Archive for November, 2009

Listening to the WordPress guy

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

You’ll see the video interview embedded below

It covers a bunch of favourite topics of mine:
– open source
– entrepreneurs – including himself, Jeff Bezos, google, ipod, cloud computing, they even give my old darling IBM a few seconds
– social network software, facebook, twitter, budypress
– plugins
– startup captial
– they have only about 12 employees to start with, now 50.
– about that they have 1200 servers, and 3 low cost data centres (and they expect them to fail, and failover fast)
– caching – they say its easy to cache high volume sites, but the low volume sites cant be cache

I found it very insightful.

Warning : its long – I think like an hour

How to get my money that is in your wallet

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The Guy Kawasaki  video reminded me of something I was talking about recently.

You need to make a machine, that starts at the customer’s wallet, and goes all the way to your bank account. Starts with the customer, via marketing, sales, delivery and support.

It start with giving value to the customer, and having a meshed organisation, so the customer/marketing/sales/product all works together to extract the sale. This may seem obvious but hard to do. Poor sales performance doesn’t require better sales training, or better/new sales people, it needs more cohesion between sales & marketing, and marketing & the customer. If this all meshes, then each piece is easy and natural.

A good example of poor meshing is software development. Customer asks:
“what do you do?”
“software development, using xcf method with agile computing and cloud components”  …. this means NOTHING to the customer.
customer asks : “can you program CRMs for my website”
“yes we can”
customer asks : “can you help with our monthly budget reporting ?”
“yes we can”
customer asks : “would I be able to get monthly sales ROI month on month for website sales ?”
“yes, I’ll get back to you on that in a proposal”

Given you do everything, sales and marketing aren’t able to be specific about anything. This is the real swiss army knife approach, we do everything, which might even be true. But you can’t effectively market or sell ‘everything’.

Art of The Start Video

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

I read Guy Kawasaki’s book some time ago. It was an easy read, and seemed quite useful.

Here is a video where he talks about all the points in the book. So if you want a quick overview, start with the video.

He throws a bunch of comedy into the speech, and some background , like I didn’t he worked for apple.

He made a few great points:
he had a 2×2 matrix, be different, be valuable, don’t be dog food.
“work out how to get your money out of the customers purse.