Successful presentations? – go back to basics
Some of us of a certain age come from a time when presentations weren’t created directly on the PC (or Mac) with PowerPoint (or Keynote), or with cool new online tools like Prezi. Back then before laptop PCs and low cost flash drives, if there was plenty of money in the marketing budget, and the [...]
Does a picture paint a thousand words?
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last few weeks thinking about the basics of presentations combined with how you get the positioning and messaging for your product right. To help I’ve been reading Jack Trout‘s In Search of the Obvious, a marketing book which is all about making sure you focus your [...]
What Makes an Entrepreneur (4/11) – Resiliency
This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful. I originally posted it on VentureHacks, one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. If you haven’t spent time over there you should. I started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity. I then covered Street Smarts and Ability to [...]
What Makes an Entrepreneur (3/10) – Ability to Pivot
This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful. I originally posted it onVentureHacks, one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. If you haven’t spent time over there you should. I started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity. I then covered Street Smarts. 3. Ability to Pivot [...]
What Makes an Entrepreneur (2/10) – Street Smarts
This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful. I originally posted it on VentureHacks, one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. If you haven’t spent time over there you should. I started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity. 2. Street Smarts – OK, so [...]
Build the Brand or the Business? – O2 and BT
When it comes to the real principles of marketing I’ve always been guided by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Their books like Positioning, Marketing Warfare, or The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing are essential reading. Even though some of the material is over 20 years old, it’s still perfectly valid in today’s market. Jump in [...]
Who Should you Hire at a Startup?
This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice. There are people who tell startups that they should hire the most senior people that they can find. I’m not one of those. I believe that you should always hire people are are looking to “punch above their weight class,” which means to hire people who [...]
3 Sales Tips for Startups – Creating a Burning Platform
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. Many entrepreneurs who start technology companies are product people, technologists or savvy business people who worked previously for a larger company. Most start-up entrepreneurs have little or no sales experience. I know I didn’t. But through nearly a decade of startups I learned that sales comes [...]
Here Is My Hammer. Show Me Your Screw!
Well I have been traveling out of the country a lot these past few weeks so its been a while since I posted. I will try and do better in the future. During my travels I had a lot of interesting discussions with people about a wide range of technology issues, solutions, and technology acquisitions [...]
Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters
This post is part of my series “Startup Lessons” Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company. This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see [...]
You’re Most Vulnerable Right After You Win a Deal
This is part of my ongoing series, “Start-up Lessons.” Recently I wrote a blog post about how I hated losing, but I embrace it. My starting line with every entrepreneur is that everything I learned about being an entrepreneur I learned from F’ing it up on my first business. I even put that in the [...]
The Best VC Meetings are Debates not Sales
This is part of my blog series “Pitching a VC.” I’ve sat through a lot of VC pitches and having been CEO of an enterprise software firm for many years I’ve also sat through many customer meetings with sales teams. There is one classic mistake that I see across both types of meetings – “the [...]
Embrace Losing
This is part of my ongoing series on Start-up Lessons that I learned from founding two companies. I HATE LOSING. I hate it. I really, really, really hate it. It chaps my hide. It rips at my core. I don’t get over it easily. I lose sleep. I fucking hate losing. It’s not so much [...]
Ice-cream Truck as the Antithesis of Inbound Marketing
And I thought ice-cream trucks went the way of the dinosaurs…or the milkmen. Apparently not, for the past few weeks I’ve been seeing and hearing one just like this: Then it just hit me: the ice-cream truck, just like the milkman are the absolute antithesis of everything I’ve been talking about under inbound marketing, i.e. [...]
