#48/111: Seizing the White Space

What is it about?

What have Amazon, Hilti and Hindustan Unilever in common? Each company revolutionized its business model. Mark W. Johnson studied these and more companies and found a process for business model innovation.

What can I learn?

What’s the job-to-be-done? Don’t ask your customer what he wants your product/service to be. Find out what tasks he have to do. This allows you to use your expertise to build a better solution. This will be your starting point.

How can you satisfy it? Now it’s time to build a company around your product. What are your key resources, your key processes and how can you make money out of it?

Let’s take the first business model of Amazon for example. The job-to-be-done was offering a wide range of books. You can only make profit, if enough books will be sold. Also the warehouse costs have to be reduced. Furthermore, people want to read their books as soon as possible.

To ensure that you are going to sell enough books, you have to build a platform. So the key resources and processes are the technology for warehousing, IT infrastructure for the website (channel) and a partner for shipping.

Change is hard: Often there’s a discrepancy between your company and your new business model. If possible, take the easy way and build a new company. It will save your lots of time, discussions and compromises.

Conclusion

I really like Seizing the White Space. It is more practical than Business Model Generation which focuses more on building a meta solution. There are lots of interesting case studies with uncommon companies. Furthermore, I like Johnson’s approach of Customer Development, i.e. searching a solution for the job-to-be-done and then building the rest of the company around it. Great recommendation for everyone who wants to start a company and solve a job-to-be-done.

#46/111: Startup

What is it about?

If you want to start a business, you need an idea and a business model and money. Elizabeth Edwards focuses about the latter. She shows you how to cut your personal expenses, how to calculate your financial numbers and why venture capital isn’t always the best option.

What can I learn?

Is your business profitable? Before starting your business, you should check if your business model can generate enough profit. How high is your initial investment and how much does it cost you monthly to operate your business? The next step is to calculate your profit on this basis. How long does it take you to break even, i.e. you aren’t losing money anymore? You should reject your idea if it will take longer than two years.

Capital can be expensive: Before you are going to look for venture capitalists, you should think about your need of outside capital. If you can do it alone, go for it. If you can’t do it without outside money, she recommends you to thoughtfully calculate your costs. Don’t forget to include your opportunity costs for searching investors.

Know your metrics: A business runs on numbers. You should monitor your industry key metrics (e.g. page impressions for social sites) and of cause your ordinary indicators like sales, costs and profit. Even if you aren’t a numbers person, learn how to read your key numbers.

Conclusion

This book is an accumulation of tips but lacks the explanation of why you should do they. This is a bit of a downer. The good parts of Startup were clearly the financial and legal knowledge. If you start your business in the US this information is possible pretty valuable. Lastly, besides of the financial and legal advice most advice is out of other books like Made to Stick or Business Model Generation. I would recommend reading those, if you want to deepen your knowledge.

#35/111: Start Small, Stay Small

What is it about?

You want an independent lifestyle? If you are creative, you should consider being a micropreneur. Rob Walling defines a micropreneur as a one person company which sells products (software, ebooks, designs) online with a minimum of effort.

Key points?

Go niche: Why? You don’t have so much competition, i.e. your advertising budget is smaller (ads are cheaper, your customers are on the same place) and you can increase your profit margin. Furthermore, your product don’t have to be extraordinary.

Marketing first, product last: Founders often make the mistake to build a product for 9 months to three years and then try to market it. Go the other way around. If you found some possible niches, build a small squeeze page where people can subscribe to a mailing list for further information and market the page with Adwords. After some weeks you can see how many people are interested in your product. If there aren’t enough, go to your next idea.

Outsource: Your time is expensive. Instead of trying to do everything, do just the things that matter, i.e. marketing and building your product. For other things consider using a virtual personal assistant which costs around $6 to $15 per hour.

Automate: If you tested enough marketing tools and done enough SEO, you won’t have to do so much. Try to automate most of the other stuff, i.e. use auto responder for new prospects or build a list with answers for most problems, so you can trim down your support time. After some time, you will have a steady income stream with a little effort.

Conclusion

Terrific book, even for bootstrappers who want to grow. It shows you how to test your ideas and how to do most of the online marketing. It’s extremely actionable and hands-on. No platitudes and fillings. Recommendation for writers, software developers and designers who want to start their own business!

#12/111: Inbound Marketing

What is it about?

Do you want to boost your customer base? Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shan show you how. Inbound Marketing focuses on building relationships and delivering remarkable content to your customers instead of interrupting them with TV or radio ads. Furthermore there are several steps for each chapter which shows you how to execute these ideas.

Key points?

Track your progress: Whether you test a new layout or a new form of online activity, track your progress. Test what works and what doesn’t and act on this!

Remarkable content: It is important that you create content which is valuable to others. It should be so valuable that your readers decide to share your content with their peers.

Conclusion

What I really like about this book is that it gives you actionable advice. This point was missed by The new Rules of Marketing & PR. Additionally, there is one really cool list with about 20 points on how to promote your startup on social media or tips on how to name your blog/company.

In conclusion, Inbound Marketing gives you a great view about a lot of important topics in social media (marketing) and provides a solid base to work on.