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.
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.
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.
Add Another Zero
Talking about scale and growth is hard. Many people talk in percentages in pre-determined time periods (e.g. let’s grow revenue 100% next year). I find this to be relatively useless. Instead, I like to challenge people to think on a bigger scale over a variable time period. My favorite line of late is “add another zero – you pick the metric and the time frame.” I used to call this “increase X by an order of magnitude” until I realized that lots of business people don’t actually know that an increase in an order of magnitude is equal to multiplying by 10. For example, I’m an investor in a company that is growing its user base as they had planned. In another case, I’m an investor in a company that had a great year on all accounts. This question can apply to any metric. While there are natural limits to this when you approach it top down, it becomes very powerful when you approach it bottom up. The variable time period is a key aspect of this.
Notes on business sustainability – Joel Andren on Zynga | The Eq
Joel Andren posted a couple of weeks ago on Why Zynga couldn’t go public soon enough – in which he notes that everything is great at Zynga right now (revenues on a tear, Farmville is hot, Cafe World is getting there) but postulates that ‘their current efforts have probably reached their apogee without making significant changes to their ecosystem’. Hence they should get out while the going is good and IPO. I’ve got no inside track on Zynga buy Joel’s analysis is interesting and can (and probably should) be applied to most internet businesses. He has a ‘customer ecosystem’ model into which he has plugged Zynga: And by way of explanation: If a company is strong, it will have three of four squares rated green. I like this model a lot. To comment on Zynga’s red squares: We have seen the danger of Facebook dependence before when iLike was only able to sell itself for $20m.
