I just thought of sharing a technique I have been using lately for collecting knowledge on target industry or a new tool/startup idea

For example, you have been trying to something in online backups (a purely hypothetical example).

First, come up with top 3 relevant keywords that people search for while thinking of online backups. You may use Google insights for search.

Here are the relevant keywords I found: “online backups”, “data backups”, “server backups”

Now here is the juicy part. Go to Twitter search and for each of your keyword, search on following themes:

• What people like: search combination of keyword with words “like”, “love”, “great”, “cool”, “:)”. Example – “online backup” “love”
• What people dislike: search for “hate”, “sucks”, “:(”, “bad”, “worst”
• What people want: search for “want”, “wish”, “if only”, “lacking”

This will give you a pretty good idea of what people like, dislike and want in this particular industry. And if you spot patterns, you could have tremendous insight.

Further exploration:

• Expand your set of keywords
• Do the same three sets of searches for competitors/leaders in that industry
• Don’t just limit till Twitter, do Google blog search also

Any more ideas? More terms for searching likes, dislikes and wants? Now if someone could just make an app for simplifying this. Anyone?

The single biggest problem with entrepreneurs is that they have a very tightly knitted community. Yes, you read that right: being part of a tight community around entrepreneurship (especially Internet and technology startups) could be a barrier to moving ahead towards success. This might sound bit controversial but allow me to explain.

Most likely, entrepreneurs visit discussion forums dedicated to entrepreneurship. They have entrepreneurial friends. They consume entrepreneurship gyan day and night on how to succeed, what to do and what not to do. When they have difficulty, they take advice from like minded entrepreneurs who understand them. In short, lives of entrepreneurs revolve around experiences of other entrepreneurs only.

But, my friend, entrepreneurship circle is a very tiny part of this world and probably mutually exclusive from your target customer segment. Your customers don’t frequent the blogs, you do. They don’t participate in the discussions you like talking about. Moreover, your entrepreneur friends know no better about your target market than you do. All they can do is to provide their point of view, which may or may not apply to you because there are so many variables when it comes to startups, customers and target market.

While, if done in sensible limits, participating in entrepreneur community can be very fruitful. You get to learn from other’s mistakes and successes. But, more often that not, entrepreneurship circles become echo chambers where same point of view keeps repeating again and again and takes a life of its own. And the entrepreneurship circle is so small and tightly knit, that you might mistake it as truth. Reality is that your customers are not even aware that such circles exist. How many of your potential customers might be aware and frequently visit forums such as Hacker News, Techcrunch, Mashable, Reddit or (in India) Pluggd.in? They don’t hold the same opinions that get reinforced in such circles.

So take a dose of reality and understand that these entrepreneurship communities exist for a different purpose and the advice, tips, feedback you get should be seen in the context that all people there probably think like you do, have low budget and represent a tiny fraction of this world. Don’t take all of what is said as reality. Reality is what your customers tell. Every second spent in such circles can be spent talking to your customers and finding their circles.

Do you agree with my point of view? Do entrepreneurship circles help or hurt?

PS: I understand the irony of automatically generated related posts below. But my point is that the entrepreneurship community participation should be done in right context and the advice there should be seen in proper light of where the person is coming from.

What do you do if you feel you are born unlucky? What do you do if you feel that the whole world is conspiring against you to make you not succeed? And, what do you do if you feel you have less intellect, less resources and less everything to succeed?

The short and sweet answer is to work harder. You cannot control luck. You cannot control amount of financial resources you have. But what you can definitely control is the amount of effort. Your competitior or neighbour might be advantaged in all respects but you can compensate all that just by working harder.

Really, putting in a lot of effort gives you a lot of chances to make mistakes, try out things and fail. What you have to loose here is your effort, which of course you must have unlimited supply of.

If your nearest competitor or neighbour works X hours, you must work for X+1 hours. If he pitches to Y bloggers, you must pitch to Y+1 bloggers. Of course, you cannot match him in his $5 million funding and a huge team of sales guys. But what you can match (and even exceed) is your persistence and sheer drive to succeed.

Yep, I know it is sounding a bit like self-help bookish type, but I have observed and realized that success is an equation with a lot of variables. Most of the variables you have little or no control on but one variable which has a lot of influence on the result is effort and persistence. Controlling the value of this variable is entirely upto you and hence affecting chances of being successful is your will.

What are your thoughts on this? Does hard work really increases the probability of success?