Challenges, a French economical newspaper, is running an interesting paper this week on entrepreneurship. They invited 10 entrepreneurs or advisors to write about 100 good ideas to turn your sweat into gold. The 'jury' includes well known entrepreneur Charles Begbeider (founder of online broker Selftrade, now CEO of Poweo) and the always fun and inspiring Philippe Bloch (founder & CEO of the espresso-bar chain Columbus Café).
They decided to look at 5 areas and had some really interesting thoughts, although I am not sure about their ROI... Here are a few that caught my eye:
- Self-care/cocooning: day-care for kids (oh yes! the system here is so unflexible... I am told that in some countries day-care starts at 6am until night-fall);
- Simplify life: Key bank (leave a copy of your keys with some kind of outsourced concierge), on-line business cards (hum... has anyone heard about VistaPrint ???), appartment scouts (they do that on your behalf), a primary market for equity trading for entrepreneurs (this would help mutualise risks... very interesting => talk to Christophe Chausson about it)
- Entertain: a family-focused travel agency (great idea, in the meantime, check meta-aggregator www.easyvols.com);
- Food: biological fast-foods and resturants and chic fast foods;
- Communicate: motorbike taxis (I used them for many years in Asia: great! I have been wondering for a long time why we didn't have them in Europe), wi-fi webcams (if you read this blog, you know by now this is something I am interested in. Check Intamac, a company in which a good friend of mine has just invested), disposable DVDs (very bad idea. Check discussions here), flirting sites (well, yeah... meetic.com, match.com, love.com... expect that sector to consolidate real quick into 1 or 2 players per country. In the meantime, they top the charts in terms of traffic in some countries such as Greece).
A number of our friends also have a quick note or sidebox in the article, including Michel from Photoways, Loic from ublog.net, and Hervé de La Martinière (we share the same investors at glowria.fr... ).
Now, please take note of a reply of Guy Kawasaki (I met him quickly at a conference back in 2000 - real great speaker, he used to be an Apple evangelist) in a interview a couple of years ago (he has been saying this for ever, and all VC-related professionals would repeat it over and over again - see a similar recent post by Philippe Laferrière ):
"Q: So when you talk to startups looking for capital do you tell them part of the way to succeed in the venture world today is building a business that goes to where the demand is?
[Answer:] We have to separate two things. Part of getting funded is what you just said. But part of building a business is not necessarily that. In today's atmosphere to get funded, you have to solve pain. You have to have a team. You have to have technology. You have to have traction. This is just a statement of fact. However, if you were to apply that test to most humongously successful companies, none of them would pass that test. There's a huge chasm if you will, between what can get funded today and what can be the next big thing."
