I’m often reminded of Tim Kastelle’s post We Don’t Need More Mousetraps!. It’s a great post on the trap of building policy for innovation ecosystems and the importance of building things people want. The post talks about a fictional country that only makes mousetraps called Mousetrapia. Thanks to their superior education system, Mousetrapians are the absolute… Continue reading
I found myself writing to a great young founder the other day with a perspective. They’d had some tough times recently, having to reduce the size of the team and getting feelings that traction and product/market fit were more difficult than initially anticipated. This is a bit of a copy/pasta and paraphrase of the advice… Continue reading
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how the Australian (in particular) investment market is segmented. This is mostly in response to talking to people who are thinking about raising money, and wanting a better way of easily communicating my perspective and philosophy as it develops. In the last few years, Australian venture… Continue reading
Twice now over the last couple of weeks I’ve found myself talking about the concept of synchronicity and modern communications (social/digital etc), and what that means when choosing what should go where. Ultimately every network is either asynchronous or synchronous. Some may have elements of both, but almost all fall one way or the other. Synchronous networks are when ‘stuff’… Continue reading
There’s been a bit of discussion lately about influencer marketing – which is essentially the equivalent of celebrity endorsements, except the people involved usually aren’t popular enough to be considered celebrities. The core premise is this: Brand wants to sell stuff Some people have big follower or subscriber numbers Brand contacts person, asks the person… Continue reading
Today’s gripe comes from everyone’s favourite buzzword du jour, growth hacking. As defined by the wizards at Wikipedia: Growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure Now, you might think, that sounds quite a lot like marketing? A good marketer uses… Continue reading
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison Innovation is a remarkably trendy and popular topic of late, but don’t let that deceive you. Companies have always needed to be responsive to their environment, regardless of whether that means process optimisation, new products, or new customers. The ones who were… Continue reading
Big news – Twitter just launched Periscope, their video live-streaming app, a few weeks after Meerkat, a competitor doing the same thing, made massive waves (although Twitter acquired Periscope in January for $100m apparently, so no surprise that Twitter will kill Meerkat). This also comes on the back of Instagram launching “Layout from Instagram”, which is wholly… Continue reading
DO IT NOW: Tweet about this article without bothering to read its content. That’s how to do the twitters, right? Click here like a good sheep. Content warning: a bit of foul language in this one. Massive scheduling-cross-queue-service-come-content-recommendation-engine service Buffer recently announced their new app Buffer Daily. And it’s fucking horrid. Like, horrible. And it’s… Continue reading
Users may revolt when asked to pay for things they are accustomed to getting free Vineet Kumar in the Harvard Business Review One of the things that has really been getting me going lately is the attitude people have toward business services online. As a disclaimer, in this article I’m mostly referring to business-to-business (or… Continue reading