What can a volcanic island being torn apart from 78 earthquakes a week, surrounded by cold violent water, with little or no natural resources except geothermal heat offer the tourist or the entrepreneur? Surprisingly, more than you can imagine. Iceland has something to teach us all.

How can you get a financial return from the cold, choppy waters of the North Atlantic? Get a boat and charge tourists $200 to get wet, get sick and maybe see a whale.

How can you get a financial return on food when most fruits and vegetables are imported? Make puffin a speciality and fish a staple. And, of course, charge $100 for a meal.

How do you get a financial return on a lava field that cannot support vegetation or housing? Easy, hire a bulldozer and make a track for quad and dirt bikes and charge $200 per hour to use it.

How do you get a financial return on the glaciers that cover nearly half the country? Another easy solution: allow tourists to snowmobile over them and charge each person $500.

How do you get people to pay this? Smile and give them the best service that they could ever hope for.

7 things that Iceland taught me about being a better entrepreneur:

- The ability to speak more than one language. Widening your audience increases your marketability.

- Putting the customer’s needs above time issues. An hour making a customer happy can encourage great word of mouth. Don’t make a customer unhappy bad publicity travels a lot faster than good publicity.

- Greeting everyone with a smile and then greeting every request (no matter how many) with a smile. Answer your emails promptly and offer more information and help than is expected. That extra attention is the way a smile can be generated across the internet.

- Every effort is taken to make sure that problems are resolved ensuring the customers satisfaction and therefore keeping the sale. So what if it takes longer and you have to give extra. If the customer is paying than you are the one making money.

- The ability to find a financial solution to every situation. There will always be times when you struggle, but remember successful people treat obstacles as learning experiences and opportunities to look in different directions./

- Widen your focus. If you sell domains why not sell hosting and web design. If the products you sell are similar enough you can tap into your existing market base.

- The Icelandic people are proud of who they are and where they come from. They love their country and want you – the tourist or businessman – to love it too. They pride themselves on the academic standards that everyone achieves and the creative way people are encouraged to express themselves. In Iceland the worse thing you can be is like another person. When developing your website learn from these people and be proud of what you sell, be creative in your approach and above all else be unique.

Some off you knew I had booked a short trip away, others didn’t. My trip to Iceland was great fun and I will definitely be visiting Iceland again soon!

Day 1 – Arrival, Tourist Board and Booked Trips, Caruso

Our stay began with a really slow bus ride to our 1930’s Hotel. The Hotel Borg is staffed with very attentive and conscientious people who each speak at least 7 languages.

Day 2 – Whale Watching, Afternoon Shopping, Café du Paris, The Real Italian Food Restaurant

To start our trip of adventures we decided to go out into the North Atlantic ocean to see wales, dolphins and puffins.

Day 3 – Halleif tour guide: 8 glaciers, snowmobiled over one, golden falls, oldest parliament, 9:00 -6:30 Caruso’s again

On Saturday we decided to to hire a tour guide to show us around Iceland, this is the car he turned up in!

We were heading to a glacier around a 3 hour drive away, on route we stopped and saw the oldest parliament buildings in the world. When driving there, there was almost nothing but lava rocks and mountains.When we returned to the car there was a dog walking around, it appears that for the first hour the driver had his dog in a cage in the boot. Being a dog lover we invited the dog to come sit with us for the whole day!

When we arrived at the Glacier we got kitted up and started making our way to the top of it on our Snowmobiles, I managed to get up to 57 k/hour which was very fast for the conditions. Here is a picture of me when we got to the top of the Glacier

Here is a picture of me on my Snowmobile, rock on!

On the way back we stopped for lunch and to see Golden Falls:

Day 4 – Hot Water Spring 1 ½ Hour Hike Straight Up, Quad Bikes, Great Restaurant

In the morning we had planned a 1 ½ hour hike straight up in to the mountains, when we got to there we found a hot water spring which we could go in and bathe. We spent around a hour in it as it was hotter than having a bath! It was great!

On the way back I was speaking to the driver about how we had a few hours to spare and what did he recommend. He suggested quad-biking, which sounded fun to me. He rang up his friends to organise this trip for us and we where taken  privately around mountains and lava rock on some fast quad bikes. I managed to get 82k/h on my quad bike on the way back which I was very impressed with. The friend I was with didn’t drive so fast so I didn’t get to do as much as I wanted but our guide said I could go off and do some jumps and just said “Be Careful”, this is something they would definitely not of been allowed in the UK or America due to safety.

Here is a picture of at half way:

Day 5 – Departure, Blue Lagoon

We decided that we would relax before our flight back to the UK, we decided to go to a spa which beats all other spa’s! Guests enjoy bathing and relaxing in Blue Lagoon geothermal seawater, known for its positive effects on the skin. A visit to the spa promotes harmony between body, mind and spirit, and enables one to soak away the stresses of modern life. The spa’s guests rekindle their relationship with nature, soak up the scenic beauty and enjoy breathing the clean, fresh air.

Tomorrow I will be doing a write up on 7 things that Iceland taught me about being a better entrepreneur.

Start-up Ideas

Just come across this great article by Paul Graham called Start up Ideas We’d Like to Fund - well worth a read I suggest, especially for those of us interested in using New Technology for Older Ideas.

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund presents 30 ideas that they think is cool - I have to say one or two surprised me, but then when I read Paul’s reasoning, it did make perfect sense.

For example:

Auctions.

Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that they have a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect EBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.

AND

Dating.

Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating start up has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you’re going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don’t focus on the novel take on dating that you’re going to offer. That’s the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.

They also include an old favourite of mine - Better video chat.

Skype and Tokbox are just the beginning. There’s going to be a lot of evolution in this area, especially on mobile devices.

Talking of mobile devices I did find a link to http://www.heysan.com on their website. Apparently, Heysan! is a mobile web based service that lets you use your MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and GTalk accounts in your mobile phone - for free! It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, what network or phone model you use, their patent pending technology works no matter what.

The theory is good, I like it, but a challenge for me was that I could not see any obvious way to sign-up / join (but hey, maybe I did not look hard enough) - I can see how I am supposed to sign-in to MSN etc, but really I did not fancy just offering up my username and password just like that, especially when it was not even on a secure page.

Also the link to their Blog says, coming soon and it still says © Copyright 2007 heysan! inc. (surely it would have been updated to 2008 by now?

So I am guessing this is one of the Start-ups that Y Combinator are still in process of funding? Getting launched?

According to their home page - Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.

We invest mostly in software and web services. And because we are ourselves technology people, we prefer groups with a lot of technical depth. We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.

3 Things You Need For A Successful Startup

I have just been reading a very interesting essay at PaulGraham.com - all about start-ups

Find the essay here: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

I liked the point made in the opening paragraph in particular:

You need three things to create a successful startup:

1) To start with good people,

2) To make something customers actually want,

and

3) To spend as little money as possible.

Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

Paul also mentions an “Animal Test” - made me laugh, but I can see it would work

and another interesting point about startups - which I had never thought about was this:

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Believe it or not, under current US law, you’re not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.

Note: You cannot discriminate in whom you employ - but you can pick and choose who you will include as “partners” in your startup

Go have a read at http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html