Claus Witt

I really love motivatethyself.com and zenhabits.net and would like to share some of the latest posts from the two blogs.

• 12 Ways To Get Your Motivational Groove Back
• 9 Steps to Turn off the Autopilot and Start Living Your Dreams
• 8 Liberating Strategies for Clearing the Queues in Your Life

I really encourage you to read these posts, subscribe to the rss feeds, and visit the sites regularly.

A while ago I found this list of business ideas, published by Y Combinator. The list is interesting to me, because it gives a glimpse into what venture firms might want to invest in.

Enterprise software, CRM, measuring apps, financial applications and some sort of site builders are some of the things that I have looked into previously.

In the near future I will unveil some of the projects that I have been working on lately. Stay tuned.

Having business ideas is not enough. As I have previously written I have a lot of them. My ideas have primarily been generated out of what I know, and as such from the needs that I either have had myself, privately or profesionally, or that I have experienced first hand from others. As such I follow the ideas of 37 Signals quite good, which states that you should build software that deals with your own problems.

I am however quite clear that there are many other factors in starting a new web-based application. Many of them are mentioned in Startups in 13 Sentences.

I especially agree with the second sentence on the list. Start up quickly! I believe this to be true, in the sense that from when you begin the project untill the beta is released, and actual users begin to use it, there should be as small an amount of time elapsed as possible. The reason, is listed in the list as well, is that when you do as 37 Signals would want you to, you could end up doing all the wrong things.

It is just like the actual development of software. Test early and test often.

I know that there exists a several solutions for accessing your desktop from anywhere. But I was thinking, would it be possible to create another solution, based on open source software? This off course means that you would have to earn your money on the actual service, instead of on the software. There exists a great VNC server implementation called TightVNC, which we at home use a lot on our windows computers on a local network. And I found a library for creating flash based vnc clients.

This morning I wrote about Script for Cold Calls. The follow-up is probably just as interesting. It is about how to make the sales presentation.

The overall model for his method is as follows.

1. Properly qualify the prospects on the phone
2. On the first meeting you should determine if you can work together. (And that you actually can make a solution on budget and on time. If so, book the next meeting.
3. On the second meeting you should do the presentation of your solution. If the previous steps have been done correctly, your chances of landing the client should be about 80%.

While reading a post about the marketing trap I got to thinking. I have seen this behaviour before. In 9iA we had this belief, and reinforced ourselves and eachother, that we were not salesmen. As a consequence we relied on marketing instead of sales-activities. Marketing was in our case definitely the wrong way to go. We spend a lot of money on a lot of different things, believing that we were doing sales-work. In stead we were doing – very bad – marketing. Most of our business came from what we refererred to as network sales. In fact most of it was jobs which fell in our laps because of our participation in different “we are all here to sell to eachother”-networks.

We never tried cold calling, not even warm calling. Well, not exactly true. We tried once or twice. A few calls. And then went back to believing that we could not sell.