Archive for the 'Blog' Category



Your product/service has a job, that job fits in with a habit or workflow

I’ve been absorbed in product literature of recent, one thing that stuck out to me was this Drucker quote:

“The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells him. One reason for this is, of course, that nobody pays for a ‘product.’ What is paid for is satisfaction.” Companies think they are selling products and services, but in reality people hire those products and services to get jobs done in their lives. via FastCodeDesign

Products and services slot into these jobs, if you can:

1) Capture people naturally as they complete the wider jobs you assist with

2) Acknowledge & inform the steps before/after

3) Ensure successful & seamless completion of that job.

You become an essential tool.

This is something early on, we realised at Y&S, in those days people didn’t know what digital marketing was/is/how it could help. So we built a strategy around capturing the person who would be researching, to figure out how to solve their digital problem and make them look good. That then got us in front of more businesses… and in turn more business.

With Nudge, we’re optimising towards this a lot, how can we make our role in the campaign seamless. How can we tick the three boxes above. Lots to do.

 

November 11th, 2014

Acorns – saving your spare change

If you’re like me, you like to do as much electronic transactions as possible, it means carrying less cash and also being able to study your behaviour.

Living in the US that’s not as easy as it was in NZ, the banking system is very outdated, for example when I pay my rent I log into TD Bank, hit bill pay, they then print a cheque and send it to my landlord. Nuts!

That aside, I’ve been playing with Acorns, which is a little app that pulls in your transaction data and rounds up each transaction to the nearest dollar, then once it hits $5 it will scoop that up and put it in savings.

 

Now it is automatically invested, in a fund of your choice. I’ve been doing it for around 6 weeks give or take and saved about $66. Not the most amazing amount but it is an automatic behaviour which happens in the background. It’s like scooping up a small amount here and there which isn’t noticed and then over a year will add up.

Very cool.

 

IMG_0158

My current strategy is to build that up, then at regular intervals I’ll scoop the money out and put into my other long term investments. As whilst it’s nice you earn interest on it the options aren’t that great.

Nonetheless a great little app and a way to build more automated savings into your life.

 

November 6th, 2014

You play the hand you get and other lessons from Warren Buffett

In a joint Q&A with Bill Gates at Washington University in the 90s – Warren shared some of his great wisdom to the students. Here are my top takeaways:

1) Developing great habits
He says  “the chains of habit are too light to be felt till they’re too heavy to be broken”. Re-iterating that it’s vitally important to develop productive habits when you’re young, as when you’re old they’re much harder to change.

2) Focus on moving forward

You should “never look back, don’t worry about anything”, you can’t change that, focus on where you’re going. Don’t be wed to the past – it’s already the past.

3) Play the hand you get

“You play the hand you get, play it as well as you can and be thankful enough”.

4) Turning horsepower into output

He talks about converting all your horsepower into output, that is spending your time meaningfully, on the things you’re good at, Bill Gates chimes in about how he gets Ballmer to look at his calendar and critique as to whether he’s doing that.

..

I’ve included the full interview below.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPh0_zEykU

 

November 4th, 2014

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