The Mousedriver Chronicles
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Driving it home: entrepreneurial advice from the mouse men
INTERVIEW BY STEPHANIE SWILLEY
Kyle: Creating and building. Being in control of your destiny. The possibility of endless upside.
What was the craziest thing you did to get product exposure? Kyle: One time we went to a "mouse appreciation event" and fundraiser at the Microsoft store in San Francisco. We replaced the Microsoft mice with MouseDrivers and got kicked out. Still not sure how much product awareness that generated, though.
The book covers the first 18 months of bringing MouseDriver to market. Give us your high and low of the wild experience. Kyle: One high has been collecting the $50,000+ checks from key retailers. That's a true validation of the product in the market. Also being able to help other entrepreneurs with their products and ideas has been a great high. On the flip side, having the naysayers call your baby ugly can get to you sometimes.
Do you hope your book will become required reading for future biz students? John: I really do hope that schools and students will see the value in The MouseDriver Chronicles. We worked very hard to write something that we thought would benefit aspiring entrepreneurs, highlighting the ups, downs, failures, successes and emotions that almost all entrepreneurs experience while starting a company. Basically we wrote the book with a keen understanding of what we could have really used after we graduated. In fact, if we had read TMC, it would have saved us a lot of time and money! How many times a day do you send up a prayer of thanks that you didn't start an Internet company like the rest of your classmates? John: I'm just glad I followed my intuition, did what I really wanted to do and had enough courage to go in a different direction than everybody else. It's hard to deviate from the norm, but after doing it the first time, I don't think it'll be as difficult the next time. If you hadn't taken the risks to develop MouseDriver, what do you think you'd be doing today? John: I'd probably be with some VC {venture capital] company reviewing business plans and wondering what it would be like to start my own company. Wait. No, the VC probably would have laid me off by now!
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Two eager business school graduates decided to forsake the lure of the 1999 Internet gold rush, and instead put their futures on the line for a simple invention -- a computer mouse shaped like the head of a golf club. The MouseDriver Chronicles is the honest, self-deprecating account of first-time entrepreneurs John Lusk and Kyle Harrison, who took a crash course in everything from distribution to product design as they struggled to bring the MouseDriver to market. Their ongoing newsletter The MouseDriver Insider, a personal chronicle of their up-and-down journey, became required reading in several MBA courses, and the fleshed out book is a perfect primer for wannabe entrepreneurs hoping to avoid learning some lessons the hard way. Now searching for another product to bring to market, the "mouse men" talked to BookPage about the life and times of being entrepreneurs.
