In bad times, lower the risk for your customers

Just like everyone else, I am spending cycles thinking of the economy. Unlike many others, I don’t think the crisis is one size fits all and winners will emerge alongside the losers.

There is a lot of advice for entrepreneurs and much talk in the VC community but the talk is all focused on lowering costs and not on ways to impact the revenue side, which is as important to survive this downturn. Customers will not stop spending. It never happened and it will never happen. Customers will be simply looking to lower their risk at times like this. Who wants to invest 10M in a new ERP system, when things are uncertain?

Machine gun approach to the economical crisis

There is plenty of good advice out there for start-ups and small and medium businesses (SMBs) and most of it is: slow down, save cash, go back to basics, put on hold expansion plans, be careful- it is dangerous out there. By now, everyone read the Sequoia Capital’s 56 Slide Presentation Of Doom or read the variety of e-mails sent to start-up CEOs by their investors. Today on my way to lunch I caught a glimpse of Todd McCracken, president of the National Small Business Association, talking on NPR and advising small businesses to put growth plans on hold. It is all good advice, but I have an issue with the way it is delivered. 

One year

It has been a year since I started blogging. It is not much of an event (even I missed it in 4 days…) but it made me look back on the blog statistics. I posted 55 posts, about once a week- much more than I expected. The posts that got most of the attentions were ones that came up in popular searches. For first time visitors, here are the top posts: