This is one of my favorite recent examples of entrepreneurial grounding from Groupon’s CEO and Founder, Andrew Mason:
In describing Groupon, he said that the premise is “dead-simple value that you can comprehend by looking at one page in three seconds.”
Not a bad philosophy for the design of a product and service. Incidentally, and importantly, to relate back to the subject of rehashing earlier failed business models, the article briefly discusses companies that had tried and failed in the late 1990s in collective buying. Part of executing a business model is finding a way for the user to be introduced to and to interact with the product/service in a way that is both simple and quick to understand and is compelling such that it exerts a pull on him or her to return and act again and again. That is often the genius of entrepreneurship, instead of coming up with an idea out of whole cloth (e.g., there were MP3 players before the iPod and search engines before Google and social network sites before facebook.)
Part of it may be something about the timing of the idea, which I will explore later, although my gut is that the timing and finding a compelling entry/interaction interface to bring a good idea to critical mass and success are intertwined.
