Blog
The Sure Thing
If you’ve ever watched surfers you’ll know that they spend far more time reading the waves, than riding them. And despite all of the waiting, watching and experience, they still sometimes choose the wrong wave to ride. In the end they take their best guess, commit and go. And so it goes for ideas to
How To Charge What You’re Worth
The days when you clocked in and out, and got paid by the hour for dipping squares of caramel into big vats of icing, (pink or white—a job my mother did for years), at the factory, are largely gone. You don’t get paid for showing up. And yet that’s how many creative entrepreneurs try to…
The Story Makes The Product Better
For three decades, 10% of the population of the tiny Welsh town, Cardigan, made jeans. 35,000 pairs every week. Then one day the factory died, and the jean artisans could no longer practice their art. They simply had no way to do the thing they did well, until Hiut Denim was founded. Now the company
How Dollar Shave Club Succeeds With A Better Brand Story
How does a startup come on to the scene, take on giant global brands like Gillette, and win? That’s what Dollar Shave Club did, by harnessing the power of great brand storytelling. This is how they did it. By telling the truth, and keeping it simple. With an easy to remember brand name and tagline,…
Understanding The Problem To Solve
There are a million and one web hosting services on the market. It’s hardly a niche. The market is so saturated, why would you consider launching yet another one? That’s exactly what my friend Kelly did. Her hosting business doesn’t stand out by competing on spec, or uptime. Kelly differentiates by
Because It Matters
How do you stand out when there are two other juice bars on the same street, and half a dozen ‘good enough’ life coaches just three clicks away? If you’ve got the same choices as the competition, how you choose can make all the difference. Do you make decisions based on what’s gone before, or…
What Does The Competition Do?
I was consulting with two financial planners this week. We were discussing what made them different, when they told me this story about working with one of their clients. Jonathan was offered $9 million for his house, which had amazing, never to be replaced views out over the river. He was in a quan
Valuing Creatives. When Love Is Not Enough
No business owner would expect to rent an office for half the going rate, or buy a delivery van for far less than it was worth. Not even a fledgling, bootstrapping, startup founding, entrepreneur. And yet every day designers, creatives and freelancers are asked to drop their rates, do a deal, or con
Why Are People Ignoring You?
It’s been a while since I bought a nice glossy magazine. I usually enjoy flicking through one at my favourite cafe. I’m not sure why I was so surprised to get 32 pages into the latest edition of Vogue and still be on the adverts. The entire magazine was 208 pages, 100 of those pages…
Being The Most
In the 80’s Starbucks set out to be the most inspiring coffee brand on the planet. When they forgot this in the 90’s and tried becoming the most ubiquitous, they lost their way. If you could be ‘the most’ to people what ‘most’ would you be? Most reliable. Most irresistible. Most ubiquitous. Most lov
Worldviews And The Story Of Bottled Water
Do you remember the first time you saw bottled water for sale? For me it was back in the late 80’s when I was on holiday in Greece, where the tap water wasn’t safe to drink. And then in the 90’s suddenly there it was. A trickle that turned into a deluge, supported by a…
How Can I Make Money From My Idea?
Asking this question is a terrible place to start. I don’t know of many great ideas where the first question the creator asked was, “How can I make money from this idea?” You’ve got to care about the idea and understand the problem you are setting out to solve first. Not in a naive ,…
You Don’t Need A Badge
My eldest son Adam graduated last Saturday. The whole family flew five hours across the country to be there. What you’ll know about anything as special as a graduation ceremony is that it takes an army of people to pull it off. There are legions of people involved on the day, from caterers to photog
Attention Is Not The Problem
You’ve may have access to a hundred and one new channels that allow you to broadcast a message, but there are only a handful of ways to get attention for your idea. 1. Advertising The old and expensive way to buy attention. You might be able to buy eyeballs, but you can’t guarantee you’re changing…
Signal Versus Noise. You Get To Choose.
I’ve always loved the name of the blog at 37Signals… Signal vs Noise. They chose well. They write well too. Signal versus noise perfectly describes how we are living and working right now. We want to be connected, both as business entities and as human beings. But we’re sacrificing hearing the signa
Are You Measuring What Matters?
The cafe owner thinks that what’s most important is getting customers seated and served quickly. Because she believes her customers simply value tidy lines and orders pushed through, she creates standards and KPIs. She measures things that enable her staff to tick boxes and make them look hunted. Th
The Difference Between Traffic And Visitors
When you optimise your website for “traffic” are you doing your best work? Working out how to get “traffic” to find you is a tactic, that anyone with better technical support than you can win at. Giving “visitors” a reason to stay, means having a strategy for creating great content that can’t be eas
If Only You Could Write Like Malcolm Gladwell
WANTED “A professional writer talented in non-fiction storytelling with a passion for the topics of startups, social entrepreneurship, cutting-edge science and technology, and the psychology of the crowd, capable of crafting non-fiction pieces that are captivating and massively popular (think Freako
The Internet Is Not A Shortcut
Here is the cold hard truth about the Internet, viral marketing and the way to make your ideas matter. The Internet gives you a million and one chances to amplify what’s great about what you do. It doesn’t actually make your idea better. 70,000 people found Philippa on Instagram. She was an amazing
The World Is Your Focus Group Now
Think about every conversation you overheard today. It may have been on the train, in the coffee queue, or while you waited in the hair salon. You know, the one where the guy on his mobile explained loudly that his taxi hadn’t turned up. Or when forty something Sarah confided how stressed out she wa
