Archive for 2015
Expensive Lottery
Successful entrepreneurship is a lottery where the tickets are really expensive.
Read MoreSaid In An (Out)Saucy Voice
Outsourcing your content marketing to the lowest bidder to build your brand, to speak in “your voice”, to build you up as an authority, is utterly brain dead. It doesn’t make you look like an authority on anything. It does make you look like a fool.
Read MoreFree, Cheap, Equity!
I don’t work for free, for equity, for cheap, for exposure. Now tell me, what was it you wanted me to do for you?
Read MoreBillions And Billions Of Viruses
Your video that went viral won’t even be a footnote in three years. Virality is not a KPI you should ever optimize for. P.S. That one example video you are about to cite that has a billion views and is still semi-relevant won’t even be a footnote in a decade.
Read MoreExclusively Produced For Everyone
Some products only have an audience of one (Monet? Degas? The rarest of jewels?), either due to interest or exclusiveness. Other products have an audience measured in hundreds of millions (Coca-Cola? Apple? Nike?). It is difficult (and expensive) to make your product move to either end of that spectrum. But somewhere in the spectrum of…
Read MoreSustainable Audience
Want your product or service to be a success? Build the smallest possible audience that can sustain the product.
Read MoreDo It Like They Do On The Marketing Channel
Marketing? Marketing is easy. Doing it all the time and doing it consistently is what makes it hard.
Read MoreManufactured Contrivance
I find that most outrage these days is contrived pearl clutching horror manufactured to take away from the real issue. It is pretty obvious (to those who are not outraged) when you’re using your outrage as a distraction. Manufactured outrage is a strong indicator you have no claim on the issue under discussion.
Read MoreHired A Lover To Fix My Toilet And Now There Is Shit Everywhere
Plumbers fix your leaking toilet cistern. You don’t hire a plumber because they are fun to have lunch with. Hang out at the bar at the end of the day. Or spend a casual weekend together. You don’t worry about whether they fit in your culture. Lovers are people you want to spend a lot…
Read MoreUpper Trust
Trust knows no upper price.
Read MoreFungal Career Growth
Your career goal should be to be un-fungible.
Read MoreDo 1,000 Things Badly
Do 1,000 related things badly, eventually, somewhere along the way, without knowing it, you’ll be doing all of them really damn well. Do the same thing 1,000 times, you’ll end up doing one bad thing really well. You cannot skip ahead to doing the 1,000th thing pretty damn well. You might find a few shortcuts…
Read MoreCheap People
People will forget you were the cheapest. People will forget you were the most expensive. People will forget they overpaid for your product or service when they could have gotten it cheaper just down the road. They will never forget the trust they placed in you. Or that you violated it.
Read MoreBrand Trustee
“The brand you can trust.” There’s a lot of power in that very last word that influences everything you purchase, experience and think about. When the brand loses that very last word (in your mind), the brand might as well not exist.
Read MoreBleeding Out!
I’ve met founders of start-ups that bleed equity so profusely they are in imminent danger of exsanguination.
Read MoreVisionary Spread
People won’t spread your vision simply because you asked them to.
Read MorePay Me Again, Sam!
If you only know how to get paid once for what you are doing instead of being paid repeatedly for what you have done, you will always be poor.
Read MoreUnreasonable Aids
All requests for your help and aid are reasonable. It is the people who do the asking that are not.
Read MoreSoftware Snake Oil Sales
Removing all the cruft and bloatware from a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad we just purchased. At the completion of uninstalling the Intel AppUp software the uninstaller pops open a browser window for me to fill out a survey of why I am uninstalling the software. Oh, I don’t know… maybe because you closed the fucking…
Read MoreTastes Better Than Wine In A Box
What happens when you spend too many hours coming up with clever marketing for other people’s projects? You come up with clever marketing for trivial events in your life. I have to keep a special litter box for one of my cats due to his illness. They tell a story around the cat tree, “There…
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