i never thought i'd quote happy gilmore here but there's a scene where the pro golfers are trying to give him advice and he cuts them off and says "whoa you're confusing me. just let me put the ball in the hole."

if you're a small team, just make the best possible product. don't spread yourself too thin.

Once you have this product how do you get users to come to use it? How do you keep users coming back? How do you make money from it. There are questions beyond making the best possible core product.

Great list. I would also add a box for 'Core Values'. It might help, for instance, in computing a more accurate valuation of 'Fear' as a trade object.

Good idea. I'm going to superset fear with core values.

Thanks Jude, nice to see that ideas like yours are considered a good fit to startups. Much of my writing/thoughts are spent on optimizing efficiency (time/enthusiasm). Heckuva map, it hits on many of the "virtual landing points" that new businesses can setup to bring in customers/users. I was a little long winded/philosophical but did my best to describe some of the landing points here: http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/05/11/how-web-marketing-w...

Excellent bulletin board material! A picture really can say a thousand words.

Also pretty eye opening. I've been spending 80% of my time in one box. I'll have to rethink my perspective. Thanks, Jude.

I'm sorry but I didn't get a lot out of this diagram.

Is there supposed to be some kind of relationship or definition between either the boxes or the groups of boxes? To me it looks like a brainstorm of the facets of business put into little boxes and then grouped by topic area.

Is there some sort of structure beyond that? I mean, the boxes inside the "engines" aren't put into any special relationship with each other and the groups all have arrows pointing to the other groups. There's a "funnel" symbol, but then every large group has one, and it's not connected to anything to be funneled.

Perhaps it was so simple I missed it.

See it more as a cheat sheet for possibilities that you may want to use. There are many possible combination and potential hook ups and compatibilities.

I think the "Core product" should be slightly bigger/more important ;)

Nice diagram though.

Thanks for the comment. The size on the map doesn't relate to importance. The map should be viewed in respect to the specific product your working on. The idea is to give more chart area to the interesting areas that are not talked about that much. Hope that clears that up.

Sure - not a criticism, just observation :) I guess it's the complement to "Make something people want" which basically only focuses on the product - this chart shows some of the other important things to think about.

Would be nice to map out the core product part more....:>

Isn't that an exercise left to the reader?