Dear founder, Your job is the same as it’s always been for founders at this stage. The only difference is that you have to actually achieve the validation required from investors early on. You have to do the hard work … Continue reading A Letter To The Founder Who Has Yet To Raise Their First Big Round
Quotes from the book: Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs … Continue reading ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’-Ben Horowitz
Paypal’s results update didn’t quite hit the target late last week, but its blossoming tech friendship might bode well for the future. What Does This Mean? You don’t have to be a genius to guess that companies like PayPal would suffer when spending’s on the decline, and this time, common sense is on the money: the company processed a disappointing 14% more payments by value last quarter versus the same time the year before. In fairness, PayPal’s focus on marketing towards existing customers was worth the work, with active accounts making 13% more transactions, helping revenue and profit beat analysts’ expectations. But … Continue reading PayPal’s Pay Pal
What’s Going On Here? Not even the slipperiest of bananas could trip up Nintendo’s quarterly results: the Japanese game maker upped its full-year profit outlook on Tuesday. What Does This Mean? The currency gods are smiling upon Nintendo right now: the yen’s … Continue reading Nintendo’s Dodging Obstacles
All success stories begin with an idea you truly believe in and the courage to go your own way when venture capitalists give you the cold shoulder. By clearly differentiating yourself from others, putting the customer at the heart of … Continue reading Study notes from reading ‘Behind the Cloud’ by Marc Benioff
Damodaran makes two key points with particular elegance. One is that, in equilibrium, the insistence that ESG portfolios can outperform non-ESG portfolios makes no sense: “The notion that adding an ESG constraint to investing increases expected returns is counter intuitive. … Continue reading Aswath Damodaran on ESG
The Chinese government ordered the country’s app stores to remove the ride-hailing giant, Didi, over the weekend. It says it’s a matter of national security: Didi has access to hundreds of millions of Chinese customers’ personal information, while counting major international companies (like Uber) among its shareholders. It’s not the only one: other US-listed Chinese companies – including online recruitment company Kanzhun and truck-hailing firm Full Truck Alliance – were caught up in the crackdown too. For markets: Cue the ripple effects.This was the next episode in a long-running series of crackdowns on Chinese tech firms, so the news sent all their stocks tumbling on … Continue reading Didi is back in the Chinese government’s crosshairs, just days after pulling off one of the biggest US IPOs of the past decade
You can be confident that your product is a must-have if at least 40% of your customers choose ‘Very disappointed’. However, if the amount of customers answering, ‘Very disappointed’ is under 40%, you must continue to improve and develop your product. 3. A/B testing. A way tests the effectiveness of two different product variations. The project management tool Basecamp used this method to test potential marketing taglines, for example, and that’s how they discovered that the prompt ‘See Plans and Pricing’ attracted twice as many new customers as ‘Sign Up for Free Trial’. 4. Standard metrics for online businesses include … Continue reading Studying notes from ‘Hacking Growth’
The circle of concern includes all those things that concern you but you have no control over. The circle of influence focuses on everything you can actually do something about. Things you can directly improve. You need to focus on things in this circle. For example, improving your interpersonal skills, going out of your comfort zone; this is something in your circle of influence, you can control yourself. You could make an effort to socialise more. Instead of responding to every question by email, get up and meet your coworkers face to face. Just by working on this one thing, … Continue reading Study notes from ‘The Languages of Leaderhship’
Then produce a competitor analysis; in this you want to identify roughly five main competitors along with their biggest strengths and weaknesses. For instance, this might relate to their marketing strategies, their delivery policy or their operating hours. Then you can try to determine how your competitors will respond when you enter the market. For instance, will they slash their prices, steal your ideas or maybe increase their use of aggressive advertisements? The last step is to offer specific marketing techniques, like email marketing , press and media, internet ads, blogging and countless other strategies. To determine which are right … Continue reading Study notes from ‘The Secrets to Writing a Successful Business Plan’
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