Skip to main content

How to not kill a good idea

When you are starting an initiative don’t expect people to jump into the boat with you. Even the best ideas can fail because of this.

Example
For example if you want to start a learning program you should think twice about how you can convince people to join the program and participate to it. In the first moment everyone will say that it is a great idea, this is something that was missing and it will add extra value to the group. But in the moment when you send a ‘mass’ invitation to people, to see who would like to join the program you will have 0 people that would like to join the program.

Cause
In my personal opinion, the way how you recut people to a new program is wrong. Don’t expect people to jump into a new boat, to a PoC. They have a lot of things to do and even if the idea sounds good, you are still in the PoC phase.
You cannot guaranty to them that there is a real value for them. This is why in you ask the ‘mass’ nobody will be interested directly. The way how you try to gather the first group of people is not very good.
You may find some people that has stamina and are open to do different things, but is pretty hard to find this kind of people.

Solution
A better approach may be to go directly to a small group of people, which you know that have stamina and would like to join the program. Invite them to a private group. In this way you will be able to ‘spark’ the interest to people and form the first group of people that can be used to run the PILOT.
Once the PILOT was run, it will be more easily for you to attract people. Based on this approach, people from the private group can start to invite other people and so on. You can end up with groups of people that were formed only based on private invitation.

Conclusion
Ideas and initiatives are very good, but a good idea is not everything. We should be very caution at the way how we implement and put in practice an idea. A bad approach can kill even the best ideas before they are born.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(

Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.  Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified

What to do when you hit the throughput limits of Azure Storage (Blobs)

In this post we will talk about how we can detect when we hit a throughput limit of Azure Storage and what we can do in that moment. Context If we take a look on Scalability Targets of Azure Storage ( https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-scalability-targets/ ) we will observe that the limits are prety high. But, based on our business logic we can end up at this limits. If you create a system that is hitted by a high number of device, you can hit easily the total number of requests rate that can be done on a Storage Account. This limits on Azure is 20.000 IOPS (entities or messages per second) where (and this is very important) the size of the request is 1KB. Normally, if you make a load tests where 20.000 clients will hit different blobs storages from the same Azure Storage Account, this limits can be reached. How we can detect this problem? From client, we can detect that this limits was reached based on the HTTP error code that is returned by HTTP