By Hasan Luongo
April, 16th, 2007

I came across a very compelling post on Seth Godin’s blog last week titled: The Mechanics of Word of Mouth, where Seth describes feeling a powerful desire to tell the world about a movie he had just seen.

It was not that the movie was life challengingly remarkable, but it delivered an excellent cinematic expereince, and that left him wanting to tell his friends and readers about it. After pondering why he felt the urge to tell others about the movie he came up with the following response: “People want to talk.”

This simple statement is a fundamental truth of Referral Marketing, when people have an expereince that surpasses their expectations, they are compelled to talk about it.

It actually means a lot to them and above any desire to be rewarded, or increase their reputation, there is a strong desire to simply express their satisfaction to others.

Thanks Seth for boiling down an important marketing lesson into an easy to understand story.

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Technorati Tags: word of mouth, referrals, customer experience, seth godin

By Hasan Luongo
April, 11th, 2007

With all the work involved in building a startup company, it hardly surprising why such a small percentage of people are able to achieve success. So what can a brave entrepreneur do to increase their chance of success? Well, managing your time like a Googler is a good place to start.

The 70/20/10 Model is a business resource management model pioneered by Eric E. Schmidt, CEO, Google.

This model dictates that, to cultivate innovation, employees (founders) of a company should utilize their time in the following ratio:

• 70% of time should be dedicated to core business tasks.
• 20% of time should be dedicated to projects related to the core business.
• 10% of time should be dedicated to projects unrelated to the core business

Assuming a typical 14 hour workday (lunch and breaks not included), heres how this might look at a small startup:

• 9.8 hours developing the product; and discovering and developing the market.
• 2.8 hours managing projects and people.
• The remaining hour and forty minutes can be spent on daily habits such as blogs, news, social networks, prototyping ideas, and chatting with entrepreneurs.

In a highly unstructured and unknown environment it can be easy get derailed by unproductive time robbers. We can all benefit from the wisdom of the man who manages the co-founders of the most important internet company in the world.

Technorati Tags: google, time management, startup, eric schmidt, 70/20/10 model

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By Hasan Luongo
April, 4th, 2007

Our congressional representatives in Washington are developing an innovative piece of legislation meant to encourage entrepreneurship through tax cuts for angel investors. The new bill is called the Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs Act of 2007 (H. R. 578), and is the first bill directly targeting the Angel Investment sector.

During the past six years under the Bush administration, most of the tax cuts and credits have been for large corporation’s (R&D) and high net worth individuals (estate, capital gains, flat rates). Because Angel Investors are by nature high net worth individuals it may seem redundant to offer them more tax breaks (the rich get richer), but these individuals unlike their wealthy peers, are actively engaging in the economic development cycle by investing in very early stage small companies.
The U.S Government through the SBA has provided banks with significant incentive to make loans to small business, but SBA loans have never been a great source of capital for early stage companies because banks still require significant collateral to make the loans, this works for established businesses, not for startups.

With the shift in power following the 2006 elections, it is very encouraging to see bills coming to the House of Representatives meant to benefit, encourage, and reward seed stage investors and entrepreneurs . Both groups have a profoundly positive impact on our economy and global competitiveness as a nation.

Be sure to take a moment today to contact your Congress-man-or-woman and let them know how important it is to support this bill (H. R 578).

Technorati Tags: Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs Act, taxes, small business, angel investment, entrepreneurship