It started on Thursday night off the wrong foot for me – I was tired and wasn’t sure what was happening. I pitched my idea in a very dull manner and it went nowhere! That was upsetting, but nonetheless I had to join another team. We were trying to develop a solution that would help people who hate their jobs.

HireShark Team

From the start it looked like we will not make it, it was only 4 of us, whereas everyone else had 6-7 people on the team. We did not have UI/UX designers, hardcore devs, etc. Thursday night I went home thinking I will stick to my usual schedule and go skiing on Friday – screw LSMTO! Last minute I decided to make the best out of it and I would love to thank our great team for putting their best effort:

• Oleg Melnikov
• Jason Little
• Lily Samerkhanova

2 evenings and 2 full days later we’ve ended up with a HireShark - software as a service that helps small businesses and recruiters to pick top talent out of 100s of candidates that apply for their positions.

Over this time, we have conducted customer development interviews with over 20 potential customers. We have pivoted 6 times – defined our target market, identified the common issue, revamped our solution and shaped the first key features.

Sweat shop - delivering concierge service by filtering resumes manually

As a result, we have managed to sell to 4 customers ouf 7 in the new target market using just mockups of the prototype. We have delivered concierge service to one of the customers by going through 60 applicants manually and figuring out the top 10 to interview (still waiting for results of the interviews). In one weekend our sales totaled $950 via collected credit card numbers, cash, and cheques.

In the nutshell, it was an amazing deep dive into lean startup methodology. It showed that it is possible to build successful businesses right of the hop if you have the right approach and mind set. Here are the 4 simplified steps of getting to success:

HireShark 0.1

1. Conduct as many customer development interviews as possible. Make sure they are well structured and you have your hypothesis and assumptions that you are trying to test.
2. Based on results of interviews, shape your solutions and deliver it as a concierge service – do it manually for as many potential customers as possible, charge money (if it’s part of the business model)
3. Only then get to prototyping and then right away get back to selling the prototype. The goal is to nail the minimal feature set that will sell.
4. Start building the first version, only when you start getting a feel from your customers that you’ve nailed the product – usually expressed in a way of reaching into their pockets and giving you cash, credit card information, or cheques.
   

   3rd customer - Satish Kanwar (Partner, JetCooper)

It is fascinating – the voice recognition technology has been around for quite some time and finally it seems that it’s reaching maturity. First time I ran into it when radiologists in United States started heavily switching from people transcribing their dictated diagnosis to Nuance Dragon software. The trend just caught on to our clients at SIMMS – smaller private diagnostic imaging clinics. They’ve been making the change quite aggressively and Nuance’s Dragon works accurately even with complex medical terms.

No wonder it’s time to get this into consumer products. Apple with Siri in iPhone 4S and now TV manufacturers are racing to deploy it. Voice recognition is the next advancement that will make our lives easier, but more importantly open up new lands for entrepreneurs to build their companies on and make some of them rich.

First of all, Nuance – the leader in voice recognition technology – is to collect some big bucks. It might be too late to get into the game due to complex technology and patents, but there are at least two large opportunities that I see:

1. Licensing the technology to create new products and apps or apply to existing ones that were too cumbersome to use without voice recognition before
2. New emerging app markets, like the case with TVs. There are 1,416,338,245  TVs in the world and soon all of them will be connected to the Internet and have voice recognition with Kinect. This means that you can play Angry Birds and post updates on Facebook, as well as do something that you haven’t done before that would require large on-screen real-estate.

It is exciting times and time will show how creative entrepreneurs can make our lives easier and more fun without getting out of our living rooms! Meanwhile, I hope the technology is not coming to elevators any time soon:

The first image returned by Google for "cool"

After quite some time trying to decide what my blog will be about, I had a break through. The day before yesterday, in an argument my business partner mentioned that I’m always after “the cool” and trying to get there myself and push everyone there. “The cool” – I guess the latest technologies, cool products and startups, thought leaders, disrupting ideas, smart tactics, etc. His comment did not register with me at first, but yesterday it came to me clear. While I was waiting for Eric Ries come online on Sprouter. I ran into the following Q&A by Aaron Patzer:

Q: Other than your blog, how did you attract so many users so quickly at Mint?

A:We gave our initial beta sign ups red-carpet treatment. By the time we were ready to launch, our blog had generated about 20k email addresses of people who said they were interested. Taking them all would have overloaded the system, so we told people that if they wanted “Alpha” access before everyone else, they could put up an “I Want Mint.com” badge on their website or blog. We had about 600 people do this. That meant 600 free advertisements, plus and increase in Google PageRank, plus those 600 people got special treatment and became our biggest advocates. Source: Sprouter

It appeared to me as a very “cool” tactic of building traction before launch and right away I started recalling all the other cool things I ran into in the past. Wouldn’t it be cool to have all these cool things in one blog? So here it is – the first post and MVP of my blog. Let’s see if I will have to pivot

P.S. Don’t mind my English. I suck in languages overall plus English is not my first language.