What You Show Is What They Get!

Technology entrepreneurs, especially those who come from research backgrounds, often tend to make the mistake of assuming too much about potential customers’ interest in technology. Many tend to focus on the capabilities (innards) of the technology and neglect the user-story as mere detail. That assumption could not be more incorrect.

Having been through quite a few sales sessions, we believe that this is likely since technologists are accustomed to interacting in environments with people with similar skills, interests and backgrounds. Selling to customers with microsecond attention spans is worlds apart. The truth of this does not hit like a bucket of cold-water unless one sees much of the audience drifting off to sleep during a sales-pitch.

As the apocryphal saying goes, “perception is reality” and that could not be truer for a startup. Rare is the customer who is interested in the “how” something works, as opposed to “what is in it for me”. A “demo” that does absolutely nothing under the covers, but tells a very good story is a far superior sale than a superb technology that no one understands (read cares about).

While, much of this post might seem rehashed wisdom from other sources, turns out commonsense is very uncommon. An associate recently asked the question “will your mother understand what you do? And if she does…”

We disagree; family, friends etc. are victims of the infamous Hawthorne effect, and anything but proxies for a “customer”. Selling to your “mother” is about as far removed from selling in the real—world, as it is to a fellow researcher.

We have therefore coined a truism for entrepreneurs to keep in mind: What You Show Is What They Get! (WYSIWTG), or its cynical variant "What They See Is What They Get" (WTSIWTG).

Entrepreneurial Wisdom

Here are some pearls of wisdom on entrepreneurship drawn from various sources on the O'Reilly Radar. Anyone who is a current or aspiring entrepreneur should pay particular attention to them. While these may seem very obvious, the import of those statements does not become completely apparent unless one has been through the grind.

Our favorites:

"No means maybe, Yes means maybe":

Some of our most enthusiastic supporters (customers, advisors etc.) today, gave us the cold-shoulder early on. We kept pushing to see what could be done better. An entrepreneur's job is never to take no for an answer. Conversely, a "yes" only means anything until the next customer check, and one should never, ever take anything for granted.

"The best way to get investment is not to need it":

Many startups make the mistake of chasing investors early on hoping to dazzle VCs and angels with the sheer brilliance of their idea and team. Bad news - the odds of that happening are miniscule. As most entrepreneurs would know, focusing on closing sales and getting revenue is the best VC pitch a startup can make. The slide-decks, financials, business-models, team strengths etc. become side-shows, once a startup demonstrates a clear market-need and revenue.

The joke goes:

Q: what is the difference between God and a VC?
A: God doesn't think he is a VC!

As a joke that is funny, but is not intended to be a put-down on VCs. Please remember most VCs are pitched by a huge number of companies, and have to sift through a lot of "noise" to find the best bets. Some entrepreneurs get bitter and disillusioned at being spurned by VCs abruptly.

We think startups best serve themselves by spending all their energy on closing sales and keeping customers happy, and let the investors come to them. Not needing investment is the best pitch an entrepreneur can ever make! That is a pearl of wisdom every entrepreneur should hang onto.

Cognika's new office space!

In order to accommodate our growing workforce and business needs, Cognika has moved offices into newer and larger space at the heart of Boston's famous financial district. We are located in the Ireland Chambers ICCUSA 's Boston Innovation Center incubator space. This space is at the center of Boston's business and commerce and offers an excellent springboard for our fast-growing organization.

If you are in the neighborhood, and are interested in learning more about Cognika, please drop by to say hello. You can see where we are located here, here and here.

"Intelligent" Design

Here is a fascinating list of intelligent and smart design approach (no pun intended): of design following or borrowing from nature. Such cross-domain fertilization is a truly powerful way of cracking some of the hardest challenges of the modern world.

In a previous post we discussed the potential of biomimetics or mimetics in general. What is needed is the ability to connect scientific challenges with potential solutions from learning in nature and a variety of other domains.

Despite valiant efforts by some academicians and some in industry, such a project needs a lot more resources to reach critical-mass. One wishes there was a full-fledged collaborative effort from government, academia and big pharma and other businesses to push for a shared knowledge corpus (a la Wikipedia), but published in a machine-understandable or machine-query-able format that could be leveraged for such cross-domain breakthroughs.

The Semantic Web concept is a a great step in that direction, but we hope baby-steps could be taken by people and organizations just publishing more metadata and better descriptors of their data, on which approaches like the above can be built upon. It certainly need not be a single repository like the Wikipedia, but a just a collection of sources much like the current WWW.