I met twentysomething’s Natalie Bogart and Josh Pierre of Fathom Sphere during last year’s One Spark, a crowd funding festival, where the winners were chosen by crowd votes. What stuck out about them was their age and the sheer energy of the group.
I was not surprised when they were selected as one of the winning groups for prize money and decided to interview them for my podcast. It was only during their interview that I discovered that energy was part of their plan to win the competition.
No matter th
e age, every entrepreneur starts out with an idea and then wonders how to blow it up or make it into something that their audience “gets”. Studies of the entrepreneur mind or people who build businesses have demonstrated that “Instead of setting goals based on prediction and figuring out how to achieve them, they looked at the resources they had in hand and thought about how they could maximize profit with them.” Or, to put it another way: It’s the difference between finding a recipe in a cookbook and going out to shop for ingredients at the grocery store versus improvising with whatever you have in the fridge to make the best meal you possibly can. Meaning you don’t need to create something new but simply present your best in a different manner.
During the interview as I listened to Natalie and Josh describe their project, I wondered if they knew they were textbook examples of a Harvard MBA course titled “Competitive Advantage”? While all the other One Spa
rk Exhibitors were demonstrating what they had created, Natalie and Josh set up interactive events where the crowd became part of the experience. And, they received a lot of votes based on those positive experiences. That is called differentiation, just so you know.
But, they didn’t stop there. To draw people to their interactive events they used singers and dancers from their arts co-op which created a crowd of people willing to take the next step and go into Chamblin’s Uptown Books for their interactive event. Differentiation coupled with a little guerrilla marketing. Once again: textbook.
As we finished the interview they mentioned they were working on a new plan for this year’s One Spark but could not go into details, and frankly I didn’t want them to. At this point I am more than willing to be 
surprised and see what other tactics from Competitive Advantage they have come up with.
To hear Natalie and Josh describe their mission and detail how they went about standing out literally in a crowd, listen to the podcast. While you won’t get a grade, it will save you a lot of business school money and you don’t have to move to Boston to attend Harvard.