Our just-completed analysis of 40 direct-to-consumer brands revealed several cross-selling techniques.
prodmgmt
The best flash sales build urgency that aligns with long-term goals, brand positioning, and channel constraints.
Sean Jacobsohn, founder of the Failure Museum, shares notable product failures and the lessons we can learn from them.
How to get better, faster at the skill of uncovering demand, which underpins the skill domains of sales, marketing, and product.
The Startup CTO's Handbook, a book covering leadership, management and technical topics for leaders of software engineering teams - ZachGoldberg/Startup-CTO-Handbook
Companies that want to launch a B2B marketplace face a choice: own the platform, spin it off, or create a startup.
I asked an 🍎 Apple Vision Pro designer turned solopreneur how he sells HW.
Regarding marketing and selling products to consumers, product imagery is unquestionably one of the most important selling points. When considering the prevalence and dominance of e-commerce and digital shopping channels, traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores may question where this leaves them. There is an argument to be made regarding the benefits of seeing physical products up […]
NEXT POST: Part II of my thoughts on TikTok, on how the app design is informed by its algorithm and vice versa in a virtuous circle.
An interview with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman about Stargate, DeepSeek, and where the margins and moats will come with models.
AI-powered platforms transform a decades-old pricing practice.
When the truck makes a delivery at the nearby True Value hardware store, Danny needs to figure out which shelf to put it on. Should the extension cords go next to the hoses? After all, they both do…
Thoughts on business models that don't seem to make perfect sense
Download this free Competitive Battlecard Benchmark tool to see how your organization's competitive battlecards stack up against industry best practices.
Discovery is challenging; it can be hard to know what to research, how to do discovery as a team, and how to get buy-in. Follow these 7 tips for smoother discovery efforts.
Thoughts on business models that don't seem to make perfect sense
And why you will never get Taylor Swift tickets at face value
Use this glossary to quickly clarify key terms and concepts related to product management and UX.
How to build upon a previous experiment, without throwing it all away.
Questions on A/B testing are being increasingly asked in interviews but reliable resources to prepare for these are still far and few…
Multivariate tests indicate how various UI elements interact with each other and are a tool for making incremental improvements to a design.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
The best way to optimise your website is usually the simplest.
This is a story of how a software company was able to start a conversation with 8x more of their users by cutting the length of their emails by 90%. You could set up a test of this method in less than an hour. The Problem One of the most
Big success. Bigger failure. And lots of lessons. Learn why building a growth team may be a multi-million dollar mistake.
The biggest question in ecommerce A/B testing is not “how.”
How speciality running shoe brand Brooks refocused on performance running — and turned the company around.
Dozens of founders have used this technique to transform the cash-flow of their businesses. Now it's your turn.
The authoritative guide on how Amazon does WBRs (from former exec Colin Bryar): how it works, how to do it, and how Amazon uses it to win.
People often say things like "become data driven" without explaining what that means or how to do it. This is everything you need to know to actually become data driven, from scratch, using the same first principles that Amazon, Koch, and Toyota used back in their day.
From royal connections to succession plans, explore LVMH's journey in mastering desirability and achieving global dominance in the luxury industry.
Pneumatic tubes were supposed to revolutionize the world but have fallen by the wayside. Except in hospitals.
27 examples (with actual prompts) of how product managers are using Perplexity today
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.theatlantic.com%2Fassets%2Fmedia%2Fimg%2Fmt%2F2019%2F03%2FGettyImages_103742864%2Flead_720_405.jpg%3Fmod%3D1552587838)
Correction fluids have improbably outlasted the typewriter and survived the rise of the digital office.
A collection of bookmarks, resources, articles for product designers. - ttt30ga/awesome-product-design
How Google figures out the price of a product across websites
This is a series where we delve into the world of product management. This week we discuss the art of understanding your users.
By providing a foundation for collaboration, platforms can create network effects, where the value of the platform increases as more participants join.
Amazon's marketplace accounts for most of the revenue for thousands of merchants. Therein lies the fear.
This incredibly ambitious and thoroughly-executed project is by Charlie Humble-Thomas, done while pursuing his Masters in the Design Products program at the RCA. Called Conditional Longevity, it asks the question: "How long should objects last?" Seeking the answer, Humble-Thomas tackles an oft-discarded object, the umbrella, and designs three variants: Recyclable,
After interviewing dozens of founders, we pulled together the biggest lessons on finding PMF that stuck with us.
Pushing back on the cult of complexity.
When Paris F.C. made its tickets free, it began an experiment into the connection between fans and teams, and posed a question about the value of big crowds to televised sports.
Staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called ‘Big River.’ The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices.
This framework outlines three distinct archetypes of PMF which help you understand your product’s place in the market and determine how your company operates.
The Price Sensitivity Meter (PSM) is a market technique for determining consumer price preferences. It was introduced in 1976 by Dutch economist Peter van Westendorp. The technique has been used by a wide variety of researchers in the market research industry. The PSM approach has been a staple technique for addressing pricing issues for the past 20 years. It historically has been promoted by many professional market research associations in their training and professional development programs. The PSM approach continues to be used widely throughout the market research industry and descriptions can be easily found in many market research websites.
When you hear a company like Substack or Canva make a promise, you may get pretty cynical that they’re going to keep it. Honestly, I get that.
Deezer has deleted 26 million of what it terms as "useless" tracks, which could be an indicator of what's to come from other platforms.
Learn how to create customer habits using powerful triggers like time, mood, location, and social influences. Discover techniques to boost product usage.
At most small and medium-sized e-commerce retailers, prices are typically set and updated in an ad hoc fashion without one clear owner. The process often starts by using a gross margin target, followed by some comparison with competitors, and then some adjustments from there. Many of these retailers would quickly admit that this isn’t an optimal strategy, and that they are likely leaving money on the table — and they’re often right. The authors’ experience with price testing has shown that there is actually a significant amount of money left on the table when pricing is left un-optimized.
Its number one priority: repair relations with disgruntled distributors. Then revive the funky packaging, adventurous flavors, and anything-goes attitude that first made the brand soar.
The pricing models of the top B2B SaaS companies, the strategies to iterate on, case studies of successful changes, and everything else you need to know
Seasoned product leader and Slack’s CPO Noah Desai Weiss shares the three-step framework he leans on to make quality product decisions with just the right amount of risk.
I’ve learned early in life that game selection is a HUGE determinant of success. Let me tell you about the worst game I’ve fought & the easiest bet I’ve ever won. Both taught me about choosing unfair fights and playing by your own rules… Let’s start with the entertaining worst game. In high school I played football. I was an offensive/defensive lineman. I was half way decent enough to play in the Ernie Davis All-Star game my senior year.
Former streaming service subscribers on why they have ditched mod cons for MP3s, CDs and other DIY music formats
The author details two examples of defining customer churn in contexts where it is not explicit: Retail and Banking.
The commerce technology stack is changing. And the ability to move information from one system or platform to another is, perhaps, the essential feature mid-sized or enterprise businesses should look for in software providers.
Product lead Peter Yang taps into his decade-plus career to explain why staying focused on the craft is a product manager’s superpower.
Last updated: Jan 30, 2021 Are you looking for ideas to unlock your long-term business value? If you shook your head in yes, remember that business model is one of the ways to streamline your business process. Precisely, a business model is a holistic framework to define, understand, and design your entire business in the…
Business models based on the compiled list at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647. I find the link very hard to browse, so I made a simple version in Markdown instead. · GitHub
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fpocket-syndicated-images.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farticles%2F4096%2F1587405892_ezgif.com-webp-to-jpg6.jpg)
Did Tom Cruise really dance in his underwear and a pair of Ray-Bans in “Risky Business”? If you answered “yes,” you might be suffering from the Mandela Effect.
Some examples of disruptive innovation include: Disruptor Disruptee Personal computers Mainframe and mini computers Mini mills Integrated steel mills Cellular phones Fixed line telephony Community colleges Four-year colleges Discount retailers Full-service department stores Retail medical clinics Traditional doctor’s offices As companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ needs evolve, most […]
As shopping malls across America struggle to attract customers, fill floor space and ultimately stay open, strip malls are apparently seeing a surge in value and popularity.
Lessons learned from a year of startup life.
Identify and target personas of keywords, competitors, Reddit discussions, and more.
The founders of Pilot have started three times over, starting with Ksplice (sold to Oracle in 2011) and then Zulip (acquired by Dropbox in 2014).
Developing large-scale datasets has been critical in computer vision and natural language processing. These datasets, rich in visual and textual information, are fundamental to developing algorithms capable of understanding and interpreting images. They serve as the backbone for enhancing machine learning models, particularly those tasked with deciphering the complex interplay between visual elements in images and their corresponding textual descriptions. A significant challenge in this field is the need for large-scale, accurately annotated datasets. These are essential for training models but are often not publicly accessible, limiting the scope of research and development. The ImageNet and OpenImages datasets, containing human-annotated
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about some principles of human psychology and how they relate to UX design.
And how can you figure it out what they really need
Open-source platforms are flexible, composable, and highly customizable. Here's the all-new update to our longstanding list.
Why Systems of Intelligence™ are the Next Defensible Business Model
Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used for timeboxing in Agile principles. In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud. The cards are revealed, and the estimates are then discussed. By hiding the figures in this way, the group can avoid the cognitive bias of anchoring, where the first number spoken aloud sets a precedent for subsequent estimates.
Proprietary items work best if retailers differentiate them through either cost or innovation and are thoughtful about choosing categories, experts say.
Hey everyone! I’ve mostly started sharing my favorite memos and transcripts over at A Letter a Day, but as it’s more of a tasting menu, I’m reticent to post multiple memos or tran…
The unbundling of Excel is just as important as the unbundling of Craigslist. Here's what you need to know about the Excel Economy and how SaaS companies can take advantage of different verticals and use cases that Excel has dominated.
A deep dive into why the DOJ thinks RGSP makes ad auctions unfair, and why Google believes it creates a better user experience.
Two principles on collecting data, from the field of Statistical Process Control. As with most principles in SPC, this is both simpler and more important than you might think.
Eliciting product feedback elegantly is a competitive advantage for LLM-software. Over the weekend, I queried Google’s Bard, & noticed the elegant feedback loop the product team has incorporated into their product. I asked Bard to compare the 3rd-row leg room of the leading 7-passenger SUVs. At the bottom of the post is a little G button, which double-checks the response using Google searches. I decided to click it. This is what I would be doing in any case ; spot-checking some of the results.
Charting ESPN’s rise, including how it build leverage over the cable TV providers, and its ongoing decline, caused by the Internet.
eBay's new generative AI tool, rolling out on iOS first, can write a product listing from a single photo -- or so the company claims.
Understand the ins and outs of hierarchical clustering, and how it applies to marketing campaign analysis in the banking industry.
An obsessively detailed guide to Customer Lifetime Value techniques and real-world applications
The grocer created a cult brand with sales of $16B+ a year by doing the opposite of industry best-practices (from wages to product to ads).
Applying Reinforcement Learning strategies to real-world use cases, especially in dynamic pricing, can reveal many surprises
These tools can help you analyze PPC competitors, track search trends or design ad creative – all without spending a dime.
By Sam Cortez, managing editor and outreach specialist for Scalefluence.comMerchandising is the process and practice of displaying and arranging products for the best customer experience. The concept of merchandising is based on guiding prospective customers through the buyer’s journey and presenting them with the right products, at the right time and place, in the right quantity, and with the best prices.
Companies make two key mistakes when they try to compete with a free entrant.
Like other meta-platforms **the web thrives or declines to the extent it can accomplish the lion's share of the things we expect most computers to do**. Platform Adjacency Theory explains how to expand in a principled way and what we risk when natural expansion is prevented mechanisms that prevent effective competition.
8 stories · A guide to building an end-to-end marketing mix optimization solution for your organization.
On a flight from Paris to London in 1983 Jane Birkin, an Anglo-French chanteuse and actress, spilled the contents of her overstuffed straw...
Patterns and Practices in the Creation, Rise, and Fall of Platforms
Applying causal machine learning to trim the campaign target audience
archived 22 Jul 2023 03:08:13 UTC
Many of my discussions with product leaders (CPOs, VPs and others who manage teams of product folks) are about the substance of product management: portfolios, competing stakeholders, pricing & packaging, tarot cards as a revenue forecasting model. Last week, though, in my product leadership workshop, we had an extended discussion about
Plus! Wrappers and Layoffs; The Movies; Evaporating Sanctions; Bonds; Errors in Translation; Diff Jobs
An MIT study finds the same consumers tend to purchase failed products. Dubbed “harbingers of failure,” these buyers may provide new window into consumer behavior and behavioral economics.
Lean Canvas is a 1-page business plan template created by Ash Maurya that helps you deconstruct your idea into its key assumptions.
One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to user experience is that we must eliminate as many questions and barriers as possible.
This simple method positions your product to be more valuable, especially against competitors who aim to disrupt you, or you them.
The Apple co-founder and the super-producer share similar ideas regarding taste and creativity.
The benefits of Amazon's "Look inside" book label applies to many products. Apparel, bags, housewares, and more could experience more conversions with an inside peek.
Businesses are bound to make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you build your apology message and your careful attention to executing it appropriately can make the difference between losing those customers or increasing their loyalty. When delivered well, your apology message can improve the customer relationship to the point where it is stronger than if the mistake had never happened — a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox. In this article, the author outlines five steps for writing an effective apology message, and explains why it’s important to share the apology process internally and with external stakeholders. It not only shows vulnerability from the organization, but also shows other customers that the company can be relied upon in times of distress.
This article will take you through everything about Cohort Analysis that you should know. What is Cohort Analysis in Data Science?
One person's trash may well be another's "come up," or what the rapper Macklemore calls hidden treasures in the song "Thrift Shop," but only if secondhand shoppers follow the rapper's lead and dig through ...
When trying to make language either more concrete or more abstract, one helpful approach is to focus on either the how or the why.
How Data Scientists can learn from how a Product Manager prioritizes features and requirements to build a successful product.
By choosing open-source alternatives to commercial proprietary software, it not only save money but...
Sometimes there is a replacement for name brand tools. Knowing who makes what is the best way to save big when building your tool collection.
Telfar has introduced a “Live Price” pricing model based on customer demand.
The US thrift market has grown substantially in recent years as thrifting has become a popular pursuit of Gen Z shoppers.
OpenAI today announced its support of new third-party plugins for ChatGPT, and it already has Twitter buzzing about the company's potential platform play.
General Partner Connie Chan on how leading brands are using AI and other technology to combine the serendipitous discovery of offline shopping with the infinite options of online shopping. Today, most of the Western world revolves around search-based online commerce. This means that most shoppers type directly what they want into a store search bar,...
Optimizing your ecommerce checkout process is crucial to reduce cart abandonment rates, as it affects...
Quote "ChatGPT is like a genie in a bottle, but instead of granting you three wishes, it gives you endless responses until you realize you've been chatting with a machine for hours." 😂
How to adjust CATE to consider costs associated with your treatments
The secrets of Zoom, Amazon, and Apple products.
The world's leading online dictionary: English definitions, synonyms, word origins, example sentences, word games, and more. A trusted authority for 25+ years!
Kuo-Hua Chou, special to DIGITIMES Asia
It’s a place for obsessives to buy, sell and geek out over classic cars. The company pops open its hood after 100,000 auctions to explain why.
Google's targeted ad initiative AdSense was initially launched as “content targeting advertising” 20 years ago this month. Here’s how it changed the internet.
Make it easy for your customers to do business with you.
21 Product Management Frameworks Effective product management is critical to the success of any product development process. It helps to ensure that everything to be done matches the needs or pain points of customers and
Meta descriptions do not influence organic rankings. But the descriptions appear in search snippets more often than not and thus impact clicks on organic listings.
Learn how search engines process images and key image SEO tactics to implement from this comprehensive overview.
If you got to here, it means your project is moving forwards. That is great! As you probably know, organisation is vital in mobile apps development. That is why the development process includes important tools and concepts, such as roadmaps and prioritisation, that help developers build valuable pro
In our "Paths to Product-Market Fit," Retool founder and CEO David Hsu sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share how the internal tools company hypothesized, tested and iterated its way to 100 happy customers
The legal decision that fostered the idea of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and why it still sticks around even though that decision was overturned.
This article was initially published on Lago's blog, an open-source billing API, and was ranked #1 on...
Cost-plus pricing on the surface seems straightforward. But then market forces intervene.
Who has their hand on the dial? Talk with someone who works at Apple, Amazon, Google, Linkedin, Facebook, etc, and they’ll be happy to give you tips on how to work the platform to your advant…
Reap the benefits of an optimized product requirements document.
Graph-based models capture correlations efficiently enough to enable machine learning at scale.
Notes from books and other interesting things that I've read. Table of contents at the end 👇 - mgp/book-notes
There is a fallacy in believing your current performance is indicative of future success: Performance is a trailing indicator. Power is a leading one.
Requirements Experts is known for being the leading resource for requirements methodologies, training, tools, and templates
A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers, with the emphasis on startups - kuchin/awesome-cto
Few things are more liberating or intoxicating than controlling your own fate.
Plus! Market-Making; Poaching and Equity Currency; China's Covid Economy; The Cost of AI; Friendshoring; Diff Jobs
How can you tell the companies who are earnestly trying to improve apart from the ones who sound all polished and healthy from the outside, whilst rotting on the inside? This seems to be on a lot o…
Inside the under-the-radar business that makes more money than Amazon Prime.
A customer relationship management tool can help a business grow and scale at an affordable price. Here is a list of simple CRMs for businesses of all sizes.
Having a psychological approach to creating content helps you craft more effective messages to the right audience.
This is a book summary of The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky. Read The Art of Profitability summary to review key ideas and lessons from the book.
A professional explains why brand names have gotten weirder.
by John MahoneyThis is a bucket of chum. Chum is decomposing fish matter that elicits a purely neurological brain stem response in its target consumer: larger fish, like sharks. It signals that they should let go, deploy their nictitating ...
The former HP CEO boasted of her friendship with Apple’s leader — but he took her to the cleaners with the iPod
Two months after the startup went bankrupt, administrators have summarized the $80M+ debt the company has accumulated, most of which will not be paid. The highest offer to buy Pollen’s business assets - but without its liabilities - currently stands at only $250K. Details.
A new recommerce venture offers all of the benefits of buying second hand plus a means to help fund social service programs in local communities, such as job training and youth mentorship. Do you see retailers trying to raise the visibility of their secondhand offerings in light of rising prices?
The Fort Worth apparel company celebrates a century as a blank cultural canvas.
Piano-building was once one of the country’s largest industries. Today, only two companies remain in business.
Why does strategy tend to stall when the rubber hits the road? Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer of Cockroach Labs, shares an essential guide for creating a resilient strategy that’s still standing next year.
Some fans were outraged when man-of-the-people Bruce Springsteen charged more than $5,000 per seat for his upcoming concert. The high prices were the result of a dynamic pricing system, in which prices are adjusted upward in response to strong demand. This controversy illustrates seven lessons that managers should keep in mind when adjusting prices, including the need for clear communications, longtime customers’ expectation that they deserve a discount, and the fact that high prices will raise expectations about quality and service.
The noble but undervalued craft of maintenance could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids, and serve as a useful framework for addressing climate change and other pressing planetary constraints.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step Lǎozi 老子 I just had lunch with Shenwei, one of my ex-students who had just taken a job in a mid-sized consulting firm. After a bit of catch…
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too
The second part of a three part piece on incentives. It turns out that if you've grokked the primary incentives of an industry, you can do one other thing: identify aberrations, and use that as a guide to dig further.
Everything these days is a subscription. And honestly, on reflection, subscriptions are complete horseshit.
Plus! Watercooler Shows; Smart Thermostats; Substitutes and Complements; Monetization; Apple Ads; Diff Jobs
What is pattern library, UI kit, and brand voice? Learn all the terms that you need to build and use a long-lasting design system.
America traded eating out for ordering ahead during the pandemic—and chains noticed.
Determining which promoted auction items to display in a merchandising placement is a multi-sided customer challenge that presents opportunities to both surface amazing auction inventory to buyers and help sellers boost visibility on their auction listings.
Automating a bill of landing is like automating any other process in your system. It will save you money and time.
Software and tools not only help you manage your time better but provide helpful insights that you wouldn't otherwise see in a Google or Facebook interface.
How we communicate makes an enormous impact on our work. One of the best strategies for improving communication in a team is making it open
CX trends will continue to influence B2B software as the importance of leading with experience and product becomes more critical for success.
What it's like putting Amazon's famed Working Backwards process to practice in a small company context, and what was surprising and difficult about it.
33K votes, 2.3K comments. 21M subscribers in the dataisbeautiful community. DataIsBeautiful is for visualizations that effectively convey…
Customer retention begins at onboarding, so use these metrics to help you track the success of your customer onboarding processes.
We work with our NFX Guild on this mental model for greatness from day 1. Now, we are sharing it with the rest of the startup community.
A deep dive into writing detailed planning docs from one of the most successful companies in the world
The zipper is one of those inventions—along with the bicycle—that seems as though it should have occurred much earlier in history. How complicated...
An essential overview on the most-used barcode types. 1D- and 2D-barcodes for retail, logistics, ticketing and more. ➜ Learn more now.
In an inflationary era when customers are increasingly strapped for cash and hunting for discounts, a category of ultra-low-priced grocers that sell the unsellable is growing in popularity. Do you expect mainstream grocers to change their protocols for "unsellable" CPG items if inflation persists?
Use these tips to quickly analyze performance data and identify high-impact PPC optimizations that will move the needle.
Plus! BNPL; Coopetition; Marketplaces and Ads; Last Mile, Last Users; Value and Rates; Diff Jobs
Technology, startups, programming, technical management and software architecture
Left unchecked, pricing algorithms might unintentionally discriminate and collude to fix prices
In many board rooms, the most important go-to-market number this quarter is pipeline health. For some companies, the pipeline may be less clear than a quarter or two ago. Summer seasonality may play a role. Macroeconomics might also be lurking within the numbers. Pipeline fluctuations are normal. But any meaningful & unexpected surprise warrants introspection. Pipeline analysis often has four parts: Craft the sales sandwich to predict your GTM conversion rates & determine if close rates have changed in parallel.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23902769/VRG_Illo__226036_J_Hu.jpg)
The Japanese define quality in two ways — atarimae hinshitsu and miryokuteki hinshitsu. Understanding the difference between them is the key to building products that users love.
Microinteraction best practices that improve e-commerce UX.
When you’re defining your software or new product’s requirements, a set of criteria come into play. Acceptance criteria are one part of those criteria that are either agreed upon or come out of client/customer discussions. Unlike requirements, acceptance criteria define what must happen when a decision point such as an objective has been met. Acceptance ... Read more
Tap into people's unspoken needs to create breakthrough innovations.
Store brands are shrouded in secrecy. Who makes them?
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fmelmagazine.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F02%2FGreeting_Cards.jpg)
Believe it or not, the biggest demographic driving the greeting card industry is millennials.
Epson has gained some scrutiny in recent weeks after the company disabled a printer that was otherwise working fine, leading to accusations of planned obsolescence. Epson knows its printers will stop working without simple maintenance at a predictable point in the future, and it knows that it won't ...
Amazon will continue to be highly competitive. Want to be successful? Optimize your product listings to the fullest with these tips.
What is an Opportunity Solution Tree? Learn more about opportunity solution trees and the 4 steps involved in creating them.
There is a huge and ever-widening gap between the devices we use to make the web and the devices most people use to consume it. It’s also no secret
Why might people decline an offer of up to $10,000 just to keep their feet on the ground?
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fpocket-syndicated-images.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farticles%2F8069%2F1658869065_62e04956a5f9e.png)
The tiny photo processing kiosks could be found everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s. And that was the problem.
The most significant bottleneck in the adoption of healthcare technology to date has been distribution. Over the last decade, generations of digital health companies have struggled to reach escape velocity—not because their products and services weren’t transformative, but because they failed to find an executable path for sustainable distribution and value capture. Some of that...
In Deliberately Underselling as Sales Strategy, I wrote about the importance of sizing contracts below customer needs to ensure customer success. “A key part of the formula: crafting the right account executive compensation structure to reward this strategy.” I received a pile of questions asking for more detail. Since then, I’ve spoken to many sales leaders & Lee Kirkpatrick who originally surfaced the concept during Office Hours on how to do this well.
These five tactics will help simplify and clarify your technical copy.
Whether or not you should pursue a catalog strategy is a question that deserves significant thought. As digital marketing becomes more complex, it may make a lot of sense to send out correctly designed catalogs to the right customers. For e-commerce retailers without physical stores, catalogs can effectively mimic stores’ sensory experiences to enhance customer affinity. For multichannel retailers, by understanding the channel preferences of current customers through transactional data, multichannel retailers can add an effective catalog marketing channel to their store and e-commerce channel strategies.
Though the industry is called venture capital, the goal of a VC isn’t to maximize every risk. Instead, we try to understand all the risks a business might face and weigh those risks with the reward - the exit. Here are the major risks that I typically review when a startup pitches. Market timing risk - Is now the right time for the business? It’s often hard to evaluate this risk, but nevertheless, it’s an important consideration.
Over the past few years, marketing on the web has become way too much fun. I remember trying to figure out what “hits” on awstats [http://awstats.sourceforge.net/] meant in high school, and I distinctly can recall how disappointed I was when I found out the true meaning. Nowadays,
Go-to-Market Plan [Product Name] [author1@, author2@...] Last Updated: [ _/_/_ ]
Many startups scramble to create a "minimum viable product," or MVP, to get a version of their product to market quickly for testing. It’s a great way to cost-effectively test a website or app with real users. But be careful, if your MVP is too minimalist, it could torpedo your company's future.
A few months ago, I got this email from a customer: It would be wonderful if there was a way to tag/assign forwarded emails to specific task lists within client projects. The “email forwards” secti…
Not every business needs to have habit-forming products. Here's how two companies hooked customers and formed habits with products they rarely used.
![image](https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/q_auto/f_auto/w_auto/image_81_690616509" width="500px"> Last night, Elon Musk inspired the audience at D. It is hard to overstate the scope and breadth of his ambitions or the impact of his start ups PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX on payments, automobiles and space. Behind the desire to listen to great men like Musk speak about their perspectives is a hope to receive some insight, some pearl of wisdom. Last night, I came away with two of those both about startups.
Having a playbook of commonly used tactics lets team members understand their role in executing each play. A play is an agreed upon set of actions the team takes in a given situation.
Leverage marketing automation and customer data in a single Customer Engagement Platform.
I was recently talking with Mark Roberge, CRO at Hubspot, for a podcast we’re launching soon. I asked him, “What is a common question that…
“I’m into distribution, I’m like Atlantic I got them mutherfuckers flying’ cross the Atlantic” –Rick Ross, “Hustlin’“ When I ask new entrepreneurs what their distribution model will be, I often get answers like: “I don’t want to hire any of those Rolex-wearing, BMW-driving, overly aggressive enterprise sales slimeballs, so we are going to distribute our product like Dropbox did.” In...
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I'm also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don't blame you. I don't often talk
When I first decided to start The Silicon Valley Product Group, I had just left eBay and had some very strong opinions about what makes great product teams, and great product cultures...
Guest One key risk facing marketplace operators is the threat of disintermediation, when a buyer chooses to work directly with a seller and bypasses your platform. Through our experience investing in several pioneering marketplace companies, we've seen a handful of clever ways to fight this.
Explore powerful business model patterns by iconic firms and leverage our interactive software for business model innovation.
The product management and startup worlds are buzzing about the importance of "validation". In this entry, I'll explain how this idea orig...
Criticizing Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs is like speaking out against motherhood and apple pie. The last time I criticized VOC programs, someone left a comment chastising me for presuming that a bank could know what its customers wanted without asking them.
One of my favorite things about Ruby on Rails is that it’s a very opinionated framework. It makes key decisions up and down the technology stack so that I don’t have to. As DHH puts it, Rails is omakase: A team of chefs picked out the ingredients, designed
Get 3 talks to help you understand how to use Jobs To Be Done in your business.
Note: With the arrival of my son, I’m slowing down on the blogging. Give me a couple months (or more sleepless nights), and I’ll be back…
Hubstaff founder Dave Nevogt shares how to test your startup idea by analyzing model, market and concept.
Do you rely too heavily on product management to ensure your product is successful? Joe Kinsella explores the importance of everyone in a startup being in PM.
Product is at the epicenter of everything a product led growth (PLG) company does. So how does the product organization and its PMs need to adapt? Find out here.
This is the story of how you’re buying your enterprise software the wrong way. Probably your appliances, too. This is an excerpt from my guide, “Enterprise Software Confidential.” This post is also available in Chinese thanks to Xu Zhi. Some years ago, I had a broken GE washer. Pretty sure I knew the culprit, but if […]
Conversations with customers are valuable, but they have to be the right type of conversations – not merely questions about forgotten passwords and the like. They have to add value, for you, and them.
If you're building a product, you have to be great at saying No. Not 'maybe' or 'later'. The only word is No. Building a great product isn't about creating tons of tactically useful features which are tangentially related. It's about delivering a cohesive product with well defined parameters.
Amazon director Kintan Brahmbhatt, who's helped develop and refine the product strategy behind the Alexa and Amazon Music, explains the ways in which friction can live in your product, throwing roadblocks in a user's path to becoming a customer. He explains how to uncover counterintuitive insights that can pinpoint friction points, and spells out the three-step process for eliminating them.
Every startup I see invariably puts up a competitive analysis slide that plots performance on a X/Y graph with their company in the top right. The slide is a holdover from when existing companies l…
I’m now six months into Shopify. So far it’s going basically on schedule: as I was told, “Your first couple months you’re going to have zero idea what’s going on. Then around month three you’ll com…
Decentralized reputation is one of the most sought after prizes in the cypherpunk community: to invent a censorship-resistant protocol to make and parse unforgeable trust relationships between…
Building a two-sided market is probably the hardest thing you can build as an entrepreneur. It's so hard that a few weeks ago, I organized a Marketplace
So perhaps you’re burned out in the consumer software game, or are just considering a pivot into the enterprise (“B2B”) market. You’ve heard that there’s a lot of opportunity in “selling to enterpr…
Hits are more valuable than ever, mostly because they're more rare than ever. The Zipf Distribution, also described in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, helps us understand just how valuable hi…
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
Many new products fail because their creators use an ineffective market segmentation mechanism, according to HBS professor Clayton Christensen. It's time for companies to look at products the way customers do: as a way to get a job done.
It can be more important than word of mouth.
This past week our Community / Growth Manager, Brad Patterson, spoke at the European Cloud Expo in London on the topic Try Before You Buy – Successes and Misgivings in the European Cloud Ecosystem. Also speaking were Jason Turner, director of Business development at Cedexis, António Ferreira, CEO at Luna Cloud, Lee […]
I can be pedantic about user acquisition. The truth is that consumer web and mobile applications are under increasing pressure to demonstrate explosive exponential traction. Building a great prod…
Analyzing the SERPs for these micro intents will help you create the right content that a searcher will want to find.
Today's consumers expect free shipping for most items. But it's not always obvious for merchants to know when and how to offer it. Here's our all-new update for analyzing shipping costs and free delivery.
Why has this problematic, unloved technology taken over retail?
Get the best insights into the latest trends and all things human insight, CX, UX , product, marketing and research on our blog.
Projects are a popular way of organizing software efforts, but long-running product teams are often superior
01 Intro One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. The book makes two main arguments: a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking b) Our brains deliberately hi
New research indicates that consumers are catching on and may be annoyed by certain nudges, potentially limiting their effectiveness.
Your product can’t suck. That’s a given. But it’s also not enough to be a good product that doesn’t hook your customer and connect to their pain points.
Insights and Resources for Tech Entrepreneurs
Scroll down for a template — but I recommend you read the post before you try to use it.
For an aspiring product manager (PM), there are three primary considerations when evaluating the role: core competencies, emotional intelligence (EQ), and company fit. The best PMs have mastered the core competencies, have a high EQ, and work for the right company for them. The last requires thinking about the level of technical skill the company requires, its philosophy of the PM role, the stage of the company, and the relationship you’ll have with senior management.
When it comes to making money online you’re going to have a lot of options at your disposal. Frankly, it can be quite overwhelming just choosing an online
What consumers truly value can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. But universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in existing markets or break into new markets. In the right combinations, the authors’ analysis shows, those elements will pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth. Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led the authors—all with Bain & Company—to identify 30 “elements of value.” Their model traces its conceptual roots to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers: describing their behavior around products and services. They arrange the elements in a pyramid according to four kinds of needs, with “functional” at the bottom, followed by “emotional,” “life changing,” and then “social impact” at the peak. The authors provide real-world examples to demonstrate how companies have used the elements to grow revenue, refine product design to better meet customers’ needs, identify where customers perceive strengths and weaknesses, and cross-sell services.
This post is all about network effects and critical mass. But it’s also about applying those concepts as important mental models in business, so I will share a short story about a business decision I once made that required me to consider network effects. The Internet bubble had popped by 2002, and a lot...
Increasing price is not easyIt requires careful review of customers you want to serve, their needs and alternatives available to them. Increasing price of an extremely popular product is even harde…
I spent a lot of money on Google ads last year across Search, Display, Youtube, Discovery, and Gmail. Here's what I learned.
The limitations of algorithmic curation of news and culture has prompted a return to the use of actual humans to select, edit, and explain. Who knows, this might spread to another less traditional…
Rob Walling looks at how traffic sources have a half-life, and that recognizing this is a key to successful startup marketing.
The rise of on-demand marketplaces has brought with it varied business models, across number of industries. This framework tries to explain how a marketplace’s vertical impacts its business m…
Adding new layers of complementary businesses on top of your core product can fight the “gravity effect” of scaling and boost long-term growth.
A technology advantage isn’t enough to build an enduring enterprise SaaS company because at the core, all SaaS software share the same architecture. A relational database stores data and a web site presents the data. This is true for CRM (Salesforce), marketing automation (Marketo), email (Exchange), content management systems (Sharepoint) and so on. Because SaaS apps use standard databases, engineers can easily transfer the data from one database to another. I’m greatly simplifying here because differences in architecture may exist, but in principle it’s simple to extract, transform and load data from one relational database into another.
Antitrust law will have to evolve to cope.
This post is meant to list and briefly explain the successful marketplace monetisation strategies we have seen across our portfolio and…
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.
New products change what we buy, but new platforms have much broader effects.
Are consumers more likely to buy if they see the price before the product, or vice versa? Uma Karmarkar and colleagues scan the brains of shoppers to find out.
When you understand the difference between a feature and a product, designing that successful product will be easier.
Each day on Tech Twitter, we get up in the morning, open up the website, and then go see what it is we’re mad about. A few days ago, it was this: The concept of “pay to get a better place in l…
How Letting People Choose Their Price Can Make You a Millionaire
Reflections on the 20th anniversary of a $100+ billion product
You don’t want to waste your time and money building a product no one will want to use or pay for. So, first get out of the building and talk to your customers. But there’s a world of difference between talk and action. What your customers say, and what they eventually do. Talking, and putting the […]
While product managers may not build the actual product, they do produce something very tangible for a team: decisions.
Decentralized reputation is one of the most sought after prizes in the cypherpunk community: to invent a censorship-resistant protocol to create and parse unforgeable trust relationships between…
Pricing is hard. Make it too low and you miss out on profit; too high and you miss out on sales. These pricing experiments will help you get it right.
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
Molly Graham helped forge a work culture at Facebook that's withstood huge amounts of growth. Today, she's something of a rapid scaling expert. Here's the key to doing it right, she says.
This post originally appeared on Hackthings.com So you have a hardware product in the works? Before you can launch it, one of the most important things you need to figure out is pricing. Unlike software, you can’t AB test your pricing and change it for different customers, which means your product has one price and …
Make your brand messages viral with the 6 STEPPS from Jonah Berger's Contagious, including 75 real-life marketing examples to learn from.
Many businesses are managing a sharp decline in sales during the ongoing coronavirus crisis. An instinctive reaction may be to cut low-performing products from their menu of offerings — but this isn’t always the best way forward. The authors lay out a case for adding an ultra-expensive product to their portfolio. There are five reasons to do it: To increase sales across other products; to communicate expertise; to convey prestige; to garner publicity; and to move upmarket.
Why stores like Trader Joe’s succeed.
Ride-sharing is a winner-take-all market that depends on controlling demand more than it does supply.
Technology has made it easier, but strategic rules still apply.
It's OK to ask a B2B prospect if they would use your product during customer discovery. Just don't to stop at "Yes" and assume validation or a likely sale.
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
You can charge much more than you think, if you reposition your value-proposition. Here's how.
Raise a glass of bubbly to the count of Champagne.
We are all too familiar with price unbundling. Remember the first time Airlines charged for checkin bags? Or a restaurant charged for salad dressing? The simple recipe for price unbundling is to s…
Closing stores requires a deliberate, systematic approach to price markdowns and inventory transfers. The result, say Ananth Raman and Nathan Craig, is significant value for the retailer and new opportunities for others.
This is the first post in a three post series on user acquisition. The topic of this blog post may seem simplistic to those of you who have been in the trenches, working hard to grow visits and vis…
R&D leaders can boost productivity by using advanced analytics to create stronger, faster engineering teams.
An in-depth overview of 20 product prioritization techniques and a periodic table to make sense of them all.
Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies. — Awhile back I blogged about Ashwin, one of my ex…
In the furiously competitive world of tech startups, where good entrepreneurs tend to think of comparable ideas around the same time and "hot spaces" get crowded quickly with well-funded hopefuls, competitive moats matter more than ever. Ideally, as your startup scales, you want to not only be able
In working with a number of SaaS portfolio companies, I have found that there are two causes of churn that occur more frequently than any others. They are: Failure to successfully onboard the customer Loss of the champion who drove the purchase Looking at these in order: Failure to successfully onboard It’s easy to understand […]
There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.
If your startup is building a consumer product, your product has to be viral. For consumer products, the average revenue per user tends to…
Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product
In a world of abundance, an authentic, meaning-rich story can drive a company’s margins up.
My name is Molson Hart. I’m the CEO of a consumer products company I founded 10 years ago, called Viahart. We design and distribute toys…
In good times and bad, dollar stores seem to thrive. But how are they are able to make so much money selling things so cheaply?
Try these 100 growth hacking strategies and techniques to grow your business with minimal investment or effort.
Goods versus Services: The next trillion dollar opportunity Marketplace startups have done incredibly well over the first few decades of the internet, reinventing the way we shop for goods, but less so for services. In this essay, we argue that a breakthrough is on its way: The first phase of the internet has been...
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
Hello, my name is Andrew, and I can’t stop disagreeing.
Perhaps the most egregious is a failure of imagination.
Companies are a sequencing of loops. While it’s possible to stumble into an initial core loop that works, the companies that are successful in the long term are the ones that can repeatedly find the next loop. However, this evolution is poorly understood relative to its existential impact on a company’s trajectory. Figma is a … Continue reading Why Figma Wins →
What’s wrong with today’s entrepreneurism
An online Game of Thrones quiz got a million online hits for HBO.
Traction PDF Summary by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares pinpoints how startups can climb the ladder at lightning speed and learn how to expand your company.
I’m a startup product growth guy with a social gaming background. I currently work as VP of Growth at Relcy, a mobile search engine. A few companies I’ve worked with on growth in the past (HIRED $702…
There's lots written about how you should build software, but few concrete examples of the messy reality as implemented by startups. Here's our process.
Since Benchmark’s investment in Ebay 15 years ago, we have been fascinated by online marketplaces. Entrepreneurs accurately recognize that the connective tissue of the Internet provides an opportunity to link the players in a particular market, reducing friction in both the buying and selling experience. For example, my car tax check is an online platfrom that allows you to book a slot for a complete history and guidance of your car taxes and other details. The arrival of the smartphone amplifies these opportunities, as the Internet’s connective tissue now extends deeper and deeper into an industry with the participants connected…
The same-day cancellation rate likely includes subscribers who only wanted access to one article, or who felt the full paid experience was lacking after a quick look around. New data suggests some just really hate the idea of auto-renewal.
Pricing is a good place to make a few critical resolutions for businesses. Learn the 5 resolutions as you shape your pricing strategy for 2019.
The “unreasonable effectiveness” of data for machine-learning applications has been widely debated over the years (see here, here and…
Consumer inertia is the tendency of some customers to buy a product, even when superior options exist. Alexander J. MacKay discusses how that habit affects competitive strategy and even regulatory oversight.
336 Vintage Christmas Catalogs & Holiday Wish Books with 302,605 total catalog pages from Sears, Montgomery Ward and JCPenney over the years.
Prioritized lists are essential for product managers, right? Yes, but be careful. Ken Norton illustrates why.
You can't build a weatherproof company if you don’t constantly gather challenges to your thinking, learn to listen to them, and then test those learnings out.
This week, we published the a16z Marketplace 100, a ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies. See the full index and analysis here, and visit a16z.com/marketplace-100 for more marketplace-related content. From a business standpoint, we know marketplaces are challenging to scale; from a conversational perspective, we’ve come to realize they’re...
Apologies in advance: If you’re fluent in the language of accounting, please skip to the bonus Verizon iPhone feature at the end. What I’m about to describe will strike you as oversimplified and…
Chris Dixon's blog.
The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche is nothing if not determined in its quest to acquire Illumina, the San Diego-based leader in genetic-sequencing equipment. In January, after Illumina’s board rebuffed Roche’s initial overtures, Roche made a $5.7 billion tender offer directly to shareholders. When that didn’t succeed, it extended the offer to midnight last Friday. Now […]
In a casino, the term “rake” refers to the commission that the house earns for operating a poker game. With each hand, a small percentage of the pot is scraped off by the dealer, which in essence becomes the “revenue” for the casino. While casinos use the term “rake,” a plethora of interesting word choices exist which all describe the same thing – keeping a little bit of the revenue for the company that is running the service. Examples include “commission,” “fee,” “toll,” “tax,” “vig” or “vigorish,” “juice,” “the take”, and “graft” (although this last one is typically associated with…
Innovation is not a binary choice between the old and the new. The answer is often to contribute to evolution — by making parts that work…
Rethinking old strategies.
How to improve your product experience to eliminate confusion and frustration for your users.
When it's time to call a feature quits, how should you announce end of life? Here's how to sunset a feature while minimizing customer impact.
Centralized planning is no longer required.
Anand Iyer, former Head of Product at Threadflip, on how marketplaces can build trust in order to build their businesses.
There is increased efficiency and other benefits to doing so.
[Project Name] [one-line description] Team: [Awesome] Contributors: [PM], [Designer], [Engineer], [Analyst] Resources: [Designs], [Analytics], [Notes] Status: Draft / Problem Review / Solution Review / Launch Review / Launched Last Updated: Thursday, May 21, 2020 Problem Alignment Describe...
Our job in the product organization is to create products that can sustain a business. Make no mistake about it: everything depends on strong products. Without these strong products, our marketing programs require customer acquisition costs that are too high; our sales organization is forced to get creative which drives up cost of sales, lengthens...
This is the second post in a three post series on user acquisition. In the first post in this series, we covered the basics of the five sources of traffic to a web-based product. This next post co…
Pricing is one of the most challenging decisions for any startup. One of the simplest ways of discovering customer willingness to pay is simply to ask them. At first blush, that might seem a reasonable and effective solution, it is prone to wild inaccuracy. Absolute pricing judgments are hard without reference points. For example: How much would you be willing to pay for a new iPhone? It’s a very challenging question to answer in the abstract.
Over the course of the past year, many writers have offered their perspectives on Uber’s dynamic pricing strategy. Perhaps the only consistency is that people have deeply passionate views on this topic. However, there are still many misperceptions about how the model works, and the purpose of this post is to clarify some of those misperceptions. I am an Uber investor and board member, and therefore expect that many will dismiss these thoughts as naked bias. But consider that as a result of my role I have access to more information that might enable a deeper perspective. I also have…
Why do companies routinely succumb to the lure of rebranding? The answer, say A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, the authors of “Customer Loyalty Is Overrated,” is rooted in serious misperceptions about the nature of competitive advantage—namely, that companies need to continually update their business models, strategies, and communications to respond to the explosion of options that sophisticated consumers face. Research suggests that what makes competitive advantage truly sustainable is helping consumers avoid having to make a choice. They choose the leading product in the market primarily because that is the easiest thing to do. And each time they select it, its advantage increases over that of the products or services they didn’t choose, creating what the authors call cumulative advantage. Lafley and Martin offer guidance for building cumulative advantage: Become popular early. Back in 1946, Procter & Gamble gave away a box of Tide with every washing machine sold in America. Design for habit. When P&G introduced Febreze, consumers liked it but didn’t use it much. The problem, it turned out, was that the product came in what looked like a glass-cleaner bottle, so users kept it under the sink. When the company redesigned the bottle so that customers would keep it in a more visible spot, they ended up using it more often. Innovate inside the brand. Efforts to “relaunch” brands can lead people to break their habits. Changes in product features should be introduced in a way that retains cumulative advantage. For customers, “improved” is much more comfortable than “new.” Keep communication simple. A clever ad may win awards, but if its message is too complex, it will backfire.
B.J. Mendelson breaks down how Batman is a growth hacker, and what we can learn about the field from him.
The following is a guest post by Andy Singleton Andy is the founder and CEO of Assembla a company that provides bug tracking and hosted GIT and SVN
In many ways, online marketplaces are the perfect business model. Since they facilitate transactions between independent suppliers and customers rather than take possession of and responsibility for the products or services in question, they have inherently low cost structures and fat gross margins. They are highly defensible once established, owing to network effects. Yet online marketplaces remain extremely difficult to build, say Andrei Hagiu of Harvard Business School and venture capitalist Simon Rothman of Greylock Partners. Most entrepreneurs and investors attribute this to the challenge of quickly attracting a critical mass of buyers and suppliers. But it is wrong to assume that once a marketplace has overcome this hurdle, the sailing will be smooth. Several other important pitfalls can threaten marketplaces: growing too fast too early; failing to foster sufficient trust and safety; resorting to sticks, rather than carrots, to deter user disintermediation; and ignoring the risks of regulation. This article draws on company examples such as eBay, Lending Club, and Airbnb to offer practical advice for avoiding those hazards.
[Follow Me on Twitter] “ Don't you know that you are a shooting star, And all the world will love you just as long, As long as you are.” -- Paul Rodgers, Shooting Star With the IPO market now blown wide-open, and the media completely infatuated with frothy trades in the bubbly late stage private market, it is common to see articles that reference both “valuation” and “revenue” and suggest that there is a correlation between the two. Calculating or qualifying potential valuation using the simplistic and crude tool of a revenue multiple (also known as the price/revenue or price/sales ratio)…
Apple has carefully guarded the podcast directory, persuading podcasters that ‘winning’ here is the shortcut to building a popular podcast. But they’re terrible at introducing pod…
“A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture fundin…
The three skills that are necessary to craft a successful product, and how to create and perpetuate them throughout a company.
Focus on the problem you’re trying to solve.
Last night, Twitter curtailed Meerkat's access to its graph . I saw lots of discussion on Twitter (I'd say this was ironic but it's just expected) about why and whether Twitter should just compete on its own merits with its recent acquisition Periscope . Some have termed what happened to Meerkat
How to productively make collaborative decisions
You can make software if you choose to. Not just the expected version of software that runs on a computer, but the metaphorical idea of rules and algorithms designed to solve problems and connect p…
The sprint is a 5-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing with customers. Learn to run your own sprints, and read about our book on sprints.
From social media sentiment analysis to digital ad buying, faster is increasingly seen as better, or at least necessary. So it’s no surprise that the ability to generate lots of data and analyze it…
By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste t...
Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had. Before that, the biggest increase in revenue came when FreshBooks emailed a million people and mentioned Bidsketch as a new integration for sales proposals. I got so many new sales notifications that day, I thought someone had hacked my server. It was nuts.… Continue reading How to Increase SaaS Pricing (and Quickly Triple Your Growth) →
There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure ’ Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven In late 2013 Cowboy Ventures did an analysis of …
Ecommerce is booming, and there’s no doubt about that. The numbers speak for themselves. After all, in 2017, ecommerce sales reached $2.3 trillion, and
Funnel optimization for web3 companies will become critical to their success. Token grants cost 4-7x than traditional customer acquisition techniques. Other techniques, like incentivized referral, improve the economics but still tally 19 month payback periods. A year-and-a-half might be fine for a SaaS company selling a $50k to $100k ARR product, but long-term viability demands achieving 3-6 month paybacks of modern web2 consumer companies. Why are the payback periods so high?
As consumers skip ads and streaming content balloons, brands aim to be everywhere all at once.
What happens on the other side of the acquisition doesn't get much startup press
This paper appeared in VLDB'19 and is authored by Maurice Herlihy, Barbara Liskov, and Liuba Shrira. How can autonomous, mutually-distrust...
Storytelling is a powerful technique for building data-informed products.
In the 1950s, most products were built to last. Companies knew that manufacturing long-lasting products would spread word-of-mouth referrals, which meant
Without driving yourself crazy
There’s a reason scalpers have confused economists for decades.
Reputation management is essential for any brand. Your company's future may depend on what’s been said about it in posts, comments, reviews, and rankings. Fortunately, there are affordable tools to help. Here is a list of tools to manage your brand’s reputation.
Knowledge moats (secret sauces) are one of the most fundamental type of moat in business. They consist of the information, data and…
Five of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today—Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—derive much of their worth from their multisided platforms, which facilitate interactions or transactions between parties. Many MSPs are more valuable than companies in the same industries that provide only products or services: For instance, Airbnb is now worth more than Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain. However, companies that weren’t born as platform businesses rarely realize that they can—at least partially—turn their offerings into one, say the authors. And even if they do realize it, they often wander in the dark searching for a strategy to achieve this transformation. In this article, Hagiu and Altman provide a framework for doing so. They lay out four specific ways in which products and services can be turned into platforms and examine the strategic advantages and pitfalls of each: (1) opening the door to third parties; (2) connecting customers; (3) connecting products to connect customers; and (4) becoming a supplier to a multisided platform. These ideas can be used by physical as well as online businesses.
Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. Our stories take you into the depths of science and spotlight its ripples in our lives and cultures.
Product management is one of the hardest jobs to define in any organization, partially because it’s different in every company. I’ve had several recent conversations about “what is a product…
From ATMs to automated checkouts to fast food.
Pandora CTO Tom Conrad explains how Pandora picks the most important features to build with its limited engineering power.
Getting people to notice your product on the web is hard. Getting them to understand what you do is even harder. One of the biggest challenges startups face is cutting through the noise and…
Etsy COO Linda Kozlowski knows an operations leader is critical to the success of a company. Here, she sheds light on the most mysterious role in the C-suite — and how startups can hire and empower the right COO for their company.
Believe it or not, packaging design is easier than you think! In this guide, learn everything you need to know to create stand-out product packaging.
I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a cu…
Restaurants are great test labs for testing neuromarketing techniques. It's easy to change offerings, menus, and pricing, and one gets immediate feedback on what's working and what's not. Today, many eateries are employing sophisticated menu psychology to maximize sales and profits.
In the Creative Founder, students are paired semi-randomly, and then spend a semester trying to get to product-market fit. I always start them with market selection. A market has three key elements…
“My biggest surprise was when we launched the Facebook app and it didn’t go viral” -Startup CEO quote “The month after we ...
Luxury brands should use their digital channels to support and enhance their high-quality customer experiences. This requires providing product details that spark interest, balancing visual design with other priorities, and avoiding interruptions that risk cheapening the brand.
It's not always true that simplicity makes the best product. Sometimes making things less simple will get you the users you truly want.
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
Database Marketing, Data Mining, Analytics, Big Data, Forecasting, Segmentation, Predictive Modeling, Measurement, Catalog, Business
On Sunday, I was fortunate enough to give a talk at the 9th annual Harvard Business School Entrepreneurship Conference. I’m trying to be better about posting the slides from these talks as t…
Done right, companies competing as a multi-sided platform often win with higher percentage profit margins than those enjoyed by traditional resellers. The problem is that a winning strategy is far from self-evident. Professor Andrei Hagiu explains the potential and the pitfalls for life as an MSP.
Low-margin retailers argue they can't afford customer loyalty programs, but is that true? Rajiv Lal and Marcel Corstjens make the case that such programs are profit-enhancing differentiators.
Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you're building a B2B app, and you have something built but you're having trouble getting people to pay for it There are three problems with getting your first few customers: You (probably) don't know how to sell things You don't know who you're selling to You don't even really know what you're selling Nobody tells you how to answers these questions, and so most people go out
Selling software isn’t like selling cars or real estate. Don’t sell yourself short.
I have always avoided writing. As a mechanical engineer, I would rather do just about anything else: sketch parts, build prototypes, or collaborate with manufacturers. Rough sketches for Dor, one of Bolt’s portfolio companies For over 15 years, I have designed and engineered products — mostly a
Knowing what to test and how to interpret the results based on nuances and oddities of experiments is an important skill for people, not automations.
Take a look at these two coupons Target stores printed out at checkout at the same time. What is your take on the reasoning behind this? If you have the read the famous Target Big Data story about …
In my last article I discussed the top reasons for slow product, and here I wanted to highlight the top reasons for weak product. I am defining weak product here as product that fails to meet its objectives and provide new and expanded sources of revenue and/or growth for your company. Lack of product vision. ...
The ability to get issues on the table and work through them constructively is critical to having a healthy culture. Managers can normalize productive conflict on your team by using an exercise to map out the unique value of each role and the tensions that should exist among them. Draw a circle and divide that circle into enough wedges to represent each role on your team. For each role, ask: What is the unique value of this role on this team? On which stakeholders is this role focused? What is the most common tension this role puts on team discussions? Answer those questions for each member of the team, filling in the wedges with the answers. As you go, emphasize how the different roles are supposed to be in tension with one another. With heightened awareness and a shared language, your team will start to realize that much of what they have been interpreting as interpersonal friction has actually been perfectly healthy role-based tension.
Michael Sippey has been building tech products for over 20 years. His most valuable ideas, though? They came from speaking with customers. Here's how.
This quote comes to us from Ms. Allie Webb, the Founder and CEO of Drybar a blow dry only salon. A blow dry salon is not like any hair salon. It offers, just as name indicates, blow dry and styling…
Fences are never beautiful. May be the picket fences are. But when designed to keep two sides from moving easily from one side to the other they are not usually described as beautiful. Price fences…
‘The Problem with…’ series covers controversial topics related to efforts to improve healthcare quality, including widely recommended but deceptively difficult strategies for improvement and pervasive problems that seem to resist solution. The ‘5 whys’ technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to root-cause analysis (RCA) in healthcare. Its use is promoted by the WHO,1 the English National Health Service,2 the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,3 the Joint Commission4 and many other organisations in the field of healthcare quality and safety. Like most such tools, though, its popularity is not the result of any evidence that it is effective.5–8 Instead, it probably owes its place in the curriculum and practice of RCA to a combination of pedigree, simplicity and pedagogy. In terms of pedigree, ‘5 whys’ traces its roots back to the Toyota Production System (TPS).9 It also plays a key role in Lean10 (a generic version of TPS) as well as Six Sigma,11 another popular quality improvement (QI) methodology. Taiichi Ohno describes ‘5 whys’ as central to the TPS methodology:The basis of Toyota's scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. The solution, or the how-to, is designated as ‘1H.’ Thus, ‘Five whys equal one how’ (5W=1H). (ref. 9, p. 123) This quote also makes the case for the technique's simplicity. Asking ‘why’ five times allows users to arrive at a single root cause that might not have been obvious at the outset. It may also inspire a single solution to address that root cause (though it is not clear that the ‘1H’ side of the equation has been adopted as widely). The pedagogical argument for …
I’ve been working on a marketing automation tool (more on that at the end of the post). Or rather, I’ve been working on an idea for a marketing automation tool as I don’t want a single line of code written before I’d experienced a notable pull from target customers. (This may sound like I am clever/…
In the spirit of capturing some of the observations that I find myself repeating, I’m adding this one to the mix tonight. Unlike the previous two, this is really a piece of concrete advice f…
Guest How to get a two-sided marketplace startup like Airbnb, Exec, or eBay up and running -- the painless way.
You’re probably not aware of it, but the price of your product includes a risk discount.
Part Two of the Needfinding/Ideation/MVP Creation Charette This is the second part of a three part essay on rapid MVP creation to start testing assumptions. Part One is here. It was written for my …
Reddit has never been a place where you could necessarily connect one user with one account. Parody accounts are commonplace -- to a fault if you ask some -- and there have been more than one fiasco involving users who pretend to be different people with different accounts; it's crazy. It's also extremely fitting. Why? Because when Reddit was first started, it was populated almost entirely with content submitted by fake users.
Founders and product managers alike wear this proudly on their sleeves (or twitter bios) The Ultimate Product Person – who loves products, building products and sweating the details. Skim thr…
Imagine you’re a product manager and a co-worker from Marketing comes to you with a feature request. Let’s call her ‘fictitious Annie’. She asks you, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we built this amazing crypto-blockchain feature into our product?” Well…
Clayton Christensen claims that Uber is not disruptive, and he’s exactly right. In fact, disruption theory often doesn’t make sense when it comes to understanding how companies succeed …
Startup Metrics, a love story. All slides of an 6h Lean Analytics workshop. - Download as a PDF or view online for free
We compiled this official guide based on conversations with hundreds of product managers in our PMHQ community who revealed the most popular product management tools and product management tools that they currently use on the job. 64 Best Product Management Tools 2024 The following are the best tools for product management according to their main functions. They are divided into different categories such as collaboration, product roadmap, product management, etc. Product Management...
Snapchat is on the verge of conquering the toughest messaging market in the world: the United States. The way they did it is by laddering-up.
Dyson almost launched a robot vacuum. Back in 2001, after three years in development. Its first effort, shown to the British public in London looked nothing (and we mean nothing) like the eventual 360 Eye unveiled today. Sixteen years is a long time in tech. The DC06, as it was called, never made it past home-trial stages in 2012 -- apparently too pricey and heavy. Between then and now, technology got better. A lot better. At the Tokyo launch of its new robot vacuum, Sir James Dyson himself, told us how it all came together, and why it's not his native UK, but Japan, that'll get to buy it first.
A conversation with Bruce La Fetra on customer interviews. We compare notes on how to organize findings and take best advantage of the insights gleaned.
Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.
The Startup Marketing Checklist is a comprehensive, chronologically ordered list of marketing tactics and ideas that you can try with your early stage startup. The checklist is free and open to suggestions.
Ever wondered if Google Ads are really worth it, but don't have the cash for an experiment? One's been done for you!
Startups fail because they run out of money before achieving product-market fit. NFX Managing Partner Gigi Levy-Weiss identifies 10 places to look for product-market fit in startup ideas.
After many years of being a very vocal advocate for the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) technique, in the majority of companies I meet, I have stopped recommending the practice. That’s because, in so many companies, even though conceptually the technique is simple and sound, it ends up proving a waste of time and effort,...
Take the same item to 4 different pawn shops and you might get offers that vary by hundreds of dollars. Here’s why.
Have you ever bought sweet tickets for a ballgame, a concert or some other live event, only to find out that you couldn't make it? The internet certainly
Great insight moves your career, organization, or business forward. The problem? Most people are terrible at asking questions. Learn from the pros how to do it right.
A growing number of new businesses are following in the footsteps of successful companies such as Dropbox and Skype, by giving away their products and services free to build a customer base. But for some, that 'freemium' strategy is turning out to be costly.
This is an edited version of a recent online conversation I had with a team of bootstrappers about how to make their product attract early adopters.
Video is increasingly impacting ecommerce. Consumers use it for purchase decisions. Influencers live-stream product endorsements. And brands deploy video for engagement and product offerings. Here is a list of platforms for shoppable video.
Leadership Now is a leading source for leadership development and analysis. We believe that anyone can make a difference by leading from where they are.
One sector has an unfair number of elite product minds. These 9 habits are their underlying behaviors that result in product success.
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…
Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business—but is it bad for music?
Ninety percent of Americans have used a credit card, but far fewer understand the underlying systems enabling their payments. So let’s dive…
Tips from successful campaigns promoting everything from shapewear to prostate health.
Editor's note: Victor Belfor is the vice president of business development at Influitive. He recently started angel investing and mentoring at 500 startups. As products mature, companies continue to compete in heated battles with their competitors by adding more features and more functionality. However, a lot of customers would prefer fewer features because extra features tend to make products clunky and difficult to use. Still, companies become feature-producing machines.
Forrester is a leading global market research company that helps organizations exceed customer demands and excel with technology. Learn how Forrester can help.
An inside look at 19 tactics top marketplaces have used to solve the chicken-or-egg problem and kickstart growth.
Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by Simon Rothman of Greylock Partners. Rothman is particularly passionate about Marketplace technology (Etsy, Kickstarter, Airbnb, etc) and how to garner success in that category. Marketplaces are endemic to the consumer web: Largely popularized by eBay, we've recently seen quite a few variations on the theme, like young guns Etsy, oDesk, Airbnb, and Kickstarter. Old or new, the two elements that bind all marketplaces are network effects (a good thing) and the chicken-and-egg problem (not such a good thing).
The 6-step process is an adapted version of the process Google Ventures taught us. It's applicable whether you’re a startup or a Fortune 500 company.
Proximity Designs is a for-profit design company whose goal is to create products cheap enough--and good enough--that they can be bought by poor farmers, instead of just giving them aid.
As part of its ongoing efforts to expand into e-commerce, Twitter today announced a new partnership with Shopify. The deal will see Twitter launching a
As more companies strive to deliver software faster it becomes clear what legacy processes are...
Shoppers' actions on an ecommerce site create opportunities for automated, triggered emails. Such behavior-based email automation is a sure-fire tactic to drive revenue.
Editor's note: Roman Stanek is CEO and founder of GoodData. Lately, in Silicon Valley and its counterparts around the world, disappointment has ruled the halls of companies that had a huge impact with consumers, but then fizzled as investments when they went public—Facebook’s and Zynga’s IPOs being the most notorious examples. Attention quickly moved from the consumer to the enterprise market, where Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, Workday, and LinkedIn are all humming along just fine. Entrepreneurs seeking to sell to enterprise customers should recognize that the business-to-business (B2B) market, especially with respect to IT, plays by a different set of rules than the business-to-consumer (B2C) space.
How To Run a 5 Whys (With Humans, Not Robots) - Download as a PDF or view online for free
Andreessen Horowitz-backed music lyrics and annotations Rap Genius was the latest to stray over to the darker side of so-called "growth hacking," with its spammy SEO tactics disguised as an affiliate program. Called out, exposed and now punished by Google, the site's traffic has tanked. But Rap Genius, thanks in part to that $15 million investment, will probably recover. They'll clean up their links, make amends, and maybe even get back into Google's good graces. End users will once again land on Rap Genius's pages, many of them none the wiser for the time the site spent in the penalty box. Other startups may not be as lucky.
A overview on the basics behind how we quantify product-market fit at Tribe Capital. These are the underpinnings of our underwriting framework.
We’ve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the question - what are the factors that drive a company’s survival, differentiate it, and ultimately make it a winner? In today’s online world, personalization is increasingly making or breaking companies. The companies that win are the ones making personalization a key company value – not just a feature. In the early days of the web, consumers were happy just to gain access to information. However, as technology became more sophisticated, and as more consumers and companies came online, we quickly moved out of the access age and into a state of information overload, often leaving consumers frustrated and confused. Companies that helped consumers cut through the clutter to reveal relevant information had a critical and sustainable competitive advantage in their respective areas. The concept of relevance is critical to the success of Google, for example.
Founders and marketers must go beyond selling products, and instead sell what their product will allow customers to do.
A deep dive into our process for identifying the optimal B2B SaaS Marketing Channels for our clients, or Customer-Channel Fit.
Data has long been lauded as a competitive moat for companies, and that narrative’s been further hyped with the recent wave of AI startups. Network effects have been similarly promoted as a defensible force in building software businesses. So of course, we constantly hear about the combination of the two: “data network effects” (heck, we’ve...
Counterfeit goods have proliferated along with e-commerce. Here’s your primer on the growing world of fake products—and the forces working to combat them.
Increase customer loyalty and take advantage of an additional opportunity to connect with customers by using packaging inserts. Here's why and how to use them in every package you send out.
See why evaluating your value metric and aligning it with your pricing strategy is the key to optimizing your SaaS business for profits and growth.
Managed marketplaces have been one of the hottest categories of venture investment over the past several years. They garner a lot of press because the consumer experiences are often radically different than what’s previously been available in the market. But there is confusion over what a true “managed” marketplace is. It’s fairly easy to spot if you know what to look for.
In recent years, we’ve seen new definitions for old titles and many new titles being created. We’ve got product managers, product marketing managers, product owners, business analysts, product strategists, product line managers, and portfolio managers.
In this article, my goal is to show you what is negotiation for Product Managers and share 10 steps to influence without authority.
There has been a lot of discussion in the design world recently about "change aversion." Most of the articles about it seem to be targeting the new Google redesign, but I've certainly seen this same discussion happen at many companies when big changes aren't universally embraced by users.
By Stephanie Tilenius, an entrepreneur in residence at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers The Wild West of online marketplaces is over. From 1999 until 2006, eBay and Amazon Marketplaces dominated the field, offering platforms that brought buyers and sellers together. But over the last seven years, more than 20 new marketplace [...]
Like CEOs, data-driven product managers need a variety of different tools, skills, and capabilities. Here's the tools product managers need to succeed.
Wayfair has a huge catalog with over 14 million items. Our site features a diverse array of products for people’s homes, with product categories ranging from “appliances” to “décor and pillows” to “outdoor storage sheds.” Some of these categories include hundreds of thousands of products; this broad offering ensures that we have something for every style and home. However, the large size of our product catalog also makes it hard for customers to find the perfect item among all of the possible options.
“Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy,” Andrew Chen wrote back in 2007. “Successful viral products don’t have viral marketing bolted on once the product has been developed. It’s not a marketing strategy. Instead, it’s designed into the product from the very beginning as part of the fundamental architecture of the experience.”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20083813/akrales_200714_4027_0041.0.jpg)
Even the software-focused Chromecast relies on hardware sometimes.
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fpocket-syndicated-images%2Farticles%2F3345%2F1582045587_GUR66LXZ5T77CHCPZRUCXU4WIE.jpg)
Constant bargain hunting makes us value all the wrong things about shopping.
Reselling software can mean recurring revenue and great profit margins. But how do you choose a niche and find your first customers?
Keyword phrases are the fuel that drives many online marketing efforts, including search engine optimization, paid search advertising, and even content ideas. If marketers do a better job in selecting keyword phrases, they may do a better job promoting their products and content.
The 16 Network Effects & How They Actually Work
Building on Aggregation Theory, this provides a precise definition of the characteristics of aggregators, and a classification system based on suppliers. Plus, how to think about aggregator regulat…
Need to spice up descriptions for bland products? Use these themes and examples the next time you’re describing a back-to-school backpack or plain white t-shirt. You’ll soon understand how to look at ordinary products differently.
You should never underestimate the power of making people happy. Here are four tips from Techstars' Eamonn Carey to help you build products people love.
This post on B2B customer development interviews offers my lessons learned from several thousand interviews over the last 16 years.
If you are building a product, you should always speak with customers and test your idea before. But you probably don’t know that *you *might be making some of the most common mistakes when running your experiments. Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. In this article, Grace Ng will show you a guide to designing quick, effective, low-cost experiments.
Building a Marketplace: A Checklist for Online Disruption - Download as a PDF or view online for free
Boost brand awareness, increase site visitors, and drive conversions with personalized advertising. AdRoll's been trusted by 140,000+ brands for over 15 years.
Mike Krieger, Instagram's founder thinks you can build apps that fit the real world by watching what people want, not guessing. He presented his eight core product design insights today at 500 Startups' Warm Gun conference. Here's the cheat sheet to his talk.
Conjoint analysis is a highly effective means of market research, capable of informing a company’s pricing strategy and product development.
Conjoint analysis is the optimal market research approach for measuring the value that consumers place on features of a product or service. Learn more!
This is the legendary presentation about cross-functional teams from Ken Norton that made donuts and product management synonymous.
Money is made at chokepoints, and the most valuable chokepoints are operating systems; Amazon is building exactly that with Alexa.
More and more companies are announcing new products based on human curation, even as the most important content players — Google and Facebook — rely on algorithms. When does curation make sense, an…
To find the perfect brand, leave no word unturned.
At IHOP and Applebee's, menus are sales documents. And navigational guides. And explainers.
Ever wonder why after buying shoes online (or any other consumer goods), for the next few weeks or months, you can be sure to spot ads or promotions for those same shoes on nearly every website you visit? What’s more, you'll see which shoes your Facebook friends bought, which shoes their friends bought and which shoes “others like you” bought. You already bought shoes, so why are you still being bombarded with ads for them?
Find the latest Design news from Fast company. See related business and technology articles, photos, slideshows and videos.
Use a flexible responsibility-assignment matrix to clarify UX roles and responsibilities, anticipate team collaboration points, and maintain productivity in product development.
Airbnb gets less press than Uber, but in some respects its even more radical: understanding how it works leads one to question many of the premises of modern society from hotels to regulations. It&…
Credit where it's definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie. Don't look now, but something remarkable is happening. Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips out there. They do no manufacturing; instead they license their designs to companies like Apple, who in turn contract with companies like TSMC for the actual fabrication. Nest Labs and Ubiquiti are both 200-employee hardware companies worth circa $1 billion...who subcontract their actual manufacturing out to China.
Because of the Internet realities described by Aggregation Theory a smaller number of companies hold an increasing amount of power. However, an increasing focus on market forces reduces the latitud…
Here's our guide for assembling a growth team who strive for constant improvement, with a commitment to understanding why experiments succeed or fail.
To understand how people look for movies, the video service created 76,897 micro-genres. We took the genre descriptions, broke them down to their key words … and built our own new-genre generator.
Dollar Shave Club is a textbook example of how the new Internet economy will destroy value in incumbent industries.
Check this unique list of handy apps that can help you multiply your website’s visitor or paying customer count without bleeding too much cash.
CommerceHub and ChannelAdvisor are now united as Rithum. We empower top brands, suppliers, and retailers with durable, profitable e-commerce solutions.
Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Sangeet Paul Choudary analyzes business models for network businesses at Platformed.info. Traditionally defined as a system where each new user on the network increases the value of the service for all others, a network effect often creates a winner-takes-all dynamic, ordaining one dominant company above the rest.
To explore the future of online networks, it's important to note how network effects correlate with value and the factors that make these network effects work in reverse.
Until recently, a lack of digital prioritization and desire to control access have led to sub-par luxury ecommerce experiences. Many luxury brands are struggling to improve.
The Netflix executive says he — and the company he helped build — will survive a bout of bad earnings numbers.
We thought we were being smart with innovative pricing models. We were wrong, but we finally righted the ship.
Few realize that Uber's core network effects aren't as strong as they seem. At this point, we count no less than 9 additional defensibilities Uber is pursuing to reinforce their core network effect.
All you need to know about the benefits of customer loyalty programs for small business + examples of 5 types of programs to consider.
getAbstract Summary: Get the key points from this book in less than 10 minutes.Ronald J. Baker makes a sound economic case that the traditional method of generating prices by calculating costs and figuring in an acceptable profit is outdated and u...
Free Online Guide - Which digits to choose? How high should it be? Should it be rounded or precise? Plus other techniques.
Why does the ecommerce community have such a blind spot when it comes to unique product descriptions? Syndicated descriptions produce duplicate content. Why is duplicate product copy accepted so blindly? The answer depends on whether you’re the syndicator or the site using the syndicated content.
Value is created through innovation, but how much of that value accrues to the innovator depends partly on how quickly their competitors imitate the innovation. Innovators must deter competition to…
The way we live our lives has an impact on our work. Long lists of typical chores may turn your
Competitive poaching refers to the practice of bidding on ads for a competitor’s search terms, in order to poach customers searching for that brand. It’s a common tactic in the world of digital ads — but is it effective? The author shares results from the first-ever empirical study of this practice, which found that poaching can work well for higher-end brands, but may backfire for lower-end or mass market offerings. Specifically, the study found that when an ad poached customers who searched for a high-end brand, users clicked on it more, but when an ad poached a low-end or mass market target, users were less likely to click. Of course, the author notes that clickthrough rate is just one metric, and there may be other ways in which a poaching campaign could be harmful or beneficial. But these findings can help marketers add a bit of science to the art that is digital advertising, helping them to optimize campaigns for their unique products and customers.
We live in a world shaped by shopping carts. The ubiquitous, unloved contraptions are a key feature of US economy. (Yes, really.)
The story of See’s Candies reminds us of the importance of consistency, quality, and long-term growth in investing.
Optimizing content for organic rankings requires knowing how Google will interpret searchers' intent — informational, commercial, or navigational.
The Chinese company has become a fast-fashion juggernaut by appealing to budget-conscious Gen Zers. But its ultralow prices are hiding unacceptable costs.
TLDR: Use this quick framework to help you think about product questions. I’ve learned through building product at startups and in large…
Zapier has 3M+ users and generates $125M in ARR. At a $5B valuation, its fast-growing horizontal platform is unable to meet the demands of all of its customers. The increase of underserved Zapier customers presents an opportunity.
Darryl Praill joins the Predictable Revenue Podcast to share best practices and common mistakes companies make when implementing outbound sales sequences.
What happens when you turn off all of your Internet advertising? Apparently, nothing. This post explores how I came to the decision to turn off all ads, and what I found as a result.
Under the new machine learning model, buyers are recommended items that are more aligned to their shopping interests on eBay.
Before joining Wave four years ago, I spoke to a former employee about his experience. He said something that has stayed in my memory ever since: “Wave is really good at execution, so by working at Wave, you’ll learn how to execute very well.” Now that I’ve been here a while, I thought it would be good to write down what really good execution actually looks like in practice and the counterintuitive lessons I’ve learned along the way.
From Stripe to Notion, Cristina Cordova has worked on some of the biggest products in tech. She shares tactical tidbits on what she’s learned about about scaling companies and shaping your career.
It's time to optimize for People Also Asked questions asked around and about your brand in Google's SERPs. Here's why.
Retail has been constantly reinventing itself, and participants race to keep up with what feels like a series of epic shifts in consumer preferences. To get a clearer, more-complete picture, we studied the actual decisions made by 1,500 apparel and footwear shoppers in the United States. Our five most surprising findings: shopping is not yet truly omnichannel; when consumers buy online, they purchase more; online journeys take longer than in-store; brand stores and website generate higher spend than multibrand stores; and, very often, consumers just want to buy new versions of an item they already own.
New research reveals that how we perform work as a team contributes more to resilience than external stressors. On resilient teams, individuals feel responsible for energizing each other. This is in stark contrast to teams who are challenged by frustrating ways of working and fractured relationships. As we move into the third year of pandemic uncertainty, adopting three simple practices will help managers build more resilient — and re-energized — teams.
I joined Datadog as VP Finance back in 2015 when the company was still very small. Back then, the company had about 100 employees, was making around $20
How data businesses start, and how they keep going, and growing, and growing.
Ravi Mehta, former CPO at Tinder & Product Exec at TripAdvisor, shares his framework for crafting a crisp product strategy for startups — a 5-step system called the "Product Strategy Stack." He also makes the case for setting "non-goals" and using an alternative to OKRs.
This week we teardown the pricing of Dollar Shave Club and Gillette. Will Dollar Shave Club win out by taking over the bathroom, or can Gillette fight back with over 100 years of brand awareness? We find out in this week's Pricing Page Teardown.
If you’re a creative entrepreneur who understands the power of branding in your packaging design, you’re already
The most consistent sales leader I’ve worked with hit plan 27 consecutive quarters. How can a sales leader develop similar repeatability? Much goes into it here are the reports he used to manage his team at the board level. The PQR (pipeline-to-quota) funnel is first. Pipeline is the total value of the accounts within a stage or later. Quota is the aggregate quota on the street for the quarter. Divide P by Q to get PQR.
Ordering clothes from Chinese fast-fashion brands like Shein is easy. Sending them back is a lot more complicated
I used to be very anti-advertising. Fast forward two years and several pivots, and my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads.
There are four primary ways that businesses can protect their intellectual property (IP) assets: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.
Driven by buyers' need for consistency and explanation, the most popular pricing method uses a surprisingly simple formula based on size.
Two inventors turned a failed experiment into an irresistibly poppable product that revolutionized the shipping industry
Keywords are an important building block for ecommerce marketing. Developing and maintaining a keyword list may help an ecommerce business understand shoppers and do a better job of marketing to them. In the context of search engine optimization, searchers' words or phrases summarize their thoughts, questions, or needs. Those keywords represent the language people use to ask for help finding resources online.
In early and developing markets, selling complete products is often a superior go to market strategy, rather than selling an innovation in a layer in the stack. This is true for five reasons. First, for early customers to generate value from a novel technology, that technology must solve a business problem completely. End-to-end products do that. Layers in the stack don’t. They optimize existing systems. In early markets, customers want to buy a car, not a better camshaft.
If you want to move to a Jeff Bezos–style executive meeting without PowerPoint, with a six-page narrative memo, you mustn't forget the narrative. Here's why
Like CEOs, data-driven product managers need a variety of different tools, skills, and capabilities. Here's the tools product managers need to succeed.
Today, we’re sharing the newest social nfx we've identified—the 15th type of network effect: Tribal Network Effects.
So you like our media brand Growth Quarters? You should join our Growth Quarters event track at TNW2020, where you’ll hear how the most successful founders kickstarted and grew their companies. This article was originally published by Buil
The best designers employ specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles when they work. Here are a few of them.
SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics shows how the shift in technology has changed business; it is a perfect example of using the Internet to one’s advantage.
Personas are great, but they are all too often under utilised, or worse mis-used. Find out some tips for creating and using your personas, so that you can get the most out of them.
As a rule of thumb business owners should be primarily focused on delighting their customers in any way possible. Every subtle interaction should be closely optimized for customer enchantment, and a decision as simple as where to park your car can subconsciously attract or detract a customer.
The history of technology is one of subtracting humans and replacing them with machines. Do the unintended consequences include creating shoplifters?
‘Harbinger customers’ are really good at picking out things that fail — and in the product marketing business, they can be a kiss of death.
Coming out of a banner year, Marvin Ellison discusses how initiatives put in place years ago contributed to the retailer's success.
The estate-sale industry is fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t square with the story of the world as we have come to expect it.
The world’s most successful companies all exhibit some form of structural competitive advantage: A defensibility mechanism that protects their margins and profits from competitors over long periods of time. Business strategy books like to refer to these competitive advantages as “economic moats”.
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
What Apple, Samsung, and Starbucks learned from Pepsi Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash The year was 1957, and Pepsi — like many of the youth at that time — was dealing with an ide…
Be a strategic thinker by recognizing opportunities at scale with seemingly small and insignificant data.
From the high-level perspective of what makes for a great design leader, to the tactical suggestions around the slide that needs to be in your portfolio presentation, Twilio & Segment's Hareem Mannan shares useful advice for every stage of a designer's career.
American consumers can’t resist the lure of a well-designed container. Of all the things I’ve purchased during the pandemic, the most useful has been a box cutter.
If listeners today can stream just about any song they want, why are so many music aficionados still buying records? Ryan Raffaelli and Gold Rush Vinyl CEO Caren Kelleher discuss the resurgence of vinyl.
The final step in product photography is optimizing the images for search engines and page speed. This is the 14th installment in my series on helping ecommerce merchants create better product images. In this post, I'll address making your photos faster to download and more visible in Google's image search.
European stores like Marks & Spencer and Monoprix, and U.S. chains like Whole Foods, understand the powerful "appetite appeal" of grocery labels.
The containers we use over and over, from Cool Whip tubs to Taster’s Choice jars, can evoke stronger feelings than the food that came in them.
Explore Stratechery by: Concepts | Companies | Topics | Search Aggregation Theory Disruption Theory Incentives Technology and Society Evolution of Technology Media Strategy and Product Management
Aggregators, by virtue of owning demand, gain power over suppliers which become modularized and commoditized. The Moat Map The Moat Map describes the correlation between the degree of supplier diff…
Aggregation Theory provides a framework to understand the impact of the Internet on nearly all industries.
Most U.S. news organizations won't let readers cancel online. The Federal Trade Commission wants that to change.
After more than a decade of running B2B growth teams at PayPal and investing at 500 Startups, Matt Lerner now spends his days helping early-stage startups with growth. He's seen firsthand how changes in a handful of words can yield jaw-dropping differences in conversion — and accelerate a startup's course to product/market fit. Here, he makes the case for starting with language/market fit first, and offers up his 4-step process for getting there.
Every company makes decisions based on the highest paid person's opinion. It turns out it's just a hypothesis. Here's how to tame it.
Profit desert customers — small, low-profit customers often numbering in the tens of thousands — are an important business segment in most companies. They often amount to about 50–80% of customers and consume about 40–60% of the company’s costs. In some companies, they’re assigned to territory reps as low-revenue “C” accounts, which distracts the reps from selling more lucrative business. In all companies, they create costly complexity in functions ranging from order-taking to fulfilment to after-sales service and returns because these customers are numerous and often inexperienced. The best way to manage your profit desert customers is to cluster them under a unified management structure — a profit desert customer team — rather than having them scattered in sales reps’ portfolios throughout the company. This team should be composed of specialized sales and marketing managers who are solely focused on this customer segment. The author presents three steps these managers should take to bring latent profits to the bottom line.
That cute dress you bought off Instagram could be found on Shein, AliExpress, or Amazon for much cheaper.
Unwind An Unsuccessful Startup The Right Way - Many startups fail, but few founders prepare for unwinding. Find out how to do this & deal with investors.
Want to improve your product's positioning but not sure where to start? This article is going to give you everything you need to get started including what positioning is, why it matters, and how to improve it.
Building white label products is more profitable than starting a new design every time. Learn how to properly implement white labelling.
Not open to the public, this expansive archive schools marketers in the art of pitchmanship
From blood banks and barcodes to the Super Soaker and the pizza box, here are the fascinating stories behind inventions that changed the world.
Business-to-business marketplaces are among ecommerce's leading growth trends, yet many industries remain under-served, especially for raw materials.
The long read: Amid the complex web of international trade, proving the authenticity of a product can be near-impossible. But one company is taking the search to the atomic level
Western platforms are still way behind in giving creators (and fans) the tools to succeed.
The Singer Sewing Machine changed the way America manufactured textiles, but the invention itself was less important than the company’s innovative business
One fintech veteran from India found out the hard way why “Mexicans love cash.”
All things being equal, speed will determine whether your company succeeds or not. Here's how to make it core to your culture.
Almost exactly a year ago, I started a little boutique software company called Report Card Writer. As the name suggests, my flagship software product does pretty much one thing: it helps teachers write report card comments faster. Its core technical functionality is part survey form, part template-filler-inner, with a few extra bolt-on features that make it easy to create and populate the form and template, respectively.
In the modern business world, there are several businesses releasing similar products into the market.
Reputation management is essential for any brand. Your company's future may depend on what’s been said about it in posts, comments, reviews, and rankings. Fortunately, there are affordable tools to help. Here is a list of tools to manage your brand’s reputation.
I first wrote this essay a few years ago. A founder mentioned it to me over the weekend, and so I decided to re-publish it here. One thing that's bothered me in the time since I wrote it is the way...
The true star of the Akutagawa Prize-winning novel Convenience Store Woman is the convenience store itself. But what is it that makes these shops so magical?
Check the requirements, book the viewing, let yourself in, and submit your application, all without emails or phone tag.
Shoppers search an online store's policy pages for details on shipping, returns, and more. Rarely are these vital pages engaging. But they should be.
The video app is causing products to blow up — and flame out — faster than ever.
An open letter from a former Facebook and VMware engineering executive on how startups can best structure their release processes.
Explore all you need know to make better decisions for your revenue operations team. Learn KPI's and key term that will drive success.
Suppose you’ve started a company that’s creating a category. Most buyers in your target market haven’t heard of your business or the kind of software you sell. There’s no budget line item, no Magic Quadrant, no G2 High Performer Award, no conference. You have an idea, a vast blue ocean in front of you, and a pile of greenbacks stashed in a bank account from your last financing. Do you spend aggressively to create the category or conserve capital, knowing education will take time?
3-min marketing recommendations from the latest scientific research. Join 30,000+ marketers, for $0.
20 years ago Apple seized music, and turned it into a lever for its broader business. It failed to do the same to TV, and lost control of music, but won massively in games, where it now makes more money than the entire global digital music industry. Now, perhaps, it’s looking at advertising.
Although the protection of secrets is often vital to the survival of organizations, at other times organizations can benefit by deliberately leaking secrets to outsiders. We explore how and why this is the case. We identify two dimensions of leaks:
Although there may be risks for companies in leaking secrets, the researchers make a strong case for doing so when appropriate. It appears that some of the most prolific and careful leakers are also among the most profitable companies in the world.
You’re a few weeks into managing a beta test for a new product your company plans to release soon. You get an email from someone on your beta team that there has been a leak online. One of your testers took a picture of your company’s new gadget fresh out of the box and posted […]
Summary Helmer sets out to create a simple, but not simplistic, strategy compass. His 7 powers include: scale economics, switching costs, cornered resource, counter positioning, branding, network effects, and process. Key Takeaways Strategy: the study of the fundamental determinants of potential business value The objective here is both positive—to reveal the foundations of business value—and […]
I laugh at this tweet every time I remember it:
Distribution on the Internet is free; what matters is controlling demand. AT&T and Verizon didn’t understand the distinction.
There are all kinds of arguments to make about the App Store, and nearly all of them are good ones; that’s why the best solution can only come from Apple.
Getting a good performance score from Google is hard for any website — but doing so for an online store is even harder. We achieved green scores — even several for mobile. Here is how we did it.
Should we still be talking about online and offline retail, or about trucks versus boxes versus bikes?
Every week, I talk with CEOs who tell me they want to speed up innovation. In fact, they want to schedule it. Recently a product leader shared with me an OKR to ship one major innovation each quarter, measured as “users will give each innovative feature a top rating.” This
A step-by-step guide on how to predict customer churn the right way using PyCaret that actually optimizes the business objective and improves ROI for the business.
Writing product descriptions sounds simple. But it takes planning. The best descriptions address a broad audience, which is why many companies employ marketers to help. When writing descriptions for the masses, focus on the following three elements.
Net dollar churn is a more value-driven way of looking at churn.
When Megan Thee Stallion took off her bright orange mask and walked onstage to accept her Grammy on March 14, she fought back tears and thanked God, her mother, and her managers for helping her become the first female rapper to win the award for best new artist in two decades.
Connecting things physically, mechanically or digitally can have profound effects. Here’s a list of 5 connectors that changed the world.
Today’s films are brimming with products from big-name brands. How exactly do these partnerships work? And is the payoff worth it?
Let's be clear about something right at the start: If you're not optimizing your site search to convert more visitors into buyers, you're missing out on
Spotify’s new subscription podcast offerings embrace the open ecosystem of podcasts in multiple ways.
3-min practical marketing insights based on the latest science from top business schools. No opinions, no flawed data, no BS.
The best detectives seem to have almost supernatural insight, but their cognitive toolkit is one that anybody can use
As Spotify turns 15 this month, we look at 15 ways the streaming giant has changed, reinvented and reshaped music and the music business.
Working Backwards is the first book that explains how Amazon really works.
Most innovation managers know that few of their initiatives will succeed, so they keep multiple projects running at the same time and create processes for quickly separating winners from losers. One popular way to make decisions about what stays and what goes is the use of stage gates. Yet, even with stage gates, firms struggle to kill bad projects. The authors undertook a decade-long review of the product development portfolio at former handset maker Sony Ericsson. They found that that the conventional use of stage gates can actually be part of the problem, impeding project discontinuation in counterintuitive ways.
After more than 12.000 Github stars, two successful open-source projects, a failed open-core company, and a successful prop-tech one*, I feel more than ever that giving your product away for free is just as bad a business strategy as it sounds.
The three-step framework Shopify's Data Science & Engineering team built for evaluating new search algorithms.
A recurring subscription model is a powerful tool for growth and profit — if you can get subscribers. "A lot of brands install our subscription software
Regardless what kind of campaign you're running, being aware of these key performance indicators are necessary for success.
Well, if you are planning to sell your stuff online and make money, then there are a few top eCommerce platforms that would help you out. Shopify is the
It seems like absolutely nobody except your grandmother sends greeting cards anymore, which makes sense, because a text message is so much more immediate and...
Brands have unsolicited feedback in their TikTok comments, allowing them to answer customer questions, see trends, and make product changes.
Get a selection of good threads from Twitter every day
Earlier this year, GitLab got rid of a paid starter offering, trimming its product catalog from 4 subscription tiers to 3 — here's why it makes sense.
In college, I took a self-defense class, taught by Sensei Flagg. The next semester, I took a kickboxing class, taught by Sensei Flagg. The next and final semester, I took an Isshin-Ryū Karate class, taught by Sensei Flagg. It was the exact same class each time. The administrators just couldn’
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fpocket-syndicated-images%2Farticles%2F326%2F1566916077_direct.jpg)
How to ask better questions.
The marketplace revolution is still just beginning and the enterprise gateway is the newest type of marketplace.
You’ve downloaded TikTok and browsed the videos. Now you’re wondering what content to create for your ecommerce business. There are many types of videos to attract leads without dancing on camera. Here are 11 ideas for all types of merchants.
One of social media's oldest companies is also its most undervalued.
Manufacturers, retailers and publishers should use structured data and provide an accurate GTIN whenever possible.
There’s a reason that online ticket sellers hit you with those extra fees after you’ve picked your seats and are ready to click “buy.” Pure profit. A
The most popular products don’t become mass popular overnight. It’s a process. Usually they popularity is uneven, they are unknown in some niches, but very popular in another niches.
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.theconversation.com%2Ffiles%2F257627%2Foriginal%2Ffile-20190207-174890-1btlu70.jpg%3Fixlib%3Drb-1.1.0%26q%3D45%26auto%3Dformat%26w%3D496%26fit%3Dclip)
Think you got a good deal? Look again.
Former Amazon execs Colin Bryar and Bill Carr helped build the "invention machine" that enabled the company to successfully launch everything from AWS to the Kindle. Here, they share granular advice and concrete takeaways for startups looking to alter their own trajectories.
Imagine you could work more and be wildly productive. And you wouldn’t need to force yourself to work.
I learned from bosses & peers, including some famous peeps like Reed Hastings, Patty McCord, and Dan Rosensweig. But mainly I learned by doing, supercharged by feedback from many "Friends of Gib."
Burlington shut down online sales in March right before coronavirus lockdowns. But it's among the discount retailers that have endured the pandemic surprisingly well, even opening new stores.
How Figma and Canva are taking on Adobe—and winning In 2010, Photoshop was ubiquitous. Whether you were editing a photo, making a poster, or designing a website, it happened in Photoshop. Today, Adobe looks incredibly strong. They’ve had spectacular stock performance, thanks to clear-eyed management who’ve made bold bets that have paid off. Their transition … Continue reading How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time →
Apoorva Mehta’s grocery delivery app is now an essential—and booming—business. Now the 34-year-old billionaire has to show he can outfox Bezos, dodge an avalanche of new competitors and calm his rebellious workers and restless partners.
Product teams often know that a project needs to change direction, but they don’t have a way to make that change safely and quickly. Survival metrics empower them to do just that.
Risk management needs to be part of the daily lives of all employees up, down, and across an organization. Here’s how the Swiss electricity network achieves that.
Some careers can be made on the back of a single, wonderful idea. We take a look at what that looks like, through Bill Gurley's VC career.
Usage-based pricing can be incredibly powerful, particularly in cases where the SaaS solution handles the flow of money.
Part 1 in this 3-part series: Find the pricing model that fits with your particular options for expansion once you've made that first sale.
In today's consumer-centric world, packaging designs hold a very important place! A unique and attractive packaging design is what captures the interest and attention of your consumer. It pulls the consumer towards the product and even drives them to purchase it. Hence, allocating time, effort, and energy to create an appealing packaging design is extremely
Why Amazon Needs a Competitor and Why Walmart Ain’t It
Making things look nice can take a long time, either due to lack of resources or abundance of opinions. This could delay launches, frustrate people, and waste precious energy. Those are high costs for startups or companies hoping to move fast. Is it worth it? Long ago I got fed
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.
A few factors I’ve seen pull winners off the podium…
Looking to grow your affiliate marketing site but aren't sure which affiliate network is right for you? Here's everything you need to know.
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
These were my favorite product management and UX articles of 2020, which is the 5th year I’ve compiled this list. Though 2020 was a…
When solving a difficult problem, re-ask the problem so the solution helps you learn faster.
Dave Chappelle has a new special about his old show that includes fundamental lessons about how the Internet has changed the content business.
Sometimes, deciding what to do is the easiest part of a decision. Being decisive on an issue you hate is a whole different ballgame.
Video and slides from Mark Stiving's talk on value based pricing and price segmentation at the Aug-26-2020 Lean Culture Online event.
Tips on running successful Black Friday sales for creators and Indie Hackers
Efficacy, effectiveness, efficiency… These terms sound confusingly similar. Commonly used in medical research, project management, and decision science, they are often mixed up in everyday conversations. If you’re in a hurry, here’s the difference: Efficacy means getting things done Effectiveness means doing the right things Efficiency means doing things right Sounds confusing? Don’t worry, I ... Read More
Publisher comment sections are not only seen has hotbeds for toxicity, but historically have been very difficult to monetize.
These three real-life case studies are anonymized to share textbook examples of how not to approach search engine optimization.
Airbnb and DoorDash both created new markets where ones did not previously exist; they are startups played on “hard” mode.
How can dropshipping tools give you the edge in the competitive world of e-commerce? We take a look at the 11 best dropshipping tools you should be using.
How the Silicon Valley veteran transformed the e-signature pioneer Into a $37 billion powerhouse
Read more in the DTC Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail column about the biggest challenges and trends facing the DTC startup world.
If e-commerce was a market for L’Oreal, then it would be the biggest in terms of market value, worth nearly €5 billion ($5.9 billion).
What is behavioral marketing? Here's how email marketing, demographics, and upsells can be used to monitor and act on customer behavior.
The pandemic has boosted interest in vending machine ownership. We surveyed 20+ operators to find out how much they make.
An introduction to forming hypothesis statements for product experimentation.
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fpocket-syndicated-images.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farticles%2F3373%2F1582216096_GettyImages-1142992009.jpg)
Some products sell themselves, but habits don’t. They require a bit of finesse.
It’s so important to test your new product idea long before you feel ready.
I’m now six months into Shopify. So far it’s going basically on schedule: as I was told, “Your first couple months you’re going to have zero idea what’s going on. Then around month three you’ll com…
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22781388/VRG_ILLO_4687_A_guide_to_platform_fees.jpg)
To succeed in today’s e-commerce environment, companies must craft an online experience that meshes with the brick-and-mortar brand experience in their physical stores.
The Guide to Product Analytics taps dozens of product leaders (from companies like Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn) to break down how PMs can use product analytics to drive product-led growth.
Finding a brand name can be a painful process but these eight rules, based on brand naming examples, cover everything to get it right.
View our video advertising glossary and learn common terms that will help you understand better the world of video advertising.
Convenience and security increasingly impact online selling. That's especially the case for the upcoming holiday season, as consumers will likely seek flexible, seamless payment options. Here are four payment methods to consider for this year's holiday selling.
Prices for works by some relatively new artists have skyrocketed, seemingly overnight.
After I completed my first programming class, I went straight to Craigslist. I advertised my programming services. I called myself an experienced programmer who could code anything. I posted a link to
I regularly help pre-seed entrepreneurs identify and evaluate potential startup opportunities. The following is a set of heuristics I’ve developed and collected over the years that might of u…
We've recently built support for multi-armed bandits into the Stitch Fix experimentation platform. This post will explain how and why.
Shopping on Facebook and Instagram is finally here. With the recent launches of Shops on both apps and Live Shopping, Facebook is facilitating easier commerce across its platform. Here is a list of tools to help you sell on Facebook and Instagram.
The right way of being practical, theoretical and technical when analyzing churn
Complete analysis and implementation of a multinomial mixture model for supermarket shopper segmentation and predictive profiles prediction
Xin Yu, Yingyuan (Valerie) Zhang, Yutong (Grace) Zhu
User stories are system requirements often expressed as “persona + need + purpose.” Learn how stories drive agile programs & how to get started.
Fountain pens were a stylish statement but messy and impractical. Their replacement was a stroke of design genius perfectly in time for the era of mass production.
Hello, my name is Andrew, and I can’t stop disagreeing.
My name is Molson Hart. I’m the CEO of a consumer products company I founded 10 years ago, called Viahart. We design and distribute toys…
As much as marketers would like to control the narrative around their brands doing so is a fallacy.
How a small, family-owned electronics company came to control 97% of the ice cream truck music market.
Hagoromo chalk has developed a cult following among mathematicians. When the company went out of business, chaos ensued.
With a great landing page builder, you can get results. We tested dozens of apps, and here are our picks for the 7 best.
I bet your company’s pricing is all wrong. Here’s a 4 step method to get it right.
Why I miss Crazy Frog
Local shops in Turkey have been transporting groceries for centuries. Getir promises to bring them to your doorstep in 13 minutes or less.
Inflections in finance and tech. Click to read The Diff, by Byrne Hobart, a Substack publication.
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
The “personal transporter” promised to change cities back in 2001. It didn’t. But its demise should be a warning for today’s urban mobility disrupters.
Paid groups, bespoke social networks, and the meaning of community for internet-native businesses.
As the demand for in-person shopping diminishes, landlords, startups and retailers are converting abandoned stores into online fulfillment centers.
Even before the pandemic, it had started to unravel. What happens now that no one has a reason to dress up?
Changes in content, linking, and URL structure can dramatically impact organic search performance. Thus it's critical to understand the search engine risks and rewards from a new design before you start developing it. This is the 10th installment in my "SEO How-to" series.
Artifact is producing podcasts that only you and 4 friends will ever want.
Brick-and-mortar retail businesses are turning toward ecommerce to generate revenue — online and click-and-collect. As they make this digital transformation, those merchants will likely have questions about ecommerce platforms, themes, and design. While all of these are important, a company's focus should be on products and marketing first, in my experience.
Unlock valuable insights for effective discovery by decoding product metrics. Learn how to leverage these metrics to make informed decisions and optimize your product development process.
Our top ecommerce builders are based on objective performance data, feature set & value. Check out ecommerce platforms now.
From toy jeeps and karaoke machines to the Game Boy and Tamagotchi, “Pure Invention” explores how Japan's cultural influence has spread across the globe.
The long read: Nestlé’s sleek, chic capsule system changed the way we drink coffee. But in an age when everyone’s a coffee snob and waste is wickedness, can it survive?
[updated April, 2022] So you wanna start a side business while holding down a full-time job. Kool. Dang smart move – that’s the same route I took – ten years ago now. Self-funded, no VC to appease, no angel investor to update. Just you, and your sandbox of ambition. Hmm, but where to start? Which ... Read more
Dixie cups were the Zoom of the 1918 pandemic, and they can teach startups a lot about adapting and surviving during hard times.
Kevin Kwok had a great essay the other day on Figma, and how its runaway success is based on hundreds of successful loops baked into its product and business model: Why Figma Wins | Kevin Kwok It g…
A ecosystem of buyers, sellers, and brokers creates a thriving M&A market for digital businesses.
What tacit knowledge is, and why it is the most interesting topic in the study of expertise today.
Sometimes the best solution to a problem is to step around it. When was the last time you butted your head against a technical challenge and had several failed attempts to solve it? Maybe it was due to limitations of the platform you're using or limitations of your own technical ability. Or ma
Brands have long been able to bid for the premier slot at the top left of Amazon’s listings, but during the pandemic the online retailer has begun using this position for its private-label items, raising antitrust concerns.
Learn to build and maintain strong corporate innovation programs via innovation training and innovation infrastructure, with in-person and online innovation courses and advising.
Insiders may already know who’s going to buy what for how much, and lots are presented in a certain order just to build excitement.
A curated list of product management advice for technical people. - ProductHired/open-product-management
When you're faced with uncertainty, the best thing you can do is analyse your inputs, synthesise a new model, and then destroy it to start over again.
A curated collection of marketing articles & tools to grow your product. - GitHub - goabstract/Marketing-for-Engineers: A curated collection of marketing articles & tools to grow y...
Traditional sales visualizations miss critical information about what is happening in the sales process.
I often struggle to explain what it means to be part of a high-functioning software team. Sure, there are mountains of literature, and an entire genre of LinkedIn thought leadership that professes all kinds of guidelines and heuristics about what makes teams work, but in my experience, it’s hard to internalize these ideas and follow someone else’s model if you’ve never seen what good looks like.
The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea...
In 2019, long before the outbreak of COVID-19, many lower gross margin tech companies were not being well-received by the public markets, and an excessive spotlight was cast by many on company gross margins. In the present moment, that attention has only grown for both public and private companies. We’ve observed a bifurcation in the...
Curious about product design at Dropbox? Here’s a look at tools we use for solving problems, making decisions, and communicating ideas.
After more than 45 years as an off-pricer, the retailer hit the skids when COVID-19 forced its doors shut and zeroed out revenue. Now it hopes to slim down in Chapter 11.
How King Arthur Flour found itself in the unlikely crosshairs of a pandemic
7 Powers breaks fresh ground by constructing a comprehe…
Search and browse cloud infrastructure services such as PaaS, IaaS, log management, exception monitoring, realtime backend APIs, and more. Find the right tools and services to build your next app.
Lagrange Multiplier on a function with 2 variables with 1 equality constraint
2020 was the year East Fork ceramics planned to become profitable. Now, that's likely no longer on the table, but the company is using a new model to better handle its balance sheet: pre-sales. Now, new product lines will all be for sale before they're manufactured, as a way to get capital in as early as possible.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right [Gawande, Atul] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
@mmcgrana: Patio11’s Law: The software economy is bigger than you think, even when you take into account Patio11’s Law.1 A few years ago, I woke up in Sunriver, OR, and went to make coffee. The house had one of those bed-and-breakfast-type coffee trays. Drip machine. A stack
In an age where customer word of mouth can quickly go viral, managers can take five proactive actions to get the most lift out of their customers’ good reviews and minimize the bad ones. For positive reviews, managers should delay their response and–when they do respond– make sure the response is generic and short. The authors found that more customized responses — perceived as promotional and thus viewed as disingenuous — negatively affected future reviews. For negative reviews, it’s important to quickly respond to every one with a tailored solution to the specific complaint.
Greetings, everyone. This post begins a series on Web Monetization and serves to document my learning...
I learned the hard way how important a carefully designed sign-up process is. I saw a large percentage of interested people fail to sign up because of easily preventable flaws in the flow.
Don't store legal names, at least not as the default. Here's why, and why it matters.
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.atlasobscura.com%2Fmedia%2FW1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvYXNzZXRzLzRlZWM1YmQ2ZTcyYTAwMTA1ZF9jYW1lcmEga25vbGwxLnBuZyJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCIiXSxbInAiLCJjb252ZXJ0IiwiLXF1YWxpdHkgODEgLWF1dG8tb3JpZW50Il0sWyJwIiwidGh1bWIiLCIxMjgweD4iXV0%2Fcamera%2520knoll1.png)
From brewing tea to making shipping containers.
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fhbr.org%2Fresources%2Fimages%2Farticle_assets%2F2017%2F08%2Faug17-16-97231137.jpg)
Working backwards and breaking free from the norm exposes new and unique opportunities you probably haven’t considered.
AliExpress lets you unlock top brands' bestselling electronics, clothing, homewares, toys, sporting equipment, auto parts and more so you can live better for less.
In Bali, western immigrants are selling products they've never handled, from countries they've never visited, to consumers they've never met
If I got a dollar every time I hear about gamification in a meeting, I would be rich. Very rich. And the funny thing is, I don’t really…
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fpocket-syndicated-images.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farticles%2F4102%2F1587479518_ezgif.com-webp-to-jpg89.jpg)
Have you ever actually thrown a pair of gloves in the glove compartment?
It's been 25 years since an aging prizefighter, a quirky gadget, and iconic ’90s marketing combined to take over the world.
Leaders need to lead by example using OKRs, showing that they are equally as committed to successful outcomes as anyone on the front lines of the business.
China’s bike-sharing firms were supposed to be the next big thing. What happened?
See how brands can re-imagine the post-purchase experience to create loyal customers globally.
We should invest at least as much time in understanding our customers as we do in optimizing our product development process.
Inside the surreal and lucrative two-sided marketplace of mediocre famous people
How venture capital became the most dangerous thing to happen to now-troubled DTCs like Outdoor Voices, Harry’s, and Casper
It's been said that ideas don't matter, and that only execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good...
Packing an astonishing amount of information into an easy-to-digest visual, it's well worth the download.
Channel control, predatory contracting, vertical integration, and the 'God View'
Executives insist 2020 is the year Wayfair's logistics investments will show their worth.
After a behind-the-scenes business decision, labels and record stores are having trouble stocking shelves with CDs and vinyl
If you polled a cross-section of companies about their most important software, accounts payable and accounts receivable software would likely not rank high on their lists. It’s the kind of unglamorous, workhorse software that’s necessary, but often taken for granted. Then, late last year, the cloud-based b2b payments company Bill.com went public—and became the second...
The company's values used to just be considered good business sense. Not anymore.
You probably think startups have nothing in common with a classical Chinese dance performance. You’re wrong.
“Real quick, whole squad on that real sh*t 0 to 100, n***a, real quick” —Drake, “0 to 100/The Catch Up” I am a giant advocate for technical founders running their own companies, but one consistent way that technical founders deeply harm their businesses is by screwing up the budgeting process. Yes, the budgeting process. How...
Consumer needs spark consumer journeys. How can marketers identify those needs and address them? The latest consumer research from Google will help.
Trying to crush other companies' use of color is not only petty; it completely misses the point of branding.
177K subscribers in the ProductManagement community. Product Management
Matt Meyers spent two decades at Weyerhaeuser dealing with product engineering, manufacturing, software engineering, product development, sales and
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fpocket-syndicated-images.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farticles%2F1027%2F1621987878_GettyImages-1218981896.jpg)
The origin story of one of the great icons of 20th-century industrial design.
Inside the world of audio branding with Skype’s new pings, bounces, and pops
Canva are one of Australia's most successfull startups. In this case study we analyse how they use digital channels to attract and acquire new users
Most of the times, startup don't work. At some point it may make sense to either (1) give up on your original product and to sell the company, (2) shut down what you are doing and return money to investors, or (3) to pivot. You can read more on making the decision to give up in a future article. This post focuses on pivoting for small, early stage companies (e.g. 10 or fewer people).
Polly Wong, managing partner at Belardi Wong, offers tips for crafting customer offers while avoiding discount fatigue and harm to the bottom line.
If you shop on Amazon, an algorithm rather than a human probably set the price of the service or item you bought. Pricing algorithms have become ubiquitous in online retail as automated systems have grown increasingly affordable and easy to implement. But while companies like airlines and hotels have long used machines to set their…
Returns are on the rise – here’s what you can do to make it your competitive advantage.
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Last month, I spoke […]
One man's desire to create the perfect gun profoundly changed manufacturing.
There might be no more beloved image of the American entrepreneurial spirit than that of neighborhood kids who open a sidewalk lemonade stand on a hot summer day. With a little bit of “capital” from their parents — lemons, water, sugar, a card table, some markers and paper — hard work, and good sidewalk placement,...
Unleash the power of Product Qualified Leads to skyrocket your SaaS business growth. Learn to identify, nurture, and convert PQLs now with our guide.
Product builders should aim for lovable, not just viable. Jiaona Zhang (product leader at Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork and lecturer at Stanford) shares her tactics for building MLPs that win users' hearts.
Steven Rogelberg, a professor at UNC Charlotte, has spent decades researching workplace meetings and reports that many of them are a waste of time. Why? Because the vast majority of managers aren’t trained in or reviewed on effective meeting management. He explains how leaders can improve meetings — for example, by welcoming attendees as if they were party guests or banning use of the mute button on conference calls — and how organizations can support these efforts with better practices and policies, from creating meeting-free days to appointing a Chief Meeting Officer. Rogelberg is the author of the book “The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance” and the HBR article “Why Your Meetings Stink — And What To Do About It.”
Learn the exact way that I perform keyword research that generates profitable, scalable ROI for eCommerce stores.
Every website or PWA you build should automate as much prospecting and selling as possible. The only thing is that visitors enter websites with various mindsets, depending on which part of the buying stage they’re at. This means that you can’t just take every person who enters the site through the same path. You have to design a custom sales funnel (or pathway) for each kind of buyer. In this article, Suzanna Scacca will tell you what you need to keep in mind.
Purpose-built tools have emerged to help product managers do their jobs more effectively. These make up the product management stack, composed of more than a dozen categories. But what is the actual function of each category? We drill down on everything from roadmapping to onboarding.
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. I’ve found a visual […]
:extract_focal()/https%3A%2F%2Fhbr.org%2Fresources%2Fimages%2Farticle_assets%2F2015%2F11%2Fnov15-26-2696244.jpg)
To make sure productivity doesn’t slow after you walk out of the room, do two things after and in between meetings.
I joked the other day that some of the best fairytales are written in Excel. While there isn’t a single magic number or set formula, understanding industry benchmarks can be really helpful to…
Apple TV+ is cheap and barren. HBO Max is expensive and cheapening their brand. Everyone is confused.
Hired's Head of Global Revenue, John Kelly, explains how the company successfully transitioned from a transactional to a subscription model.
Agile methodologies theory, practice, examples, and free templates for product development and product management teams.
Tokyo Ohka Kogyo Co., JSR Corp. and Shin-Etsu Chemical Co.: Three seemingly inconspicuous companies suddenly came into the spotlight in early July when Japan announced it would slap tightened export controls to South Korea on three key chemicals — photoresists, fluorinated polyimide and hydrogen fluoride...
Nir Eyal’s Hooked Model explains how games keep players coming back.
An MIT Sloan Ph.D. candidate discovered what turned skilled hobbyists into entrepreneurs.
Each customer has an individualized style map, laying out her feelings about peasant blouses, A-line dresses, or pencil skirts.
As your sales team grows, your tech stack almost always does too. But figuring out which sales tools you should buy can be a daunting task.
Increasingly, companies are using experiments to guide them in their decision making—but many are still missing opportunities, or are failing to implement experiments well. When it comes to the rollout of new products, one particularly effective new kind of experiment involves randomizing the introduction of new products across a set of markets. Uber used this strategy before rolling out its Express Pool service, and Airbnb did the same before rollout out a new landing-page design. In both cases, the companies gathered data that allowed them to roll out their products with confidence that they would succeed—as indeed they did. Many companies, even those not in the tech sector, can benefit from this kind of experimentation, especially if they follow a few basic guidelines.
On ecommerce sites, saving shopping-cart items for possible later purchase must be discoverable and low-effort.
How does Netflix get away with releasing its movies in theaters on the same day it makes them available for “free” on its streaming platform? The answer is that Netflix is pursuing a fundamentally different business model from everyone else in the industry. Netflix is not in the business of selling individual movies to many different customers. Instead, it’s in the business of selling many different movies to individual customers—in bundles. Bundled subscriptions allow Netflix to practice a different kind of price discrimination from the movie studios. The company doesn’t have to figure out how much a consumer values any individual movie on the service. The bundle does that for them—very profitably.
Buyer Experience Benchmarking of 5 Top eCommerce Sites Dec 2018 Ken Leaver
Unexpected service fees and special-delivery costs should be disclosed early in the shopping process to avoid losing customers.
Some of the most successful companies and products have been predicated on the concept of network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it… if managed well. But you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So, what metrics should you look at to determine if you even have network...
We’ve defined network effects — from what they are and aren’t to how to measure and manage them in practice — but network effects have still always been hotly debated: Where are they, are they real, are they enduring… and so on. So in this second video of our three-part miniseries on network effects, a16z...
Some of the most successful companies and products — from the phone era to the internet era — have all been predicated on the concept of network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it. But how do you tell network effects apart from scale effects, brand preference, or...
Effective leadership of virtual teams matters more than which collaboration platform you choose.
Coupons and other discounts should be easy to apply and shopping carts should clearly display how the total was affected by the promotion.
Practical thoughts from a back-end team leader
The “traditional” user onboarding flows and walkthroughs are dead. Learn about the next era of user onboarding and how to adapt to the changes in your org.
What will you do in product management if you can not deal with strategic planning? How will you succeed if you are not able to prioritize correctly?
Executives often assume that speed comes at the cost of quality in good decision making. A survey challenges this belief and offers tips on getting the best of both worlds.
Frustrated decision makers take heart. Three practices can help companies make better decisions more quickly.
Buying a domain at the asking price? That's like buying a used car at the asking price. Doing your homework pays off.
Retailers seek to avoid markdowns and sell out of the season at full margin, but it isn’t easy to predict how much inventory to acquire. In this post, I'll address four online merchandising tactics that balance consumer demand with inventory levels, to maximize profits.
It’s common for companies to hang on for too long to projects or parts of the business that are underperforming. Two effective techniques can help executives make project investment decisions on when to hold on to an asset and when to let it go.
When you deliver value to your customer is as important as how you deliver value. The when becomes a critical input into designing your pricing model. Learn more here.
This was first published on my mailing list The Looking Glass. Every week, I answer a reader’s question.
A new battle is brewing to be the default of every choice we make. As modern interfaces like voice remove options, augmented reality…
The ideal onboarding path is an easy and frictionless path to finding value. But some products include irreducible complexity – so here are 5 techniques that help to create the magic of a consumer onboarding flow in a complex product with considered actions.
OpenView's Kyle Poyar presents an inclusive guide featuring the best resources available to help you execute a successful product-led growth strategy.
A product qualified lead (PQL) is a lead who has experienced meaningful value using your product through a free trial or freemium model. Learn how to use them in your organization here.
✨ We have released a new and updated version of this book on Amazon If you have read this free book (below) and it has created value for you, please leave a written review on the Amazon link above. Even better, buy a book on Amazon (so that you will be marked as a Verified Purchaser when you ...
The simple and open source user story mapping tool. - amborle/featmap
Bird recently announced a new form factor for micromobility, the Bird Cruiser. It’s a cross between an electric scooter, a bicycle and a…
Toshiba has discovered a new way to enforce such planned obsolescence by cutting the repair market off from critical service information. But the cost to society is significant: The e-waste problem is growing; we’re losing thousands of domestic jobs as independent repair shops shut down; and consumers are being forced to replace their hardware much frequently than they should have to.
As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my…
SaaS products may be the future of how we work, but that future will only happen if we can learn how to build trust with your customers.
This report describes 12 common flaws, errors, and misadventures that occur in people’s heads when predictions are made.
Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.
“We believe true equality is when spending more can’t buy you a better education.” – Duolingo founders When the language learning software company Rosetta Stone went public in 2009, they… Keep reading
Many of the most consequential projects of the internet era — from Wikipedia to Facebook and bitcoin — have all been predicated on network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it. As a result, we’ve become really good at analyzing and measuring network effects. Whether it’s decreasing customer...
Plus how to actually do it—with sample scripts
Not every SaaS company has endless spare money. One of the biggest piggy bank breakers are the tools we use—and it adds up fast.
You’re keen on encouraging innovation and letting a thousand flowers bloom, but how do you sort the weeds from the seeds?
What's the number one prerequisite to building a high-quality wardrobe? Exactly: You need to be able to recognize a quality garment when you see one. You need to be able to tell the difference between a durable, well-crafted piece and one that looks pretty on the rack but won't last more than half a
Improve your thinking, become smarter and pioneer the future
I’ll be surprised if broadcast television in the U.S. survives another decade.
Robert R. Taylor is a name you’ve probably never heard before. But this serial entrepreneur made his mark on the world of business by coming up with several products you are almost certainly very familiar with. Today we’re going to talk about, on the surface, the most boring of those- liquid hand soap. Something you can thank Mr. Taylor and [...]
Orbitz, the travel website, offers slightly different prices to customers who are shopping through its app or a computer, and even between two different users on the same platform. Some of this may be due to experimentation and testing, but it’s also a sign that web retailers are using technology to try to offer personalized pricing — a practice some might consider a form of price profiling. The goal of this practice is to try to identify an individual’s willingness to pay and adjust the price upward or downward to maximize profits. It’s something shoppers should be aware of as more purchases are made online.
Google Analytics is a powerful, free web analytics platform. However, it has gaps that are better served by other tools. I'll address those gaps and tools in this post.
Many attributes of the customer journey are very predictable and can be planned for to create and convert inbound store footfall.
Rapid, customer-tailored dynamic pricing adjustments being made possible by new digital and advanced-analytics capabilities can generate substantial margin improvement for chemical companies.
“Gravity’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.” A truth is a useful, reliable statement of how the world is. You can ignore it, but it will cost you, because the world won&#…
In his new book, Range, David Epstein argues that although specialization has its virtues, businesses need people with wide horizons and ranges of interests in order to succeed.
Your phone increasingly knows what you’re taking a picture of. And which apps you have installed. So…
Researchers at MIT's CSAIL have developed a new technique that identifies high-performance subnetworks within neural networks.
Create strong culture, stay laser-focused on problems, and set wildly ambitious goals
Based on data from 597 people, the best ways to build trust as a leader aren’t what you think they are. How do you build trust as a leader? The answer seems intuitive enough. For many of us, …
When Hulu was launched, in 2008, it had the backing of three major motion-picture studios—21st Century Fox, NBC Universal, and Walt Disney Studios/ABC Television. The service seemed poised to dominate video distribution online—but today it ranks only 8th among streaming services, far behind Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video. What happened? From its inception, it turns out, the service faced two major obstacles to success: its ownership structure, which discouraged its members from sharing their most valuable content; and the organizational structure of its members, which focused on their traditional model of doing business, rather than on streaming. But streaming is the future of the entertainment industry, the authors write, and Hulu will only succeed if it acknowledges that truth and adapts its business model accordingly—which, promisingly, it has begun to do.
Making better decisions is one of the best skills we can develop. Good decisions save time, money, and stress. Here, we break down what makes a good decision and what we can do to improve our decision-making processes.
Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches. The company’s future is far from certain.
In a world where there are no secrets, where innovations are quickly imitated or become obsolete, the theory of competitive advantage may have had its day. Realistically, ask yourself, If all your competitors gave their strategic plans to each other, would it really make a difference? In 1986, Amar Bhide wrote “Hustle as Strategy” for the Harvard Business Review. At the time, he was an assistant professor at HBS. He examined the dynamics within the financial services market.
How a user-first culture led to a decade of eureka moments at Google UX
There is a story arc of the electric scooter market that took the world by storm in 2018, was second-guessed late in the year and has…
The key is flexibility, according to Trump's former National Security Advisor.
Thoughtful, empathetic language can make or break your business relationships
Understanding user behavior is key to understanding how users interact with your product. Here are 15 steps to analyze & change their interactions to your benefit.
Update 2016-10-18: This tutorial has been updated to reflect the latest version of my stack (now with Drip!). I’ve also updated pricing info (it’s technically a $0 stack now) and screenshots. The original outdated article is archived here. “Just tell me what to do so I can stop
“That’s just one person” and “Our real users aren’t like that” are common objections to findings from qualitative usability testing. Address these concerns proactively to ensure your research is effective.
A way to communicate, quantify, validate, and design for a Job to be Done
Dollar Tree has struggled to grow Family Dollar because of its different business model.
The long read: When Aldi arrived in Britain, Tesco and Sainsbury’s were sure they had nothing to worry about. Three decades later, they know better
Done right, GIST keeps the team, management and stakeholders aligned on the why (goals), what (ideas) and how (steps and tasks), and every task we execute is connected to a business goal. A full quarterly plan creates a GIST tree per goal:
Confirming what people already believe can sometimes help organizations overcome barriers to change.
Throughout China, Allen Zhang is known as the “father of WeChat”. Zhang’s public persona has much the same cultural importance and weight as the American legacy of Steve Jobs. He is renowned in China’s tech scene as an artist and philosopher, as well as for his fierce mission against anything that degrades user experience. Product...
Finding and building the next big idea is the holy grail of any tech company. Unfortunately the statistics are against us: when subjected…
A discussion of the 9 core operating principles that world class companies tend to embrace, by NFX Managing Partner James Currier.
Manufacturers are developing two packaging designs for the same product: those destined for the retail shelf and those sent directly to consumers.
Recently, a founder asked to chat with me about SEO. During our call, the founder - whose startup is backed by a top-tier VC - said to me “I assume that you acquired your first users through paid marketing.” Really? Is this an assumption nowadays? Since we’ve raised money
Untuckit is using Amazon to offload older styles -- preferring the marketplace as an alternative over the traditional outlet store.
Chris Dixon's blog.
PopSockets opted not to be a direct vendor to Amazon. Instead, it chose one major reseller to represent it on the marketplace. But, Amazon would not allow it. So, PopSockets walked away.
All things being equal, speed will determine whether your company succeeds or not. Here's how to make it core to your culture.
The most successful companies and products of the internet era have all been predicated on the concept of network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it. This is as true of companies like Amazon and Google as it is for open source projects like Wikipedia and some cryptocurrencies....
Shopify App Store: customize your online store and grow your business with Shopify-approved apps for marketing, store design, fulfillment, and more.
Shopify is partnering with a network of more than 20,000 app developers and agency partners to build profitable businesses.
Pricing is a good place to make a few critical resolutions for businesses. Learn the 5 resolutions as you shape your pricing strategy for 2019.
Dear designers/marketers (and innocent person reading this note), So, you’re doing customer interviews and user research, good for you! You’ve joined the fold of responsible, empathetic, and effective product design and marketing professionals. But you sound like a robot when you email me. Here are some questions from user testing emails & surveys I’ve received […]
Brands are giving the masses the illusion that they are consuming luxury, when in reality they are doing nothing of the sort, argues Eugene Rabkin.
Product is at the epicenter of everything a product led growth (PLG) company does. So how does the product organization and its PMs need to adapt? Find out here.
Express and Ann Taylor are just two of several established retailers that have launched clothing rental subscriptions in recent months.
Data is invading every nook and cranny of every team, department, and company in every industry, everywhere. Developing the talent needed to take full advantage must be a high priority. Indeed, everyone must be able to contribute to improving data quality, interpreting analyses, and conducting their own experiments. It will take decades for the public education systems to churn out enough people with the needed skills — far too long for companies to wait. Fortunately, managers, aided by a senior data scientist engaged for a few hours a week can introduce five powerful “tools” that will help their teams start to use analytics to solve important business problems.
Casper, Glossier, Harry’s, and Away love to send you mail.
There are two interesting ways to solve a problem, find a startup or even write a blog post. You can lump two previously disparate categories into one. Or you can split a previously coherent catego…
Customer segmentation is not just a revenue tool, but also a way to achieve excellence in execution.
After I published test && commit || revert, I got a variety of responses on Twitter and on Hacker News. The Twitter comments were mostly…
Robert Smith is the Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Vista Equity Partners. A March 2018 Forbes profile described Vista’s performance: “Since the firm’s inception in 2000, Vi…
Learn more about the data analytics industry, dbt Cloud and dbt Core, as well as company news and updates.
If you were an alien hovering above planet earth on a quick visit and trying to find out quickly which were its most dominant companies, you could probably do worse than try to reach their customer…
Forget the new iPhones, Apple best product is now privacy.
The mysteries of consumer behavior, explained by ice cream and independent bookstores.
The U.S. grocery industry has reached an uncertain crossroads, facing competition from many sources, but especially German discount stores ALDI and LIDL, who are aggressively expanding across the United States. Whether U.S. retailers will maintain their market share hinges on how they use private-label products (also called white-label goods or store brands) to fight back. In France, grocers were able to repel ALDI and LIDL by offering private-label goods that were both affordable and high quality, but in the UK, retailers chose to offer super-budget private-label items. They might have been cheap, but they were very low-quality, and consumers punished them. The U.S. doesn’t have a lot of experience with private-label goods, so American retailers will have to come up to speed quickly if they hope to maintain their advantage.
Why every purchase is a performance “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.” — Thomas Cooley About a month ago, I published what has become my mo…
Product expansion is often used as a path to growth, but it can have unintended consequences for other aspects of the business — including the customer experience central to the company’s value proposition. Indeed, current trends are moving away from broad offerings in many industries. A recent poll had 64% of consumers saying they would pay more for a simpler, more convenient experience. The trick is, growth strategies have to fit the company’s current context, especially its brand promise and its target market. Once the company has a strategy to fit the context, it can sequence out the various steps to implement it. For example, McDonald’s had known for years that customers wanted all-day breakfast, but to be able to offer it, it first had to streamline and revamp its kitchens.
Investing in more efficient ways for consumers to use your core commodity as it faces disruptive competition can be a smart move.
Faced with tough competition and uncertainty in raw-material prices, industrial companies must reset their pricing architecture.
An illuminating infographic highlights 10 e-commerce pain points that ruin the user experience and lead to shopping cart abandonment.
Editor’s note: This article by now-a16z general partner Alex Rampell was originally published in 2012 in TechCrunch. The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements, and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to...
PopSugar said it expects to have 20,000 subscribers by year's end to its text message program, which it's used to sell protein bars and housewares.
Strategy and tactics are two terms that get thrown around a lot, often used interchangeably. But what exactly do they mean, what is the difference, and why is it important? In this article, we look at the contrast between strategy and tactics, and the most effective ways to use each, whether you're trying to win a war, start a business, or reach any other important objective.
Cost-plus pricing is a lot like the romance novel genre, in that it’s widely ridiculed yet tremendously popular. The idea behind cost-plus pricing is straightforward. The seller calculates all costs, fixed and variable, that have been or will be incurred in manufacturing the product, and then applies a markup percentage to these costs to estimate the asking price. Though currently out of fashion among pricing experts (for good reason), there are sometimes strategic and pragmatic reasons to use cost-plus pricing. When implemented with forethought and prudence, cost-plus pricing can lead to powerful differentiation, greater customer trust, reduced risk of price wars, and steady, predictable profits for the company.
I'm a longtime seller on Amazon's marketplace. I also mentor many sellers and help brands to improve their marketplace sales. And I belong to various
Building a product that connects to multiple third-party products is a common approach — an annotated twitter thread exploring strategic…
Many online retailers unintentionally train consumers to expect discounts. Clothing stores are amongst the worst offenders. Constant discounting makes full-price shoppers believe they’re being overcharged. They often won’t shop until the next sale, which leads to a vicious cycle. It is a rare company that doesn’t get asked for discounts. In this post, I'll review 10 ways to offer clients a discount.
The Moat Map describes the correlation between the degree of supplier differentiation and the externalization (or internalization) of a company’s network effect.
Connect with developers sharing the strategies and revenue numbers behind their companies and side projects.
I'm often asked why I started FringeSport. People inquire, "Of all the things to do, why sell barbells?" I tell them that if I wanted only to make money,
We explain how we came to spend $20,000 on this domain, and the incredible business opportunities that exist, waiting for someone to bring them to life.
The Internet has removed friction: that means a whole new set of possibilities; it doesn’t mean they are all good.
LIKE THIS ARTICLE SO FAR? THEN YOU’LL REALLY WANT TO SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER. IT’S DELIVERED ONCE A WEEK AND PACKED WITH IDEAS ON…
At some point, almost every company faces questions like How good are the customers that we acquire? How do they
Amazon turned an event into a blockbuster. Here’s a roadmap for retailers who want to replicate its success.
Lessons learned from opening a brick-and-mortar retail store may apply to online merchants, providing insights about promoting products, driving sales,
Rather than simply selling products, more and more companies have begun to sell projects, helping customers achieve a specific goal on a specific timeframe. For example, consider the evolution of medical device maker Philips. After more than a century of profitable existence, the company has become an intricate, blurred matrix organization. Accountabilities and responsibilities were shared between products, segments, countries, regions, functions, and headquarters. To simplify this convoluted and archaic organization structure, as well as protect its products against commoditization, Philips put projects at center stage. Shifting from selling products or experiences to selling projects requires fundamental shifts across your business — but in a rapidly evolving industry, it can make your company more nimble and responsive to the market.
Meet the hidden pressures shaping design, from the waistlines of kings to the whims of 18th Century wagon drivers.
Running a win loss analysis can greatly impact your bottom line. But how do you do so effectively? Get all the tips here.
Want to get the most out of your first month as a product manager? Want your new hire to hit the ground running? Here's our best practices.
Part One: Types of Teams Written to sort out my thoughts for my UXDC keynote. If you’d like me to speak at your conference on high performing teams, check out cwodtke.com “High Performing Team” is …
Update, Dec 12, 2016: There is a follow up post discussing the outcome of all of this after the election results were known.
Accounting, bookkeeping, and tax tips to help you understand your small business finances.
To build word of mouth, try these strategies.
Consumers are primed to see ".99," but prices that deviate from that format can affect the way they interpret the cost.
It rarely makes sense to take product feedback from all users and it never makes sense to get it all at once. Five fixes feedback for your product.
I remember the first time I had to write one of these puppies. I had just been promoted to manager at Yahoo back in 2000, and was running a small team. I was told to “write a status email covering …