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A version of this article previously appeared on Forbes. Tracy DiNunzio, Founder and CEO of Tradesy , recently shared her insights regarding the best approach for entrepreneurs to address competition. If you haven''t already subscribed yet, subscribe now for free weekly JohnGreathouse.com articles! Competition Is A Lie.
They were a little too fierce in their competitive practices against Lyft to sign up drivers. As somebody who has to rub shoulders with big tech companies often I can tell you that there is much blood spilled in the competitive trenches of Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on. This article had much resonance with me.
The original post of this article on appeared on GigaOm in a more concise version here. In the evangelical phase you’re working through these with customers on the fly. But they want to establish a baseline in the customer’s mind of the value they will get by using your product. It is tacit knowledge.
There’s an article making the rounds in tech circles titled “ Growth Hacking is Bull ” written by Muhammad Saleem. I’d like to make the case that the article is wrong. I tell people that they need to blog about their industry to drive customers and not blog to their egos to drive their peer group to their blogs.
For much of 2013 I watched the press write articles about how the YouTube “MCNs” (multi-channel networks) were doomed and tried to square that with the data I was watching at the one I invested in, Maker Studios, who has had one hell of a year. Selling at smaller retailers will net you fewer customers and higher margins.
My list of excuses includes: product, pricing, competition and lack of sales support. That said, I think it is written without taking the full extent of my sales articles into account. This includes presentations, ROI calculators, competitive analyses and so forth. My guess is that we are likely in total agreement. In Summary.
It’s building a product that is substantially differentiated, and, as Bill Gross, one of the most prolific tech entrepreneurs of our era says, “ It needs to be 10x better than the competition ” (because if you shoot for that then in competitive markets you might achieve 3x. ” Here are some examples: 1.
If you care about accessing customers, reaching an audience, communicating your vision, influencing people in your industry, marketing your services or just plain engaging in a dialog with others in your industry a blog is a great way to achieve this. I’ll bet your customers, business partners or suppliers would love similar.
Over the past couple of years I’ve written down some of my thoughts and it’s started to add up enough that I’ve now created a new tab on this blog with PR related articles on the topic. So while you get the benefits of recruiting, being on VC radars and customer legitimacy there are also downsides.
Not so long ago, every business assumed that the keys to success were the highest quality product, the best value for the buck, and the best customer service. Now all we hear about is providing the best “customer experience.” You have to hear your customer’s dreams, goals, passions, and aspirations.
We went through the euphoria of massive exposure at the time of our launch due to an article that ran in the Financial Times. We hadn’t even thought about having a customer support line or who would staff it. Our customers were generally happy but they were pushing us hard for promised features. We were unprepared.
Yesterday I wrote a post about The Silent Benefits of PR in which I pointed out that most young companies I encounter don’t fully grasp the benefits of PR because they are less measurable than product milestones or customer acquisition analyses (like CAC/LTV).
Not so long ago, every business assumed that the keys to success were the highest quality product, the best value for the buck, and the best customer service. Now all we hear about is providing the best “customer experience.” You have to hear your customer’s dreams, goals, passions, and aspirations.
Hopefully this article and the accompanying six-minute video will help you avoid learning these mission-critical lessons the hard way. If you haven’t already subscribed yet, subscribe now for free weekly Infochachkie articles! Thus, you have negotiating leverage as long as a legitimate, competitive threat exists.
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. If I’m covering a company can I get evidence of what the competition is doing so the story is balanced? You can imagine the press release, “New innovative model allows us to do audits differently than the competition!” I am a VC. I hand out money. Final example.
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Whenever I heard why we didn’t feel a sales process at an important customer was going well (or if we lost) I would get involved myself. They are as good at selling you as they are at selling your product to customers. Customers buy solutions to solve their problems.
All the experts these days are talking about the increasing need for customer focus and maximizing sales. Typically entrepreneurs and even professional sales people think this means more emphasis on the customer selling process, when in fact it means spending more time understanding the customer buying process (view from the customer).
All the experts these days are talking about the increasing need for customer focus and maximizing sales. Typically entrepreneurs and even professional sales people think this means more emphasis on the customer selling process, when in fact it really means spending more time understanding the customer buying process (view from the customer).
I find it amusing when a journalist writes an article about a prominent startup (either privately held or preparing for an IPO) and decries that, “They’re not even profitable!” If you had huge customer growth but just didn’t focus on revenue that’s a different story. One of them is profitability.
Here are some of the tools in the Swiss Army Knife that your team needs to be armed with to scale: (this article was originally posted on GigaOm in a shorter format.). This document was important both for giving customers confidence as well as protecting our liability in the case of outages. And that was my opinion, too.
TechCrunch ran my article yesterday as a guest post but I wanted to have a copy here for anybody who missed it and for future readers of this blog. We were immediately thrust into a globally competitive market for B2B collaboration tools. Dinners were consumed with customers or in hotels and often past 10pm.
I was talking a month ago with a founding team who was lamenting the fact that their competitors got way better coverage than they did when they felt that their traffic numbers were > 2x the competition. You need somebody who REALLY understands your company, its customers and its competitors.
With services, scaling the business often implies cloning yourself, since you are the intellectual property and the competitive advantage. For example, both need to provide exemplary customer service, build customer loyalty, and provide real value for a competitive price. The customer experience is more than the service.
This article was originally posted in a much more concise version over GigaOm if you prefer the shorter version. In the first part of this post I talked about how sales in a startup is often evangelical , requires as consultative sale and needs constant adjustments based on customer feedback.
A version of this article previously appeared in Forbes. If you haven''t already subscribed yet, subscribe now for free weekly JohnGreathouse.com articles! Apeel Sciences - Founded in 2012, after winning $10,000 at UCSB’s New Venture Competition, the company closed $1.25M in funding during 2013. Want to be an entrepreneur?
If you haven't already subscribed yet, subscribe now for free weekly Infochachkie articles! However, at most startups, competitive advantages are derived from a combination of invention and innovation, as described more fully in Inventor Or Innovator – Which Are You? It happened one day at a competition. The Berkoff Blastoff.
Not so long ago, every business assumed that the keys to success were the highest quality product, the best value for the buck, and the best customer service. Now all we hear about is providing the best “customer experience.” You have to hear your customer’s dreams, goals, passions, and aspirations.
In these days of rapid change, the pandemic, and worldwide competition, you need to make sure your entire team is customer-focused, innovative, and always looking around the corner for the next big thing. Recent articles report that companies where everyone is focused on the big picture can increase their returns by up to 400 percent.
Customers are harder to sign than you want. Journalists have just written an article that wasn’t favorable. You’ve got to accept customer losses as learning experiences and see how you can improve next time. You’ve got to put the competition into perspective. Not lose your cool. We signed deals worth $1.2
Article first published as Eleven Startup Tips From Mark Cuban on Technorati. free weekly Infochachkie articles! The most difficult aspect of compiling this article was narrowing down Mark’s comments to ten quotes. Note: This is an installment in the Iconic Advice series. Mark’s Startup Tips. What Risk? "Because
free weekly Infochachkie articles! Bill’s advice reflects Microsoft’s hardnosed culture, which encourages internal competition and a ruthless pursuit of the truth. Along with your cash, customers and employees, a healthy startup culture will prove to be one of your most precious assets. . " [Tweet this quote]. ."
It is an LA-based company that was recently acquired by Amazon, which you can read more about in this incredibly well-researched article. Throughout all of this we saw a tinkerer, a problem solver and a completely obsessed leader who was competitive and wanted to win. We weren’t sure. He did all of these and more.
According to a January 2012 article in Forbes Magazine , nearly 16% of the 400 most affluent Americans do not have a college degree. But it's also about operations and customer relationships." Despite the relative dominance of product-oriented innovations, they seldom create sustainable competitive advantages.
This article previously appeared in Forbes. If you haven't already subscribed yet, subscribe now for free weekly Infochachkie articles! The team subsequently earned a coveted position in Launchpad LA's current accelerator class after winning the Crowdstart LA competition. The posting resulted in 40points and about 30comments.
We never built our product on one partner’s data platform but on many (20 primary data sources plus 100+ smaller ones) and Twitter’s move doesn’t “shut down DataSift” it simply takes 1,000+ customers who consume Twitter data through DataSift and makes their life more difficult. Just how much?
If you haven’t already subscribed yet, subscribe now for free weekly Infochachkie articles! Amarillo’s advice is consistent with my comments in the Startup Competition ; get to know your competitors on a personal basis, while appearing as innocuous as possible. Poker is one such game. The same is true with poker.
free weekly Infochachkie articles! You decide how much you want to invest in your employees and then you give your employees the control to build a custom perk package for themselves. Every day, let’s learn from our customers, and I did that in Iraq. If you haven’t already subscribed yet, subscribe now for.
free weekly Infochachkie articles! How does SteelHouse enable its customers to leverage the existence of these various consumers? And then create the audience and deliver the right offer to the shoppers so they get the incentive they need to convert and the site gets the sale and a new customer.”. The number one thing is trust.
Starting an entrepreneurial business, or maintaining the competitiveness of a mature business, requires innovation. In reality, the best business process innovations usually come from regular employees on the front line of your business, just trying to do a better job and better serve customers.
free weekly Infochachkie articles! Although Eucalyptus is still a relatively small company from a personnel standpoint, it already counts twenty one of the Fortune 100 as it customers. To the casual observer, it may appear that Eucalyptus and RightScale’s respective solutions are competitive.
You can have the best technology, but if customers don’t know you exist, or they don’t know how your technology solves a real problem for them, your startup will fail. In fact, this article was driven by a startup press release I saw a while back, highlighting a startup’s “geo-fencing technology” as a new basis for discount coupons.
Customer are primarily large media companies (publishers) and their media agencies. Competition: Pingg, MyPunchbowl, TinyPrints , PaperlessPost. Competition: Apple iPhone App Store Genius. Total raised: $1.74mm – Read more: TechCrunch , Wired article. Founded by Shawn Gold (ex-MySpace CMO).
free weekly Infochachkie articles! When enhancing your value proposition, ask the same question a newcomer would ask, "what is the best way for users to interact with the new features, irrespective of the existing customer experience?" . "I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then."
Contact key vendors and existing customers. During this time or earlier, you should also be doing your own due diligence on the investor, as suggested in a classic article on avoiding problem investors. This will cover the technology, the current state of development, and customer satisfaction. This is the highest priority item.
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