I am the author of the book, "How We Did It". For the book, I interviewed 100 entrepreneurs from all walks of life. From the tech world, people interviewed include the founders of companies like Freelancer, Udemy, Fiverr, Tagged.com, Unroll.me, PluralSight and Grooveshark. Other people interviewed include consultants, Yoga trainers (YogaFit),bakers, jewelry makers, etc.
I recently talked to nearly 100 entrepreneurs for my book titled "How We Did It". One thing that I asked most of them was how to validate the business idea before embarking on it. One common answer was to set up a landing page and advertise it using the right keywords on Adwords. Are people proceeding towards the purchase/download from here? In that case, there is a market and you could work on your idea.
I agree. There possibly could be another book that addresses things the exact same way I have done. But the fact that I could not find it while trying to scratch my itch tells me this book has potential to reach people like me the other books have not addressed.
Secondly, although interviews with the founders of Freelancer and Udemy makes for a nice brand building exercise, their interviews are not the USP of the book. I think this book is useful because it tells the stories from people who are not media darlings - people who run baking shops, vegetable growers, yoga schools; people who make their own jewelry and sell on Etsy. The stories and struggles of these people are not chronicled. Even if they are, they must be available as a 99 cent ebook on Kindle that has not really reached many.
This book consolidates the experiences from the ultra-successful and those who have failed, people who face challenges from multiple aspects like money, gender, industry, etc. And reading all of this in one place is definitely a useful alternative to the umpteen books that one must read for the same purpose.
As an Indian, this is a topic of conversation even inside India. For example, the place I worked for in Bangalore had people who spoke to each other in Hindi, another bunch that spoke Tamil, Telugu, etc. When there was a common need, of course they spoke in English or Hindi (when everyone understands it). But to each other, people speak in their vernacular.
For someone to whom English is a second language, it doesn't come naturally to converse all the time in English - they probably think in their vernacular and translate it into English all the time they talk to you. Asking them to converse among themselves in English just so the lone English could understand their Shah Rukh Khan gossip is unrealistic.
Makes sense. In that case, would scanning the sea for hues of red work? The MH370 has a pretty prominent red strip along its body. If we can scan for this color, then it could be a more practical search.
Another thing - a script to do this could take at least 2-3 days to code. Things could change pretty drastically by then. Of course, we might be able to reuse the code for another unfortunate time.
Do we have an IFTTT recipe for this? I guess it's a pretty good idea to try this reverse search against all of our competitors to see if there is a pattern for our specific industry.
Writing the book was a huge experience for me thanks to the inspiring stories that these entrepreneurs told me. You can find it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/How-Did-entrepreneurs-struggles-experi...