BIG Data, data, everywhere.... far too much... to think........ about

Big Data (which open data adds to, to make it even bigger) is something which has the potential to change the world forever.

Not just in scientific reasoning and mathematical equations (if you can say "just" around such a point) but as John Taysom (Harvard fellow and main speaker at the Technology Strategy Board sponsored event I went to) rightly pointed out - something that if we get it wrong, people will die.

Getting it wrong with big data has already caused a couple of financial crashes already which probably affected the real world somewhat.

So here I can see some MAJOR moments for business opportunity. As now companies can / do keep ALL your data, all your tweets, all your digital and social footprint, everything that is happening that you digitally interact with, and so they can predict things from this.

Mainly in marketing about your intentions and what you might do next. But we can get so much more from this. The other week, from only a couple of data points, researchers found they could predict, your sex and race and a host of other characteristics. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/03/12/facebook-likes-can-predict-personality_n_2858150.html

And then taking this to logical extensions, if governments open up their own huge data back log, we could find out much much more about people. Almost to the extent of civil liberties being taken. Or intrusion by companies - which I would partly help through great marketing.

So going to the BIG data day held by Tecelerate in Manchester was eye opening mainly because of the wisdom and future thinking of it's main speaker- Havard fellow John Taysom - who has invested in many of these BIG data specialist companies.

Companies like Grapeshot - which help real time buyers of digital marketing ensure that they have safe keyword allocation and websites which they really want to be on (something I love as work in digital and mobile marketing... where RTB is all over.)

And companies like Feature Space - who's predictive modelling technology is about to move into mobile gaming. Which is going to be a little scary for a new client of mine - dojit games - who has a similar plan.

And my personal favourite from a pure making money now, b2c, social marketing perspective client perspective - was - Duo Fertility who's clever sensor and data from 30,000 moments of taking a woman's temperature ensures she knows her most fertile time. I would love to be a reseller for this technology!

John's wisdom is not just in investing in the right technologies, he also spoke about the concept which I found fascinating about 'just in time competence', about how companies like Google could create cultural blindness unintentionally with algorithms (which can not be seen due to them being trade secrets and not legally protect able under current IP law) and how important it was for non linear and non casual relationships to be really understood.

As for me, working in marketing, all this was far to much to think about - let alone understand. But I do get that if you are today that if you are not paying for the product - you are the product. And that with this BIG data you can predict and also get some much wrong - not only for businesses but for society as a whole.

Google glasses anyone ;)

Four simple principles for highly effective teams from

Bruce Kasanoff is a writer and speaker.You can find many more of his highly positive business ideas at Now Possible. This great point about agile development in teams - so here are his points. Some good ones...




Value the value:

Too many teams operate without clear metrics, and thus they end up making fuzzy decisions. This is a slippery slope to disappointing results. Instead, teams should assign a tangible value to every deliverable, and – this is the important part – teams should track and validate these projections as work goes on. In this manner, team members can’t game the system, inflating values to give their pet projects priority treatment.

The philosophy underlying this principle is simple: businesses exist to make money, and if a project doesn’t support that goal in a tangible way, the team shouldn’t be doing it.

State the value of each project.
Create metrics that quantify the stated value.
Validate the value actually delivered, and reward team members for it.

Be open and honest:

Keep all team communications, facts and status reports in the open and highly visible.

Look at the way your team currently operates. Is the purpose of every action crystal clear? Do you know why Lisa has been locked in her office for three days, or why John is conducting 32 interviews this week?

Clear and open communications have immense benefits. It should be obvious to everyone who is doing what, and why. When team members get stuck, they get help faster. When they succeed, others follow faster.

Avoid private communications.
Conduct disciplined weekly progress report sessions.
Hold daily “stand-up” sessions (you stand to keep them short).
Use images, mockups, etc. to make things clearer.
Make it easy to understand the purpose of every work product.

Shorten workplans:

Break deliverables into smaller pieces that can be finished in shorter time periods.

The longer a team works before delivering a tangible result, the more likely the deliverable is to fall short of expectations. A far better approach is to break large projects down into smaller pieces, and to regularly complete deliverables.

By shortening workplans, teams also make it easier for team members to explore new strategies and take risks. This is because the cost of taking a risk and failing is minimized; you lose a week instead of six months. This tactic also maximizes flexibility, because at the end of each project the team can decide what to do next.

Shorten the length of time between deliverables.

Try to make every deliverable useable and functioning, rather than just a description of something that still needs to be done.

Whenever possible, make processes and deliverables reusable and adaptable for other purposes

Create interdependence:

No one wins unless everyone wins. Period.

This is the best way to get a team to function like, well, a team. It also fosters insights, flexibility, and resilience.

Create shared metrics.
Partner team members from different disciplines.
Have members with similar skills swap tasks often, even in the middle of working on a deliverable.
Share responsibilities, ideas, concerns and alternatives.

If these principles make sense to you, you might want to give them a try. But I'd like to suggest you do so only on one condition: that all team members voluntarily want to adopt these principles.

I hope I can bring them all into action at dojit - a new mobile games development house I am joining.

The challenge of focus and a lovely idea from Saleforce's Marc B

Taken from a slightly bigger article about greatmarketing (not from great marketing works) but from a chap called Danny who I rather like the sound of. Link here.

Seth Godin recently wrote about FOMO (fear of missing out) and it really resonated from a marketing perspective. Passionate marketers often run themselves and each other ragged, worrying if we’re all missing out on the latest insight, learning, app, model, idea, case study or news piece. I do it all the time.

Just spent a week on my back due to working too hard and doing to much client side computer work - and spent it learning about gamification (which is really rather interesting in itself)

And it underlies Danny point here... as....

There’s always something stopping us from focusing – that we feel we’re missing out somehow. So the hours worked add up and the days get longer......So how do you do it? How do we focus?

The Experts

Zig Ziglar, to my mind, pioneered this in the 1980s with his Goals methodology. He approaches it from a personal perspective of course, so it’s important you realise that as a perspective and translate it to apply at work…

Write your goals down

Date them

Identify obstacles

Identify the people/organisation that you need to work with to accomplish the goals

Find out what you need to know, if anything, to achieve them

Develop a plan of action, a list, with time limits

Identify “What’s in it for me?” – what rewards and benefits will I get?

As a more commercial alternative, though very familiar when you’ve read Zig’s earlier approach, also consider Marc Benioff’s system. I recently read about his V2MOM system here, he gives a lot of advice in that interview and one of his keys to success is “you should not allow yourself to get disfocused… An entrepreneur can have a sort of ADD type of thing (Attention Deficit Disorder)… and you have to build the tools to help you refocus yourself and channel that energy”.

“[At Salesforce.com] We have an internal tool that I use and a communications cadence to help me to stay focused – I can be the kind of person that needs help staying focused. That tool is called a V2MOM (an acronym that stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures). These are five questions that I’m constantly asking of myself. I do that basically every six months for the company…”

I can paraphrase his advice for you:

Vision: What do you want? Write it down in 10 to 15 words

Values: What is most important about that vision? What are the values of the vision? Is it growth, is it quality, is it excellence? Write those things down and prioritize them.

Methods: How are you going to achieve it? What are the actions that you’re going to specifically take? In priority, write them down.

Obstacles: What is preventing you from achieving that outcome – right now? Write it down. What other obstacles may occur?

Measures: How will you know if you’re successful? What are the measurements of success? Write it down.

Benioff suggests that we recreate this on a continual basis, and get others in the team to do the same. It’s a focusing exercise, I like how he appreciates the value of others in your team and organisation seeing what you’re doing, what you’re focussing on, as much as you or I knowing what we’re focussing on.

It creates trust and alignment Of course, you’ve got to walk your talk… “If you’re gonna write it down and say you’re gonna do it, you better do it”, he says.

Which is great timing as on Monday I start work for my new company / client / big thing dojit enterprizes: makers of high quality mobile games.

Danny learnt, and I can second this that. if you don’t have alignment it can be a real battle, for everyone, especially those not in the management team. Which is what happened at Blippar and goAugmented.

But — if you can get everybody on the same page, it’s a “super-charger”, as Benioff suggests.

So Danny suggests that we create a process to align marketing

This is the really important bit – actually applying this stuff at work and with a marketing team (or wider ideally!).

Some time ago I read a book called the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and loved it. Mike Michalowicz, the author, probably gave me the best, most obvious, advice on applying the ‘systems’ in a marketing or commercial environment where it’s about more than just you.

With your vision piece in place you know your top level focus, it’s simple to turn this into more detailed, collaborative and focussed action:

Design the daily and weekly measures:

Michalowicz advises only a handful, the really important drivers. This in itself is a powerful concept, of course the ’5′ may vary according to your role or function, I’ve found. In order to focus, tighten your attention to the measures that matter. This is going to enable to you to know if you need to dig deeper when any of those measures change negatively, and not lose focus when they’re positive by drifting into ‘nice to know’ information. Save that for specific reports on a monthly or quarterly basis if you can.

Align the whole marketing team with a ’90 day plan’.

This is the powerful bit. I always struggled with annual goals, they seem so far off that I could lose focus, whereas 90 days is long enough to impact, it’s exciting to see positive change, to deliver, yet not so long as to feel distant. Of course a 90 day (or quarterly plan) can easily cascade from an annual marketing or commercial plan once that’s created.

We set something around 5-7 SMART objectives, and then ensure all key milestones or deliverables are working towards making one or more of those goals realised, each millstone or deliverable is owned by somebody and it has a date next to it.

Using this, a whole team will know what they’re doing without having to get into each others specific task-lists – it avoids micro managing, it gives alignment and focus to the manager and the person doing it, it also enables management of expectation at the senior level of the business, total transparency as to what marketing is doing to help the business. I always found that pretty liberating!

Thanks Danny - this article was perfectly timed and the rest can be found here: Link here.

Meet Amancio Ortega: The third-richest man in the world

After Gates and Slim comes Amancio Ortega, who built the world's largest fashion empire, Zara. He's difficult to know, impossible to interview, and incredibly secretive. An exclusive portrait....................by Vivienne Walt in Fortune

Sometimes an idea comes to you - and slips perfectly into a new business. I won't say that this is the same as below but its kinda cool so I don't want to forget it - so I pop it here for safe keeping...

Meet Mr Gaona and like Mr Ford he will change industries forever, and hopefully my life too. Let me explain...

The motorbike roared up to the traffic light in La Coruña in northern Spain and stopped alongside a black Town Car. From inside, the passenger glanced out his window and saw the young biker leaning over the handlebars, jean jacket decorated with appliquéd patches, a throwback to the 1970s. The man in the car, decades older than the biker, zoomed in on the jacket. The old man grabbed his cellphone and, as the story goes, called an aide in his office. His eyes still fixed on the biker, the man described the jacket's stitching, its shape and color, and signed off with a single instruction: "¡Hácedla!" Make it.

The light turned green, the biker pulled away; unbeknown to him, he and his jacket had just played a walk-on role in one of the greatest retail stories of our time.

Amancio Ortega Gaona -- the man inside the car -- is the third-richest man on earth.

In this provincial corner of Galicia, on Spain's windswept northwestern coastline, the 76-year-old founder of the Inditex Group has spent years secluded from public view, all while living in the middle of La Coruña, a city of 246,000 people. Among the millions of shoppers who patronize Inditex's flagship brand, Zara, and have made Ortega unfathomably rich, few have even heard his name. Ortega has made sure of that, shunning social appearances and refusing all interview requests (including for this article). Until 1999 no photograph of Ortega had ever been published. (Which is sooooo cool it beggars belief.)

And yet, Ortega built a fashion empire that reaches into more than 80 countries. Beginning 40 years ago, Ortega ripped up the business model that had been refined over decades by Europe's fashion houses and replaced it with one of the most brutally fast turnaround schedules the industry had ever attempted. Decades later Zara is the world's biggest fashion retailer.

Ortega built his empire on two basic rules: Give customers what they want, and get it to them faster than anyone else. The twin organizing principles have made the company (and Ortega) into an unlikely iconoclast, more of an optimal supply chain than a traditional retailer. They are also the secret to Inditex's astonishing success. "Very few companies can challenge Inditex at this time. The company is in a race with themselves rather than anything else," says Christodoulos Chaviaras, a retail analyst at Barclays Capital in London. Tadashi Yanai, founder of clothing retailer Uniqlo, has made it his stated goal in life to beat Zara. And last August shares of the fashion company Esprit rose 28% on the day it announced its new CEO, Inditex's former distribution and operations manager.

Spain might be suffering through its worst recession in generations, with 24% unemployment and crippling debt, but within Inditex, the crisis might as well be happening on Mars. "They live in a different world," says Modesto Lomba, president of the Spanish Association of Fashion Designers. In December, CEO Pablo Isla announced that revenue was up 17% year on year for the first three quarters of 2012 -- that nine-month sales revenue amounts to $14.6 billion -- and net profits matched 2010's, at $2.71 billion. So far, the growth shows no signs of slowing.

Inditex produced 835,000 garments in 2011. A new Zara store opens every day, on average; Inditex's 6,000th store just launched on London's Oxford Street. There are 46 Zara stores in the U.S., 347 in China, and 1,938 in Spain. Ortega controls more than 59% of the company's shares, and last July he overtook Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest man, behind Carlos Slim Helú and Bill Gates. The reclusive, enigmatic Spaniard, hunting for ideas from his car window on the streets of his hometown, is now worth about $56 billion.

If such a fortune seems big, it is even more astonishing when you consider the man himself. The youngest of four children, Ortega was born in Busdongo de Arbas, a hamlet of 60 people in northern Spain, in 1936, just as the Spanish Civil War was erupting. The family scraped by on his father's railway job while his mother worked as a housemaid. When Amancio was a small boy, the family moved to La Coruña. There, home was a row house that abutted the train tracks and that served, as it still does today, as the railway workers' quarters. Amancio might have joined the rail service too, had it not been for one fateful evening when he was just 13. Walking home from his school, he and his mother stopped at a local store, where he stood by as his mother pleaded for credit. "He heard someone say, 'Señora, I cannot give this to you. You have to pay for it,'" says Covadonga O'Shea, a longtime friend of Ortega's who runs a fashion business school at the University of Navarra in Madrid and wrote the sole authorized biography of him, The Man From Zara. "He felt so humiliated, he decided he would never go back to school."

Barely in his teens, Ortega found a job as a shop hand for a local shirtmaker called Gala, which still sits on the same corner in downtown La Coruña. Today the store feels frozen in time: plaid shirts, fishermen's caps, and woolen cardigans. "Can you believe it?" says Xabier R. Blanco, a local journalist who tracks Ortega's career. "They still sell the same stuff, and Amancio is Mr. World." That painful irony is not lost on Gala's owner, José Martínez, 76, who inherited the store from his father.

THIS IS MY FAVOURITE PART OF THE STORY....

José befriended young Amancio when they were both 14. The boys spent their afternoons folding shirts at Gala and riding bikes around town. Martínez does not relish his current role as counterpoint to his childhood friend. "No one ever comes in here to buy anything," he says. "They just want to know about Amancio."

By 16, Ortega had concluded that the real money could be made giving customers exactly what they wanted, quickly, rather than buying up inventory in the hopes it would sell. To do that, he needed to figure out what people were looking for, then make it. He would need to control the supply chain. Ortega had the ideal environment: Galicia. With few job opportunities, thousands of men worked at sea, leaving their women to struggle alone back home. "The women would do anything for a little money, and they were really good at sewing," says Blanco, who co-wrote a book called Amancio Ortega: From Zero to Zara. Ortega began organizing thousands of women into sewing cooperatives. He oversaw a thriving production of quilted bathrobes for his first company, GOA. Mercedes López was 14 when she went to work for Ortega and says most women were thrilled to be hired. "The conditions were really pretty good," says López, now 52, who is the textile union representative at Inditex. "We knew Amancio well. He was very close to the workers." It was a family business: Ortega ran design, his brother Antonio headed the commercial side, and his sister Josefa was the bookkeeper. The company trucked in textiles from Barcelona, cutting out the middlemen.

With enough cash, Ortega opened his first storefront in 1975, two blocks from his teenage job at Gala. He named it Zara, because his preferred name, Zorba, was taken. From the outset, Ortega made speed the driving force. Decades later it still is. Zara stores refresh their stock twice a week and receive orders within 48 hours, tops. Ortega imposed the 48-hour rule in the 1970s, forcing him to open the first Zara stores near La Coruña. Many lined the well-traveled truck route to Barcelona's textile factories. Even as the company grew, Ortega stuck to his two rules.

It took Ortega 10 years to found the holding company, Inditex, and open his first international store in Portugal -- whose labor force, cheaper than Spain's, made it the next obvious place to produce; New York and Paris followed in the late 1980s. While Zara proliferated across Europe through the 1990s, much of the production was kept close to home. "Our roots have always been in manufacturing," says Jesús Echevarria Hernández, Inditex's spokesman, sitting in the company's sprawling headquarters in Arteixo, outside La Coruña, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking farmland. "When we come here, we always refer to it as 'going to the factory.'"

The factory is part sci-fi machine, part old-fashioned retail -- a well-oiled operation organized around Ortega's twin principles. It is restocking continually at top speed. Inside, its high-gloss, white, minimalist interiors resemble a humongous Zara store. Along two arteries down the main floor, hundreds of designers and sales analysts work at long white counters in a vast open space, grouped around regions of Zara's empire. The pace is frantic: Designers create about three items a day, and patternmakers cut one sample from each. Seated alongside them are commercial-sales specialists, each with regional expertise, who dissect tastes and customer habits using sales reports from Zara store managers to see what's selling and (more telling) what customers are looking for. Staffers say inspiration comes from the streets, clubs, bars, and restaurants. Each is trained to keep an eye on what people are wearing, just as Ortega has done for decades.


At one end of the Zara design floor is a small team that manages Zara.com. There, flat-screen monitors linked by webcam to offices in Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York act as trendspotters, since countries and cities are not monolithic: Tokyo's Ginza district, for example, resembles SoHo in Manhattan more than Tokyo's business district. The obsession for spotting new tastes is pure Ortega. "We never go to fashion shows," says Loreta García, who joined Inditex 23 years ago, straight out of design school, and now heads Zara Woman's trends department. "We track bloggers and listen to customers, but we change our opinions all the time," she says. "What seems great today, in two weeks is the worst idea ever."

What keeps this machine ticking is the logistics department -- "the essence of the company," says Echevarria, who credits the system for such turnaround speeds in places as far-flung as Baku and Melbourne. At 400,000 square feet, the logistics building is more than three times the size of headquarters across the street, and is organized around a Rube Goldberg-style labyrinth of conveyer belts extending five stories high. It delivers customized orders to every Zara store on the planet. There is a firm 24-hour turnaround deadline for Europe, the Middle East, and much of the U.S., and 48 hours for Asia and Latin America.

The unusual arrangement is pure Ortega. Though he officially handed the reins to Pablo Isla in July 2011, Ortega remains the company's muse, inspiration, and biggest shareholder. Astonishingly, Ortega has never had an office. Even now, the world's third-richest man sits at a desk at the end of Zara Woman's open workspace. Ortega prefers touching fabrics to reading memos. "It's as though there are no computers," García says. "The directors are like that too now," she says. "We all started here young and have grown up with Ortega." Newer staff members say they are astonished at how often Ortega discusses colors and trends with them. "You can ask Ortega, 'What do you think of this?' It's very flexible," says García. "You don't have to fix an appointment." Asked what Ortega's legacy will be at Inditex, Isla, the CEO, answered similarly: "The entrepreneurial spirit, the self-criticism, the culture: The company is completely flat."

Ortega's insistence on staying close to home and his ability to connect with even low-level employees raise an intriguing question: Would his executive style have been more hierarchical and conventional -- and perhaps less successful -- had he emerged from a privileged family and with an MBA, rather than from dire poverty with little education? "Poverty clearly made him who he is," says Blanco, who wrote his unauthorized biography. "There was a hunger. Show me any great boxer who didn't come from this kind of background."

In semiretirement, Ortega now lives in a five-story sea-facing house in La Coruña, on a busy city street, with little evident security. He eats breakfast every morning (eggs and fries, say friends) with acquaintances at La Coruña's businessmen's club, and retreats on weekends to his country house, where he raises chickens and goats and gathers his grown children. A creature of habit, Ortega devotes weeks a year to hiking pilgrimage routes in Galicia, and his lifelong aversion to flying keeps him from traveling much. Antonio Grandío Dopico, economics professor at the University of La Coruña, who has known Ortega since Inditex began, says his old friend's life philosophy is "absolute normality."

Yet these are not normal times in Spain. Youths in their twenties -- Zara's key market -- suffer unemployment rates of about 50%, double the national average. The country's economic pain is clear walking through La Coruña. The commercial artery has dozens of boarded-up storefronts. The one bright spot is a renovated building on a prized corner near the port, lit up and humming with action: the city's premier Zara store.

How long can Zara maintain its relentless expansion? With Europe's slowdown, the company expanded in the U.S. and Asia, with a splashy opening on Fifth Avenue last year, and in September launched Zara.com in China. As Zara expands farther from La Coruña, Ortega's rules might collide with the reality of shipping hundreds of thousands of garments a year back to Galicia for distribution.

Zara may change, but the man who built this retail giant will always be, deep down, a small-town hero. Once, when traveling to a store opening in Manhattan, Ortega watched as shoppers poured through the doors. He was so overcome he shut himself in a bathroom and wept. "No one could see the tears streaming down my face," he told O'Shea. "Can you imagine how I thought of my parents then? How proud they would have been of their son who had, so to speak, discovered America, starting from a little town lost in the sticks of northern Spain!"

Not the power of phones - but the power of intention

My iphone broke the other week - nothing amazing there - as over 2 years old.

Which is shocking when you think I am in mobile marketing - but it is interesting to see the phones of other people in the mobile industry - the CEO of Blippar's phone was more beat up than mine - and he runs one of the most successful mobile augmented reality companies in the world. So... it says something.

The point is that my phone broke and a good friend of mine gave me his old phone (another iphone that goodness) as he is off to Bali to do some soul searching.

And it was interesting to see what he left on his phone. On his itunes / ipod or podcasts. Some really spiritual and enlightened works which I was very happy to be reacquainted with.

As my blogs as of late have been a little tech heavy, mainly if not totally about startups and my passion for them, I wanted to pop this in here as well. Nothing to do with marketing. But everything to do with life.

"There is a universal source of energy that is called the “power of intention.” This source – whether you call it God, the divine, or something else – is always available to us and is infinite in its possibilities. - Dr Wayne Dyer

So in his podcast on my best friend's phone who I may never see again was the Seven Faces of Intention. And so I list them here... they are:

Creativity, Kindness, Love, Beauty, Expansion, Unlimited Abundance, and Receptivity - Dr W Dyer believes that they are the keys to unlocking the power of intention in your life. And so do I.

1. Creativity

– Realize that there is creativity within you, and learn to recognize and appreciate your creative impulses. You don’t have to be an artist or a writer – creativity is just as important to the business person looking for the next big idea.

“If you’ve ever felt inspired by a purpose or calling, you know the feeling of Spirit working through you. Inspired is our word for in-spirited.”

Learn to recognize this state of being in-spirited, and you’ll unlock your inner creativity.


2. Kindness

–Whether you call it karma, the law of reciprocity or the power of positive thinking, work from the belief that you’ll be rewarded for good intentions.
Dr. Dyer shares the science behind kindness in The Power of Intention. When you do something kind for someone else, their brain releases serotonin – and so does yours! Serotonin is a hormone that makes us feel good. So, every act of kindness makes two happier people in the world.

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

3. Love

- Think of this power of intention as the face of kindness exponentiation with the emotion of love.

Love means a lack of judgment, a lack of anger or resentment. It means recognizing God in others.

4. Beauty

– The face of beauty is the face of intention.

Learn to appreciate the beauty of everything around you.

The face of beauty is truth, honesty and a knowing that what "is" -- is exactly as it should be. You can use this power by re-framing any negative thoughts you have towards others and replace them with an appreciate (a thankfulness attitude) towards them.


5. Expansion

– Expand your awareness of what is possible.

Don’t set limits on yourself; instead, learn to listen to your intuition.

If you see the world as a negative and hurtful place, then you’re only ever going to experience it that way. Instead, learn to recognize your true nobility.
“True nobility isn’t about being better than someone else, it’s about being better than you used to be.”


6.Unlimited Abundance

– Realizing your unlimited abundance means facing down your fears and limitations. Dr. Dyer has a simple three-word suggestion for how to put this into action:

Act “as if”. This means acting as if the thing you want has already happened.

You were probably taught all of your life about limitations and about what is "not possible." Fortunately, this came from well-meaning people who believed in limitation and not abundance. This law does not require you to be intellectually perfect in order to receive the benefits. Believing in unlimited abundance has no downside, so why not take another look at your business life after you answer this question, "What if I could have it all?"

7. Receptivity

– This means being open without judgment. Being aware enough and engaged enough to see possibilities where others don’t. And most importantly, it means simply relaxing and letting the Power of Intention do its work.

So there you have it - not really about marketing or startups or mobile - but massively important in making sure that they bring you what you intend... not just what you want :)

Resources:
http://www.selfgrowth.com

Start ups and Growth .... what you might need to know...

This is PURELY taken from someone else - I put it here only so I can remember it more and click back to it when I am in Malaysia.

The blog is by - Paul Graham. And it is wonderful.

Startup = Growth

September 2012

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

If you want to start one it's important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can't be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you're after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.

Redwoods

Let's start with a distinction that should be obvious but is often overlooked: not every newly founded company is a startup. Millions of companies are started every year in the US. Only a tiny fraction are startups. Most are service businesses—restaurants, barbershops, plumbers, and so on. These are not startups, except in a few unusual cases. A barbershop isn't designed to grow fast. Whereas a search engine, for example, is.

When I say startups are designed to grow fast, I mean it in two senses. Partly I mean designed in the sense of intended, because most startups fail. But I also mean startups are different by nature, in the same way a redwood seedling has a different destiny from a bean sprout.

That difference is why there's a distinct word, "startup," for companies designed to grow fast. If all companies were essentially similar, but some through luck or the efforts of their founders ended up growing very fast, we wouldn't need a separate word. We could just talk about super-successful companies and less successful ones. But in fact startups do have a different sort of DNA from other businesses. Google is not just a barbershop whose founders were unusually lucky and hard-working. Google was different from the beginning.

To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That's the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn't scale.

For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. Barbershops are doing fine in the (a) department. Almost everyone needs their hair cut. The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail establishment, is (b). A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. And even if they did the barbershop couldn't accomodate them. [1]

Writing software is a great way to solve (b), but you can still end up constrained in (a). If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarian speakers, you'll be able to reach most of the people who want it, but there won't be many of them. If you make software to teach English to Chinese speakers, however, you're in startup territory.

Most businesses are tightly constrained in (a) or (b). The distinctive feature of successful startups is that they're not.

Ideas

It might seem that it would always be better to start a startup than an ordinary business. If you're going to start a company, why not start the type with the most potential? The catch is that this is a (fairly) efficient market. If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarians, you won't have much competition. If you write software to teach English to Chinese speakers, you'll face ferocious competition, precisely because that's such a larger prize. [2]

The constraints that limit ordinary companies also protect them. That's the tradeoff. If you start a barbershop, you only have to compete with other local barbers. If you start a search engine you have to compete with the whole world.

The most important thing that the constraints on a normal business protect it from is not competition, however, but the difficulty of coming up with new ideas. If you open a bar in a particular neighborhood, as well as limiting your potential and protecting you from competitors, that geographic constraint also helps define your company. Bar + neighborhood is a sufficient idea for a small business. Similarly for companies constrained in (a). Your niche both protects and defines you.

Whereas if you want to start a startup, you're probably going to have to think of something fairly novel. A startup has to make something it can deliver to a large market, and ideas of that type are so valuable that all the obvious ones are already taken.

That space of ideas has been so thoroughly picked over that a startup generally has to work on something everyone else has overlooked. I was going to write that one has to make a conscious effort to find ideas everyone else has overlooked. But that's not how most startups get started. Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them. Perhaps later they step back and notice they've found an idea in everyone else's blind spot, and from that point make a deliberate effort to stay there. [3] But at the moment when successful startups get started, much of the innovation is unconscious.

What's different about successful founders is that they can see different problems. It's a particularly good combination both to be good at technology and to face problems that can be solved by it, because technology changes so rapidly that formerly bad ideas often become good without anyone noticing. Steve Wozniak's problem was that he wanted his own computer. That was an unusual problem to have in 1975. But technological change was about to make it a much more common one. Because he not only wanted a computer but knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one. And the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for millions of people in the coming years. But by the time it was obvious to ordinary people that this was a big market, Apple was already established.

Google has similar origins. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to search the web. But unlike most people they had the technical expertise both to notice that existing search engines were not as good as they could be, and to know how to improve them. Over the next few years their problem became everyone's problem, as the web grew to a size where you didn't have to be a picky search expert to notice the old algorithms weren't good enough. But as happened with Apple, by the time everyone else realized how important search was, Google was entrenched.

That's one connection between startup ideas and technology. Rapid change in one area uncovers big, soluble problems in other areas. Sometimes the changes are advances, and what they change is solubility. That was the kind of change that yielded Apple; advances in chip technology finally let Steve Wozniak design a computer he could afford. But in Google's case the most important change was the growth of the web. What changed there was not solubility but bigness.

The other connection between startups and technology is that startups create new ways of doing things, and new ways of doing things are, in the broader sense of the word, new technology. When a startup both begins with an idea exposed by technological change and makes a product consisting of technology in the narrower sense (what used to be called "high technology"), it's easy to conflate the two. But the two connections are distinct and in principle one could start a startup that was neither driven by technological change, nor whose product consisted of technology except in the broader sense. [4]

Rate

How fast does a company have to grow to be considered a startup? There's no precise answer to that. "Startup" is a pole, not a threshold. Starting one is at first no more than a declaration of one's ambitions. You're committing not just to starting a company, but to starting a fast growing one, and you're thus committing to search for one of the rare ideas of that type. But at first you have no more than commitment. Starting a startup is like being an actor in that respect. "Actor" too is a pole rather than a threshold. At the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to auditions. Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he doesn't only become an actor when he's successful.

So the real question is not what growth rate makes a company a startup, but what growth rate successful startups tend to have. For founders that's more than a theoretical question, because it's equivalent to asking if they're on the right path.

The growth of a successful startup usually has three phases:

There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing.

As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a period of rapid growth.

Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company. Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves. [5]

Together these three phases produce an S-curve. The phase whose growth defines the startup is the second one, the ascent. Its length and slope determine how big the company will be.

The slope is the company's growth rate. If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate. That's the measure of a startup. If you don't know that number, you don't even know if you're doing well or badly.

When I first meet founders and ask what their growth rate is, sometimes they tell me "we get about a hundred new customers a month." That's not a rate. What matters is not the abolute number of new customers, but the ratio of new customers to existing ones. If you're really getting a constant number of new customers every month, you're in trouble, because that means your growth rate is decreasing.

During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week, partly because there is so little time before Demo Day, and partly because startups early on need frequent feedback from their users to tweak what they're doing. [6]

A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.

The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users. That's a reasonable proxy for revenue growth because whenever the startup does start trying to make money, their revenues will probably be a constant multiple of active users. [7]

Compass

We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just." If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for that week. There's nothing more they need to do. But if they don't hit it, they've failed in the only thing that mattered, and should be correspondingly alarmed.

Programmers will recognize what we're doing here. We're turning starting a startup into an optimization problem. And anyone who has tried optimizing code knows how wonderfully effective that sort of narrow focus can be. Optimizing code means taking an existing program and changing it to use less of something, usually time or memory. You don't have to think about what the program should do, just make it faster. For most programmers this is very satisfying work. The narrow focus makes it a sort of puzzle, and you're generally surprised how fast you can solve it.

Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup to a single problem. You can use that target growth rate to make all your decisions for you; anything that gets you the growth you need is ipso facto right. Should you spend two days at a conference? Should you hire another programmer? Should you focus more on marketing? Should you spend time courting some big customer? Should you add x feature? Whatever gets you your target growth rate. [8]

Judging yourself by weekly growth doesn't mean you can look no more than a week ahead. Once you experience the pain of missing your target one week (it was the only thing that mattered, and you failed at it), you become interested in anything that could spare you such pain in the future. So you'll be willing for example to hire another programmer, who won't contribute to this week's growth but perhaps in a month will have implemented some new feature that will get you more users. But only if (a) the distraction of hiring someone won't make you miss your numbers in the short term, and (b) you're sufficiently worried about whether you can keep hitting your numbers without hiring someone new.

It's not that you don't think about the future, just that you think about it no more than necessary.

In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. Having to hit a growth number every week forces founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding. Nine times out of ten, sitting around strategizing is just a form of procrastination. Whereas founders' intuitions about which hill to climb are usually better than they realize. Plus the maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated. Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.

The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with.

There's a parallel here to small businesses. Just as the constraint of being located in a particular neighborhood helps define a bar, the constraint of growing at a certain rate can help define a startup.

You'll generally do best to follow that constraint wherever it leads rather than being influenced by some initial vision, just as a scientist is better off following the truth wherever it leads rather than being influenced by what he wishes were the case. When Richard Feynman said that the imagination of nature was greater than the imagination of man, he meant that if you just keep following the truth you'll discover cooler things than you could ever have made up. For startups, growth is a constraint much like truth. Every successful startup is at least partly a product of the imagination of growth. [9]

Value

It's hard to find something that grows consistently at several percent a week, but if you do you may have found something surprisingly valuable. If we project forward we see why.

weekly yearly
1% 1.7x
2% 2.8x
5% 12.6x
7% 33.7x
10% 142.0x

A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month. [10]

Our ancestors must rarely have encountered cases of exponential growth, because our intutitions are no guide here. What happens to fast growing startups tends to surprise even the founders.

Small variations in growth rate produce qualitatively different outcomes. That's why there's a separate word for startups, and why startups do things that ordinary companies don't, like raising money and getting acquired. And, strangely enough, it's also why they fail so frequently.

Considering how valuable a successful startup can become, anyone familiar with the concept of expected value would be surprised if the failure rate weren't high. If a successful startup could make a founder $100 million, then even if the chance of succeeding were only 1%, the expected value of starting one would be $1 million. And the probability of a group of sufficiently smart and determined founders succeeding on that scale might be significantly over 1%. For the right people—e.g. the young Bill Gates—the probability might be 20% or even 50%. So it's not surprising that so many want to take a shot at it. In an efficient market, the number of failed startups should be proportionate to the size of the successes. And since the latter is huge the former should be too. [11]

What this means is that at any given time, the great majority of startups will be working on something that's never going to go anywhere, and yet glorifying their doomed efforts with the grandiose title of "startup."

This doesn't bother me. It's the same with other high-beta vocations, like being an actor or a novelist. I've long since gotten used to it. But it seems to bother a lot of people, particularly those who've started ordinary businesses. Many are annoyed that these so-called startups get all the attention, when hardly any of them will amount to anything.

If they stepped back and looked at the whole picture they might be less indignant. The mistake they're making is that by basing their opinions on anecdotal evidence they're implicitly judging by the median rather than the average. If you judge by the median startup, the whole concept of a startup seems like a fraud. You have to invent a bubble to explain why founders want to start them or investors want to fund them. But it's a mistake to use the median in a domain with so much variation. If you look at the average outcome rather than the median, you can understand why investors like them, and why, if they aren't median people, it's a rational choice for founders to start them.

Deals

Why do investors like startups so much? Why are they so hot to invest in photo-sharing apps, rather than solid money-making businesses? Not only for the obvious reason.

The test of any investment is the ratio of return to risk. Startups pass that test because although they're appallingly risky, the returns when they do succeed are so high. But that's not the only reason investors like startups. An ordinary slower-growing business might have just as good a ratio of return to risk, if both were lower. So why are VCs interested only in high-growth companies? The reason is that they get paid by getting their capital back, ideally after the startup IPOs, or failing that when it's acquired.

The other way to get returns from an investment is in the form of dividends. Why isn't there a parallel VC industry that invests in ordinary companies in return for a percentage of their profits? Because it's too easy for people who control a private company to funnel its revenues to themselves (e.g. by buying overpriced components from a supplier they control) while making it look like the company is making little profit. Anyone who invested in private companies in return for dividends would have to pay close attention to their books.

The reason VCs like to invest in startups is not simply the returns, but also because such investments are so easy to oversee. The founders can't enrich themselves without also enriching the investors. [12]

Why do founders want to take the VCs' money? Growth, again. The constraint between good ideas and growth operates in both directions. It's not merely that you need a scalable idea to grow. If you have such an idea and don't grow fast enough, competitors will. Growing too slowly is particularly dangerous in a business with network effects, which the best startups usually have to some degree.

Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable. It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's no more foolish than buying insurance. Fundamentally that's how the most successful startups view fundraising. They could grow the company on its own revenues, but the extra money and help supplied by VCs will let them grow even faster. Raising money lets you choose your growth rate.

Money to grow faster is always at the command of the most successful startups, because the VCs need them more than they need the VCs. A profitable startup could if it wanted just grow on its own revenues. Growing slower might be slightly dangerous, but chances are it wouldn't kill them. Whereas VCs need to invest in startups, and in particular the most successful startups, or they'll be out of business. Which means that any sufficiently promising startup will be offered money on terms they'd be crazy to refuse. And yet because of the scale of the successes in the startup business, VCs can still make money from such investments. You'd have to be crazy to believe your company was going to become as valuable as a high growth rate can make it, but some do.

Pretty much every successful startup will get acquisition offers too. Why? What is it about startups that makes other companies want to buy them? [13]

Fundamentally the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups: a rapidly growing company is valuable. It's a good thing eBay bought Paypal, for example, because Paypal is now responsible for 43% of their sales and probably more of their growth.

But acquirers have an additional reason to want startups. A rapidly growing company is not merely valuable, but dangerous. If it keeps expanding, it might expand into the acquirer's own territory. Most product acquisitions have some component of fear. Even if an acquirer isn't threatened by the startup itself, they might be alarmed at the thought of what a competitor could do with it. And because startups are in this sense doubly valuable to acquirers, acquirers will often pay more than an ordinary investor would. [14]

Understand

The combination of founders, investors, and acquirers forms a natural ecosystem. It works so well that those who don't understand it are driven to invent conspiracy theories to explain how neatly things sometimes turn out. Just as our ancestors did to explain the apparently too neat workings of the natural world. But there is no secret cabal making it all work.

If you start from the mistaken assumption that Instagram was worthless, you have to invent a secret boss to force Mark Zuckerberg to buy it. To anyone who knows Mark Zuckerberg that is the reductio ad absurdum of the initial assumption. The reason he bought Instagram was that it was valuable and dangerous, and what made it so was growth.

If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology—because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change. Growth is why it's a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup: growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too. Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups: not just because the returns are high but also because generating returns from capital gains is easier to manage than generating returns from dividends. Growth explains why the most successful startups take VC money even if they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate. And growth explains why successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers. To acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous too.

It's not just that if you want to succeed in some domain, you have to understand the forces driving it. Understanding growth is what starting a startup consists of. What you're really doing (and to the dismay of some observers, all you're really doing) when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do. You're committing to search for one of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth. Because these ideas are so valuable, finding one is hard. The startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be research scientist: you're not committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.









Notes

[1] Strictly speaking it's not lots of customers you need but a big market, meaning a high product of number of customers times how much they'll pay. But it's dangerous to have too few customers even if they pay a lot, or the power that individual customers have over you could turn you into a de facto consulting firm. So whatever market you're in, you'll usually do best to err on the side of making the broadest type of product for it.

[2] One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to start businesses to use a restaurant as a model. What he meant, I believe, is that it's fine to start software companies constrained in (a) in the same way a restaurant is constrained in (b). I agree. Most people should not try to start startups.

[3] That sort of stepping back is one of the things we focus on at Y Combinator. It's common for founders to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications. That's probably true of the biggest discoveries in any field.

[4] I got it wrong in "How to Make Wealth" when I said that a startup was a small company that takes on a hard technical problem. That is the most common recipe but not the only one.

[5] In principle companies aren't limited by the size of the markets they serve, because they could just expand into new markets. But there seem to be limits on the ability of big companies to do that. Which means the slowdown that comes from bumping up against the limits of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which internal limits are expressed.

It may be that some of these limits could be overcome by changing the shape of the organization—specifically by sharding it.

[6] This is, obviously, only for startups that have already launched or can launch during YC. A startup building a new database will probably not do that. On the other hand, launching something small and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any company that could start this way probably should.

[7] If the startup is taking the Facebook/Twitter route and building something they hope will be very popular but from which they don't yet have a definite plan to make money, the growth rate has to be higher, even though it's a proxy for revenue growth, because such companies need huge numbers of users to succeed at all.

Beware too of the edge case where something spreads rapidly but the churn is high too, so that you have good net growth till you run through all the potential users, at which point it suddenly stops.

[8] Within YC when we say it's ipso facto right to do whatever gets you growth, it's implicit that this excludes trickery like buying users for more than their lifetime value, counting users as active when they're really not, bleeding out invites at a regularly increasing rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc. Even if you were able to fool investors with such tricks, you'd ultimately be hurting yourself, because you're throwing off your own compass.

[9] Which is why it's such a dangerous mistake to believe that successful startups are simply the embodiment of some brilliant initial idea. What you're looking for initially is not so much a great idea as an idea that could evolve into a great one. The danger is that promising ideas are not merely blurry versions of great ones. They're often different in kind, because the early adopters you evolve the idea upon have different needs from the rest of the market. For example, the idea that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a subset of Facebook; the idea that evolves into Facebook is a site for Harvard undergrads.

[10] What if a company grew at 1.7x a year for a really long time? Could it not grow just as big as any successful startup? In principle yes, of course. If our hypothetical company making $1000 a month grew at 1% a week for 19 years, it would grow as big as a company growing at 5% a week for 4 years. But while such trajectories may be common in, say, real estate development, you don't see them much in the technology business. In technology, companies that grow slowly tend not to grow as big.

[11] Any expected value calculation varies from person to person depending on their utility function for money. I.e. the first million is worth more to most people than subsequent millions. How much more depends on the person. For founders who are younger or more ambitious the utility function is flatter. Which is probably part of the reason the founders of the most successful startups of all tend to be on the young side.

[12] More precisely, this is the case in the biggest winners, which is where all the returns come from. A startup founder could pull the same trick of enriching himself at the company's expense by selling them overpriced components. But it wouldn't be worth it for the founders of Google to do that. Only founders of failing startups would even be tempted, but those are writeoffs from the VCs' point of view anyway.

[13] Acquisitions fall into two categories: those where the acquirer wants the business, and those where the acquirer just wants the employees. The latter type is sometimes called an HR acquisition. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a scale that has a significant effect on the expected value calculation for potential founders, HR acquisitions are viewed by acquirers as more akin to hiring bonuses.

[14] I once explained this to some founders who had recently arrived from Russia. They found it novel that if you threatened a company they'd pay a premium for you. "In Russia they just kill you," they said, and they were only partly joking. Economically, the fact that established companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be one of the most valuable aspects of the rule of law. And so to the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we should worry, not because it's a departure from the rule of law per se but from what the rule of law is aiming at.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.

Some well read wisdom about start ups

This is SOOOOOO good I feel a little ashamed that I have no input into it - ok a little bit later on. So I mainly pop it here so I will not forget it.

Those of you who are launching a business...............

................. especially a techie business, will love this.

Life in the “Trough of Sorrow” all works credited to Andrew Chen as he wrote it.

In the life of a startup you get to a place called the Trough of Sorrows. See below.

Ok not a bad thought. But the real Question is that whilst you’re in the Trough of Sorrow, what do you do? How do you beat it?

This is something we sadly failed to do with goAugmented even after winning awards - so we lost our developers and lost our way. And lost the company in the end...

Traditional business literature won’t help you solve it- most of that stuff is focused on life after product/market fit, after the Trough of Sorrow. A lot of startup stuff is focused on the initial phases, when you don’t have a team, idea, or investors.

What happens when you have a team, an idea, and investors, but it’s not quite working yet? What do you do there?

I have some notes from my personal experience, and from others who have beat the Trough of Sorrow, and wanted to share them. First off, there’s both an emotional component as well as an analytical one.

Dealing with the emotions

Let’s start with the emotional first. First, a couple important things to remember:

Getting to product/market fit is hard, and even though you feel like you’re uniquely failing, you’re actually not. Turns out every startup has to go through this, but not every startup survives it. Entrepreneurs will blame themselves for failing, but it’s OK, this is hard and we all start the journey by failing a lot.

A corollary to the above is, expect to face the Trough of Sorrow. It’s hard to avoid. Quitting, starting over, executing a “too big” pivot, and other avoidance strategies won’t keep you from hitting a difficult point again, it’ll just delay the inevitable. Instead, just figure out how to work through it.

Expect to fight with your cofounders. When things are going great, cofounders tend to go along since the focus will be on keeping the momentum up. When things are mixed or going badly, there will be meaningful disagreements about what to do next!

Quitting is your decision. There’s a huge spectrum of tools you can use to fix up a broken thing. You can change the product, switch customer segments. You can recapitalize the company, reset the team, and fire your cofounders. You can (usually) find a way to keep going if you want to. Whether or not you want to quit, that’s up to you, but don’t think that quitting and starting a new thing will let you start something up without passing through this difficult phase.

Churning customers, employees, and cofounders isn’t failing. While you’re going from one iteration to the next, people will fall off the wagon. It just happens. That’s OK! That’s part of what happens, and even though it’ll feel like it’s a failure, don’t let it discourage you. The question is, does the new strategy make more sense than the old one? You only fail when you fail.

An additional thought on quitting: It’s ultimately the entrepreneur’s personal decision to quit, because there’s always some alternative scenario, as unpleasant as it might be. You can always dilute yourself more, raise more capital, or reduce the burn rate. It can add more time to the clock, which might be unpleasant, yet it might save the company. Is it always logical to do that? Maybe, and maybe not! But it’s worth considering that there’s always another move, and an entrepreneur shouldn’t ever feel like they’re somehow “forced” to quit.

A lot of entrepreneurs quit when they hit the Trough of Sorrow, struggle for 12-24 months, and face up to the reality that they’ll have to raise another dilutive round. Is this a good time to quit? Maybe. But given that the majority of startups go through this kind of stage, I’d actually argue that it’s just part of struggle to being successful. Sometimes it just takes 3 years to get through the Trough of Sorrow, but on the other side is something that might really be worth the pain. Maybe :)

I find that when I spend time with startups as an investor/advisor, a lot of my time ends up being about the above issues. Probably 80%, actually. If you can minimize the emotionality of feeling like you’re failing, you can try to keep the team together and get to the problem solving part.

Dealing with the problems

If you can hold everything together, and keep the team productive enough and the runway long enough to try to make a run at the problem, then here’s a few wild unfounded generalities on how to proceed. It’s super hard to generalize here but here’s an attempt.

Identify the root problem. Is the product working? Does the onboarding suck? Or is execution on growth lacking? You can figure out the main bottleneck by trying to understand where it’s working and where it’s not. If the problem is high retention and high engagement, but not a lot of people are showing up, just focus on marketing. If the product is low retention and low engagement, you probably have to work on the product. More marketing and optimizing your notifications won’t help there.

I find that much of the time, startups take too much product risk, and that’s why they aren’t working. Most of the new products I run into aren’t at the phase of “we’re product/market fit, just add more users!” Instead, most of the time, the products are just fundamentally broken. They are asking users to do new things, they exist in new markets with no competitors, and as a result, it’s unclear if the customer behavior is there to support their product. Instead, try to take a known working category and try to invent 20% of it, rather than 90%. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, the MP3 player, or the computer, and yet they are super innovative and successful. You don’t have to invent a new product category either, and it’s easier to get to product/market fit when you have a baseline competitor to compete against.

Resist the urge to start over. There’s always a feeling that if you just rebooted, you’ll somehow avoid the Trough of Sorrow. Not true. Trust your initial instincts in your market and in your product, and figure out how to guide it into a similar place. If smart people invested in you and in the market, there’s probably something there, but you have to find it.

Get your product to be stripped down, focused, and so easy to understand that it’s boring. Look, you’re not in this to impress your designery friends, you’re in this to communicate your product’s value prop in simple and focused terms. The closer you are to that, the more boring your product will sound- that’s a good thing!

Money buys time, and time buys product iterations. This is why there’s a school of thought that says, raise as much money as you can at every point- before product/market fit, raise the max amount so that you have as many iterations as possible to ensure you get to P/M fit. After P/M fit, raise as much money to maximize the upside. Something a few steps back from that extreme is probably the right one :)

Pick up small tactical wins. Even if you do something in the product that doesn’t scale at first, it can be worth it- like prepopulating content, inviting all your friends, doing PR, etc. These small wins build momentum, raise team morale, gets you incremental amounts of capital, and makes it so that you can keep going. Over time, to scale, you can figure out how to systematize these processes or they can end up bootstrapping bigger and more scalable ideas.

Small teams are great. They move faster, way faster. If you plan to do lots of product iterations, you don’t need to communicate all the changes and get buy-in from everyone. Conversely big teams have lots of chaos every time there’s a bit pivot. Build out the team afterwards to create the complete featureset, but until then, consumer product teams can just be a few engineers/designers and the product leader. That’s <6 people. As you can see this is quite brilliant and just what I wanted to read before we start Entermobile - a new platform for brand your own mobile games and apps.


Think of wordpress but for mobile games and customer engagement rather than for blogging and websites. It could be really rather cool for mobile marketing and the like. But already we are looking into the worry of the trough of sorrow.

Which if you think about it is very much like the Trough of Disillusionment which features in Gartners the Hype Cycle. Also worth a look or two.

Hmmm. Interesting. Perhaps both is best. Having a job and making a business.

According to the survey results from the recent EVG Research Survey, nearly half of their members and subscribers own a business in one form or another.

Let’s take a closer look at the survey results...from 5000 of their members.

• 25% make under $30,000 per year (USD)
• 21% make between $30,000 - $50,000 per year
• 34% make between $50,000 - $100,000 per year
• 18% make between $100,000 - $250,000 per year
• 2% make MORE than $250,000 per year

BUT...when you break it down to those who identified themselves as “employees” only, or employees who also run a part-time business, and those who run full-time businesses, there are some interesting trends:


As having at least a part-time business helps you easily move up an income bracket ... If you just want to boost your chance at making over $100K per year, hanging on to your job AND starting a part-time business appears to be the best bet.

BUT ... if you want to have a chance at making at least $250k per year or more, owning your own business more than quadruples your chance.

So having your own business is a good idea. But having a part time business as well as a job is a better idea. Hmmm. Interesting.

But are there businesses out there you can do part time, from your laptop, after your job from 9-5? Are their businesses you could run and make money from, from your mobile phone. The mind boogles.

You know when it's good - when you almost drop everything and go....

But before I explain what it is... that would get me to leave everything I know and love for 100 days - let me just say this:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the
work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Antoine de Saint Exupery

Now this comes from a blog by the very man who told me about the event.

An event which is sooooo wonderful I would have come on it if I could.

Luckily, for me time stopped me. Not a lack of time. But time itself. As the applications have past. But next year (if we have a next year) it is my goal to go on it.

“20 Mentors. 100 days. 1 ship. 14 countries. 10 ventures. 1 belief that entrepreneurship will change the world”.

Unreasonable at Sea is a mentor driven accelerator for tech entrepreneurs who desire to take their ventures into new international markets.

Instead of uniting entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial Hub of Boulder (as Unreasonable Institute does), they have partnered with Semester at Sea to launch an accelerator on a ship as it travels more than 25,000 nautical miles around the globe to 14 international destinations.

Over the course of the 100 day accelerator, the 10 companies they work with will have the chance to… explore the local economies of 14 countries where they will experiment in taking their technology to market and will bridge connections with top government officials, foundations, venture capitalists, and serial entrepreneurs.

Bring 2-3 core members of their founding team for the entirety of the program

Be mentored by 20 world-class serial entrepreneurs and innovators who will join us on the ship,

Be connected to and form relationships with top-tier globally centric venture capital funds and foundations.

And guess when the application process was over....

Last week!

Sometimes it would be better to not know than to know too late.

Or sometimes it is better to know people like Oli Barrett a little earlier in your life :)

By next year we will have launched our international marketplace for customizable mobile games - and this is what I will take with me :) (this is my new BHAG)

What I love about this idea - is that they have decided to leave Colorado and yet still manage to do some greatmarketing for it. Manchester take note!

Worth thinkg about after a training session with New Directions - 7 Ways to Disrupt your Chosen Industry

I just finished a rather lovely trainig half day with MMU and some fine students who wish to take a New Direction in life and maybe start their own businesses.

I was, of course, talking mainly about guerrilla marketing and the amazing changes that digital marketing and mobile marketing are bringing to the world.

I then read the below from Fast Company - and loved it so much - I had to pop it below. So there you go.

To all of your reading this blog from New Directions - congrats to you and good luck with the new year ahead.

Just remember... Massive disruption is coming, and the only question is whether your idea is going to cause it or fall victim to it. Disruption is not easy--either to create or to confront. We have no illusions about that.

But in the spirit of helping established firms best serve their customers, we offer seven ways your firm could disrupt its own industry, raising the standards of customer experience and creating new opportunities for growth:

1) Totally eliminate your industry’s persistent customer pain points.

Each industry has practices that drive customers crazy.

Technology providers drive customers crazy with technical support that often requires long waits on hold and hopelessly complex interactions (“Just find the serial number on the back of your device and type that into the space provided along with your IP address and the exact wording of the error message you encountered”).

Unsurprisingly, this is the exact type of practice that causes customers to believe a company is behaving stupidly.

What practices exist in your industry that drive customers crazy? How do all companies in your industry behave stupidly? Identify these types of practices, and wipe them out.

Think: can we turn our process or perspective around, to look through the customer’s eyes as though they were the company and we were the customers?

2) Dramatically reduce complexity.

As we write this in November 2011, a company we have been tracking for some time--Simple, formerly known as BankSimple--is trying to take a machete to the insanely complex and confusing world of consumer banking.

Recognizing that banks do a pretty good job of managing money but a poor job of managing customers, Simple has been designing vastly simpler customer interfaces and tools.

Simple plans to partner with, not compete against, established banks. They’ll manage the customers while their banking partners manage the money.

The more complex the processes and practices in your industry, the greater your opportunity to gain competitive advantage by simplifying them. Yes, doing so will be very hard. But that’s the whole point; the first firm to do so gains tremendous advantages.

3) Cut prices 90 percent (or more).

Incremental change doesn’t disrupt an industry; radical change does. Radical price reductions require radical new processes and business models. Smartphones and tablets create numerous opportunities to identify these. Recently we replaced a $500 marine navigation unit with a $20 iPad app that works better.

You don’t cut prices by 90 percent through marginal improvements in existing products. You do it by asking, “What problem are we trying to solve for the customer, and how do these disruptive forces create opportunities for us to solve it in a far more efficient manner?”

4) Make stupid objects smart.

We didn’t think this one up. The race is on to make everything smart, and the dumber your products were to begin with, the greater the opportunity to make them smart.

Think of a garbage dumpster that calls central dispatch when it is full, eliminating the need for the customer to do so or your office to send a driver out unnecessarily. That same dumpster could warn the customer when it is overweight, and point out that it would be cheaper to empty it now than to further overfill it.

No offense to dogs, but their collars could alert owners when the dog wanders away, barks excessively, or jumps on the furniture.

Light bulbs could flash before they burn out. Baseballs could announce how fast they were thrown. Plants could politely request water when they are too dry, or shout out when you try to overwater them.

Take every product you sell, and make it smart…or accept the fact that you must forever more compete on price and accept low margins.

5) Teach your company to talk.

Apple's Siri personal assistant on the iPhone allows you to have a conversation with your phone. Your iPhone can now access the Internet as well as the information it stores, both understanding and responding appropriately to your statements.

Flash-forward two to five years from now. What if your company could talk to customers? We don’t mean that your employees talk on behalf on the company. We mean that a digital, computerized persona speaks on behalf of your firm.

It takes orders. It provides support. It answers questions. It upsells. It issues refunds. All of this, and more, in response to verbal requests by customers.

The toughest part of this challenge is not technical, although a few problems still need to be solved.

The tough part is knocking down the walls that separate your databases and departments. It’s deciding whose product gets cross-sold, who gets “credit” for sales, and who “owns” the customer.

Our view is simple. No one owns the customer, and you either do what’s best for the customer or you will lose him. But the real question we want to put forward is this: what happens if your competitors’ companies talk, but yours doesn’t?

6) Be utterly transparent

Think: not just no secrets, but also no spin.

The concepts of social influence and pervasive memory will make it increasingly difficult for companies to hide from dissatisfied customers, negative reviews, and faulty products.

What if your company didn’t simply try to stop hiding, but instead radically embraced the truth? How might it impact your culture to decide that your firm would be the most powerful force in your industry making certain that every speck of the truth was obvious to every customer, analyst, and reviewer?

Would it change your reward systems? Would it impact employee motivation? Might it cause changes in the kind of employees you attract and retain?

We’re pretty opinionated in this regard. The truth is coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But most firms won’t recognize this until it happens. Better to get far out in front while confusion reigns.

7) Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.

According to Don Clark writing in his Wall Street Journal blog, Intel executive Mooly Eden once asked an audience how many had cellphones, and then how many were married.

Then, he asked if any of the married people would be willing to hand over their phone if their spouse lost his or hers. None would. “That is my point,” said Eden. “That is personalization.” By definition, when companies act smart they are personalizing the way they interact with and serve customers. Once you start delivering personalization, you create immense opportunities to make loyalty more convenient than disloyalty:

You can store customer preferences, and act on them.
You can save the customer time, money, or effort--especially by eliminating repetitive tasks.
You can provide auto-replenishment of needed supplies.
You can monitor products remotely, and service them before they break instead of afterwards.

Think about every major purchase decision your customers face in your industry. How can you make it easier for customers to remain with your firm? Now, think even bigger. Can it be five or ten times easier? Subtlety can be lost on today’s customers.

The challenge is to make loyalty so much more convenient, so radically easy, that customers won’t even consider switching to a competitor. Ever.

Something happened today. Nothing too major but got me thinking. About values and goals.

Something happened today. Nothing too major but got me thinking.

And so I decided to think and link today to this article about values and visions. 

Written by a chap called Richard - it's nothing about "greatmarketing" per se - but it is about great business.

No matter how big or small your business is without a clear vision of where you are going owners and directors often fall into the classic trap of just managing from day-to-day.

Envisioning, the ability to see into the future and imagine how things could be, is as important for success as having real passion for the business and the determination to create something new.

These three personal qualities of leaders are vital for successful companies and a vision statement, sometimes called “a picture of your company in the future”, but it’s so much more than that.  Your vision statement is your inspiration, the framework for all your strategic planning. A vision statement may apply to an entire company or to a single division within that company.

The vision statement answers the question, “Where do we want to go?”

What you are doing when creating a vision statement is articulating your dreams and hopes for your business. It reminds you of what you are trying to build. A vision statement is for you and the other members of your company, not just for your customers or clients.  Visionary goals should be longer term and more challenging than strategic goals.

Collins and Porras describe these lofty objectives as "Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals." These goals should be challenging enough so that people nearly gasp when they learn of them and realize the effort that will be required to reach them.

Most visionary goals fall into one of the following four categories:

1. Targeted - quantitative or qualitative goals such as Nike: "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world" “If you have a body, you are an athlete.”
2. Common enemy - focused on overtaking a specific firm, becoming the number one in that sector, such as Amazon: "Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."
3. Role model - to become like another in a different industry or market, the mirror role, Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) "Right from the beginning, I said I wanted to be more famous than Persil Automatic”.
4. Internal transformation – creating internal vision, GE set the goal of “Becoming number one or number two in every market it serves”

While visionary goals may require significant stretching to achieve, many visionary companies have succeeded in reaching them.

Once such a goal is achieved, it needs to be replaced; otherwise, it is unlikely that the organization will continue to be successful. The second most dangerous place for a company is to have achieved its only goal, the most dangerous place is never to have had one. Simple steps to creating your vision, ask some simple questions:

• What will our business look like in 3 to 5 years from now?
• What new things do we intend to pursue and how?
• What future customer needs do we want to satisfy?

Write the answers down and focus on developing them into a coherent, motivational and purposeful message which can connect with everyone. 

Then Question:

• Does our vision statement provide a powerful picture of what our business will look like in 3 to 5 years from now?
• Is your vision statement a picture of your company’s future, which everyone can interpret into their role?
• Does it clarify the business activities to pursue, the desired market position and capabilities you will need 

If your statement answers these questions then you have a vision worth owning and sharing. A vision must be motivational to everyone inside an organisation.  The classic apocryphal story to demonstrate the effectiveness of great visions is about the time President Kennedy visited NASA. During one trip he came across a cleaner sweeping the warehouse floor, and asked him what his job at NASA was. The cleaner replied “My Job is to put a man on the moon, Sir.”

Now I don’t know if the story is true, but it’s inspiring. In a facility full of high-powered individuals and great minds, even the cleaner was completely on board with the strategy. While you may not be planning to put a person on the moon, we can learn a lot from the story. It may sound ridiculous, but every business needs to be a little like NASA.    Great visions can create an unstoppable company

 Every organisation needs to have a clear goal, owned by everyone inside and outside it. An owned and shared vision creates and sustains great morale and internal strength for companies, which can become a powerful and unstoppable force in any market no matter how competitive.

What happened today with goAugmented -  a client which specialises in mobile augmented reality solutions -  was the opposite of that, the opposite of great marketing and a big mistake which we will learn from and move forward with.

With goAugmented we want to change the way the world of marketing is percieve and recieved in the NW and beyond. Just like Steve Jobs and Apple - we want to make a HUGE difference. (A link to a great article here)

We just want to do it with mobile augmeted reality - something both Apple and Steve Jobs know a lot about. Perhaps we should learn lessons from them as well :)

And perhaps even better timing for this - the Start up Project.