Is Vacation an Opportunity to Rethink Our Approach to Doing Business?

Bulgaria is magical yes! So magical, that I believed going on vacations, crossing the Maritsa River, and finally ending up in the Rhodopes, in an 80-year-old house could be organized with the patience of Marie Kondo and on the rhythm of the Super-califragilis-ticex-pialidocious Mary Poppins' spell!

And I realized vacation is as well one way to go out of my comfort zone.

First because taking vacations or going away is my biggest struggle and second, I embraced a minimalist lifestyle 4 years ago. By the way, I would recommend this lifestyle especially when you are an entrepreneur. The time you don't spend organizing your clothes, furniture, or home decoration is more time you can spend on your business.

So, how this article is connected to entrepreneurship and LinkedIn?

Yes, you have to choose a destination (your goal) based on budget, priorities, and what you want to experience to create value for your clients.

But you don't need to go to the Black Sea as most people would do during the peak of the summertime.

If we apply that to business, the trends are appealing for investors maybe intellectually exciting for the founders but look what is not done yet, where your client would need you, and for what reason?

And you might want eventually create something that could be trendy in 2 or 3 years.

The product (your Doge Coin) is trendy but the process (stablecoin) is stable!

Communication is key!

Yes, you might have the vision, a clear idea of where you want to go.

But you have to tell your team, what you expect from them, set up deadlines, and estimate the time they might need to accomplish each part of the project and who will be in charge to manage it.

User journey?

It is cool to say, let's go to Rhodopes when we don't have a?clue about how to go, when we leave, where to stay, what we will do, and when we come back. It is hard to keep the attention, and focus and prevent any last-minute drop-off.

How to satisfy everyone? Sadly you can't!

And I can tell when I say to friends they can come to visit us, the first question is; how long it takes to come, and more of these kinds of practical questions pop up depending on where they live, and if I consider age, habits, standards, diets (vegan, no carb, intermittent fasting), and expectations depending of their mood, I can only invite 10% my friends, maybe 5% will accept, of 2% of the 5% will come and one 1% will enjoy the vacations and plan to come back. And I am not even mentioning the cost for them to come and the time I will need to dedicate to host them accordingly.

Living in an 80-year-old house, in the middle of the mountains, means, minimum comfort, and we had to improvise a kitchen setup, which is our MVP1.

But it is good enough to host people during the summertime and enjoy a simple life, where it is all bout being in the now!

The good side of this is innovation, improvisation, and creativity, and I have been cooking more than a fancy apartment in Sofia. In conclusion, no need for a fully equipped kitchen to make a fancy meal you could pay 15 BGN in a vegan restaurant.

And for coffee, no need one served by George Cloney, a French Press does the job!

Who is your customer?

In a world of hyper-personalization with more options than what we used to have when we were kids...

At this time no AirBnB, no retargeting, no internet, and only one paper map of France for me and we were having the choice between visiting Grand Ma 1 in the South?or Grand Ma 2 in Normandy :) And it is always hard to choose because you love them both but there a complex logistics considering traffic jams... One might be more up to go for hiking and the other would prefer gardening. So your potential clients would have the choice between your company and your competitor.

So, knowing your customers, stories, and needs based on information you can collect, will help to offer an experience that would fit their expectations.

So to me, vacations are a way :

To find inspiration again based on real-world and human interaction, that ChatGPT can't experience.

An opportunity to improve my communication skills for concrete remote projects at the end of the Balkans, requiring a lot of discussions, planning, and logistics to go from A to B!

And rethinking the user experience with a different culture, and background is something that I should do with more consciousness!

So doing the buyer persona should be the first step before jumping into building an offer and pricing strategy.

Facts, facts, facts!

Through my experience to plan my little trip away from the city, I have acknowledged more than ever that the product market fit is all about choosing my clients based on their real needs and expectations. But for that, I need to do a market study, that could lead to understanding the standards, and best practices, see what is not offered yet and what are the current pain points.

If you are not into studying, you can run a beta testing program to get precise direct feedback and identify the use case, and problems making save time, and money and adding value your competitors are not offering currently.

No call to action today on purpose, it's vacation time! Just a thank you to be one of my 18K followers and one of the 2700 subscribers.