The Really Good Idea Test consists of 7 practical steps:
<ul>
<li>Write hypothesis</li>
<li>Identify risks</li>
<li>Create questions</li>
<li>Find interviewees</li>
<li>Measures & targets</li>
<li>Conduct interviews</li>
<li>Analyse and decide</li>
</ul>
The ultimate goal of The Really Good Idea Test is to enable individuals and businesses to make evidence-based decisions.

The Really Good Idea Test

The four main components of writing your idea hypothesis:<ul><li>Goal – What are you trying to achieve overall? </li><li>The idea – A short idea of what it is you want to create (if you know).</li><li>The people who will benefit – Reference who has the problem, need or desire that you want to solve or meet.</li><li>The action – What you need these people to do so you can realise your goal.</li></ul>

Writing A Hypothesis

The next steps to carve out a really good idea are:<ul><li>Step Two: Identify the risks in the idea by brainstorming.</li><li>Step Three: Create and list down the questions that pop up regarding the idea.</li><li>Step Four: Find Interviewees.</li></ul>

The Next Steps

In Step Five of The Really Good Idea Test: measures & targets, you need to ask yourself the following before conducting any interviews:Does the problem, need or desire exist?Are the existing solutions good enough to solve the interviewee's problem / meet their needs or desires?Are the interviewees prepared to take the necessary actions to get another solution?

The Crucial Step: Measures And Targets

Step Six is to conduct the interviews to test your hypothesis, after which you can analyse the insights from your test, share the results and make a decision about whether to pursue your idea or not.The final step is of course your action to pursue the idea or reject the same.This test is beneficial for anyone who wants to pursue a new idea.

The Final Steps

problemsolving

Problem Solving

business

Business

books

Books

product

Product & Design

Axiom Business Book Award Winner 2021 Got an idea? <ul> Want an easy way to test, refine and validate your idea? </li> Wondering whether it's worth investing your time, energy and money? </li> Trying to work out your next step? </li> </ul> Put it to The Really Good Idea Test! Whoever you are and whatever your idea is, this book gives you 7 practical steps to find out if it is worth pursuing. Spring into action as you read, using proven techniques, hands-on templates and lots of real examples. By the end of the test you will be able to move forward with confidence, making decisions based on evidence of what people want and need, rather than incorrect assumptions.

Julia Shalet

How self-aware are you? How well do you know yourself? Do you know how others perceive you?  There are two kinds of self-awareness: internal – how we perceive ourselves – and external – how others perceive us. To be truly self-aware, we need to gain both an internal and external perspective. To successfully take others’ perspectives in highly charged situations, we should start by “zooming in” on our perspective first to better understand it. Next, we should “zoom out” and consider the perspective of the other person.

See Yourself With Clarity

When coaching others, I’ll often focus a conversation on why the other person wants to change. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but there’s a risk that we don’t get to the ‘actionable’ part of our insights or emotions. We need to ask ourselves about the “what”. Why questions draw us to our limitations, what questions keep us curious. What can I do? What do you like? These kinds of “what” questions are geared towards personal growth, to seeing our potential.

Don't Ask Why, Ask What

A simple but powerful tool is to spend five minutes at the end of every day reflecting on the following questions: <ul><li>What went well today?</li><li>What didn’t go well?</li><li>What did I learn and how will I be smarter tomorrow?</li></ul>

Daily Check

Reframing means that we look at our circumstances, our behaviours, and our relationships from a different angle. I know from experience how easy it can be to be drawn into a single view of a circumstance, and therefore struggling to find a good way to change things. We need to instead look at the good and the bad from multiple angles, as a way to help maximise our insights and chances of success.

Reframing

Instead of focussing on the problem all the time, we need to mine solutions, dedicating a good amount of our efforts to exploring different ways of solving a problem. To increase your ability to mine problems for solutions, try the Miracle Question:Suppose that one night, while you are asleep, there’s a miracle and the problem that brought you here is solved. However, because you are asleep you don’t know that the miracle has already happened … Think for a moment … How's life going to be different now? Describe it in detail. What’s the first thing you’ll notice as you wake up in the morning?

Mining Solutions

If being individually self-aware means who you are and how others see you, a self-aware team commits to that same understanding at a collective level. There are five cornerstones of collective insight that teams can access and address: <ul><li>Objectives – What are we trying to achieve?</li><li>Progress – How are we doing? </li><li>Process – The processes we’re employing to achieve our objectives.</li><li>Assumptions – Our assumptions about the business and our environment.</li><li>Individual Contributions – What impact is each team member having on the team’s performance?</li></ul>

Awareness At Team Level: Collective Insight

Leadership is not about trying to control every move of the employees. Leaders should help connect their employees with the bigger picture, give them the right tools and provide them with the space to make mistakes whilst still holding them accountable. Leaders can ask some key questions to their employees to make sure that teams share their collective insight: <ol><li>Do we all know the plan?</li><li>Do we all know the status of the plan?</li><li>Are we all aware of the challenges the company is facing?</li></ol>

What Leaders Need To Do

Learn how to develop self-awareness and use it to become more fulfilled, confident, and successful. Most people feel like they know themselves pretty well. But what if you could know yourself just a little bit better—and with this small improvement, get a big payoff…not just in your career, but in your life? Research shows that self-awareness—knowing who we are and how others see us—is the foundation for high performance, smart choices, and lasting relationships. There’s just one problem: most people don’t see themselves quite as clearly as they could. Fortunately, reveals organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, self-awareness is a surprisingly developable skill. Integrating hundreds of studies with her own research and work in the Fortune 500 world, she shows us what it really takes to better understand ourselves on the inside—and how to get others to tell us the honest truth about how we come across. Through stories of people who have made dramatic gains in self-awareness, she offers surprising secrets, techniques and strategies to help you do the same—and how to use this insight to be more fulfilled, confident, and successful in life and in work. In Insight, you'll learn: • The 7 types of self-knowledge that self-aware people possess. • The 2 biggest invisible roadblocks to self-awareness. • Why approaches like therapy and journaling don't always lead to true insight • How to stop your confidence-killing habits and learn to love who you are. • How to benefit from mindfulness without uttering a single mantra. • Why other people don’t tell you the truth about yourself—and how to find out what they really think. • How to deepen your insight into your passions, gifts, and the blind spots that could be holding you back. • How to hear critical feedback without losing your mojo. • Why the people with the most power can often be the least-self-aware, and how smart leaders avoid this trap. • The 3 building blocks for self-aware teams. • How to deal with delusional bosses, clients, and coworkers.

career

Career

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Learn how to develop self-awareness and use it to become more fulfilled, confident, and successful. Most people feel like they know themselves pretty well. But what if you could know yourself just a little bit better—and with this small improvement, get a big payoff…not just in your career, but in your life?   Research shows that self-awareness—knowing who we are and how others see us—is the foundation for high performance, smart choices, and lasting relationships. There’s just one problem: most people don’t see themselves quite as clearly as they could.   Fortunately, reveals organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, self-awareness is a surprisingly developable skill. Integrating hundreds of studies with her own research and work in the Fortune 500 world, she shows us what it really takes to better understand ourselves on the inside—and how to get others to tell us the honest truth about how we come across.   Through stories of people who have made dramatic gains in self-awareness, she offers surprising secrets, techniques and strategies to help you do the same—and how to use this insight to be more fulfilled, confident, and successful in life and in work.   In Insight, you'll learn: • The 7 types of self-knowledge that self-aware people possess. • The 2 biggest invisible roadblocks to self-awareness. • Why approaches like therapy and journaling don't always lead to true insight • How to stop your confidence-killing habits and learn to love who you are. • How to benefit from mindfulness without uttering a single mantra. • Why other people don’t tell you the truth about yourself—and how to find out what they really think. • How to deepen your insight into your passions, gifts, and the blind spots that could be holding you back. • How to hear critical feedback without losing your mojo. • Why the people with the most power can often be the least-self-aware, and how smart leaders avoid this trap. • The 3 building blocks for self-aware teams. • How to deal with delusional bosses, clients, and coworkers.

Tasha Eurich is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Tasha Eurich has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Tasha Eurich's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Tasha Eurich

Insight

An outcome is “a change in human behaviour that drives business results.” Outcomes have nothing to do with making ‘stuff’ – though they’re something created by making the right stuff.
Outcomes are the changes in the customer, user, employee behaviour that lead to good things for your company, your organisation, or whoever is the focus of your work.

The Meaning Of Outcomes

Features are outputs, solutions have outcomes.Organizations need to embrace the goal of building as little as possible to solve the problem at hand. Intuitively, this makes sense. You’d obviously rather invest $1M solving a problem than $5M.Once we realize the goal of building as little as possible, we can orient our planning process around building less.

Building As Little As Possible

Engineering managers and product managers pride themselves on delivery. Did the thing get built on time, on budget, on spec? That’s how we judge our own performance and also how our managers typically judge us.Instead, we should be measuring ourselves against user and customer behaviour changes. Email open rates, user interactions, account creations, and the like.

Outcomes Are Behaviours, Measurable And Observable

Instead of building plans around outputs or features, it often makes more sense to plan around themes of work, problems to solve, or outcomes to deliver.A leader has to coordinate with internal teams(like support) for input and shift the conversations about features to conversations about problems and the possible solutions.

Feature Requests Are Simply Problems To Solve

In place of big bang product releases, a leader has to focus on creating specific, smaller customer behaviours that drive business results. You can create new behaviours or focus on existing customer behaviours (e.g. opening emails or sharing images). This could in turn help increase the lifetime value of those users, which is a measurable business result.The customer-centric company's highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of value.For example: Enabling users to create a music playlist, so that they can find their favourite music easily.

Delivering Value

An MVP is NOT version 1.0 of your product. It is the smallest thing you can create to learn if your hypothesis is correct. Agile products begin with a series of hypotheses and experiments, designed to achieve a specific and measurable outcome.

The Minimum Viable Product(MVP)

How do teams determine the right outcomes to concentrate on?Firstly, they ask: “What are the customer behaviours that drive business results?” and set an “impact level target”.Secondly, once the impact level target has been defined, they can then ask “what are the things that customers do that they predict they’ll visit our site?” The focus is on observable and measurable outcomes.

The Right Outcome

The Magic Questions that we can all apply when figuring out the right, measurable outcomes to concentrate on: <ul><li>What are the user and customer behaviours that drive business results? This is the outcome that we’re trying to create.</li><li>How can we get people to do more of these behaviours? These are the features, policy changes, promotions, etc. that we’ll do to create the right outcomes.</li><li>How do we know that we’re right? This uncovers the dynamics of the system, as well as the tests and metrics we’ll use to measure our progress.</li></ul>

The Magic Questions

In the old days, when we made physical products, setting project goals wasn't that hard. But in today's service- and software-driven world, "done" is less obvious. When is Amazon done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, services powered by digital systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on?Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features--but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve. Using outcomes creates focus and alignment. It eliminates needless work. And it puts the customer at the center of everything you do.Setting goals as outcomes sounds simple, but it can be hard to do in practice. This book is a practical guide to using outcomes to guide the work of your team. "Josh's crisp volume brims with insight about how to fly at just the right level - the level of outcomes. If you've ever wondered how M your MVP should be, or how to get more R in your OKRs, this book will help." - Nick Rockwell, CTO, NY Times

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

Joshua Seiden

Outcomes Over Output

Red Teaming is a revolutionary new way to make critical and contrarian thinking part of the planning process of any organization, allowing companies to stress-test their strategies, flush out hidden threats and missed opportunities and avoid being sandbagged by competitors.
Red teaming challenges your plans and the assumption upon which they are based. It forces you to think differently about your business and consider alternative points of view.

Red Teaming: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

<ul><li>Red teaming makes critical and contrarian thinking part of your company’s planning process and gives you a set of tools and techniques that can be used to stress-test your strategy. </li><li>Red teaming helps you better understand your customers and your competitors. </li><li>Red teaming helps you scan the business environment for both threats and opportunities. </li><li>Red teaming shows you the dangers that lie ahead—and how to turn them to your advantage. </li><li>Red teaming may make your organization a bit uncomfortable, but it will also help you stay relevant, keep ahead of your competition.</li></ul>

Red Teaming: The Concept

Good leaders know that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with conflict. Dealing with conflict lies at the heart of managing any business. As a result, confrontation—facing issues about which there is disagreement—can be avoided only at the manager’s peril. The issue can be put off, it can be allowed to fester for a long time, it can be smoothed over or swept under some rug. But it is not going to disappear. Conflicts must be resolved if the organization is to go forward. Constructive confrontation accelerates problem-solving.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Conflict Is Good

In a business setting, a red team will be most effective when it reports directly to the CEO and enjoys his or her full support. In practice, that will not always be possible. Red teams can still be effective when they report to the head of a department or division, as long as their scope is limited to those areas. If the red team tries to tackle problems outside of those areas, it is bound to find itself in conflict with other senior executives.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Having Top Cover

Even when red team members conduct themselves blamelessly, it can still be a challenge to get the entire organization to embrace red teaming and take the red team’s recommendations to heart. In the military, resistance to red teaming has come largely from officers who do not fully understand what red teaming is or why it is necessary. Once they are briefed on red teaming, that resistance usually dissipates. Successful units also tend to resist red teaming. They think that because they have been successful in the past, they know what it takes to be successful in the future.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: It Works If Leadership Lets It Work

It is counterproductive for a red team to analyze every decision an organization makes. Constant red teaming can be stressful and demoralizing for employees who have their every move questioned and challenged. That is not the point of red teaming, nor is it an effective use of red teams.A red team should be used strategically and selectively. It should be brought in to analyze important decisions, major deals, and overarching strategies. It should be called on when problems cannot be satisfactorily solved through regular means.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Red Teaming To Death

A Red team cannot become a routine and should always challenge itself. It should always encourage its members to voice different perspectives and conflicting views. Mixing up the way the team uses those tools and techniques is also a good idea. If you approach every problem the same way, you run the risk of making red teaming a bureaucratic exercise rather than the game-changing tool it should be. In addition, using the same methods over and over again can yield red teaming reports that read remarkably similar to one another, making them easier to ignore.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Red Team Your Red Team

A Red Team that is always wrong will never be taken seriously. Its warnings will be ignored. Its reports will go unread. Its members will lose their credibility. For that reason, red teams do need to pay attention to their track record and make sure that they hit the ball out of the park, at least occasionally.If the Red Team misunderstands the problem it was asked to solve, recommends actions that have already proven unsuccessful, or suggests alternatives that are ethically, legally, or financially impossible, it will lose its credibility.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: You Can’t Be Always Right, But Don’t Be Always Wrong

Many companies like simple solutions that do not require too much effort to implement. They prefer short-term fixes that offer immediate results, even if they do little to address the underlying problem. They are less interested in long-term solutions that require a coordinated effort to implement and that often take time to move the needle in a big way. The Red team is not to be given up, as the easy way out usually leads back in.

The Seven Rules Of Red Teaming: Don’t Give Up

Red teaming is all about rigorous questioning and thinking unconventionally. Red teams consist of people who’ve proven to be contrarian thinkers. These are the three phases of a typical red teaming exercise:<ul><li>Using analytical tools to question the arguments and assumptions that too often go unquestioned.</li><li>Using imaginative techniques to figure out what could go wrong – and what could go right – with the plan, in order to expose hidden threats and missed opportunities.</li><li>Applying contrarian thinking to challenge the plan and force the organisation to consider alternative perspectives.</li></ul>

Implementing The Red Team

<ul><li>Restating a problem and re-examining the same.</li><li>Encouraging writing the problem and the solution(s).</li><li>Dissecting an argument, which involves asking a number of questions of any argument that is used to justify a particular course of action, or that is offered as an explanation for a problem.</li><li>Checking key assumptions and re-examining the obvious.</li></ul>

The Techniques Of Red Teaming

Military strategy for the corporate world

"The revolutionary program that is transforming the military"--Jacket.

strategy

Strategy

Red Teaming is a revolutionary new way to make critical and contrarian thinking part of the planning process of any organization, allowing companies to stress-test their strategies, flush out hidden threats and missed opportunities and avoid being sandbagged by competitors. Today, most -- if not all -- established corporations live with the gnawing fear that there is another Uber out there just waiting to disrupt their industry. Red Teaming is the cure for this anxiety. The term was coined by the U.S. Army, which has developed the most comprehensive and effective approach to Red Teaming in the world today in response to the debacles of its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the roots of Red Teaming run very deep: to the Roman Catholic Church's "Office of the Devil's Advocate," to the Kriegsspiel of the Prussian General Staff and to the secretive AMAN organization, Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence. In this book, author Bryce Hoffman shows business how to use the same techniques to better plan for the uncertainties of today's rapidly changing economy. Red Teaming is both a set of analytical tools and a mindset. It is designed to overcome the mental blind spots and cognitive biases that all of us fall victim to when we try to address complex problems. The same heuristics that allow us to successfully navigate life and business also cause us to miss or ignore important information. It is a simple and provable fact that we do not know what we do not know. The good news is that, through Red Teaming, we can find out. In this book, Hoffman shows how the most innovative and disruptive companies, such as Google and Toyota, already employ some of these techniques organically. He also shows how many high-profile business failures, including those that sparked the Great Recession, could easily have been averted by using these approaches. Most importantly, he teaches leaders how to make Red Teaming part of their own planning process, laying the foundation for a movement that will change the way America does business.

Bryce G. Hoffman

Red Teaming

In the early stages of a new business, it is usually the founder who takes on many tasks themselves. With progress over time, the goal is to delegate secondary tasks so that the executives can focus on the 20% of tasks that will generate 80% of the results to scale the company.The main objective is to be able to answer yes to the question: “If I were not present, would my company still generate money?” That’s an excellent indication of whether or not you are financially independent.If you have several sources of income, you will get that much closer to becoming financially independent.

1. Achieving Financial Independence

It is important to make sure that your first business is mature and developed enough before you start focusing on an eventual second source of income. However, I believe it is also important for entrepreneurs to always have an ambitious attitude and seek new sources of growth.Having multiple sources of income can decrease your risk of losing it all. If the business to which you’re dedicating all your efforts goes bankrupt or fails, you will lose your only source of income, and you will be left empty-handed. When you have several sources of steady income, that worry is reduced.

2. Greater Stability And Safety

Everyone wants to live their dream life, but not everyone is able to achieve that goal. If you are smart and manage more than one source of income, then you have a real chance of creating the dream life you want. The more time and effort you put into building your sources of income, the greater the chances you will achieve financial freedom to live the life you want.You may decide to invest more freely in your time and personal development, you could choose to continue building additional sources of income, or you may want to travel the world and enjoy it with your family.

5. Living Your Dream Life

You’ve likely heard the expression,“Wealth begets wealth.” Essentially, higher amounts of money and income will attract more money and ROI. Having multiple sources of income will allow you to invest a greater proportion in both your primary company and other new sources of income. In short, you will likely be able to scale faster because it is a virtuous cycle.

3. Scaling Faster

With the rise of remote work, there has recently been more debate about what is best: working in an office or from the comfort of your home. This is relative, as both options have their benefits and disadvantages.No matter your opinion, as your own boss, you will be the one to decide where and when to work on your businesses. And when you have the increased flexibility of an entrepreneur, you can monitor and strengthen your sources of income while continuously identifying new opportunities that aren’t limited to your geographic area.

4. Working From The Comfort Of Your Own Home 

Multiple sources of income provide you with a wider safety net and the chance to achieve financial freedom.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

 Five Benefits Of Having Multiple Sources Of Income As An Entrepreneur

Larger companies can be difficult to compete against because they seem to have all the advantages. Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of the larger competitor can help you to use them strategically to build your business profitably.

Smaller companies can capitalise on their strengths

<ol><li>They have more resources: multiple locations, more people, more cash. </li><li>Bigger network: They have more suppliers, more customers, more shareholders, and a better-developed network.</li><li>Purchasing economy: They can benefit from the best discounts on big volumes.</li><li>Location advantages: Larger companies can have multiple locations and distribution centres.</li><li>Depth of skill: They can support specific skills smaller companies can't afford.</li></ol>

Common advantages of larger competitors

<ol><li>More agile: A smaller company can change direction faster.</li><li>Less need for volume to absorb overhead.</li><li>Closer to the customer. A larger size often separates the customer from the business. Larger competitors may have layers of management between the decision-makers and the customer.</li><li>More focused. Larger companies need a higher gross revenue and more customers to sustain the business.</li></ol>

Advantages of a smaller company

<ul><li>Speciality strategy. A smaller company can be the best in quality, service, innovation etc.</li><li>Segment focus. Building a business around a subset of the market may limit your size but is more likely to lead to a strong market share. Larger companies have to serve multiple segments to reach their volume targets.</li><li>Moving faster. Smaller companies can chase changes in the market.</li><li>Customer intimacy. Smaller companies are often closer to their customers and can understand their customers better than larger competitors.</li></ul>

How to compete with a larger company

Competing with a larger company is hard. Here are the advantages of being smaller and four key strategies that will help you win.

How to compete with a larger company - Center for Simplified Strategic Planning

There are 8 million online stores in the world. This means that there are more choices to choose from. If you sift through the stores according to your unique criteria, including price, location and service, you may still end up with several stores you can choose from. If one of these stores have a loyalty program, they may sway you to order from them to gain additional benefits.

Loyalty programs 

In the United States, shoppers belong to 3 billion loyalty programs. But many business owners create mediocre loyalty programs so that they can tick it off their list. These undesirable loyalty programs are left unused and forgotten by consumers.With so many e-commerce options for customers to choose from, customers gravitate towards the programs where they feel valued.

Effective customer loyalty programs

<ol><li>Connect customers with unexpected surprises.</li><li>These perks should be tailored to the individual.</li></ol>Most customers prefer a VIP experience. A 2020 survey found that free shipping and discounts are considered a low bar. "Early access to sales" and "early access to new products" were most valued, followed by "tailored offers and recommendations."

How to build  a successful loyalty program

A loyalty program that is just a collection of coupons is more harmful than not having a program as it reveals your low regard for your customers. A loyalty program should foster value year-round.<ul><li>A baseline inclusion is giving a perk on your customer's birthdays. View it as an opportunity to interact with your customers. </li><li>Perhaps give them a 50% off coupon together with a fun birthday note. Or maybe provide exclusive access to content with a paywall or offer a voucher for a free item from your store.</li></ul>

The Best Customer Loyalty Programs

<ul><li>Personalised. Your program should not feel like a default for all customers. Instead, the program should feel tailored to each customer.</li><li>Unique. Ensure your programs looks and feels distinct.</li><li>Accessible. Build your program, then make it easy to access. Even loyal fans will lose interest if they have to complete too many steps.</li><li>Rewarding. Instead of reverting to the collection of coupons, consider free shipping, an extended window for product returns, or a discount on their birthday.</li><li>Consistent. Some loyalty programs start with enthusiasm, then fizzle out. Ensure that your program is consistent.</li></ul>

Must have's for a successful loyalty program

Suitable investments at the right time will always be beneficial. Balance the offerings with the cost of the program to ensure the value is symbiotic. Your incremental revenues - your incremental costs = loyalty program cost. The formula is based on the projections for customer response to the program. The incremental revenues include increased customer referrals, decreased turnover, and higher sales.

The cost of building customer loyalty programs

Building customer loyalty programs is easy. Making them successful takes effort. Get valuable insights on how to make yours shine.

Building Customer Loyalty Programs That Work

Anchoring your work deeply in the dreams, desires, and communities of those you seek to serve. It’s about changing people for the better, creating work you can be proud of. And it’s about being a driver of the market, not simply being market-driven.

“Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.”

Not just ideas, but markets

<ul><li>You aren’t busy enough.</li><li>Your ideas aren’t spreading.</li><li>The community around you isn’t what it could be.</li><li>The people you care about aren’t achieving everything they hoped.</li></ul>

Marketing problems?

It has to resonate with the listener, to tell them something they’ve been waiting to hear, something they’re open to believing. It has to invite them on a journey where a change might happen. And then, if you’ve opened all those doors, it has to solve the problem, to deliver on the promise.

Form deep connections

You have a marketing question, and it’s possible that there’s an answer.But only if you look for it.“ Instead of selfish mass, effective marketing now relies on empathy and service.”

Not selfish mass marketing

Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.It’s a chance to change the culture for the better.Marketing involves very little in the way of shouting, hustling, or coercion.It’s a chance to serve, instead

A chance to serve

<ol><li>The first step is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling, and a contribution worth talking about.</li><li>The second step is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about.</li><li>The third step is to tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market.</li><li>The fourth step is the one everyone gets excited about: spread the word.</li><li>The last step is often overlooked: show up—regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years</li></ol>

Marketing in five steps

How do I describe my love for this book? It completely changed my view of marketing.  He says it is "seeing what others see. Building tension. Aligning with tribes. Creating ideas that spread. It means doing the hard work of becoming driven by the market and working with (your part of) that market.”  Seth Godin is indeed the Father of Modern Marketing. 

#1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Instant New York Times Bestseller A game-changing approach to marketing, sales, and advertising. Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip. Now, for the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you're proud of, whether you're a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation. Great marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. Their tactics rely on empathy, connection, and emotional labor instead of attention-stealing ads and spammy email funnels. No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it's presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it. Seth employs his signature blend of insight, observation, and memorable examples to teach you: * How to build trust and permission with your target market. * The art of positioning--deciding not only who it's for, but who it's not for. * Why the best way to achieve your goals is to help others become who they want to be. * Why the old approaches to advertising and branding no longer work. * The surprising role of tension in any decision to buy (or not). * How marketing is at its core about the stories we tell ourselves about our social status. You can do work that matters for people who care. This book shows you the way.

Over the past quarter century, Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas and phrases that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketingto Purple Cowto Tribesto The Dip. Now, for the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one accessible, timeless package. At the heart of his approach is a big idea- Great marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. They don't just make noise; they make the world better. Truly powerful marketing is grounded in empathy, generosity, and emotional labour. This book teaches you how to identify your smallest viable audience; draw on the right signals and signs to position your offering; build trust and permission with your target market; speak to the narratives your audience tells themselves about status, affiliation, and dominance; spot opportunities to create and release tension; and give people the tools to achieve their goals. It's time for marketers to stop lying, spamming, and feeling guilty about their work. It's time to stop confusing social media metrics with true connections. It's time to stop wasting money on stolen attention that won't pay off in the long run. This is Marketingoffers a better approach that will still apply for decades to come, no matter how the tactics of marketing continue to evolve.

Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.Godin is author of ten books that have been bestsellers around the world, and he is also a renowned speaker. He was recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses.Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry's leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998.He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week.

Seth Godin

This is Marketing

This Is Marketing

It refers to the fact of designing a product in a more complex way than necessary:Overengineering (or over-engineering, or over-kill) is the act of designing a product or providing a solution to a problem in an overly complicated manner, where a simpler solution can be demonstrated to exist with the same efficiency and effectiveness as that of the original design.In the context of software: Code or design that solves problems you don’t have.

Overengineering

<ul>
<li>Trying to anticipate the future and be ready for the unknown: It's easy to think that we can make it future-proof by investing a little more time “just in case”.</li>
<li>A lack of experience. The more senior you are, the less prone you are to overengineer.</li>
<li>Loosely defined requirements: If an engineer does not have a well-defined problem, he will tend to overengineer to protect himself from uncertainty.</li>
<li>Boredom: If an engineer does not have exciting challenges to face, he may end up complicating any problem simply by trying something new.</li>
</ul>

Overengineering causes

It increases development costs. If engineers do not choose the simplest solution to address a problem, the costs in time and money increase, preventing us from iterating faster. It also increases your maintenance costs. Simple code is much easier to program, test, and modify. When you complicate it, the complexity can grow exponentially, impacting our iteration speed.

Overengineering consequences

The best way to prevent over-engineering is to turn your engineers into true product engineers.<ul><li>Involve them in the day-to-day business, explaining the why after each initiative, and linking it with the metrics that matter for the organization and its vision. </li><li>Bring them closer to the users, inviting them to interviews and discovery sessions with them. You want your team to empathize intimately with your user’s problems, so they can quickly discard any engineering effort that won’t solve them as efficiently as possible.</li></ul>

How to prevent over-engineering?

<ul>
<li>YAGNI(“You are not going to need it”) tries to prevent you from adding anything that is not strictly necessary to solve the problem you have in front of you because the reality is that most likely, “you won’t need it”.</li>
<li>KISS (“Keep it simple stupid”), refers to the fact that simple systems are easier to repair, evolve and maintain. Therefore, simplicity should be one of the goals of any design.</li>
<li>Worse is better: There comes the point when having fewer options is preferable to having more; Simplify the use of our product, making it attractive to a broader segment of the market.</li>
</ul>

Mental models to prevent overengineering

In today's post, Simón Muñoz speaks about one of the most prevalent issues when creating products: overengineering them.

computerscience

Computer Science

Overengineering can kill your product

Pricing can be used as a marketing strategy or as a way to increase perceptions of quality. Sometimes it’s baked directly into a brand’s ethos. It’s so much more than a simple calculation—pricing, especially the practice of psychological pricing, can have a real impact on the purchasing decisions of your customers.

What Your Prices Say to Customers

It's a strategy that uses pricing to influence a customer’s spending or shopping habits to make more or higher value sales.The goal is to meet a customer’s psychological need for something, whether that’s saving money, investing in the highest quality item, or getting a “good deal.”

Psychological Pricing

Psychological pricing plays on the fact that consumers rarely know what something should cost. Most often the way we’re able to determine if something is a good deal is by getting it for a lower price than normally listed or by comparing it to similar products in the same category.  Consumers want to know that they’re getting the best of something, whether it’s the best price point, the best quality, or the best value.

Why Psychological Pricing is Effective 

<ul>
<li>Charm pricing and odd-even pricing: It removes one cent from the rounded dollar price of an item to trick the brain into thinking it costs less.</li>
<li>Slashing the MSRP: Some businesses sell right at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, but others show it next to the lower price they’re selling the item for.</li>
<li>Artificial time constraintsto create a sense of urgency: Only a few hours left!</li>
<li>Innumeracy: A box of pasta might be on sale for 50% off if you buy 2.</li>
<li>Price appearance: $12 feels cheaper than $12.00 because the number itself isn’t as long.</li>
<li>Consumers like flat rates, even when they cost more.</li>
</ul>

6 Types of Psychological Pricing

Higher prices give the impression that an item is worth more, even if it’s made by the same manufacturer or the same materials.This is a popular strategy that businesses use to signal that their items are luxury or designer pieces. Customers see an expensive price tag and assume the items are of the highest quality possible. Even if that is true, it doesn’t mean that the cost reflects what the items are actually worth.

Higher Prices As Quality Signals 

We explore what psychological pricing is, how it functions as a marketing strategy, and ways you can implement pricing strategies into your business.

Psychological Pricing: What Your Prices Really Say to Customers

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