David Carboni makes a great point in this piece: successful powerhouse businesses, paragons of scaling up (your Netflixes, Googles, Ubers, et al), could never build the disruptive, fast-moving products that made them successful from their positions today:
Admired and respected as towering giants of our digital world, our hero companies emanate an almost mythical quality. The scale, power and inspiration they command are the stuff of legend. Glib statements about “business” distort their stories into gaudy two-dimensional caricatures whilst organisations seeking Digital Transformation aspire to emulate what they see in this theatre. Paradoxically our...
David Skok opens this post on selling with the classic sales training mantra — customers love to buy, but hate to be sold to:
Customers hate being sold to. They don’t mind getting expert help when they want to buy something. But much of the time they are not ready to buy, and one of the most irritating things is to have a salesperson try to get them to buy when they aren’t ready. Unfortunately too many people in marketing and sales positions don’t seem to understand this, and proceed...
Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely’s descriptions of three groups of people you need to “attack a market”:
Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. Woz and Jobs were the commandos of the Apple II. Don Estridge and his twelve disciples were the commandos of the IBM PC. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were the commandos of VisiCalc.
Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. These are the people who...
Fred Wilson with advice to startups on keeping things simple:
I have sat through numerous pitches where I am listening to the founder explain their technology and go to market plan and I think “this is going to be a reverse triple somersault with two twists in pike and there is no way they are going to land it…
So the better approach is to pick something simple to execute, nail it, then build on it with another relatively simple move, nail that too, and keep going.
One of the benefits of staying in bootstrapped mode is that...
This talk from a16z’s Martin Casado covers how the market for B2B SaaS go-to-market is changing from sales-driven to a marketing-driven. We’ve been thinking a lot about this lately in the context of Fulcrum — how the “consumerization of IT” plays into how business users today are finding, evaluating, purchasing, and expanding their usage of software.
As he describes in the talk, consumer business tend toward a marketing-led GTM, and enterprise ones toward a sales-led GTM....