Write short
Writing wordy marketing materials is easy. The problem, though, you will hardly find readers for these. It is a real challenge to put all this comprehensive information in a short, appealing message.
Business blog (English)
Let’s get right to the business.
Higher
With a startup, you always want to get to the point when you can sell the company. Ironically enough, when you are reaching this point, there is no way you will sell it until you are at that next point five times higher than the current. Same passion alpinists have. Always higher.
Lesson learned
Each screw up can be presented as a “we learned the valuable lesson” thing. What is the actual difference between former and latter? The ability to capitalize on the lesson learned.
Short Friday
We evaluated the usefulness of “Short Friday” practice from the previous year and decided to replace “Short Friday” practice with “Short Saturday” one.
Piracy in UA
Here is how I would do it. I would split the process into three stages. Pay attention that even Stage 1 is much better than present status quo.
Stage 1. Three years.
Value and marketing
What is marketing’s primary responsibility? Marketing creates the product awareness and explains how the product helps us increase the quality of our lives. What value the product provides and why we will be better off using this product.
Business case
There is a gifts’ Internet store I have been working with for more than five years. Over the course of these years, I spent something like $10k with them. This Eve I ordered $300 worth goods. They never called me back until I had to call them in 3 days. They did not manage to bring the stuff (next day delivery) in a week. When they finally did, the order was incomplete. It missed about 25% of positions. I was late to send presents to my loved ones. They lost me as a client most certainly. Let us analyze the business case now. Several topics are worth discussing.
CEO
Here I put together the list of product IT Company’s CEO’s responsibilities. Based on the stage and particular circumstances, some tasks eventually becoming the duty of various VPs. I did not list sales and marketing functions below. It would be too much. As if it is not too much anyway.
Small company problem
When you are bigger than startup but still a small company, when you are trying to grow organically, when you have a very tight budget and attempting to operate with profitability; in these and few other circumstances, you may find yourself dealing with a “small company problem.”
Opportunities
I was ordering sushi delivery this evening. While talking to the manager, I felt like ordering sake on top. So I asked what sake options they had. They didn’t have any. That was a very valid answer. They just didn’t have sake in the menu.