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Measuring Disinterest

One of the side effects of being a founder is that you get a lot of unsolicited and solicited pitches from potential parts, employees, investors, suppliers, business service providers (mostly recruiters), and generally a lot of people interested in leveraging your corporate assets and taking your money (and time).

Part of the growth process of our company is to assign someone to look these suitors over to make sure you find the diamond in the rough, and weed out the marginal or insane opportunities that can drain precious business time.

Peter Rip, whose blog I read often has a great summary of the value of time for a start up:

"It often feels like the scarcest resource in a startup is money. It is not. Time is scarcer. You can raise more money, but you cannot raise more time."

So while a colleague and I sat in an unusually mind numbing preso of how a potential partner could use our sales team and customer base as a “co-marketing” opportunity I day dreamed about a device that could measure my lack of interest in these types of presos. Here is what I came up with: The DODI (trademark pending widespread viral adoption).

DODI is an acronym for the “Depth of Disinterest” machine that calculates the message receiver’s interest to a specific input.

DODI has almost one person month of development but works for almost anyone at a 100% accuracy rate. Also it is pervasive, persuasive and free. In fact it is common vernacular in our company now we here a phrase like;

“Where was it on the DODI scale?”

Now the DODI scale also has almost a person month of development and works as follows;

A person receives input on a business opportunity. Their internal DODI-ometer calculates a score for the message. The lower the score the more interested the receiving party is in the message. The DODI scoring system is like golf scores; the lower the score the better. In the 1.0 release of DODI the scale was only 0 – 10. Now some folks’ DODI will go below 0 as I released a patch and some bug fixes for DODI 1.3.5.7.9 but DODI will never go over the theoretical limit of 10 when calculating disinterest.

A score of 0 or less means the message is received, understood and is worth exploring.


The DODI scale tops out at 10 (ten) where a score of 10 means the machine cannot actually compute the depth of the receiver’s disinterest in that message. In other words, the time spent receiving the message is gone and returned a value of zero to the company.

Add DODI to your business toolbox.


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