Are there people that cannot learn? No. Are there people that do not learn? Yes. Why is that? I’ve asked myself this question many times. The only answer I’ve come up with is this: people do not learn because they do not realize they have to learn.

It’s not enough wanting to evolve. We have to realize what we do wrong and what we need to change. The biggest step is realizing what we lack. The problem is always in ourselves.

Let’s talk about people who do learn. During life, they keep evolving and transforming themselves. How can they evolve? By learning. They learn, they gather information, they gather feedback, they gather reactions to what they do, and they sum all these up. Then they gather their desires and their aspirations and they sum all these up. Using the sum of these sums, they have enough information to transform themselves and become better and brighter.

Let’s also talk about people that do not learn. They want to learn. Most of them do. But they do not use the information as they should. And so they never know what to learn. They keep trying to understand where the problem is, but they will not find it until they understand how to use the information surrounding them. And they have all the needed data, more than enough, feedback, reactions, desires, aspirations, but they don’t understand how to use it.   And so they don’t evolve and they stay the same.

What type of these two are you? What type do you want to be?

Advertising on mobile phones or How to create a user-centric community - the free SMS service. Why the “How to create … ” alternative? When I think about developing a service, I think about the users of this service and I ask myself: what would be their benefit from using this service (value added), what would make them keep using it (usability), why would they tell their friends about this service? And the most important question: “Would I use this service?” I think the best way to create a great community is to give people access to things that they already use or would like to use on a daily basis, and give it away for free.

Why?

I have started exposing the idea of services that split money with the users in Advertising Industry Crossroad - why not sharing the money with the consumers? I’ve also started to describe my business plan in Advertising and Communities - Developing a Business Plan. The first step in my plan is developing a free SMS service. This might sound pretty simple or unimportant, but SMS is the second most used service by mobile phone users, voice being the first. So it has a lot of potential. Advertising on mobile phones is a pretty hot topic these days so there’s already a need for this kind of services.

How?

Telf is a service which allows the users to send SMS messages for free. They can send as many messages as they want to as many friends as they want. All they need to do is log in, and they’ll be able to type the message, type one or several phone numbers, and click Send. Remember the holidays, when you have to send a lot of messages to your friends and family? It would be very simple to do it with this service.

Registration for the service I want to avoid “SMS spammers” so the service will be available only to registered users. The users will register, they will receive an activation code on their phone and they’ll use that to activate their account. And because this concept (of giving stuff away for free) is pretty new, the users will not be able to register as they register to a normal email or other type of service. The users will be able to join only by invitation (only at the beginning, until the service is well known). I want people to hear about this service and wish they were able to access it. So I’ll send invitations to 100 users, which will be my beta testers, and then I’ll give them invitations to send to their friends, and so on. I’m pretty sure a service that looks a little exclusive is more desired than another one with free access. Remember Gmail, it was in beta version for 2 years and it was available only by invitations.

Where do the money come from? I know, I haven’t told you yet how will this service pay for the SMS messages. It will insert short ads at the end of each message. One SMS message has 160 characters length, so the users will use 120 chars and the last 40 will be used for short ads. like “visit www.sergiutruta.com” or “open your own blog at…” or “visit the new club…” and so on. Each ad message insertion will be charged the cost of the SMS message. And that’s how the service will give SMS messages for free. The ads will be related to the message, so for example to a message saying “Let’s go to that new club that just opened” will be appended a related ad: “Visit www.clubs.com” or something like that. The ads will be contextual adds, related to the message. There you go, targeted ads And of course, the users will know when they register that short ads will be inserted at the end of the messages, in order to pay for the messages.

Will the SMS message recipients agree to receive the ads? The SMS messages are not unsolicited ads messages sent by Telf.ro They are actually messages sent from friends to friends. If I send a message to a friend saying “Meet me at the coffee shop downtown”, the final message might look like this: “Meet me at the coffee shop downtown. Telf.ro: Try the new Frappucino from Starbucks!”. It might look odd to the users at the beginning, but they’ll come to accept it pretty quickly.

The last, but not least It sounds nice being able to send messages for free to your friends from a web page. But what if I’m on the move? What if I’m waiting for someone in a coffeeshop or in a park? Well, I’m also working at a simple J2ME client which will be deployed on any java enabled mobile phone. That J2ME client will have a really simple UI, with a textbox for recipient’s phone number, textbox for message and a send button. When the send button is clicked, it will send the message through GPRS to Telf.ro, which will do the rest. This means I’ll be able to send SMS messages from my mobile phone really really cheap. Imagine typing the message, then typing 10 phone numbers, and clicking send. Normally it would cost probably 40 - 50 cents, but with this solutions it will only cost 1 cent or less, for the GPRS traffic.

In How to evaluate a Startup Idea I’ve described a criteria for evaluating a startup-idea. Here’s what Telf looks like analyzed through these criteria.

What effort is necessary to implement the idea?
As you can see the first page, it’s really really simple to implement. There’s a little more work at the profile area, where the users can send invitations, the publishers (the ones paying for their ads being inserted in the SMS messages) will be able to manipulate their ads and will know all the time what messages and how many of them have been sent. Also, the admin of the entire service will be able to manipulate users, publishers and global settings. I’ve chosen Ruby On Rails and it should take like a week.

Also, for the J2ME client, a midlet doing this is a 2 hours task. So no sweat here either.

What is the initial investment?
If we don’t count web hosting, no initial investment is necessary. At the beginning I’ll support the costs for the messages sent (I’ll promote my own products, of course ), and after I make sure everything runs as planned, I’ll start inserting ads from other publishers. For 5 cents a message, 1000 messages cost 50$, so it’s not a big deal while in beta testing.

How will the new service/product attract users?
I see two reasons that will attract users: sending messages for free and sending them directly from the phone or from a web page.

How will the new service/product make money?
If the cost for a message is 5 cents, I’ll charge the publishers 6 cents for each inserted ad.

Are there any other external dependencies?
There’s one external dependency. The connection to a company like Orange, Vodafone or others. Because they make money when the SMS service is used, I don’t see any problem here.

Once your service is running, what effort will it need from your side?
Very little, admin check-ups once in a while.

I’m only developing this service for Romania, so I’ll upload the source files for both the web service and the J2ME midlet and attach them to this article as soon as they’re working.

Advertising and Communities

A lot of the successful businesses have learned how to use two very important tools: the advertising industry, and the power of communities.

These both become more and more important and more and more powerful. Google for example became one of the mostly known companies in the world by making money from advertising. On the other hand, communities become more and more important, even to the point to decide the industry evolution or to help a company grow and evolve.

The purpose of the advertising industry is simple: taking the message to as many people as possible. It can use many types of media: television, radio, printed papers, internet. No matter how it propagates, the final goal is always the same: taking the message to more and more people.
The purpose of communities is always to grow by attracting more users. As they grow, communities gain visibility, they gain power, they draw attention and start to be heard and listened to.

When someone finds out how to join the advertising industry and the communities successfully, they have a good chance to develop a great business. Let’s take (again) Google as an example. They focused on the community first, they had millions of users long before they started thinking how to make money. When they found the solution with using advertising, their users community was growing so fast that it was pretty easy to predict where they were heading.

Nowadays, a lot of people look for successful solutions from combining advertising and communities. Though each of these two has at least one fault which have to be overcome in order to create a successful business.

The problem in the advertising industry is that people pay less and less attention to the ads. No matter what the ads are (video, audio, printed, text), people are getting better at ignoring them. One reason might be that the ad campaigns become more and more aggressive, so we have to protect from them somehow. On TV, when a show is stopped for ads, people start changing the channels. They avoid (consciously or not) being fed with more and more ads, so they start changing channels. The percentage of people who really watch the ads is smaller than the people watching tv. On the web, almost every page displays ads because it’s a good and easy way to make money. But the readers develop like a 6th sense and get better and better at reading the articles between the ads, without even noticing the ads.

In order to overcome this problem, the ads campaigns have get smarter and more interesting, in order to be noticed by people. The video ads have to present a story which sticks into our minds, the printed ads have to have more color and some layout that draws attention. The text ads have less possibilities to draw attention, and probably will be replaced by video ads. Though these are not real solutions, because as they become better, we become better at ignoring them.

In communities, drawing more users is pretty easy. Most communities attract users by focusing on general topics like cars, music, movies, blogging, sports, sex, money, or more specific topics like: bmw, porche, gm, ford (cars), football, basket-ball, baseball (sports), and so on. The more general the addressed topic, the more users will want to join that community. Probably the best topics for growing communities would be the ones addressing our needs: money and sex. With money we can eat what we want, we can drink what we want, we can buy what we want, we can go in vacations wherever we want, and so on. With sex, well…you know

My suggestion to solving these two problems is giving money to the users. I’ve already exposed this idea in Advertising Industry Crossroad - why not sharing the money with the consumers?. Let’s look at this now from the Advertising and Communities point of view.

Advertising: the money for ads will be payed without doubt to the ones broadcasting/displaying/printing the ads. So the costs are already in place and this will not change too soon. What if a part of these money will be payed to the users, to the consumers. Let’s say that displaying an ad on TV costs 2 cents for each user that sees it. What if 1 cent goes into the user’s account and the other goes into the television’s account. What if clicking on a link on a web page will make money not only to the page owner, but also to the reader, the one that clicked the link? What if seeing an add on the street can make me money, or hearing some ad on radio can make me money? The money are already payed to the television/radio/web page owner, so there’s no extra expenses. This might be a solution to attract more users. For example I see an ad on TV or on the street, I call a number, I answer correctly to some question, I get payed (this is not new, but probably was not looked at from this angle). Or I click on some links, I earn some money. Or I watch some video, I get some money.

Using this idea, I’ve developed a business plan for my startup, and I’ll share it with you. I’m mostly developing services for Romania, so it’s ok if you use my ideas for your own startup.

Developing a business plan

Giving users stuff for free might sound too weird and they might run away from your services (hey, we have to work hard in life in order to get what we want, right? ). So you have to be careful and do this in really small steps. Start giving them little things, of less importance, gain visibility and trust from your users. Then take it a step further and give them something else, more important, and so on.

My plan contains at least 3 phases:

Phase 1 - SMS Free Service
I’ve started developing a Free SMS Service. The users will be able to send text messages (SMS on mobile phones) to their friends for free. The costs will be supported by inserting short ads at the end of the message.

Phase 2 - Free music & movies download Service The users will have to watch an ad, and at the end they’ll be able to download a song. If they want to download a movie, they will have to watch several ads. Here you’ll have to make sure that they are watching the ads. Otherwise they might leave the computer and come back in 5 or 30 minutes and then download what they want.

Phase 3 - On-line making Service by watching video ads
If you can pay for music or movies when your users watch ads, why not giving the money directly to your users? And maybe you’ll find an ingenious way for them to make important amounts of money by spending only one or two hours in front of the computer.

The concept is so simple that it’s easy to find a lot of other applications where you give stuff for free to your users. They’ll be happy getting it for free, and the advertisers will be happy because their message gets to the consumers.

I’ll detail each one of the three phases above into separate articles.

Most of us live our lives by some predefined patterns. We tend to do default things only because we’re taught that’s how it should be. Our parents, our teachers, most of our guides teach us these default things; we’re always told we have to do them. They are never tagged as default things, instead they are tagged as normal things because everybody does them.
Starting from childhood, we’re taught by our parents that we have to go to school; in school we’re told we have to get good grades to get to a good high school; in high school we have to get good grades in order to get to a good college; in college we have to study hard and specialize in some field; we keep hearing that if we’re good enough we might have a chance to get a good job in an important company and for a good salary. We accept these default things as normal things and they become our way of life; we do them without question and then we start our own family, we have our own children and we teach them the same default things.
Ok, so let’s recap. We study hard in school, we get a well-payed job, we go to work and get payed for this. We’re taught that that’s the way the society works so we have to follow the rules. We’re taught to work for money. We’re even taught that the harder we work, the more money we get.

Let’s analyze these default things one by one.

Go to school

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not stating that our children shouldn’t go to school. They should, but it’s important why do they go to school. Most educational systems teach the children a lot of things. Which is good in primary and secondary school. But starting from high school, we should focus on what we need to do next. And when we go to college we should know what we want to do and what we’re good at. I met people who went to college because that’s how it should be. They didn’t even chose the college, their parents did. And they didn’t like what they were doing, but for them it was impossible to drop out and start something else. It’s ok to go to college, as long as you are aware that you can do anything you want. The default path is to go to college, study hard, then get a well payed job and work for others. Start another path. Go to college to meet new people, go to college to learn new things, go to college to find your path. But don’t go to college just because everybody says you should.

Get a job in an important company

Starting from high school most of us dream of a good job, with a well known company. Working in a big company might be very helpful. We can get in touch with new technologies, we can learn faster to interact with people, we can learn how to manage people or projects, we can learn how to interact with customers. Working for a big company might help us learn faster a lot of things. But most people remain in companies even after they stop learning, even after they stop enjoying what they do. Most people stay with their jobs for safety. Leaving a well payed job might be hard and it might be risky. Though, if you stop enjoying your job, if you stop learning and evolving with your job, why stay? Most of us prefer working for a company because it’s safer than starting our own startups. But starting a family business might be a lot better on all aspects. Ok, you might have to allocate a lot more time for doing a startup, but you’ll certainly learn a lot more. You won’t be frustrated with being payed a lot less than what the project you’re working for is worth. You stop complaining about your boss or about the company because you’ll be the boss and the company will be your own company.

Don’t go to work because everybody else goes to work, don’t look for a job in a company because everybody else does it. Get a job if you don’t want to start your own business or if you feel not ready to start your own business. But if you want to start your own business, why wait? Start it right now. It might not work from the beginning, it might be hard, you might fail several times before you succeed, but you’ll learn a lot more than you’ll learn in a regular job. Unless you’re a CEO, right?

I’ve faced the idea of doing a startup. And I kept saying that I have to wait for that genius idea for a great startup. And I kept waiting and I kept waiting. And after a while I realized that a great idea might come after 10 or 100 small ideas. So there’s no point in waiting for that great idea. Try small ideas first, and each of them will be a step toward that great idea

Work hard for money

This is one of the defaults that we all hear every day. Most people say that you can’t have money without working. But there are a lot of people around which work hard and are always in debt. Ask around you what do you have to do for more money and the answer you’ll get is “work harder”. So the harder you work, the more money you’ll have. Actually that’s not entirely true. How come there are a lot of people who make money very easy? Most of them are rich people. And they’ve probably worked hard to get rich. But being rich is not really having a lot of material money, it is in fact a state of mind. All rich people who worked hard to get rich worked hard to believe they’re rich. They worked hard to see themselves rich. They didn’t work hard for the material money. They worked hard to come to believe they’re rich and they worked hard to understand what wealth is all about. The faster we come to understand what wealth is, the faster we’ll get rich. When we get there we’ll understand that working hard for money is just a big lie.

If you can think of other default things, add your comments here.

What is lateral thinking?

I’m pretty sure you’ve already heard about lateral thinking. Probably you’ve even read something about this. Lateral thinking means thinking out of the box, looking at problems from unusual angles. It means finding answers to your questions by thinking unconventionally. Because of our educational system, we tend to use some standard connections when looking for answers. Lateral thinking is exactly the opposite. It tries to break the thinking patterns and it tries to break the default bonds. We all tend to think in default patterns, patterns which were formed during our education. Probably that is why we all have similar lives, we all go to school and try to get good grades, then we all do our best to get well payed jobs and become good managers. Our life plans look pretty similar because we’ve been taught to think in some predefined patterns.

How can lateral thinking help me?

When you are facing a problem and you think that no usual method will work, you might find a great solution by using lateral thinking. I was facing this problem while thinking about how can the advertising industry be revived? Even though it makes a lot of money yearly, the ways the ads are spread aren’t very efficient. On the internet, the most used types of ads are banners and text ads. I’d say that video ads are much more efficient and can transmit much more information. But how can you make the readers watch video ads? By using lateral thinking, you might find a few good answers.

Finding solutions using lateral thinking

Let’s think about peer to peer networks. They offer means to download content like music, movies, software, without paying. The conventional thinking is that the ones who download also have to pay. But from a lateral thinking perspective, I’d ask: why? Why shouldn’t I be able to download content without paying? Why shouldn’t or couldn’t someone else pay? Why can’t the money come from some other source, not from the ones that download. It sounds good, but where could these money come from? I give you one hint: advertising .
If you read my article about Advertising industry crossroad you will see that I have suggested a solution for reinvigorating this industry. Why shouldn’t the publishers share the money with the consumers? There are a lot of money spent yearly on advertising industry, how to make this more efficient, how can we make sure that more interested people get to see the ads? You’ll get some hints inside the article. This is another example of lateral thinking.