Wednesday 29 December 2010

Bulbomatic.com case study - 7 simple steps to test any idea or muse business

I talked in a previous post about our new venture, The Bulb Club. We're now bringing our first idea to life and it's called Bulbomatic.com. This time it's real light bulbs we're interested in rather than idea light bulbs!


I'd like to share with you the steps we've taken so that you can learn from our trial and error approach and hopefully be inspired to bring some of your own ideas to life rather than working on other people's ideas (i.e. having a job).

Who knows where any idea could take you, you could start a successful Muse Business, get your ticket to freedom and live your life to the absolute MAXIMUM! The important step is to take action and get your ideas out of your head and into the world. The Bulb Club project is trying to make this process as simple and repeatable as possible.

Our steps to date on the Bulbomatic idea are as follows:

Saturday 18 December 2010

Toolkit of a Digital Nomad : v1.1

I’ve spent the last 3 months carrying my homemade 'office' on my back. This means that I can work practically anywhere. Recently Jason Fried of 37signals.com gave a excellent TED lecture on "Why work doesn't happen at work". He has a point. When was the last time you managed to get much work done at your office desk?  The joy of a digital nomad lifestyle doesn’t just have to be for the not-employed. If you’re in a job you can benefit too, improving your productivity and reducing your working day. I can now get as much done in about 3 hours as I used to do in 8-10 hours at a conventional office because I’m inspired by my surroundings (that I choose and change) and because no one interrupts me.



Here’s my toolkit...

Saturday 11 December 2010

BUSINESS: Introducing The Bulb Club

Following on from my last post I’d like to tell you more about The Bulb Club. As you know my loose goals include being more creative, increasing connections and collaboration, starting a business and achieving a target monthly income.



The Bulb Club is a club / social framework for achieving these goals. What I’ve realised is that it’s actually more fun and energising (for me at least) to work with other people. I believe that small, nimble, practical, skilled teams can be incredibly productive. What I don’t believe in (well it doesn’t work for me) is fixed working hours, pointless meetings, too much talk, commuting, interruptions, big teams, lack of focus, lack of ethics or higher values etc.. things that many companies often suffer from.

So how does it work?

Saturday 4 December 2010

UPDATE: What I've been up to so far

It's been just over 3 months since I left employment.  It actually feels like much longer than that, so much has happened already! I thought it would be good to take stock and look back on the things I've been up to so far.

Apologies for another long post, I promise I'll write some shorter ones soon! :) Here goes...

The first item on my todo list when I left was to write the big masterplan, but I quickly realised that could be a bad idea. For the first time in a very long time I had the luxury of unplanned time, so I purposely set out without a master plan. I wanted to spend the first few months with enough space to let random things happen. I did want to set some vague 'goals' though just to give me some direction. So I created some directions of travel that I wanted to explore. I did this rough plan using the technique described here, creating some 'nothing' time and taking a pen and paper along.

My 'Agile' plan has areas of explorations, targets and a first step rather than a detailed timeline