Positioning is one of my favorite parts of a start up. Like chess, it’s moving pieces so the position is advantageous. With Swift Kick, positioning matters for different reasons than my previous efforts, it’s not so much about competition. We are trying to improve education with our own money. There’s a ton of risk in that. So positioning for us, means affordable innovation. We want to spend money on building methods and tools which are practically useful to education and we don’t want to lose our shirts while doing it.
After our first year, I am very excited about our current position. Speaking is our cash flow. It is not much, but it is enough to pay for a chunk of the development. As speaking grows year 2, the cash flow should be enough to again fund a chunk of the development and keep us solvent with only small amounts of additional financing out of our pockets. The speaking side of things will definitely go cash positive in ’07. We will be rolling out the educational tech components shortly, greatly enhancing the speaking side of things (with all of the intros, web 2.0 research and community we talked about all last year) and setting up at least 4 new substantial revenue opportunities.
All of this will pay for the Research and Development tech platform that we are giving away into the activities / leadership arena, first to colleges, then to high schools. I’m sooooo excited about this. We are actually building the research, learning and doing platform of the future. I don’t mean we will have the only, or even best, solution, just that we are using very cutting edge methods and applying to the opportunities of learning and engagement. At the very least, as I’ve said before, we are exploring so that others can learn from our path. This is good work, and our positioning as of the beginning of ’07 makes look like it will be sustainable.
