3 laptops. R 1,000. 3 days to create a sustainable business.
Four young SA entrepreneurs are taking business to the extreme.
From their press release:
How many times do we talk about the ‘great idea’ around the braai? How many times do we say ‘Sheez man, I thought of that idea first, and if only I had acted upon it!’? Mostly, we are limited by time. Our normal jobs or family lives prevent us from acting upon the ‘Eureka’ bright spark that we had in the shower, or in traffic, or lying in bed at three in morning. Well, what if time was not part of the equation?
Jon Hughes, Shane Dryden, Fred Roed and Andrew Smith are meeting at Kayos Casting (The River Club, Cape Town) between 6-8 October to bring life to the extreme business concept. They’re all Internet and marketing geeks who have a desire to walk the talk. On the first morning the team will get together for a meeting, put ideas on the table and choose a product that may be viable to sell on the internet. They will then start the business by formulating a strategy, creating the website, developing an e-commerce platform and making sales – all within 3 days.
The event will be filmed, and updates will be available on the internet at the Extreme Business site. Wanting to sponsor the event? Get involved by contacting the Extreme Business team go to the website.
All proceeds from the sponsorship of the event will go to Autism Western Cape – see www.autismwesterncape.org.za
Also of interest:
The Business Experiment – a global, open source Internet business start-up
http://www.ideate.co.za
http://www.extremebusiness.co.za
…and they didn’t choose women to be on the team….
don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings but that was probably their first mistake.
dube – I agree completely. Diversity is a key to creativity, which is a cornerstone of innovation…
We don’t need to be overly paranoid about exhaustive representation, but diversity of gender, race and worldview would be helpful in almost any situation.
I’ve just checked in on them. This is the last day of their challenge and this is the day they need to make their sales! But it’s Saturday and everyone’s either at the shops, at home or visiting? So no-one’s home or logged on. Why did they choose Saturday as the day they need to make their sales? Bad planning? Lack of foresight? Second mistake.
Their aims are to: formulate a strategy (DONE), create the website (DONE), develop an e-commerce platform (DONE) and make sales (….). Yet their team is made up of marketing and internet geeks. Third mistake – no sales experience on their team.
Or is the point of this experiment exposure instead of a viable business?
Have looked at their marketing efforts and they seem to be very safe and tried and tested. What I would have liked to see is them being a lot more creative and pushing the boundaries. They have very little time left and it’s about having the guts and the insights to really be different. In a very short space of time.
Hi Guys. It’s Andrew from the Extreme Business team. Thanks very much for commenting on what we’re doing.
We first had the idea for this project 2 weeks ago and we didn’t want to lose momemtum, so it has all been put together very quickly. I’m sure we have made plenty of mistakes, but here are some responses to the ones that you highlighted.
1) The four of us are friends who run our own small businesses, and work on projects together. We decided to do this project together mainly for fun and to extend ourselves. We didn’t aim to create a multi-cultural, multi-gender “team”. This thing just happened.
2) Because we all run small businesses, we tried to miss as little work time as possible, which is why we ended on a Saturday. We initially thought of doing it on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but that would have made for a very tiring weekend! It also adds a bit of reality – most new businesses start during evenings and weekends.
3) I’m surprised that Anj is able to criticise our sales experience from the little he/she knows of us. I suppose it’s up to us to prove ourselves!
The exposure that we have received has totally taken us by surprise. We didn’t expect it, and I don’t think we would have gone to all this effort in the hope of some publicity.
Hey, good for you guys! I think it was a really creative venture and not bad pulling together everything in a few days. I guess this experiment might be along the lines of the Google 20% policy, where employees must give some of their time to non-work related projects. Maybe some companies should follow suit?