Most of the big costs have been cut out of businesses by now: Job cuts Budget cuts Perk cuts (no more free lunches, massages, group activities) Now we’re into the home stretch of little cuts (paper cuts if you will). Next time you visit a company’s office look for: Broken chairs Frayed cords and power adaptors Fruit (and good quality food) replaced with junk food and sugar (cheap)...
HubSpot announced they are acquiring Clearbit.
Makes perfect sense.
And fits in beautifully as part of the CRM puzzle I wrote about here. Ian and I also chatted about it here on our YouTube show.
Really looking forward to this being so seamless.
Here’s the part of the show where Ian and I chat about it (53:55 mark):
Great that Queensland Government has launched an app for driver’s licenses. Nice of them to say this “We worked with our counterparts in other Australian states that have digital licences, to ensure we learnt from the way they developed and released their apps. But odd to also say this: “Queensland’s Digital Licence app will set the standard for mobile driver licence apps...
Two thoughts [1] SME definition In Australia, the definition of an SME (or small-medium enterprise) is: 1-200 employees. SMEs: make up 98% of all business produce 33% of total GDP employ 4.7M people are 90% of all goods exporters are 60% of all services exporters The ABS further highlights: approx 200,000 businesses with revenue > $2M close to 100,000 of those have revenue > $5M [2] HubSpot...
Always tricky to understand valuations… we’re in a high interest rate period and yet AI startups are (selectively) breaking through and still getting crazy valuations. Recently Perplexity got a half billion valuation, even though current ARR is just $3M (note: revenue, not profit). That’s 150x It’s easy to ridicule, but then I’m reminded of DHH’s...
Saw a post on Threads lamenting how non-marketers often underestimate just how hard marketing is – in the post the activity in focus was social media management. Here’s the post: Every so often, one of my posts about the struggles social media managers face will make its way outside of marketing circles and I’ll get replies like “How is posting on social media a real job...
I used the YouTube Digest extension (thanks to Allen for the recommendation) to summarise the latest episode of HubShots on YouTube, and here’s what it prepared (I was impressed): Customer Perspective 00:00 Customers may not be aware of or interested in company events like inbound conferences. Focus on providing value to customers and helping them provide value to their own customers...
Seeing a number of small to mid-size companies rolling out ‘initiatives’ purely for show. Usually driven by people within the company feeling the need to be seen ‘doing something new’… Digital transformation projects are a good way to disguise this. As are branding projects. Why? Because the easiest way to be seen to be doing something is for it to be easy to point to eg new website, new...
A reminder to myself to continue to focus on profit growth (as opposed to revenue, headcount, toys, etc).
So many companies doing it tough this year.
Small and large.
For example, I wonder if Atlassian will ever make a profit…
A reasonably useful rule of thumb when starting new consulting projects with clients:
Understand big outcomes, solve micro problems
You must understand the overall context and expected outcomes – broad and wide ranging as they are.
But focus intensely on solving small pieces, bit by bit.