Chip Heath and Dan Heath
03/01/2007
Entrepreneurs seek out investors who can provide strong business judgment, valuable networks of contacts and, of course, capital. But they also need something for which they may not explicitly ask: advice on how to make their big ideas stick.
Entrepreneurs often get lost in abstract visions of the product or service they have created. They speak of how they are going to “transform the industry” or “build a new paradigm in customer service.” Yet their mission statements, synergies and strategies are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. The biggest challenge these innovators face is how to get employees, business partners and customers to understand their vision, remember it and act on it. In other words, entrepreneurs must make their ideas stick.
While a handful of important factors often determine which ideas stick, the simplest one is being concrete. A concrete idea is one that is expressed in terms that people can see, hear and touch. One of the simplest tools for making sure an idea is concrete is what we call the “address test.” The entrepreneur should be able to list the name and address of an actual person who will benefit from his innovation.
Every new idea, whether for an entrepreneurial venture or a new product from an existing company, should be able to pass this test. As an example of a company that passed with flying colors, consider Presto, a Mountain View, Calif.–based firm that started with an abstract idea of using technology to connect baby boomers with their aging parents. According to Joe Beninato, one of the founders, the need for such a product or service became clear when Presto’s founding team heard about a Palo Alto, Calif., retirement community where each day at about 3 pm, residents eagerly awaited the arrival of the mailman, who brought envelopes and packages from loved ones. The daily mail call was so important that the retirement center residents would often check their mailboxes hourly, returning to their apartments disappointed when the mail had not arrived. While this was good for physical fitness, it was bad for morale.
Conversations with residents revealed that most of them were not computer users. Furthermore, the middle-age children of these retirees strongly indicated they would like to be able to send email to their parents. To accommodate both groups, Presto designed a “printing” mailbox: a stripped-down printer that plugs into a phone jack. Children can email notes or pictures to the Presto service, which formats them and sends them via a modem to the printing mailbox. Presto! Refrigerator-worthy letters—complete with grandkid pictures—arrive in the kitchen.
Emotive Engineering
The 3 pm mail call is an incredibly useful and concrete vision. It passes the address test: The customers for this service are the kind of people who live in retirement communities in every state. But the 3 pm mail call also tells the engineers what kind of product they must design—a simple interface for people who do not love technology for technology’s sake. Finally, it offers a sticky message for its customers—“Pictures of your grandkids arrive in your kitchen, twice a day!”
The concrete vision forced by the address test is also useful when the entrepreneurs you are advising are not tackling business issues, but, instead, social ones. The website kiva.org enables individuals to use the Internet to engage in a type of microlending to entrepreneurs in developing countries. The mechanics of the microlending are a bit complicated, so if Kiva had chosen to dwell on the process, it would have found it impossible to convince people to invest their resources. Instead, the first thing visitors see on Kiva’s homepage is a concrete customer: a picture of someone like Boris Jordanov, who needs $2,000 to buy two refrigerators for a start-up grocery store in Bulgaria. Kiva’s ability to communicate about its customers instantly is critical to its success. Indeed, Kiva’s concrete idea is so compelling that when a segment about Kiva aired on national television, it generated so much traffic that its servers crashed—the sign of a really sticky idea.
Sticky ideas are not the only thing that determines an entrepreneur’s success; the servers still have to keep running. But investors, advisors and board members are in a good position to ensure that an entrepreneur takes the first concrete steps toward a successful business: a sticky idea.
 | Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. Together they authored Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. |