customers
Is The Project Worth Pursuing?
What are your criteria for deciding that an idea is worth pursuing? We all have our own set of selection criteria, the first of which is usually looking for profits. However, selecting a course of action based solely on ROI can be limiting. If you are doing something really innovative, how on earth
Extract Value from Old Assets
Magazine publishers are in the same predicament as the book-publishing and recording industries before it. How do you keep your customers believing that your content is worth paying for when there is endless free content available on the Internet? Some fashion magazines are experimenting with making
The Promise of Online Dating
Are you in a serious relationship or married? If so, how did you meet your spouse or partner? I work with a lot of young single people and most, if not all, of them have tried online dating. Some of them are young enough that the idea of not using online dating sites is incomprehensible. […]
Forget the obvious solution
One of the first products I created as a software developer was a touch-typing program called Typing Instructor. This was back in 1985, and at that time there was no such thing as a standard PC. Instead you owned a specific brand and had access to the programs that had been written specifically for
The Benefit of Being Strategically Disliked
The flipside to any positive emotional connotation or connection is a negative one. If you are inspiring enough such that some people love what you are doing, odds are you are going to be inspiring others to dislike your product with an equal passion. Plenty of companies trade on the fact that they
Products that make customers say, “I did this!”
Do you need to have a finished product in order to make a sale? Is there any way that not offering a finished product would actually give you an advantage, or even become a selling point? Suppose that your manufacturing costs appear to have gotten as low as they can without sacrificing quality. Even
Know that your customers’ needs will change
A big part of my business is being aware of, and responding to, the life cycles of my industry and my customers. Some of these are easy to see; you only need a cursory understanding of the effect of OPEC on gas prices in the early ’70s to understand why cars became more fuel efficient […]
Being on board with social evolutions
Every hot trend reaches a point I like to call the “Uncle Larry moment.” You know what I mean. It’s the juncture where one of your older relatives announces he’s taken up something that had seemed cutting edge, futuristic, and exciting up till that second. Facebook and Twitter have long passed the U
Changing customers
At HP, we have an Executive Briefing Center; where our large corporate clients come to be briefed about the latest technologies and products that are either in development or about to hit the market. Now, technically this service is for them. We are offering them information and opportunities to sta
Decide to Keep or Push Out Customers
We tend to assume that any customer is a good customer. However, if you find that you’re working like crazy and have a solid and reliable customer base, but you’re still not making the profits you expected, then ask the Killer Question, Who do I not want to use my product? Do you remember back […]
