How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)

Let’s take skin creams as an example. Here’s what you need to know:

- the biographies of everyone in the business
- what’s in all the popular skin creams. How does each chemical work, smell, etc.
- what’s the importance of smell in skin creams
- what are the popular brands out there? How do they work?
- who are the celebrities doing marketing in the businenss?
- what are the popular mechanisms for selling skin creams (multi-level marketing, party planning, informercials, direct marketing, informercials, internet advertising)
- what are the top 10 websites for skin creams and what are the common features among all of them (usually: celebrity sponsorship, a starter kit, testimonials, before-and-after shots, beautiful photos of the packaging, plus an FAQ on how to look beautiful)
- where can you make the creams for cheap
- what’s necessary for your starter kit (morning, afternoon, night stuff – and every item should run out in a month)
I say all of this knowing nothing about skin creams. This is just where I would start should I want to go into that business. For any business you’re in, or for any career (writing, painting, the arts, social gaming, comedy, television, investment banking) you need to know EVERYTHING.

Does your product dramatically reduce costs in an industry with large incumbents and fat margins?
Can you provide a narrowly focused product to a niche of that market who will be attracted to dramatically lower costs?
As your business grows can you find ways to continually lower your costs by whatever means?
I would also think about how you use scale to your advantage to keep margins low.

Are you offering a product where the supply costs will continue to drop precipitously? (think Amazon’s Storage costs)
Are there alternative ways to monetize your product where incumbent are not? (think virtual goods of Zynga, ad supported models, freemium models)
Are there ways to offer super low margins on your product knowing that you will overlay other product offers to the same customers later that will improve your margins?

These are the only things you need to do to be successful:

* Do things
* Tell people.

Poker is a skill game pretending to be a chance game.

– read as many books as you can written by players better than you
– study hands and the analysis of those hands
– study and think about your mistakes. Don’t regret your mistakes. You’ll always make mistakes. The better you are, the less mistakes you make. The only way to get better is to thoroughly analyze your mistakes. So the more mistakes you have, the more opportunities you have to get better. Of course, this applies to everything you do in life.
– talk to people smarter than you. Try to learn from them anything you can.

People ask me why I bother to hire chefs like Nate Appleman or Kyle Connaughton when we never change our menu. We may never change our menu, but we are always changing our food.

Joswiak: Try to be the best, or don’t enter the market

Before you write content for MailChimp, it’s important to think about our readers. Though our voice doesn’t change, our tone adapts to our users’ feelings. This interactive guide will show you how that works.

“Sprezzatura” is an Italian word that means “to hide conscious effort and appear to accomplish difficult actions with casual nonchalance.”

business models at startup is about acid-testing (as he choose to call it) your core business assumptions.

“Get me to page 1 of Google, while emailing our customers a bi-weekly newsletter, engaging influencers on Twitter, maintaining a captive Facebook audience, capturing new leads, and putting out 3 blog posts a week.” Harsh? Yes. Familiar? Definitely.

You should not jump to do a survey if you have not formed  a few hypotheses that you want objectively tested.

Roshambo basic theory

Guidelines and Suggestions for crushing.

Strategy is immutable; it is a Big Picture look at a problem that focuses upon the entire forest and not individual trees.

Tactics vary with circumstances and, especially, technology.

Jason Baptiste on business strategy. Great strategy level overview.

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, "I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you'd punched through the card, you couldn't make any more investments at all."

- Give yourself credit- This is the thing I do the least of and I'm trying to work on it. What may seem simple+not that revolutionary to anyone ahead of the curve can usually be pure wizardry to the general public, whom is often your customer. Give yourself more credit.