Mark Hurst
Read the entire article and context - One social media tip: first build a good customer experience
Tag Results: business
First build a good customer experience […] It’s no use spending time, money, or effort to entice people into a product or service if it just leads to a bad experience. Why? Because those people you carefully encouraged and nudged into your circle? They go right back into the cloud, spreading the news about their bad experience.
Disruptive by Design
Great design, motion and flow by Bonsajo, visual performance unit, for the 2010 Wired Business Conference - Disruptive by Design
Absolutely anyone can sell crappy work to clients. It’s actually quite easy, and on of the main reasons why there are so many terrible ads, mediocre campaigns, and uninspired websites reeking of sameness. If you want to sell a truly unique idea or creative work to a client it will take hard work and serious effort.
Here are a few key points from the article: know the work inside and out, pick apart your idea, be ready to fight for your ideas, believe in what you’re presenting, and brass balls can help too.
After you finish reading part 1, continue on to part 2.
A fascinating look into the reasons why Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) sold Zappos to Amazon for $850 million. Ultimately it was sold to save and protect the customer and employee culture.
Profitable and Proud: Campaign Monitor
37signals’ Signal vs. Noise is posting a new series highlighting companies that have $1M+ in revenue all without any initial VC investments. The first post in the series features the creator of email marketing software targeted towards web designers, Campaign Monitor. The founders of Campaign Monitor talk about their shift from a web design business to creating and profitably selling a product over six months. Read the full article discussing their culture, challenges, and goals for the future.
At the end of the article they give sound advice to others considering starting a business.
- Don’t make excuses, start building something right now. Ideas are worthless unless they’re executed.
- Never be afraid to charge for your product from day one. If nobody is prepared to pay for it, it’s probably not solving an important problem anyway.
- Avoid additional investors if you can. There’s nothing more satisfying than being in complete control of your destiny.
- Never lose sight of the fact that you’re starting a business to give you more freedom to do what you enjoy in life. Don’t let it consume the very thing you’re aiming to improve.
$1,000+ a Day Without Making the Top 1000 Downloads
Currently there’s a race to the top (or bottom depending on how you view it) to churn out a large quantity of iPhone/iPad apps at cheap prices to break into the top downloads. Rather than focusing on how to break into the top downloads iTeleport worked to maintain their quality and kept their app at a premium price of $25.
How did we get here? We believe it’s a combination of creating a high quality product with great support in a well-defined market with significant demand. This doesn’t sound too different from classic definitions of how to develop a successful software business, and it’s not. … That, combined with offering something people really want, and are willing to pay a premium for if you give them distinctive, useful, hard-to-find features in return.
The conventional wisdom in our business is that you have to grow and keep moving to survive. We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it serves us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients. We actually have a rather good track record, because we do select projects carefully.
Stefan Sagmeister on staying lean and nimble. Read more at 99%
Via Bud Caddell
Don’t Be Afraid of the S-Word
I meet a lot of designers every week. Unsurprisingly, most of them don’t think about their sales process. The truth is that if you want to sustain your business, or (and excuse me for mentioning this unpopular idea) grow it, you must manage your sales properly. It’s that simple.
One thing I’ve found in the 16 months after launching New Ezra is I can manage to stay busy (and profitable) by just relying on people to contact me for new business, but in order to grow it takes a lot of work and effort to work and manage sales.
Read the full article at The 99 Percent
1099’d to Death
Already every freelancer, small business, and really everyone else dreads taxes, but a change slipped into the Health Care Reform bill is going to be an absolute nightmare to deal with starting January 1, 2012.
The new change requires freelancers, contractors, or companies to issue 1099s for services and goods over $600 to both individuals and companies. What does this mean? If you buy an iMac you’ll have to send Apple a 1099. If you buy software upgrades from Adobe you’ll have to send them a 1099. If you buy dozens of things from Amazon you’ll have to send them a 1099.
If the law was in effect last year I would have had to send out hundreds of 1099s to Apple, Best Buy, Dell, B&H Photo, Amazon, Virgin America, Alaskan Airlines, American Airlines, Mariott, HIlton, BlueShield, and the list goes on.
Whoever comes up with a web app/service to deal with sending out all these 1099s will be sitting on a gold mine.
A Call to Arms for Creative Firms
“The forces of the creative industry are aligned against the artist. These forces pressure him to give his work away for free as a means of proving his worthiness of the assignment. Clients demand it. Industry associations deride it but offer alternatives that are just as costly and commoditizing. Agencies resign themselves to it.”
As I’m refining the business development process for New Ezra the insight from Win Without Pitching has been tremendously helpful. I observed a lot of the principles in action while working at 2Advanced Studios, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming book to help refine the approach.
