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Getting customers: rules that will not help you

August 18, 2008 | Author: Vinh

Yup.
That’s business. Marketing is all about selling.
If you don’t sell, you don’t have a business.

So, you will hear: “Think about the customers!”

First rule that will never help you:
Just focus on the first customer.
Once you did that, think about the next one.
Restart the process.

or sometimes:

Think about making $10. Scale that.

Second rule:
Think about your added value. Sell solutions and not a product.

Third rule:
Don’t cold call, use warm calls, use recommendations.

Fourth rule:

Listen to your customers.

After some research on the internet, I found little practical advice about getting the customers. Lots of them were Pi in the sky.
Bla bla bla, customer comes first. Customer is ROI.
Ok once you said that, it looks like you said everything.

It is different in real life.
The customer is a spoilt kid. The customer lives in a world of abundance of service and all the crowd revolves around him for a grasp of attention.
F*** that.

Don’t beg the customer. You are the provider. He’d be lucky to have your service.
That’s why you should be confident.

Say that you’re just here to help. Don’t brag too much as well :)

Once the perceived value of your service has increased, because you have so many customers, then you can have a conversation. Not a pitch.

It’s not how you sell. It’s how you discuss. How you find overlaps in your needs.
Because, if you think you have a good product, you can build a trustful relationship.

If your product is cr*p, bundle it with something that’s really worthwhile.

Cheers, amigos

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7 sin marketing for facebook apps

August 15, 2008 | Author: Vinh

It seems that making facebook applications is easier than I expected.
Following that simple tutorial from Gath Adams, my app was up and running within a few hours.
All you need is a server and some spare time. (guess what’s more valuable?)

Within minutes I was making a simple facebook quizz.
Ok, it was not a killer app, and it lacks the main facebook specificities:
communication.

If you don’t ensure you enable a new user-to-users experience, then you’ve missed the whole point.

Everything is about enabling people to interact.
What’s the point of a quizz? It’s a occasion to help the user brag about something that’s specific to him.
“See how smart I am”
“See what a fun life I have”
“See how many friends I have”

It’s the whole social world.
It’s a world where developers and marketers should team together to help people interact more.

Leverage that communication can be done with the original sins:
- Lust
- Gluttony
- Greed
- Sloth
- Wrath
- Envy
- Pride

Use those!
Those are the specific guidelines for developing facebookk applications.
By allowing a user to completely experience *choose the specific sin*, make sure the app will create *other specific sin* for other users when they will see their mini feeds.
(e.g Your friends is so cool, 1000 chicks dig him.-> creates pride for user ->envy for the others).

There you go. You’ll find more guidelines in the bible.

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That’s business as usual…

August 11, 2008 | Author: Vinh

Sometimes, you have very intense work relationship with people…
I remember I have worked with people with whom the project result was less than conclusive.
Several times, the discussion was very tense and we thought we’d never come to an arrangement. Because it seemed that noone was willing to make an effort.
The collaboration failed… but the project lived on.

Guess what, we met again.
No hard feelings. Looking back, we admitted our stubbornness.
We agreed on what went wrong and what should have been done.
That’s always easy afterwards.

What’s the right dose of personal relationship?
-Personal relationship creates trust. Better communication. More effective collaboration.
-Getting too personal blinds the mind. Should I tell my “friend” that his idea “sucks”? I mean we’re going to Ibiza together, let’s not spoil the week-end.

British people seem to be able to get drunk with their colleagues and remain professional during work hours, as if nothing happened.

French people don’t. We don’t party with the boss.
After all, that’s the boss.

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Get the girl!

August 4, 2008 | Author: Vinh

Usually, when you look at your spam, close to 70% of the content is sexually explicit.
-Enlarge your penis
-Discounted viagra
-Go see Amy stripping in front of her webcam

The rest is mostly, how to make money online, or why Amid Gronanga in Nigeria put you on his testament, so that you can inherit $100 000 (just need $200 for filing the demand).

But back to pornography, (I have numbers for 2005 and 2006 in US)
Worlwide numbers.

needless to say, the most queried keywords are “porn”, “sex” and “xxx”.

12% of websites are porn websites
Worlwide pornography is at least a 97 billion dollar market.

So, blabla, the market is big.

What about those who try to find sex in real life?

Well, you have match.com and meetic.fr. (or more commonly adultfriendfinder).
And some people make money explaining how they manage to score with those matchmaking websites.
Very sad statistics show that Asian people got half the response rate black and hispanic do, who also get half the response white caucasian do. (Well, at least, I consider it sad).

So what then?
There was a whole money making market exploiting the despair of men trying to find ways to get to the girl!
-Learn how to talk to her!
-Learn how to seduce her!
-Learn how to pleasure her!
I wish half the promises were true, but canasovas would grow everywhere and make the market ultra competitive.

Does it work?
Well I think everything can be learnt.

Is it ethical?
If anyone cares about that question, raise your hand.

Where’s the spontaneity?
Spontaneity is something you can work on.

Is it all there was to say?
No. I’ll try to say more about that in a future post.

22 Ways Get The Woman
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When I developed a feeling towards numbers

July 30, 2008 | Author: Vinh

I remember when I was in prep school.

Life was a game. Maths was a game.
Collect the exercises. Gotta catch them all.
We spent a lot of time with friends, sharing exercises…

Some people didn’t do that. They were thinking about the stakes.
They were thinking about their future. What they would be doing later on.
What the results would entail. The name of the school would be on your resume for ever.

It would tell you what kind of people you’d be.
Whether you’s be well paid or not.
Whether you had a chance to meet the right people at the right moment.

Life is a game. Enjoy it. Find the little things that you enjoy.
Maker it everyday. Trade math exercises like pokemon cards, or girls met in a bar.

I sometimes remember walking on the edge of a sidewalk…
If I can walk like this for 20 meters, I’ll treat myself to a McDonald’s.
If I do a little more, I’ll take a McFlurry.

C’est fou comme le temps passe vite quand on s’amuse!

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We spend our lives in front of screens.

July 28, 2008 | Author: Vinh

I wake up, I watch my e-mails.
Then I check my phone for sms, or voicemails.
At work, I just stand in front of my rectangle of internet.
I stream movies at home.

My computer could not boot 2 days ago.
I felt like I lost my eyesight.

I think we should stop using screens.
I would like a plug I could directly connect to my brain.

As I was in a swimming pool, with the blazing sun, during a barbecue, I realized.
I realized that I was just an animal.

I felt really good just sitting there in the water.
My hands floating freely.

Business planning. Market. Competition. Porter diagram. Agile programming.
Paying the bills.

Everything vanished in a wink, rubbed away by the water.
There was nothing left but my body.

What’s going to happen later? Is everything just a dream? A fart in a Jacuzzi?
Is my tie stuck in the grinder?

I don’t know. I don’t care.
Just feels like monday again. I hate monday.

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When brothers have to share the cake

July 23, 2008 | Author: Vinh

Here to share a recipe.

That’s just a basic trick we used with my brother.
I thought it was universal, but most people seem not to use it.

Ok imagine, you’re 13 years old, and your brother is 10.

You have the last slice of pizza.

You look at your brother. He looks at you.
No one will give up.

We’re both ready to fight.

But you can’t darn eat no pizza with no teeths.

So we go to the sensible solution: share.
-A good compromise leaves everybody mad – Calvin and Hobbes

So who is going to have the biggest of the two new slices?

Going to the point.
-One of us splits the remaining slice.
-The other chooses.

We often chose that way, because it made sense to us.
We had a very fair share, and sometimes, the deal would be tricky.
-Imagine you like olives, the smallest portion will be the one with olive… (life is hard)

So that’s our (my brother and me) solution to achieve world peace.

Send us our Nobel Prize via this blog.

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The take-off of the Beluga…

July 22, 2008 | Author: Vinh

In Toulouse, you can’t help seeing aircraft in the sky all the time.

Connoisseurs might recognize the Beluga in the sky. It is a modified A300 which has a better Max Take-off weight, and helps carry the A380 parts. Airbus had to use Boeing Supper Guppy, until they decided it sucked using Boeing’s plane.

So was born the Beluga. Only 5 in the world and you can read their serial number on their tail plane.

which comes from…

They do the same at Eurocopter, naming their helicopters like animals. Much less striking.

As I see that mythical animal slowly moving in the sky like a magical brick.
Why it flies, I know not.

But something comes to mind…

Twitter.

Twitter the fail whale, the big fat service that once again is not available.
But can work with the commitment of the fans. Drawn by Yiying Lu,that picture has gained tremendous traction.

I feel that flying whales, like the Beluga, hit our imagination hard.

Something that wasn’t supposed to be possible, made real by a community.

A fail whale saved by fans.
An aircraft, that is eerily flying with the commitments of engineers.

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It is 5 in the morning.

July 18, 2008 | Author: Vinh

As the quietness around is slightly heavy, I try to get some sleep.
I can not find it.

I walk around a bit. Morning fresh air and a bitter coffee wakes me up little by little.

I look at Linkedin. LinkedIn is sleeping. I can not access. It is being upgraded.
I look at facebook. Nothing new for the past three hours.
I try to watch TV. I end up putting M6 channel as a background noise.

It is funny that everyone just stops living during those times.
Yes, we are sleeping.
As if time had stopped.
As if the world was on pause.

Then I think about how much time I could gain by NOT sleeping.

Imagine one third of your life. In your bed. Not necessarily with someone else.

I wish sleeping was an option.

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La grenouille a faim.

July 16, 2008 | Author: Vinh

La grenouille sauta sur le bord de la fenêtre.
Un vent frais soufflait. Petite brise du matin.
Elle écarquilla les yeux, et vit passer un embouteillage de petits nuages.

Elle sauta sur le sol, et se servit un petit café. Sans sucre.
Pas de femme, pas de problèmes, se dit-elle en baillant, toute langue pendue.

Elle traversa la petite trappe de la porte, et sentit le contact rugueux du ciment sous ses pattes.

Sa tortue l’attendait. Celle-ci regardait le vide avec un air détaché, et ne semblait pas avoir remarqué son arrivée.

La grenouille sauta sur sa carapace.
“Comme d’habitude, Alfred”.
“Oui monsieur”, répondit machinalement la tortue, en se dirigeant vers la circulation.

C’était un lundi matin. Et il faisait frais.

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