1. Marketing & Strategy 🚀
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Who is it for?
Context: Like many entrepreneurs, when I started GoudronBlanc, I fell in love with what I believed was a brilliant product idea.
It’s really tempting to pursue an idea because we think it sounds great, it makes sense, or “wouldn’t it be so cool if...?”.
But the true questions are: “Who is it for? Who will want it? And why?"
Being really clear on the answers to these questions can help avoid lots of troubles.
Some lessons: Here's a recent article about what I learned from launching a business without an audience.
A solution: Focusing on a minimum viable audience. More about the topic in The Value Mix.
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2. High Performance Teams & Personal Growth 🐝
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Embrace your calling: Turning pro
Is it you? Have you ever felt you're not giving yourself fully to the work you want to do? Have you ever ended up checking your emails repetitively (i.e. procrastinating) instead of doing the work? Have you ever spent more time on side activities because they feel easier and less scary?
An explanation? Maybe you haven't turned pro, yet.
What does it mean? Turning pro is tautologically acting like a professional.
- It's about focusing on what matters.
- It's about leaving excuses at the door.
- It's about embracing the effort of doing the work and the discipline of doing things right.
A quote: "In his heart, the amateur knows he’s hiding. He knows he was meant for better things. He knows he has turned away from his higher nature."
The amateur hides away from the impact he aspires to make. The amateur lives in the world of complacency—where everything is easy and comfortable.
Another quote: "[Turning pro] changes our days completely. It changes what time we get up and it changes what time we go to bed. It changes what we do and what we don’t do. It changes the activities we engage in and with what attitude we engage in them. It changes what we read and what we eat. It changes the shape of our bodies."
Turning pro is about forming the right habits. A pro doesn't make excuses; a pro is resourceful. Pros find the ways to make it happen. A pro shows up and does the work—no matter what. A pro is patient, disciplined, and committed.
A book: Turning Pro is a short book that pushes you to make that difficult decision: turning pro. It's worth reading it in a quiet afternoon. It's inspiring.
Find it here.
A last quote: "I wrote [previously] that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better." — Stephen Pressfield
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3. Innovation & Sustainable Development 🌱
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The business opportunities of the 2020s
A good analysis: Benedict Evans of a16z, a VC fund, put together a really good analysis about what’s next in tech. You can watch it here.
Some takeaways:
- E-commerce is tiny. Most of the people are online. But most of the money isn't yet.
- E-commerce = $0.5 trillion in the US
- Overall consumer spending > $10 trillions in the US
- Growth? People getting access to the Internet explains the double digit growth. But... now that most people have access. Where is the growth going to come from?
- New opportunities. It’s going to get harder. The low hanging fruits are taken. The next big opportunities will require more capital and more sophisticated technology.
- Purchase experience. The way we buy things has changed and keeps changing. What’s interesting is that how we buy influences what we buy (e.g. impulse purchase).
- Retail as logistics vs. Retail as taste-maker. The mix of social media platforms and machine-learning-tailored recommendations are becoming powerful curators that influence what we want.
- E-sports boom! E-sports are getting a lot of consumer attention, but not much money has been invested in it compared to other sports. (Total revenue of e-sports could have exceeded $900 million in 2018.)
An extract: "The internet began as an open, ‘permissionless’, decentralized network, but then we got (and indeed needed) new centralised networks on top, and so we’ve spent a lot of the past decade talking about search and social. Machine learning and crypto give new and often decentralized, permissionless fundamental layers for looking at meaning, intent and preference, and for attaching value to those." — The end of the beginning
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Dell's first P&L
What happened: Michael Dell shared on Twitter the first financial statement of Dell.
An anecdote: It is the argument he used to convince his parents that it was okay for him to drop out of college.
Interesting numbers:
- Dell started with $1,000. It’s only $2,400 in today’s adjusted inflation.
- Dell achieved a 15% net margin in the first quarter.
- Since it was started in the 80s, Dell has generated over $1 trillion of revenue. Impressive.
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See you next month!
And have fun!
Guerric.
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