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Aunt Mary’s Haikus

When the death knell of newspapers was but an echo in the valleys of the Internet along comes Apple. Apple doing the Apple thing by at once re-inventing a market and resurrecting its potential. The print world – itself in shambles – was the first Apple courtier. As an independent publisher, we’re still waiting for [...]

“Harder to scale”

I opened up the LA Times this morning and turned to my favorite Sunday section: books. Having little time to indulge in the art of the written word, instead I like to read about what other people are reading. Today, I happened up on an Essay by Dani Shapiro where she extolls the virtues of [...]

1,000 Books Sold

We realized going into this that the gain was not profit. We thought we’d learn something and that, to us, was something we couldn’t quite put a value on. Nevertheless, we didn’t go into it without wanting to make money. We just didn’t know where to set our expectations. After all, publishing a book first [...]

Core Market, Core Values

Core Market

There comes a time in the life cycle of a failing product where the progenitors, in spite of their best intentions to develop a strong set of features the customer wants, find themselves scratching their heads asking the million-dollar question: “Why won’t you come?”

“Look at all these features. Now, why won’t you use them?”

There’s [...]

The Startup Pyramid

Like the food pyramid, only richer.

Achieve “market fit” product status before worrying about the rest. Which is to say, prove that there is a market for what you offer by getting a small but dedicated audience willing to pay to use it.

The most compelling KPI for market fit products is essentially customer satisfaction: the number [...]

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