Marketing With Spice

100-page-long marketing plans packed with detailed forecasts and spurious assumptions just don't make sense in the world of startups having to churn out minimum valuable products (MVPs) and build a customer base under immense time pressure. 

After all, the main tenet behind this forum is that marketing and growing a young business is about trying, tasting, adjusting, and trying again. The market is your kitchen; your ideas are your ingredients; your products are your dishes. While preparing your marketing plan, we have found that these 7tips are just the right spices to use!

So, listen closely, engage, measure, address, fix, delight, remain patient, and repeat again until you get it right.

The Science of the Future?

It’s that archetypal scene from “The Graduate”. But instead of “plastics,” the hot field is “data science.” And the career advice would seem to be well founded. A Harvard Business Review article of 2012 dubbed the field, “The Sexiest Profession Alive.”

According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, there will be almost half a million data science jobs in five years and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data. Institutions of higher learning have responded. In 2013, a handful of universities began offering data science courses, some leading to degrees in the field.

Read more on here.

18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently

Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process.

Carolyn Gregoire explains how here.

The Technology Haiku

Technology develops

from the primitive

via the complex

to the simple

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

On The Share Economy

AirBnB on the "share economy" on Charlie Rose:

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running A Business

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running A Business (in the US)

Read James Altucher's concentrate here.

We are not sure about #22 or #57 (at least in the medium turn) but the rest will save you a lot of time pondering on the essential decisions entrepreneurs face while starting a business.

Oldies But Not Goodies

We are surrounded by incredible digital experiences. Masterful design, branding and marketing. Yet, it would be fair to say we are also drowning in awful digital experiences – or, at the very minimum, experiences that seem to be stuck in 1991.

Read more on Occam's Razor.

Apple déjà vu?

Some unsolicited advice for Apple:

1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game. Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely, to compete more directly with Microsoft without the liability of manufacturing boxes.

2. License the Apple name/technology to appliance manufacturers and build GUIs for every possible device - from washing machines to telephones to WebTV. Have them all use the same communications protocol. Result: you monopolize the market for smart devices/homes.

3. Start pampering independent software vendors. Your future depends on strong, user-friendly software. ISVs are losing confidence and crossing over to the Dark Side to take advantage of Wintel's market share. Remember what happened to OS/2 - not enough applications, updates too late, scarce industry support. And all the marketing dollars IBM threw at it couldn't help.

Relevant? Timely?

(From 101 Ways to Save Apple - By James Daly, Wired June 1997)

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The Usage Life-Cycle

Internet designer Joshua Porter put forth the usage life-cycle (ULC) as a model to track the usage evolution of a web application. According to Porter, as time passes, “social web” users go through a cycle consisting of five stages: unaware, interested, first-time use, regular use, and passionate use.

In the SNS context, the most relevant and difficult transition is from first-time use (sign-up) to regular (repeated) use, whereby, if users are not motivated by new content or new features, they will not reach the repeated usage stage and, as a result, will use the service less as time passes. The SNS usage distribution through the various ULC stages over time approximates that of a normal distribution. Hence, the ULC establishes a relationship between usage and time.

Usage Perpetuity?

However, in contrast to the PLC and diffusion models, no academic study has verified Porter’s model. Besides, at least one if its assumptions can be easily challenged: could passionate use be the terminal stage of usage? We don’t think so since using an SNS is actually like using any other product or service: decline will eventually settle in as is does with other high-tech products in due time.