How do you see your role in a startup?
I was thinking about the different roles people play at various stages of a startup and how they approach it, and I was reminded of this old story:
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Twitter, good business models and cash registers
I spend a lot of time helping companies find the right business model. One of the first questions we ask is, “How close is your core product to the cash register?”
What we mean by this is, “How far are you away from someone actually paying cash for something?” The general principle is, the closer you are, the stronger your business model. -
Often customers don’t want to be wowed – they want to be ‘not dissatisfied’
There isn’t just satisfaction and dissatisfaction, there’s non-satisfaction and non-dissatisfaction too. It’s important to know the difference. I did some research once on bank customers and found out that they weren’t hoping for satisfaction, just no dissatisfaction. And it really made me think.
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How to launch a lean event at short notice
A couple of weeks ago, regular Anthill contributor Mick Liubinskas heard that lean startup luminary Eric Ries would be in Sydney, He and a few friends sprang into action to organise a Lean Startup event for Sydney’s digital startup community in Sydney. Here’s Liubinskas’s account of how it came together.
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Implementing ideas: Instinct vs Testing
Entrepreneurs like to fly by the seat of their pants, implementing ideas almost as quickly as they occur. However, successful companies know the critical importance of adding a sturdy layer of testing to the product development process. Pollenizer’s Mick Liubinskas explains.
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Make sure you’re never too busy to read
Whether it’s audio books, eBook readers or actual real books (with paper, for Gen Ys reading this), books are still one of the best ways to really learn something new. The increasing trend towards shorter, smaller, briefer, 140 characters is great to a sense of what’s going on, but it’s insufficient to actually change the way you think.
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How hard is it to get a new user?
If you developing a product or service that’s designed to meet a consumer’s need, here’s the reason why you can’t just be better than what currently exists. Or you can’t just be really useful. You have to be insanely, grossly, massively, obviously, simply and wonderfully useful.
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Five similarities between forming habits and deep customer development
I spend a lot of time thinking about new companies finding, nurturing and winning over their first lot of customers and I’ve realised that there are a lot of similarities with forming habits. Here are five…
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Vision and Focus, the Capulet and Montague of business strategy
Some quick thoughts on one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur (or intrapreneur) — holding both a big vision and a brutal focus in your mind at the same time. They sound like contradictions and in many ways they are the endlessly feuding families of a new venture. You need to make them happy neighbours though.
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It takes 100 cups of coffee to refine your start-up pitch
I often joke that it takes 100 cups of coffee to get a new start-up funded. Not because the investor is one out of 100 but because it takes a long time to get the story polished.
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The market-building dilemma
Having a strong market-based business is great. You are a power broker and can often profit from both sides. But how do you get over the chicken and egg problem?
From my experience working with more than 12 market-based businesses, there are two things you need to do.
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Me, ‘tall poppy’? Thanks!
Forget about Australia’s ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’. What we really need is a ‘Small Poppy Syndrome’.
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Wasted Opportunity With ‘Don’t Reply’
Take every chance to hear from your customers. Don’t waste a single one. If they bother to hit reply and type something out, you should read it. If you’re product or service doesn’t have the margin to allow for listening to your customers when they want to talk to you, then you’re in trouble.
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It’s the right time to start a new business
Published in Australian Anthill Magazine, Dec 2008/Jan 2009 Economic downturn? What an opportunity! Mick Liubinskas explores the upside of the downturn for serious start-up entrepreneurs. I met with a guy recently who started his business in the late nineties, built it up, got slapped in 2001 by the market, held on, kept building it up,…
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