Facebook disrupted the media market forever. The Apple App Store created the app economy, valued at $6.3 trillion today. What makes platforms like these SO successful?
In this episode, you will learn the core concepts behind platform businesses, so you can identify platforms in the making or build them yourself.
This is the beginning of a mini-series on platform fundamentals at Tech for Non-Techies.
Learning notes from this episode:
Does having $2 billion in the bank account and celebrity backing guarantee success for a consumer app? Not necessarily.
Listen to how one company burned through almost $2 billion and had to shut down their app after just 6 months. Learn what Quibi did wrong, so you can avoid their mistakes.
Learning notes from this episode:
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Developers don't work in the same ways as non-technical professionals. If you don't know how to work with developers, you can waste thousands of dollars and get very frustrated, as you'll see from the story Sophia shares on this week's episode.
Learning notes from this episode:
Success in tech consists of two parts: making great products and using them to build a business. No matter how brilliant an app or algorithm is, if people do not want to pay for it, it is unlikely to live for long.
This is why all tech innovators need to learn the core skills of commercialising innovation.
Listen to this episode to learn how Salesforce, Starbucks and Xero commercialise their tech products, and so you can apply their lessons too.
The top 3 questions you need to answer to ensure your tech product has business success are:
Always focus on the benefits that the product will bring customers, not its features.
Tell Sophia what you’re working on and submit your questions to her on [email protected]
Or reach her on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter.
The terms coding and programming are ubiquitous, yet many non-technical professionals do not know what they mean in practice. Why are there different coding languages? What do developers actually do?
This is what you'll learn in this episode.
Learning notes:
Nasi Rwigema doesn't have a background in software, but that didn't stop him from building his tech platform: Umwuga, a social network for blue collar workers in South Africa. To his surprise, he found that figuring out what people want is much harder than learning about tech.
Nasi is one of Sophia's students from London Business School. He took her course three years ago, and used his knowledge, network and resilience to build his platform.
If you have an idea for a tech venture, as a founder or a corporate innovator, or you want to invest in tech businesses, but don't have a tech background, this episode is for you.
Learning notes from this episode:
”Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer — that the designers are told, 'Make it look good! ' That's not what design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” - Steve Jobs
In this episode, you''ll hear from Sarah Doody, a UX designer who has worked for the likes of Vice Media and Dow Jones. Today Sarah runs Career Strategy Lab, a school for UX designers.
Learning notes from this episode:
If you have an idea for a new product in a traditional business, you will probably have to work on an extensive plan before you do anything else.
This is not how it works in tech companies. When the likes of Airbnb and Slack bring new apps or features to market, they use the Sprint Method. It is a methodology developed by Google Ventures to bring new ideas to life and test them quickly and cheaply.
Learn how this works in this podcast.
Learning notes from this episode:
Agile is now a ubiquitous management term, but few people understand what it means in practice.
For some products, agile is THE BEST system, for others, it is THE WORST.
Listen to this week’s episode to find out what it is, how it works in practice, when to use it and when to avoid it.
You’ll hear how WhatsApp used this methodology to release its first product, and learn how to use it yourself.
Learning notes from this episode:
It’s easy to put the tech sector on a pedestal, as we’re constantly bombarded with its power and profits. But “technology is just a tool to affect business outcomes,” says prop tech entrepreneur Sebastian Rivas.
Sebastian runs Andes STR, a which uses machine learning algorithms to find property investments for short term rentals. If you want to invest in a property and rent it out on Airbnb, Andes STR will find the investment and manage the rental.
Sebastian started his career in finance, and created a smart plan to break into tech. Listen to this episode to learn how he did it.
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