Newsletter #5: My flight plan
I could also write about my business plan but I’m a pilot so I prefer filing a flight plan. Things never happen the way business plans are written anyway, right?
1. Finish the leade.rs website
We are working on a minimum viable product which we are hoping to launch in March. The features will be minimalist and the design a first version. It will not blow my mind or yours. I’m just hoping it will work and be a platform to find great people. It will need a ton of work and we will improve it daily. It won’t be for everybody but for a core group of first users who find value in it.
2. Eat my own dog food
I will use it myself with the help of my team. If it does not work for me it won’t work for anyone. I’m hoping the website will be ready enough so I can start adding great people from Davos and TED that are coming soon.
3. Add great leaders I already know
The purpose of leade.rs is to discover new amazing people but I also want it to be a destination to find anyone doing great things so I will add many Leaders I already know on a daily basis.
4. Get some help to add great content
A very small number of people (most that I know very well) will hopefully be interested to post. They are already content curators or need to find Leaders for events. Some already reached out.
5. Make it a community
This one will be hard. “Just another website” isn’t my goal. I’m hoping many friends will contribute daily, comment, vote and find enough value in it to come back often.
6. Let the leaders we added join the site
Say someone added “Jeremyah Oyang” as a leader of the collaborative economy. I want Jeremiah to be able to come to leade.rs and say “this is me!”. He can then login and take control of some of the content about him. It will be interesting to see if it’s the whole content or just parts of it. Think how Wikipedia does it, you’re not supposed to change your own. I never changed mine but it’s full of errors. I know the way to do it is to go and comment. I will work on this later.
7. Add actions on Leade.rs
This will be very interesting. I’m thinking “book a leader to speak” or “book a leader for a 30 min call” or “offer this leader to try that product”. That will also be our business model. It will be tricky because we don’t want to send too much to our leaders or it will just be noise. Curation will be needed.
8. Gather all sources of great leaders
Forbes 30 under 30. Davos Young Global Leaders. TED Speakers. Nobel prizes. There are hundreds of sources of existing or new leaders. Leaders are also in the news daily. I want to gather most relevant sources and build an algorithm that suggest them to the community to possibly add them.
9. Work with event organizers
The event industry is huge and worth tens of billions of dollars. It can be corporate events (say Unilever organizing an offsite for its management) or conferences. They are always looking for great speakers.
10. Include Speakers Bureau and PR agencies
I don’t want to disrupt them but rather work with them. When I was curating the content for LeWeb I was bombarded by PR agencies offering speakers. As a speaker I worked with success with a few Speakers Bureau and they added great value.
I have much more in mind but this should keep us busy for a few months! I will also for sure discover new business ideas along the way as we are building Leade.rs.
As always, feel free to let me know what you think by just replying to this email, I might not be able to answer all emails in a timely manner but I will read them all.
Thanks!
Loic
