the goose

I have been steadily working my way through the Building a Business podcast from the Oxford University.  All the topics covered are pretty standard but there are a lot of insights available from the top people in their field.  The podcast on negotiation, given by Owen Derbishire,  has some real nuggets.  I’m going to try and summarize them here.  You can listen to the whole lecture here.

No deal is sometimes a good deal

Ever go shopping for the day and come back with absolutely nothing?  It is kind of a bummer.  All that effort and nothing to show for it.  We are naturally biased towards doing a deal.  Its worth remembering that when in any negotiating.  I have a natural tendency to do some deal rather than walk away – even if that deal might be bad.  You can see this in the Dragon’s Den, every episode where entrepreneurs give away large chunks of their business.  This tendency isn’t limited to small timers either.  The infamous 3g auctions of the early 00’s left supposedly smart phone companies over-paying massively for licenses which never made a return.  In short, don’t be afraid to walk away. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have been using  the 085 agtweet number for the last while you have been experiencing a less than stellar experience.  In fact, it has been down since Friday and I’m having real problems getting it back on its feet.

Now, I should say, that it really shouldn’t take this long and I will admit to not giving it 100% attention as some day job issues are pretty pressing right now.  I guess I took on some responsibility when I launched the service and right now I don’t feel like I’m living up to that responsibility.  In part I am relying on the kindness of friends to keep agtweet running and I don’t want to abuse that by pestering them all the time for help.  I’ve been getting a lot of questions about when the 085 number will be back … to which I’ll say I’m not totally sure right now.

For the moment, accept my apologies and bear with me.

thanks

James

I was listening to the excellent Pegram Harrison talking about Building a Business in a podcast series released by the Oxford University.  Pegram was going over how to evaluate ideas.  All very good stuff.  One throw away comment did prick my interest though …

“Unless you have the cure for cancer, there probably isn’t the need for your product you thought there was”

“I know how to cure cancer”, I thought, “maybe I should do something about that”.

Now, I am perhaps being a little dramatic for effect, but there is an opportunity for someone to literally prolong and enhance the lives of millions of people.  Lets run through some stats and see if you can guess how.

• One fifth of patients don’t fill out their prescriptions
• 125,000 American’s die annually by virtue of not taking their pills properly
• 60% of patients cannot identify their own drugs
• 1 in 4 people in nursing homes are there because they can’t figure out their own meds

Read the rest of this entry »

It turns out we might have to give up the house we are currently staying at in Mendoza, Argentina.  This prompted a spurt of epic googling on the part of my dear fiancé – which eventually resulted in her creating this presentation of our options.

Did I mention that I really love this chick?

Last year I set up an A/B test on our ebook subscription page on Piehole.ie.  We are a pretty low traffic site but I didn’t let that stop me drawing conclusions early on.  My thought was that hard as nails sales copy was outperforming a very much more understated (and a little scrappy) subscription page.

It looks like I jumped to conclusions though.  Checking back again this morning after some time I noticed that actually, the simple copy out-performs the snazzy buy now copy.  This goes against conventional wisdom.

Of course google did tell me that the early results had a weak level of confidence but I was too impatient to wait for confirmation.  It is just by luck that I forgot to stop the experiment early on.

@jdrumgoole did a great job of detailing the goings on at the #igap marketing conference in Dubiln.  It is at times like this I wash I was back there myself.  I’m posting Joe’s tweets here for posterity.

If we can just get 1% of our visitors to convert  …

Never have more dangerous words been written in a business plan.  It sounds plausible only because humans are mind-boggelingly bad at understanding percentages.  Even if you were a complete wingnut in school you probably still managed to get 10% in the honours math exam.  A 5% discount is nothing.  A doctor telling you that you have a 1% chance of not waking up after an op is hardly worth losing any sleep over.

However, I don’t see a lot of discussion on the chances of a 0% conversion rate in your business. Read the rest of this entry »

Agtweet has been going through the wars recently.  A combination of simple mistakes, expiring credit, tripping over cables, twitter connectivity issues and getting snowed in in the Wicklow mountains, all conspired to patchy service.  In my experience, these things come along like buses, in clumps of 3 or 4.  We’ve had about 7 months of pretty continuous service but over the last few months there have been problems.

All of which results in posts like …

and … Read the rest of this entry »

Fortune 500 listing excerpt

According to Wikipedia, Raytheon makes …

• 3.2 Air Traffic Control Systems
• 3.3 Radars and sensors
• 3.4 Satellite sensors
• 3.5 Communications
• 3.6 Radioactive materials detection system
• 3.7 Semiconductors
• 3.8 Missile defense systems
• 3.9 Missiles
• 3.10 Hi-tech simulators
• 3.11 Training Services and Learning Outsourcing

Coca-Cola makes bottled sugary water. Read the rest of this entry »

Right, so O2 have started offering Twitter from your mobile phone over SMS.

Now who do I know that does that?  Oh yeah – me.  So is this good news or bad news?   Well, the good news is that it means more people are using Twitter although I’m still detecting a slow down in the number of Irish Twitter sign ups.   Read the rest of this entry »