Founder Lesson
I spend most of my time working on startups for consumers. To people new to startups, the differences between startups that sell to consumers and those that sell to businesses might not seem big, but the playbook for validating, launching and growing B2C versus B2B startups is very different.

One (of many) differences is the B2C focus on creativity. Consumer startups have to engage their customers on a very deep level and this more often than not involves the founder(s) being extremely creative.

About a year ago my brother recommended that I listen to The Tim Ferriss Show. It hasn’t gotten into my regular podcast rotation, but I do listen even so often and yesterday I ran across this episode and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

The part that I wanted to share was about creativity. I had never heard about this notion of “the three B’s of creativity,” but it sounded totally right to me.

What is described is a way to encourage truly new ideas out of your unconscious mind when it’s in a period of non-thinking (some good examples are here).

The three B’s are...

Bed - Sleeping at night or napping is a great way to let your unconscious mind run with an idea.

Bath - As a fan of baths, I fully endorse spending as much time as possible here.

Bus - Switching locations can also do the trick. I’m sure that I’m not alone when I say that some of my best thinking occurs during vacations.

When I think of truly great consumer startups, they are often orders of magnitude better than what existed before.

How do great consumer founders look at the existing world and see the future? I’m sure there are many ways, but creativity plays a huge part.

What existed before Warby Parker? You bought glasses from your eye doctor. Before Waze? Generic mapping apps. Before Blue Apron? This.

I believe that the creativity required to get to 10x better consumer solutions is exactly like the creativity required to produce great music or works of art.

If you listen to the entire podcast, two other parts really resonated with me...

• They discuss how people have individual super powers and they should optimize for opportunities to exploit those super powers.

• The part about Warren Buffett's day planner.

Also here’s another blog post dedicated to the topic of creativity.

Get Right to the Lesson
I’d recommend listening to the entire thing, but to get right to the point go to minute 1:002:56 of this podcast.

Thanks to these folks for helping us all learn faster
Adam Robinson (@IAmAdamRobinson)
Tim Ferriss (@tferriss)

Please let me and others know what you think about this topic
Email me privately at dave@switchyards.com or let's discuss publicly at @davempayne.