Storytelling
If your product is truly unique (or as long as it is), then you don't need marketing. You only need advertising. When you get competition, you need to start telling a story that will set you apart from your competition - you need to start marketing.
Bootstrapping vs. Venture funding
So, you've got a great business idea and you happen to have saved some money. Not much, but enough to start executing on the idea. And let's assume that you've got enough money that your business will start making money before you run out of money. What should you do in this case? Should you start pitching your idea to potential investors or should you start executing the idea on your own? It is a hard but very important question that gets neglected by many entrepreneurs. Especially because the decision to take someone else's money in exchange for equity is usually non-reversible! There is no right or wrong answer. I just want you to make a deliberate decision if you [...]
Seth Godin repost: What will you do with the time you save?
Ordering in instead of cooking. Working from home instead of commuting. Using a dishwasher instead of the sink… All that time saved. Now that you’ve got the time back, you get to choose what’s truly important to you. How will you spend it? [Time spent on TV and social media has gone up every year of my lifetime].
Trust, start-ups and marketing departments
If you started working in an already established business you're probably not entirely aware of the issue of trust. The issue of trust usually comes before the issue of pricing. Trust is divided into two types: a trust that your product or service can actually solve a problem ("trusting the product") and a trust that you're able to produce such a product or render such a service ("trusting the quality"). Only if people trust you on both accounts will they become your customers and give you the money. The problem of a new company is the following. If people already trust the product it means that you're entering an established (competitive) market. So you have to show potential customers [...]
Money
First things first: the way the world is (or at least the emergent way we perceive it) the money is either an important thing or everything (Peter Thiel in Zero to One). The minority knows that even though the money is important it is not the goal per se! They want to make money. And they also know how they will spend it. For them the money is only enabler. It will make them happier, because it will enable them new experiences. The majority believes the money will solve all their problems. They want to make money but they don't know how to spend it. (Sidenote: if one wants to spend it predominantly on material stuff one doesn't know [...]
Who is entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is a person, who is working on changing the current system for the better. Who is actively fighting against the status quo. It doesn't matter, whether he has his own company or not, whether he is high-tech or not. Not even if the area of change is not even in the business domain. It might as well be in the relationships he's having. Be an entrepreneur. Don't accept the way things are as the way things should be!
