Engines of growth

New customers come from the actions of past customers.

• Word of mouth
• Side effect of product usage, e.g. seeing your bag/car/clothes on the street or online. (Seeing the business you're shopping with is using PayPal to accept payments - my example)
• Funding advertising
• Repeat purchase

Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, p208

Exponential growth & anchoring

"Give an enormous sheet of newspaper which folded over on itself 100 times let's imagine that's possible how thick would would the eventual wad of paper be? The thickness of a brick? A shoe box? As Sam Harris points out, to prove a similar points about intuition in his excellent book The End of Faith, the correct answer is that the resulting object would be as thick as the known universe. Again. we anchor ourselves to the initial smaller measurements."

Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, p257

Personal growth is an endlessly iterative process

"Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don't go from being 'wrong' to 'right'. Rather we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly less wrong than that and then to even less wrong than that and so on. We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without ever actually reach truth or perfection."

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson, p117

Innovative conference and meeting formats

Useful list:

www.pcmaconvene.org/features/cmp-series/innovative-forum-formats/

Market Readiness Level

Source: https://www.cloudwatchhub.eu/exploitation/readiness-market-more-completing-software-development

Opportunity Canvas

Good list of questions on this:

Source: https://www.jpattonassociates.com/opportunity-canvas/

Planet Money & Pagan Kennedy

Episode of Planet Money about Accidental Innovation:
https://pca.st/7Od3

Features book and research by Pagan Kennedy accidental innovation. Research from her that 50 percent of patents were from things that happened by accident.

How could corporate respond to threats from start-ups?

Corporates can respond to threats from start-ups by:

• Invest
• Invent (start internal project in that area)
• Acquire
• Partner
• Incubate

- Evangelos Simoudis on A16Z podcast

Also mentioned by his collaborator Steve Blank: 

https://steveblank.com/2015/12/17/how-to-set-up-a-corporate-innovation-outpost/

Prototyping for Rent the Runway

"We never did research in an academic sense. We did real world research. Which was that we went to Bloomingdale's , bought about 100 dresses, all in our own sizes so that if this experiment didn't work out we would have an awesome new wardrobe. We spent a lot of our savings on this. We hosted a pop-up at Harvard undergrad. And we invited different groups of Harvard undergrads to the pop-up. And the idea behind this was to learn (a) will women rent dresses; (b) what do they rent, how much will they pay, what brands do they want, and most importantly if they do rent what happens to these garments after they rent. Do they get destroyed? Can you send them through the mail? How do you dry-clean these items. And so on and so forth."

"Our first pop-up was in April 2009".

"I got the sense that it would work because I saw the emotional effect. So in this pop-up I saw girls stripping down, trying on these amazing dresses, and feeling beautiful. And you saw their facial expressions change. And they threw their shoulders back, and tossled their hair. And they walked with a new sense of confidence. And you know I really thought this could be a business that isn't just about offering her a rational or smart choice, but it can also be a business that is delivering something emotional to her. Making her feel beautiful every single day."

- co-founder Jenn Hyman, Rent the Runway

Source: How I Built This podcast, http://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=541686055:541701331

Prototyping Buzzfeed

Jonah Perretti used the Nike ID sweatshop viral email and Black People Love Us as experiments into what goes viral. This would go on to form the basis of Buzzfeed.

Source: How I Built This podcast, http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this