4 Ways to Beat Your College Competition (None of Them Involve Grades)

4 Ways to Beat Your College Competition (None of Them Involve Grades): "

Everyone knows that in order to amount to anything, you have to go to college. While I agree that college is a wise decision, the untemplater in me knows that the real reasons for attending are not the ones you hear every day.

In fact, there are tons of misconceptions about why you should attend a university. The conventional wisdom consists of the following steps:

1. Attend a four-year college with a good reputation


2. Suck up to professors to get good grades


3. Get good grades in order to go to law or grad school


4. Get an entry-level position with a large corporation that will “”treat you right”

The untemplater knows there has to be a better way; there have to be more compelling reasons to spend another four years in scchool. Having come to the end of my university experience, here are four things the untemplater should learn in college:

1) Learn How to Be Persuasive

College is the time to learn how to deal with all types of people. Your university probably has students from all sorts of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The structure of classes forces you to sit next to and interact with people you probably wouldn’t any other way.

With this diversity and forced interaction comes an awesome opportunity to learn what makes other people tick. Learn what other people like, dislike, and how to help them recognize both. Learn how to be persuasive, how to present an argument and get others to agree with you. This “soft skill” as it’s called in the business world will take you far.

2) Learn How to Work in Groups

At least half of the classes I attended included some form of group work. Now is the time to learn how to delegate, make group decisions, and disagree artfully. Gone are the days of the lone ranger, “collaboration” is the buzzword in today’s business world.

Even if you choose the untemplater path of a freelancer, you will always be consulting with other business owners: asking for their opinions, outsourcing tasks, and collaborating on large projects. Unless you are going to be an accountant or programmer tucked away in a cubicle, learn how to work in groups.

3) Learn How to Start a Business

There is no better time than college to start your own business. Think about it: what responsibilities do you really have? What is holding you back? Life is only going to get more complicated from here when partners, children and mortgages come along.

If you fail now, it will hurt a lot less. So start a business and learn from your mistakes. In college I was able to start a web design business and blog in my spare time. It sure was more instructive and profitable than playing Xbox or partying.

4) Learn How to Learn

Sounds obvious, but hear me out. Most people go to college and their chief concern is getting good grades. They spend hours sucking up to professors, milking their grades and looking for extra credit. All of this work in hopes that a large corporation with a good name will hire them.

The untemplater follows a different path. Instead of grade-grubbing, focus on learning. Take classes you are genuinely interested in and learn what is important to you and your career. Worry less about the letter grade and more about the information.

How to Do It Right

Now, don’t get me wrong, grades are important. Make sure you pass your classes! I graduated with an average GPA and had very little trouble finding employment that interests me, even in this economy. As long as you have something to show for in place of your less-than-stellar grades (like starting your own business), many companies that aren’t stupid will want to hire you.

College is an awesome time to learn skills that will help you in your untemplater career. Just don’t get sucked into grade-grubbing and other useless conventional wisdom.

What untemplater skills did you learn in college?

"

Importance of Cash over Profits

Importance of Cash over Profits: "

Profit vs. Cash Flow : Importance of Cash over Profits. Focusing on the right financial indicators for your business.

I have been invited by folks at Power of Ideas to give a talk on the above topic as part of POI start up workshop 2010 - that will take place @ IIMA Campus from 8-17 October. I looked at the agenda of the workshop & believe its is a very good idea and should end up adding a lot of value the shortlisted teams (big improvement over last year mentoring sessions).

They requested me to jot down my thoughts about the session and share with POI folks for feedback. I thought why not jot down the thoughts on my blog and also get feedback of a larger community. I plan to use a lot of real life case studies (both good and bad) from the my experience @ madhouse and with all The Morpheus portfolio companies. Here is a related post I wrote previously: Should a startup be Ramen Profitable

Basics

• A startup should focus on only two things - Making & Selling
• When you are making something you need to spend cash & when you sell anything you earn cash
• Naturally Making comes before sales and hence cash wise spending comes before expenses
• You can divide a startup's life into following stages
• S0 - Team formation - This is the stage in which the founding team gets formed.
• S1 - Problem (or Idea) identification - This is where you decide what problem will your venture solve or what idea will you work on
• S2 - MVP identification - This when you identify the smallest part of problem you will solve with V 1.0 of your product
• S3 - Making V 1.0 - This is when you make the version V 1.0 and will need to spend the initial amount of cash
• S4 - Customer Acquisition(CA) V 1.0 - This is when you start customer acquisition efforts / which will eventually lead to "Sales"
• S5 - Making V 2.0 - Based on the feedback you receive from early users / your roadmap and results of CA 1.0 you making V 2.0 of the product
• S6 - CA 2.0 - Again based on the feedback & experience of 1.0 you evolve and execute V 2.0 of Customer acquisition
• and so on.....
• These stages dont take place serially in fact any given time you have two subsequent stages going on in Parallel.

Making

• While making V 1.0:

• Identifying the minimum set of features that you need to build in order to solve the smallest part of the "big problem" you are going after
• What you build should offer "definitive value" to the customers - so that you can users to use your product
• Getting paid for V 1.0 is optional - but getting users is important
• It should be something you can evolve (or scale) into a bigger business
• Do not invest more than 40-50% of your initial capital in making V 1.0
• It should take between 2 - 6 months to make V 1.0

• Closer to 2 months for a simpler product - lets a web service
• Closer to 6 months for a more complex product lets a hardware based device

The lesser the time & features - the lesser would be the cash you would need to spend before you can start sales

Since you have 50% of your capital still with you, there will be enough room to evolve your product into some thing that will people will pay for and something that makes money

Important pointers

• In the beginning, don't spend more than 2 weeks on discussions / analysis / customer surveys / market search and other such activities
• Remember "Doing is learning" - so start the process of making your product asap - the real learning will start when you start making stuff
• For the initial version almost all of the making should be done by founders / there is no room for hiring employees for making or out sourcing the making. You will need to spend more time / more money and you will end up with lower quality product
• Never hold a release waiting for a perfect product.

• There is nothing called a product that can not be improved and this startup who get into this mindset normally end up spending most of their cash building V 1.0
• Irrespective of how much you spent making V 1.0 - it usually doesnt sell - you need to be able to take the learnings from this phase and build 2.0 / 3.0 and some time 4.0
• So you should launch a product with minimum features and good enough quality and see what happens to it in the market
• Keeping the cost of making to minimum means your sales target for becoming cash flow positive will be lower
• Releasing early allows you to start your sales effort and you can get valuable customer / market feedback and gives you the room to make improvements early in the life of your startup , while you still have cash available

Most of these points also apply to versions that come after 1.0

Selling

• Right from our childhood we are bombarded with so many advertisement across all kind of mediums and by all kind of brands . Hence we strongly believe that the only way to sell a product is by "advertising"
• Now this is far from truth as possible when it comes to startups - there are lots of other capital efficient ways of spreading awareness about your product / generating leads / closing sales and getting repeat orders
• In good startups all money is spent on "making" and there is no budget for "Marketing or advertising" and even if they were to spend some amount, given their small budgets - no one would notice them
• In in first year or two almost all marketing and sales should be done by founders / there is no room for hiring employees or outsourcing the work. You will end up spending more time / more money and bad results
• Startups need to practice "Zero budget marketing" which consists of stuff like

• Create kick ass products which will be sold by the initial users to other users
• Start a blog / build a website - both with grt design that communicates what your startup makes
• For offline ventures create brochures / pamphlets
• On the blog and other parts of the website / create content that is relevant to users and gets you links / tweets / likes / references from users who read it
• Create channels to engage with your users : FB / Twitter / Linkedin / email newsletters / Off-line newletters / offline meetups etc.
• Build a community around you / Distribute your content via these channels
• Attend events & conferences relevant to your startup and present in as many forums as possible
• In some case you may need to get an existing data base of potential users (mail ids or phone numbers)

• Do not start spamming via email or SMS or via cold calls
• Create nice campaign to reach to these guys and ask their permission to engage with them
• And when you ask a customer to engage with you - offer them clear benefits of the engagement
• Remember engagement does not mean they start buying from you - it only means you have permission to keep in touch

Goal of marketing is to generate leads - so you need to choose channels similar to listed above to create leads

Sales

• Once you have leads - you start the process of sales
• Start a one on one conversation with a potential customer to convert them into paid customers
• Since you are a new brand you will face a problem of trust from the customer
• The best way to tackle that is to offer your customer a chance to try your product before buying.
• You must figure out a way for doing that both in case of B2B and B2C
• In B2B you should not only offer a way to try but also after the trial customer should be able to make a purchase worth a small amount / smaller quanity and if they are satisfied with that - they can move to the next level
• Building trust via - community engagement / free trial . small purchases is essential for customers

Remember the golden rule of Permission Marketing

• Convert Strangers to Friends
• And Friends to Customers

Back to basics

• Make a good product while controlling the spend on making
• Practice zero budget marketing techniques
• Founders should take care of both making and selling
• Improve the product fast to help sales take off
• There you are

• Low monthly expenses
• Early Sales
• You are now cash flow positive and that feels good

Cashflows

• Running out of cash is the biggest reasons for startup to shutdown
• Hence its very important that at every point you have a good understanding of

• Cash in Bank
• Monthly cash flow
• Runaway available

monthly_cashflow = (monthly_cash_in) - (monthly_cash_out)

For example if you spend 1000 Rs in month of September and got paid 600 Rs for the sale made

monthly_cashflow = (600 - 1000) = - 400

Having a negative cashflow means the total cash that you had at beginning of September is now less by 400 Rs

If you keep going like that one day you will have "ZERO" cash available and that would end up killing your startup

On the other hand if you become cash flow positive even by a small amount - it means at end of every month you have slight more cash than what you had the beginning of the month

This means few important things

• Your startup had infinite runway (feels good)
• You have made something people want to use and pay for
• You have managed to keep your cost of making and selling below the cost at which customers are buying
• And this is pretty much formula of a successful business

While fighting the battle of survival - cash flow and runway are the most important things a startup should pay attention to

Profits

• They also matter but more in longer term after you have won the battle of survival
• There are two kind of costs

• Monthly costs (for example - office rent / salaries etc)
• One time costs (for example the office printer you paid for this month but will use for next 2 years)

While calculating monthly profits you take the one time costs and convert them to monthly cost and compare them to your earnings

One time Cost

• You purchased a printer this month for 2400 Rs
• Printer will be useful for next 24 months
• You convert the cost into monthly cost - which is 100 Rs per month
• You add the printer cost into monthly cost

Lets you monthly cost are 1000 rs without considering the one time cost

Now to become cash flow positive you need to earn above 1000 Rs

But to be profitable you need to take into account the one time cost as well and earn above 1100 Rs

Notes:

1. I have kept the talk to Monthly Cash flows and Profits

2. I have also kept the concept a little simplified so that its easy to understand. Not gone into payables / receivables / PAT / EBITA etc

3. Once people understand basics they can build upon them

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Whens the right time to do it ?

Welcome to Day #1 of my 30 day trial-experiment I like to call

d i R N

Thats short for- do it RIGHT NOW.

What does this mean ?

Its implies getting off your lazy ass and doing what you think really needs to be did ! But that you dont wait on it anymore than an instant.

Uh Huh , I dont understand

Let me explain , my car has had a faulty switch on the left rear power window for the last 2 months. Today morning after breakfast , I decided to diRN it once and for all.

I drove out to the accessories showroom immediately in what I woke up wearing. (torn shirt , loose shorts , you get the picture )

Slow down , Wheres the fire bob ?

Wherever it is , you haven't bothered calling the fire department until after the house has burned down.

My need to diRN on things is because I have this problem.

Before I can say to myself to not pro-crass-tea-nate , I've already sidetracked and shifted energy away from the task deserving my immediate attention.

I put off things until it became so so so so overdue, not only was it nearing another critical emergency , but the fact that by then it has gathered so much massive inertia , overcoming it was a nuisance , too much work , and plain sucking the fun out of doing it.

Make it easier by doing it quicker ?

Or when by devoting a little time and active brain RAM , you can extract more value out of that task than by hacking away till 3:30 in the morning out of the need to save your skin.

How do I start not putting things off ?

With a little incentive ! Humans are great at responding to incentives !

or challenges.

Im trying to write this post by NOT looking away from my computer screen AT ALL.

The lucidity of my thought process is a little teased by this new format. Suddenly my visual connect is actively driving not my motor functions but only my language-and-blog-writing cortex (yes Im sure such a thing exists)

And obviously yes , activity for day#1 of diRN also included ' UPDATE BLOG'

The Art of Selling Out (or Why Seeking Validation Is Stupid But Making Money Is Not)

The Art of Selling Out (or Why Seeking Validation Is Stupid But Making Money Is Not): "

Note: This is part 3 of a 3-part series about creating. I’m using the topic of writing/blogging since that’s what I know, but the lessons can be extrapolated to any form of art. Part 1 covered How To Never Run Out Of Ideas, Part 2 covered How To Extinguish the Fiery Flames of Burnout, and Part 3 is on Validation (today!).

As a blogger (or artist of any sort) you may not get much validation … especially when you’re starting. The little validation you do get will be from people you know … family, friends, maybe co-workers. This kind of validation is empty because you’re not sure if it’s real. (Let’s be honest, it’s probably not.)

The validation most of us want is from random strangers. People we don’t know and who don’t know us. It makes us feel “famous” in a way.

“Somebody from Siberia said they liked my article! I have arrived!”

The Honest Truth About Validation

If you need validation then you’re not creating art.

That’s not to say that what you’re doing isn’t valuable. But the thing about art is this: your art should be valuable to you, first and foremost. Everything else is a bonus.

If your art isn’t valuable to you then you’re not an artist, you’re a factory. And probably unhappy.

What if nobody sees or appreciates what you do? Is it a waste of time putting your heart into something that gets no outside validation? No. Maybe you’re too progressive. Maybe people don’t understand you. Maybe you’re not good enough right now. It happens. If you’re doing it for yourself, none of that matters. You’ll press on.

Ask Steven Pressfield how long it took before he could make a living from his writing. Actually, you don’t need to ask him, just read his blog.

Why did he continue on for 17 years before getting his first paycheck from his writing? Because he’s an artist.

An artist may want the world to see his art, but he does it because he needs to do it and not to seek validation.

When I started writing this blog I didn’t get much traffic, many comments, or many e-mails. I didn’t do a whole lot to change that either. I just wrote. Every day. And then posted articles on my scheduled post days.

It took 3 months to break 100 RSS subscribers. And that’s only because I did a guest post on ZenHabits.net, which brought a flood of traffic and ~1,000 subscribers all at once.

I was going to write anyway, whether I had 0 readers or 5,000+ readers (you rock!).

I committed myself to this blog. I never had plans to turn it into a business.

Amazingly, these days the income from this blog fully supports my lifestyle and then some. Wow, for something I started without any particularly concrete plans (and definitely no plans to make money) I almost don’t know what to think. I feel like thank you isn’t enough, but thank you.

Is Making Money From Your Art Selling Out?

No. Under one condition: if you support things you don’t believe in to make money then you’ve sold out.

For example, I would never accept money from the dairy or beef industries. They could say “Hey Karol, $1 million to advertise on your blog” and I would say “Hey, eat shit.” ;) (I guess they do eat shit if they eat their own products.)

If, on the other hand, a company that made vegan goods contacted me and wanted me to write about their products I may accept and write about them. I wouldn’t accept cash (that’s not my game), but I have no problem reviewing a product that you and I may find useful (especially if it’s travel related!). If that were to ever happen I would be up-front about it with you, of course. And obviously this isn’t a review site, I’m simply making a point.

So, again, is making money selling out? No. Anybody who thinks you shouldn’t make money with your art if you want to is an idiot. If artists don’t get paid we don’t have art.

Well, let me rephrase that slightly: there will always be art and artists. But I want my favorite artists to be exposed to more people and to create more art.

How and Why I Support My Favorite Artists

I want all my favorite artists to be millionaires (or, you know, whatever they want) so they can keep producing their art.

This is why I supported one of my favorite musicians, Jenny Owen Youngs, when she did her KickStarter. Not only does the $38,543 she raised help with her new record, but since she’s not on a label anymore she’ll have 100% creative control. Awesome! (I even drove from Austin, TX to Fort Worth, TX and bought 2 tickets (myself and a friend) to see her last year. That is supporting her art! hehe)

This is also why you see me promote other blogger’s blog posts every Saturday and, every once in a while, their premium products as an affiliate. Yes, it may produce income for me, but that’s secondary. Yes, it was awesome being Corbett’s #1 affiliate for the Affiliate Marketing For Beginners launch last month. And yes, that is validation. But even if none of that was the case, I want to support people who do good work.

The more people who are able to do good work, the better the world becomes.

Artists need this kind of support. Yes, they need you to spread the word and give non-monetary support. But you know what many of them need more than anything? Cash, so they can continue producing art.

Don’t let anybody make you feel bad if you want to make a living from your art.

I Don’t Understand, You Say Artists Don’t Need Validation and You Say They’re Not Sellouts If They Make Money. But If They’re Making Money, That IS Validation. What’s Going On Karol?!

Good question, Karol. (Yes, I did just refer to myself referring to myself. Or something.)

The difference is actually very simple: A true artist will continue with their art whether they receive validation or not.

Whether I make money from my writing or not, I will continue writing.

Whatever you choose to do, I hope that you’ll continue doing it whether you receive validation or not as well. We need more artists. We need more ass-kickers.

I can’t guarantee you will make a living with your art, but I can guarantee we need you anyway.

—–

If you enjoyed this series, would you mind doing me a big favor and supporting my art? Just click the Facebook Like button or Twitter Retweet button below:

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Why jazz is more interesting than bowling

Why jazz is more interesting than bowling: "

Bowling is all about one number: the final score. And great bowlers come whisker-close to hitting the perfect score regularly. Not enough dimensions for me to be fascinated by, and few people pay money to attend bowling matches.

Jazz is practiced over a thousand or perhaps a million dimensions. It's non-linear and non-predictable, and most of all, it's never perfect.

And yet...

when we get to work, most of us choose to bowl.

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