by Doug Richard
What better way to start to start an article than by quoting a man I loathe?
“. . . as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002
The thing is. He’s right....
By Doug Richard
Let’s first re-cap the argument to date. Last week during the Budget Festival, Lord Mandelson was on a side stage promoting his idea of a credit adjudicator. This novel idea is to create a completely new judicial system to review unfair loan denials by banks to small businesses.
This is a remedy to the asserted problem that banks are secretly tightening credit requirements or in other ways screwing around with small businesses: setting new fees for current loan holders,...
Yesterday, Doug wrote a revealing post about “What Businesses Will Be Worrying About Next Year“. After a flurry of tweeting activity and interest, we thought we would follow up with an exclusive video from our S4Stv archive entitled “Product Marketing on the Internet“.
In the clip below, Doug explains how your product or service can serve as the marketing for itself.
...I was sitting in a development meeting at a small company that I mentor last week. The CEO, who was the “sales” guy on the team, and the other founder, who was the “tech” guy on the team were arguing about the development schedule and what features should be included in release one.
Actually, they were arguing about when to ship, meaning what they were arguing about was what features would not make it into release one. Behind us on the...
Ship Early, Ship Little, Ship Fast. This article explores why startup companies should focus on creating products with a small feature set that is completely integrated with the outside world.
South by Southwest winds down again. And once again I marvel at how useful and useless it is. As a conference where one can hear provocative ideas, learn new things, and see the edge of what’s going on: it sucks. But as a place to meet people who you really should meet, it is unrivalled. Let me explain. Austin is a city unto itself. It is the anti-Texas. And as many Austin residents will tell you, they pride themselves on being a centre of sophistication in the midst of a state that is anything but. I admit to having held a bias against Texas for a long time and I am not going to soften it in this essay; but I admit that Austin is special.
This morning, we posted an article by Doug called “Successful Startups Almost Never Compete On Price”. Due to the popularity of the article, within hours, our website started to receive an unprecedented amount of traffic.
Naturally, this tells us we’ve hit upon a key issue that faces most entrepreneurs.
We thought it would be helpful to post a video clip from our S4Stv library entitled “Prices Are Discovered” with Doug explaining the thinking behind pricing, turning around some of the more commonly...
I have counseled and supported many thousands of entrepreneurs over the years, and something that never ceases to amaze me is how many initially enter the market with the intent of competing on price. Since I have an extensive background in sales and marketing, and since I've managed more than my fare share of sales teams, the idea of maximizing the number of low margin sales a business makes just seems completely insane. Startups rarely have the returns to scale or the marketing and sales efficiency to do large volumes of business profitably at a low price.
Location: The British Library Time: Noon – 7pm
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Bring your computers because this is a hands-on day. It’s a...
As a very happy entrepreneur over fifty, I encourage my peers to join the entrepreneur revolution required to keep the UK wealthy and prosperous well into the next century. Innovation, invention, insight and good implementation can build a good business at any age.
