Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises

Many years ago, I read Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy, and that got me thinking seriously about building an internet business. Since then, I’ve found that all sorts of interesting people seem to point me back to his website for some interesting thoughts about interesting things. After one such pointing, I checked out his collection of sourced quotes and spotted one from George Gilder (I used the quote as the title of this post) pointing to this article about entrepreneurs and the creation of wealth. The internet is pretty cool.

I regularly find myself attempting to and failing to explain the importance of entrepreneurship and how entrepreneur means something different than business person or capitalist. Well, yes, entrepreneurs are often business people and might even describe themselves as capitalists, but seldom is a capitalist or a business person an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are, in fact, very rare and getting rarer.

One day a couple years ago, I got annoyed by so many people describing themselves as entrepreneurs–feeling that it dilutes the value and meaning of the career–that I tried to wrap some definition around the phrase. I much prefer the way Gilder characterizes entrepreneurship. It’s more than simply making new stuff work; entrepreneurship is about enabling prosperity.

I love how he differentiates between wealth creation and wealth extraction. Some wonderful excerpts:

Continue reading “Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises”

The cutting room floor

A couple months ago, GuildQuality introduced a new service that helps homeowners or prospective homebuyers find a builder, remodeler, or home improvement contractor. Internally, we’ve been referring to it as Find.

This is a pretty big expansion from our core bread-and-butter service of customer surveying for contractors. Since 2003, the best contractors in North America have relied on our surveying to help them deliver great service. When we launched way back when, we focused solely on surveying homeowners and homebuyers on behalf of builders and remodelers. We quickly found that our information was useful to anyone interesting in learning more about the great companies we work with. So that led to us in 2004 to introduce company profile pages for our members. Over the years, we added more and more to those pages: pictures of work, social media integrations, public reviews. Etc. etc.

We realized that there were byproducts from serving our GuildQuality members that we could repurpose in new and valuable ways. We created member profile pages after we realized that we had a ton of feedback that, if repackaged, was really useful for the prospective clients of our members. We introduced reviews after we realized that we were already going to the effort of prompting a customer to share their feedback in our surveys, and we could easily give them the chance to share a review as well.

Now, years later, we find ourselves with tons and tons of great information from both homeowners and contractors from all over the United States and Canada. We have enough that we can now share powerful information about who’s doing what sort of work in which locations. If you’re in Seattle and need a new home or renovation, we can help. If you’re interested in finding a Charleston remodeler, we’ve got you covered. If you’d like to replace some windows in your Bethesda home, we know who you need to speak with.

We’re really excited about Find. Check it out, and don’t hesitate to share your feedback.

What are your byproducts? What assets are you developing that you’re not leveraging? What are the sorts of things that you’re leaving on the cutting room floor?

P.S. Here are some more ideas about using your byproducts from the folks at 37signals, circa 2009.

The cutting room floor

A couple months ago, GuildQuality introduced a new service that helps homeowners or prospective homebuyers find a builder, remodeler, or home improvement contractor. Internally, we’ve been referring to it as Find.

This is a pretty big expansion from our core bread-and-butter service of customer surveying for contractors. Since 2003, the best contractors in North America have relied on our surveying to help them deliver great service. When we launched way back when, we focused solely on surveying homeowners and homebuyers on behalf of builders and remodelers. We quickly found that our information was useful to anyone interesting in learning more about the great companies we work with. So that led to us in 2004 to introduce company profile pages for our members. Over the years, we added more and more to those pages: pictures of work, social media integrations, public reviews. Etc. etc.

We realized that there were byproducts from serving our GuildQuality members that we could repurpose in new and valuable ways. We created member profile pages after we realized that we had a ton of feedback that, if repackaged, was really useful for the prospective clients of our members. We introduced reviews after we realized that we were already going to the effort of prompting a customer to share their feedback in our surveys, and we could easily give them the chance to share a review as well.

Now, years later, we find ourselves with tons and tons of great information from both homeowners and contractors from all over the United States and Canada. We have enough that we can now share powerful information about who’s doing what sort of work in which locations. If you’re in Seattle and need a new home or renovation, we can help. If you’re interested in finding a Charleston remodeler, we’ve got you covered. If you’d like to replace some windows in your Bethesda home, we know who you need to speak with.

We’re really excited about Find. Check it out, and don’t hesitate to share your feedback.

What are your byproducts? What assets are you developing that you’re not leveraging? What are the sorts of things that you’re leaving on the cutting room floor?

P.S. Here are some more ideas about using your byproducts from the folks at 37signals, circa 2009.