I was chatting with a fellow entrepreneur last night, around the at least one competitor rule.
A companies founder that he’d invested in was worrying that there was a competitor in the space. You want at least one, as they help educate the market, they help bring a point of difference, they help sell. You don’t want to the lone soldier growing the market.
Especially when your product is iterative, it’s worrying if others aren’t reaching a similar conclusion.
Every now and again I’ll get back into my Economics books, podcasts and relook at things from an Economics lens.
The lens is always good for looking at incentives, how are parties incentivised, what will they gradually move towards when incentivised that way.
We’ve been looking at our new product Nudge, at how our competitors bill and what their incentives were, it helped explain a lot.
We don’t onsell your data, if our product creates insightful data you maintain ownership. Our competitors don’t, they want to onsell it, they have to as they have priced free and gone broad. We’ve gone high value and charge upfront.
Data is accessible & actionable, we’re pushing the data we create to Ad Servers, so that our clients can then use this data for targeting as they need. Our competitors have to get you to buy through them, this is their margin on top.
Our objectives are sustainable growth, the others in our space are looking for overnight scale to exit rapidly. We want to hold our clients for a long period of time, the cost of change is too big for us and them.
In any market place, look at the incentives, what is it that’s going to dictate how a company acts. Always insightful.
Improvement is about turning change into habits.
Self discipline is what gets you started turning it into a habit is what sustains the improvement.
And self control is an exhaustible behaviour, so you want to turn things into habit to make sure they keep happening.
Same with businesses and systems & processes – once there’s consistency you get that consistent output.
I’m reading Daily Rituals of Artists at the moment – very good, worth a read.
I’m finding at the moment the web is becoming a lot more homogenized. It’s in a zag, all the ways that content bubbles to the top is becoming rapidly connected.
Top of Medium? Top of Digg? On the main media outlets in hours.
What used to be niche is no longer niche.
What this has meant is it;s allowing less content for discovery those little moments of finding gems but even more value in that discovery.
Creep to the edges of the web – what’s happening there?
My wife Esther and blogger friend Marian always tell me off for the double spacing after a full stop.
It was a paradigm meant for typewriters! Not digital communications. I did learn to type on typewriters as our school couldn’t afford enough computers (fortunately that changed after a couple of years) which is where it started.
I still do it – I will probably change in time but it’s a great example of legacy learning, to help shift change you need to teach people en masse the new way of doing something. At some point that will change and we need to change what we do. Where we don’t it’s the next generation that will.
In the classic book vs kindle argument, people think they could never do without books. That’s because they grew up with books, there’s a whole generation of kids growing up reading on a screen more than they ever will paper. It’s a scale that’s only tipped in the last few years.
We’ve got to be conscious of what is legacy, what will change and what won’t till the next generation. It’s these shifts which can creep up on, real fast.
We’re nearing the end of the year – still a wee way to go but it is coming.
It’s weird but at this time I always see a few friends, or personally projects look to wrap up, or people looking to quit. Usually it’s just part of the ups and downs of working on something meaningful.
But it’s always good to get someone elses thoughts, a great book I’ve found as a prompt is The Dip by Seth Godin. It’s a book I often recommend, loan and gift to other entrepreneurs. Give it a read when you just feel like that projects not moving along.
When you feel like quitting that’s the exact moment you need to double down.
In the shift up to NY, it’s like starting from scratch again – but with a bank of support behind you (thanks to the team back home!)
But in that shift we’re based out of a shared office in New York (Grind Spaces) which is excellent, I was able to pop in and get started day after arriving. It’s a healthy mix of startups, freelancers and events being run – I quite like it.
But one observation I’ve noticed, is that as it’s got colder, on a cold day there is noticeably less people in the office. That is more people are deciding to come in later or work from home. I understand but if you want to get the business grinding you’ve really got to get more disciplined.
To really crack freelancing and grow it you’ve got to into a routine, consistently, as with consistent inputs you’ll get better results. Charles Duhigg wrote this great book about habits, what they are, how they form and really how you can adjust your own habits for your benefit. After reading that I redesigned my morning to develop new habits, things as simple as leaving the keys by the front door, getting my gym gear out and ready – packing my bag before I go to bed. Simple things but they meant that when I got up my day got off to a great (frictionless) start – which of course a great start sets me up for success each day.
Freelancing is tough – don’t let something easily fixed hold you back.
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If you are freelancing, a wrote a blog series on it a while back, growing from that to a business, read it here
And even if you’re not The Power of Habit is a great book to make you look at your own habits.
It’s real easy to be busy.
And it’s easy to justify why you haven’t done something because you’ve been busy.
The reality is, we are all busy, it’s about being busy on something meaningful.
Start with 1% or 2% of your time, each day, on something meaningful. Something that you work on today to improve tomorrow. And keep at it. Till you achieve what you wanted. Then start on the next.
Don’t let ‘being busy’ stop you from what you want to be doing.
I saw the launch of Disconnect, a Chrome Browser extension that keeps your web browsing anonymous so I thought I’d give it a go for a couple of weeks.
In short Disconnect blocks the many tracking cookies that let advertisers target ads based on your behaviour, i.e. search for a barber on google and then you find more ads targeting you around barber. Or shop online at a store for shoes and suddenly find yourself being targeted by ads from that advertiser.
And now it’s not full on study or experiment just my first hand experiment of what I’ve found.
What I noticed is that ads blended back into the background. For the fair part I stopped paying attention whereas when I wasn’t using it I would notice these personalised ads a lot more.
I think for advertisers, it shows that ad targeting does work when it has real utility & value through personalisation. For consumers, there is an upside to tracking, websites for the most part need ads to survive and more personalised ads are a friendlier way of monetising.
It’s still early days yet people are still figuring it out and its quite fragmented but I think it’s about to go through a period of consolidation and thus less confusion for customers.
I was finally listening to this Chris Anderson podcast over at EconTalk re: Makers Economy.
Chris talks to the fabric of the internet and the true web generation, whereby sharing is ingrained.
In the past, tinkerers would sweat their projects, all encountering the same problems. You could go from city to city to see people tackling the same issues and hitting the same roadblocks.
With this interconnectedness of the internet you can see who else is working on it and work together and have additive innovation rather than parallel frustration.
For me this is natural and way more efficient, now imagine what it will be like once the 14 year olds of today are 24! Once they set their mind to something, a global community can work together to achieve it.
Both Google & Apple know that the limiting factor to technology development is adoption. If consumers aren’t on board, adopting the product, it’s going to be short lived. As great as the technology is if no ones using it there’s no point.
So they both take different paths,
Apple, prepare the masses for it, through small continual changes. Significant changes every two years and tweaks in between. Apple 5, the 5S coming out soon – mirroring their past lifecycle of a significant change every other year. This means continual momentum and time to think it through. The argument can be, that you’re holding technology back but are you if you’re getting continual adoption? Surely at some point this pace of change will speed up.
Google, does the opposite, it pushes expectations, to ready us for the change. They don’t mind if someone else executes, it they want the future faster. This approach means a lot more thrashing people get uncomfortable with the change but a few get it. They build on it early and help foster the eco-system. The key here is to hold on during the initial change.
Both work (clearly) just interesting to see as entities the different approaches.
Last week I made the big move to New York, one that was decided a while back but came together pretty quick.
My wife Esther and I are here now – naturally moving to a new place, everything is new – especially coming from New Zealand to New York.
One of our first considerations, is places to live, so we’ve come up with this plan. We’ll test different neighbourhoods. Lets stay there for a week, get a real feel, wander the streets, dine and meet the locals. An experience you can’t if you just wander over for a half day. Ideally it helps us settle in faster – and if we don’t like a place a weeks not too long before we’re off.
Using AirBNB we can stay in different neighbourhoods each week, first week is Chelsea, next week is Williamsburg. Then not sure week after that.
AirBNB allows people to rent out their apartments online, we’ve used it before as gives a nice local experience but also I’m not always up for hotels. You can often check in/out at odd times, we don’t have to tip and generally a bit more laid back.
Anyway, it ends up about 20-30% more expensive than renting straight away, but we think it’s worth it – in fact I’m surprised it’s not more expensive (but older rent controlled apartments real rental is probably way below market so the owners are killing it).
Just a wonder of using the internet to create a market by connecting travellers with locals. To do the equivalent only three years ago would have been a nightmare. If you haven’t tried AirBNB give it a go, it’s a real experience.
The key is taking small incremental steps, such that the end (large) result isn’t a surprise.
Windows 8 has found this, with the big step up from Windows 7. Trying to bring the touch screen interface across both platforms (mobile & desktop). Users have struggled, the start menu is gone, it’s been too big a leap.
Whilst yes it is overdue to update – people rely on their desktops each day. When you significantly change that it makes them uncomfortable.
It would have been better, to keep growing the desktop experience and changed consumers perceptions with it’s tablets. Then keep up the updates. I think Apples on a good track to doing this, each year they’re releasing small incremental changes – slowly but surely working towards a significant change.
Malls are great at this, they’re specifically designed to take you the long way. Escalators that are easy to go up, tiresome to go down. Toilets at either end of the mall.
This works well for the mall, not so much for the user.
Like lines at a concert, people will naturally be guided by you, if you guide them.
Whether it’s:
Simulate that process – is that really what you want people going through?
I’ve finally completed Hackers by Steven Levy, it goes through the history of hackers.
And not hackers in the sense that we know them today.
But in the sense of tinkerers, explorers of knowledge, creators of shortcuts (or hacks).
They lived by the premise that information wants to be free… a fundamental ethos of the internet. Information sharing, makes us all smarter and that’s the ultimate aim of the hacker.
It’s funny, in this, I see a lot of digital marketing culture, transparency of information, results and you can see what you’re competitors are up to. It’s the ultimate hackers marketplace.
Well worth a read.
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Also worth a read, Growth Hackers on Quora.