startups Archives - Page 48 of 117

The Power Flip – Update

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Guys – this link was made private by the Arts council while they get other stuff ready – they promise me it will be available shortly and I will advise.

Here’s a talk I did for the Arts Australia Council Marketing Conference. It’s kinda long – around 30 minutes, but it might have a few useful ideas for my readers in the entrepreneurial and marketing space.

(I apologise for making up the word ‘decomplexify’ during the talk. My mouth was moving faster than my brain at that stage)

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/43163645]

Fan Culture

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

In the early years we had ‘customers’.

Then we invented demographics and started using that horrible word ‘consumers’.

We went on line and started talking about ‘users’. (Sound like drug addicts to me)

I rather prefer the word people….

But if we do really well we might even develop some fans. And fans are what we should be aiming for. This doco below on fan culture looks interesting. I’d be keen to know if anyone has seen it. I even hear Sean the Sports Geek might even be in it…

And before you watch this trailer it’s worth having think about the things, people, ideas and brands that you are a fan of and why. There are some nice clues in this thought experiment.

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/39260699]

Would you like some pie?

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

There are 2 people who are offering you some pie.

Person 1:

They tell you that they are about to bake a pie. They then continue to tell you a story that they are terrific pie makers and that all of their experience in and around the kitchen (watching their parents bake) and eating lots of pie, gives them the right qualifications to make a really great tasting pie. They also tell you about their secret recipe, which has never been used before. They are certain it will make a far superior pie. They even show you the written recipe and tell you about the ingredients and methods.

After all this explaining they then ask if you’d like a taste, but before that, you will have to wait until they bake it. Then they ask you to give them some money to go build a kitchen and buy some ingredients. They want to bake these pies at great scale. They think they can sell many of these pies.

Person 2:

Has already baked a pie and offers you some. They have only baked this one small pie. But would like you to try it even though it is just a small sample. It smells nice, and it looks nice. You try some and it tastes lovely. You then engage in some conversation about their pie. How they baked it, the ingredients, and if they think they could replicate this pie and make it at scale. It turns into a really great discussion and evolves into a deeper immersion about the pie business. You’re both really inspired by each other and start planning some next steps.

Your startup is the pie. Which person would you invest in?

The electrician

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

I know a person who runs a very large electrical contracting business. He has a staff of around 50 people and has been running the business for more than 30 years. He once told me of the story of what got him started. This story is not verbatim, but it is worth sharing here.

‘I remember when I was an apprentice electrician. Everyday in the lunch room the fully qualified sparkys would whinge about how well the boss was doing. That the boss made money off their labour, and that they should go out on their own, take a risk and start their own electrical contracting businesses. But other than the whinging, most of them would never do anything about it. They’d just come back to work everyday and tell the same story of how they should quit their job and startup their own firm. None of them ever did. I wasn’t even finished my 4 year apprenticeship and I was sick to death of hearing the same old story. So I promised myself that I would go and start my own business, fail, go broke and get it out of my system while I was still young. I didn’t really care about running my own business, I just didn’t want to end up becoming a whinger like those other blokes.

So I did. I went out on my own and started. It turns out I became the opposite of those guys in every way. I didn’t whinge, I went out to fail, and failed at failing. Thirty years later I am running a multi-million dollar business. It’s amazing what you can become if you are sure of who you don’t want to become.’

The truth about secrets

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Secrets kills us. They eat at our souls and disrupt our emotions in a negative way. We very rarely feel good about secrets because by nature we are social creatures that rely and need each other to survive. Collaboration is what put us atop of the food chain and that means we must share. I’m certain the feeling we often get when we hold secrets is our genetic code telling us that secrets are not cool and generally don’t lead to ideal outcomes.

So it got me thinking about the nature of secrets and the different types of them.

There are many types of secrets, but these 2 are interesting:

Secrets that hide things we have done for fear of judgement or persecution.
Secrets that hide things which are ideas we want to benefit from at the exclusion of others.

These are 2 types of secrets we should avoid.

The first one should be avoided because we shouldn’t do anything dodgy, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of anything that is out of our control.

The second is counter intuitive. Our emotional need to share secrets is our DNA telling us it will create more for everyone. A shared idea can often be improved, a shared idea creates a team to build it, a shared idea increases access to resources, a shared idea creates a market place and a bigger pie for all. Stealing ideas is not the same as stealing chestnuts. If we exchange ideas, we both end up with more ideas than we started with.

Startup blog maths:

Sharing > Secrets

What is evaporating?

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

We are trained to look for and focus on everything that is new. What technologies are emerging and how are we using them? What we are not so good at doing, is observing the things which are only noticeable by their increasing absence.

Very often it’s the most important trend because it is less product oriented and more human oriented. Which means that well before we know who or what the new winner is, we will know who or what is no longer fulfilling our needs and is being made obsolete. In a rapidly changing world of near disposable technology the list of dying technologies is already long and growing. Life cycles are in decline and it’s sometimes hard to see a future for even relatively new technologies.

– The remote control (being usurped by smart phones & gesturing),

– Local hard drives (being usurped by the cloud),

– iPod (being usurped by it’s big brother the smart phone),

Then there’s the changing retail landscape. Closing down signs will be the new normal for department & clothing stores. In fact, any product that is sold at a price and is available on-line, cannot and will not be for sale in bricks and mortar retail soon. They simply do not have a cost infrastructure that will allow them to exist. Add to this our changing eating habits (instant coffee anyone?) and the impending transport revolution (when we work from home 4/5 days a week owning a car may become an historical relic) and the changes we are facing are more far reaching than we currently think.

As Marc Andreessen said, software is eating everything… and a great way to see this in action is to drive around well healed suburbs and see what is out for hard rubbish collection these days. A cacophony of previous hardware and technology darlings, not limited to Plasma TV’s, DVD players, laptops, iPods – you name it.

It’s not just about technology, it’s all about human movement, the new solutions we seek and our dissatisfaction with the solutions of today. Good entrepreneurs know what’s hot and what’s next. Great entrepreneurs notice what is evaporating before the replacement emerges for all to see.

Meet Alistair

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Steve Sammartino

Meet Alistair Leathwood. Alistair is the Managing Director of a large research firm. Research is a typically conservative industry, which for good reason is filled with conservative individuals. The type of individuals that are diligent, thoughtful, sedulous, hard working and considered.

Alistair is also one of these people.

The interesting thing about Alistair is that he doesn’t let the reality of hard, thoughtful and considered work get in the way of fun. Alistair knows that it is possible to display personality, have fun and actually still get work done in a professional manner. And when I caught up with Alistair for lunch today he told that he doesn’t just ask his people to have fun in the office, he mandates it.

Just quietly, this is the kind of attitude I can dig. An attitude that knows that a suit and tie are not the basis of diligence or insight.

So here’s little picture of how cool cat Alistair rolls. He’s an everyday colored sock man, regardless of what else he happens to be wearing…. and the bead necklace? Well he’s had it on every time I’ve seen him and he reckons he’s worn it everyday for the past 10 years. He then went on to say, the shirt and pants where for me, while the socks and necklace were for him!

It feels a lot like the industrial revolution and the marketing of widgetry had a subconscious influence on what business people would wear. A specified expectation of limited differentiation which I will be glad to see the end of. I think we should all take a sock out of Alistair’s drawer and ensure we don’t become our own version of Mista Bob Dobalina

And don’t panic, the world is quickly learning that how smart and capable we are is not dependent of our uniform.