I spent most of this week writing on what I figured would be this week’s essay, then late last night I thought of this topic. I read and consume a bit of red pill content, because I find it interesting, I like supporting the other content creators in the sphere, I learn from it and like this week I got a bit of inspiration. I consumed 2 major pieces of content this week, I watched Rich Cooper’s speech at last years 21 Convention and I read Alan Roger Currie’s book “Mode One“. I just got to know Rich when we started doing The Red Man Group, and I was not very familiar with Alan, except for a Podcast he did with Donovan [3] a while back, but I’m glad I took the time to consume their content this week.
Both men have a similar over-arching theme to these pieces of work that is very familiar to me from my work with start-ups. In my experience, entrepreneurs often come in two types, there is the salesman and the engineer. Both groups can make very successful companies, however the problems they face are often quite different. The salesman comes up with an idea for a business and as he prefers doing sales, that’s where he begins. Over a fairly short period of time he may amass a lot of orders, sign quite a few contracts, then when it becomes time to deliver the product he has no idea what to do next. The help that the salesman often needed was structuring up his value chain, handling the administrative work, product development, logistics, production and other parts of the day to day operations.
The engineer type on the other hand comes up with an idea for a product, and he immediately starts work on making a prototype. He often spends a ton of time working out every kink in the product, setting up production, figuring out how to handle his value chain and his logistics. However, he would end up very far into the hole because he never really got around to thinking about who his market is, how to bring the product to market or how to get sales. Continue reading