Customer Service Matters for Mission Critical - Continuations Customer Service Matters for Mission Critical Saturday night I arrived late at our house having taken our older son to his first tennis “tournament.” Everyone else was already asleep and the house was dark. I tried to turn some lights on, only to discover that we had a power outage! After some back and forth, I finally managed to get Con Edison to dispatch someone. That’s where the fun really started. Never heard back from our regular electrician, who no longer is that (I left a follow up voice mail). This little episode really brought home (so to speak) how important responsive service is for anything that’s mission critical.
How to nail your product market fit and sales pitch with a value proposition diagram Products aren’t sold in isolation - they exist within ecosystems. Great product market fit and sales pitches hinge on understanding and serving all the members of an ecosystem. Should a product fail to meet the needs of any one member, company success and sales velocity will falter. One tool I use with portfolio companies is the Value Proposition Diagram (VPD) which shows why a product is compelling to every customer - and most products are sold to more than one customer at the same time. I’ll walk through three examples of the VPD: Google AdSense, Expensify and Axial Market. A VPD has three columns: the product, the customers and the value proposition for each customer. Google’s AdSense enables publishers to run ads on their websites to generate revenue. The user is the most important. The advertiser follows the user in importance. That’s the genius of AdSense: ad relevancy aligns the incentives of everyone in the ecosystem. Expensify builds expense management systems for SMBs.
What’s strategic for Google? cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog Google seems to be releasing or acquiring new products almost daily. It’s one thing for a couple of programmers to hack together a side project. It’s another thing for Google to put gobs of time and money behind it. Google makes 99% of their revenue selling text ads for things like airplane tickets, dvd players, and malpractice lawyers. Human – device – OS – browser – bandwidth – websites – ads – ad tech – relationship to advertiser – $$$ At each layer, Google either wants to dominate it or commoditize it. Device: Desktop hardware already commoditized. OS: Not commoditized, and dominated by archenemy (Microsoft)!! Browser: Not commoditized, and dominated by arch enemy! Bandwidth: Dominated by wireless carriers, cable operators and telcos. Websites/search (“ad inventory”): Search is obviously dominated by Google. Relationships to advertisers: Google is dominant in non-local direct-response ads, both SMB self serve and big company serviced accounts.
How to bring a product to market / A very rare interview with Se Nivi · December 14th, 2009 Sean Ellis recently sat down with us and explained how to bring products to market. You should listen to this interview for ideas on how to get to product/market fit, how to measure fit, and how to survey your users so you can improve fit. If you don’t know Sean from his blog or tweets, he lead marketing from launch to IPO filing at LogMeIn and Uproar. His firm, 12in6, then worked with Xobni (Khosla), Dropbox (Sequoia), Eventbrite (Sequoia), Grockit (Benchmark)… the list goes on. 12in6 “helps startups unlock their full growth potential by focusing on the core value perceived by their most passionate users.” This is the first time Sean has done an interview on the record. SlideShare: How to bring a product to market Audio: Interview with chapters (for iPod, iPhone, iTunes) Audio: Interview without chapters (MP3, works anywhere) Transcript with highlights: Below This inteview is free — thanks to KISSmetrics Prerequisites Outline Transcript Nivi: Right. Sean: Yeah.
Back to the Future: Intel will pour $100M into connected-car investments Intel Capital is announcing today a $100 million fund to invest in the future of car technology. The Intel Capital Connected Car Fund is aimed at turning the web-connected automobile into a reality. The investment arm of the world’s biggest chip maker will target funds at technologies such as in-vehicle infotainment systems (like the pictured system embedded in Tesla’s upcoming Model S electric car), seamless mobile connectivity between the car electronics and your mobile devices, compelling applications and advanced driver assistance systems. The fund marks a turning point for the once-staid electronics of cars, which are now being reimagined in the digital era. The fund will be invested over the next four to five years in hardware, software, and services companies developing new technologies. Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president, said that Intel is already collaborating with Toyota, Hyundai, Kia, and BMW.
Progress towards the mobile web and away from apps | The Equity Regular readers will know I see the iPhone/app store as a passing phase in mobile, a step on the way to a web paradigm equivalent to what we have on the PC. One of the big questions is how long this current phase lasts and with the momentum of the iPhone and the rush by all sorts of mobile players to open app stores one has to say it is still in the growth phase. That said, two pieces of news today point to the true mobile web not being too far away. Firstly Firefox has announced a new mobile browser which they claim will: be very fast support plugins sync with your PC, including bookmarks and open tabs allow developers to have apps running on multiple devices from a single code base As developers get more frustrated with quality assurance, the amount of handsets they have to buy, whether their security updates will get past the iPhone approval process… I think they’ll move to the web. and like this: In the interim period, apps will be very successful.
The Startup Pyramid Every six months I rethink the optimal startup go to market approach based on new insights gained at recent startups. Lately I’ve been using a pyramid to represent the process I’m using. Startups require a solid foundation of product/market fit before progressing up the pyramid and scaling the business. Achieving Product/Market Fit Product/market fit has always been a fairly abstract concept making it difficult to know when you have actually achieved it. Paul Graham: The mantra at Paul’s successful startup incubator YCombinator is “make things people want.”Steve Blank: In Steve’s book Four Steps to the Epiphany he writes: “Customer Validation proves that you have found a set of customers and a market who react positively to the product: By relieving those customers of some of their money.”Marc Andreessen: A couple years ago Marc wrote the following on his blog: “…the life of any startup can be divided into two parts – before product/market fit and after product/market fit.”
Web 2 winners start as free apps and become platforms | The Equi I’m at the Le Web conference in Paris for the next couple of days and this morning I caught a panel chaired by Mike Arrington with the platform people from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, Ning and Six Apart. The first observation is that these companies have been very successful in getting people to use their ‘platforms’. There are now 50,000 apps built on Twitter, 60 million people use Facebook Connect every month, and the Ning numbers are also very impressive. The second observation is that with the exception of Ning these companies all started as applications and have backed into a platform model over time. Traditionally in IT the move has more been in the other direction – e.g. I think the difference this time round is that the web 2.0 success stories built wildly popular free apps which generated the enablers for their platforms as a by product. This, of course, is the ‘free’ business model in action, or at least it could be.