17 5 / 2013
Do customers pay for your B2B product in a cost-center, or a profit-center?
When marketing your (startup’s) product, it’s really important to understand whether the department that will be paying for the cost of your product fits into a cost-center vs. a profit-center portion of their budget.
In other words, does your product primarily save your customer time & money (cost-centers), or primarily generate more revenue for them (profit-centers).
Looking back at products in these segments, the barriers to sale are actually quite different. Cost-center savings oriented products, like product management tools, ERP, etc, generally need to be 10x more cost-effective than the products they compete against, because switching costs are generally high (because of re-training, for example). However, Profit-center increasing oriented products generally only have to be 1% better than the products they compete against; more revenue is easy to measure, and usually switching costs are low.
This generally means that sales cycles are also much shorter for profit-center increasing products, because every customer is willing to try. On the other hand, the barriers to entry are much lower for competing products, so innovation has to keep an incredibly fast pace.
Real life example: Groupon’s sales cycles were incredibly short, and revenues grew like a weed; but they couldn’t keep up the innovation required. Conversely, Square’s sales cycles are comparatively long; but it’s going to be hard to unseat them.
Lesson: understand what mode you’re in. If you’re a cost-center, raise enough money to survive longer sales cycles. If you’re a profit-center, setup the product to allow revenues to grow like a weed, but keep the whole company incredibly agile, so when your product has to change, the organization can keep up.
03 5 / 2013
Fork & Pull Request: The Right Model for Updating Everything
The more I’ve been using Fork & Pull Requests in GitHub, the more I’m convinced all information should be modified in this fashion. From scientific research to wikipedia (and obviously, for software)
02 5 / 2013
Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen are Silicon Valley luminaries, epic entrepreneurs and prominent financiers. Both have something to say about where high-tech is taking the world economy, and what is being left behind. Andreessen, co-developer of the first Web browser and now a top venture capitalist, expects software to automate and ultimately dominate most other industries. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, has written in depth about what he considers the stagnation of innovation in fields that others see as emblems of progress: energy, pharmaceuticals, space exploration, nanotech and much more. In fact, Thiel links the austerity gripping the Western world to productivity gains that never happened. Join these acute observers for a unique exchange on science, business and innovation, or the lack thereof.
30 4 / 2013
Inter-Informational Computing
If the 1990’s & 2000’s were about Inter-Personal Computing, the 2010’s will be about Inter-Informational Computing. Where we actually start using the massive amounts of data being collected, and combining them together from multiple sources.
30 4 / 2013
Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.
22 4 / 2013
What bothers me about Google’s AppEngine
I’ve finally realized what bothers me so much about Google’s AppEngine compared to Amazon’s AWS Suite.
AppEngine is a highly opinionated product; “use our approved stack or use another provider.” Generally, I’m a huge fan of opinionated products, because standards & conventions are fantastic for productivity. That’s why I love Apple products and the Rails web framework.
However, AppEngine is a product for hackers, who love tinkering. For the same reason that the Apple II had to have expansion slots for hackers, AppEngine is just too constraining of a stack to be a product for web developers.
That’s compounded by the fact that the majority of applications on Google’s AppEngine are going to find themselves being forced to also use Google’s BigTable implementation. Well, that’s a pretty huge investment on the developers’ part, because BigTable isn’t really a standard that’s easily deployable on other cloud providers. So if you’re writing for AppEngine, you probably will have to stay on AppEngine or suffer a rewrite of your data logic layer.
If anything, AppEngine is more accurately compared to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, not lower-level services like Amazon EC2 or Amazon OpsWorks.
AppEngine is a product/service to be sold for hackers, yet is a fully-enclosed-system that can’t be tinkered with. That means they are selling a consumer-like offering to an audience where a massive percentage of it wants to hack the hell out of it!
07 4 / 2013
What is the nicest thing you've ever done that no one knows about?
Awesome Quora thread.
07 3 / 2013
Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling
- You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
- You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
- Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
- Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
- Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
- What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
- Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
- Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
- When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
- Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
- Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
- Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
- Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
- Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
- If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
- What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
- No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
- You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
- Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
- Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
- You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
- What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
