Monetizing Your Business Is The Only Way To Make Money
One of my favorite internet entrepreneurs, Gary Vaynerchuk, posted an excellent video online on how to monetize your blog. It was so great, I decided to share it with everyone here as well. While this may not be that useful for many companies building and selling products - it is for those who are at least on some level monetizing their business with advertising. In the video he calls a beer glass company unplanned and unrehearsed about a possibility of them sponsoring he's upcoming beer blog. Watch and learn.
Another aspect to look at this is, as Gary Vaynerchuk quickly mentioned, is the proportion of your time you spend with customers and with developing your product. I'm willing to argue that while time is always needed to develop your product - you need to put a relatively large amount of time aside for talking to your potential customers. In the video he mentioned that he'd put 10 times more time into cold calling his prospective advertisers compared to the effort needed to create the online video show where they'd advertise.
The problem with not talking to your clients, even about everyday things, is the fact that you may fail to live their lives in a way that you're able to see and overcome their obstacles in the form your product or service. The more you understand about them and their problems, the better a product you're able to build. And it's for reasons like these that the Customer Development mantra by Steve Blank as well as the Lean Startup thinking by Eric Ries have become so popular.
So as you go enjoy your summer days - make sure you think of better ways to talking to your customers.
That's a great reminder for all us introverts: have cojones and pick the phone to make those calls.
Even better is Gary's talk from RailsConf 2010. A lot of wisdom about community-building. (I hate that word, but "caring about people that care about the shit you do" doesn't fit in a tweet)
It's long, but I recommend everybody to watch it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWHkcCP3tA&feature=player_embedded
Quote of the day: "Giving a fuck is coming on strong"