Reading Time: 3 minJust over a decade ago, Paul Graham coined the phrase “schlep blindness”. It essentially means that we often become blind to tedious, unpleasant tasks and simply put up with them. Paul shared this example from Stripe, the credit card processing company: The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe’s idea. […]
Business
Find more problems
Reading Time: 2 minNone of us want problems to pop up, but worse is ignoring them when they do. Discovering and resolving problems and deficiencies are one of the best ways to grow your business. At GreenMellen, we have multiple meetings every week (with different groups) to unpack and resolve issues that come up. Each one leads to […]
Retargeting and Remarketing aren’t quite the same
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen it comes to marketing, I’ve long interchanged the words “Retargeting” and “Remarketing”, considering them similar enough to essentially be the same thing. They’re indeed quite similar, but different enough that it’s worth being precise. Both of them are ways to reach back out to potential leads for your product, but you go about them […]
Which one do you like?
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen presenting options for feedback, a common question is simply asking “which one do you like?”. While that might be a good question at times, it’s generally not a smart way to go. Similar to the bad suggestion of “make it darker“, asking “which one do you like?” is pointing things in the wrong direction. […]
Obsess about your competitors, or obsess about your customers?
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen I first moved to Atlanta in the late 90’s, I remember hearing a very strange tagline on radio ads for a local car dealer: “We’re number two in Atlanta, but we’re going to be number one!” Constantly. I sort of get it; they’re going to work hard to win your business, but it really […]
Your real customers are a level or two deeper
Reading Time: 2 minIn any kind of marketing it’s essential to know who your real customers are, but it’s sometimes a little trickier than it might seem. As I shared earlier this year, the people that we build websites for aren’t the ones that we’re actually building them for. When we build a site for a client, we’re […]
Wasting your efforts on marketing
Reading Time: 2 minSolid marketing can do wonderful things for your business, but it can be easy to get distracted and waste your time. Similar to my recent post “Can you speed it up?“, people can often do things in marketing that have the opposite of the intended effect. In the book “Trying Not To Try“, the author […]
Can you speed it up?
Reading Time: < 1 minMost tasks in this world could be sped up with improved processes, but in many cases that’s not what’s best. I recently wrote about un-automating parts of my note-taking in order to better understand what I have in there, and there are other areas like that to consider. For me, a big one is the […]
Sell the customer as little as possible
Reading Time: < 1 minIt sounds counter-intuitive, but some of the best companies in the world work hard to sell as little as possible to each of their customers. I first shared this a few years ago when talking about how “if you don’t say no, your yes is meaningless“, where the companies I trust most often push to […]
A solid business is built on trust
Reading Time: 2 minThe title of this post may seem a bit obvious, and I think it is, but taken from a wider view it can get a little interesting. In Patrick Lencioni’s book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“, he breaks down the typical dysfunctions in the form of a pyramid, shown here. In his pyramid, you […]