Doug's Blog Archives – Page 22 of 58

31 Oct 2011

Who Are You (and Your Business)?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:43:19-06:00October 31st, 2011|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Mindset and Motivation|

Today I was reading a post about "Being Right at Someone Else's Expense" by Bob Burg (recommended blogger).

I decided to comment on his post. Rather than take my normally more serious approach (in business anyways), I decided to post a fun comment where I started out in a negative over the top tone and then switched tone midway through. In fact, one commenter (Amy Wells) replied "Doug, LOL. I was gonna offer you a Jack Ass to carry all that rightness of yours…" which shows how over the top my intro was. See the post and the comments in detail for yourself. […]

27 Oct 2011

Build Something You Know… Or?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:43:26-06:00October 27th, 2011|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Software Development|

Good business advice is to build products and services around things you already know well. Then you can focus on one hard thing at a time; building a great product.

But not all innovators do so with something they already knew. In fact sometimes innovators are successful precisely because they brought fresh insight into an area where the experts already knew everything there was to know.

You can build a product that relies on expertise that you have to learn as you go. This is a lot harder, but possible.

The trick is to truly commit to becoming an expert in the new area; […]

25 Oct 2011

Product Value – Long and Short Term

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:43:32-06:00October 25th, 2011|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Marketing, Sales|

If you are building a product (or service) that is intended to help companies and people over the longer-term you have a dilemma on how to get them to long-term.

People have short-term attention spans and may not have the staying power to see things through if they don't start seeing benefits over the short-term. If they abandon your product before they see the value, you have a problem.

You might try to lock them into a longer term contract. The problem is that while you have the money, they still might stop using your product or at least have lost interest. If […]

24 Oct 2011

Start Your Engine of Growth

By Doug Wagner|2017-05-31T12:26:32-06:00October 24th, 2011|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Manifast, Working on the Business|Tags: Brand Strategy, business advice, business growth, business strategy, business success, Engine of Growth, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Eric Ries, Lean Startup, Manifast, Marketing Strategy, SaaS, Software, Startup, Sticky Engine of Growth, Working on the Business|

We are in the midst of launching our new Manifast product. In fact we are committing to launching our MVP in November 2011. This has gotten me to thinking about marketing, sales and most importantly our revenue model. Do we have our engine of growth defined?

In “The Lean Startup” Eric Ries talks about three engines of growth for startups:

The Sticky Engine of Growth (customer retention (churn) is key)
The Viral […]

18 Oct 2011

Getting Past Fear – Launching our MVP in November

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-04T14:53:29-06:00October 18th, 2011|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Software Development|

Ok, I admit it. I was caught in a trap… actually a few; partly of my own making.

After reading “Lean Startup” (see review) and rethinking what I’ve learned from Seth Godin over the years the message is loud and clear. Build and ship, measure and learn, adapt and ship. This needs to happen sooner than later.

The fear comes from putting a product out there that is conceptually good on paper, but not yet feature complete nor as perfect as I would like. After all you only get one shot at a first impression, right?

But after reading Lean Startup […]

17 Oct 2011

Lean Startup 2 – Growing and Staying Lean

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-04T14:55:04-06:00October 17th, 2011|Categories: Books and Courses, Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

I’ve finished reading “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries that I discussed on my last post.

Part 3 of the book talks about:

Batch – Continuing to work in small batches. Avoid the large batch “death spiral” and other lessons applied from Lean manufacturing.
Grow – The three primary engines of growth and the importance to pick one and focus on it until success (and eventual market saturation) or you prove it won’t work (pivot). Essentially the reason is that the expertise is vastly different for each and it is hard enough to measure and grow one at a time.

[…]

5 Oct 2011

The Lean Startup – Measure, Learn and Adapt

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:44:01-06:00October 5th, 2011|Categories: Books and Courses, Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

I am about two thirds of the way finished reading "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries. I was already coming to some of the same conclusions as part of my thinking and reading on entrepreneurship; his book helped me solidify things and fleshed in more of the details of implementation.

Essentially, starting a business (especially a high tech one) is a crapshoot. You come up with a brilliant idea. Then you make a business plan or strategy that incorporates some large (leaps of faith) and small assumptions about your product, your customers, the market uptake, revenue and profits. When you are […]

28 Sep 2011

Customer Testimonials

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:44:09-06:00September 28th, 2011|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

I was recently asked to write a testimonial by the owner of a dance studio. I think people like to know what others think of a business or service and I am really happy with the studio so here is what I wrote.

"I have been taking Canadian Step Dancing classes at Dance Through Life since it opened and prior to that with Paula at another location. I didn’t have any prior dance experience when I started so it was a bit of a shocker to get those feet moving correctly. From personal experience I know not everyone is born with coordination […]

27 Sep 2011

Only 24 Hours in a Day? Really?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:44:15-06:00September 27th, 2011|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Mindset and Motivation|

Are there really only 24 hours in a day?

I am an eternal optimist when comes to thinking I can do anything; as much as I want. My brain tries come up with ways to get more time in a day. Maybe I can sleep a little less. Maybe if I work harder I can get everything done. Yet there is a price to pay. A trade-off for every choice you make. And there is always something more.

Still, there are only 24 hours in a day.

Work. Relationships. Health. Recreation. Hobbies. Self-improvement. You need to be balanced or you will eventually pay the toll […]

8 Sep 2011

Fueling the Myth

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-04T14:57:06-06:00September 8th, 2011|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development, Technology|

Computers are still harder to use than they should be.

I overheard a conversation between two young university students the other day:

Person 1: “I don’t know why people bother using Macs, they cost a lot more.”

Person 2: “They are easier to use and they don’t get viruses because they are more secure.”

My Recent Experiences (Part 1)

I recently shot and edited a dance video (see my last post for the link). I ran into to some issues that would have derailed a non-technical person.

The HD camcorders we were using had memory cards. Rather than use the USB […]

Doug’s Blog

My Recent Experiences (Part 1)