Spinning Guyro

When I'm Sixty Four

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending Paul McCartney's concert in Tel-Aviv. Sure, the tickets were a rip-off, but worth every penny. The 66 year old Beatle had more energy on stage than most kids today have on the school playground. Which brings me back to my pondering... where will I be "when I'm sixty-four" (or sixty-six, whatever)?

If you've ever been at a large organization, you'll have heard the saying that people get stuck one level higher than the one they were best at. The theory is simple - whenever you're good at your job you get a promotion. When, at some point, you reach a job you suck at, the promotion stops and that's where you end up.

The moral of the story is this - wherever you are, find what you're really, really good at and keep doing it. If you're a great performer, then why not keep doing it until you're sixty-four? If you're God's gift to development, you don't HAVE to become a manager, a product manager or an entrepreneur - keep developing! If you're the best salesman in the world then by all means keep selling. Unless of course, you want a change. Do take on new challenges and change, but also know when you have reached your limit. Remember to leverage your own relative advantage and never, ever try to be someone else.

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

I stumbled upon (literally) HubSpot's Mac vs. PC ad take-off, comparing inbound vs. outbound marketing:

 

So do people still even answer cold calls from random people? Well, here's the truth - cold calls aren't as dead as we like to think they are.

There is no match to actually talking to your customers! Here's what happens - your team sits down in your comfortable offices and comes up with an inbound marketing campaign that YOU think is going to take the world by storm. Your customers, however, are outside. Who says they care about what you're saying?

Don't get me wrong, inbound marketing scales up better and (for most products) you'll place your long-term emphasis there. My point is this: your inbound marketing campaigns will be so much better after you've actually spoken to some customers first.

Introducing Startup Critics

Things really got nasty this weekend when French entrepreneur and blogger Loic Le Meur responded to blogging guru Robert Scoble's recent (negative) comments on 70 startups. Here are the highlights:

Scoble: "I just visited every one of these companies. Boy do they almost all suck"
Le Meur: "You have never launched a startup yourself, you think you know them because you cover them all day long but taking the risk yourself is a very different story."

This exchange got me to realize that we entrepreneurs are no different from chefs or movie directors. We've got the same critics on our backs. They will criticize us, we will get insulted, we will hit back with the easy-for-you-to-say argument. I say let's learn from those professions who have been criticized for hundreds of years - learn to embrace the criticism, take the positive and ignore the negative. (Is that really what they do? Maybe we'll just go on hating them...)

As Mark Twain once said - “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all”.