Explorations in Anti-Stealth Business Creation
Back in August a guy named Charlie O’Donnell tested an interesting tactic for garnering attention and feedback on a business that he was starting called Path101. At the time I wrote a quick blog entry admiring the tactic. The tactic, defined as Anti-Stealth, has been an unqualified success for Charlie as he generated significant interest in his business, found a technical partner, refined his presentation and successfully raised an angel round of funding. A consequence of this tactic has been an ongoing discussion within the NYC entrepreneur community about the business effect of this tactic.
Steve and I have always maintained an anti-stealth bias due to our shared belief in the effectiveness of agile development. Our first act of anti-stealth was launching PlansForUs as soon as we had a working set of tools, exposing ourselves as quickly as possible to feedback. Given that our target market, K12 teachers, has a reputation for a lack of tech awareness this was a risk…but it has paid dividends as we embark on our second iteration with a much better understanding of how teachers might interact and use a tool like PlansForUs. With our second iteration underway, a growing user base and a need to increase our development cycles we need to find our seed-stage financing. This leads us to our second act of Anti-Stealth; revealing our investor presentation to readers of this blog…I know the anticipation is building.
By revealing our investor presentation, we also want to better understand a fundamental question of the anti-stealth tactic, if you do not have 1,000+ readers on your blog would it still work as well?
I have 13 subscribers to my blog, went to Colgate, New Trier HS (Winnetka, IL) and play hoops at Stuy Town. Those are a few of my primary networks, so lets find out if this blog can spread the word on PlansForUs beyond these networks. I promise to give full disclosure on how this plays out. So with the lead of Charlie’s anti-stealth movement and our own agile leanings we offer you our investor presentation (slightly modified).
As for anti-stealth, we will continue to play around with this concept as an outgrowth of our convictions that agile development is the most efficient path towards success.
November 10th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Not quite sure I totally understand what the product is. Is it content? From where? Is it a tool? What does the first user see?
November 10th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Interesting. I was discussing visualizing our product with my wife last night. The first iteration was focused on sharing lesson plans. We will have to add visuals for where we are going, as the text is not making our vision clear.
Thanks for taking a look.
November 10th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
You lost me after the first few slides. I think you need a one slide problem (which you have) and then a one slide solution which really defines what you are doing. Company purpose is really the product, not “make the world better”. Also, the first problem slide was enough for me. Didn’t need the other 2-3.
November 12th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Excellent…I really nailed this first attempt.
I am working on a revision and it will improve on the noted deficiencies. Thanks for the critiques.
Tyler
November 12th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
So I’m going to poke the bear here. (Just as a sidenote, I teach at CCNY Teacher’s College, and sometimes lecture at various HSs in the city).
1) Very often, the course material I write for a college course / private school is not even owned by me, but by the trustees of the institution.
2) It is already very time consuming to write lesson plans. I definitely don’t see myself re-typing them in a wiki. Is there some other way you could incentivize me (or make my life easier) so I would be inclined to at least upload a ppt of my lecture?
November 12th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
i think you’re off to a good start, but it needs some work. those slides are dependent on audio, they don’t hold up on their own.
also, i’d make sure you don’t overwrite the copy or make it all sound too dry.
Examples and clear statements might work best:
“A new teacher can go to our website and get ideas for a lesson plan, or advice on a lesson, from more experienced colleagues. ”
“‘Plans for Us’ creates a welcoming online community for teachers.”
November 13th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Ming Jack,
Thanks for the poke. I agree totally that rewriting the plan is a non-starter. I also question whether uploading a plan would generate value, though Scribd and SlideShare have found some success using that strategy.
I think Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr have done a great job creating a content base by limiting the content inputs. We intend to apply a similar strategy.
We are in the midst of a site redesign that deemphasizes the full lesson plan and focuses instead on finding the components of a lesson plan. For instance, my wife wants to know what books are good for a read aloud? She sends this request to 6 of her peers. The answers are compiled at PlansForUs and linked to related lessons or ideas (there are 1,000’s of freely available lesson plans that we are indexing).
By integrating a thought starter with an easily editable lesson plan, we hope to create a range of plans that derive from the content base that is already available. Incentivizing is difficult. Perhaps, the key is to streamline the capacity to share by integrating a “save to plansforus” button into your offline word processor or by subscribing to a blog’s feed like dy/dan.
As for college course work or proprietary private school teaching methods. That is an open question that I don’t have a solution to, however at this point private school teachers total about 400k of the 3.6 million teachers, so we are not focused on that case yet.
I will be posting an updated presentation this evening.
Tyler
November 13th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Jack,
Thanks for the comments. I agree that there was too much focus on language. I had attempted to hedge the fact that I was not actually presenting by filling the slides w/ explanatory language. The issue was that there was not enough space to properly explain and plenty of space for explanations to fall short.
I am posting a new plan this evening and will look into adding an audio component.
Tyler