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Takeaways from conversations observed for the week

  • Ved and Tim
    • Abstract terms like simplicity can get interpretated differently
    • Simplicity could mean minimal number of clicks
    • Simplicity could mean the look and feel is something I am most familiar with
  • Regina
    • To keep the tendency to do everything yourself in check
    • much better to learn from the mistake of others
    • find a group of people that are actively learning how to solve the pricing problem and learn their lessons. It’s cheaper
    • personal branding is important. Not being taken seriously results in lack of access to resources in times of need

Relevant resources

  • The design of everyday things
  • Dont make me think
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Key takeaways from discussions with Ved and observations around me during the day

  • Product management is the function that allows you to cut across the operations of all other functions in a Tech company
  • strategic partnership is focused on maintaining relationship for the sake of maintaining relationships
  • Fund raising is focused on being a good sales person. One becomes a good sales person by telling a good story thereby painting the big picture / a.k.a the Vision which will get investors excited enough act upon the call to action.
  • The fundamental difference between a human leader and a human follower is not skill-set but the ability to effectively self-regulate his own neural chemistry
    • domain specific skill sets get acquired overtime
    • leading will put subject in situations which will trigger off more neural chemistry than otherwise.
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Key take aways from Purple Cow by Seth Godin

  • You have to build the product to be worthwhile of spreading by the evangelizers amongst the early adopters from day 1
    • Be hyper targeted
    • Evangelizers amongst the adopters are the folks that will sell your product to the early majority
  • Seek to be remarkable amongst the audience you are trying to serve
    • Forget about the majority and the laggards – don’t waste bandwidth targeting them
    • cater the message specifically to the audience you are trying to target
  • important to be able to take on their perception to see the world
    • Mirror neurons
    • Meditation might be helpful
  • Balancing Early Adopters and Majority
    • The Majority requires the product be further simplified
    • Early adopters require the product to be remarkable
    • When product gets to the early majority stage, its time to start another side product that will cater to the early adopters
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Key take aways from Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

  • its more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain one
  • seek to build trust in every interaction
  • levels of trust
    • visitor
    • friend
    • customer
  • Types of marketing
    • permission marketing
      • continue to educate them on the problem space they are interested in
      • can use high frequency
        • treat correspondence with users as a one-on-one conversation
        • better to do the correspondence manually first to learn what works and what doesn’t
    • interruption marketing
      • catch their attention quick enough with a quick unique value proposition
      • use sparingly. It can be quite expensive
  • On sales lead lists
    • not useful if bought
    • the people on the list did not give you any permission to spam them
    • focus on inbound marketing
  • focus on creating content that is very deeply focus on the space that you are working on
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Steve Jobs in between the lines on user research and market trends

On Market Insights and User Research

Contrary to popular beliefs, if you listened very carefully between the lines of this 1 hour long lecture with the MBA students in MIT, Jobs did spend a lot of time and energy deeply listening to and understanding customer needs.

It would not have been possible to gain the insight and develop that very informed go to market strategy otherwise

Key lessons on building teams:

  • Take a longer time horizon on people
  • Resist the urge to do things yourself, when someone on your team screws up, think about how you could train him to improve
  • It is very easy to hire people to do things, it is very hard to find smart people to tell you the way things are supposed to be done
  • The really good people usually take around 1 year and a half to hire

On Timing

There is always that 5 year window where the market is not really ready yet, where you need to spend a lot of time and effort to push the window open. Beyond that 5 year window, you have around a 5 year period to exploit the market before the next technology curve comes about.

If you hang around MIT or other research labs, you can kind feel it in your bones. Different pieces of technology that come together to make what was not possible before possible. Based on historical observation these things tend to converge in clumps. They are not linear.

The key challenge now for computing is the two segments of conflicting needs. The  need for portability versus the need for power. Morse Law and technology innovation makes it inevitable that they converge.