A must read. A great list of immensely successful companies that Bessemer passed up on for 'obvious' reasons.
Link: Bessemer Venture Partners - Our Portfolio.
Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.
I missed this from Debi earlier in the month. I totally agree with what she says. Actually, she and I have had some great discussions around this topic of mobile myopia among the Internet leaders.
Yes, Debi, there is a need for mobile-savvy folks to start permeating all these Internet companies. In any case, it's a business opportunity for mobile folks to leave traditional telecom companies and get involved with companies in different areas.
Link: The Supernova Mobile Apps Panel - Wasn't | 8/8/2005 | mobile jones.
The only person on the panel to reference mobile audiences and the mobile life style was AJ Kim. This is an ongoing problem that is perceived in the view of Silicon Valley companies and not incorporating a mobile perspective in their product planning, and initially even in their language. This panel demonstrates the absence of comfort and ultimately understanding that these seminal user created content and social communication tools vendors have for mobile prosumers and their needs.
In the spirit of openness, I'll give away my list of potential targets.
Companies who could use an infusion of mobility
- Six Apart - TypePad
- Yahoo! - Flickr, Search, Yahoo!mail
- Google - GMail, Search, Dodgeball
- Apple - iTunes, iPhoto, .mac
- AskJeeves - Bloglines
- 37signals - Basecamp, Backpack
- Kodak
- smaller companies - del.icio.us
And since this is a community, I have a list of people I know who get mobile and whom I'd call on to execute stuff with the companies listed above. I'll keep that list to myself - to protect the innocent.
Laura Ramsey brings up a very interesting point regarding marketing of Open Source products (projects, things, stuff). The funny thing for me while reading (and re-reading) the post is that I kept thinking, not of 'Open Source' marketing, as in the marketing of Open Source products, but as on Open Source Marketing', as in marketing in an Open Source way.
I think the answer to her question lies in my initial understanding of what she was saying - the marketing of Open Source has to come from the community in an Open Source way. Everyone feels passionate of the Open Source project they are working on and of the products they use that come out of the Open Source community. Why can't some of the evangelist-inclined folks in the Open Source community run their marketing (or whatever you want to call it) like any Open Source project? The enthusiasm is from within, and the knowledge, too.
In a way, that was where I was going with my marketing with Lifeblog - I was trying to get others to own the marketing of the product, on their terms, and also to find others who would act as multipliers and do the same for me. Isn't this how Open Source works? Organically grows from unguided, collective interaction in the community to create a self-organized, complex, organism with a life and direction of its own?
Sure, I greased my efforts with some money and gadgets, but it wasn't all that necessary, it just sped things up, facilitated us getting off the ground. And, even with me gone, it's still happening on its own!
So, my answer to where are all the Open Source marketers is: they are sitting right next to you. Use the tools you know and love to conquer marketing on your own terms.
Link by way of Kathy Sierra: Laura's Box of Chocolates.
Neo-marketing, indeed. Kathy Sierra's post and ensuing discussion point out a lot of issues I have been grappling with in the past 5 years since I was anointed Marketing Manager.
You see, prior to that, I was a writer and just before that a molecular biologist. Yes, quite odd.
Nonetheless, I have been able to kick some serious butt, getting folks excited about the products I was marketing, succeeding in spreading good will and positive energy, and in avoiding the regular pitfalls of standard Marcoms.
Why is that? I had no training in marketing principles or techniques. I had no clue on how to create a PowerPoint presentation or what Value Proposition meant. I never did a SWOT analysis or written up some USPs. Basically, I was less trained than a trainee. How did I do it?
Common sense. Honesty. Kindness. Trust. And a gut feeling as to how people really want to participate in the creation of a brand, the creation of a community around a product, in how they wanted to be respected for their opinions and not force-fed some rose-colored product-promise krap.
Sure, along the way I read some books and listened to some bright folks. But most of these just reinforced my beliefs into what makes good marketing PR outreach cheerleading evangelism oh, you know what I mean, What I Did.
In the end, I was doing a concoction of public relations, media relations, consumer outreach, strategic and collaborative business development, clever sponsoring of companies and events, and participating in the give and take of the community conversation (and all with way less money than the rest of the company). When I look back and see how these functions are so deeply separated in most companies, I can see why Marketing, Comms, and PR get a bum rap. It's a half-assed, non-integrated, incomplete interaction with customers.
Enough of me. Go read the post and discussions.
Link, by way of our Chris Bouret: Creating Passionate Users: You ARE a marketer. Deal with it..
But the difference between what we now consider "old-school marketing" (otherwise known as The Four P's -- product, price, promotion, and placement -- heavy on advertising and "branding") and the "neo-marketing" we're doing here is frickin' huge.
And don't miss the rest of the blog - three braniacs write it and have some great posts on other topics.
I changed my personal email address a while back to reset the spam counter to zero. I don't use my personal email address much and I managed to last a while, protecting my address from spam for about a year. Slowly the spam started appearing. It's really not much - a few a day - but I don't get much proper email, so relatively, it was a lot.
But, the main thing for me was that I heavily access my account with my phone. The spam headers were annoying to manage, since the email client on the phone has no spam filter. The only solution was either to pay my email provider for a spam filter or find some other free way of having a spam filter.
Well, I finally set up a Gmail account - forwarding my email to it, setting my reply address properly, and setting up the POP access from the phone. Yup, it all came together quite well, even better than before. I have spam filtering and my sent messages show up in my Gmail sent folder. Also, I can use my PC client to also access Gmail the same way.
The sad thing is that I had to go to a separate service provider to have all this done. If my email provider (in Finland, no less) had a clue, they would make spam filters free and make a more mobile-friendly email service.
Hmm, seems like practically everyone can use some help in making their services mobile-friendly. And of course, when I mean 'mobile-friendly' I mean integrated into the mobile lifestyle.
Mobile lifestyle - sounds lame, so feel free to suggest another term for me to use. ;-)
One of the perks of working with a huge company is that there is no shortage of analyst reports and presentations you can peruse. I was going through a whole bunch of reports today and read closely two of them.
One was a presentation that was typical of analysts - fancy forecasts in a market segment we already know a lot about and nothing new was revealed (and for sure the numbers, winners, and forecasts changed quarterly). This was basic research, interviewing users and estimating trends. Yes, analysts are good at this, but you can forget about ever becoming smarter as a result of reading such reports. I ended up calling it '20/20 hindsight into the future'.
The second report was a similar data analysis type of report, but the questions they were asking were much more clever. Therefore, the value of the trends were much greater, since it pointed out things in ways we normally don't think of. Nonetheless, it was a trend report, a report on existing trends. More 20/20 hindsight, only with better guidance.
The second report was from: M:Metrics. I link to them here, since I poked around their website and was intrigued (they were new to me).
But, here's my thought for the day. What if analysts backed away from the research a bit and used their big brains to guide innovation? What if they could figure out what could not be asked, what could not be measured, but what could use a bit of attention.
Isn't that the best use of data? I have done this my whole career (I should say, my three careers) - measure and observe and analyze, and then kick butt with insights and innovations the data missed or suggested somehow. Data analysis is about now with a future predicated on now. Innovation is about tomorrow and a future predicated on tomorrow. You need to be able to go beyond the data of now to innovate in the future. I have never found analysts, with all their clever reports or presentations, to help me there.
Do you have what it takes to build a mobile app? Yes or no, you should read what these guys have to say.
Link: InterCasting Corp: Inferior Bathroom Technology and UI In The Mobile Space.
Rabble has been in development for a year. Sounds like a long time for a blogging and social networking app, doesn’t it? How about cramming that app into a 200k payload, working around caching limitations which are all different across hundreds of supported handsets, overcoming network latency issues unheard of on the web and doing it all in a presentation environment that requires creative solutions to the problems that are among the easiest to solve on the web? Now do it with 1.5 inches or less of screen real estate in a way that is logical and useful for the consumer. The coding was done in a few months. It’s everything else that goes into bringing a product to market that takes time. This is the kind of time I wish the automatic bathroom flushing people would have spent.
[...]
Here are my five criteria for useful mobile applications. (All of our planned mobile applications must have at least four, but maybe you don’t think they are all that important for what you are doing. Time will tell.)
Successful mobile applications:
1) Are not just mobile relevant, but mobility relevant
2) Are personal or offer some form of personalization
3) Leverage the network effect of mobile connected devices
4) Originate in the mobile space
5) Utilize and extend the upstream capabilities of the mobile device (this could be as simple as texting and passive location or as involved as massively multi-user networked games.)
A few comments about the list:
1) Yes. 'Mobility relevant' in my mind is 'relevant to the user's mobile lifestyle'.
2) Yes. The mobile is personal*, great mobile services are personal.
3) Hmm. This I think is a challenge in some forms, but now is a must to succeed - it's all about communication in the end. The best services currently are about communication: voice and SMS. And I think there's a lot that can still be built upon those two pillars of communication. Rabble is an example of a service that turns the phone's camera into a mobile communication tool. I'd be curious to know how much Rabble uses other channels of communication available to the phone.
4) Hmm. I am partial to a mix of mobile and PC originated activities. I think some services have failed because they pushed the mobile-origination without complementing it in other ways. So, 'mobile-originated', yes, but in moderation. ;-)
5) Hmm. not too sure what you mean here, but I get a feeling that it ties into the network effect in item 3. If so, yes, the phone has some pretty nifty ways of supporting the flow of information in a service.
Great stuff.
*personal services - some folks here say 'intimate' services, which clashes when they mention 'sticky' services. i'll stick with personal.
Spot on. This is what you get when someone understands the mobile lifestyle. you need to live it to understand what it means and how to build for it.
Debi gets it. Do you?
Link: More on thought and jargon | 8/25/2005 | mobile jones.
New language to shape new thought
* Publish to web address and read everywhere versus location matters allot.
* Browser is the UI versus fragmented UI by device, activity or service.
* Information browsing versus information precision.
* Time measured as number of minutes on a single site versus minutes or seconds spent on all locations.
* All data lives on and is shared from the web versus data lives on and is shared across all devices.
The list above is a high level beginning. Just as many bloggers
are convinced that one must engage in blogging to comprehend a blogger
perspective, immersive experience as a mobile user and with mobile
experts would open new avenues of language and thought when considering
development of mobile services.
Without a marketing background, I understood this instinctively.
Link: gapingvoid: we want to be part of something.
Like I said, it's all about Outreach. It's about wanting to be part of something interesting, something larger than the actual product.
If I had had more time with Lifeblog, I just might have been able to have a case study to convince the mass marketeers in the rest of my company the value of participatory, conversational, personal outreach. In any case, it is amazing how far we got with what little we did (and spent). I even managed to get the flywheel going so that the conversation could keep going for many more months (still is!) after I was bumped and the Lifeblog team stopped talking.
Some more commentary on the Google WebOS.
Link: Om Malik’s Broadband Blog � Google, the ultimate deflator.
It’s not too difficult for me to imagine a day, very soon, when I rely on Google for almost all my computing needs and I buy hardware devices based on such criteria. That’s the day Google will have become my operating system.
Hesburger is a local fast-food chain. Last time I stopped in to pick up some fries they were advertising their mobile phone service. Not content being an MVNO, they now seem to be offering Wireless Internet.
Go figure.
Will mobile phone and wireless Net service end up being as ubiquitous as water and bathrooms at restaurants? How small will MVNOs get? Restaurant chains? Stores? Universities? Clubs? Families?
Can you tell I've been home today reading, writing, and thinking?
I need a new gig!
They've just started me on some biz opportunity research (can't tell you the domain, it's hush-hush). Biz opportunity research is what you do in a venture organization when you're between ventures, and it's not bad if you're at that stage. But, since I've been doing it on my own all summer, I'm ready to act.
Sigh.
Link: MobHappy: Top 10 Business Uses of SMS -- How Dull.
Okay, it's great that companies are adopting SMS, but is anybody doing anything interesting? The vast majority of these are simply voice call or e-mail substitutes.
Yes, all these services (actually, since they are so identical, I really only see one service) are dull because they are all passive - no real communication involved. Just this week I've said numerous times that we should challenge ourselves to create SMS-focused services, or at least services that take advantage of SMS as a quick, cheap, ubiquitous, and easy communications channel. I've been using a ton in the past five years and the few that converted to browser-based have become worse in many ways.
After voice, SMS is still the most used service on mobile networks. Additionally, folks understand it. I've seen a few new SMS-based services (can you say Dodgeball?) and I myself have a few in my head that I'd love to specify some day when I have the time.
Wake up guys! Forget fancy software platforms like Java or Symbian. Go for Simple - create compelling SMS services!
Yes! Yes! Yes! (and I've cut out my own similar preaching)
Link: BuzzMachine � Blog Archive � Who wants to own content?.
But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.
via Roland
One thing: it's not so much that content has no value, but that the value of content is to spur conversation. When Nokia was about to come out with the N-gage, a friend of mine and I were in the middle of some research into games, music, and books and banging our heads trying to figure a way Nokia could kick butt in these areas. We knew the N-gage was coming and wondered if, instead of just duplicating the current top-down publishing and distribution model of the gaming industry, what would happen if Nokia flipped the 'normal' games publishing model and gave the games away free. What we didn't really figure out was how Nokia would then make money other than device sales.
Now I know - make money from and with the community built around the games. They could have built top-quality games (call it a marketing expense), distribute them to the community, and make money off of community services (or even with the community). We all know that's not what Nokia ended up doing. Oh, well, nobody asked us for our suggestions. Nonetheless, since then, I've advocated giving content away and finding the revenue elsewhere.
Feedster gets it. Do you?
Link: Feeding Feedster with Scott Rafer: Feedster 500 Mobilized.
Feedster's pals and partners over at Wireless Ink have been busy. This morning they put out a completely mobile version of the Feedster Top 500, simultaneously mobilizing all 500 underlying blogs.
via MoMo SFO Mike
I've been meaning to write a review on WINKsite. I had a great conversation with David Harper a while back that I want to share. He so gets the mobile lifestyle.
In the mean time, go check out WINKsite.
Link: Roland Tanglao's Weblog: Portable Print Party - Crazy Flickr Idea #88.
I am sure this idea which was inspired by Kris winning a HP 375 mobile photo printer at the OSCON HP Photo contest is not new (I am sure Gail has thought of it for sure since she has one of these cool mobile photo printers) but I'll throw it out there for what it's worth:
* Announce the party. It costs $5/person to be part of the party (for paper and printer ink).
* 1st five to sign up are the "shooters for the party". The rest get to party but not to shoot.
* 1st five take photos for half an hour somewhere and then meet back at a WiFi cafe with power.
* The next half hour the fab five pick their top 5 photos from the half hour shot.
* Then somebody with a laptop downloads the 25 top photos from the fab five.
* Finally the whole party including the fab five pick the top five photos on this laptop.
* Then you print out 1 of each of the top five photos for everybody at the party.
* Much hilarity and fun follows :-) !
Excellent idea! A few too many 'rules' for my liking, and a bit too techy, but the heart is in the right place. If it were up to me, everyone would be taking photos and printing them the whole night through (or maybe first posting over the air to a website). Then, at the end, select the best, print, and distribute. But, then again, I am used to doing this with a BT printer and a mobile phone. ;-) Indeed, we (Nokia party-freak phone-geeks) are already doing this kind of stuff at our events.
On a related note: I remember reading somewhere (maybe Mimi Ito's stuff) that jointly going over the evening's photos (captured on mobile phones) is starting to become a part of people's evening habits. Roland's idea here is certainly a fun twist to that new behaviour.
Now I can't wait to go to a party as fun as this. :-D
Link: Joho the Blog: Knowledge as conversation.
Knowledge is not the body of beliefs that needs no further discussion. Knowledge is the neverending conversation. And much of that conversation is precisely about what we can disagree about and still share a world.
And it is the conversation about knowledge that brings people together,
not just reading about knowledge in books, but talking about it. And
not just knowledge, anything can be a spark for conversation without
having to be some nugget of info, such as a photo, a Pokemon card, a TV
show, a new gadget.
I have a funny feeling that pre-historic people sat around the fire chatting all
excited about the latest flint chipping technique or bone tool, just
like we do today with all the gadget websites. The specifics might have
changed, but the urge to chat and exchange thoughts about something has
not.
Podcasting over the air to your mobile?
I'm not so sure. I was playing around with various version of getting recording onto my phone and wasn't too keen many aspects of it, especially on the long download times and the huge file sizes. It's not so much the price of the download, but the experience isn't so hot if a few podcasts fill up your MMC or if it takes 15 minutes to download something good.
It's really about the user experience. The tech is all there.
I do know some ways around this, though.
Link: Russell Beattie Notebook � Pod2Mob: MobCasting Right Now!.
The other day when I wrote about Melodeo’s new service, I didn’t realize that Pod2Mob had already been launched. Silly me… a press release that says some company is first and I believed it. Doh! Not only has it been launched, it’s actually available to try right now this second at Pod2Mob.com/mobile, no specific carrier needed. I love direct to consumer mobile services!
Link: Internet growth is slowing down--until mobile gets moving.
The next big growth spurt should come when the mobile Internet finally gets into gear. Mobility will change not only the numbers, but also the very nature of the Internet--and blogging.
And I'm bursting with energy.
A little snippet in a great long article. Read it and learn. This is the future.
Link: ongoing � Web 2.0 or Not?.
Bernard Goldbach at IrishEyes points to Brian Fling’s 10 Reasons to Publish to Mobile, and let me reveal my own big hunch about the future: if there really is a Web, The Next Generation, it’ll be the Web of mobile devices, with not many “computers” in the loop.
[...]
And then there’s the Mobile Web, or whatever you call it when people use the technology without using a “computer”. The numbers of potentially-capable devices are just mind-boggling, you’re probably seeing a year’s worth of blog/feed growth every couple of days. Right now it’s ringtones and SMS, but at some point the garden walls will come down, and when a lot of those phones want in, that’s going to need a name way more grandiose than “Web 2.0”.
Fusion of PC, Web, and mobile. Let's see how it turns out.
Link: Darla Mack: Nokia 20 Lives Kicks Off on September 19.
Nokia 20Lives uses video and animated images on the Internet, as well as SMS, email and voice messages to share information with the players.
When shrinking the interaction shrinks the thinking.
Link: Blackbeltjones/Work.
As a non-Blackberry/push email user I have a morbid fascination with what their usage does to people and projects. Has the organisational atom of thought in corporations shrunk from a Powerpoint bullet to Berrybite?
With any product, the brand promise is crucial for longevity. The brand is the personality, the story, the aspirations of the product. Watching the way the Republicans have decimated the American brand in the past 10 years, I've been wondering when someone would notice the decline of America in terms of its perceived brand.
I've always said that a company is no better than the integrity and values the CEO spreads to the rest of the company - witness the difference between Microsoft and Apple, both with hothead leaders, but only one with a strong sense of values. The same applies to the US - the CEO and his cronies are spreading hollow values and a poor attitude that is infecting everything in America. And the rest of the world feels it.
Enough about my thoughts. Here's a great article about Brand America.
Link: brandchannel.com | American Brand Globally | Brand America | brands | brand | branding.
The tale of how Brand America was built is a truly heroic one. And it must be said that this is a brand that has been managed, for the most part, with honor and integrity, or at least with the best intentions, as well as skill, inventiveness, vigor, consistency and passion, for a quarter of a millennium.
All the more pity, then, that the last few years have seen such a decline in the passion, consistency, vigor, inventiveness, skill, integrity and honor with which it has been managed. From the dismantling of the United States Information Agency to the recent failure of the "Shared Values" public diplomacy initiative, America simply seems to have lost its extraordinary talent for enlightened and effective self-promotion.
[...]
America needs to rediscover its brand instinct, and live by the principles that most American companies never forgot: clarity and firmness of purpose and of message; sensitivity to the needs of different audiences around the world; a simple and attractive positioning; transparent and ethical behavior in the organization as well as in the products; coordination between the stakeholders.
I've been walking around for some time with a snippet of insight from Kottke regarding the WebOS idea. It so dovetails with my 'fusion of mobile, PC, and Web', though I am sure nobody is actually thinking of the mobile part (oh, I am! I am! <waving hand in air>).
Now, the new Google desktop tool has prompted Kottke to come up with a more full-fledged overview of what he sees, rightfully, as the WebOS. My only disagreement is that I do not think he needs to label this Web 3.0. It think it's fully in Web 2.0 space.
Link: GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? (kottke.org).
Compared to "standalone" Web apps and desktop apps, applications developed for this hypothetical platform have some powerful advantages. Because they run in a Web browser, these applications are cross platform (assuming that whoever develops such a system develops the local Web server part of it for Windows, OS X, Linux, your mobile phone, etc.), just like Web apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, and Salesforce.com. You don't need to be on a specific machine with a specific OS...you just need a browser local Web server to access your favorite data and apps.
Yes, once day you won't care where your stuff is, so long as you can find it. I can see load of applications that can benefit from this model. Break free from the silos of PC, mobile, and Web. Fuse it all together and build those great interfaces. That's where it's all going. That's what it's all going to be about.
Just listened to the podcast (1h30m, 42MB) of this event. Great stuff, of course. Guy was the moderator.
Link: Churchill Club - Event Detail - Building a Successful Startup: The CEO View.
Building a Successful Startup: The CEO View Audio
Speakers: William Chen, Founder and CEO, Accelergy Dirk Gates, Founder and CEO, Xirrus, Inc. Prescott Lee, CEO, FilmLoop; Founder, eCircles Martin Roscheisen, CEO, NanoSolar, (and special surprise guest).
Moderator: Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director and Chairman, Garage Technology Ventures
Have you ever read any of Guy Kawasiki's books? I've read and re-read many of them. He's just amazing and I adore his irreverence (do you see a pattern in the kinds of writers I like?). He's been quite influential in my attitude towards business.
This is the last one I read: Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start.
When you get pregnant, you read What to Expect When You're Expecting. When you get laid off, you read What Color is Your Parachute?. When you get entrepreneurial, you read The Art of the Start.
This book is a weapon of mass construction. My goal was to provide the definitive guide for anyone starting anything. It builds upon my experience as an evangelist, entrepreneur, and most recently, as a venture capitalist who found, fixed, and funded startups.
The book is as relevant for two guys in a garage starting the next Google as social activists trying to save the world. GIST: cuts through the theoretical crap, theories and gets down to the real-world tactics of pitching, positioning, branding, recruiting, bootstrapping, and rainmaking.
Like all his books, The Art of the Start entertained and enlightened me.
I especially laughed at the end when he said he wanted to see the book in folks' hands, annotated, underlined, and dog eared. His previous books have been mangled by me as I keep going back to them.
It was interesting to see what I dog-eared in this last book (for various reasons, I didn't scribble stuff in it). Only two of my dog-eared pages are not in the Proliferation section. And most of them are in the branding chapter.
True, at the time (last winter), my venture (Lifeblog) was past many of the stages in the first parts of the book, which I read anyway as a refresher. But, the pattern of dog-earing also showed where my concern was largest - marketing and branding - how to get the product into as many hands as possible.
Indeed, Guy's slant on marketing and selling have been my biggest draw to his books. The books have inspired me to be a bit bolder than the average Nokia marketing person, and I have benefited from that.
For example, in this last venture, my boss came to me one day and said I needed a little more Wasabi in the marketing. He liked what I was doing, but wanted me to take things up a notch. That was great! For the rest of the time I was in the venture, I had three guiding principles:
- Put more Wasabi into it.
- It is easier to be forgiven than to get permission.
- Push the boundaries of what you do until they fire you.
And here are some notes I made while reading The Art of the Start:
- For partnerships, find an internal champion who can keep the partnership alive, don't use a committee. <<< Very crucial in any endeavor.
- Learn the art of schmoozing: circulate, ask good questions and listen, follow up, make it easy to get in touch, be passionate, read voraciously, give favours, return favours, ask for favours in return. <<< It's a give and take.
- Branding: simplify simplify simplify the product. <<< Yes.
- Recruit evangelists:ask, look for believers, let bloom,assign tasks and expect them to get done, nurture and support, give them tools <<< That's why I had an outreach program.
- Make sure everyone can talk the walk. <<< Every employee represents your company.
- Some fun advice on marketing shirts: Not white, little text, large fonts, make it cool, and consider kids' sizes. <<< True Kawasaki Wisdom
- Seminars for lead generation. <<< This ties back, somewhat, to the Marketing Sucks recommendations.
Thanks Guy. Keep them coming.
Have you ever read anything by Tom Peters?
I've only read his more recent stuff, starting with re-imagine.
Link: Tom Peters Company | wow!store | re-imagine.
Re-imagine! By Tom Peters
More than just a how-to book for the 21st Century, Re-imagine! is a call to arms—a passionate wake-up call for the business world, educators, and society as a whole.
I find him to be totally outrageous and I tend to subscribe to practically all his ideas. You need to read him.
I found a few notes I wrote about him:
- Say it in 8 words, otherwise it's too complicated. <<< A struggle for me. :-D
- You need to have that dream. <<< Yes!!!
- Be a great storyteller. <<< Yes!!!
- The power is with the one who sets the agenda (obvious) and the one who writes the minutes (crafts the memory, controls the spin, and knows what's going on). Volunteer to do it! <<< I found this one most enlightening, since everyone tried to avoid doing these things. But after he said it, I realized what kind of power can be wielded. Thank goodness the ones who have taken the notes so far don't realize this.
Here are also some bite-sized Tom pieces (relatively speaking) over at ChangeThis (which I also recommend as an eye-opener).
I read this last fall and happened to find today some notes I took on it.
Link: Crown | Your Marketing Sucks..
Your Marketing Sucks. Written by Mark Stevens
It's written in a refreshing no-nonsense way, quite like the title suggests. I like it, since it supported many of the things I believed regarding marketing - I was non-traditional from the start.
Here are some of my notes on 'Your marketing sucks'
- Making the sale is the only acceptable return on investment. << Obvious, but always overlooked. I kept reminding the R&D guys that sales was the end, not just the delivery of the product. I told them that they needed to ask themselves daily what they did to increase sales.
- Use many communications channels: PR, advertising, website, email lists, referrals.
-A thought I had: Become expert in something that is related to your product, which leads to talking gigs at events and using your product as an example. It's about educating versus sellling. <<< Get your own blog!
- Sales people sell, non-sales people-types will never be turned into sales people - save money and pair up or get them to 'educate' rather than sell. <<< So true.
- Create demand. Command attention. Build brand. Drive consumer behaviour. Change purchase patterns. Gobble up market share. Increase revenues and profitability. <<< Oh, yeah. So simple.
- Dreamlike scenarios - the impossible, the implausible, the phantasmagoric. <<< I don't remember what this was about.
- Link activites, repeatedly hit message. <<< And again, and again.
Another from Om.
Link: Om Malik’s Broadband Blog � 37 Signals - Anywhere But Here.
Jason and his virtual bandmates are spread all over the country/world, and make a comfortable living from their efforts such as Ta-Da List and Basecamp. 37 Signals should have part of my story, but somehow I missed them. Shame on me!
They are a prototypical next-gen start-up, that shuns venture capital, has realistic expectations of itself, and is highly distributed. Jason says they are comfortable in the knowledge that they are not going to be the next Google. This self awareness has to be part of any start-ups DNA. There are many entrepreneurs who are “do-it-themselves” who often tell me that they are immensely worried about the unrealistic expectations placed on them by VC investments. You won’t find them in Silicon Valley, where these days features are posing as companies. They can only wish to get the fierce loyalty 37 Signals enjoys from its customers.
Two threads here get me thinking and are close to my philosophy.
1) Virtual company. I'm in a uncomfortable fix because I want something that is
geographically-challenged (not where I want it to be) and therefore
have to find other geographically-challenged opportunities where I want
to be (not where the action is). Something tells me that I won't get a really cool job in one
state and live in another. Sigh.
2) Why the rush to grow? Call me näive, but why can't we just be happy with getting what we need? When I worked for myself, I had many opportunities to expand. But, I chose to just work for myself because the gettin' was good and that's what I needed. And still need. Kudos to 37 Signals.
But, here's the rub (as I repeat myself, for sure): we're in a hyper-linked society - broadband, Skype, mobiles, jet travel, blogs, social stuff. The only reason to work in a specfic location is to be closer to the client or to the others in the office. If your main clients are not where your office is, there is no reason for you to be fixed there. If you don't need 24/7, or maybe just 8/5, contact with the rest of the company, then you don't need to be there physically. I am the first to admit that face time is invaluable and spontaneous face time is amazingly crucial to any business, but there is no reason a person can't just come and go on a semi-regular basis, you know, to touch base. Heck, I was on the road or out of the office at least 50% of the time anyway. Why couldn't I just live somewhere else and come in every so often?
I think folks who worked for themselves are more likely to ask for this than regular office workers. Indeed, I usually get strange 'yeah, right' looks when I choose to work from home. Damn, I'm rated on what I deliver not on the punch-clock.
Yes, this is a serious topic for me - serious and soon to change my whole family life.
Oh, and Jason from 37 Signals has, unlike many I have been speaking to lately for advice, moved away from Silicon Valley. The only one I have found so far.
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