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Rethinking selling
Making a sale of a Software as a Service (SaaS) product to a large enterprise customer can be slow and difficult. There are a lot of potential roadblocks that need to be overcome.
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Bringing the menu to life
We recently visited a local Indian restaurant and they had an interesting way to explain the dishes on the menu.
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How I learnt to pick ideas that win
I come up with lots of ideas for potential applications, businesses, stories and random other things.
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Numbers for managing teams
Sometimes you come across an article that makes you think. The article, Numbers To Know For Managing Software Teams, made me do that.
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Picking ideas
I have a file with 400+ ideas for businesses, products, books, etc. So finding ideas is relatively easy. However validating and picking ideas is more of a challenge.
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Decide who decides
As many of my posts start, I was listening to a podcast. This was a startup founder who was talking about the company she started with a partner and how they handled decisions where the two of them didn’t agree about something.
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A Tale of Three Experiences: Customer Service Up Close
Last week I experienced a range of customer service related to a new sofa we bought. It’s clear how much difference it can make.
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Information - Organisation - Application
“Put everything you know out for free but in a random order”.
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Tiny Projects
Like lots of people, especially developers, I have a long list of potential business/app ideas that sit around and gather dust. Some of them are just impractical, some I don’t have the skills to do but the biggest constraint is time and the battle with all the other commitments life throws at you.
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WeWork versus IWork
A colleague just spent the day at a WeWork and commented on how badly named it was.
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The growing power of influencers
Quite often I will come across long articles and either put off reading them or just skim through their content. This article is well worth taking the time to read as it completely changed my views on where the media industry is heading. My notes here do not do it justice but will hopefully give you enough to encourage you to read it in full.
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The loosely held product roadmap
In a recent article by Ryan Singer, Options, Not Roadmaps, he explains why he doesn’t use roadmaps - he uses options instead.
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New ways to generate ideas online
There are a lot of sites that claim to be idea generators. Most of them turn out to be just a button you click that slings together a bunch of random words that are meant to then become a prompt to generate ideas.
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Rethinking conferences in a remote only world
I recently attended the fully virtual Microsoft Build conference. There is no way I would have been able to attend the real “physical” conference due to the location, financial commitment and time required however this gave me an opportunity to benefit from something normally out of my reach.
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Yet another productivity book summaries site
I came across an excellent site for summaries of productivity books. There are a lot of sites out there that provide summaries however the quality of the video summaries is excellent and seems to be updated fairly frequently.
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Tackle the difficult problems first with #MonkeyFirst
I was listening to the audiobook for “Questions Are the Answer” by Hal Gregerson and it mentioned an approach used by the X lab at Alphabet nicknamed “MonkeyFirst”.
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Consensus 2019 - Conference Notes
These are my notes from attending the Consensus 2019 conference in New York - there is a good chance that some of the notes I made are incorrect.
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Empowering problem solvers - not offering solutions
There is a natural reaction for people when faced with a problem to offer solutions. This can be especially true for managers.
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The battle of real versus artificial deadlines
This excellent article looks at the different types of deadlines and the impact they have. The key point for me, and not something I had seen previously defined, is the distinction between real and artificial deadlines:
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Places to name things
This one is just for future reference for me that I may find useful one day - a website full of resources that may be useful for naming things.
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From 5 whys to why now?
I have used the “5 whys” approach multiple times to get to the root of some question. This article advocates adding a time dimension to the decision. Not only should we consider why we are doing something, we should also consider why we are doing something at a specific point in time. It also twists this around and suggests we should consider “What is the danger of not doing this right now?” - what would we lose or miss?
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How to identify real gurus and experts
This is an old post (March 2009) that someone retweeted but still holds true on how to work out if an expert is really an expert. It also is a guide how not to fall into common traps that so-called experts fall into.
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The unseen impact of the little trade-offs
I found this article to be a very astute observation that it can be all the “little trade-offs” that can add up to cause issues. The article highlights it from the perspective of a leader who can make small decisions, usually around putting something off or taking a short cut, that can add up to impact their work and those around them.
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Using crazy socks to make an impact
This is a great article about a small business that is growing rapidly and run with a smile on their faces. John and his dad started a business to sell crazy, fun socks and it has gone from strength to strength. I also like the 5% of sales to the Special Olympics and the socks for charities (watch the video).
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Surprising the customer with unexpected pricing
Derek Sivers highlights an interesting pricing approach in this article. He was asked to perform at a distant location. When the customer couldn’t afford the price they suggested reducing the performance time, hoping to reduce the price. Instead of doing the expected he raised his price. His reason was that they were paying for him to get to the location and then do the work where the work was the fun bit. By reducing the time on the fun bit it was less worth him making the trip.
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Knowledge workers are assets not costs
This is an excellent article that touches on some many areas including Amazon (again) and their structure. However the most interesting part for me is the section on the way to view knowledge workers in business:
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Taking the pain out of logo design with Tailor Brands
I came across a link on Product Hunt to Tailor Brands who do automatic logo creation and branding. It is great to see them still doing well. I used them for my company logo, Sentio Ventures, shortly after they started in 2014!
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