Despite the many press releases touting Silicon Valley's diversity efforts, the majority of funding from this innovation will still go to white males in 2023.
While this reality is not what many of us want, it is an opportunity for investors and innovators to capture overlooked user markets.
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Software updates can have weird unintended consequences that the company doesn't even know about. Existing features that worked perfectly can stop working, leading to lost revenues and annoyed customers.
Listen to this episode to learn why this happens and how non-technical leaders deal with it when it does.
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"Successful entrepreneurs don't have better ideas, they have a better process," says Eric Reis in The Lean Start-Up. To learn how to innovate with speed, listen to this week's episode.
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(Diagram from The Lean Start-Up)
To become SMART MONEY as an investor, founder or corporate innovator, you have to know what questions to ask about a product. This helps you spot signs of early success or early warning.
Listen to this episode to learn what questions to ask and how to link product innovation to business strategy.
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Even the smartest professionals who don’t have backgrounds in digital businesses make the same mistakes when it comes to tech start-ups.
They often want vanity metrics, as opposed to what truly matters, and because they don’t know how a tech product gets made, they don’t know how to properly evaluate an opportunity.
In this episode you'll learn 3 core tech concepts and how they apply to early stage investing.
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There are fundamental differences between software products, that are especially important at the early stages. This is because, when a product is very new, it is still in development mode. This is why understanding product development is vital at the early stages.
For example, evaluating Airbnb as a listed company focusses on typical investment metrics: revenues, costs, growth etc. These would have been unavailable when Airbnb first launched, so investors must look for other signs.
When an app has too many features and pop ups, most users get confused and frustrated. This is feature creep: when the product’s core functionality becomes hidden in too many options and things to do.
Feature creep happens when a team is determined to stay productive, but loses sight of its strategy. Sometimes stopping is better for the product than doing more.
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On Airbnb, people stay at strangers' homes. On Twitter, people get trolled. Both are global tech platforms, but why do people treat strangers well on one, and badly on the other?
The answer lies in platform governance: the rules you make to encourage good interactions and punish the bad stuff. Learn how to set up platforms where people are nice to strangers with this week's podcast 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.
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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.
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.
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