Category: Marketing
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Why Information Work is “Expensive”
“I know a lawyer that charges $750/hr. At that price, I would only pay for the 3 minutes it took for him to give him the advice I needed and I would expect that he would already have the answer to the question I asked. If he had to look it up, that would be…
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Bullsh*t vs. The 5th Amendment
Nothing has been scientifically proven to be more effective for headaches. – TV commercial Sure sounds better than reality: No scientific studies have ever compared this product to any other product. Modern marketing and politics play fancy free and foot loose with the truth. Spin is king. Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a small treatise on…
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The What and The Why
Compared to a decade ago, it’s ridiculously easy to start a new web business these days. There are a number of platforms and free software that can be used to quickly create a piece of software without seeking any additional funding. But as Michael Gerber points out in the E-myth: just because one knows how…
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Decision Fatigue & Dessert
Our brains use glucose just like the rest of our body. However, when our muscles are depleted of energy, we feel it. When parts of our brain are depleted, we may not know it even though it’s affecting our decisions. Over the last two weeks, two different people sent me this NY Times article on…
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The Way It’s Supposed to Be Done
Tom Sawyer may have been ingenious converting whitewashing fences into play, but when he is trying to help Huckleberry Finn free a slave he represents the establishment. For those that don’t know the story, here is a quick overview: Huck and Jim are running away. Huck from his father, Jim from slavery. Eventually Jim is…
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What “Fail Fast, Fail Often” Means
What if we have so many customers knocking down our door that we can’t support them all? What if our support is so bad, they never come back? We should build our company and technology for that day, just in case. This hypothesis keeps companies overbuilding their product for an eventuality that will probably never…
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The Beach Vendor Sales Cycle
There are certain fundamentals of business that can be observed in almost any environment. Today, at the beach in Manzanillo, Mexico, a wide variety of vendors walked passed us, each selling wares that were quite varied: donuts, candies, mangos, tamales, blankets, wooden statues, bathing suits, jewelry, temporary tattoos, and even rubber chickens. All day long…
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Aligning Incentives: Preferred vs Common Stock
An investor friend of mine posted on his blog this question: This week’s sign of tech bubble: multiple seed-stage startups demanding investors buy common stock instead of preferred. Thoughts? I have strong professional opinions on this and will draft a full blog post on the topic, but thought I’d crowdsource some input first… Every…
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The Consequences of Price
On a fluke, I recently visited BlockBuster for the first time in 4 years. Between Netflix and Redbox, I never really consider renting a movie from the expensive brick and mortar place. Walking through the store, I could almost smell the death of their business. Their competitors have displaced them. Even though they’ve changed their…
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Lipitor – “80% of Heart Attack Victims Have High Cholesterol”
80% of Heart Attack Victims Have High Cholesterol -Lipitor Television Ad If you had high cholesterol, would you start feeling worried? Lipitor is lying. Not in a factual sense, but in an emotional one. This is an example of a great statistical lie. One that we have a hard time understanding on the surface, but…