Hard is where the money is … unless

I was discussing a business idea with my dad today and I realised something quite important.

“Hard” is where the money is.

But nobody likes “hard”. They want “easy”.

Bill Gates wanted to put a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. He didn’t set out to create something compelling to venture capitalists. Steve Jobs lured John Sculley over to Apple with the line “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”. Quite clear his mission wasn’t going to be humble. Those are big examples but look around at anyone who is successful, lottery winners aside (and that is even if you count winning the lottery as “success”), it’s not about easy.

You don’t need me to tell you this. But still people are looking for the quick-wins, the short cuts, the easy money. If you tell people they have to work hard every day, put in the hours, put their own money and reputation on the line, and still not have a guarantee of success their eyes glaze. It’s either the instant success or path of least resistance.

So I believe the money is in the stuff people don’t want to do or making the hard stuff people really want to do, easy. Like entrepreneurial kung fu, use the human laziness to your advantage. Work hard to make your customers task easy.

• Google – making it easy for tons of users to find good information, and advertisers to easily get in front of those users – love or hate Google, which search engine do you use?
• eBay – made getting money for your old crap possible, never mind easier
• Apple – computers were important but hard, Macs were easy (even if more expensive) – even a Linux or Windows fan would concede Apple does lots of things right
• Ikea – stylish furniture, shopping for it, choosing it, getting it home, putting it together, was hard and expensive – regardless of your tastes you can’t argue with the $$
• Tivo – video cassettes, DVD-recorders, all nice and good, but compare all that with Tivo – how many people do you know still with a black box with 12:00 or 00:00 permanently flashing under their television?
• Viagra – do I really need to say any more? OK then I can’t resist … what better example of making hard, easy!

Looking around at “Web2.0″ companies, many do not seem to know exactly what their business is. If they do they are not articulating it very well. And if they are solving a problem, they are not problems people are exactly screaming to have solved.

If your product, service or company is all about marginal, incremental improvements, think bigger, think harder. Where you need your customer to use their imagination then it is you who needs to be more creative. When you talk about “enhancing”, “improving” or “leveraging” think “fixing”, “curing” and “solving”.

OK, the hardest part is probably finding a problem to solve. But anything worthwhile is never easy … right?