So you’ve started to build your online product. You’ve surrounded yourself with people who can do what you can’t, learned much along the way and been changed by that experience. It’s difficult and at times not fun, but you’re making progress. But at the end of the day, you still just have a good idea – you haven’t executed yet. You must. It’s essential that you launch the right version of your product.

What’s the right version?

It’s likely the simplest possible version (SPV) of your internet product. Launching the SPV of your product is absolutely essential because it keeps costs down and avoids building something that your customers don’t need or want. If you are anything like me, you’ve had at least one idea that you thought was excellent, only to find that nobody else shared your opinion. Even with all the research and data projections, this sort of thing happens to businesses all the time. Don’t be one of those businesses. Bring a simple offering to the market with a clear core value proposition and let your customers help you build the rest. This process is elegant and effective. It keeps you focused on your core offering and competencies while responding to what the market truly desires. It helps mitigate high development costs and allows you to build only the extras that are wanted into your product.

Keep it simple, and listen to your customers. Learn from them and understand what your business is to them. You can then evolve into a platform or product that is valuable to users without the waste and customer confusion that comes with a fully loaded offering. This strategy will keep you true to your core and help you successfully turn your best idea into a real internet business.

It’s a scary thing to recognize how many facets of our lives are founded in online facilities, how much we depend upon the web in our day-to-day interactions, transactions, and exchange of information. It’s even more terrifying to imagine what we would do if the internet ever….collapsed.

These days, everything from our interpersonal communication, to our storage of all sorts of information, to our transfer of funds, to even our telephone usage is based off of the internet. What would happen to society if this forum for exchange and communication ever disappeared? How much of the world’s data and knowledge would be lost with the loss of the internet?  New data suggests that there are 1.3 trillion gigabytes of information stored on the internet.

In the very beginning, the internet was built around a feeling of trust for other internet users. As scientist Danny Hillis recounts, “The Internet was designed with the assumption that the communications links could not be trusted, but that the people that connected computers to the Internet were smart and trustworthy.”

In this video, Hillis recounts the early days of his internet experience and confesses his concerns regarding the future of the internet—its security and lack thereof.

Surround Yourself with People Who are Better than You.

You have now become proficient in the basics of your business’s language. Fantastic! It’s at this point that you realize that you know absolutely NOTHING. You are the 8th grader struggling to understand the quadratic formula while your friends are doing crazy things with Green’s Theorem. You now understand that you are totally outclassed and figure out that there are a thousand other people who know so much more than you. Good – now go work with them!

Collaboration is one of the best ways to advance your professional and personal development. Your internet business depends upon the work you can ship, and the work you can ship depends on your network. Develop your network as best you can – your business depends on it. Your personal knowledge depends on it. Your livelihood depends on it.

Nobody is an island, and nobody includes you. Build your network and surround yourself with people who are better at things than yourself. They will push you to do a greater volume of high quality work than you would otherwise. You network is your lifeline, your support, your phone-a-friend. Build it and use it.

Introduction

Every internet business starts as a simple idea. They come from experiences, frustrations, and joy. Internet businesses are a product of life. So you’ve lived life and come back with a few observations and opinions. How do you now turn your best idea into a real internet business? Never before has it been simultaneously so easy and so freaking difficult. A successful business takes excellent execution, and excellent execution takes skill and knowledge and understanding. But you’ve got understanding because you’ve lived. You just need skill, and therefore knowledge. How? Let’s explore these questions together.

Take Time to Learn the Basics

At the basis of every system is a language, a syntax that is the key to progressing beyond an entry level understanding. This syntax is the cornerstone of relevance  because, like in math, if you cannot grasp the basics of algebra, there is no way you can figure out calc 3. The internet business equivalent of Calc 3 is what you’ll want to succeed.  And again, at the basis of that is a syntax. You can’t learn a language by reading about it. Whether it’s building, programming, researching, or selling, you have to practice it to understand it. You have to do it!

Too many times I’ve told myself that I don’t have the time or the know-how or the skills to accomplish a goal. I’m human, and to error is to be human. I was wrong and so are you. Don’t let your lack of knowledge be an excuse. In the words of Josh Long, when it comes down to it, “unless [you] have a disability, [you're] just plain lazy.” Virtually everything you need to know is at your fingertips through a simple search on Google. Don’t let your lack of knowledge be an excuse to a continued lack of knowledge! Go out and experience it, learn the language of your business and start engaging in the discourse. You’re living and engaging your niches. Good. Keep it up! It’s the start.

Immerse Yourself in Your Work

Rarely do great things happen today without someone being absolutely sold-out and committed to their work. Knowledge and technology are too far advanced in most realms to simply stumble upon something revolutionary. This ties back to our first point, Don’t Count on Luck. Remember, she’s a dropout no-show. Besides, people are only interested in living their lives, and in the end so are you. So find that place you fit and thrive in it. Don’t just exist there, but create something valuable. Something people want to talk about. Something people need. Don’t forget – this takes a thorough understanding of where you all came from. You must truly live and breathe your niche, your work.

Life is work. Murphy’s Law tells us this, as we’ve already covered. To innovate, we must understand life, and to understand life, we must know where we came from. And to know where we came from, we must live life. So don’t just sit there. Go live. Go to the world and immerse yourself in it. I don’t care what others tell you to do. You’ve got one life. Listen to it. Observe it. Be changed by it. Understand it. Then innovation will come naturally because you know exactly where you are, how you got there, where you want to go, and how best to get there. Go live, make mistakes, learn from them, and tell others about it. You will become an innovator because you’ve lived.

Understand the Context

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s a product of life. Life is the experiences we have – the good and the bad, the fun and the not so fun. Every day here on earth shapes our minds and how we perceive our lives, and it’s our past, whether we acknowledge it or not, that effects our experiences. History is the key to today, and today is the key to the future. If we understand the future, we can help bring it about. We can be the drivers – we become the innovators. In other words, to shape the future, we must first understand how we arrived at the present, and to understand how we arrived at the present requires understanding the greater context that the present arose from.

So how do we understand the context?

Understand Society

Whether you want to admit it or not, you are a product of your environment. Society shapes the way you live your life, from the clothes you wear to the music you listen to. From the foods you eat to the things you spend your time on. And guess what – society didn’t arise from a vacuum either. Society is a product of history, and by transitive property, so are you. Therefore, to conceive what you want, what you need, you must understand history. And when you understand what YOU want – and not what you like want, but really, really crave – you likely find what everyone else wants. And now you can innovate. Innovation starts with understanding what movements shaped your society on a grand scale.

Understand Your Sub-Culture

You are a part of society at large, and you are effected by it. Don’t hide from that fact. But you think Tyler Durden had it right. You reject society.  The first rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club. Congratulations,  you’ve made it.You’re the same as everyone, you just joined a group that pretends that you’re not. You’re a reaction to society at large. Marx had it right in more ways than one.

Good news – subcultures are just another word for niches. And niches lead to riches. Ahhhh, so you’re getting it now. You’re not so different. You want to make money just like those high rollers in society you’ve rejected, because in the end you are human. Just please don’t pretend you’re ultimately different. Let’s get to business. You’ve got a niche. Understand that niche. It arose as a reaction to society at large, now it’s your job to decipher why and how. If you figure that out, you truly begin to understand the state of your niche – what motivates it, what makes it tick, what makes it live and breathe. NOW BE THE OXYGEN. Give it life, feed it, nurture it, grow it. You love it, so embrace it and give your life to it. If you can do that, innovation is only natural.

Remember, innovation is just a product of life. A life of understanding.

If you have been a part of the social networking craze from its very beginnings with Myspace, AOL, and Xanga, you have probably noticed the dramatic shift in focus of these sites. When you first made your MySpace profile, you most likely spent oodles of time writing a full self-description in the “about” section, including your favorite animal, favorite color, current favorite music, favorite quotes, and favorite movies. You uploaded pictures of yourself (but only the good ones) to complete this online identity, so that anyone browsing your page might get a full and extremely accurate (note the sarcasm, please) depiction of who you are and why you are worth getting to know. But we all know: if you were anything like the average social network user, you spent exponentially more time on your own profile than you did on your friends’.

With the advent of facebook, we saw all of these same features—pictures, lengthy descriptions of interests and “likes,” space for quotes and long ranting paragraphs about the things you wanted everyone to hear about you. However, as time has gone by, the popularity of these portions of social networking pages has dwindled. People pay less attention to the nitty gritty details on their own page and have begun to use facebook for what is perhaps an even more unhealthy purpose: intensive stalking of friends’ profiles. And of your friends’ friends’ profiles. Suddenly, facebook has become less about helping others get to know you and more about getting to know other people—people who, too often, you are too lazy to get to know in person. It’s an interesting social phenomenon, really. I’ll be honest—one of the primary reasons I find and friend recent acquaintances on facebook is so that I can get a fuller, more rounded picture of what that person is like from their facebook profile. But like we’ve already said—all the effort we put into building our own profiles is geared toward establishing the best possible self-image for all to see.  So what does this boil down to? Are we really getting to know each other through our facebook profiles? Are we really building friendships or are we building false pretenses and expectations of one another? Regardless of whether it’s “right” or “wrong,” there has been an obvious shift in the purpose of facebook. So this is question we must answer: is it socially beneficial and validated to use facebook as a means of discovering things about people that we are too lazy or scared to ask them about in person?

While my instinctive reaction is to be repulsed by this obvious, society-wide leap back in social capabilities, my other response is simply: if you’re willing to post your info, you’re welcoming people to use it in whatever way they deem necessary.