For a while, us self-employed, digital nomads were a much underrated professional tribe.
Ian Sanders (@iansanders) is an author, ideas guy and marketing expert. His new book, co-written with David Sloly is ‘Zoom! The Faster Way To Make Your Business Idea Happen’.
As someone who ditched a proper office in favour of laptop-friendly spaces over ten years ago, I remember the days when friends would assume that sitting in a coffee shop meant I was chilling out, not working.
Fortunately those days are over and there are more of us hanging out in coffee shops and co-working spaces. Indeed the essential tools of my trade as a writer and marketing expert remain my moleskine, my laptop, iPhone, wifi and espresso. Sound familiar?
But this isn’t just about a revolution in working practices and productivity; digital opportunities and the advent of micro-entrepreneurs are forcing us to rethink ‘business’.
For my new book (that I co-wrote with David Sloly), we spoke to Jeffrey Kalmikoff, one of the original line-up at the crowd-sourced t-shirt business Threadless that began in a spare room. Jeffrey has a great, simple definition of ‘business’: it’s the mechanism for taking an idea to reality. I think that’s important for us all to remember. If you’re a coffee-shop-hopping entrepreneur sitting with your net-book and flat white on the side you may think starting a business is about five year plans, raising finance and the language of Dragon’s Den. But forget all that.
The Internet has fortunately lowered the barriers to entry, creating a great opportunity for digital nomads where success is about two things: speed and simplicity. For our book we spoke to many entrepreneurs from former chief evangelist of Apple, Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) to MOO.COM’s Richard Moross. And we learnt the importance of speed.
Applying some ‘zoom’ to your business idea - whether you’re a freelancer rolling out a new service or a designer with a product idea - will help you make your idea happen faster. Because often it’s not having the idea that wins; it’s about how quick you execute. It’s probably better to launch ‘in beta’ rather than procrastinate and get stuck in business planning. The idea that launches fastest is the one that succeeds; as one of the new generation of twenty-something software entrepreneurs, Feross Aboukhadijeh reminds us, “Done is better than perfect”.
So, if you’re sitting in a coffee shop reading this and wondering about how to make make your dream a reality, apply some Zoom and make it happen fast…. !
Photo credit: Éole
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