💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week
#1 💡
It’s an easy trap to start making excuses when sales velocity is slow. It’s almost always a symptom of a fundamental issue, not an unchangeable feature of the system.
The one things missing from the growth model described here is prompts. In Brian Fogg’s model: B = MAP, where B = Behavior, M = Motivation, A = Ability, and P = Prompts. In a growth context, Ability = 1/Friction, and encodes how easy it is for a person to do something.
For Motivation, we can use Hormozi’s formula: Dream Outcome x Perceived Likelihood of Achievement/Time Delay x Effort & Sacrifice.
However, the key thing is that you still need prompts to actually trigger a behavior. Optimizing an offer and reducing friction will not result in sales unless you actually also make people aware of your product.
Here’s an interesting related observation:
#2 💡
For some reason, this opinion turned out to be quite controversial.
There are of course exceptions to every rule and building a brand can be powerful.
However at the end of the day, every business has limited resources. Investing them in “brand” before PMF is hardly ever the best use of money. The most extreme example is founders spending money on having a fancy logo designed before closing their first customer.
#3 💡
#4 💡
This seems like a huge opportunity.
Software buying decisions are worth millions of dollars. But finding unbiased information on what software to choose is incredibly hard. No one wants to sift through pages of reviews that most likely are fake anyway.
A single trusted voice would be a lot more helpful.
#5 💡
I know little about e-commerce but found this interesting as just a few years ago lots of gurus were running around and claiming just how easy building an e-commerce business is.
#6 💡
There are a few things to learn from the failed launch of the $200M AI wearable Humane launch .
They tried too much at once and as a result the product isn’t able to do anything reasonably well.
Also instead of leaning into their products unique strength, they simply tried to copy as many features of a regular phone as possible.
End Note
As always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.
And whenever you're ready, here are ways I can help:
If your B2B business has an established sales process and you are now looking to systematize and scale your outbound efforts, my agency Sales.co might be able to help.
Book a 1:1 Consulting Call with me where we'll do a deep dive to help you with whatever issues your business may be facing. (Topics we can talk about include: running + scaling an agency, sales, cold email, AI, automating the boring stuff, generating + validating business ideas, newsletter growth, web scraping). Also available in asynchronous format here.
Have a great week,
Jakob