How to Sell a $300 Chocolate Bar
Follow the wine playbook.
prodmgmt
Giving a Shit as a Service
A mental model for service businesses.
5 Pricing Resolutions for 2019 - OpenView
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.
10 Data Acquisition Strategies for Startups
The “unreasonable effectiveness” of data for machine-learning applications has been widely debated over the years (see here, here and…
If Your Customers Don't Care What You Charge, What Should You Charge?
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.
Catalogs & Wishbooks
336 Vintage Christmas Catalogs & Holiday Wish Books with 302,605 total catalog pages from Sears, Montgomery Ward and JCPenney over the years.
Babe Ruth and Feature Lists
Prioritized lists are essential for product managers, right? Yes, but be careful. Ken Norton illustrates why.
Thoughts on Building Weatherproof Companies | Andreessen Horowitz
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.
The Five Types of Virality
and choosing the right one for your product to grow
The Marketplace Glossary | Andreessen Horowitz
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…
Cash is a fact, profit is an opinion
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…
Selling pickaxes during a gold rush
Chris Dixon's blog.
Five Questions Companies Should Ask Before Making an Innovation-Driven Acquisition
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…
A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy
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…
In times of change, make tires
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…
The *real* pivot
4 Business Models for the Data Age
Rethinking old strategies.
10-Steps to a Friction-Free App.
How to improve your product experience to eliminate confusion and frustration for your users.
3 Steps to Break Out in a Tired Industry
Focus, eliminate, replace.
How to sunset a feature
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.
The Real Power of Platforms Is Helping People Self-Organize
Centralized planning is no longer required.
How Modern Marketplaces Like Uber and Airbnb Build Trust to Achieve Liquidity
Anand Iyer, former Head of Product at Threadflip, on how marketplaces can build trust in order to build their businesses.
It’s OK to Move Down (Yes, Down) the Value Chain
There is increased efficiency and other benefits to doing so.
Anatomy of a Great User Story
How to tell your product’s tale
The Power of Reference Customers | Silicon Valley Product Group
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…
User Acquisition: Viral Factor Basics
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…
The Most Effective Price Discovery Question for Your Startup by @ttunguz
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…
http://platformed.info/platform-strategy-and-walled-gardens-in-the-toy-industry/
An eBook pricing model that resulted in $100,000 in sales
A Deeper Look at Uber’s Dynamic Pricing Model
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…
Six Principles for Making New Things
Customer Loyalty Is Overrated
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…
Batman Is A Growth Hacker
B.J. Mendelson breaks down how Batman is a growth hacker, and what we can learn about the field from him.
Secrets Of Freemium Pricing: Make The Cheapskates Pay
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
Network Effects Aren’t Enough
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…
All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club
[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…
Who is good at discovery?
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 Dozen Attributes of a Scalable Business
“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…
How to Master The Discipline of Product Management (Not the job of Product Manager)
The three skills that are necessary to craft a successful product, and how to create and perpetuate them throughout a company.
Relearning the Art of Asking Questions
Focus on the problem you’re trying to solve.
“Platform” risk — Remains of the Day
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…
6 decision-making techniques all Product Managers should know
How to productively make collaborative decisions
Hardware is sexy, but it’s software that matters
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 Design Sprint — GV
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.
Five dynamic pricing issues retailers should consider
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…
If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
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...
The Availability Cascade: How Information Spreads on a Large Scale
Use Co-opetition to Build New Lines of Revenue
Just don’t pretend you’re all on the same side.
How to Increase SaaS Pricing (and Quickly Triple Your Growth) - ExtendsLogic
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…
Steve Blank Do Pivots Matter?
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 …