Simeon Margolis

Tracking Your Nutrition, as Easy as Tweeting

I'm very excited to be releasing a new Nutritter feature allowing people to track their nutrition just by tweeting their meals.  I wrote a bunch more about this feature and where Nutritter is going next over on the Nutritter blog.  Take a gander and let me know what you think! If you're too lazy to click-through, here's the video:

Healthy Eating on the Go = Ready Health Go

My buddy Jeff Siteman just debuted another location in Boston where you can buy his line of pre-wrapped Ready Health Go salads, wraps and sandwiches. Heather and I got down to the new location at Forever Fit in Watertown and enjoyed an Herb Chicken salad for Heather and their best selling Turkey Green Apple wrap for me.  Jeff is bringing it real with these salads and sandy's. Both of them were clearly made with real ingredients and were delicious and fresh even for something you'd order in a restaurant. Jeff isn't putting me up to writing this, I just love a good sandwich and appreciate the sandwich maker who does the same.  You can check out their other locations here or peak at the nutrition facts here. Here's to 100 more locations Jeff!

Your Alumni Community

Do you stay in touch with old classmates? Take advantage of your alumni network? You should! I got to get back to Babson again today to touch base with old friends and new acquaintances and check out the Alumni Technology event on cloud computing. Just like a conference, nobody was really there to learn about cloud computing, they were there to connect and reconnect. Now go get out there and reconnect with your alma mater, trust me, they want to hear from you!

What are you eating?

I'm very excited to be getting a new service off the ground at SXSWi '09 next week. We'll be introducing the Nutritter alpha to about 50 people. Nutritter asks the question "What are you eating?" By answering, Nutritter members are seamlessly tracking their nutrition, connecting with friends and family, and much more.

The grand vision for Nutritter is to help more people take control of their nutrition including parents struggling with childhood obesity by making it easy to share information with each other and with qualified health professionals.We can't wait to get your feedback.

For more information on how to get an invite to the Nutritter alpha, check out the latest post on the Nutritter Blog or keep up with our progress by following @nutritter on Twitter.

The Technology Barrier

I'm not a technologist. I'm a generalist. In fact, while I knew most of what went into it, I created, hosted, and published my first web page just this month. From talking to so many people recently, I know I'm not alone. There's lots of us generalist out there with big ideas and limited resources.

What I've found surprising is that my limited technical skill set has played in my favor during concept formation and prototyping. This past year, I had gotten used to having nearly anything be technically possible. But what happens when you can build anything you want? For me, the product became more about the product and less about the user. Sure, the user was always central to my thought process and I tried to keep feedback loops tightly integrated with feature development, but ultimately, I'll admit, it became 49 percent "the user would do this with it" and 51 percent "that would be cool!"

So what's my point? The technology barrier is the opposite of what I was expecting. By being capable of managing and fully understanding basically one thing, I've been forced to think about the highest use for that one thing's implementation. 

Could development of a prototype be going 100 times faster? Yes. Has gathering the technical resources to get something together quickly been painful? Definitely. But in the end, gathering the resources is a matter of using leverage and seeing connections. It's sales. Being forced to implement only one piece of technology doing one specific task for one specific audience has been the key to demystifying the development cycle. My mantra so far is 'less Segway, more...mechanical pencil.'

What do you think? Are you a generalist? A technologist? Are you thinking about technologies that defy gravity or the implementation of existing technologies to solve a problem?

Business Planning without a Plan

I'm wrapping up a business plan and since I'm not comfortable screaming the concept out loud quite yet, I thought I'd share the process I used for the actual business planning. I'll note that this process is an outgrowth of the 'Two Things' principal I learned from Marty Anderson at Babson College during a course called "Extended Enterprise Management."  I'm not an expert on business planning, but for what it's worth, here's what I've done.

A traditional plan has sections such as Opportunity, Problem, Business Model, Competitive Advantage. So does mine. The mistake I wanted to avoid however, was writing my plan in those sections. I've wasted time in the past trying to build an organism on paper in those stages. It doesn't work.

I should note, this process really began after considerable research had been done on market trends, niche markets, supply and demand chains, etc.  Never with a specific solution in mind, but just to appraise an industry that I think is ripe with opportunity.

Within any set of entities that assumptions have defined as an industry, there are a complex set of connections.  They can be summarized into those between members of Demand Chains, Supply Chains, and Communities (markets). My first task was to define those demand chains, supply chains and communities as best I could.  This included members, interests, operations, financial information, trends, leverage, and opinions.  Often, I tried to relate demand chains, supply chains, and communities from other groups of entities to the one that had my focus.

While defining these command like organizational structures, I was also plotting the three layers of each entity as well as the the sum of the entities along three common criteria.  Those are their physical layer, information layer, and mental model layer.  An over-simplified example for the music industry in the late 90's might be:
    - Physical: CD's, home entertainment centers, car stereos, retail
    - Information: prices, marketing
    - Mental models: compete for 'share of wallet,' CD sales are key to making money from promoting musicians...

I found you never really finish an exercise like this, but you decide to slow down advancing it and begin to examine and organize it.  What I had created were a series of notes that could almost all be organized like this matrix.

I then highlighted commonalities across these maps that fit together into a larger network map. The implications internal to each of these highlighted players determined the value proposition (or lack thereof), balance of power, and flow of money. Out of these connections fell the opportunity and out of understanding the opportunity in this way, fell the business plan. When plotted against a supply and demand chain map that represents market conditions, our commonalities open up funnels that can be put together in unique ways to maximize an opportunity.

It was a painful process that was often frustrating but equally enlightening.  To tell the truth, now that I've put the opportunity on paper, I wonder if all that work was worth the end concept. Even if the opportunity is not big enough or bound to succeed, it's put together in the most rational way I could think of given the current pace of the market.

What do you think, rational method? Would you change it?

The Two Things

In the past 3 years I've done some of my best learning.  A lot of it has reaffirmed some of my earlier thoughts on the validity of chaos theory, string theory, and assorted other explanations for both social and scientific phenomenon. So much of the same has rung true in my dive into online conversations. If you're not already reading people like Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Seth Godin, and many others commenting on how this space in maturing, start taking a look.

What I want to talk about is something that has fallen out of these past 3 years. As I take a leap into entrepreneurship I've been thinking about something I learned from Marty Anderson at Babson College. That is, if you can accomplish two things, you may be ready to successfully run or start a business.  What two things?

    1. See the network
    2. Control or influence it without owning it

I'll be talking more about these two things in the coming months, but I had the need to publicly remind myself just how much these two things force me to think about all the most important things when sizing up opportunities. 

See the Network
This is not seeing that my friends are friends with other people who I may be interested in meeting, although that is part of it.  This is finding the connection between two seemingly unrelated things and boiling it down to an action I can take to benefit from that connection. One of my favorite examples is still the opportunity for Columbian drug cartels if they were only looking at how the fact that there is a northern and southern hemisphere helps them tremendously in an unrelated business. 

Control without Ownership
This one is pretty straightforward, but it's in the execution of this principal that separates a good idea from a successfully bootstrapped venture. You have much more leverage than you think. 

More to come but let me know what you think. Can successful business strategy be summarized entirely by these two things?

A Rising Tide

Podcamp Boston 3 has, so far, been a confirmation of social media's rising tide.  Sitting here at the Utterz table giving demos and making people giddy with our little stuffed cow giveaways has been an eye-opener. Typically, I'd expect some of the usual personalities asking about when we'll be providing the new plugin for the whigetamaker for the whozigamwhat.  Because, you know, that would be worth, what? Three more users?  But no, so far today, I'd say 90 percent of people have opened with something along the lines of: "so I'm new to this whole social media thing, just trying to figure it out and someone told me 'you guys' were one of the companies to check out."  Brilliant.

So what does this all mean? Probably not much of anything for people waiting with bated-breath for the explosion of social media into their everyday lives dealing with customer service, purchase orders or internal enterprise communications. 

Why? You tell me, but I suspect it has something to do with our spot on the adoption curve.  Not great news for you, my social media obsessed friend, but hey, at least you're probably not a company trying to make a living at it!

Is it time for a takeover?

Microsoft tried a year ago and were rebuffed by Yahoo.  They've had a year to turn it around, is it time for Yahoo to sell?

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Our Government at Work

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