Road to the Moon — Part 2

I read and thought a lot this week but haven’t done much to push Moon forward. Which is a shame.

Never forget to not replace you doing stuff by you learning stuff. Learning/reading is good but are you actually delivering value to the customers ? Are you progressing on your business model ? Nope. That’s easy to be busy. So are the ants. What is the single most important thing you can do right now for your project ?

I know my answer. I need to finish setting up Google Analytics on my app, QA-it and send it to potential customers so they can give me feedbacks and I can start growing an audience. This is my goal next week.

This probably can be summed up as the 80/20 rule (I know there’s 10000 80/20 rules these days). In that context, I mean that 80% of your efforts must be focused on doing the most important thing you think. Big focus on DOING. The rest of your effort (the 20%) must be focused on LEARNING. So don’t replace doing by learning, you have the illusion of moving but don’t be a fool, even if you’re building up your knowledge, your project hasn’t moved an inch.

Nevertheless, I’ve read some interesting concepts I can apply on Moon. For instance in Zero to One, the author talks about how we should focus on a specific and small customer segment first. And become the first solution in that segment. So I thought, what segments can I take by storm with Moon ? Here are some of the ideas that I have:

• Engineering schools like Epita. The fact that Moon is using AI may be a good argument
• Couples
• Entrepreneurs

Then once we have one segment, we can expand to others.

The Hard thing about hard things I read is not really for us that are trying to move an idea to something concrete or even finding the idea. It’s more for CEOs whose companies are already in place. But hopefully, this will be me at some point. Although I’m not sure I want to be the CEO of a big firm, I think you tend to loos the entrepreneur-side and you look more like a big manager. I still want to be hands-on in the project

I also re-read Blue Ocean Strategy and conclude I needed to spend more time on what are the factors in our industry our competitiors are positioned on. The preliminary list would be:

• Diversity of events
• All-in experience (ticketing, …)
• Analytics for event organisers
• Price for event organisers
• …

I need to think about what factors could we introduce in this industry, what factors we’d need to reduce and what factors we’d need to eliminate. Some factors we could introduce:

• Social aspect (sharing, friend system)
• Gamification
• Conversational feature
• Generic trends for event organisers, specified for Paris

What factors could we reduce:

• Diversity of events if we focus on a target market for instance : Don’t take into account business events if we target couples first.
• ?

What factors could we eliminate ?

• The All-in experience ? For instance ticketing could be eliminated if we only re-direct to eventBrite, meetups, …