1. Learning – Sarah didn’t know anything about starting businesses or about the fashion industry, yet she made a revolutionary new product because she was willing to learn whatever it took.
2. Selling – Blakely is also a fantastic public speaker. Her background before Spanx was in sales, and you can see that so much of her story is about selling her idea and product, first to create it in the first place, then to convince stores to sell it, and finally to get more people buying it.
3. Solve your own problem. When you find something that’s a problem for you, ask yourself if it might be an issue for other people.
4. Eating your own dog food. This disturbing expression means that you should use what you make. Spanx was created because there was an unfulfilled need, and Blakely points out that a lot of the problems were because the manufacturers of hosiery and underwear were predominantly men, who didn’t use their own products and had little appreciation for the problems with them.
5. Opportunities for female entrepreneurs. Women can obviously start any business they want, but there are special opportunities in industries where the products are made by men but sold primarily to women. The competitive advantage of actually knowing and using the product (eg. “eating your own dog food“) can be enormously profitable.
6. Stick to It, and Adapt — Virtually every entrepreneur’s story includes a lot of scary moments, and times when it seemed like every option had been tried and nothing had worked.
7. The Lean Startup. It’s become a buzzword, but once upon a time that’s how almost all businesses were started: with little more than ideas, dreams, and a lot of hard work. The idea of burning millions of dollars in the hopes of attaining profitability is what’s new. The Spanx story is a perfect example of starting out with next to nothing and building a company, using ingenuity, bargaining, and salesmanship.

Check out the video below:

• Sara Blakely Dared To Ask, “Why Not?” [Inc.com]

There are a number of reasons why failure is extremely important:

1. Entrepreneurship is about starting new things. If it’s new, it means in reality you don’t know how it works. Whether you’re doing something completely new, like a revolutionary new killer app, or just trying to do something better, such as building the world’s best swing dance school, the assumption is that you don’t yet know the best way.
2. Small means quick. It’s easier for small companies to make changes quickly. Conversely, big corporations tend to have a lot of cash but have to go through a lot of bureaucracy in order to change, leading to a tendency to use money to “power through” bad ideas with advertising and staff. So as a new business owner, you need to leverage what you have: the ability to recognize and fix mistakes early rather than spend money.
3. You learn more from failure than success. When you succeed immediately at something, it’s hard to figure out why. How much was luck? How much was timing, choosing the right staff, creating a brilliant marketing campaign… and how much was that the product was great? When you fail, it’s often easier to see what went wrong. Maybe the customers loved the product, but too few of them heard about it. Or maybe the early adopters loved it, but you tried to mainstream it too quickly and turned off people will a product that was too rough around the edges.

• Good: Circles. Building the whole system around “circles” of friends is an idea that has been waiting for a good implementation. This could be huge. Within my company we’ve found that sharing issues have been a big problem with Facebook, where private videos or photos have a way of getting shared.
• Bad: Cold, geeky interface. The basic interface of Google is great because it gets out of the way when you’re looking for stuff. Ditto for GMail: when you’re doing email, you want the words to be the focus. And if you really need it, you can theme GMail and get distracted by whatever pretty pictures you want. But Facebook has done a better job of making the interface look friendly. Google+ is dominated by whitespace and lightly decorated with cool colours, whereas Facebook has a comforting blue that holds things together better. Beyond that, it will be interesting to see how people react to the way “circles” operate like mathematical sets. The overall feel of Google+ is very geeky, which is great for early adopters but might be less interesting for people who don’t have engineering degrees or do math for fun.

[twid-n bey-kuh n]

–noun

1. A form of Bacn that is transmitted via Twitter.
2. When some of your Tweeps are dominating your Twitter Stream with random chatter.