Collingwood Football Club president Eddie McGuire offers this retrospective on cheque book recruiting:
“I’ve never seen anyone who won the lotto become *Kerry Packer”
*insert revered businessperson’s name here…
Entrepreneur lesson:
Hoping and luck is never the same as learning, creating and building.
Momentum is the key to the success for any start up.
In classical mechanics, momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. P=mV
The start up blog definition is a bit simpler:
Momentum = How big you are X How quick you do things.
Hence, the momentum of anything will increase if either of the above factors increase while the other factor remains constant. That is, you don’t need both factors to gather momentum.
A small thing moving fast can gather momentum. A big thing moving slowly can gather momentum. This is why big companies (although they react slowly) still have momentum, their mass helps them maintain their forward motion and ulitmate power.
The lesson for start ups is simple;
We want to gather momentum
We are small
We must focus on speed
In Australia there’s a great example of a non technology firm going viral.
Zingara Cucina – Italian for Gypsy Kitchen.
Here’s a short summary:
A more detailed report is here.
As you guessed, it’s the hottest restaurant in town. The only trick is finding it!
One reason to do anything:
Because it’s worth doing
There is nothing worse than an advertising voice over. (yes advertisers, we recognize it)
Here’s what it says to the audience:
We don’t care who you are
We don’t care where you’re from
We don’t respect your culture
We think we can stooge you
We think you won’t know the difference
We think all our customers are the same
We talk to you, not with you
To me it makes no sense to be stingy on making a TVC worth $500k when you’re spending over $5m on media. It’s a false economy, especially when the media doesn’t work and it turns off the potential audience you’re trying to persuade.
I’m not about to define a brand, I’d be wasting your time as there are plenty of marketing books to do that. I am about to talk about some qualities that many brands used to have, and more importantly the features that tomorrow’s hero brands do have.
function first
reliable consistency
thin product range
you’ll travel to buy it
limited distribution
you found out about it by recommendation
limited if any advertising expenditure
no external branding
you don’t care if people don’t know your using it
often founder defined
An example for me personally is Herringbone shirts. A Sydney based shirt company. Their specialty is shirts. 
They’re expensive, but the quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten. Only those who have one would know you’re wearing it. We know the cut, the feel, the fabric and they just sit like quality garments should.
A lot of global brands once fit the above description. Then due to the brand’s own success they simply became ‘corporations’. Once this happens, the rot sets in. They go public, product ranges get expanded, the founder loses control or sells out (as they deserve to), production is outsourced, quality is compromised, distribution is expanded, branding becomes overt and crass, sales targets must be met, prices get cut, customer basses expand, the product adapts to the larger vanilla consumer…. – rinse and repeat. Until their core consumer moves on.
Outrageous commercial success often predicates a brand’s inevitable decline because it is hard to retain the focus that drove the success in the first instance.
What is your – yesterday’s hero brand?
What is your – tomorrow’s hero brand?
Sampling is the best thing a start up can spend money on when you know consumers will dig what you have.
There is one thing companies often get wrong when sampling a new product. They decide in their infinite wisdom to only give a portion of the actual consumption experience. That way they can sample more people, have wider reach – get the product or experience in the hands of more people.
How frustrating is it to get a little pouch of shampoo that will barely produce a lather on your hair? In this case, all consumers will do is tell their friends about how bad the product is.
If budget is an issue we’re better off sampling less people with the full product experience.
