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Part of the magic of Silicon Valley is that people default to taking you seriously if you’re willing to be serious—they’ve learned it’s a very expensive mistake, in aggregate, not to. If you want to start a company working on a better way to build homes, gene editing, artificial general intelligence, a new education system, or carbon sequestration, you may actually be able to get it funded, even if you don’t have a degree or much experience.
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Rather than viewing one’s fans as a uniform group, the 100 True Fans model calls on creators to distinguish between various subsegments based on affinity and willingness to pay.
The relationship super-fans have with creators is different from regular fans: they become disciples, protégés, co-learners, and co-creators. As such, they require a whole new set of tools and platforms.
— Li Jin
An org that is truly scaling, however, is becoming more effective as it gets bigger.
The difference is purpose.
When you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, you make better choices about allocating resources and saying “yes” vs. saying “no”. Scaling enables you to stop doing one thing so you can start doing something new.
— Dominic Price
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/unlearn-five-fallacies-innovation
But perhaps the most important thing in this building is on Arison’s computer. It’s a document that lists everything he learned from his experience with Taxi Magic, which he’s now applying to Shift.
This might be the biggest Uber lesson of all, and one that Arison hasn’t yet internalized: If you want to build a transformative company, you have to reimagine an industry, or create a new one, not buff up an old one. That’s why Uber succeeded where Taxi Magic failed. It didn’t try to improve taxis; it replaced them.
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What used to cost $1M-$2M to set up, now costs $10K. What used to cost $5M to build, now costs $250K. What used to cost $20M to go to market now costs $1M.
But the upside hasn’t gone down. It has gone up. The 3 billionth person will be online shortly. They can all use the product. Network effects are stronger than ever, and some businesses become natural monopolies very quickly. Most web products have no marginal cost of replication, so adding a new customer is pure profit.
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When someone wants a yes, they don’t hear maybe as a no.
They hear it as “So what you’re telling me is that I have a chance?”
The attempt to get out of it by being less than direct only entangles you in it more.
— Ryan Holiday
http://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2016/03/dont-say-maybe-if-you-want-to-say-no/
In many ways, Getwear’s story was an attempt to revive a golem. Most people, whatever their social group or сlass, don’t see the need to design their own clothes. Getwear was doomed from day one.
We started listening to user feedback only when we were already up and running, and acting on it didn’t change much. What sense would adding color and fabric options make if people simply are not interested in purchasing custom jeans online?
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When you focus purely on how a feature is used, ignoring the “category” it’s in, or “type of feature” it is, you quickly learn how to improve it, and those improvements resonate immediately…
— Des Traynor
Focussing on outcome, rather than category, industry, or product type, lets you understand your real competitors. The second a company focuses on “the industry it’s in” rather than the “outcome it delivers“, it loses touch, and shortly after, loses customers.
— Des Traynor
https://medium.com/@intercom/are-you-making-things-people-want-d0219a79788c
And for founders, asking for a firm commitment from an acquirer on resources and timelines is key. While not always possible, the best way for a startup to become successful post-acquisition is to remain independent, he says.
— Tomio Geron
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/23/flickrs-acquisition-9-years-later/
Ultimately, Brazilian entrepreneurs will have to prove their worth by way of execution. That means forming strategies that fit the local market, and then implementing with excellence, efficiency, foresight, and a strong orientation to cash-flow.
— Roy Carthi
The executives had problem-solving, I was amazed, at something like seven or eight, and their number one was problem identification. It’s a big deal. This is what entrepreneurs do. Entrepreneurs find problems, they surface problems, and then come up with a solution to them.
— Dan Pink
Determined to turn this rejection into a learning experience, I probed Logan for details. He didn’t want to make his office manager split the snack budget just for some jerky.
I framed Sumo Jerky as a healthy & productivity enhancing office snack and he seemed much more excited.
Logan’s office never ended up becoming a customer, but his excitement would eventually help me sign up hundreds of customers.
Lesson: Always politely ask “why” when people reject your sales pitch.
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B2B Customers will actually pay for your products.
B2C is way harder to monetize unless you’re at massive scale because no one wants to pay.
When asked how much people would pay for Facebook, it’s a fraction of what Facebook actually makes from ad revenue. Consumers are price sensitive, so you often need other models that rely on some other element, like data, to make sufficient money off consumers.
In B2B you can just charge a price and the company will pay if the product is worth that much to them. Then, over time you can improve it and charge more. Also, it turns out that most everyone in B2B is charging too little.
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