Do Things that Don't Scale July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. Recruit The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe. There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. You'll be doing different things when you're acquiring users a thousand at a time, and growth has to slow down eventually. Airbnb is a classic example of this technique. Fragile Delight Experience
Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage If you believe Thomas Kuhn’s theory outlined in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, then the pace of change happens slowly at first and then all at once. Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage, an out-of-print book from 1984 takes a timeless look at this theory and applies it to innovation. This is the Innovator’s Dilemma long before the innovator’s dilemma. The perspective of Richard Foster, the book’s author, is that there is a battle going on in the marketplace between innovators (or attackers) and defenders (who want to maintain their existing advantage). Some companies have more good years than bad years. It is about the inexorable and yet stealthy challenge of new technology and the economics of sub situation which force companies to behave like the mythical phoenix, a bird that periodically crashed to earth in order to rejuvenate itself. The book isn’t about improving process but rather changing your mindset. Henry Ford understood this mindset. The S-Curve Understanding Limits
pinterest Pinterest Today Watch Shop Explore When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. Design Save From 2.bp.blogspot.com Sales And Marketing Brand resonance Pyramid for Tropicana Shantanu Sengupta 244 followers More information Brand resonance Pyramid for Tropicana Sales And Marketing Marketing Tips Bottle Logo Brand Architecture Conflict Management Brand Management Brand Building Brand Strategy Business Branding Comments Online CV Builder and Professional Resume CV Maker Book Review - What Technology Wants - By Kevin Kelly In “What Technology Wants,” Kelly provides an engaging journey through the history of “the technium,” a term he uses to describe the “global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us,” extending “beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions and intellectual creations of all types.” We learn, for instance, that our hunter-gatherer ancestors, despite their technological limitations, may have worked as little as three to four hours a day. Since then, the technium has grown exponentially: while colonial American households boasted fewer than 100 objects, Kelly’s own home contains, by his reckoning, more than 10,000. As Kelly is a gadget-phile by trade (and an affluent American to boot), this index probably inflates the current predominance of technology and its products, but a thoroughly mundane statistic makes the same point: a typical supermarket now offers more than 48,000 different items. So far, so good.
ADFX Awards | WaterWipes: How showing ineffectiveness proved to be dramatically effective Introduction & Background The story of WaterWipes demonstrates the effectiveness of advertising in its purest form – i.e. take a great product, bring it to the masses in the right way and watch demand become so great that you have to build a brand new factory just to keep up with it! To fully appreciate the story of the brand, we need to first briefly tell the story of the man behind it – Louth native Edward McCloskey. Edward’s father set up the Boyne Valley group, so Edward grew up in a culture that encouraged entrepreneurial spirit. From early on in his career, he constantly strived to develop new products and new solutions for problems that, in most cases, had gone unrecognised by others. The quest that led to WaterWipes was no different. In 2015, having been in multiples for four years but only showing modest growth, the decision was taken to advertise WaterWipes for the first time. Marketing Objectives Commercial Objectives: Marketing objectives: The Role for communications: The Task
Zero to One summary The advice come from “Zero to One” book. This article is a short summary of it. The first team Thiel built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of his former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. They sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then: Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla MotorsReid Hoffman co-founded LinkedInSteve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTubeJeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded YelpDavid Sacks co-founded Yammerand Thiel himself co-founded Palantir Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each. Contents The challenge of the FutureOn “lean startup” dogmasCompetition is for losersBusiness vs startupBuilding a monopolyFoundationsRecruitingSales7 questions every startup should answerCompanies are monarchies The challenge of the Future “What important truth do few people agree with you on?” Business vs startup
If You Want To Innovate, Learn These 9 Rules image credit: Pixabay On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution. The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart. So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Rule 1: Innovation Is Never A Single Event Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn’t until 15 years later, in 1943, that the miracle drug came into widespread use. We tend to think of innovation as arising from a single brilliant flash of insight, but the truth is that it is a drawn out process involving the discovery of an insight, the engineering a solution and then the transformation of an industry or field. Rule 2: Innovation Is Combination This isn’t the exception, but the norm. Rule 3: First, Ask The Right Questions Clearly, no one method can suffice.
app-launch-guide/README.md at master · adamwulf/app-launch-guide Why Clayton Christensen Is Wrong About Uber And Disruptive Innovation Silicon Valley has disrupted disruptive innovation, and Clayton Christensen isn’t happy about it. Christensen vaulted to rock-star status in the tech world in 1995 when he introduced the theory of disruptive innovation in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). Two years later, he published his bestselling book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Yet, two decades after Christensen published his original article, the idea of disruptive innovation has achieved almost meme-like status in Silicon Valley — and lost much of its original meaning in the process. Dismayed by this misuse of his work, Christensen recently wrote a reply to his critics, titled “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” To prove his point, Christensen uses Uber as an example. That’s where Christensen gets it wrong. UberX disrupted the taxi market “A disruptive innovation, by definition, starts from one of those two footholds,” Christensen says. First, Uber clearly took off from a low-market foothold. Platforms create new markets