I did Leaving certificate in last recession of the 80s, resisted emigration and started www.johndalyfoods.com importing fresh food and wholesaling to retail trade. It was a difficult business but we grew it to a nation wide service employing 80 people with a turn over of 14m. I sold it in 2006 and was shocked at effects of retirement on a 42 year old. I went into education and did a higher diploma and honors degree in business and currently completing an MBA. In 2009 i started www.irelandfood.ie selling chickens and milk to retailers in the west of Ireland.The company employs 12 and is profitable but has no debt.
Developing Ability Ltd. is up and running since 2007. We have stumbled along the road and now finally are making inroads into our market. The mistakes we made were avoidable but understandable. Almost all of them relate to marketing, in the true sense of the word - matching your product or service to customers' expectations and needs. Lessons include picking the right partners, picking the right initial "loose brick" segments, Roger's diffusion curve and opinion leaders, avoiding competition and being able to admit mistakes, change direction, dump something and move on...
Although cash is usually seen as the biggest constraint for start-ups, the resource that really matters is time -- not in the sense of whether one has enough hours in the day, but how long it will take to bring a product to market and generate revenue. The time forecasts we make in our business plans are usually way out, that's because, by nature, we're too optimistic about the state of the market we're addressing, or too ambitious in our product development. This leads to big blunders, all of which I have made. With everything taking longer than you would like, you make hurried deals with customers which end up costing money, upset the bank, upset investors, launch things too early, or misapply precious funds to product development, when you might do better to spend money on marketing. I am going to distil My Biggest Blunder: Timescales into a consideration of a 3 x 3 grid, with 'Product' up the y axis, and 'Market' across the x axis. On each scale there will be three values; Current, Emerging and Novel. By picking a cell on the grid, we'll consider what are the challenges of selling a current product in a current market compared with selling, say, a novel product in a novel market, or a current product in an emerging market and so on -- The grid will also give me a structure for relaying the pitfalls of not being self-critical about the state of your product and its market, and the consequent under budgeting of time that results in grey hairs and sleepless nights.
I specialise in applying lean and agile methods to software development organisations - but many of these principles can equally apply to small companies developing product and service offerings. Recently the Lean Start-Up movement has looked at how these can help entrepreneurs develop, validate and market their ideas where cash is scarce and time is of the essence. In this talk I'll introduce some of the Lean principles so we can discuss how they can be applied by small businesses and start-ups.
I will talk about how we should put more emphsis on choosing our market before we choose our product or service within that market.
I've started two games studios, Nephin Games in 2004 and Tribal City Interactive in 2009. I will compare both startups from a founder's perspective covering aspects such as funding, business relationships, staffing, focus and sharing some of the key differences between the two and the reasons behind them.