What is at the heart of your company’s DNA?
Within the technology industry there’s still a spectrum between marketing and engineering companies. Where does your company lie? It’s an important question to know. The answer impacts nearly all facets of how you operate.
Deep down, are you a marketing company? Does your company calculate its brand value and aspire to top this list someday?
Or are you an engineering company? It might be obvious, like the team over at Boston Dynamics:
Prototypes are great to quickly build out a representation of your ‘amazing’ new product idea. In the mobile app world prototypes are especially awesome because you have them at your disposal to share, promote and test wherever you are.
This section will be short and to the point. Here we go:
You’re at a conference.
You want to network. Well, you know you should be networking.
But you’re alone in a sea of people. This is overwhelming. You lookout and everyone is talking to each other; it seems you’re the only person without a coworker, old client or agency friend to chat with.
Or at least that’s what you tell yourself as you pull out your phone hoping to find a new unread email.
Continue reading
There’s a wonderful, free, blogging platform out there in Medium. Yet I shake my fist and defy it every week as I choose to write here. Why? A friend recently asked this in so many words.
The Medium option has never quite appealed to me although I’m not exactly vehemently against it either. So I took him up on his recommendation and cross-posted my recent post about Product Managers and Business Analysts over on Medium:
So what is it you’d say you dooooo here?
What the Bob’s are asking here is really, “What is a BA, a business analyst?”
Continue reading
Following up the Websites are Easy; The Content, That’s the Hard Stuff post, here are a handful of more tips to make blog writing easier for you.
Continue reading
Ideas all to often steal the show. Ideas, however, are like the shallow celeb on the red carpet. They look great from far away – successful, valuable, popular. Get near though, spending a few days with the shallow celeb, and you soon see that they’re grasping to their career, putting pieces together of an unenviable social life and sitting on empty bank accounts.
The shallow celeb lacks execution behind the scenes, but that’s not exciting is it?
Time and again I hear a friend joke that if only they’d had the idea for Twitter, Flappy Bird, even Selfie Sticks. But really, any of the countless seemingly simple and obvious, yet wildly succesful ideas out there.
As the Apple Watch launch nears I want to divert your attention slightly to another successful wearable product. This wearable predates the Apple Watch by two years and came out with an equally raucous launch. Except that wearable failed and while the jury is still out on the Apple Watch, I imagine it’ll have a much more positive response two years from now (spring of 2017).
That’s what it feels like to be an entrepreneur.
Of course most successful entrepreneurs love to learn. They don’t learn just one thing every day, but rather many things – entire topics – and it happens almost naturally.
And with the interwebs being what they are, one of the best places to learn* is by seeing what other people are doing, have done and then written about online.
*Other places to learn: talking to people in person; just f***ing doing it and learning from your mistakes
Continue reading
When you break ground on a new SaaS startup it’s easy to set ambitious sales goals.
Pick a number…1,000+ customers, $1mm in annual revenue, a dozen strategic partners lined up by year two. Oh and don’t forget the hockey stick growth.
Forget it. Forget all of that. Those numbers, those goals, they aren’t what you should be focusing on right now.
