Archive for 2015

Expensive Lottery

Successful entrepreneurship is a lottery where the tickets are really expensive.

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Said 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.

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Free, 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?

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Billions 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.

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Exclusively 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…

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Sustainable Audience

Want your product or service to be a success? Build the smallest possible audience that can sustain the product.

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Manufactured 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.

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Hired 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…

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Do 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…

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Cheap 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.

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Brand 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.

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Bleeding Out!

I’ve met founders of start-ups that bleed equity so profusely they are in imminent danger of exsanguination.

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Visionary Spread

People won’t spread your vision simply because you asked them to.

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Pay 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.

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Unreasonable Aids

All requests for your help and aid are reasonable. It is the people who do the asking that are not.

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Software 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…

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Tastes 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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