Tom Nixon

How to make money without charging a premium

TechCrunch points us to Sequoia Capital's elements of sustainable companies.

There’s clearly a lot of wisdom there, but I would take issue with just one of their points:

“Rich Customers: Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.”

Of course it’s great to build a product or service for which you can charge a premium, but don’t forget that 4bn people on this planet live in poverty. There is enormous potential to help these people, via the vehicle of capitalism, to meet their most basic needs.

“Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.”

How about clean water; food; shelter; medicine? If you don’t have these things I imagine you’d be fairly delighted with a solution that you could afford! You can’t charge a premium, but the market is enormous.

Here's my favourite example of the moment, the LifeStraw - a clean water filter within a drinking straw. Simple, cheap, and can you imagine the impact that this could have upon the world?

This is an area I want to learn more about. I've just started reading "Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the Worlds Most Difficult Problems"

If you want a quick hit of inspiration, check out Alex Steffen's TED talk I posted a little while back.

links for 2008-03-17

• Better Business Blogging - Small Business & Corporate blogs - Courses | Advice | Coaching | Consultancy
  (tags: blogging)

What cats and laser pointers tell us about how we use the web

Steve Krug (usability hero and author of Don't Make Me Think) points us to this article on the Wall Street Journal site about how an abundance of interesting and useful information online taps into a hard-wired human instinct that makes us crave more information. Sort of reminds of the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit. MORE INPUT!!

links for 2008-03-16

• Mutado
  (tags: design agency)
• ::: PLUM DIGITAL MEDIA :::
  (tags: development agency)

An easy way to add a little democracy: open up your board meetings

A very easy way to add a little more democracy to your company is to open up your board meetings. All you have to do is allocate one or two additional seats at the meeting for any employees to volunteer to come along. Here's the email I send round once a month:

Hi all, as you (hopefully!) already know, we try to run things here at NM in as transparent and participative a way as possible. One of the ways we achieve this is through having two ‘open seats’ at the monthly company board meeting for ANYONE on the team to come along. It’s a real opportunity to see how the company is run, and more importantly, to get involved in discussions and decisions.

If you’d like to come along then please send me an email by 14:00 tomorrow. If more than two people are interested I’ll give priority to people who haven’t been to a board meeting before. Over the coming months there will be opportunities for everyone to take part.

The contributions from the employees in the open seats are so valuable to the process of running the business because basic assumptions are questioned, and you get instant feedback from the people who will be affected by decisions. And it's motivating for the employees too because they get to see the big picture about how the company is run. Here's a snippet of an email I had from an employee after a board meeting:

It's very motivating to see the 'big picture' in terms of the company and where it is going (and feel like a part of that, of course!)

links for 2008-03-11

• Research: Social Media Map™ | Sway, Inc. | the leaders in social media
  (tags: socialmedia mapping tools)

links for 2008-02-26

• A guide to Social Media opportunities for Travel and Tourism | Katie Lips: Social Media Strategist
  (tags: socialmedia travel tourism)

Star pupils and corporate drones

The students who did well at my school:

• Sat quietly in class and didn’t answer back
• Always completed every homework assignment they were given
• Spent a long time on their homework
• Were always on time for class

These people are the corporate drones of today. Sure, you need a bunch of them in a business, but you also need people who:

• Ask 'why?' and hold those around them (in all directions on the org chart) to account
• Only work on tasks that they feel have value
• Spend the minimum amount of time on each task so they can move on to the next thing
• Work when they need to work, often in peaks and troughs

These are the people who change things and take a company forward.

The anti-retainer (random idea of the day)

Retainer:

• Fixed cost per month;
• Agency reports on time spent on that account each month;
• Client continues to pay up until the relationship has run its course

Anti-retainer:

• Monthly budget limit agreed by client and agency;
• Agency reports on results and tangible progress achieved each month;
• Client pays whatever they feel the results and progress are worth, up to the budget limit;
• Either party can cancel if the deal becomes not worthwhile.

Could this work? Is there a better anti-retainer model?

If the iPhone is Sputnik, what will the Shuttle be like?

This is a really cool glimpse of the future of mobile from Chris Messina which I found whilst searching for something completely different, as you do:

"In the future, you will buy a cellphone-like device. It will have a connection to the internet, no matter what. And it’ll probably be powered over the air. The device will be tradeable with your friends and will retain no solid-state memory. You literally could pick up a device on a park bench, login with your OpenID (IP-routed people, right?) from any number of service providers (though the best ones will be provided by the credit card companies). Your user data will live in the cloud and be delivered in bursts via myriad APIs strung together and then authorized with OAuth to accomplish specific tasks as they manifest. If you want to make a phone call, you call up the function on the touch screen and it’s all web-based, and looks and behaves natively. Your address book lives in Google-land on some server, and not in the phone. You start typing someone’s name and not only does it pull the latest photos of the first five to ten people it matches, but it does so in a distributed fashion, plucking the data from hcards across the web, grabbing both the most up-to-date contact information, the person’s hcalendar availability and their presence. It’s basically an IM-style buddy list for presence, and the data never grows old and never goes stale. Instead of just seeing someone’s inert photo when you bring up their record in your address book, you see all manner of social and presence data. Hell, you might even get a picture of their current location. This is the lowercase semantic web in action where the people who still hold on to figments of their privacy will become increasingly marginalized through obfuscation and increasingly invisible to the network. I don’t have an answer for this or a moral judgement on it; it’s going to happen one way or another."

Read the full article.