<ul><li>71% of businesses prefer Instagram as their top digital marketing platform</li><li>About 90% of Instagram users follow business accounts</li><li>2 in 3 people surveyed feel Instagram conveniently allows to interact with brands</li><li>50% show interest in a brand after seeing its ads on Instagram</li></ul>

Instagram Is Hot In Digital Marketing

<ul><li>To convert to a business account, go to Settings> Account> Switch to Professional account option in Instagram.</li><li>Create a strong Instagram content strategy.</li><li>Prepare a strong content strategy with well-defined KPIs to help you analyze the performance of your Instagram marketing plan.</li></ul>Schedule your posts:<ul><li>Most brands post 1-5 times daily but don’t bombard your followers with posts.</li><li>Create a social media content calendar, as this helps you get a 360⁰ view of your marketing strategy and gives you control over the content you wish to schedule.</li></ul>

Convert Your Instagram Account to A Business Account

<ul><li>With over 500 million Instagram accounts viewing stories daily, it gives you enough scope to: promote your products and services.</li><li>Post content informing your audience about any upcoming events or deals.</li><li>Have casual interactions with viewers to connect with them better and improve your brand’s presence.</li></ul>

Say it with Stories

Use Reels to be more creative with your content and express more with the combination of multiple videos for seamless transitionsAdd to your brand's personality by making your posts appealing and informative using captions.60% of posts tag other users to gain traction.Repost posts in which you are tagged to increase the engagement and visibility of your posts and, in turn, of your profile.IGTV allows you to upload videos as short as 15 seconds to as long as one hour.Track user analytics with the Insights option. It optimizes analytics based on the frequency of visitors.

Use The Tools

<ul><li>70% of Instagram hashtags are brand campaigning strategy-related.</li><li>Prepare different lists of preferred hashtags and keep track of which posts and hashtags perform the best.</li><li>Limit 30 hashtags per post.</li><li>Use relevant hashtags for your business posts that become the reason viewers visit your profile.</li><li>Offer incentives for going through your post and captions, using promo codes and coupons</li></ul>

Play with Hashtags And Promo Codes

82% of people reportedly prefer watching a live video rather than viewing a social media post. Use the Live feature to interact with your audience through comments and questions in real-time.Increase engagement and audience reach by announcing live contests and giveaways to drive viewership.

Go Live

Contests: Instagram accounts that actively post about contests tend to grow their followers 70% faster than those that do not.Sponsored ads can be effective if you have a niche brand.Post sponsored content and contest alerts to improve consumer engagement while increasing your following and visibility.Facebook’s Ads Manager and Power Editor are some of the most effective Instagram marketing tools to create Instagram ads in bulk.You can easily set up your Instagram Shop (Settings, Business, Set Up Instagram Shopping) and use features such as product tags to promote your posts.

Promote Your Stuff

Provide the link to your website through Instagram bio tools such as Feedlink or Linktree to increase engagement and website visits.Use direct CTAs, mention links in your bio, or share your latest Instagram posts to create interest in readers on other social media platforms.

Make Links Prominent

<ul><li>Captions can be as small as one-liners.</li><li>Memes generate more engagement and have mass appeal.</li><li>Use them judicially and ensure that it is relevant to your branding and your brand’s purpose.</li><li>Most of the audience on Instagram are millennials who share memes to communicate on social media.</li><li>Create eye-catching content and publish it directly on all your accounts.</li></ul>

Use Memes

<ul><li>80% of consumers feel companies have become more accountable due to social media channels.</li><li>Either follow the account to study their strategy or partner with them to understand their techniques.</li><li>The latter option can help you both interact with each other's followers and have a chance to increase your audience reach.</li><li>Find accounts that are relevant to your brand and boost its visibility.</li><li>Reply to comments on your posts, comment on posts of those who regularly comment on yours, and wish your followers on special occasions.</li></ul>

Driving Engagement

<ul><li>Focus on the audience's interests beyond your product or brand.</li><li>Create a user profile while conducting market research of your audience, such as defining their demographics, interests, likes, and dislikes to create a holistic brand image while being relevant to the audience.</li><li>Use Stories or profile pages to directly sell your digital gift cards to build a better relationship with your followers and potential customers.</li><li>Geotags: Instagram allows you to tag your location in your posts.</li></ul>

Lifestyle Content

Use Story Highlights to direct users to your product storeYou can either use a previous Story from the Story Archive Gallery or tap the heart icon below on your current Story about your business offerings to ensure continuous and convenient access to existing and potential customers to your store.

Story Highlights

If you find it difficult to promote your brand on Instagram or feel it is time-consuming, try revising your schedule or reducing your posts' frequency or reinventing your strategy, but don't quit the platform.Bonus: The best time to post on Instagram is between 6 AM - 9 AM and 5 PM - 6 PM on weekdays and till 2 PM on weekends.

The Bottom Line

Instagram is everything you need for Digital Marketing

51 Instagram marketing tips to exponentially scale your brand for better engagement, visibility, ROI, and overall growth.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

Powerful Instagram Marketing Tips To Boost Your Instagram Presence

Transitioning back into business travel after the pandemic isn’t as simple as buying a plane ticket. Individuals are having to remember how to pack efficiently, adjust to time zone changes, and modify their meeting schedules — and that’s on top of monitoring differences in travel restrictions, quarantine requirements, and virus risk levels throughout the world.

Back On The Road And In The Air

<ul>
<li>Evaluate the benefit. Think carefully about where you believe travel would add the greatest benefit versus working remotely.</li>
<li>Right-size the investment. Even as you’re able to fold more business travel into your schedule, question whether all the travel you used to do really needs to be added back in.</li>
<li>Pace yourself by starting small, and then building up after you see how you feel.</li>
<li>Leave margin. If you’ve got important business travel, give yourself more flexibility than you used to do, and make sure you have access to everything you need, like food and car rentals.</li>
</ul>

Transition Back Into Work Travel

<ul><li>Team retreats to craft strategy</li><li>Visits to international worksites to facilitate communication across cultural and language barriers</li><li>Sales negotiations to land deals</li><li>Conferences to network</li></ul>

Reasons To Travel: What Benefits From Getting Out

Four strategies for your next business trip.

remotework

Remote Work

career

Career

travel

Travel

How to Ease Back into Traveling for Work

If we look at the recent developments in AI, it can seem as though the developers and creators of AI applications have lost control of its powerful potential.But these reports lose sight of the more effective and well-governed developments that are supporting and optimizing real work and the interchanges happening every day between humans and AI. When AI is approached comprehensively for how it can optimize an entire system-- including the humans within that system-- it has a higher chance of delivering meaningful impact.

AI And Customer Experience: The Premise

Customer care was one of the top use cases for AI.60 percent of executive respondents believe AI will play a role in 11 percent to 30 percent of their processes-- a considerable but not necessarily dominant influence on how most businesses operate. The overall acceleration of digital adoption has likely changed these metrics post-pandemic and the need to implement digital and AI solutions is now imperative to be competitive.

The Facts

One of the fastest areas of adoption for AI in the enterprise is chatbot applications.What customers really want is instant access to someone (or something) that understands what they need. Self-service customer engagement is trending towards delivering that-- but companies need to work with a partner that can deliver at scale.

ChatBots: The First Experience With AI

Employees need systems that support a balance between complex tasks and easy-to-execute deliverables that satisfy a sense of accomplishment and completion of work at the end of a workday.The design and implementation of AI must consider empathy and how it augments and supports the self-reported, lagging skill set for listening and understanding.

Supporting a Growing AI-Native Workforce

The customer engagement employee is an AI worker, their knowledge and contributions are essential to AI implementation. You cannot separate the two.The next generation will have moved beyond being 'digital natives' they will be 'AI natives.'Contact centre employees are at the cutting edge of an AI-literate workforce in our society and we have the opportunity now to provide the technology that will support their work and better serve customers.Companies need to expand the aperture in how success is measured against the human-side of the AI equation.

The need to implement digital and AI solutions is now imperative to be competitive.

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Strategy. It Is a Customer Experience Accelerator

The PLG model is about showing users what your product can do for them. Our goal was for our product to be an MVP, and in doing so, it was essential to have a tight feedback loop between our users and the product. Basically, we needed as many people to use the app to gather feedback. This allowed us to adjust the product to the user’s needs so we could truly stand out.Starting as a <a href="https://productled.com/sales-to-product-led-organization/">product-led organization</a> was the quickest way to understand how we could lead our users to the value of our product.

Product-Led Growth(PLG): A Case Study

We discovered from looking at the organic ranking that the following factors came into play:<ul><li>Number of Customer Reviews</li><li>Overall Rating</li><li>Price</li><li>Feature Set</li><li>Word-of-Mouth/Referral</li></ul>Word-of-mouth became more important than we initially anticipated. Some of these apps don't even have a website because word-of-mouth alone was enough. A lot of the distribution comes from the Shopify app itself. These factors are crucial in getting high reviews to encourage merchants to use a product.

Competitive Analysis

We found the majority of the apps on the Shopify App store are product-led; however, nobody was giving users free access to the entire product before they bought it. We established that we needed the following to be competitive on the Shopify platform:<ul><li>Get feedback from users.</li><li>Bring greater value to our product from the feedback.</li><li>Improve marketing, messaging, and copy from the feedback.</li><li>Get reviews that comment on these differences.</li><li>Finally, get revenue from our product. </li></ul>We explored product-led models that could bring in revenue. <ul><li>Limited Freemium</li><li>14-Day Free Trial</li><li>Pure Freemium</li></ul>

The Business Model

We noticed that other quiz apps on the Shopify platform applied a limited freemium option, which meant you'd be allocated 5,000 quiz engagements every month for free. Anything over that, you would be bumped up to the basic plan at $39 a month. We didn’t find this a good model because, by the time people hit their limit, they would no longer be getting value from the product, and it would be harder to convert them.

Limited Freemium

When we thought about our product-led approach, we had to think about the steps for a user to derive value. The onboarding phase had the following steps:<ul><li>Decide on the quiz questions needed.</li><li>Put the quizzes together.</li><li>Implement it.</li><li>Design it. </li></ul>The user had to see it was driving traffic before they could derive value from it. So there were a lot of steps the user had to go through before arriving at the product’s value proposition, and 14-days wasn’t long enough. Plus, we needed users to use it at that moment, give us feedback, and provide us with a review.

14-day Free Trial

it was important to get as many users as possible to help us rank higher organically and improve our product. We saw the importance of tapping into a customer feedback loop as quickly and efficiently as possible. So we decided to go all-in on a pure freemium model.

Pure Freemium

Users have to experience a product without any sales pressuring them to try it or buy it. We then went through a slew of doubts about our product:<ul><li>What if our product is not an MVP?</li><li>What if it has limitations?</li><li>What if it has shortcomings other apps in the market don’t have?</li><li>Can we convert enough users on the free plan to sustain us?</li></ul>These are serious concerns in terms of the pricing model, but we decided to go for it, and that's why product-led growth can be scary.

Undermining Revenue Potential

The biggest challenge might be that users don’t value the product if they don’t pay for it. We know users typically always value a product they have a stake in. If it’s free, it’s easy to fall into that pile of tools that are left behind and forgotten.

The Value Of Free

To be competitive on the PLG platform, you need to:<ul><li>Get feedback from users.</li><li>Bring greater value to the product from the feedback.</li><li>Improve marketing, messaging, and copy.</li><li>Have reviews that comment on these differences.</li><li>Finally, get revenue from your product.</li></ul>

Challenges of Making Freemium Work

Product-led growth has a customer-centric mentality and prioritizing which is vital to success.<ul><li>Delivering Value Fast</li><li>Make onboarding easy, don't make users do anything too complicated, and create a quick path to the "Aha! moment."</li><li>Play the long game</li><li>We succeed when our customers succeed</li><li>Prioritize users - whether they are free or paid.</li></ul>

Our Core Differentiators

The main goal of starting as a product-led organization is that we were able to get the product used by more users than if we had started as sales-led. In addition, giving users a free product to use eliminates a barrier to entry – pricing. From there, we received real insights into the needs of our users. This feedback showed us how to deliver value from our product to the user quicker. Finally, the word got out that we had a great product, and more users came to try the product through the freemium model and became paying users.

The founder of Prehook shares insights into their product-led model strategy, and how they're making freemium work with real-worls insights

startup

Startups

product

Product & Design

Making Freemium Work: How Prehook did it

A metaverse is a device and vendor-agnostic collective virtual open space that merges the physical and digital worlds. In that space, users can interact with each other through 3D avatars.The primary goal of Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Microsoft, NVIDIA, and other companies working on activities that take place in isolated virtual environments is to ultimately blend these realms into a single one - the Metaverse.

Metaverse for business: The basics

<ul><li>The media and entertainment industry is booming, but it's also starting to show the first signs of fatigue.</li><li>41% of consumers are now worried about the impact of the Internet on their well-being and mental health.</li><li>And independent content makers are moving to platforms like Substack and OnlyFans to monetize their articles and videos directly.</li></ul>

Why metaverse could be the next frontier for business

"Metaverse" is a multitude of things<ul><li>A virtual realm that can be an exact replica of the real physical world or a brand-new immersive environment with its own landscape and forms of creative expression.</li><li>An independent digital consumer-to-consumer economy enabled by digital currencies and non-fungible tokens.</li><li>It is a set of technologies that alter the very notion of place.</li><li>When we visit a website or load an app on our mobile devices, we don't get a feeling of actually going anywhere.</li></ul>

What you should know before stepping into the metaverse for business purposes

Technology-wise, the extended reality is the cornerstone of metaverse applications.Other technologies, such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things also provide a foundation for virtual content creation, content mapping, and life-like interactions between users.

How does metaverse work under the hood?

The metaverse could fuel the creation of new business models:<ul><li>Buying digital land</li><li>Purchasing outfits and accessories for 3D avatars</li><li>Interacting with digital humans for employee onboarding, customer service, sales, etc.</li><li>Participating in virtual social experiences.</li></ul>

Metaverse business models and opportunities

<ul><li>Selling digital products is one of the key metaverse business opportunities. To facilitate this activity, content creators and buyers need to protect virtual assets.</li><li>Blockchain solutions in general, and non-fungible tokens in particular, come into play.</li><li>A NFT is an asset (image, video, audio clip, virtual real estate, or event tickets) that has been created using digital media. These assets bear marks of uniqueness, which can be recorded in an NFT card driven by blockchain technology.</li></ul>

The Metaverse economy and NFTs explained

<ul><li>The metaverse concept does not revolve around ditching reality in favor of a unicorn-populated world. It is an opportunity to escape the real world’s boundaries and enhance certain activities we perform online.</li><li>Benefits of metaverse include a more engaging and realistic online shopping experience, futuristic digital marketing, and risk-free modeling of business processes and operations.</li></ul>

Key reasons to use metaverse for business

Governments and prominent tech vendors alike should address the following issues:<ul><li>Ensuring a single point of entry to the global metaverse created by different companies.</li><li>Enforcing a set of metaverse implementation and content creation standards to provide a seamless user experience.</li><li>Regulating metaverses to avoid online toxicity, unauthorized personal data usage, and cybercrime.</li><li>Minimizing the metaverse's environmental impact.</li></ul>

How to Get into the Metaverse and reap its benefits faster

What is the metaverse exactly? How does the metaverse work? Most importantly, what are the metaverse business opportunities? Read on to find that out!

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

The Corporate Metaverse: A Complete Guide For Business Leaders

The global youth employment crisis has implications for social stability and equality that exceed anything we have experienced in our history.1.3 billion youth are about to attempt to enter the workforce. As more entry-level jobs are automated, businesses and policymakers need to work together to ensure young people have the skills they need.

The global youth employment crisis

<ul><li>36% of CEOs said they were focused on improving productivity through technology and automation.</li><li>Nearly one-quarter of youth ages 18 to 24 stopped working during the pandemic, and many others had their hours and income slashed, likely because they were working in highly affected sectors.</li><li>Four high-impact actions governments and businesses can take to reverse the trend.</li></ul>

Jobs historically held by the young are at risk of being automated

<ul><li>Build a pipeline of workers suitably trained for the future labor market that requires both digital and relational skills.</li><li>National skills maps should include standardized definitions and methods that measure whether or not a skill has been learned.</li><li>Leverage corporate training outside of corporations.</li><li>By pairing elements from best-of-class corporate programs with a government-led national policy framework, stakeholders can jointly help establish a high-quality national skills development program that is germane to national and local populations and efficiently achieves scale.</li></ul>

Understand what skills your organization or country needs

Creating a global or national verification system enables employers to identify the most useful skills for their current employees and set up new hires for success by indicating what additional training they should consider.A national system built on a technology platform such as a distributed ledger or Blockchain will help employees track and store their skill base and provide employers with a trusted and easily verifiable assessment method.

Build a national digital skills verification trust

Insight, access, and trustThese are informational problems that can be addressed by concerted, large-scale investments in skill mapping, measurement, verification, prediction, and development enginesThe means for building out these platforms are all at hand, and much promising work has already started

Philanthropic investments and layouts help, but do not address the core problem

As more entry-level jobs are automated, businesses and policymakers need to work together to ensure young people have the skills they need.

education

Learning & Education

4 Ways to Bridge the Global Skills Gap

With help from Google's charitable arm, Google.org, a new carbon calculator was just rolled out by the Stockholm, Sweden-based Normative for small businesses to use. Normative provides carbon accounting software.The calculator is available at no cost thanks to the SME Climate Hub, which is a joint nonprofit initiative that helps small and medium-sized businesses reach their climate goals. Small businesses can identify and keep track of emissions with the calculator, a tool that will guide them in how they can take action that can reduce energy waste, increase efficiency and lower cost.

Free Carbon Calculators

Against such a monumental problem there doesn't seem much that small businesses can do, but solutions are going to have to come from everywhere. Small businesses are a large part of the economy and can play a big role in helping to achieve this goal and in the process help us shift to a prosperous low-carbon future. We've seen a wave of net-zero commitments from companies large and small, but we really need companies to translate these commitments and pledges into action

Climate Risk and Small Businesses

Slashing emissions rates will help Mother Earth, but businesses might also stumble upon some appealing incentives as they go green.


scienceandnature

Science & Nature

There's Value in Calculating Your Carbon Footprint

The best leaders all had something more than skills. They had an X-factor that set them apart from everyone else: you can spot such people at any level. This is the mindset difference. It is invisible key to success: once you have it, you have an advantage that lasts a lifetime and works for you time and again.

The Mindset Of Success

Mindset is not about changing who you are. It is about becoming the best of who you are. The right mindset lets you focus on your natural strengths. It is not a simply new set of skills. It is a new way of thinking.

The Mindset Revolution

Focus on one or two must-win battles where you will secure your legacy and create a better future for yourself.

High Aspirations 

Be brave enough to trust your team to deliver. Learn to step back and stop interfering; this is remarkably hard to do for leaders who spent their entire careers believing that success comes from delivery. At this level, success comes from getting others to deliver.

Courage

You need to be persistent and focused, but you are past the need for deep resilience. Complaining about your intense travel schedule does not count if you travel first class around the world: you are showing off.

Resilience

You are now a role model, and you are under constant observation. Act the way you would want to be remembered, because people will remember you more for how you are and less for what you achieve.

Positive

Define your role, knowing that less is more. What is it that you, and only you, can do? Everything else has to be delegated. As with courage, learn to let go.

Accountable 

Very experienced leaders now report to you. They will resent being micro-managed. Instead, you have to forge a relationship which is about partnership, coaching and consulting.

Collaborative

Your role has changed again, but there is no one to tell you what your role is or how to perform it. The rules of survival and success have not changed, because there are no rules, you have to make the rules yourself. Your challange is to make the right rules.

Growth

Stay focused on your goal and do what it takes to get there. In practice, leaders below you will have to do most of the dirty work.

Ruthless

Short notes from the summary of the book that reflect the content of the subject well and explains what Jo Owen believes the mindset of success is. 

Will help you unlock your true potential and accelerate your career by acquiring the seven key mindsets that lead to leadership success.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

This book is not about changing who you are, but becoming the best version of yourself. The Mindset of Success provides a clearly structured set of tools to change the way you think, act and perform, pushing you beyond good management to great leadership. After 14 years of researching leaders around the world, Jo Owen has found that the best and most successful leaders have something more powerful than just skill. They act differently because they think differently. This book will help you unlock your true potential, showing you how to acquire the seven key mindsets that lead to success, whilst making the most of your existing talent and focusing on your natural strengths. This is the second edition of the bestselling The Mindset of Success and it has been updated with new cutting-edge research, targeted business advice and guidance on how your mindset must change as you move through your career. From spies to sports, education to entrepreneurship, business to beyond, Jo Owen's original research and interviews will show you how outstanding leaders think and behave differently from the merely good. This is the mindset difference and, once you have it, you have an advantage which lasts for a lifetime and will work for you time and time again. Using this unique book to develop your right mindset will enable you to open up new career possibilities and achieve far more than you could have imagined.

Jo Owen

The Mindset of Success

In the early days of modern content marketing (2008/2009), the content approach to marketing found fertile soil. The old content marketing was found in loyalty magazines, employee engagement magazines, and content on how to use innovative products, such as Jell-O's recipe book. In the early 2000s, content marketing became a continued strategic business function. The trigger was the expansion of Web 1.0 technology - web search.

Content marketing history

Early concepts of the metaverse date back to the early 2000s. The marketing hype around virtual currencies goes back to 1999 with Beenz and Flooz. <ul><li>Beenz positioned itself as "the web's currency". The site paid people in Beenz for viewing ads or signing up for a service.</li><li>Flooz, a virtual currency startup, used its internet currency as a loyalty program to internet merchants.</li></ul> Web 3.0 concepts in the early 2020s are like content marketing concepts in the early 2000s. These concepts aren't new, but they may transform into solid business strategies.

Web 3.0 isn’t new - it's just time

Web 3.0 technologies will impact the way consumers experience, consume, transact, and behave. But it is very early days. Web 3.0's first iterations are about how people gain and share content, join virtual communities and create customer experiences. In marketing, we may see the introduction of immersive participation and intelligent peer-to-peer transactions with a shift in allowing consumers to control their personal data. This means content-driven marketing experiences might evolve to where consumers control the connection. Retaining the relationship would require delivering great value.

Web 3.0 opportunities for content marketers

Blockchain technology enables these new decentralized capabilities for new customer experiences and supports direct peer-to-peer transactions without a centralized service provider. Decentralized content, marketing, and advertising will change the digital relationship between customers and businesses. This is called tokenized customer experience or tokenized CX.

How blockchain fits into content marketing

Marketers may soon be able to issue "tokens" (or smart contracts) powered by blockchain technology to enable more automated, secure, and trusted customer experiences. These tokens can enable any transaction involving digital artefacts (including ads, downloadable assets, subscriptions, or access to communities) and empower consumers to help shape their experience. They also enable marketers to develop more creative content and marketing experiences, meaning the scope is largely a content marketing approach.

Tokenized CX is just content marketing evolved

The early days of Web 1.0 were all about FINDING pages, blog posts, and downloads of documents, meaning marketers needed to focus on publishing content.  Web 2.0 pushed marketers to create responsive (and contextual) approaches so that customers could EXPERIENCE something better. But along the way, the focus shifted from creating findable content to finding intent signals that marketers used. As data becomes more precious, things will change again. If it continues to develop as expected, the promise of marketing in Web3.0 is to help customers CREATE something better.

Tomorrow’s content marketing and Web 3.0

Web3 and content marketing as a business strategy.

What you need to know about the impact of Web 3.0 concepts like NFTs, blockchain, and metaverse on the future of content marketing – Content Marketing Institute

crypto

Cryptocurrency

How Content Marketing Fits Into Web 3.0 (You Might Be Surprised)

<ul><li>Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work— going from 1 to n.</li><li>Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things— going from 0 to 1.</li></ul>Vertical progress is more challenging. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet, but it has greater potential rewards. Peter believes that only those who can think outside the box established conventions can understand and change the future.

Horizontal Vs Vertical Progress

“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”

<ul><li>Being the architect of your own future involves attempting to create the best future for you.</li><li>Peter describes future success as being a product of focus, dedication, and determination. You have to forget about the ideas of fate and luck. Those who are consistently successful create their luck through their actions.</li></ul>

How You Can Be The Architect of Your Own Future

Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. <ul><li>It is better to risk boldness than triviality</li><li>An imperfect plan is better than no plan</li><li>Competitive markets destroy profits</li><li>Sales matter just as much as products</li></ul>

On “Lean Startup” Dogmas

The importance of moving away from the idea of healthy competition is that competition means there will be no capital left for you. The rest of the capital ‘pie’ will be eaten by your competitors. Therefore, Peter emphasizes the importance of building a monopoly.

Competition Is For Losers

<ul><li>Proprietary technology (10 times better than any existing solution),</li><li>Network effect (start with a hyper-niche market. If you think its too big it is),</li><li>The economy of scale (SaaS vs employee labor-intensive), </li><li>Excellent Branding (Apple Branding to stay continual trend).</li></ul>

What Defines A Monopoly?

<ul><li>We overrated the power of chance and underrated the importance of planning.</li><li>If you want an effective board, keep it small.</li><li>Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism.</li><li>The equation for the value of a business today is the value of earnings in the future.</li></ul>

Importance Of Planning

Rule 1 : Only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.Rule 2 : Because rule one is so restrictive, there can’t be any other rules.

Follow The Money

<ul><li>Imagery: Using branded clothing and other items/events help show others in your company that you belong in the same tribe and shows commitment.</li><li>Slogans: Slogans, catch-phrases, and idioms are great tools to build strong relations among members of the team.</li><li>Advocacy: This is essentially advocating and broadcasting the main problem you aim to focus on tackling (usually mission), in addition to philanthropic-like activities.</li><li>Obsession: Find like-minded people — simple. Use active employees to recruit other like-minded people who are equally obsessed with solving the same problem as you.</li></ul>

To Construct An Effective Company Culture

1. The Engineering Question: Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?2. The Timing Question: Is now the right time to start your particular business?3. The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market?4. The People Question: Do you have the right team?5. The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?6. The Durability Question: Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?7. The Secret Question: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

7 Questions That Every Business Must Answer

”All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”— Peter Thiel

"EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS HAPPENS ONLY ONCE. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I've learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. Ask not, what would Mark do? Ask: WHAT VALUABLE COMPANY IS NOBODY BUILDING? "--

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Zero to One: How to Build the Future

Find 100+ Business Facts, Ideas & Insights - Curated from inspiring sources like Books, Podcasts & Articles - Genuine Insights from like-minded Users like You!