Posts tagged business
I love Stack’s indie magazine subscription model. Are there any businesses doing similar with other products? eg. I know there are wine of the month clubs, but how about for more esoteric/geeky goods?
Paul Graham (founder, YCombinator) (via amandapey & mikehudack)
I wouldn’t say this is necessarily my experience of startup life, but interesting comparison/sentiment.
“If Playfish can sell for $275 million and Zynga can attract big funding on reports of bigger revenue, there’s clearly life in the virtual goods game. So six Liverpool developers are hoping to emulate the success that pair has had in getting people to pay for things that don’t exist…”
Ganari Takahashi, Japanese pornographer turned vegetable farmer, on his transferrable skills, adding: “You have to create an image and make it cool.” (via boutofcontext)
Creating a cool image is just marketing, and many of the same marketing principles apply regardless of the product you’re selling. But this quote is still kinda funny :-)
(NB. I had a conversation yesterday at Barcamp Manchester about how the porn industry has often pioneered technologies and online business models that took years to later be adopted by the mainstream. A friend also gave her final-year presentation at uni on the subject of “what the music business can learn from the adult entertainment industry”. So there’s a precedent of erm…learning about business from porn. Figuratively).
How good is this logo, it works on so many levels, love it!
“The old Northwest Airlines logo has a very clever icon. Not only does the icon on the left of the text spell out N and W, but the arrow and circle symbolizes a compass pointing in the northwestern direction.”
Clever graphic design, BUT WHAT’S THE EFFECT ON THE BOTTOM LINE?
(Is what I might say if I didn’t have an appreciation for art and the aesthetics of life).
I do wonder with things like logos though: does a clever, interesting design like this provide any better ROI than a simple-yet-recognisable graphic knocked out in 5 minutes? I know brand perception is sometimes unquantifiably beneficial but…
Bijan Sabet: Some thoughts about company culture
That’s what happens when bosses who “don’t get” company culture or spend too much time on spreadsheets, not enough on people, try to manage their staff’s morale.
Fred had a good post yesterday about why he considers Y-Combinator the “Best Deal in Startup Land.“ I believe that also and want to add a key reason for it: An intense focus on making versus planning. By entering Y-Combinator, teams commit themselves to a mad sprint to get something built. Ideally something that works well enough or is far enough along to actually launch before or shortly after demo day.
That is a completely different approach from that taken by business plan competitions. Most of those put all the emphasis on planning. I recently met with a team from ITP that is entering an NYU business plan competition. The team consists of folks who all know how to design and program. Yet the emphasis of the business plan competition was all about pairing them with an MBA and working on such things as market size and go to market strategy.
I told them that if I were in their position I would spend as little time as possible on the planning and focus instead of turning their prototype into a working system and getting that out into the real world. They will learn more about the viability of what they are working on (and more about business) then any amount of planning could tell them.
Very pertinent, as over a couple of tweets yesterday I said:
Controversial, but #TC50 made me think: so many developers found startups. But you wouldn’t want a bricklayer to run a property company..
“Bricklayer” wasn’t intended to be pejorative, but someone who makes things, no matter how skilled, isn’t *necessarily* a CEO.
Let me be clear that I’m not at all suggesting programming is a trivial skill - far from it. Just sometimes I think startups need to recognise that business is a separate skill and process that should be treated as such, and not just something that can be blagged in between writing lines of code.
I wonder what Albert’s view is on the bricklayer analogy?
I like this Guardian piece…but it’s still little more than stating the facts. I want insight, speculation and punditry, dammit!
What’re your thoughts or fave links?
“I know that title might sound like a PhD thesis, but stick with me; a few more posts and I think I’ll have the grand unified social meeja theory of everything…”
A blog post I’ve just written about a new service that people have accused of being too similar to Tumblr, 4chan, Twitter and all sorts of things. And why it doesn’t actually matter.
(I also stick up for TechCrunch a bit. But that’s not the point).
