Is It Time for Price Per Square Foot to Die?
Connect:Homes is a pretty cool modular housing company. They’ve adapted their designs so that that fully prepared units can be shipped anywhere using standard industrial transporting practices. (Shipping containers.) That’s smart.
Unfortunately, the company is using the standard real estate metric of price per square foot to show that its competitive. They’re proud of the fact that $145/sf is their starting point.
I think that’s odd.
To put that number in perspective, in Austin you can buy a nice four bedroom house in one of the best school districts in the country for $80/sf (including land). The Connect:Homes pricing doesn’t include land.
So, if you compete (or market) on pricing per square foot, you’re going to lose. Why?
Because it’s irrelevant to the value you’re providing. The prefab/modular housing world offers: more flexibility, modern aesthetics, faster construction, energy efficient design. I know that if I throw down $X on a prefab house, it may cost more upfront than a traditional home, but there are savings to be had over time. Plus, and this is pure guesswork, but I suspect prefab buyers are more interested in forever homes than temporary (decade interval) housing.
That’s what Connect:Homes should be focusing on. And they can do it in language that makes sense to the real estate market. Call this metric net price per square foot. Use the formula Cost-Savings/Square Feet over a say 10 year timeline. Make the math transparent, let your users punch in their own estimates and compare.
Get other prefab companies to adopt the metric and suddenly you’ve redefined the market.
For a real kicker, use a chart to compare this with the net cost of a traditional property (which would likely increase given energy/maintenance costs etc).
Review: Founders at Work – Stories of Startups’ Early Days
If you read too much conceptual or technical stuff, you can lose sight of the other side of business. The human side. And, as everyone who is anyone is fond of saying, investors don’t invest in ideas, they invest in teams. People make it happen.
So I went looking for a startup-focused book that focuses on the humans behind the people. Not a lot of choices. This book tries to do that. It succeeds in a way.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
Basically, Livingston sat down with the key nodes (from the ‘70s on – Apple to Hotmail to Delicious) and discussed their experiences building their companies. She transcribed the interviews. Which can be great if done well, but that’s not the case here. The questions jump around in random order. There’s a lot of casual talking. Which is okay at first, but quickly becomes tedious in a ~500 page book.
When you do find the meat in the fat, it’s great. Mitch Kapor’s interview was particularly awesome. (I first came across him when I read Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
“I want to work with entrepreneurs who are personally passionate, committed, and believe in what they’re doing. Not all entrepreneurs are like that…
You think Mark Cuban really cared about what they were doing at Broadcast.com? This is not to criticize him as a businessman — I’m just observing — but I don’t think he had a fundamental passion about that business.
There was an opportunity, he saw it, he built something, he sold, and he cashed out at the right time.”
Throughout, uou learn how being an amateur helps build amazing stuff, because you just don’t know any better. You learn how painful picking the wrong investors can be. You learn about how second time entrepreneurs want more control. You learn about how each generation of tech eats then builds off the last.
Perhaps most importantly, you can see how these pieces all fell together to create the modern Valley. Lean. Customer development. Better/smarter investors. Tech over brand. Each is a reaction to some of the excesses these founders describe.
You see how the DNA evolved. And that’s useful.
But, again, it’s all implicit knowledge in the info-dump.
Note: I can’t hold this against the book since it is explicitly focused on the founders. But I wanted a focus on the people. That group that rallies behind the founders to bring the vision to life. Not the cofounders, not the functional roles that come later, but that middle stage. The ones who believe in the vision and just want to help make it real in any way possible.Looks like that book is waiting to be written. “Employees at Work” anyone?
Note 2: As someone less interested in joining the Valley and more interested in unlocking centers of economic growth everywhere, I also found myself wishing for more perspective on the community . I wanted to know what made this particular cluster of companies happen? Was it solely the proximity of a school and a major employer at ground zero of a boom — Stanford + HP ? Add some VC and you’re good to go? Is that a repeatable model?
Review: Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing
Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (New Rules Social Media Series)
Inbound Marketing is one of those things that you intuitively get. “Of course that’s how you do it.” There’s a tendency to call it basic, but I’d argue best kind of innovation always feels obvious. “Of course we should lock cockpit doors.”
Anyway, inbound marketing boils down to creating content that drives interest in your business/cause. That way your web presence turns into a hub, and not an echo chamber. In its simplest form, you must: Write stuff, seed it into the wild to build buzz, and reap the rewards.
There’s a tendency for folks to start taking each step to an absurd degree – for example, with distributing content, you can get lost in a sea of SEO SEO SEO SEO SEO KEYWORD SEO.
This book doesn’t succumb to that snake oil. Instead, the author’s say you should focus on creating what they call remarkable content – timely, relevant, useful information. Create groups of people interested in the same. Be genuinely interested, be genuinely helpful, and business will flow.
That’s something I can get behind.
It’s a three or four year old tech book, so it is definitely showing its age — for example, there’s a section on Digg. But that aside, it’s a solid basis for someone trying to establish thought leadership and garner eyeballs in a particular market. Especially in concert with…
Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher – How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media (Que Biz-Tech)
This book covers the same ground, with a few differences. Lieb reiterates using all forms of content – visual, audio, video. She uses case studies that are a little more in depth, but the real stars are the “Content Audit” section and a 14 point starter called “You’re a publisher, think like one.”
Anyway, between the two books, you have a solid basis in modern marketing. I’d argue the rest should be intuitive – build on this, hone the craft, test out buying strategies etc.
Unless there’s a major shift, you’re better off spending the time you would spending reading about marketing (beyond these two books) on writing and building great stuff.
Review: Every Nation for Itself by Ian Bremmer
Ian Bremmer’s Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World is an eminently readable, current, mainstream take on the geopolitical environment. It’s a step above the toilet paper put out by the likes of Friedman, Zakaria, and the other Friedman.
Every Nation is a 20,000 ft view of what happens to world as the massive debt bubble pops. Chapter One is a fantastic discussion of why nothing is going to get done re: climate change, oil, terror. Simply: when they launched globalization, they forgot about control systems. It’s a chapter that should be taught in schools.
The rest reads like someone narrating a game of pool just after the break: China’s going one direction, the 8-ball another, and in the corner Turkey’s slamming into Greece. It the ricochets of globalization. And as far as what that means to nation-states and Fortune 500 companies, this is a good read. These are, after all, Bremmer’s bread and butter clients.
But in doing so, he ignores the drivers. The major trends. Things like peak oil and systems disruption. Even when he tries to include cybersecurity, it reads like one of his marketing aides told him to add a buzzword. It’s un-nuanced at best (he only covers it as a tool of states and kingmakers).
So it’s not for anyone concerned with unpredictable events or disruptive innovation. But it is a good way to stay on top of white-collar mainstream thinking – which, appropriately, is all it claims to be.
Review: Insanely Simple by Ken Segall
Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall.
Ken’s the guy behind the i. As in the iPad, iPod. He worked with Jobs at NeXT, then at Apple again. He knows the man, the company. (Note, he worked for an agency, not Apple itself.) As a history of Apple, it supplements. If you’ve read the Isaacson bio you’ll be fine. There’s a couple unique stories of personalities but its not really the premise.
Taking a note from Steven Pressfield’s War of Art: Complexity is given life as a creature of such evil that it deserves a swift but utter demise. Kill it, and you will be victorious.
Is that true? Kind of.
Complexity is creating a business and sustaining it. Simplicity is creating a product and selling it to people. Two very different approaches that probably need to be balanced.
Still, simplicity is not base. It is not easy. It is complex and messy and the result of slashing and cutting every thing you can while keeping something whole and real and worthwhile.
And that’s stuff Ken gets at and wants you to think about. Which is why this book is useful.
The one thing this book struggles with is, Ken’s passion for advertising selling product is on every page. Does advertising sell stuff? Of course. Do amazing, well designed products that solve problems sell stuff? Of course. Which comes first?
The egg.