tjoos.com for bringing his Startup Camp expertise from Sydney, and Michael Specht from inspecht.com.au for food sponsorship and organisation.