My most recent encounter with Guy Kawasaki was at the Elevate festival at Toronto last September where he was the closing Key note. My first was in 2009 at the CES at Las Vegas and what you always come back after meeting or seeing him is the level of energy he brings to what ever he does and his fundamental enthusiasm to share.
Userpilot recently released an infographic “The 2020 State of SaaS Product Onboarding”. They looked at 1000 SaaS products and covered a lot of ground. Here are some telling stats (that you could benchmark your SaaS against)
Sometimes it is the only plausible way to make it. Everyone knows the Slack story – Slack is the outcome of a Pivot the team headed by Stewart Butterfield made while trying to develop a successful video game titled ‘Glitch’.
Not really, according to Midas Nouwens and Michael Veale both contributing authors to the recently released study by researchers at MIT, UCL and Aarhus University – “Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence,” and quoted in TechCrunch.
In this very inspiring interview with Vlad Magdalin of Webflow where he talks about his story from a two member (with his brother) team, maxing out their credit card at the brink of bankruptcy to a multimillion dollar company with 150+ employees (WebFlow) he talks about taking principled decisions and that journey being squarely inspired by Bret Victor and his lecture ‘Inventing on Principle.’
In a well argued article in The New Yorker Nathan Heller questions the very core of VC claims. With reference to the book“VC: An American History” by Harvard Business School professor Tom Nicolas (I wrote about this and Fred Wilson’s article on this – post #196 – Whales. Not Unicorns) where the narrative starts with Whaling and its funding in the early 19th century.
Sales 3.0 – one of the most respected conferences on Sales, Produced by Selling Power – just released “The Future of Sales: How Technology os Impacting Sales Performance” report. Here are the highlights –
Like him or hate him, Gary Vaynerchuk is a force of nature. I have never seen anyone push the idea of hard work so much. He has been consistent over the years and it is quite amazing to see how he walks the talk. I came across this 4 minute video that I watch now and then, specially when things are not necessarily moving at a pace I want.
Did you ever wonder why TRUST by the consumers contribute 25% of Apple’s Market Cap – which is like $205B? Tomasz Tunguz wrote on what trust means in business – “Brands are so valuable because they are the encapsulation of years long efforts to engender trust. …. Trust accelerates sales cycles, creates long term defensibility, and increases the value of a business overall. It’s the core purpose of marketing.”
So one issue around privacy is that bad actors get access to your data through commercial or spurious routes. Manipulation through coercive commerce is real. And all the data gatherers are guilty of it.
