2012年1月20日，Apple 公司發表了免費的電子書製作軟體 iBooks Author 嗎？只要學會這套軟體，您或您公司的產品就能編輯成冊，行銷到全世界囉！電子書的市場在這幾年被廣泛的討論，尤其是網路書店的平均業績早已超越實體書店的情形下，接踵而來的改革正要興起！

環保意識抬頭，紙本出版品面臨許多不利的威脅，加上實體通路的開拓對原創作者來說更是困難重重，許多作者或專家們，想好好的寫一本自己的著作，卻又不願意被出版社挑三撿四又重重剝屑，於是開始興起了自己出版電子書的念頭！

尤其在 iPad 2 上市之後，iBooks 的電子出版品不但超越了傳統的紙本書籍，也超越了像 PDF 這類電子書單調的「紙本電子化」書籍。

更棒的是，電子書行銷術在網路行銷佔有非常大的比重，學會利用電子書來行銷您公司的產品，打響知名度，結合智慧手機 APP，讓您的行銷手法更上一層樓。

Forget about the technology

This might sounds a bit counterintuitive, but the best way to consider technology in your business model is put the technology aside and focus more on your business objectives, and think of the potential strategies to achieve the objectives. What is the current situation and problem? Do you need to increase sales, brand awareness, streamline communications, improve coordinations, or trying to accomplish something else? Don’t get too bogged down in the details of technology features and specifications. The role of technology plays should remain in the background and not cloud your thinking. The technology is just the bit in the middle that supports your strategies and helps realizing your objectives.

Think out of the box

In most cases, it’s better if you don’t constrain yourself by the technology features that you know when suggesting a particular creative solution. Start by clearly outlining the business objectives and allow your technology partner to guide you through the creative process. If they know what they are doing they will help you by expanding your core objectives into a successful strategy. You might want to check if they are technology focused organization or is there a mix of business strategy and technology among their staff? Successful technology implementation is often people driven that requires insights about the user behaviors and social trends, i.e. how do people response to your technology-enabled business model.

Identify the priorities and gaps

Before mobilizing your developers and programmers, we should consider many technologies that is already out there in the market that can save you time and resources from reinventing the wheel. But it is important to understand that there is no one-size-fit-all technology, and your business model should be somewhat unique by its own. Therefore, when finding the right fit of technology for your business model, you should identify the gaps of various vendors. Your technology partner should work closely with you in identifying the gaps and the cost to bridge them. Understanding your business priorities at this point is critical so that your resources are spent on what matters most to achieve your objectives. You and your technology partner must prune the scope skillfully to come out with the minimum viable scope. Breaking your implementation into phases is practical not only to reduce your risk, but also provide you with more opportunities for feedback and improvements later. Thus, you should do this even if you have the budget for a complete implementation.

Include evaluation metrics

You need to know how the situation looks like when you achieve your business objectives. Thus it is important that the technology that you implemented provide you with predefined mechanisms to measure various performance indicators that are aligned with your objectives. These measurements should be structured on various levels and checkpoints that give you the idea on whether “you are on the way to achieve your ultimate objective” or otherwise.

The visionary

I think it is an asset to Coop Centrale to have a visionary CEO like Massimo with a great understanding on how practical application of technology to achieve his vision. He has a close pulse on the market behavior, good understanding on changing customer requirements, “Traditional customer categories are now blurring across hypermarkets, discount stores, and superstores. We see the same customers shopping across all our store formats – something that did not happen in the past.” While at the same time, he has a good grasp on technology to formulate innovative business models that will catch up with these market changes to remain competitive, “We also need a business model that allows us to show customers new prices and products very frequently, on a weekly or even a daily basis. Electronic labeling enables us to customize the information we provide to customers – improving the display and accessibility of products.”

It’s not the technology. It’s the people!

As I always said to my clients that the key of effective technology application is not the technology itself, but the people and process behind it. The people and process are what your business is made up. You should find technologies that support them instead of tweaking your process to suit the technologies. As Massimo nicely put it, “The challenge isn’t really the technology itself but its application to business. Can people across the organization – and particularly our customers – use the technology? So the key is transforming technology into a business enabler.” Based on my experience, tweaking your business process to suit a particular technology will allow result in more redundant process (or shadow process), creating more overhead and inefficiencies.

Bringing vision to life

I was in Europe several months ago for holiday. I was impressed by their innovation of self-scanning checkout counter. Not so much about the technology itself (I don’t think there is anything high tech here), but it is the way they innovate the process to reduce the manpower required, but most important of all, it cut down the waiting time of customers to checkout their items. To me, that is really putting technology into practical use. I can imagine that the implementation was pretty straightforward, but the ongoing observations and feedbacks are the key to success here, “We continually asked these questions and adjusted the technology and training for our employees, as well as the messaging to our customers. Eight years ago, only 1 customer out of 100 was scanning her own purchases. Nowadays, around 50 percent of our customers use self-scanning. It was a really gradual process to get there.” Massimo understood there is always resistance to change, but he advised that we should constantly looking for ways to bring the vision to life in tangible ways via piloting and prototyping.

Nevertheless, I think their achievement on this is merely tip of the iceberg. Although improving the customer experience seems to be the obvious goal, but I believe this is just a stepping stone to their greater goals. Massimo said, “Consumers are much less loyal to retailers and more selective about what they want. So technology will play a role in how we attract customers and maintain their loyalty.” Identifying customers while they checkout their items will allow the company to track their customers buying patterns, and actively engage them to provide compelling experiences and relevant offers that will give new reasons for coming to the stores.

Work with people outside your industry

I like his advice that he shared to encourage more visionary and innovative leaders, “I encourage managers to travel and observe what others are doing, looking at our own industry and especially at other industries, both in Italy and in other countries. We study restaurants, bookstores, and electronics stores – all places where consumers look not just for products but also for entertainment and emotional engagement.” That’s one of the reasons why I think putting my money in traveling is well invested. What I always said is don’t just look for people who are in your industry to work with you. Yes, they may understand better your industry and how your business work, but they may just think like everybody else in your industry. A lot of new ideas are inspired by existing innovations that is replicated or adapted from other industries.

Entrepreneurship is a journey. No, it doesn’t begin with the first step. It actually begins with a decision in your mind to undertake this life’s journey, your journey, whatever it may 
take and even how long it may take.

Entrepreneurship is fun and exciting. I like what Bill Rancic said during the Season 1 of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice,

The cover-your-butt mentality of the workplace will get you only so far. The follow-your-gut mentality of the entrepreneur has the potential to take you anywhere you want to go or run you right out of business – but it’s a whole lot more fun, don’t you think?”

Yes, I very much think so after all these years! More significantly, entrepreneurs are part of the major force of driving the country’s growth and economy, as what Andrew mentioned during the interview. I hope this interview video will give aspiring entrepreneurs out there the true picture of entrepreneurship so that they can decide wisely.

Coming Up Next

Investors such as business angels and VCs usually work with many entrepreneurs. They very likely have their fair share of experience in seeing successful and failed startups, as well as understand the key ingredients in starting successful business. Follow us on our Facebook Fans Page as we share the entrepreneurship lessons from an investor perspective in in our next issue.

Coming Up Next

Find out how Coconect come out with the idea. Learn more about the challenges and obstacles as they are trying to innovate the process? Follow us on our Facebook Fans Page as we discover the scenes behind Coconect in our next issue.

The link for downloading source code of the demo application is provided at the end of the presentation. Thie plug-in framework is a concept that was created in 2003 when I was developing an extensible IP telephony system. You can read more about the project here to see how this concept can be applied in real-world application.

Click here to download the source code for XShow.

More often when people look for software solutions, their first thought is of a technology vendor or software developer, which can be expensive and does not guarantee the best solution. Every business is unique even if they are in the same industry. What works for others might not work for you. Moreover, you want to use technology as a key differentiator or competitive advantage. Do not make the common mistake of focusing on the wrong things. You need to be objective and know how to ask the right questions. Here is a list of some of the responses I have heard to the question, “How did you go about choosing your software solution?”

• “The vendor sales consultant offered us free consultation on planning technology implementation.”
• “Because everybody in our industry was using it.”
• “Our end users liked the user interface.”
• “They told us their software solution can solve everything that we required.”
• “They pretty much convinced us that customized software solutions were the best choice.”
• “They have a large team of programmers and software engineers.”
• “They used a lot of technical jargons and buzzwords. Though I am not clear with them personally, but they seemed to know their stuffs well.”

These reasons can range from possibly acceptable to risky and dangerous. The key to successful technology implementation lies on proper planning. This includes thorough understanding of your short and long term business goals, need, pain and problem, followed by objective evaluation of technology and its functionality that suit your business needs.

Questions To Ask Your Software Consultant

Question #1: How long have you been providing these services?

A consultant that is new to the business may not have the needed experience to assist you. This might increase your risks of a failed implementation. If in doubt, always get a second opinion from another consultant.

Question #2: Who are your previous clients?

It is important to check references and the date of reference. The consultant must have good reputation. Frequent invitation to speak at local conference is a good indicator for this. Old reference dates may indicate that the consultant might not able to provide you with advice that is the most current and up to date.

Question #3: What did your clients like best about your services?

This will give you a very good perspective on the approach and methodology of the consultant. It is very important that they have balanced understanding of business and technology. Successful software implementation is less about technology and more about business. Beware of consultant who doesn’t listen and then come out with a quote or proposal that doesn’t resemble at all what you discussed. They should spend more time understanding your business, vision, process, and problem, instead of just selling and promoting their product features and technologies.

Question #4: Do you resell products, such as hardware and software?

A consultant that only deals with one or two vendors may try to fit your business problem into their solution rather than finding the right solution for your business need. The ideal consultant should be independent and have no ties to any vendor, and able to shop for your choice of products and services.

Question #5: How big is your programming team? What technologies or programming languages do they specialize in?

This will reveal that if the consultant is really a true consultant or a customized software house. The latter usually have a sizable programming team, which incurs high overhead costs where they will typically try to recoup from their fee. Ideally, a consultant should not have a fulltime programming team. This is to ensure maximum flexibility and cost effectiveness, as well as prevent giving opinions that are biased towards their team capabilities. A good consultant will assemble the team with the necessary expertise only after understanding your requirements.

Question #6: Do you personally have any experience in programming?

To minimize implementation risk, the consultant himself must have solid experience in programming to the extent where he can roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty to support the team when necessary. Be cautious with consultants who come from business background and claim that technical skills are not required or relevant until the later stage. The ideal consultant should have strong technical background with good business sense.

Question #7: What is your free structure?

Be extra careful with consultants who do not do planning or do it at no fee. They will probably provide solution that will not work, or just a narrow view of choices, or have hidden fees to recoup those costs later, probably during implementation. Also, make sure that they don’t ask for all the money up front, advance payment of 40 to 60 percent is considered fair.

Question #8: How do you guarantee your services? What type of warranty do you provide?

Most consultants will promise client satisfaction, but how do they guarantee it. Timely delivery is one of the greatest challenges when it comes to software implementation. So make sure your consultant provides some sort of service contract that ensures they can provide on-time implementation.

Introduction

There is nothing more gratifying than the recent decades for those individuals who are in the engineering and technology profession. Since the early 1980s, there is a massive growth of high-tech businesses. These new businesses operate very differently than their traditional peers, such as trading, logistics, manufacturing, banking, and the like. Their business model has very strong focus on its people and knowledge to create values by providing radical solution to problems in ways that the market does not expect. More interestingly, these businesses are founded by engineers or techies who are trained in their profession to have strong analytical and problem solving skills. To mention a few examples: Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 to develop programming languages for various computer systems. He was a computing science student at Harvard College at that time. Leonard Bosack was a computer engineer before he started Cisco Systems in 1984 to create a multi-protocol router that is instrumental in making Internet possible. Acer was created by Stan Shih who was an electronics engineer in 1976. It started off as a distributor of electronic components and microprocessor technologies, and emerged as a PC manufacturer over time. Mark Chang is the founder of JobStreet.com, a company that was formed in 1997 to provide recruitment services over the Internet. He used to be a mechanical engineer prior to that.

A common characteristic among the founders of these companies is, apart from their strong technical background, they do not have extensive exposure to the business world before starting up their business. Although they are proficient in their technical skills and knowledge, as I tried reflecting back on my past experience in various technical domains, and observing technical individuals around me, there are certain personalities or traits within us that are trained over the years as good engineers, which are not really suitable for business start-ups, and to certain extent might even put our business at risk. This article is to share with you my experience over the years, started off as a software developer, and gradually gained my business sense as I ventured into various businesses. The article may contain statements that are blunt and harsh as the objective is to ensure the intended message is presented in a more straightforward manner to prevent any misinterpretation. While you may find the article seems to be prejudice and stereotype in certain sense, I had done a great length of research on the subject to generalize all facts and cases presented here. In order to get the most benefits out of this article, it is advisable to read and understand with an open mind.

Trait #1 – Talking too much technical

“Our product has this intelligent energy analysis module, where it basically uses regression analysis on built-in data cube that allows you to simulate and predict your future energy usage pattern.”

Does that sound familiar to you? If you are like many techies, we tend to be mistaken of selling our product by promoting its features and technology. Unless your audience is technically inclined, otherwise most customers usually do not care much about the internal working (technology), not to mention they might not even able to comprehend it very well. You should instead tell your customer more on how your products can help them, what problem does it solves, how to use it, etc. It is better to avoid talking about your product features before your customer has bought into its benefits. In order to build your rapport quickly, you can share your experience and insights about your customer’s industry, try to relate to your opinion on the problems, needs, and dynamics in the industry. That can greatly increase your credibility in customer’s eyes to make your sales easier.

Trait #2 – Being a Chief Everything Officer (CEO)

“It will be great if we develop our graphics engine based on my PhD thesis, along with the path optimization algorithm that I learnt few months ago.”

We techie are very proud of our technical capabilities to solve virtually any problems. Sometimes, we feel too proud of it until we want to do everything ourselves so that we can get all the credits. Because of that, partnership and strategic alliance is never something that often comes to our mind. What we overlook in this context is the importance of time to market for our product and solution. With limited resources, we should relentlessly look for strategic alliance, partnership, licensing, and the like on the areas that are not our core business offering, which we can leverage on to get into the market as quickly as possible. We had overstressed on our technology superiority, where the fact is compelling product value proposition is more important. High technology does not ensure our business success, good product does. High technology is only good as your barrier of entry for your medium to long term business goals.

Trait #3 – Poor people management

“I am a lot more competent and efficient than my employees, might as well I do it all by myself. What’s the point if I still have to tidy up what they have done.”

Let’s face it, we techie are not the most people oriented person. We often feel that we are a lot more competent than our subordinates, which in most of the time we really are. (Unless you hire someone who is better than you, which in fact you should!) As a result, we end up trying to do all by ourselves instead of delegating to others. Then as your business expands, you will realize sooner or later you will need people to help you out so that you can focus on the tasks that really worth your time. In order to delegate, first we need to lower our expectation level, loose up a bit, let go and let others step in. It is not easy during the initial stage, but we just have to change our attitude and learn to trust our employees, provide room for learning and failure, set up an atmosphere of encouragement. A lot of techies lose control when they grow due to lack of delegation, hiring and training people. Therefore, we need to prepare for delegation to accommodate growth of company.

Trait #4 – Thinking too far

“Let’s make our core engine more robust and generic so that we can sell it in the future for additional revenue. It will be good if we include these functions as well as I believe we might need them later.”

Perhaps it is our strength in analytical skills and abstract thinking, we techie tend to focus too much energy on our long term goals. This often result in creating too much generalized “just in case” components, features, and functionalities during product development. With limited resources, we should always be mindful of the short term return that ensures survival of our business. When overly emphasize on the long term goals, everything is strategic with no projects targeting for short term profitability. This can cause competitive problems if the long term opportunities are high risk and time consuming, where competitors can take advantage of your immediate shortcomings. But having say that, too short term focus will make a company too reactive, than proactive, which can eventually succumb to competition. My advice is to focus on achieving the short term goals, while aligning them towards your long term goals. This means that you need to work on the short term goals in such way that it makes room for your long term opportunities. You should think twice when deciding on developing any “dead end solution”. Any of your short term measure must not sacrifice your longer term opportunities.

Trait #5 – Analyzing too much

“That problem can be actually solved with that algorithm. But what if there are certain rare occasion where… What if under these circumstances… What if… (Endless what if’s.)”

The baggage that comes with good problem analyst and solver is thinking too much, which, to the extent until we are bogged down by the amount of analysis and feel overwhelmed with the project and task to come to a rational conclusion. This is called “analysis paralysis”, a situation where you are frozen by having too many options with no clear answers, thus making you slow to decide as trying to wait for more facts. This “disease” typically afflicts techie as we often need to wait for all information to be in before making decision, which rarely happens in business as you usually will never have all the facts nor will there ever be riskless decisions. We need to learn to trust our instinct to decide in this situation. Sometimes, we just have to do it without thinking too much, bearing in mind there is no such thing as mistakes or wrong moves, only lessons learnt. You will soon realize most of the time, you need to try out your ideas in order to really find out whether they work for your business.

Trait #6 – Misunderstanding business networking

“I am busy developing my product and I don’t have time to network. I will start networking and building up my contacts when I start selling my product.”

Most techies never see business networking as part of their core business activities. Perhaps networking is never really our second nature. But more than anything else, we wrongly understood business networking as selling. The truth is, networking is never about selling. In contrary to what you have heard from those short sighted sales people, the true philosophy of networking is about building up relationships, either with your customers or other business owners. People often deal with those whom they trust, thus you need to gradually build these relationship over time to build your network of contacts that provide support, information, and business referrals. Networking is about forming and nurturing mutually beneficial relationships, which brings you new connections of whom will become good customers. This will ultimately bring you steady stream of business to ensure sustainability and profitability. Business success is about relationships, and building relationships takes time, so regardless of whether you are marketing your product, you have to invest substantial amount of time in business networking.

Trait #7 – Being unnecessarily perfectionist

“I tell you, this user interface will definitely look a lot better if we use some of the user controls that I found last week. Also, if we can implement a few shortcuts and tool bar buttons, it will make our software looks more complete and useful.”

Perfectionist is good only if it does not affect your overall efficiency and productivity. With the limited resources that you have during startup, you can’t have the best of everything. You need to be pragmatic. From time to time, try standing back to relocate your main focus, niche, and primary competitive advantage, and then divert most of your energy on that. Be a prioritization machine, and always conscious of your current objective to create just what is needed to meet the current objective and avoid the risk of feature creep. Once you have more resources, then you have more breathing space to consider what is the next best things to focus for improvement.

Trait #8 – Being ignorant on the sales process

“Build it and they will come. We just have to do mass advertising and emailing to announce our cool product to the world once it is released, and then wait for $$$ to come.”

We techie often think selling is a no-brainer work, which is a lot easier compare to programming. In reality, selling and marketing can be as challenging as, if not more challenging than programming. The reason is because there is no hard and fast rule on successful selling, nor any “sure win” strategy in marketing. It takes more than science and logical thinking to successfully tackle the market dynamics and psychology. The customers often have to be educated about why they need our product. Thus, it is important to know that selling to the first customer usually takes longer than we want or expect. We need to think of various strategies for overcoming customer inertia to change, which is even more critical if you are developing a unique product that the market does not know. The key here is always developing your product with thinking of how to sell in mind. You have to think critically on how the product features and functionalities affect the sales cycle and product lifecycle. Each stage of the sales cycle and product lifecycle will probably need different resources, tools, and skills to optimize sales results. Thus, it is important not to spend too much on product development and overlook the budget requirements and process of sales and marketing.

Trait #9 – Being defensive on changes

“Sorry, but I can show how your suggestion can be done thru this user interface too. In fact, I would prefer we stick to this interface as I had done a lot of research before developing it.”

Whenever our customers suggest some changes or a new feature to our product, rather than defending blatantly our design and decisions (which most techies tend to do), the customers will be more appreciative if we simply thank them, validate their ideas, and leave our justifications later. We always think that our product is the best thing, which the fact is, what customers think, what they want, is more important. If you do most of the talking, it’s hard to learn much about your customer. Instead, try to ask powerful questions that are open-ended and allow your customers or prospects to give you more information or insight. Rather than we keep schooling the customers, it is more beneficial to let them teach us. An interesting note is that a lot of entrepreneurs often end up doing business, products and services that is very different than what they thought customers need, and what they want to do. This reinforces the point that we need to learn by doing, listening, getting feedback, and adapting it into our business.

Trait #10 – Having weak determination

“Wow, this looks like going to be the next big thing! It is a lot more promising than what we are doing now. I think we should grasp the opportunity and do this now.”

As a techie, we are taught to be always at the forefront of technology. For that, we love new things, especially cutting edge technology. In our mind, we know that determination and focus is the key to success, but in our heart we are often struggling to resist the techie urge. The grass always seem greener on the other side of our fence, which in fact maybe due to our shallow understanding of the other side. It is so easy to want to go off and do new things. Thus, it is important to constantly remind us to be persistent and patient. If you think about it, your clients might confuse if you try to do or offer too much. We must have a clear identity in the market at all times where our customers know exactly who we are, and what we do, what are our business objective and priority.

Conclusion

I had shared with you on some of the behaviors I believe we techies should be aware of, especially if you have plans to start up your own business in the future. If you can keep these in mind at all times throughout your entrepreneurship journey, I have no doubt that your business success will be just around the corner. Your technical skills combined with good sense in sales, marketing, and management, will make you a savvy businessman. Your insight in the business domain will allow you to create a viable and attractive business model for your customers, while your extensive technical knowledge will enable you to explore various implementation strategies and find one that best supports your business model and priorities. If you are developing a product, you are able to ensure it is both technically viable and economically sound with an actionable go to market strategy.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Alex and Danny at TOBlender.com for making this article more lively through the comic illustrations.