io81

I’ve always enjoyed the Juice market, healthy, cool in the summer, sells well so i had an eye for it for a while. When visiting the UK once i fell in love with innocent smoothies. I said to my self why not open a smoothie shop in Kuwait, it must work well. But after researching and comparing financial of many juice companies abroad i started thinking whats in a smoothie, and after reading and seeing the ingredients i was shocked to know thats what we have all around Kuwait. 3aseer khala6 its all that it is!! ok the ones sold abroad are bottled because of the nature of the market their.

 See the ingredients in th pic, i can see my self telling the dude “abee manga, ow frawla bas fresh haa!! ow ebser3a”  but still there is a possibility of a market or to sell such products. Remember when entering most co-ops you see this disgusting bin filled with ice that sells fresh bottled juice? ahhhhhhh. Their is a market, will talk about it in later posts.

I was always interested in e-business ideas like taw9eel.com but when asked about investing or creating such a business i would decline. When starting a business you have to give what is called an added value, if you don’t your customer will start thinking what am i getting for such a business. Well when we sit and discuss idea me and my friends we always talk about taw9eel.com and many say how an excellent idea it is and etc etc, but you have to answer specific questions to make sure the business is profitable in the long run, meaning time has to pass on the business and with time competitors enter the market and only here that we start to relate the benefits as customers. First what does taw9eel.com add in value to you? and secondly whats its competitive advantage? and third whats CEO boxer brand called? j/k that’s a joke…Third, what are the barriers to entry like?

I would push forward a strategy to make taw9eel.com price competitive maybe or service competitive, but when i researched its price and made a comparison i have found out that they are 30% higher than the market. Market here is defined as the normal Co-op, so the other questions is, is he buying directly from the co-op or is he buying from the suppliers and making even a higher profit margin, which is his 30% and plus the margin of the supplier. Below is the table of prices that shows the difference,  some may argue that he delivers for free but lets say you bought from taw9eel.com  goods worth for 130KD if you had went to the coop you would have saved 30KD. Now is the 30KD wasted is it worth going to the co-op, now you can see the added value question being answered.

Nothing against taw9eel.com and i think they do have a good business model, but needs a competative advantage which i cant see, meaning any one can come and copy their business and open it elsewhere.

One of the important things to me to run a business is to understand a customer. But remember that that customer is me and you and masses of people with different backgrounds ranging from religion to spending habits to education. I will discuss a smaller portion of the customer; which i think about everyday. Do customers want complex or simple product and services? i came to think about the subject when i got introduced to the Ipod. Remember that when i talk about my self i am only a small portion of the customer and do not reflect the major trend, but i’m trying to figure them out from a Kuwaiti perspective for you ” the reader” to understand your business better. Back to the Ipod, from a customers product awareness perspective i would fall in the middle of the statical bell curve. Which means the worst kind of customer for apple, because apple need customers who cant wait to buy the newest product from them (hence you see the people sleeping before the opening of certain products). I tend to wait and hear how the product performs from friends then maybe make a decision to buy it. Again remember that my personality and upbringing is the the major factor here making me be safe and wait longer than other consumers. After the wait i have bought the Ipod and liked it to some extent but faced problems down the road. The problems for others would be simple means but for me and the likes of me (the customers) i faced problems by fully utilisng the product. I had problems in downloading music and transferring them to my Ipod, every time i sync i lose the old songs and add the new ones in. Remember this post is not about the Ipod functionality rather about how i (or we) deal with complex products. So as you can see that i tend to find simpler products that do the job well and easily so the blackberry is out of the question for me to buy. To give you another example of my simplicity is that i own a phone that is 2.5 years old, and simply only use text and voice calls only. No extra services or chat or saving plans. I say this because as a business owner you need to understand that you have many kinds of customers and some are like myself looking for the simpler option. But to prove my self wrong, Zain is making so much profits from these services and IPods and blackberrys are selling like crazy. So there is another large market that does not mind complexity in the product or serivce. So the question is who is the larger share and who you should target. I personally judge sites by how easy it is to buy from them, registration should be easy and takes a few steps, the buying should be instantaneous like Amazon. So i personally believe in simplicity but this is not the case, it may be a different approach for your business. I will provide a real life example about simplicity and how it attracts me.

I always wondered about the wine industry and how big it is, and how many compete because they got the oldest barrels or a better taste. But the whole thing was intimidating to me, why? because it was hard for me to comprehend. Many brands, many tastes from different countries, why are the older ones more expensive, why wines grown in Italy or France seem more genuine? questions that cant be answered only if i ‘am a wine taster or work in such an industry, and closed only for a certain elite (because it  is expensive compared to other drinks). If you traveled abroad and passed by the wine section you would go crazy just from the different choices available to you. So reading one day i came up with a smart company that created a wine brand called Yellow Tail. Yellow tail answers the question that many people fear, “shall i ask about wine or would i look stupid not knowing what to order?”. It has a simple branding look and comes with easy labeling, does not claim being proud about what vines they own or how old it is. This company to me found out that people are intimidated by the wine industry and that it gives you a feeling that you got to have a certificate to order a good bottle of wine:p but Yellow Tial simply made wine choices easy for the general public and in such a case most wineries thought that Yellow tail demise was foreseen, not knowing that the company took a huge market share and cant stop growing since.  After all its a new commer to the wine market and all the way from down under:P (Australia) not a wine destination from a history sense. But yet again simplicty prevailed, remeber that this may not be the answer for your business needs just an insight to my part of the consumer market.

A friend of mine came up with an idea for a new conventional Dry Cleaners, he wanted to use the net with the store. Creating a laundry store on the net basically. So i researched the idea and it sounds good but i faced resistance when people started telling me “who would log on a site instead of just getting to the store instead dropping of your laundry?”. Personally i think registering online and getting serviced without leaving your home is great, and if the price would be cheaper that’s another plus. The dry cleaners next to my house washes a shirt for 500 fils, which i think is fine but if the price would go even lower that would be better. So my idea is to try to cut cost down to provide a cheaper per garment price and introduce something else: A “green” dry cleaner! i got the idea when i read what was the basic liquid used in dry cleaners; its called Perc or perchloroethylene. This shit is harmful in many ways, skin disorders, considered a carcinogens in Canada, and it should be handled in certain methods with restirction on usage. The employees handling such chemicals should have health insurance coverage and protective wear. After reading such shit, i started thinking is their any laws/restrictions/khara:P in Kuwait that protects consumers or the employees from such harmful substances, is this harmful substance disposed in a safe method? 

So i continued reading and found out something called Wet cleaning which is considered a cleaner approach to dry cleaning. It uses sophisticated machines that use computers to clean clothes and use water instead of the Perc. So many dry cleaners in the US and Canada are adopting such methods and are satisfying their green earth friendly consumers. So again i thought would an idea like such work in Kuwait, becomingthe first green laundry store in Kuwait?  You see when smart, knowlegble government employees have a sense of respect to the environment and introduce such laws or restrictions, business then start coming up with new ways to counter such constructive laws such as a green laundry. But i guess in Kuwait its all about Allah Kareem.

Watching tv one day i came across an ad that explained that you got a chance to apply for funding if your business idea gets accepted, after i have checked out the website sponsored by MIT i started thinking about an idea but i wanted it to have a social twist to it. So i came up with two ideas which i will explain but please if you got better one add them and we may contribute in some way and if we win, your names can be added as the founders of the idea, yes there is a prize for the winner (15,000KD) which will be invested to start the business. I do have some kind of meshed thoughts but i cannot put them into an idea. Let me brief you on what i personally had in mind; my main goal is to increase awareness in the Kuwaitis society, it may be both Corporate or Community wise, but i have it meshed up with Corporate Responsibility (CR), to push companies to accept some corporate responsibility towards the community and make its employees who are part of the community to contribute to people working in the labor class. It can be called as a switching function, where i give certain employees a day off by taking their job in a later shift, ie: giving an employee at costa a break today and i take his later shift, or doing the same with the employees who clean the streets. Then instead of every company in Kuwait trying to show off some CR, we can organize them in a more strategic long term programme. Where a true programme is setup-implemented within these organizations to perform real CR instead of using beach clean ups as PR stunt. Thats one idea which sometimes feel good and other times feels stupid, so i keep the rest of that idea in your hands. The second is completely different and it came to me because i was pissed off about not finding certain books that i would like to buy in Arabic. Then the bomb that pissed me off is that why does our government have the right to tell us what to read and to not. Why should i even consider not reading a certain book because a religious guy in the ministry thinks its bad for me, then maybe i should read the book and make my own @#$%^&% mind if its bad or good. So the thought took a regional perspective and then i compared Kuwait to the rest of the GCC, yes we do have a little better censorship system but other dont and we all (GCC) got the Internet. Why not create a site like google books for Arabic books to get published on the net for Arab people to read what they please. So feel free to bash the ideas as much as you want. 

I guess many have seen the ads about the spaces for rent next to Qurain area, i have visited the place and spoken to the employees and i can provide you with a small brief about the place. The smallest shop is around 20 meters squared with a least monthly rent of 260KD. You can take more than 20 m2 and go for larger areas but you will get charged by the meter at a rate of 16KD per meter squared. Other prime location as they call it, will require a higher rate per meter at 22KD. So i asked them about a shisha place and they said that to take a shisha place you have to go for 400m2 and pay a rent of 2,850KD. The shisha place is excluded from the calculation i have provided above. The place is huge and will have all the major banks their, thats a good sign. Al Ghanim electronics and most fast food stores are their, and LuLu hyper market is their too. As for the rent you got to pay 4 months in advance and will get another 3 months free to setup you venture. The shity thing is a lost their number, sorry. One more thing, the area is seperated in small blocks like the pic below, each area has a certain purpose like, the furniture street, the cafe’s street, the car accessories street and the list goes on. Good Luck.

I have explained creativity many times in my blog, i still get surprised how these idea come to mind. From my experience (and this is not scientific) the more you understand the in’s and out’s of a certain product or service, you become more creative in it. Adding to creativity, is the “living the experience” factor will boost your idea and value of the service you are providing. I’m sure its not that easy to come up with smart idea for existing services but they can be done. A wounderful example i have seen on springwise.com is your personal paparrazzi service www.methodizaz.com. Think photokina and many other photographers in Kuwait and how we all love to have our photographs taken, look at layalina or Sho fi Mafe magazines, now imagine a service where you pay the photographer to take photos of you without you knowing so, you provide them with your address and daily routine. They follow you around and snap pictures of you looking natural, walking around, holding your kids, walking your dog; as you can see its endless and cool looking pictures. Now back to the post, if your not a photographer can you have come up with such a service?

Believe me it does, when you have many constraints you start becoming more innovative. Simple example are rules that are being put in place due to regulation, environment etc etc. Zopa an online lender provides borrows with loans charging less interest than bank, an electric car company in the UK now does not get charged the congestion charges because its a carbon free company. One of Kuwait major problem is that rules are written on water and disappear quit fast, so we do not have strict rules and regulations. So when browsing Amazon searching for business related DVD, i found Bootstrap Bootcamp. Its a DVD created by Bijoy Goswami, very informative and simple, if you listen closely you know inside you that he is correct. Many of us have business idea and think we are going to make millions from, and yes we can but by running the business the wrong way, we will lose a great sum of money to reach our goals. If your into entrepreneurship and would like to understand the concept and to take a correct approach, this DVD will clear alot.

 

Yesterday it was announced that Wataniya Airways will start flights in January 2009, i was really glad to know that we have know to private airlines competing against each other. Kuwait need another carrier to go head to head against Jazeera Airways and create better services and competion. The most amazing thing about competion is that the customer has the advantage and gets an overall better service and a cheaper ticket. Kuwait Wataniya will cater to Kuwaiti tastes, will compete more towards Kuwait Airways. This means better seats and service than Jazeera Airway, and hope they do follow the time of departure they claim on the ticket.

 

When you got an idea looming in your head, one of the thing you must do is write it down. I have said them often always write your idea on paper. If you have passed the paper part and serious about your idea, you can use a programme called BusinessPlanPro.com. Its an easy programme that provides easy steps to write up your plan. It even provides sample guides and even provides Excel tables. When done with filling the gaps in the software, you can turn your idea into a fully written document. Looking very presentable with charts and tables, all done automatically by the software.

When you got an idea for a company that is similar to another and you have that gut feeling that you can provide the service in a better way, check out Wikinvest.com. To create professional fesibility studies you got to compare your idea with some real market companies. You have to review and study there financial statements, then create your own depending on your situation and other Kuwaiti attributes, ie if your thinking of opening a sport shop check out the sports industry and if you think you got an idea which you cannot find a competator for (which i doubt) you can only find similar companies or by mixing two different financial statements.

If you just want to broaden your understanding of creative businesses check out Springwise.com. Its a collection of new business which are around the world being spotted. If you follow the website closely you can understand how business come up and what are the factors that make an idea into a solid business model.