Warm wishes to you and yours.
Add Your CommentsJust had a conversation with Darrell whose my partner on the Cell Phones etc. project. He said something that stuck.
B. Scary times, but such is the name of game. We’re smaller and more nimble.
B. We just need to keep rapidly innovating.
D. Rabidly.
Darrell’s right. Rapid is no longer good enough. You need to be Rabid.
“To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.”
- Richard Branson
I really like what Seth is saying here. No pain, no gain.
He explains that most people see only the first half of this chart, in which case, the Local Max is perceived to be the top. However, if you’re prepared to ride out some tough times, there’s probably a much grander Max awaiting you.
“The problem is that to get to Big Max, you need to go through step C, which is a horrible and scary place to be.”
“There were 10,000 single-location hamburger restaurants in the world when Ray Kroc decided to build a giant chain of franchised McDonald’s. Anyone could have done it. No one did. Because everyone who tried had to go through point C to get there. It took Colonel Sanders more than a decade of pain to get through point C.”
Venture Capitalist Paul Graham says you need 3 things to create a successful startup:
1. Start with good people.
2. Make something customers actually want.
3. Spend as little money as possible.
I think we’re doing all 3 of those with Cell Phones etc.. Time will tell.
Quote:
“Phone reps are a fact of doing business, and in many cases represent the first contact a customer has with your company. Indeed, in a cluttered world where one company’s product can be nearly identical to another’s, quality service is often the deciding factor for finicky customers. ”
Inc. Magazine, June 2005
Robin Good looks at Internet-based telephone services like Skype:
VoIP tools like Skype give small businesses a market advantage against larger competitors by lowering operating costs and increasing productivity with voice calls, instant conference calling, group chat, file-transfer, free toll-free calling and the recently released Skype Toolbars, which let callers make one-click calls to phone numbers directly from within Windows Outlook and Internet Explorer.
I started switching to VOIP about a year back and I have few regrets. Using a combination of Vonage for my regular line and Skype for calls to contractors etc., I’ve cut my phone bill by 60%. I’ve also gained some handy features that I couldn’t get with my regular phone line. For example, when you leave me a voice mail it gets delivered to me via email as an mp3 file.
Have you considered Skype or another VOIP service for your business? If not, I encourage you to take a more serious look. A great way to start is internally with Skype. If you’ve got offices in a couple different cities, why not set-up Skype for inter-office calls? It’s free to download and free to call other Skype users. That would likely eliminate a good chunk of your long distance bill each month. And, who wouldn’t like to do that?
Once you get all set-up, Skype me.
Ever heard of Details Magazine? Yeh..
How about GQ? Of course..
Now what about “The Cool Hunter”? Probably not right?
Well, The Cool Hunter is a blog that covers the latest in styles and trends. It probably has a part-time staff of 1 dude and a annual budget of a few hundred bucks. But if you’ve got a great product you better start paying attention to guys like The Cool Hunter.
Here’s an example of why:
“The Cool Hunter” recently wrote about a fleece hoodie made by a small French company called Anticon. And as a result…
Anticon, the new French brand who we featured last week sent us a Hoodie as a gesture for all the press interest we generated for them. Seems media outlets from the NY Daily News to the Sunday Times (UK) China Times, FHM Germany, Vice magazine and numerous others had contacted them due to our posting.
Moral of the story. You might not be reading blogs like The Cool Hunter but lots of important people are. What’s your blogging PR strategy?
Just because you use Internet Explorer doesn’t mean your customers do. Does your website work with the Firefox web browser?
BBC writer Kevin Anderson-Washington tells Jeff Jarvis that the BBC uses Skype (voice over internet telephony service) for interviews because it offers higer quality than a plain old phone line.
Yes, we’re using Skype heavily. We recently conducted an interview with Mr Behi, an Iranian blogger, via Skype. It’s very useful for us in that repressive governments can’t block it due to its distributed nature. And seeing as on a good connection, it’s a full 44Khz signal, it’s just below the quality of the very expensive ISDN broadcast equipment we have.
VOIP is a true disruptive technology. Is your company taking advantage of it? Should you be? Here’s 10 reasons why you should be from the Globe and Mail.
