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When you want to build something, where do you start? What problem do you look to fix and how can you see the disconnected world with new eyes?

You know those word puzzles that have a bunch of letters and you look for the words they can make when you read them vertically, horizontally and diagonally. You step back and take in the whole picture. You’re not focusing on letters you’re waiting for words to emerge out of the alphabet soup. That’s pattern perception.

Remember those magic eye posters that were everywhere in the early 90′s, especially at festivals, they were the same. They were just a mass of coloured dots on a poster if you stood in front of it. You couldn’t see anything! What you had to do was not focus on the dots in front of you but focus on some point in the distance and see past it to make the image pop out, I remember seeing dolphins and smiley faces!

The point I’m making is that to see something differently you have to look at it in a new way. You have to develop your own pattern perception. Stop looking and start seeing; then you can make connections that are truly disruptive.

 

I guest blogged this piece for a company I like a lot, who also like disrupting and changing things. Pete Watson, the CEO is a friend and razor sharp. He’s one of those people that can get right to the heart of a problem and fix it. He and his team are ‘doers’ not writers of reports that get pushed into a draw and are only read by CEOs.

I was interested in and gave some thought to “Where ideas come from“. Anyway I hope you enjoy it too.

 

What is the remarkable component of your idea?

There’s so much of the same ‘thing’ that it blends into a murky soup. An ok idea can start out as a bright colour but when you mix lots of colour together on a canvas it ends up being that yucky brownish colour! Neither attractive nor stimulating.

But you say, “Hey, lots of ok ideas together still form a marketplace.” Well that’s true, we still shop there because we want something and better to make do with what’s there than go without! But do you really want to be an ok idea amongst other ok ideas? Is that your ambition?

If you’re going to blow away the art marketplace, if you’re going to be Jackson Pollock or Matisse or Picasso – true disrupters – you’re going to need something remarkable.

Remarkable is disrupting. It’s the beautiful face that catches your eye as it scans a room of faces. It’s the iPod and in a more modern context, in this writers eyes, it’s @bufferapp. Remarkable catches our attention and changes how we do things.

Now, disruption that is powerful enough to influence change, seems incredibly difficult. After all changing a habit isn’t easy. If it were we wouldn’t feel the shockwave of disruption as keenly, but is it difficult?

The pursuit of remarkable is the application of deep thought on a subject about which you’ve gathered all the available knowledge. That’s not difficult. It’s time consuming, it requires commitment and energy and the belief that you can uncover something remarkable, but it’s not difficult.

The truth is, human beings on the whole settle for creating ok. They have an idea, but they don’t push it to be remarkable; they do enough to get it out there and make some money. Not many of us are determined enough to uncover remarkable, but I beseech you to try.

 

So you’ve listened. I stress this all the time to people. Listen, listen, listen! How else can you know what the hell people think or need? But when do you talk?

You see, for the most part you get people excited about your idea, enough to want to be part of it and then off you go on this journey to build it. The fact is, creation is often an insular pursuit; especially creating technology. You naturally want to protect your baby, so you speak about it in veiled hushed tones to a selected trusted few under an NDA. That’s as it should be – and by the way, if you’re thinking about investment at any point in the future it’s a due diligence necessity!

But when do you begin to reach out of your little den of development and speak to real people who might one day buy this slice of technical heaven you’re creating?

Right now, we’re half way through a build and because we’re bootstrapping, we’re keen to hit the ground running. So it makes sense to see what people need to get them excited about our health app without actually having a product to I can reveal with a “Tadaaaa!”. Seems to me that if you can sell an idea, plant a visual in someone’s mind and hit those core needs clearly, then people will get on board. That’s been my experience. They’re obviously not going to commit to anything without a road test, but the contact is warm and their interest is piqued.

So, talk as soon as you’ve nailed down the what, why and how. As soon as you can create the vision in their minds, that’s when to start talking.

 

There is a lot of focus on stopping smoking this month as the Dept. of Health launches it’s national campaign ‘Stoptober’. Promotion of the campaign, which is backed by Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation has be phenomenal, including ads on TV, radio and in the press, plus national media partnerships, posters and in-pharmacy literature.

Such a weight of highly visible content is outstanding and should I hope create a legacy of awareness beyond the 28 days in which the campaign wants us to focus on stopping smoking. As with the Olympics, a good event is only half a success. What happens next? How does this innovative campaign live on?

Support for others wishing to change a negative habit for a positive one is still needed and with the bar being set so high by Stoptober, what can people wanting to get fit, lose weight or manage stress in the workplace expect?

Juice will be here of course. Whilst we don’t have the marketing budget of the Dept. of Health, we have the disruptive technology to provide on-going long-term support for people who want to change.

We’ll be working with our customers to help them support the health and wellbeing of their workforce. We’ll be working with occupational health teams to provide better, more focused interventions and we’ll be there as long as there is a need for our technology.

Small has its advantages, it really does. This is what I’ve learnt early on.

Everyone is frontline
Customers are closer
No pointless meetings
No time for complexity

People count

Doers not ponderers
Try and fail and try again
No superstars just super learners
Work to people’s strengths

Relish being small

Quicker to react
Less formality
More accountability
More freedom

No money, no problem

Everything works harder
Everything and everyone has to add value
Everything moves faster
Every day matters

Build something usable fast

It doesn’t have to be finished just good
Details get in the way early on
Iterate
Iterate
Iterate

Simplify everything

Complex means more support
Fewer errors
Easier to change
Easier to scale

Finger on the pulse

When to iterate
When to leave it be

Cost versus benefit

Do what is best for your customers
Don’t take your eye of the product

Building buzz

Open about everything
Let people feel part of the success
Share ideas and then implement them
Be human always

Launching a new venture, especially when you are accountable to others, can seem a daunting task. It’s very easy to think that every decision you make is life or death to your venture and that all your decisions are permanent. They aren’t.

Decisions move you forwards, sideways and backwards but they can leave you paralysed and rooted to the spot when you’re sweating over each and every decision you need to make.

Apart from our core brand, values and ideas, the truth is, no decision is permanent. We decide what feels right now and if circumstances and conditions change, then so does the decision. It’s incredibly liberating when you adopt that mindset.

There are a lot of decision-making models you can find online if you feel you need structure. Personally, I’ve found that surrounding myself with people from different experiences and backgrounds provides me with everything I need. I’m not precious about every decision needing to come from me either; a better suggestion is glaringly obvious when it comes along. I act on it and move forward.

 

We’ve launched a sign-up page for Juice. It’s all very exciting!

The Juice app will be available for download in January, providing ‘Right on Time’ support 24/7 for people who are fighting cravings, setting themselves up healthy goals or just trying to get into shape for that sponsored run.

Juice uniquely calibrates itself to your personal cravings, habits or goals and enlists your friends and family to support you in achieving your objectives.

Our mission is simple. Whenever you’re fighting to make the right choices; eating healthily, resisting a cigarette or simply getting your gear on for a run, your friends will be there to support you.

If you would like to test the app please click on the link below the Logo or follow this link.

….there was an idea. Sometimes they come to you in a flash of inspiration; others are as a result of looking for something – a product or service – and not finding it anywhere. The idea for Juice came to me as I paid for lasagne in a café!

I was dieting. Not following any programme as such, but just trying to be conscious of what I was eating. I’d planned to eat a salad that lunch time; in fact I’d convinced myself I WAS going to eat a salad. As I stood in the queue, by the service area, I spotted the lasagne. It’s a weakness I have! What followed was an internal dialogue that went something like this:

Subconscious: (in a Fagin style voice) Mmmmmm, lasagne. You know you like it; it’s your ultimate comfort food. Go one, have some….

Conscious: No. I need the salad.

Subconscious: …… but you WANT the lasagne. Go on; get it! It’ll make you feel good about yourself.

Conscious: No, it won’t. It’ll make me feel good while I’m eating it, but afterwards, I’ll hate myself for it.

Subconscious: No it won’t. I’ll look after you… I always look after you….

I bought the lasagne and hated myself afterwards.

But it got me thinking. Change has to happen internally before it can stand a chance of happening externally. We have to be prepared to change a negative eating habit for a positive one, but how do we go about this? What’s available to help us?

Well there are life coaches and therapists, but they are out of the reach financially for most people. There are popular and affordable self-help books that can give you an objective view of yourself and your habits. There are hundreds of apps that help you count calories, diary your diet, measure nutrition, measure your heartbeat, capture your fitness levels etc.

These are all important throughout the change process, but what actually “kick starts” you? What helps you to effectively fight cravings and give you an armoury to fight the battle of the habit?

So I had this moment of enlightenment. I thought that if you’re fighting a battle, you need support at the moments when the battle is at its most intense; when you are making choice. So I figured, if a system through an app could learn an individual’s habit and capture in detail when they think about their habit (how often they eat or smoke or need to take exercise etc) and at the same time provide the user with the expert advice to enable them to understand and therefore change negative habits for ever, then that would be a useful tool.

Then I thought, that system which now has a detailed timeline of the user’s habit… what if it provided him or her with the ability to recruit their friends and family to support them in their habit change? That would provide real personal, emotionally positive support, right at the moment when the user is making their choices.

I had this image in my mind of me, standing in the queue in the café, battling to be healthy… and then receiving a message from my daughter saying how important it is to her for me to be around and healthy as she grows up. Lump in the throat moment!

So that’s where Juice came from. It’s evolved hugely since that moment, but it remains true to its core idea. Helping people fight their cravings by providing ‘Right on Time’ support from their family and friends.