Epiphanize

I’m a disciple of Guy Kawasaki. But I’m not a click-my-heels, stand at attention kind of disciple. I read his blog 2-3 times week but I don’t own a Mac (Guy used to be the Chief Evangelist at Apple). I like that Guy focuses more on what makes sense than conventional wisdom. Cutting through the muck and uncovering what makes sense is especially refreshing in a business world saturated with get rich quick kool-aid drinkers and companies who would be happier if they didn’t have to deal with their annoying customers (most airlines; most banks; all insurance companies – except mine, USAA; and all cell phone companies).

Guy recently launched a social media site, Truemors, complete with Web 2.0 bling for only $12,107.09 (trademark, software development, design…the whole 9 yards). It’s a fully functional site that has great revenue potential.

I relearned the lesson that these all go together:

1. skinny budget
2. quick development periods (7.5 weeks from domain registration to launch of Truemors)
3. no business plan
4. no VC money

Now, I know that there’s not much of a backend for Truemors – backends are more expensive to develop and there’s a lot more room to get them wrong the first (and 58th) time. But I need to do more experimenting in the Truemors mold. If a new product launch or a new site is on a 6 month develpment timeline what does the 2 month version look like? What is the minimum needed to remarkably deliver the basic value proposition? 37Signals (the originators of the Ruby on Rails open source code) wrote a great e-book about choosing simplicity over bloat. I call it excellence in small scale – make something that’s truly remarkable (thank you Seth Godin) but realize it doesn’t have to reach it’s full potential right out of the box. Truemors is the best and easiest to use “Web 2.0, User-Generated [rumor] content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media” site out there. I’m sure it’ll become much more than that over time when Guy adds new remarkable, simple features/services.