Project Q

  Every investment deck I’ve seen always claims a massive market size for whatever industry a business is addressing. These usually involve using cut and paste stats from some consultancy, market research or investment research company. Heaven knows how often I've prepared decks in the past that have been guilty of this. The trouble is that market size and addressable market size are two very different figures and the latter is usual a fraction of the former. The global TV market is easily worth $1 trillion. The market for rights management software, which underlies the whole industry, is probably £500m, or 0.05% of the market size. Then this is taken up by competitors, so the addressable market size is considerably smaller. Factor in churn and the volatility of the TV market thanks to mergers and you suddenly end at a very different figure for the actual addressable market. You can apply the same metrics to online streaming technology or asset management software for the industry....

  I’ve long believed that every business has a model at its core and that model can be defined as a formula. As an entrepreneur or investor you then stress test that formula to decide if you have a viable business. For example, my early stage streaming business, Narrowstep charged monthly platform fees and services payments, but the core formula was that we bought bandwidth for a lower price and sold it for a higher price. Most such models are based on barter arbitrage. I recently encountered a business that looked like it has great reseller margins, but nowhere in its business plan did it contemplate the cost of customer acquisition. You can negotiate a 20% margin with suppliers, but unless you can acquire customers for 10% of your sale price you are never going to realise a profit. It’s basic, but what brings down 90% of startups in my experience. There are two other pratfalls. One is psychological, one is hoping that you can change the way people behave. The other is over-estima...

Usually when you do anything in life it has a focused application, but here at Project Q we have a problem.  Our new platform can be nothing or everything. I’ve never been in this situation before, where what I can do can be utterly ignored or change the way everyone uses the internet (yes, seriously).  Thankfully I’m getting great advice from some very experienced people.

Coming up with a pithy name is easy, but finding one that is in some way unique and even meaningful is a real problem. I always start with the .com URL, which is a hiding to nothing in itself. You can spend hours on the site of a name registrar such as GoDaddy. It's not surprising that suffixes such as .ai and .io are increasingly popular. Still, the .com is the holy grail.. In the case of Project Q we came up with a great name - one that is meaningful, relevant, short and where, hallelujah!, the .com URL was available. But the fun doesn't stop there. You need other accounts - Twitter and Instagram handles, a Gmail address for YouTube and Adwords, etc.. Of course, none of those are available (although many of the names you covet haven't been used for a decade or more) and we had to come up with alternatives in each case. Things were a lot easier in 1996... If you're looking for suggestions, Shopify has a name generator here:  Business Name Generator - Free Company Name ...

My biggest pride in business hasn’t necessarily been the ideas I have had and the businesses I have built, but the very many colleagues and employees who went on to create their own companies and saw success in doing so: I hope that I at the very least showed them what was possible. So, in this era when many of us are working differently to how we’ve ever worked before, I’ve decided to live blog the launch of my new company. I’m doing this for a number of reasons: to create a historical journal of the process, as a means of engaging you, our audience and potential customers, as a means of thinking out loud and a vehicle for gathering feedback on the fly. But the main reason behind this decision is that the past year will have seen many people inspired to start up business on their own, something I have done over and over down the years and I’m hoping that I can provide a bit of guidance on the process and an inspiration for you to take the next step. This said, Project Q is the most si...