for Gods sake, make a dent in this blog discussion!

Stop using “bit”, it is no measure of anything! Having spend 25 M€ and opened a shop that only very few are aware of is not a “bit” thing.

I just got Switch in my hands (by Chip and Dan Heath http://amzn.to/dvgp2P). An eye-opener. It is about changing things when changes are hard. It resonated.

Consider your comments for Draw a line in the sand, You need less than think and Start a business… from “What is working and how can we do more of it?”. My immediate thoughts were about your retailer base. There were signs and indications that some of them were/are only ballast and pure cost – no profit. There were also similar experiences elsewhere in Europe: free of charge service brings in also low quality perfomers.

Why did I wrote that? Purely because Fruugo is afraid of turning its back on others. It seemed have been easier to lay-off people than let poor performing retailers go!

There is a lot of good, working things in entire Fruugo ecosystem. Build on those! Focus fiercely on important things, just as you cited. I’m not asking you to give up the vision and strategies, but get some headroom for the good things by letting the bad ones go away.

Sincerely Yours
Tapsa

I first thought the I would have one post about one issue at the time, but then realised that it would take too long. Then decided that I will cover all sub-topics under one chapter at a time. I’ll see, what makes sense when I do the next ones – maybe I’ll select the ones that resonate most (in my head) .

-juha.

you asked if you take the messages too literally. You don’t. If you would take these literally you wouldn’t disagree with them. And if you would take them too literally you would be blogging about how you will be implementing these learnings at Fruugo.

I liked the book a lot! It was quick reading, it occasionally put my thoughts in flames and elsewhere fostered learnings from past projects.

I fully agree with the “Ignoring the real world” although those cynical people are sometimes half right. Even the 37Signals itself is an evidence of that, they started in web-design consulting and transformed (perhaps unintentionally) to a software product company and made the breakthrough – rest is history. Thereby the cynical people were partly right – the web-design consulting was not the thing that made business blossoming.
As a matter of fact there are very few, if any, success stories that are based on the original business idea of any company. Nevertheless, we all ought to fight the cynicism – even if they are sometimes partly right!

I think you have misunderstood the concept of exploring things, you shouldn’t consider “not working = failed”. I mean that a result of exploration is a finding: something either works or not. As long as you can conclude whether it worked or not, you have done the exploring right – you have a result. There is neither failure nor mistake. A mistake is not to explore. A big mistake is stubbornly execute a plan that is not adjusted with results of explorations. Such mistakes do not improve the likelihood of future success like stated in the book.

Planning is guessing – a plan is piece of guess work even if it was required by an investor. An investor requiring a plan does not improve it’s credibility or probability. Both you and I have been in business where plans have been very accurate – last weeks of quarters very hectic to make the numbers. A start-up is not such an execution platform. Thereby planning is – uuuh – guessing. I don’t have a formula how to satisfy the needs of investors, but if guess work makes them happy then keep on.

The style of the book is somewhat provocative. It invokes similar commenting. Could you limit your further postings to 2 – 3 issues at a time, it’d be a bit easier to fire back comments.

I will also have Rework on my “to-do-video-on” for http://www.mcreads.com. I am about half way done and convinced that this is a must-read. mc@mcreads