Many of you who know me have been wondering over the last year about my business plans, when I was going to launch, how I was going to make money, etc. Although I appreciate the interest I’ve often struggled to find the right words to answer you. I probably need to get better at delivering thirty-second elevator pitches but frankly I’m a big-picture thinker and my vision doesn’t condense well into sound bytes. I’m looking to tackle big problems which are complex and require complex solutions. And, in my opinion, they require robust conversations. I truly believe we need more creative conversations and better collaboration if we are going to make the substantial changes our country and world demand.

So with that, I introduce the What Would Better Look Like? (WWBLL) Entrepreneurial Network, which is my attempt to build community, facilitate better conversations and mobilize actions toward social change. If you force me to reduce it to one sentence, I’ll say it’s a collaboration amongst entrepreneurial thinkers and doers that’s about “connecting the dots” — synthesizing data, needs, desires, ideas, organizations, resources and individuals together in order to serve lots of people. This community leverages a simple but powerful question I learned from a professor of mine: What would better look like?

Is it a business? No, not in a traditional sense although, if my current vision holds form, it will spark the creation of various for-profit initiatives that I hope will operate like agile startup ventures, become profitable and sustain themselves as they grow.

WWBLL is more of a hub: a dynamic social enterprise dedicated to positively improving and optimizing human experiences. Perhaps it will grow to become the most innovative and influential global community of entrepreneurial ventures creating and distributing solutions for social change (Why bother if you’re not going to aim big, right?). Perhaps we just help a few people in really meaningful ways. That’s OK too but, truth be told, I have bold aspirations!

I hope you are intrigued and interested in learning more. It may not yet be clear what “it” is and that’s because “it” will be co-created from here on out. My intention is to provide the initial spark. I’m going to need your help and your feedback as things evolve. In the days ahead I’ll be providing more details about the first initiative which is already underway. It focuses on developing products and services that improve and optimize a productive aging experience for older adults. There is so much work to be done in this arena and I couldn’t be more excited by the people already helping me and the opportunities we are pursuing.

I encourage you to start here: http://www.facebook.com/WWBLL and “Like” this page or visit frequently. You can post questions there or email me at joel@wwbll.com .

Please stay tuned. There will be more details soon about my near-term plans (including a public launch in late April) as well as specific ways you may be able to help if you are so inclined.

Thank you so much for your consideration and support.

(photo by Robert Scoble of the Lean Startup sessions at SXSW 2011)

Last week I sat down in SF with my friend Joel and over the course of an afternoon we developed a new business venture. We agreed to spend the next five weeks fine-tuning our ideas and testing our hypotheses so that we can launch an initial product at the 2011 Annual Conference of the American Society on Aging in San Francisco the last week of April.

We deliberately gave ourselves a short runway to bring our product to market. I have been a proponent of the Lean Startup philosophy from early conversations on the topic before Eric Ries was speaking on the topic around the world. In fact, he and I had conversations about the subject while he was still at IMVU in their downtown Palo Alto offices. 

Our Minimum Viable Product will be in the form of a research project which will explore how older adults (age 50+) play games online and offline. To obtain the kind of insights which we think will eventually form the basis of a more extensive “information-as-a-service” deliverable, we will be launching a Facebook application and cultivating a community that generates extensive behavioral data about their gaming activity. We will reach out to online game players and those who are online but who do not generally play online games. We plan to interact with them and learn from them and see where that takes us.

But how do we get to an MVP from where we are today - two guys, in two different cities, with ideas that need to be investigated and tested in a short time-frame and with little money? Good question since not only must we collaborate extensively despite him living in Chicago and me living in San Francisco but we’ll soon be integrating other people and strategic partners into our work and need to communicate regularly with them.

Our initial answer was to purchase the second Lean Startup Bundle offered by Appsumo and make extensive use of the applications, services and references included within that bundle as we quickly move ahead.

The bundle includes dozens of services and tools and many have already helped us get momentum this week. We may not use everything in the bundle and we may also need to find some complementary pieces (for those we’ll likely start with Steve Blank’s Startup Resource page). However, our intention is to use as much as we can from what we obtained via the Lean Startup Bundle. We’re going to share our experience as we go and see what we and others might learn from the process.

Here’s how we started:

Our focus is on the needs, interests and current behavior of the aging population. We want to get past often cited statistics (based usually on infrequent annual studies) such as "the fastest growing population on Facebook are the over-50's" and explore both how those populations are actually using technology today. And to build a near-realtime ability to explore how this usage changes over time. Further we are exploring how demographics and interests really do overlap (or don't) - in what areas do demographics matter more than interests and usage. 

We will start with a simple question – Who do you play?