I haven’t been involved in customer development throughout most of my career. That only changed in recent years, so I have to learn quite a bit on that front. So, the list of “10 Things I’ve Learned About Customer Development” resonated with me quite well. The best part of it is that not only it highlights the issues, but also provides a direction towards solution.
Tag: business
What People Really Think During a Board of Directors of Meeting
“What People Really Think During a Board of Directors of Meeting” is one of the funniest and most accurate things I’ve read on the subject of business meetings in a very long time. Enjoy!
Seven Reasons IT Projects Fail
While reading through “Seven Reasons IT Projects Fail“, I came across an interesting statistic (source):
By categorizing documented causes of IT project failure, a majority—54 percent—are attributed to project management. Surprisingly to some, technical challenges are the least-cited factor at 3 percent.
For me, this is just a confirmation of the gut feeling I had for years. It doesn’t really matter which technology stack you are using for your project. The reasons for success or failure are usually somewhere else.
The article lists the following seven reasons for IT projects failure:
- Poor Project Planning and Direction
- Insufficient Communication
- Ineffective Management
- Failure to Align With Constituents and Stakeholders
- Ineffective Involvement of Executive Management
- Lack of Soft Skills or the Ability to Adapt
- Poor or Missing Methodology and Tools
The AWS spend of a SaaS side-business
As someone who went through a whole pile of trying and error with Amazon AWS, I strongly recommend reading anything you can on the subject before you start moving your business to the cloud (not even necessarily Amazon, but any vendor), and while you have it running there. “The AWS spend of a SaaS side-business” is a good one in that category.
Things I wish someone had told me before I started angel investing
Things I wish someone had told me before I started angel investing blog post shares some insight into what it takes to be an angel investor, and how much failure one will probably go through before getting any kind of success. Like with everything, it takes time, money, and effort to learn the intricacies.
Actually, the needle-in-the-haystack is not quite the right metaphor. There is a small cadre of people who actually have what it takes to successfully build an NBT, and experienced investors are pretty good at recognizing them. Because of this, they don’t have trouble raising money. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons people get into angel investing is because they think it’s more fun to be the beggee than the beggor. But the cool kids don’t beg. The cool kids — the ones who really know what they’re doing and have the best chances of succeeding — decide who they allow to invest in their companies. And they want investors who have been around the block, who know what they are doing, who have a thick rolodex of potentially useful contacts, and most importantly, deep enough pockets to do follow-on investments, and thick enough hides not to complain if things go south.
If you want to make money on angel investing, you really have to treat it as a full time job, not because it makes you more likely to pick the winners, but because it makes it more likely that the winners will pick you.
Also, don’t forget that there are also more investing options out there, one of them being etf investing, which is a very profitable option!
If you’re not ready for that, you will be much better off financially buying index funds.