From March 7, 2010 New York Times article about Pandora radio:

It is all a long way from January 2000, when Mr. Westergren founded [pandora]. Trained as a jazz pianist, he spent a decade playing in rock bands before taking a job as a film composer. While analyzing the construction of music to figure out what film directors would like, he came up with an idea to create a music genome.

This being 1999, he turned the idea into a Web start-up and raised $1.5 million from angel investors. It was originally called Savage Beast Technologies and sold music recommendation services to businesses like Best Buy.

By the end of 2001, he had 50 employees and no money. Every two weeks, he held all-hands meetings to beg people to work, unpaid, for another two weeks. That went on for two years.

The article goes on to mention that Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million annual revenue in 2009. It pays to persevere.

Last week we quietly launched an Elias module store. Now you can purchase 8 different modules to enhance, extend & enjoy your Magento storefront. Keep an eye on the module store as we add several more modules over the next few weeks. And let us know if you need a module for your store that hasn’t been built yet.

To win big you have to make the right bet on the winning platform.

- Jeff Raikes on Microsoft’s strategic error vs. Lotus 123

“Strong players can quickly evaluate many types of positions because they’ve seen similar positions before. Of course, most positions in chess have their own quirks or involve other variables that require specific calculations to truly understand them, but chess players start from a base of common knowledge about the game and work out the variations from there. You can, therefore, zero in on a relatively few moves to study seriously, which greatly reduces the amount of actual calculation.

…Spatially oriented players build up their chess vocabularies more rapidly and become fluent in the language of chess much earlier than do their nonspatially oriented brethren. True pattern recognition skills, however, come mostly from experience with the game. After you see enough different positions on the chessboard, you begin to just know what kinds of moves you should consider, almost without conscious thought…” (emphasis added)

- James Eade, Chess Master, US Chess Federation

Is business strategy really any different?

Now substitue “business” for “chess” in Mr. Eade’s quote. See enough different business experiences and you begin to just know what kinds of moves you should consider with your organization.

One way to develop quickly as an amateur chess player is to learn the game’s notation and then study historically great matches of masters. That’s why I read the biographies and blogs of how other business leaders played the game.

Dear Thinnish Becker and Rudolph Propos,

I don’t want your lists of 120k finance professionals, 4.8 million new businesses, or 150k criminal attorneys. Unless something recently changed with the United States legal system and defense attorneys are now miraculously requesting online Magento ecommerce stores, then I’m not sure why you thought I would need your services. Please remove me from your list.

And Jerry (if that is your real name),

I’m not interested in your Chinese textile manufacturing offer. I believe you when you say the polar fleece blankets, 100% polyester curtains, and coral fleece bathrobes that are produced in your Jiangsu Province manufacturing facility are made by skilled workers at a competitively low price. It’s just that nothing about my business requires textile manufacturing at the moment. Have you tried the people who make snuggies yet? A snuggy seems like the perfect combination of your three specialties.

Now Mr. David Barnet Bradle,

You may send my swiss lotto winnings of 750k euros to the red cross relief program for Haiti. Please consider this my official approval to do so – no need to get any of my personal banking information.

Sincerely Yours,

Josh Colter

When people ask me about Elias, it is our team’s virtual setup that usually generates the most interest. I realized the world is different one day while driving down US 135 in Greenwood, Indiana. I was using my iphone to chat on skype with a teammate in New Zealand and business partner in Uruguay about a client in New York.

Inc magazine is using the month of February to conduct an experiment whereby their staff abandons plush office space for the freedom of home workspaces and the occasional noisy coffee shop (sidenote: I am writing this post from a starbucks). The magazine’s blog asked for feedback from other virtual companies – tips, pro, cons, and reasons for working virtually. I posted the response below (hopefully we make the upcoming April article):

Tips for working virtually

Choose the Right People

Not everyone is cut out to work virtually. Hire people who are trustworthy and self-motivated. Use smaller test contract projects with potential candidates to determine how they perform with your team in a virtual work environment before you hire them.

Set Clear Objectives

Cultivate a ROWE (results oriented work environment). It shouldn’t matter when someone clocks in or out if they get their work done. Find a good project management tool like basecamp, activecollab, zoho, or redmine to assign tasks and measure performance.

Invest in Communication

Buy a good headset for sound quality on calls. Take some of the money saved from no office space and spend it on frequent in person team meetings (we meet quarterly for 3-5 days). And use your project and customer relationship management tools instead of email when possible so that everyone has access to the same information.

Why EliasInteractive.com operates virtually

• Family: We all have strong commitments to our families and our families are rooted in different locations.
• Access to talent: anyone can join our team without having to relocate, which dramatically increases the potential pool of talent
• Cost savings: no office space and cheaper standard-of-living costs in our locations.

Virtual Company Pros

• Focus: I don’t get interrupted by coworkers stopping by my desk.
• Accountability: Too many managers measure performance based on employees arriving on time and staying late. Virtual work forces you to answer the question, “What did I really accomplish today?”
• Flexibility: You should work when you are most productive. For some this might be late at night rather than during “normal” business hours.

Virtual Company Cons

• Boundaries: the lack of separation between home and work can open the door for interruptions from family while working or allow work to bleed over into family time. One of our teammates rents a cheap one room office because it is hard for him to be productive with 4 kids at home.
• Miscommunication: email, IM, and even conference calls remove nonverbal cues like facial expression and vocal tone which we all use to lend context to our messages. Beware of assuming what a coworker meant and give them the benefit of the doubt.

Our project management wiz, Eric, just had his first kid a few months ago and is already busy carting the family around in a new SUV. How domesticated can you get? So you can imagine his delight when he came across this product for SoundRacer, the gizmo that turns your boring family automobile into a muscle car.

The client wasn’t happy.  We’d worked with her for a number of weeks now, and this was the second time she felt we “just didn’t get it” and she was getting frustrated.  We felt we “got it”, but each time we met with her our presentation didn’t live up to her expectations.

“She’s difficult,” we said to one another while working on the project.  As the next meeting approached a growing sense of dread loomed over us, curdling our creativity and eroding our confidence.  When the day came to present, the design fell flat. She compared our work to a “doodle on a napkin”.  Discouraged, we left feeling like we’d put forth our best creative efforts only to have them tossed aside.  It’s a day I’ll never forget.

Making Everyone Happy

Does this scenario sound painfully familiar?  Well, you can’t make everyone happy, right?

Wrong.  Dead wrong.  Close-the-doors-and-give-up-now-if-you-don’t-believe-me wrong.  You CAN make everyone happy with a simple process I’m going to outline today.  For those of you in a hurry, here’s the pseudo-code:

1. Ask your client the “important” questions.
2. Listen to what they say, and write it down
3. Think about what they said.
4. Present the client with a written summary of what they said, asking if you got it right.

Oh, and this process has a name: Discovery.

Discovery and a Smile

The purpose of Discovery is for your team to learn about the client’s goals, values, customers and competitors.   The client already knows these things, but you don’t.  Oh, and when you go back to the client with your results from Step 4, you almost always get a smile.  You see, you took all their rambling and hand-waving and turned it into a coherent document.  You did all the hard work to “get it”, and that says you really care.  Your document should have, at the minimum:

1. Key goals for the project
2. Key measurements for each goal
3. Key business marketing messages
4. Key customer segments and values

Let’s recap: they spoke, you listened; you summarized, they smiled.  ;-)

Oh, and did I mention you get to CHARGE MONEY FOR THESE EFFORTS?  This is important because Discovery is as important to the project as writing HTML, coding JavaScript, or all the other stuff you used to *think* the client hired you to do.

In fact, the client hired you to solve a business problem.   They didn’t hire you to write HTML.  They don’t care about HTML/CSS/JS/blah/blah/blah.  They don’t care about AJAX, Validating XHTML, or any of the other things you care about.  If you talk to them about how cool your new Drupal module is, you really don’t get it.  But now, because you clearly understand their business goals, you “get it”.  And “getting it” is a wonderful way to start a relationship.

Oh, and my client who hated our designs?  In time she came around.  In fact, she was one of the first we tried our new Discovery phase with, and you know what?  When we were done she smiled and paid us.

That’s also a day I’ll never forget.

Working on pricing for something new. Sometimes a simple drawing can help process ideas and determine where to focus your time.