These days its interesting to see privileges given to people and provided in products for a fee. These privileges or super options were mere basic features or options in the years gone by. Learning from great marketing tricks here are some examples I have come across in these days.
1) Checked baggage is not a free option now on most of the airlines. You have to pay a fee for that. But guess what “Get an XYZ credit card from ABC and your first checked bag is free”. So you see where I am going, they will give your checked bag a free ticket to fly with you – only if you get this XYZ credit card. Does that ring a bell?
2) Not that I do not like the iphone, but remember it did not have cut and paste at one time. Apple did a big upgrade and announced cut and paste. Again a basic function which has existed pre whatever, becomes a privileged option. Again, this time with iOS4, the new iphone operating system, multitasking becomes a feature set. Now does that ring the bell??
Point to be taken, build something everyone likes minus that one feature which you will announce in a big release, this is pure marketing ploy. I as a person do no endorse this as a great way to gain followers, yet my point has been proven false for the iphone. Your call now.
How we go about it depends on the original founder. Two’s company three’s a crowd. Not that companies with three have not worked.
Same energy levels as you, passion and driving force to believe in the product. The lethal combinations to find is tough, but try and get someone you know and have worked with, this helps match wavelengths.
Make sure if you are technically apt then the co founder is business savvy and can sell.
Tech founders don’t pick the right seller founders, and seller founders don’t pick the right tech founders.
One done, second on the run
That the nature of startup world. I will bring an experience into words starting today.
No shop agreement, just what the words mean. You are not going to go shopping again for the same thing once you have decided or agreed to buy the product (VC funding), its a good faith thing that you and your investor strike a balance on.
Just like when you strike a deal with a realtor and decide that the realtor is going to do the house hunting for you, the VC’s have something called a “no shop agreement”.
This is not a legally binding clause, it ethically is followed. What it does it once you decide to choose your investor and go with them, you are telling them – before we finalize and close our deal legally, we the company people will not be chasing other investors behind your back. As I wrote earlier about “Term Sheet”, this no shop agreement takes to life just before or during the final stages of the term sheet.
These are words used in the world of VC’s. Term sheet in short or in plain english is nothing but a non formal agreement. This works towards building a partnership and working towards a mutually defined goal.
What it does is put in place a working relationship binding in nature and it continues to be a basis of negotiation between the investors/partners/entrepreneurs before a more formal or legally binding contract is executed.
Here’s my take on this. Learning is WIKUD, it is the culmination of wisdom, information, knowledge, understanding and data.
It depends on how this combination gets mashed and absorbed.
Pick the biggest possible market, this way you have a great reach for your product and its success.
Learn everything about this market. If you do not know everything, find a place to learn about it in more detail.
Most of the successful businesses were just hobbies or were just some other kind of gig, which turned into this great success of the century. Didn’t phones ever exist? Didn’t touch screen phones ever exist?
This is what I call a plan, a technique – which takes a long time or a very short time to explode. When you have product which is build for the community, here take for example the X/Y generation. Marketing it around them is the most powerful medium you have, build the product around them and you have a fail or pass result in a rather fast time span. This helps you reduce your burning the cash for a long time to figure out if the product succeeds or not.
All examples or products, rated the best, are built around the community – our community, your community or their community. “Community” is the buzz.Technorati Tags: community, ttm, xy, generation
This is a catch 22 situation I have been in recently. What is the difference between the two, the sound different, well they are. The confusing part is with so many GPL, GNU’s around no open source or community edition software is without some small print.
Open source is supposed to be open – that makes it available easily and code can be modified. Community editions also seem the same, but the catch is these are also run by Corporations who make money on the Enterprise edition of the same tool. Scratching my head now, will figure out the small print very soon. Till then.
Tags: community, open source
This is a great piece I had read a few days ago. How much of it is true? well the entire three lines is accurate.
If you tweet or use Facebook, e-mail or instant messaging, you are to blame for creating the largest pile of permanent waste in the history of mankind. Nice going.
Never mind that your messages are ethereal wisps of digits and electrons and that 99% of them are useless a few seconds after they are created. They are 0s and 1s that will be stored on some disk drive somewhere whether you want them or not, ready to be retrieved by your grandkids, prosecutors and historians for all eternity.
What it also says is, we tend to be so consiously not printing on paper to save trees and be green, but what we fail to realize is all this data gets stored on machines which, most of them cannot be 100% recycled, so where does it end up? What green initiative are we initiating? Keep thinking, that’s what I am trying to do.
Tags: data
