SocialWire

or I’m going to a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home. I’m going to a city with a mixture of people from different parts of the world; possibly the most European of all American cities… to a city where the bay area is a playpen of countercultures. There might not be a heaven but there is…

Breaking News (drumroll please ):

Yeah, you guessed it right. I’m heading to west, from Istanbul, to San Francisco !

Thank You GROU.PS

And I have to say a big thank you to my teammates at GROU.PS, especially to our CEO Emre, who actively helped me in my job-transition period. It was great time architecting and developing GROU.PS‘ web, desktop and mobile JavaScript front-end. I am sure the knowledge and experience I’ve gained at GROU.PS will help me do great things at SocialWire.

(names are in no specific order)
Thank you Emre Sokullu, Mustafa Sapcili, Bige Akar, Serkan Alp, Alper Kanat, Ergin Aykut, Ahmet Bulut, Engin Dumlu, Mehmet Emek, AHK(test sifir sifir…), Jennifer Lewis, Roberta Ciftci, Omer Ongun, Ipek Oren, Enes Ozden, Bora Sezer, Merve Sokullu, Sean Yu, Taner Yurttas, Ahmet Tatari, Mustafa Ozyurt… for sharing a wonderful year with me! You are such a great team, and I’m sure you’ll achieve great things together.

Hello SocialWire

In a few weeks’ time, I will be leaving GROU.PS and start joining an equally dynamic, clever and disruptive team at SocialWire, as a JavaScript Hacker. I am really really excited to start adding value to, improving and extending SocialWire.

The job at SocialWire is really exciting and challenging. And that’s not only about the job:

At SocialWire not only I see a bunch of multi-skilled genius minds whose knowledge and talents overlap and complement each other, but I also sense SocialWire team is far more than the sum of its individual contributors. At SocialWire, people are willing and capable change the way world turns around!

Besides, San Fransico is one of the greatest cities to live for a geek like me .

Hasta Siempre…

Dear GROU.PS team! I’ll be going to good hands . And me being physically apart does not mean I’m away from you. I will be more than excited to hear your good news. Keep on doing what you do best, and change the social era like never before!

"this" is easier than being in a startup - Believe me; even for a juggler everything is stable and clearly defined.

If you are startup, chances are that you are experiencing wild competition. And by that token every single user you have is precious:

Failure to manage your users’ expectations and experience will and can result in disaster.

The Internet has lowered the barrier to entry for most services to “non existent”. Event with a tiny initial budget, you can have your dream idea up an running in no time.

Whatever you are dreaming about there are at least 10 already-established services on the Internet waiting to become your competitors. Moreover, there are a dozen of similar services growing in (so called) “stealth mode” which will be entering to the marketplace by the time you are preparing for your launch for the next big thing.

Yes, the arena is harsh; ever-changing; and strongly competitive.

And I strongly believe, in such a crowded marketplace, where…

• the cost of switching is virtually none,
• and the users’ choices are virtually infinite,

“user experience” is the key competitive advantage and the main differentiator that makes users select your service instead of dozens of alternatives around.

To make it simpler: It all boils down to “relationship”. The relationship you have with your user-base has vital value and impact for the growth and profitability of your business:

The ultimate goal in user satisfaction is to have…

not happy…

not loyal…

wait for this…

“devoted” users.

Why?

Because loyalty is “logical”. “Loyal” users come back because they get their needs and problems solved, which makes sense.

“Devotion”, on the other hand, is an emotional connection to you, your brand, your company, and your services.

• “Devotion” tweets about you,
• “Devotion” blogs about you,
• “Devotion” covers your a** you when you make a mistake,
• “Devotion” shouts your name in wall graffiti.

That’s why I think “Customer Devotion” should be the ultimate goal of every business leader.

Teams and individuals that are inventive, and imaginative in creating experience with their users that lead to “devotion” will be the real winners.

And I have three questions for you:

• What are you and your team doing right now to be sure that today’s users don’t belong to your competitors tomorrow>?
• How are you managing and improving your users’ experience with you, your organization, and your service?
• (This is a tough one) Are your users “loyal”, “devoted”, or just plain bored?

Look around: Every single one of your competitors is scrambling for business. And with the vast majority of alternatives around, the competition is beyond fierce. When you lose your users to your competitors, it impacts every single individual in your enterprise.

Your best defense and your competitive differentiator is your ability to create great experience for your users.

That’s why I love being a part of grou.ps, and that’s what I believe makes grou.ps distinctive:

Yes, we have the best technical team you can find around. And that’s only one side of the coin. What we rock is our loyalty and fanatical support to our users:

We think, inspect, analyze, and provide solutions to our users’ needs and wants 24/7.

We are devoted to our users. And we experience the same devotion in return.

• We are, and will always be, enthusiastic, and “in tune” with our users.
• We are, and will always be, working to the best of our abilities to provide them a wonderful experience.
• We are, and will always be, devoted to our users.

That’s why grou.ps is a growing, profitable, and fun place to work no matter how harsh the competition is raging in the marketplace.

At least, that’s what I think; and I’d love to have your opinions.

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

Today, I’d like to announce an important change in my life:

I’m leaving LiveGO and joining grou.ps.

I joined LiveGO (when it was known as MessengerFX) in 2008, just over 3+ years ago. I’ve had many roles there including front-end architecture, backend design, widget and module development, security auditing, project management… and many things that are hard to give an exact definition of — it’s a startup you know.

During my time at the company, I’ve had an excellent opportunity to lead and mentor my team on JavaScript module development best practices, the importance of thinking library independently, important issues to consider when developing a high-performance fat-client single-page web application, why the heck the goddamn memory “leaks“, the importance of keeping things simple and neat, the fact that optimization without measurement is a useless effort, always being skeptical and asking questions, trusting nothing including themselves, the importance of progressive enhancement and graceful degredation,
thinking about the end user first and giving utmost importance to user feedbacks, tips and tricks to make a web application lightning fast

I think I’ve been successful in my endeavour, and I was able to add value to my company as much as I can. And I’d like to thank everyone for bearing to work with me: (the names below are quasi-random, mostly in cubicle order )

I’d like to thank Cihan Topçu for he always managed to look things at a different perspective,
I’d like to thank İlyas Osmanoğulları for he always observed, analyzed and moved with confidence and managed to solve any technical problem with ease,
I’d like to thank Gülistan Turhan van der Linden for she is an excellent business manager and she know how to reflect the true value of the company,
I’d like to thank Niels van der Linden for his ongoing effor to learn Turkish, and also his business insight he’s given and the value he’s added to the company,
I’d like to thank Furkan Öçal, for he has been always kind, calm, friendly and professional, and he know his suff well,
I’d like to thank Seyran Gülnar for she was a great office manager, who can simultaneusly organize a multitude of things,
I’d like to thank İlter Yıldız for he knows how to drink tequila, and also for he knows design patterns by heart, and can trustably optimize any back-end infrastructure to run under high traffic load,
I’d like to thank my name-sake Volkan Vardar for he’s an excellent leader who knows how to keep calm, think reasonably, and find a rational solution, even under the most stressful situations,
I’d like to thank Erdem Erdoğan for his analytical mindset, and his ability to patiently listen to the “infinite energy machines” nonsense for hours, which is a pain in the rear for an “Applied Physics” major,
I’d like to thank Gizem Şahin for she was the best testing lead, who knows her stuff well,
I’d like to thank Kamrul Ahsan for he was a great tester,
I’d like to thank Ercan Çalışkan for his keen design eye,
I’d like to thank Can Gürbüz for his obsession with details, and his ability to use photoshop without a mouse,
I’d like to thank Ahmet Ardal for he is a tirelss developer, knows how to think like an engineer, and he also can stand to write Objective C,
I’d like to thank Gürer Özen for the little chocolate muffins he brought to the office in the mornings, and for his open-source wisdom of course,
I’d like to thank Yusuf, for he is the CEO,
I’d like to thank Faik Uygur his ability to write and compile code without using a GUI, and also for his ability to manage a grid of servers without hassle,
I’d like to thank Fatih Buğan for he can stand Ferit 8 hours per day, and for he is an excellent project lead, and he’s a top-notch engineer,
I’d like to thank Ferit, for he is… “Ferit” — be yourself buddy, no matter what they say; I’d also like to thank him for his creative mindset, that “at times” he comes up with solutions, which fit right into the problem, that no one ever can imagine,
I’d like to thank Fatih Hayrioğlu, for he is the greatest CSS/HTML/HTML5 guru you can find around,
I’d like to thank tosb… Orhan Ekici for his multi-tasking ability, and his thirst to learn and implement new things,
I’d like to thank Gönül abla, for her wonderful sandwitches, and for her ability to look after a horde of crazy and messy developers.

…

Starting next Monday, I will be working at grou.ps as a Platform Engineer, and I see this as an excellent opportunity to learn a lot of things and equally add value to where I am.

Thank you grou.ps for accepting me aboard

I’m sure it wil be wonderful !

Cheers,
Volkan Özçelik,
JavaScript Samurai & a fresh new groupie.

Each startup has its ups and downs.

Every successful startup boots up with a great idea, and then grows.

This growth, more or less, goes through
the following stages:

• The Seed Stage
• The Start-up Stage
• The Second Stage
• The Third Stage
• The Bridge/Pre-public Stage
• The Exit stage

That’s what’s written in the textbooks. Pretty straightforward, huh?
That’s also how VCs look at the point at hand

… but from the founders’ perspective the can of worms look “very”, very different

The Actual Startup Life Cycle

Here’s a more in-depth view of a startup’s lifecyle.

Well, that’s what I call complicated .

But that’s not everything.

Due to the very nature of the startup, the team keeps unintentionally digging a hole for themselves deeper and deeper…

A Decline Begins…

Any startup that has passed beyond its seed stage will have

• Overconfidence due to initial rapid successes,
• Self-deception and myopia,
• Lack of flexibility,
• or, on the contrary, being too much flexible and quickly depleting resources,
• and not being able to create a sustainable cash flow

The biggest problem is, how, and for how long, the business will support this negative cash flow.

These problems will sooner, than later, turn the startup upside down:
Employees who lose their trust will jump ship. Moreover there will be layoffs, panic and chaos.

This decline phase may be the quickest end of the unprepared.

The Resurrection

“I believe what doesn’t kill you simply makes you… stranger”
– The Joker (Heath Ledger)

For the selected few who survive the storm, a very painful resurrection begins:

• The team will bond together, more than ever, to make their dream come true.
• The team will share the good, and the not so good, more than ever.

Isn’t it usually from understanding of the not so good that the best emerges?

The leaders forcefully choose to be reborn from their ashes.
They have no other option but to support this renewal.

Choosing this renewal is painful, and it requires tremendous commitment.

• The leaders adopt the behavior they want to see in the organization (modeling),
• The leaders communicate a vision in a way that causes others to adopt it as their own (inspiration),
• The leaders challenge the processes and adopt change (innovation),
• The leaders create a climate and opportunity to leverage ideas (action),
• The leaders implant enthusiasm into their organization (passion)

If you are the founder of a startup, you had better burn the following into your head:

In these hard times, having a good team or even an excellent team isn’t enough.

You have to create a “creed“; namely, a group of highly-devoted people:

• A creed who trust each other without question,
• A creed who have similar ways of thinking,
• A creed who have similar ways of learning,
• A creed who have similar ways of reacting,
• A creed who have similar ways of problem-solving,
• And a creed who have similar ways of collaboration.

Further, this team needs to be bond together under a leader (guess who ) they trust and respect.

• They must not be afraid of any type of challenge;
• They must be willing to walk through fire when their leader asks them;
• And they must believe they deserve to be the ones that will change the world.

This is the genesis of a success. Don’t nail it, and you’re not going to get much sleep.

Do this and you and your team can handle anything.
Don’t, and you’ll be heading to the dead pool.

Let me be more straight:

Fuck up your team, and no matter how much you tell yourself otherwise, you’re fucked!

The door is open, the question is do you have the courage to pass through to a better place?

.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to him. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw

There are many hard-working entrepreneurs who work tirelessly, night and day. Most of these –so called– “hard-working” entrepreneurs fail in pain.

Don’t get me wrong: working hard is not a bad thing, and working tirelessly is a necessary evil for any startup.

Though, working hard is not a magic wand that creates great products and successful inventions. Most of the time, we work hard to on the wrong things, forgetting that working on the right set of problems is far more precious.

…

While developing LiveGO, we’ve worked so hard as a team. I still am, thinking about LiveGO, optimizing LiveGO, researching and identifying potential issues, proposing solutions, managing the exceptionally talented LiveGO team, and hands-on coding LiveGO… all waking hours.

Though when I retrospect, I find that part of this “working hard” time was actually nothing more than “going nuts”, in the following sense:

• I can confess that we hardly ever thought about a roadmap,
• From time to time, we got paralyzed by over-analyzing our competitors,
• As a group of truly bright founders & managers we switched between several ideas, prototypes, and implementations, causing us lose months of developer time.
• As a team of truly bright developers, we re-invented the wheel “a lot” ,
• Corollary to that, at times, we worked on things just to be working on things,
• Moreover, we, at times, panicked, and feared failure — knowing that fear has never been an effective time-management strategy,

Never the less, LiveGO is currently an excellent all in one communication mid-point, addressing the needs of a certain niche. (Yeah, I know it has “issues” to be sorted out — we are in beta man! why not give us a feedback?)

Despite our strategic mistakes, which might be fatal in any other alternative condition, we succeeded. We are still growing, and getting hundreds of thousands of visits per day!

…

Confused? Reap the Benefits of Being Confused

You can’t learn anything unless you are confused.

When people work “hard” either they usually know exactly what they are doing –or– they haven’t the foggiest idea what to do, but they are blowing their minds off. For that reason, they haven’t learned to reap the benefits of being “confused”.

LiveGO is an ongoing success:

• We are successful not because of our failures,
• We are successful, not because we’ve worked hard,
• We are successful, not because of our lack of organization,
• We are successful, not because we are perfectionists,

We are successful, because we literally “know” the right thing to work on:

• We’ve paid attention to what was going around us,
• We’ve seen “patterns” that had not been visible at the first sight,
• We’ve listened to our audience, and we’ve learned what they want and need,
• We’ve analyzed our target market’s behaviors, and habits,
• We self-controlled our egos, and saw things as is, rather than how we wanted them to be,
• We put ourselves in the right place where there’s a free flow of information, and we took a meaning out of it.

Knowing when to shift towards implementing, knowing you’ve found the right thing to work on and disengaging from the information fire hose… That’s the hard part. And, by the same token, that’s the most valuable part .

Sometimes the harder you work; the more difficult it can be to maintain the strategic detachment necessary to find the right problem. As for how to choose the right problem Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” is an excellent talk.

What I’ve learned in the past one year of LiveGO, is that you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing.

…

Inventions are born from insight. Creativity is born from play. Focus is far more important than hard work. And panic is the enemy of it all. So,

In order to succeed, working hard is necessary, but not sufficient:
You have to work hard on the right thing as well

Finding “the” problem to work on, is far more important than exhausting labor and effort.
And finding the right problem depends on how well you can interpret the context you live in.

Working hard doesn’t mean you will achieve success at the end.

It’s all about the dolce trio:

• working hard,
• being persistent and confident,
• And having great ideas

And not to mention, wheel-spinning is hard; but hard work on something you love is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Life’s short, pick things that make a difference, share with others, be excited what you’re doing whatever it is, and enjoy your journey along the way

Do what you love, and love what you do.

Now go forth, and do great work!

.

With tens of thousands of twitter followers, I’m kinda famous
But that’s not what I’d like to be. That’s not “near” what I’d like to be. I want to help change things, or I want to help things change. I don’t want to be well-known. I want to be “influential”.

What good is fame when you have no influence at all? Whether it’s the Twitter followers or Facebook fan pages, it all applies. It doesn’t matter what the number is. What matters is whether you can influence people or not.

So let’s start from the bottom of it. Influence has different meanings in different contexts.

It is:

• A power to affect persons or events,
• An ability to cause something without any direct or apparent effort,
• A charm, that is, a cognitive factor that tends to have an effect on what you do.

More important than what influence is, is what it is not:

Being well-known has nothing to do with being influential. Take, Britney Spears, for example. There’s no doubt that she has a great personal reputation. She’s a celebrity. None the less, you won’t consider that she is influential — unless you’re a 10 year old girl

Famous people often fail to realize the amount of influence they carry, never realizing the damage they have done. Influential people realize the gift they carry, and become famous through their actions.

You can be a celebrity in a day. A viral video can make you famous in a day. Do you remember the first Coke-Mentos experiment — The video has achieved millions of views in a single day, with one shot. In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

But certainly influence is harder to earn and keep. To be famous all we have to do is draw attention (which is admittedly often difficult, but can happen more or less at random). But in order to be influential we must…

• Have something of value to say,
• And earn the respect of our audience.

The problem with fame is that it fades eventually. But if you don’t know what you’ll do next when more people know who you are, then you’re doomed to be forgotten.

It’s true that fame and influence, most of the time, go hand in hand. They are not mutually exclusive. Famous people can be influential also and influential people can become famous because of their influence. It’s hard to influence people unless they look for you for advice. So there is no influence without some degree of fame.

Influence is neither the amount of followers in your network, nor it is the number of people who are about to hear what you’ll say.It’s your intention, attention and ability to affect the decisions, behaviors, ideas, and actions of others.

You can be widely recognized, honored or acclaimed. But your personal brand and your
reputation can only make you famous, not “influential”.

An influential person

• Knows how to impact the way people think,
• Motivates people to do the right things at the right times,
• Inspires action and triggers social change,
• Challenges beliefs that they’ve accepted,
• Makes people look at things from a different perspective,
• Is a trendsetter, she inspires people with unseen and undisclosed ideas.

But with great power comes great responsibility. If you have great impact over someone’s vision, you should use it wisely. You should not force your ideas on people to make them change. You should let them have a look at their beliefs, behaviors, the way they do business without forcing them.

You should be a catalyst, and have people say “Why have I never thought of it in just this way before?!” I bet it will be the most gratifying response you’ll ever receive

Fame is trivial. Influence is powerful.

Fame is simply “brand recognition”. On the other hand, influence is the ability to fluctuate your audience’s actions.

Fame can be an empty reward and quite a bit of a hassle. Positively influencing someone else is almost always rewarding. Influence comes to those who don’t specifically seek fame, but instead work for accomplishing change.

In this age of social media, everybody wants to be somebody. But when forced to answer the follow up question “now that you’re famous so what will you do next?” many don’t know what to say.

So what do you do to be influential? What do you do change the world? I’d be glad to hear your opinions.

The typical plot of the yield capacity or value of returns of a successful business venture over time is similar to this graph.

The horizontal section in the middle of the graph is the plateau region. At that phase, many entrepreneurs think that they are not reaping the benefits of their efforts, they get tired, they think they had enough, and they may eventually quit. That’s not a wise decision though

The length of this plateau region depends on

• The type of risk taken,
• And the composition of your target audience (are they open to innovations, are they leaders, or followers, are they risk-takers, or risk-avoiders… and the like).

None the less, you should keep in mind that this is a transient period, and you have to keep on doing what you do best as an entrepreneur: Innovate.

If your target audience really cares about your product, you’ll experience and exponential increase in the value gained after the end of this period.

I prefer to talk about the increase in the value gained instead of increase in profit margins. Because the value you gain need not be monetary. In fact, the intangible assets you accumulate over time are far more important than your tangible assets. Some of these intangible assets are:

• The increase in the brand awareness of your target audience,
• The increase in your audience’s the loyalty and trust to your brand,
• The changes in the vector, velocity, smoothness, degree of influence, and persistence parameters of your product.

Think about this:

Would you like to be the first brand that people recall when they think of a certain market niche, would you like to be a brand that the world trusts and prefers without any doubt… or would you prefer $10B in cash?

If you have an entrepreneurial mindset, you already have the answer

Be proud of what you do. And dedicate yourself to it.

• Danger,
• Stress and anxiety,
• And loss.

However risk does also have positive counterparts that are discarded most of the time:

• A higher than expected return on investment,
• An unexpected increase in your brand’s recognition,
• And an unforeseen acquisition of popularity.

Clever Risk-Taking

…and the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
– Erica Jong

Not all risks are equal. To gain recognition, to be popular and to earn profits you need to learn to take a controlled amount of risk. Being able to define what risk is and to take a controlled amount of it requires foresight, experience, and emotional intelligence.

To exemplify, assume that after careful analysis and weeks of research marketing, you find out that no one in the market produces “artichoke flavored ice creams”. Lucky you! You’ve spotted out a niche market segment that no one else has discovered ever before! Moreover, in the future you can produce “cauliflower” and “spinach” flavored ice creams as well.

Do people need, and will people want artichoke-flavored ice creams? — that’s the risky part

The higher the risk you take, the greater the returns you get. Corollary to that: “The higher the risk, the greater the change of loss”.

Make clever judgments when taking risks.

Less than 0.01% of the world’s population is born to be influential. Take, for example, Steve Jobs or Seth Godin, or Perez Hilton, or Om Malik. If you are one of them, that’s good for you: It’s dead easy to convince your audience to do anything you like. You even can sell artichoke-flavored ice creams!

However, chances are that, you belong to the 99.99% remaining, and you’ll need to think thrice before taking risks

What defines risk is not only what it brings you when you succeed, but also what it takes away from you, when you fail. There are risks that can ruin your life upon failure. Deciding what risks to take requires careful judgment, careful reasoning, and careful consideration of the risk’s return on investment.

Let’s go back to our “artichoke flavored ice cream” example:

• If we succeed and convince a tiny fraction of the market to purchase “artichoke flavored ice creams” (who will buy it anyway?!) your profit per unit of ice cream will not exceed if you were to sell say, vanilla-flavored ice creams. May be you would try put a lower price tag than you would want to gain market penetration. In short, you will have a low return on investment.
• But you will have a high loss if you fail: People will ridicule you, they’ll think that creating “artichoke flavored ice creams” was a brainless and childish idea from the beginning. All your research and development efforts will be thrown away. Moreover, if you want to produce, say, vanilla-flavored ice creams later, nobody will buy from you because of the bad reputation you’ve gained.

Consequentially, “artichoke flavored ice cream” job has a high amount of risk, and a lower amount of return in comparison. Which is not what “clever risk taking” is.

Some examples of clever risk-taking are:

• You confess your love to the one you adore.
  • What you lose if you fail: meeting with a refusal, hence lack of motivation, and feeling ashamed for a considerably smaller period of time.
  • What you gain if you succeed: Living together happily ever after.

• You ask for a salary increase.
  • What you lose if you fail: You’ll not get the increase in your salary — not a big deal.
  • What you gain if you succeed: Your boss will think about what you’ve done to the company. You’ll gain his admiration and get the raise you want.

• You start sharing your ideas and experience in a brand new blog.
  • What you lose if you fail: You’ll have a public diary, where no one else but you read.
  • What you gain if you succeed: You’ll have an overwhelming increase in your subscribers, and have a recognized personal brand. You’ll have an audience (or a “Tribe”, as Seth mentions, that understands, listens to and contributes to your ideas. (as a sidenote: it has been only a few weeks, but this blog’s visitors are increasing exponentially, which shows that I’m doing the right thing )

Have a Perspective

Think big, think bold, think ahead.

To be able to take clever risks, you should have foresight. Having foresight will enable you plan and aim for a long-term success.

If you plan for the long term, you’ll thoroughly analyze, and deeply think about the results of your actions, where you’ll make healthier decisions.

Another advantage of long-term planning is that you’ll not lose your motivation when you face with obstacles on your way.

…

Are you a risk-taker? If not, you’re already taking risks

Some peaople dream of success, while other people live to crush those dreams

original image via: despair.com

Most people are afraid of change, and that’s okay, because change leads to uncertainty. And uncertainty may lead to failure. However, in our ever-changing world resisting change has much more fatal consequences than not taking the risk of change.

If you want to be successful in business — or life in general — you ought to possess certain traits:

Learn to Trust Yourself

There will be times when you doubt whether you can achieve your goal:

• People around you may discourage you.
• Your fear of failure may itself be an obstacle.

That’s why trusting in your knowledge, skills, and abilities comes first. You should have %100 trust in yourself. You should be sure that even if the world turns upside down you will survive.

Listen to what people say about you and your business carefully. Comments are your most valuable assets. They are tools for your development. Re-evaluate yourself and your business in the light of others’ opinions.

Be aware of your weaknesses. Similarly, be aware of your strengths. Focus on your strengths, and have the determination and courage to eliminate your weaknesses.

Keep in mind that all the obstacles and barriers ahead of you are in fact opportunities that can take you one step further.

Learn to Take Risks

If you don’t take risks, you’ll stand still.

Obvious, isn’t it? However, to put risk-taking into practice you have to be a master in trusting in yourself.

In addition, don’t take more risk than you can carry on your shoulders. I mean don’t put all your stakes onto an “all or nothing” game that has the possibility to eventually ruin your life. Take a controlled amount of risk, and separate your risks into more than one basket.

For instance quitting a full-time job and starting a freelance career is a risk on its own. So if you are to do so, don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ll have a stable cash flow from day one. To take the risk of quitting a job:

• You need to have deposited enough money to sustain your living for at least 6 months.
• You should already have a strong business network (growing a business network obviously takes more than a few months),
• And most of all you should have a thick skin against criticisms (you should have the will to selflessly analyze them),
• And you should have the guts to seek and destroy your weak points.

Learn to Grow Your Network

Build your business network before you need it.

Sooner or later, your business will grow to a certain point where you will not have enough time or resources to take it to the next level. At that time, you will need to build a team of quality professionals to grow your business further. And that’s when your network comes into play. Building a business network takes a long time. Build one before you need it

Learn to Manage Your Colleagues

Assume that you’ve taken the risk and grown your business to the next level. You’ve built a team of like-minded individuals. You may even be outsourcing certain parts of your project.

In order to plan your time and allocate your resources efficiently, you have to manage people you work with.

Draw a clear roadmap, and determine milestones for your project. Once your team reaches a milestone, discuss the state of the project with your colleagues. This will help them evaluate the current state of the business, and understand what you expect them to do next.

Your colleagues may be gurus in their fields, or they may be your best friends, or they may have tens of years of experience. But if you think that they’ll understand what you want her to do as soon as you tell them, think twice

Be sure that your colleagues fully understand what you say.

Keep in mind that your colleagues have a totally different mindset than yours:

• They have a different starting points,
• They have different priorities,
• And they have different initial assumptions.

Be sure that they have fully understood what you want them to do, and what they’ll do, and how they’ll do it.

Managing people is a talent that’s not easy to achieve. But if you want to be successful in your business, this talent is a must have.

Learn to Manager Your Customers

Don’t think that your customers can describe what they expect from you in detail. Most of them do not know what they actually want. They require your lead as a business partner. That’s why they are your customers.

You have to understand what your customers want from their (mostly vague) description of what they require to get done. You need to direct them by asking further questions to clarify the job description. Customers are not always right.

You are the expert in your field, and that’s why your customers have contacted you: To solve a problem that’s out of their domain of experience. Therefore, you have the ability to take the lead, come with a solution that exceeds their expectations, and educate your customers.

Managing your customers is a mutual relationship. Your customers are not a green bag of dollars; they are partners that you’ll grow a mutual lifelong relationship. Every satisfied customer is a key to a stable and ever-growing business network.

Learn to Brand and Market Yourself

Nobody is interested in what you do.

Don’t ever hard-sell your product or service, it will not work. It’s not about you; it’s about the community

The more people recognize you, the more value you have. And that’s one true way of gaining trust and recognition:

Add value to the community.

Think different, and be different. Provide tools that people will benefit. Honestly share your ideas and experience without expecting anything in return.

Learn to Learn

The world is changing faster than ever before: We’re talking about location-aware social networks, semantic search, content syndication, podcasts, microblogs… None of them were imaginable 15 years ago. 15 years ago, there was no Google! Can you imagine that?!

If you want your business to survive, you also have to learn to evolve and adapt to change.

Spare a few hours each day to develop your knowledge, skills and abilities to keep up with the rest of the world.

Be your own customer.

That’s all for now I’ll be glad to hear your ideas and suggestions. Feel free to share your comments and add value

Leave the “will do it for food” approach aside and think of your job and your relationship to your target audience as:

• “I add value to you (as a customer) with my products and services”
• “My services satisfy a special need or want of you (better than others)”
• “… and you (the customer) may not be aware of this need or want at all”

In short your job is not about creating a decent product or service. It’s about interaction and telling an authentic story.

Be Creative

Nobody wants a “me too” product. You have to be different, you have to be authentic.

• You need to fill a niche,
• You need to satisfy a need that none of your competitors have thought of,
• And to achieve this, your primary ingredient is your creativity.

Creativity does not happen to come all at once. Contrarily, creativity is a long process in which you continuously ask questions, focus, and think about your product. If you want to succeed, you have to live your product. And to live your product, you need to know your product:

• What are the top five properties that make your product or service unique/different/genuine?
• Why should people use your product but not use one of your competitors’?
• What are the aces in your pocket? (What is your competitive advantage? What is your unique selling proposition?)

If you are having difficulties answering any of these questions, then you should stop right now and elaborate them before diving deep into developing your product.

It’s not the Product, It’s the Relationship

You are not selling a product. You are building a lifelong relationship.

People resist expressing why they choose a product or service they use. And that’s understandable: It’s their weakness. Once you catch this weakness, you’ll be able to trick them buy anything you want.

Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Would you want to be easily deceived by publicly expressing your weaknesses? No way . Nobody wants to be perceived as an idiot.

Stop sales-oriented thinking. Think about building relationships instead.

Build a strong, lifelong relationship with your audience.

Be honest. Be genuine.

That’s it for now. See you next week