I was recently travelling in Europe and as I was waiting for my Nice to Dubai flight to board I noticed the following billboard ad: Thoughts in my mind went as follow: 1. I wish I was the target audience ;) 2. What a great focus! 3. Wait a minute… 4. lol, @mick would love [...]
(Yes, this is the way I think) I had a flashback to this video that my brother and I danced to when I was about 4. (It’s a great video, watch the whole thing – some great cameos including Paul Simon and Danny Devito) You can’t do two wonderful things at once. I love my [...]
I hear lots of startup founders get worried when I talk about testing things fast, moving quickly, trying different target micro-segments and failing constantly on the way to finding a working model. “Yeah, but won’t we be burning people? Won’t they not come back ever again? Won’t it hurt our brand?” A brand, as I [...]
A quick, good example of a very focused first target micro-segment is Honestly.com “Previously, access to Unvarnished has been limited to invite-only or professionals from a list of roughly 200 pre-approved tech/tech-related companies.” From Techcrunch. By intentionally limiting their initial base, not just through a private beta, but by actually specifically only allowing a certain [...]
I’m pretty busy right now, but when this subject line hit my inbox, I had to open it; I hated listening to your talk at SydStart Here is what it said; Hi Mick, My name is Kevin Lippy and I founded a company called Brokepacker.com, a booking engine for backpackers offering discounts and value adding [...]
If someone who loves you is wrong for you, you need to dump them and move on. You can’t two time as a startup. This post is inspired by the KaChing case study on Startup Lessons Learned on Pivoting on Eric Ries blog, and this quote; Which is a nice story. But when kaChing actually [...]
Pollenizer was approached Chris Gray in June to run a focus workshop for a web business Chris had founded (working title ‘Pledgespace’). In the first half of the 4 hour workshop we worked on customer discovery (micro-segments, customer values, creating 10 X value). We iterated on this process to create a focused customer development plan. [...]
Briefly, I mentioned a quick business idea to Dean and Justus from Spreets. It was an alternate way to use the same technology to grow a new revenue stream. Dean’s response; “One day, but right now, I’m not wasting a single second or cent chasing anything else.” Great answer. It doesn’t cost much or take [...]
More often than not, we have a lot on our plates. Usually when this happens, it’s very easy to be tempted by distractions. I found this blog post by Darren (which is aimed at bloggers, but applicable to web businesses) at problogger.net truthful and interesting. It can be difficult to remain focused when you’re constantly [...]
Below is a short video of Donald Trump at the Real Estate Wealth Expo in Los Angeles in 2007, answering a question about focus and his own experiences. Focus is important to not only new businesses and entrepreneurs but those who are ‘old-hands’, who may lose sight and become complacent due to a lack of [...]
