Looking for “startup vision” while traveling…
Right now, I’m traveling in Europe for 23 days—visiting 10 cities in 7 countries. Subconsciously, I’ve been looking for answers to certain questions about entrepreneurship while traveling.
For the past 2 years, I’ve been unemployed, building startup ideas full-time. Well, not full-blown startups — more like minimum viable products. 36 different MVPs, most of them launched, and some of them are still listed at baylaunch.com. I worked in a lot of different industries, with a lot of different partners. Some projects took 9 months to build and launch. Some took just 1 day from conception to launch. None of them have gotten traction — yet.
Looking back, I was fortunate to gain an education in such a variety of industries and to have worked with such awesome partners. I learned a lot about what people want, and what I’m missing. In the end, I feel that the key skills I’m missing are vision, leadership, and self-discipline.
But if you think about it, self-discipline is merely leadership of yourself. In leadership — both of others and of yourself—you need to know how to motivate people to work hard towards some vision or goal. And to motivate, you need to have an intuition for what you want (discipline) or what other people want (leadership), and you need to explain how your vision connects with people’s deepest desires. And “entrepreneurial vision” is just about knowing what products people want, and motivating them to pay you. So both leadership and vision are about knowing what people want. In other words, the one thing I’m really missing is vision.
So, why am I missing vision? Why don’t I know if people want something? How can I be so blind? Is it a lack of exposure to knowledge?
Well, I’ve been studying my whole life. Since elementary school, I was a bookworm, spending many of my days immersed in books from the library, reading about science, history, architecture, math, business, and art.
So perhaps, I was book-smart, but not street-smart?
But as early as the 5th grade, I was fairly multi-disciplinary — playing in the school band, singing in the choir, participating in public speaking competitions, running for student office, painting & sketching, playing basketball, and studying computer programming. I’ve even been somewhat of a hiphop head and amateur freestyle battle rapper.
As an immigrant, I’ve been exposed to 2 countries, and 2 modes of life — growing up rich in China, and then immigrating to the USA, where all of a sudden, my parents were very poor, and for a while, they were collecting soda cans from the trash in order to make money.
In the USA, I’ve lived in 6 different areas—San Francisco Bay Area, Beverly Hills, Seattle, Boston, Manhattan, and Wisconsin. Starting around age 21, I became passionate about talking to strangers, talking to over 3500 strangers in one year while living in NYC.
Partly due to this propensity to seek education through diverse experiences, I’ve met a lot of diverse people — from playing basketball with a homeless man in Berkeley to eating barbecue at Bill Gates’s house in Medina.
But despite all these experiences, I feel lost. I don’t know what people want. What then is missing?
I’m reminded of a scene in Godfather III. Michael Corleone is speaking with Cardinal Lamberto, who would soon become Pope. The cardinal retrieves a pebble from the water in a bird bath. “Look at this stone,” he says. “It has been lying in the water for a very long time, but the water has not penetrated it.” He then whacks the rock on the side of the fountain, breaking the rock in two. He continues:
Look. Perfectly dry. The same thing has happened to men in Europe. For centuries, they have been surrounded by Christianity, but Christ has not penetrated. Christ doesn’t live within them.
And in a similar way, the same thing might have happened to me. I’m surrounded — by products, people, and economic activity — but I fail to grasp what people want. I am rich in experiences (and perhaps low-level knowledge), but I am poor in intuition. Or at least, my intuition has not been developed to a great enough degree to allow me to create insanely great products.
The reason for that lack of development is a lack of deep reflection of what’s going on around me. A lack of awareness and absorption. In other words, I’ve been floating blissfully aloof through life, lazily taking things for granted, and only paying attention when it was absolutely necessary. I.e., I’ve been unmindful.
Travel is a forcing function for mindfulness. I’m forced to separate signal from noise: what I truly want from the frivolous, the hidden gems from the tourist traps, the distinctly unique from the mundane.
There are literally millions of businesses in the world. This becomes extremely apparent while traveling. Every street is lined with shops, restaurants, cafes, and more — all of them screaming for your attention. Yet only a few of these venues extract our money.
Through things like Yelp and TripAdvisor, it becomes extremely apparent what is insanely great, and what’s mediocre. As a result, there’s a large amount of pull towards the top attractions and the top-reviewed eateries. In contrast, everything else gets very little in terms of attention and revenue.
If I am to create a business:
- I must first understand what people fundamentally want,
- and secondly, become insanely great — i.e., become 10X better than the average commoditized business suffering from the heat death of mediocrity.
The past few weeks have answered the first question well: what are fundamental wants?
While traveling, the extraneous falls away, revealing what’s truly necessary to survive, consume, and have a good time. The fundamental wants I’ve observed:
- Housing — AirBnb, Expedia
- Food & drinks — TripAdvisor & Yelp → groceries, restaurants, Coca-Cola
- Clothing — H&M
- Water & electricity — public utilities
- Social identity & connection — Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, selfie stick
- Messaging — WhatsApp, WeChat, Skype, SMS
- Language — DuoLingo, Google Translate
- Logistics — Google Maps, Uber, Expedia/Kayak, public transportation
- Payment — credit cards, ATMs
- Faith — churches, religions
- Internet — T-mobile, Mifi routers, Wifi
- Spectacle —TripAdvisor → museums, monuments, markets, & parks
- Research — Google
So services that enable the discovery and delivery of things that you fundamentally want are good businesses, as long as they have a monopoly or network effect.
(Note that these are mostly consumer services. When you are traveling for leisure, you are mostly focused on consuming, not producing — so no B2B services listed here.)
Interestingly, these services are normally invisible in day-to-day life. You hardly pay attention when you get on public transportation, or walk into a restaurant. But when you’re traveling, you must actively research “what is the currency”, “where can I extract cash without paying an ATM fee”, “which is a good restaurant to spend my local currency”, and “how can I get there”. As a result, you’re forced to pay attention, take notice, and be mindful of the services you truly need.
Even while using Yelp, it’s better to use the foreign version (yelp.es, yelp.it, etc.) instead of yelp.com, because the locals are more likely to review restaurants in their own language. Using Yelp in a foreign language forces you to pay attention to the UI elements and their design, as if you were using Yelp for the first time. This also makes you notice how Yelp solves such a fundamentally human problem, that it can be internationalized across all these different languages and cultures. It also makes you realize how strong winner-take-all effects are in tech: there isn’t even a localized competitor to Yelp in European countries — well there was, but it was acquired and its reviews were sucked into Yelp.
While traveling, I’m on a mission, and I only want to:
- learn some basics of the local language
- see some sights
- take some pictures
- eat some food
- meet some people
- blog, vlog, post statuses, and show off my photos on social media
I don’t want much of anything else. I don’t care much about:
- reading news about my industry (our project Meerkat)
- giving strangers gifts (our project Gildme)
- paying with bitcoin (our project Coinjay)
I would pay (in terms of time, attention, and money) for the former, and I wouldn’t pay for the latter. That’s the difference between painkillers and vitamins — between priorities and non-priorities.
And in terms of UI, I need to blog and do research on my laptop (10% of the time), and everything else must happen through my phone (90% of the time). So, travel really reinforces the idea that mobile is the dominant platform.
Traveling forces you to pay attention to the mundane, even to something as simple as drinking water. You must first search on Google, “Is it safe to drink the tap water in _____?” This mindfulness causes you to suddenly realize what is a “fundamental force of life” and what isn’t. It causes you to notice the strong “share of mind” of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Ray-Bans, Facebook, Google, and Yelp.
So that answers the first question. If you want to have even a chance of “user acquisition”, you must focus on services in categories that people absolutely cannot live without — food, transportation, and messaging are some of these things.
But simply providing something fundamental—like selling food — doesn’t guarantee you’ll have customers. After all, restauranteering is one of the toughest paths of entrepreneurship.
This reminds me of our experience yesterday morning at Quinoa Restaurant in Barcelona. It was a random highly-reviewed hole-in-the-wall we found on Yelp. The food was very cheap, extremely healthy (vegetarian), and extremely delicious. We had the veggie burger, the combo quiche & salad plate, and the cocoa banana almond milk shake.
It was out-of-this-world delicious. My wife loved it. Our bill came out under 10 Euros per person, so it was a great deal as well.
I watched our chef and server skillfully prepare our meal. So I talked to him a bit. Turns out he had been cooking for 15 years. From the perspective of the chef, this random hole-in-the-wall was 15 years in-the-making. A great experience — deeply artistic, perfectly orchestrated, affordably delivered.
The same requirement for excellence applies to tech startups, except in a tech startup, it might be even less straightforward than opening a restaurant.
In addition to executional excellence, you also need “timing”. Because of the winner-take-all nature of technology-based networks and platforms, you must catch the wave — with perfect timing. As you can see above, most of the obvious fundamental consumer needs are now pretty well-served by mobile and Internet technology. Even in China, where the top services are blocked (Facebook, Google, Twitter), there are replacements (RenRen/WeChat, Baidu, Weibo). So, there’s a limited window of opportunity — between when new UX/technological developments first become available (camera & Internet access in a smartphone) — and when services (Instagram) capture the untapped markets enabled by that technology (taking photos and sharing them). This timing requires mindfulness.
And because of the Internet, you are not just competing with the nearby local businesses, like a restaurant. You are competing with the world. So even with perfect timing, the execution bar is set much higher. Because everyone in the world works super hard at their craft, obtaining extra skill in execution requires careful thought — again, mindfulness.
In summary, travel is a forcing function on mindfulness.
My recent travels have caused me to realize that my lack of “startup vision” can mostly addressed via “mindfulness” in its various carnal forms of:
- mindful execution,
- mindful timing,
- mindful knowledge of new technological and UX trends and what new services they enable,
- mindful intuition for what people fundamentally want
I don’t think I have the answer yet. But this blogpost has brought me one step closer in my thinking.
