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Archive for December, 2010
A Great Example Of Win Then Play In Action Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
I introduced the concept of succeeding with your ideas a few a week ago without wasting a lot of money. We call the concept “Win Then Play“. It becomes difficult to get our mind around how we can use this concept to get our ideas moving without the right financial resources. I ran across a great example of how this can look in the marketplace with a product that needed to be manufactured.
The article is titled, How I Launched A Great Idea Without Any Money. Money is greatest reason or excuse given as to why we can’t move forward with an idea. Let’s take a closer look at financial capital vs. relationship capital.
Financial Capital: The first thing that Scott Wilson from Minimal (author of the article) did was take an idea he had for an iPod Nano watch to a big company to see if they would buy it. They didn’t. Scott, like many others, was perplexed about his next move because of the difficulty in manufacturing a physical product by bootstrapping. This is where most of stop. We can’t get funding and so assume that the idea is impossible.
Relationship Capital: There’s a reason why we say that this is the most powerful form of capital that you have at your disposal. Scott’s product example is a great lesson. You have probably heard of the term “Crowdsourcing“. In case you haven’t, Crowdsourcing is a way to outsource tasks for your business to a group of people through an open call. In the case of the iPod watch, Scott Wilson used Crowdfunding to raise money for his project launch. Anyone reading this ever think that social media is a total waste of time? I have but it’s examples like these that have turned me into not only a believer but an evangelist. This is the power of relationship capital and the best part is he did it with strangers.
One other quick point also about this idea is that, did you notice how Scott didn’t try and invent something out of thin air? He just took an existing product and made it better. This is innovation at it’s best.
Think about ideas that you have. What’s keeping you from putting them in place? What are the obstacles that you have run into? Who can help you overcome them? Win then play works in a lot of different situations as you can see. It’s up to us to look past the limitations to find the solutions that are waiting for us.