If I can imagine a single scenario in which two people with zero difference in skill or preference can both benefit from the division of labor and exchange, my answer was correct and the professor was wrong. (This was like 10 years ago. Still, can’t let it go.)
Category: Education Through Entrepreneurship
Alexa the Speech Pathologist
Alexa’s approach worked ten times better than ours. My daughter doesn’t have perfect pronunciation, but it’s much better than it was. And the shame of working on pronunciation for parental approval is gone. My daughter doesn’t distinguish speech practice from play time.
The Power of Speaking
What it takes to summon the courage to speak bold goals or proclaim bold truths about yourself and the world actually begins the process of transforming you and the world into what you speak.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 11
There’s a fatal flaw in your plan. Your business model, or market, or pricing, or something about your crazy idea is going to stop you dead in your tracks. Of course. That’s probably why no one else has done it yet. Or maybe that’s why you’re going to succeed where they failed.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 10
In the first year of Praxis, there were several desperate-for-a-silver-bullet moments. Bewildering circumstances where the gum in the works couldn’t be pinpointed. Just a tough slog. Every step forward took Herculean effort. This can’t continue if we’re going to grow like we want to!
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 9
You’re one punch away from hoisting the heavyweight title. Problem is, you don’t have enough time to throw that big punch because you’re taking jab after jab after jab before you can gather yourself. That’s when you realize that staying on your feet to go the distance might be more important than that one big blow.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 8
Alright, the company is real now. But your product requires some resources that only come when you have commitments from customers… and customers require a product before they’ll commit to anything. It might be time to sell something you don’t yet have so you can get the resources necessary to build it.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 7
If your market includes everyone, it includes no one. I knew I’d do better with a tighter market. Ideally, as Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One, a tiny niche I could monopolize. But even this was broad enough for me to lose focus. The real break-through for choosing actions to get traction came when I got down to the smallest unit possible.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 6
It takes a lot longer to exhaust all possible bootstrap growth activities than you think. When money is not an option, you get way, way more creative. Every time you think you’ve reached a true stopping point, where nothing more can be done without money, you discover a new batch of things you can do to move forward.
Lessons from Building Praxis – Part 5
I had a lot to do, much of it outside my ability, much of it costly, and I had a few grand I could put on my personal credit card and that was it. The idea for Praxis wasn’t fundable yet, and I didn’t even know what the letters “VC” meant anyway, let alone how to go raise. But I didn’t need any of that because I had something far more valuable. I had dozens of accounts with positive balances of social capital, and it was time to cash them in.