Money in a business is like gas in your car. You need to pay attention so you don’t end up on the side of the road. But your trip is not a tour of gas stations.
No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else other than you.
But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that they’ve never experienced such attention themselves. Their standards for customer service have been set by the companies they’ve been customers of, which are mostly big ones. Tim Cook doesn’t send you a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. He can’t. But you can. That’s one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can.
For SMEs, while it might be “cost effective” to hire foreigners for junior roles, the senior roles are often reserved for locals, where possible. The nuances of cultural understanding, the ability to connect with local suppliers and clients alike, as well as the connections we have built over time (that secondary school friend who’s now a potential business partner, that army buddy who would make a great colleague) are all reason why, all else being equal, hiring locals in senior roles is usually the more appealing choice for SME owners.
Kopitiam founder once shared a very good business strategy: dominate the drink and dessert stall, while renting out the food stalls.
Companies employ the strategy to increase efficiency. By receiving goods only as they need them for the production process, it reduces inventory costs and wastage, and increases productivity and profit. The downside is that it requires producers to forecast demand accurately as the benefits can be nullified by minor delays in the supply chain. It may also impact negatively on workers due to added stress and inflexible conditions. A successful operation depends on a company having regular outputs, high-quality processes, and reliable suppliers.
More recently, the loosely coupled, self-organizing network of businesses who cooperate to provide product and service offerings has been called the extended enterprise, and the use of the term “chain” and the linear structure it appears to represent have been criticized as “harder to relate to the way supply networks really operate. A chain is actually a complex and dynamic supply and demand network.”
Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing.
What YC looks for, above all, are founders who understand some group of users and can make what they want.
If you want to raise money, the best thing you can do is get yourself to the point where you don’t need to.
Let me just cut through it, if you believe that your stock is undervalued, you should buy your stock. I thought that was just the simplest way to look at it.
Netflix, with its then near-endless source of cash and no need to please distributors or theaters, could afford to produce more varied content to try and secure people’s subscriptions every month. And it could further rationalize the heavy spending because it was trying to better understand audiences through meticulous analysis of viewer data that its competitors just didn’t have access to.
Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself.
The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.