Tag Archives: Gurus

What is the Minimum Minimum Viable Product?

2 Replies

Funny how coincidence goes. I was only last night watching Eric Ries gig at the LSE – which two years on seems surprisingly dated (see eg Wu-wei, Growth Hacking, and The Rise of Marketing-less Marketing) when what should I get today but a text from a buddy asking about the above koan. How could I resist 🙂

lean-startup_book-cover

For those of you not in the loop. Ries’ (a silicon valley programmer turned manager turned director) book is based on his experience of spending 6mts and a whole bunch of funding developing a product that no-one ever downloaded.  A pain I can relate to as my first gig way back was porting Unix to an ICL mainframe (when the UK had a mainframe company). Lots of work, lots of stress, huge efforts, brilliant work. And it never got used. Ever. [ICL was sold to Fujitsu].  Not long after I promptly became a Merchant Banker 😀

Ries methodology centres on having an MVP – a Minimum Viable Product – that you can put out there ASAP to at least find out if the market wants it.  In the extreme case it’s a single page website which says click here for more info.

It’s a solution to the old Supply-Push, Demand-Pull balance. It’s product development interacting ASAP with Sales.

We can also Continue reading →

Share

A Must-Read Article On Bitcoin By The Inventor Of The Web-Browser

Leave a reply

I never had any interest in all the hysterical articles on Bitcoin until I read this non-hysterical one by Marc Andressen who wrote the first web browser, co-founded Netscape and now is investing in Bitcoin-related businesses.  Nor have I ever used a post to summarise someone else’s content.  However rules are made to be broken 🙂

I have been tangentially interested in Bitcoin only as the first crack in governments’ control over money (and in seeing governments do everything they can to prevent and ‘diss it).  So much attention is placed on economic monopolies but we seem to be stuck with political monopolies [“one party/two brand” systems] and currency monopolies controlled by said political monopoly (or arguably by the civil service monopolies which in practice control the politicians more than vice versa).  Screaming Lord Sutch, erstwhile leader of the Monster Raving Loony party put it well when he asked why there is only one Monopolies Commission.  He should have taken his argument much further 🙂
Lord SutchHere are some snips to whet your appetite from the NYTimes article… Continue reading →

Share

Content Shock, Rear-View Mirrors and the End of a Gold Rush?

Leave a reply

I am sure you have noticed how the number of books have gone up in your lifetime.  How the number of webpages explodes along with emails, blogs to read, podcasts, YouTubes, and links to cute kittens.

Mark Schaefer Grow Blog

Mark Schaefer Grow Blog

Exponentially increasing content, a limit to eyeball hours in the day and naturally it gets less valuable.  Coupled with the fact that in this world of instant sharing how much is genuinely new?

Of course strong rebuttals.  A buddy who is an expert in government website content sent me (when I mentioned the phrase “another snowflake in the content blizzard”) a link denying all of this.  It was written by “The Content Marketing Association” (and had little real logic).  No shit Sherlock the X institute says X is no way getting less important to the world 🙂

It’s a good excuse to recap the whole picture and let you know my take… Continue reading →

Share

Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends On It.

Leave a reply

Mitch (a marketing/journalist/publicist and uber-interwebby person) must have loved it when Marketing Magazine dubbed him the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing”.  It’s a great by-line and he did work as a rock journalist for a long time and you don’t want to start listening to a conversation between Mitch and Seth on “vinyl” 🙂  Instead you can watch and listen to Seth Godin interview Mitch about the new book and take questions in an event hosted by Google no less:

Mitch is one of my three “must follows” – as in even when I don’t have time and fall behind I will catch up on his material in his blog and great (if a bit “marketing/pr industry” detailed) podcast.  You can check out the book in all the usual places. My aim here is not to add another precis to the internet. Rather I want to draw out some key themes in the context of this blog. Continue reading →

Share

Purple Cows – Getting Noticed vs Being Distinctive

The High Priest of 21stC BizDev thinking must be Seth Godin – love him or hate him (a few do).  If you have been hiding in a cave since the last millennium and rather missed 21stC BizDev thinking, I’d recommend starting to catch up with any of the YouTubes by Godin I have never actually managed to finish any of his books … they tend to read like a strong of blog posts stuck together.  He has blogged daily for years and there are some great pearls in there – surrounded by a lot of sand.

One of the distinctive titles of his over a dozen books is the Purple Cow.  This has been interpreted, reinterpreted and misinterpreted.  You drive past a field and amongst all the same-old cows there’s a purple cow:

Purple Cow image

So it gets noticed right? And you remember it right? And you tell your mates right? So that’s the “get noticed” vibe. And you can see it makes sense.  I recently heard of someone in an office where they put a job online. Within four hours they had received 200 CVs (and that’s probably not a lot). So how to stand out? How to get noticed?

Set against this “standing out” can be taken too far (especially as this is culturally determined).  You could send in a lavender-scented CV on bearskin – now hey that would stand out but would it help? Continue reading →

Share