Category Archives: Learning

Learning, Mobile

The Internet trends report by Mary Meeker – some key insights

I enjoy Mary Meeker’s annual trends  reports, which summarize key mobile and Internet stats and puts them in context to tell a compelling story. Below is a link to the report, which makes for a great iPad reading late in the day.

KPCB Internet Trends 2012http://www.scribd.com/embeds/95259089/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list

Some key takeaways for me.

1. Even though India is ranked #2 in the Internet users added in 2012 metric, (most of whom are thanks to the mobile phone) it “feels” like a comparison of apples to oranges. Most Indian users with mobile Internet access dont use it is my gut feeling.

2. 3G is dramatically changing the landscape. 1.1B subscribers is more than critical mass.

3. Smartphones are at little less than 1B. Again an amazing stat, but considering the number of feature phones is at 5 B, there’s a lot of room for growth. Most interesting is that this might happen in the next 5 years. Imagine every person (or most everyone) having a phone that has a camera, GPS and Internet. It has the potential to *change* the news media industry dramatically. The #1 thing people do (besides email and call) on the phone is get news and information (weather, stock, sports, news) and #2 is play games – this is by # of minutes spent.

4. Mobile traffic is 10% of all Internet traffic. For some websites its close to 30% of their visits. Mobile first seems like a very smart strategy for consumer apps / sites.

5. Mobile monetization is driven (71%) by app purchases, and very little <30% by ads.

6. India Internet traffic from mobile is reaching the same number as desktop Internet traffic (April 2012). Not surprisingly CPM’s are lower on mobile than notebooks.

7. Newspaper ad revenues was surpassed by Internet in 2012 and the trend is heading towards digital at a very fast clip.

Absolutely awesome read on the before and after pictures.

Entrepreneurship, Learning, Tips

What makes a product “fit” a market? Or how to achieve product-market fit?

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A relatively young term in an entrepreneur’s vocabulary is “product-market fit” (PMF). Attributed to Marc Andreessen in 2009, this term, has a relatively simple meaning but one that’s hard to really get a sense of:

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

If you go after an awesome market – growing fast, has excellent demand and a great growth curve, then you’ve got 90% product-market fit, even though technically 50% of the challenge in any startup is coming up with a good product.

Lets assume you are going after a great market.

How do you know its a great market? Besides the fact that its large (obvious) the speed of adoption is tremendous.

What then makes a product “fit” a market?

First there are 3 important assumptions I make:

1. The best team does not necessarily create the best product.

2. The best product does not necessarily win in the market.

3. It is rare for startups or entrepreneurs to create markets.

A product “fits” a market when

1. Your metrics for adoption of your product exceed adoption of all your “competitors” combined (Instagram had more downloads in 1 week than other competitors did in 6 months)

2. There are so many missing features in your product but its still being sought after (HotorNot had no other features except an upvote and downvote)

3. The problem you solve for the user is such a big one that they are willing to forgive the lack of “nice to have” capabilities (during its early days, Twitter kept crashing daily)

The first point (metric) answers the question – What should I measure to know when I have achieved PMF?

The second point (features) answers – How can I tell?

The third point is the most important. To know about problems that are painful and large there’s one thing you need to learn:

Learn how to ask the right questions.

—–

Relevant links that I would highly recommend you read:

1. Jeff Bussgang on why early in the product cycle entrepreneurs should be hunch and not data driven.

2. Andrew Chen on “When” has a product-market fit been achieved?

3. Ash Maurya on the 3 stages of a startup and why problem-solution fit comes before product-market fit

4. Patrick’s perspectives on steps to product-market fit.

P.S. Thanks to my good friend Dorai who asked me to write about this.

Learning

Learn how to learn

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Christopher Lochhead was the CMO at Mercury Interactive during its renaissance. He’s the best speaker I have ever worked with. Period. He taught me more about marketing and speaking than anyone else I have ever known, read or worked with (yes, that includes Seth Godin). He had many one-liners that he would illustrate with examples that would drive home the point with humor. Being with him in a meeting (just one-one) would be like being in a surround-sound experience at a PVR.

There’s one thing that he said that I want to highlight. It was about experience and learning.

“50% of what you know, will be useless & invalid in 6 months”.

The point he was making was about experience & learning.

This plays in my mind daily. In every way possible. From the mundane to the arcane.

Examples (from the useless to the useful):

1. I thought I figured out the best way to get from home to work via a bunch of shortcuts and learned the right bus to catch at the right time, and change buses at the right stops. Bangalore traffic police though, have other intentions. Every road that was a one way is now a one way in the other direction. So much for “optimal way to get from point A to point B”.

2. Facebook advertising was simple until a few months ago when they introduced precise targeting. Now there are over 200 providers offering 2-3 day courses on facebook advertising and marketing.

I can give a lot more examples, but take anything you know and expect that you will not need to know it in a very short period. Since it will evolve, change and morph or more likely go away. Begs the question – why should I even learn it? And the answer is “it will teach you to learn”.

I believe there are 2 “kinds of learning” – that which is from first principles which gives you a lens or framework to learn anything new and that which is temporal in nature.

The temporal most likely is the one that pays the bills. Knowing a new language, like Ruby or Clojure will likely fall into this category. Learning how to learn a new language, though, falls into the former category.

What I have figured out is “I does not matter how much I know”.

I am constantly humbled daily by having no clue about something that I think I should know.

On the flip side, the only thing my experience has taught me is that if I learn with the intention to share / teach, its a lot more fun.