“
No product irrespective of how great it is can sell itself without being discovered with the power of marketing.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
Mrs. Gautier, I hear there are places online where you can sell children for a good price. Nick is still young enough, he should fetch enough to tide you over for a bit.” – Rosa
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Invincible (Chronicles of Nick, #2))
“
Marketing can neither sell a broken product nor can it mend a broken heart.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
“
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media:
1 Post content that add value
2 Spread positivity
3 Create steady stream of info
4 Make an impact
5 Be yourself
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Germany Kent
“
Make something people want and sell that, or be someone people need and sell you.
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Ryan Lilly
“
Right. So swords would be good. Where do swords come from? Like, who sells swords in the twenty-first century? It’s probably all online. Does Amazon Prime still deliver in the apocalypse?
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Keira Andrews (Kick at the Darkness)
“
Yes Please is an attempt to present an open scrapbook that includes a sense of what I am thinking and feeling right now. But mostly, let’s call this book what it really is: an obvious money grab to support my notorious online shopping addiction. I have already spent the advance on fancy washcloths from Amazon, so I need this book to really sell a lot of copies or else I am in trouble. Chop-chop, people.
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Amy Poehler (Yes Please)
“
When you are calculating an hourly labor rate, add in an additional thirty percent to that rate cover employment taxes.
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James Dillehay (How to Price Crafts and Things You Make to Sell -- Formulas and Strategies for Arriving at Profitable Craft Prices for Selling Online or Off, Wholesale or Retail)
“
Of course, we all have to make money. But money has to come second to the desire to help people.
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Rob Cubbon (How To Sell Video Courses Online: A Roadmap To How I Make an Extra $5000+ Passive Income Every Month)
“
Cyber disobedients are criminalized because they seek, or succeed, to give away that which capital seeks to own, and sell, for a profit
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Jeff Shantz (Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online Anarchy)
“
1973 Fair Information Practices:
- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used.
- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.
- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.
- Your data should be secure.
..while it's illegal to use Brad Pitt's image to sell a watch without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to your friends.
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Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You)
“
I don’t like splashing details about my life across the Internet. It’s not real, what people post. It’s a carefully cultivated highlight reel. Everyone is marketing their own personal brand whether they know it or not, and I’d rather keep my personal life to myself instead of trying to sell a fake version of it online. And opening up your life to others means people can comment on it,
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Angie Hockman (Shipped)
“
the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third.
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Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism)
“
The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives.
As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed.
In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are:
- Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person.
- Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual.
Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish:
- Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day
- Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish
Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves.
The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.
”
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Malcolm Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
“
When adding descriptions to your online listings or printed materials, lead with benefits and follow with features.
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James Dillehay (How to Price Crafts and Things You Make to Sell -- Formulas and Strategies for Arriving at Profitable Craft Prices for Selling Online or Off, Wholesale or Retail)
“
When I was bartering to gain clients, I was self-sabotaging my business. I wasn’t making money, and the promised “exchange of advertising” wasn’t helping to grow my business.
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Kim Beasley (The Creative Introverted Entrepreneur: Learn To Be SEEN So That You Can SELL Online To Your Target Customers)
“
She left with Jacob Denver. The two of them own a buy, sell, and trade store online. And Kennedy Carlyle now goes by Lana Myers.
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S.T. Abby (All the Lies (Mindf*ck, #4))
“
Check out digitalrenfaire.com for virtual performances and the Facebook group Faire Relief 2020 for vendors selling their crafts online.
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Jen DeLuca (Well Matched (Well Met, #3))
“
The world has changed, and the only true security is your ability to create value and get paid for that value. Once
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Jeff Walker (Launch (Updated & Expanded Edition): How to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams)
“
The goal with this or any kind of business is not to lead with, “How can I sell my product?” Instead, you want to ask, “How can I serve people?
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Russell Brunson (Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Converting Your Online Visitors into Lifelong Customers)
“
Facebook is popular, approachable, and a fast, easy read. This social media behemoth is all about plot.
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Frances Caballo (Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books)
“
focus on producing quality content, writing short posts (80 to 190 characters), and always including stupendous photographs that are colorful, unique, and compelling.
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Frances Caballo (Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books)
“
With the evolution of online retail, however, has come the revelation that being able to recategorize and rearrange products on the fly unlocks their real value.
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Chris Anderson (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More)
“
If you want to make your business and your marketing memorable, then your marketing needs to tell a story.
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Jeff Walker (Launch: An Internet Millionaire's Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams)
“
Your most scarce resource is focus.
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Jeff Walker (Launch: An Internet Millionaire's Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams)
“
This is how problem solvers both pitch and sell solutions to businesses every day. They find other people’s big problems and then use their creative skills to come up with a solution.
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Rob Anthony O'Rourke ($1,000,000 Web Designer Guide: A Practical Guide for Wealth and Freedom as an Online Freelancer)
“
If “piracy” means using value from someone else’s creative property without permission from that creator–as it is increasingly described today – then every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV… Extremists in this debate love to say “You wouldn’t go into Barnes & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different with online music?” The difference is, of course, that when you take a book from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold. The physics of piracy of the intangible are different from the physics of piracy of the tangible.
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Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity)
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It’s not hard to impress your clients. Give them what you promised, give them great customer support, and then give them an extra surprise or two along the way. Do those things and you will be paid back 100 times. And
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Jeff Walker (Launch: An Internet Millionaire's Secret Formula to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams)
“
Naming your packaged products helps call attention to how the deal is special. Call the product bundle a collector’s set, a gift basket, or holiday set, and give each one a name; something like The Artisan’s Selection or Your Name’s Gift Set.
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James Dillehay (How to Price Crafts and Things You Make to Sell -- Formulas and Strategies for Arriving at Profitable Craft Prices for Selling Online or Off, Wholesale or Retail)
“
If you're thinking of a social media spring clean, start with those who never comment on or like anything you post - they're just spying on you. Next, lose the ones who only contact when they have something to sell or promote - they're using you.
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Stewart Stafford
“
If you needed one million dollars and you had an idea worth one million dollars, but you did not have the opportunity to sell your idea to one person, you had better sell it for one dollar to one million people as simple as this. That is creativity.
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Mohsen Estesnaei (Why Don’t you Target the Achilles' Heel of Amazon?: a start-up idea that can boom online selling)
“
Mindset Shift Recap: #1: Sell a result, not a website. A website is only ever a tool. #2: Business owners always care most about their core business needs; not design, coding or technical aspects. #3: The market pays you for the value you create; not your time, effort, background, or education.
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Rob Anthony O'Rourke ($1,000,000 Web Designer Guide: A Practical Guide for Wealth and Freedom as an Online Freelancer)
“
When I was in the advertising business, I used to offer free seminars to advertisers about how to create better ads (the material in this chapter being the content). That was not so long ago, but since then the Internet has ballooned to major significance. If I were selling advertising today, I’d have that seminar online. Think of how this cuts down on your travel expenses. I used to fly all over creation to deliver those seminars. And appointments were harder to get. The education-based marketing concept that you learned in Chapter Four works hand in glove with the ability to do things over the Internet. Here’s the pitch I’d do today: “How would you like to learn to make your advertising literally 10 times more effective? And you can do it right from the comfort of your favorite office chair.” It’s hard to resist such an offer. There are many examples I could give you to flesh out the model of turning your Web site into a community. The examples below are simple and some are even silly, but each shows how far this concept can go and how it helps you capture more leads and build a better brand.
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Chet Holmes (The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies)
“
People used to call me an attention whore, it’s like, is that what you call authors who try to sell their book? Do you call a movie star that when they walk the red carpet? Would you ever call a man that?’ I was trying to get people to read my columns so I could pay rent on my $2,500 studio apartment. Even that word, ‘whore,’ everyone uses it so much about me. She’s an attention whore.
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Taylor Lorenz (Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet)
“
classical style, and is likely to be adapted to other musical genres in the future. Like Eureqa, Iamus has resulted in a start-up company to commercialize the technology. Melomics Media, Inc., has been set up to sell the music from an iTunes-like online store. The difference is that compositions created by Iamus are offered on a royalty-free basis, allowing purchasers to use the music in any
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Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future)
“
Mindset Shift Recap: #1: Sell a result, not a website. A website is only ever a tool. #2: Business owners always care most about their core business needs; not design, coding or technical aspects. #3: The market pays you for the value you create; not your time, effort, background, or education. #4: If you think like a business owner, you will succeed. If you think only like a web designer, you will fail.
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Rob Anthony O'Rourke ($1,000,000 Web Designer Guide: A Practical Guide for Wealth and Freedom as an Online Freelancer)
“
post real information. Perhaps you’ll mention the literati you met at Book Expo America, the latest insight you gleaned from Bob Mayer’s blog Write It Forward, the book festival where you’ll be a presenter, or a courageous new book a colleague is publishing. The news can’t always be about you, right? But your posts can and should be informative and interesting, like the first paragraph of a Wall Street Journal article.
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Frances Caballo (Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books)
“
My friend Joe Polish uses the analogy of a racehorse. If you owned a million-dollar racehorse, you would take great care in how you treated that horse. You would feed it well, make sure it was well rested, carefully monitor its workouts, give it a clean and comfortable stable, and schedule regular checkups with a vet. In your life and your business, your body is your million-dollar racehorse. Don’t you deserve the same care?
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Jeff Walker (Launch (Updated & Expanded Edition): How to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams)
“
SALES ASSESSMENT ONLINE. The world's first customized sales assessment, renamed a "successment," will judge your selling skill level in 12 critical areas of sales knowledge and give you a diagnostic report that includes fifty mini sales lessons. This amazing tool will rate your sales abilities and explain your opportunities for sales growth. This program is aptly named KnowSuccess because you can't know success until you know yourself.
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Jeffrey Gitomer (Jeffrey Gitomer's Little Gold Book of Yes! Attitude: How to find, build, and keep a YES! attitude for a lifetime of SUCCESS (Jeffrey Gitomer's Little Book Series))
“
Yeah. I’m actually a little surprised that the—what I guess is the—maybe the majority of the population, or at least the majority of younger people in the United States, who essentially live their lives online, are not completely up in arms about this, are not storming Washington about this, because what they’ve done is they’ve made it easier for online private, profit-making corporations to sell the most intimate details of your life. You’d think people would object to that.
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Allan Nairn
“
«All the Amazon guys around Seattle were also aware of the trend. They all knew that, someday, European haute couture would sell online. The problem was that feat couldn’t be done by anybody from Amazon. Because Amazon guys were hacker geeks and cheesy hicks. Amazon had been invented to sell sci-fi books. The least chic thing in the world.
The European couture biz would never go anywhere near a dorky sci-fi geek like Jeff Bezos. As for Jeff himself, Jeff would much rather conquer outer space with his private rocket than ever dress the First Lady of France.»
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Bruce Sterling (Love is Strange)
“
Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work."
A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok.
People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact.
Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety.
So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars.
And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality.
And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent.
The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.
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Peter Joseph
“
In 1994 very, very few people had heard of the internet. It was used at that time mostly by scientists and physicists. We used it a little bit at D. E. Shaw for some things but not much, and I came across the fact that the web—the World Wide Web—was growing at something like 2,300 percent a year. Anything growing that fast, even if it’s baseline usage today is tiny, is going to be big. I concluded that I should come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it and keep working to improve it. So I made a list of products I might sell online. I started ranking them, and I picked books because books are super unusual in one respect: there are more items in the book category than in any other category. There are three million different books in print around the world at any given time. The biggest bookstores had only 150,000 titles. So the founding idea of Amazon was to build a universal selection of books in print. That’s what I did: I hired a small team, and we built the software. I moved to Seattle because the largest book warehouse in the world at that time was nearby in a town called Roseberg, Oregon, and also because of the recruiting pool available from Microsoft.
”
”
Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
“
It mattered very much to this young person. I was inclined to tell him that if he was worried, it probably was a sin, or at the very least, would weigh on him as one. For God also tells us that when you perform an action you believe to be a sin, it still counts as a sin even if it is proven to be permissible. Conscience. Conscience is the ultimate measure of man."
"All right, it's a sin," moaned Alif. "I don't care. I don't play Battlecraft. It's for teenagers."
"I'm not looking for any particular answer. Don't feel you must agree. I want to know what you think."
"I'm not looking for any particular answer. Don't feel you must agree. I want to know what you think."
"I think people need a break. It's not like they're out there selling bacon and booze. They want to pretend for a few hours a day that we don't live in this awful hole getting squeezed by State on one side and pious airheads on the other, all while smiling our shit-eating grins so that the oil companies keep shoveling money into our pockets. Surely God wouldn't mind people pretending life is better, even if it involves fictional pork."
"But isn't that a dangerous precedent? Fictional pork is one thing-one cannot smell it or taste it, and thus the temptation to go out and consume real pork is low. However, if we were to talk about fictional adultery-I know there are many people who do and say all kinds of dirty things online-then it would be another matter. Those are real desires manifesting themselves on the computer screen. Who knows how many adulterous relationships begin on the Internet and end in the bedroom?"
Alif blanched.
"And even if they don't," the sheikh continued, "who's to say the spiritual damage isn't real nonetheless? When two people form a relationship online, it isn't a fiction based on real life, it's real life based on a fiction. You believe the person you cannot see or touch is perfect, because she chooses to reveal only the things that she knows will please you. Surely that is dangerous indeed."
"You could say the same thing about an arranged marriage," said Alif.
”
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G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen)
“
Anything the Tarahumara eat, you can get very easily,” Tony told me. “It’s mostly pinto beans, squash, chili peppers, wild greens, pinole, and lots of chia. And pinole isn’t as hard to get as you think.” Nativeseeds.org sells it online, along with heritage seeds in case you want to grow your own corn and whiz up some homemade pinole in a coffee grinder. Protein is no problem; according to a 1979 study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the traditional Tarahumara diet exceeds the United Nations’ recommended daily intake by more than 50 percent. As for bone-strengthening calcium, that gets worked into tortillas and pinole with the limestone the Tarahumara women use to soften the corn.
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Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
“
What we're now starting to see, as online retailers begin to capitalize on their extraordinary economic efficiences, is the shape of a massive mountain of choice emerging where before there was just a peak.... By necessity, the conomics of traditional, hit-driven retail limit choice. When you dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. This is not just a quantiative change, but a qualitative one, too. Bringing niches within reach reveals latent demand for noncommercial content. Then, as demand shifts toward the niches, the economics of provided them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries - and the culture - for decades to come.
”
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Chris Anderson (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More)
“
More Kindle eBooks by Steve Outsourcing Mastery – How to Build a Thriving Internet Business with an Army of Freelancers Email Marketing Blueprint – The Ultimate Guide to Building an Email List Asset Your First $1000 – How to Start an Online Business that Actually Makes Money How to Write a Nonfiction eBook in 21 Days – That Readers LOVE! How to Write Great Blog Posts that Engage Readers My Blog Traffic Sucks! 8 Simple Steps to Get 100,000 Blog Visitors Without Working 8 Days a Week How to Discover Best Selling Amazon Kindle Nonfiction Book Ideas Is $.99 the New Free? The Truth About Launching and Pricing Your Kindle Books Make Money Online – How I Made an Extra $1,187.66 from a 4-Minute YouTube Video Internet Lifestyle Productivity: Master Time. Increase Profits. Enjoy LIFE!
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Steve Scott (61 Ways to Sell More Nonfiction Kindle Books)
“
Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
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Cory Doctorow (Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age)
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GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.
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Grant Cardone (Be Obsessed or Be Average)
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By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It's the government, they say. Or it's Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college.
Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure.
Or maybe there's no sickness at all—that's what some have begun posting online. Isn't Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you're asleep?
Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there's no such saint as Santa Lora. It's made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don't those houses look a little too quaint?
Don't be naïve, say others—they don't need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat.
Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.
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Karen Thompson Walker (The Dreamers)
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Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.… Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone.
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Jeff Bezos (Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos)
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On the third day after all hell broke loose, I come upstairs to the apartment, finished with my shift and so looking forward to a hot shower. Well, lukewarm—but I’ll pretend it’s hot.
But when I pass Ellie’s room, I hear cursing—Linda Blair-Exorcist-head-spinning-around kind of cursing. I push open her door and spot my sister at her little desk, yelling at her laptop.
Even Bosco barks from the bed.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “I just came up but Marty’s down there on his own—he won’t last longer than ten minutes.”
“I know, I know.” She waves her hand. “I’m in a flame war with a toxic bitch on Twitter. Let me just huff and puff and burn her motherfucking house down…and then I’ll go sell some coffee.”
“What happened?” I ask sarcastically. “Did she insult your makeup video?”
Ellie sighs, long and tortured. “That’s Instagram, Liv—I seriously think you were born in the wrong century. And anyway, she didn’t insult me—she insulted you.”
Her words pour over me like the ice-bucket challenge.
“Me? I have like two followers on Twitter.”
Ellie finishes typing. “Boo-ya. Take that, skank-a-licious!” Then she turns slowly my way. “You haven’t been online lately, have you?”
This isn’t going to end well, I know it. My stomach knows it too—it whines and grumbles.
“Ah, no?”
Ellie nods and stands, gesturing to her computer. “You might want to check it out. Or not—ignorance is bliss, after all. If you do decide to take a peek, you might want to have some grain alcohol nearby.”
Then she pats my shoulder and heads downstairs, her blond ponytail swaying behind her.
I glance at the screen and my breath comes in quick, semi-panicked bursts and my blood rushes like a runaway train in my veins. I’ve never been in a fight, not in my whole life. The closest I came was sophomore year in high school, when Kimberly Willis told everyone she was going to kick the crap out of me. So I told my gym teacher, Coach Brewster—a giant lumberjack of a man—that I got my period unexpectedly and had to go home. He spent the rest of the school year avoiding eye contact with me. But it worked—by the next day, Kimberly found out Tara Hoffman was the one talking shit about her and kicked the crap out of her instead
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Emma Chase (Royally Screwed (Royally, #1))
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More recently that has begun to change. Long divided by borders and history, some of the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third. These issues are unrelated—there is no reason why you can’t be a pro-European Catholic, as so many have been in the past—and yet those who believe in them have made common cause. Dislike of same-sex marriage, African taxi drivers, or “Eurocrats” is something that even Spaniards and Italians who disagree about their respective separatist movements can share. Avoiding history and old border disputes, they can conduct joint campaigns against the secular, ethnically mixed societies they inhabit, and at the same time appeal to the people who want the raucous debate about these things to come to a halt.
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Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism)
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Disney now unofficially tolerates hundreds of small online shops run by die-hard fans selling T-shirts, buttons, pins, patches, jewelry, and thousands more items that leverage Disney characters. These stores don’t pay Disney a dime in licensing fees. Why the pivot to tolerating knockoffs? Because Disney learned that fan-made, unlicensed twenty-five-dollar T-shirts drive their wearers to Disney parks, where they buy expensive entrance tickets and pass the day spending even more money. Another reason for Disney’s newfound tolerance: it has discovered the marketing research value from the hundreds of small knockoff shops. These shops turn out to be a vibrant source of ideas for new official Disney merchandise. In 2016 the online vendor Bibbidi Bobbidi Brooke came out with a hugely popular line of rose-gold sequined Mickey ears, something that had not occurred to the Disney licensors. So Disney copied the design, which sold out immediately in its official stores. Bibbidi Bobbidi Brooke was gracious, posting “always excited to see new merch offerings.” Her fans replied, “Yours will always be the original!!!” Everyone wins.
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Michael A. Heller (Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives)
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In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s Arpanet sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1.
In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, search, and communicate.
The Web2 era has also been one of centralization. Network effects and economies of scale have led to clear winners, and those companies (many of which I mentioned above) have produced mind-boggling wealth for themselves and their shareholders by scraping users’ data and selling targeted ads against it. This has allowed services to be offered for “free,” though users initially didn’t understand the implications of that bargain. Web2 also created new ways for regular people to make money, such as through the sharing economy and the sometimes-lucrative job of being an influencer.
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Harvard Business Review (Web3: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (HBR Insights Series))
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Fast-forward nearly a hundred years, and Prufrock’s protest is enshrined in high school syllabi, where it’s dutifully memorized, then quickly forgotten, by teens increasingly skilled at shaping their own online and offline personae. These students inhabit a world in which status, income, and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation. “Social anxiety disorder”—which essentially means pathological shyness—is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology—not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease—if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance. “It’s not enough,” one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, “to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.” (Apparently it’s OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you’re excited about giving speeches.)
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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The fragility of the US economy had nearly destroyed him. It wasn't enough that Citadel's walls were as strong and impenetrable as the name implied; the economy itself needed to be just as solid.
Over the next decade, he endeavored to place Citadel at the center of the equity markets, using his company's superiority in math and technology to tie trading to information flow. Citadel Securities, the trading and market-making division of his company, which he'd founded back in 2003, grew by leaps and bounds as he took advantage of his 'algorithmic'-driven abilities to read 'ahead of the market.' Because he could predict where trades were heading faster and better than anyone else, he could outcompete larger banks for trading volume, offering better rates while still capturing immense profits on the spreads between buys and sells. In 2005, the SEC had passed regulations that forced brokers to seek out middlemen like Citadel who could provide the most savings to their customers; in part because of this move by the SEC, Ken's outfit was able to grow into the most effective, and thus dominant, middleman for trading — and especially for retail traders, who were proliferating in tune to the numerous online brokerages sprouting up in the decade after 2008.
Citadel Securities reached scale before the bigger banks even knew what had hit them; and once Citadel was at scale, it became impossible for anyone else to compete. Citadel's efficiency, and its ability to make billions off the minute spreads between bids and asks — multiplied by millions upon millions of trades — made companies like Robinhood, with its zero fees, possible. Citadel could profit by being the most efficient and cheapest market maker on the Street. Robinhood could profit by offering zero fees to its users. And the retail traders, on their couches and in their kitchens and in their dorm rooms, profited because they could now trade stocks with the same tools as their Wall Street counterparts.
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Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
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Starting a little over a decade ago, Target began building a vast data warehouse that assigned every shopper an identification code—known internally as the “Guest ID number”—that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a customer used a Target-issued credit card, handed over a frequent-buyer tag at the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a survey, mailed in a refund, phoned the customer help line, opened an email from Target, visited Target.com, or purchased anything online, the company’s computers took note. A record of each purchase was linked to that shopper’s Guest ID number along with information on everything else they’d ever bought.
Also linked to that Guest ID number was demographic information that Target collected or purchased from other firms, including the shopper’s age, whether they were married and had kids, which part of town they lived in, how long it took them to drive to the store, an estimate of how much money they earned, if they’d moved recently, which websites they visited, the credit cards they carried in their wallet, and their home and mobile phone numbers. Target can purchase data that indicates a shopper’s ethnicity, their job history, what magazines they read, if they have ever declared bankruptcy, the year they bought (or lost) their house, where they went to college or graduate school, and whether they prefer certain brands of coffee, toilet paper, cereal, or applesauce.
There are data peddlers such as InfiniGraph that “listen” to shoppers’ online conversations on message boards and Internet forums, and track which products people mention favorably. A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
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Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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If Jim was back at the imaginary dinner party, trying to explain what he did for a living, he'd have tried to keep it simple: clearing involved everything that took place between the moment someone started at trade — buying or selling a stock, for instance — and the moment that trade was settled — meaning the stock had officially and legally changed hands.
Most people who used online brokerages thought of that transaction as happening instantly; you wanted 10 shares of GME, you hit a button and bought 10 shares of GME, and suddenly 10 shares of GME were in your account. But that's not actually what happened. You hit the Buy button, and Robinhood might find you your shares immediately and put them into your account; but the actual trade took two days to complete, known, for that reason, in financial parlance as 'T+2 clearing.'
By this point in the dinner conversation, Jim would have fully expected the other diners' eyes to glaze over; but he would only be just beginning. Once the trade was initiated — once you hit that Buy button on your phone — it was Jim's job to handle everything that happened in that in-between world. First, he had to facilitate finding the opposite partner for the trade — which was where payment for order flow came in, as Robinhood bundled its trades and 'sold' them to a market maker like Citadel. And next, it was the clearing brokerage's job to make sure that transaction was safe and secure. In practice, the way this worked was by 10:00 a.m. each market day, Robinhood had to insure its trade, by making a cash deposit to a federally regulated clearinghouse — something called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC. That deposit was based on the volume, type, risk profile, and value of the equities being traded. The riskier the equities — the more likely something might go wrong between the buy and the sell — the higher that deposit might be.
Of course, most all of this took place via computers — in 2021, and especially at a place like Robinhood, it was an almost entirely automated system; when customers bought and sold stocks, Jim's computers gave him a recommendation of the sort of deposits he could expect to need to make based on the requirements set down by the SEC and the banking regulators — all simple and tidy, and at the push of a button.
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Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
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The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong.
But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects.
But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood.
Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal.
This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives.
And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist.
The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile.
What country do you want to live in?
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Cory Doctorow (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future)
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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PUBG Free Battle Points Generator 2018 - PUBG points [Android/iOS/XBOX/PS4]
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If a Tokyoite knows anything about Nakano, it's likely to be Nakano Broadway, a shopping mall with several floors devoted to Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime). It is geek central. I found most of it incomprehensible, but I did enjoy browsing at Junkworld, which sells useful electronic discards, like old working digital cameras for $5 and assorted connectors and dongles and sound cards. In the 1980's, when William Gibson was padding around the streets of Tokyo and inventing the world of Neuromancer, Japan was the place where the future had already arrived, where you could find electronic toys that wouldn't hit American shelves for years, if ever. For a variety of reasons (blogs and online shopping, advances in international shipping, the fact that the coolest mobile phones are now designed in Silicon Valley and Seoul), this is no longer true. While it's still fun to go to Akihabara at night and shop all seven floors of a neon-lit electronics superstore, you won't bring home any objects of nerdy wet dreams.
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Matthew Amster-Burton (Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo)
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Blue Bottle wanted to help customers find coffee they’d love. But coffee beans all look alike, so photos wouldn’t be helpful. To find useful solutions, the team did Lightning Demos of websites selling everything from clothes to wine, looking for ways to describe sensory details such as flavor, aroma, and texture. In the end, it was a chocolate-bar wrapper that provided the most useful idea. Tcho is a chocolate manufacturer in Berkeley, California. Printed on the wrapper of every Tcho bar is a simple flavor wheel with just six words: Bright, Fruity, Floral, Earthy, Nutty, and Chocolatey. When Blue Bottle looked at that wheel, they got inspired, and when we sketched, someone repurposed the idea as a simple flavor vocabulary for describing Blue Bottle’s coffee beans: In Friday’s test, and later, at the new online store, customers loved the simple descriptions. It’s a prime example of finding inspiration outside your domain (and yet another reason to be grateful for chocolate).
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Jake Knapp (Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days)
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The bank knew exactly what it was looking for and how to go about it. There was consensus on two critical aspects: the system had to be centralized and had to be based on UNIX, even if that meant spending tonnes of money. MicroBanker, a fully integrated online banking automation system, developed by Citicorp Information Technology Industries Ltd (Citil), a Citibank subsidiary, fit the bill, but Citil was not willing to deal with HDFC Bank. A small outfit, Citil thought, would not be able to afford the system. Citil was expanding operations in Africa and Europe and was not too keen to sell the software to a start-up Indian bank. While Citil reluctantly made a presentation on the system, Citibank intervened before a deal could be signed, saying that selling MicroBanker to HDFC Bank could give the Indian bank more muscle as a competitor. Aditya had to call Rajesh Hukku, Citil head, to play ball and he relented. Citil later became i-Flex Solutions Ltd (now Oracle Financial Services Software Ltd).
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Tamal Bandopadhyaya (A Bank for the Buck)
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Whether it be brand marketers trumpeting the new BMW X5, game developers getting players to spend real money on virtual goods, or someone selling an online nursing degree, the only difference is the time frame in which those different goals occur—in other words, the time between attention and action. If the time frame is very short, like browsing for and buying a shirt at nordstroms.com, it’s called “direct response,” or “DR” advertising. If the time frame is very long, such as making you believe life is unlivable outside the pricey mantle of a Burberry coat, it’s called “brand advertising.” Note that the goal is the same in both: to make you buy shit you likely don’t need with money you likely don’t have. In the former case, the trail is easily trackable, as the “conversion” usually happens online, usually after clicking on the very ad you were served.* In the latter, the media employed is a multipronged strategy of Super Bowl ads, Internet advertising, postal mail, free keychains, and God knows what else. Also, the conversion happens way after the initial exposure to the media, and often offline and in a physical space, like at a car dealership. The tracking and attribution are much harder, due to both the manifold media used and the months or years gone by between the exposure and the sale. As such, brand advertising budgets, which are far larger than direct-response ones, are spent in embarrassingly large broadsides, barely targeted or tracked in any way. Now you know all there is to know about advertising. The rest is technical detail and self-promoting bullshit spun by agencies. You’re officially as informed as the media tycoons who run the handful of agencies that manage our media world.
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Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
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By far, the most popular of the peer-to-peer exchanges is LocalBitcoins. On LocalBitcoins, you can meet nearby people interested in selling Bitcoin. Then, you can trade with them online or ask to meet up in-person to trade Bitcoin for cash.
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Alan T. Norman (Mastering Bitcoin for Starters: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, Mining, Investing and Trading - Bitcoin Book 1, Blockchain, Wallet, Business)
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Even those retailers who don’t sell products online or who have substantial offline sales are still impacted by search. Online advertising triggers $6 to be spent offline for every dollar spent online29 and the in-store sales boost from search is three times greater than online display advertising.
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Vanessa Fox (Marketing in the Age of Google, Revised and Updated: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy)
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Tour Operator Software :- Our Tour Operator software helps inbound and outbound tour operators sell tours and activity packages online, manage bookings, inventory and also manage agents and their commissions.
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aurlynolsen
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Travel Agency software :-Our Travel Agency Software helps travel agencies sell flights, hotels and packages online, manage reservations, connect to multiple suppliers, manage inventory, build quotations.
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aurlynolsen
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RETAILERS KNOW THEIR shelfspace is a valuable resource. But this is a recent discovery; in the past, they gave it away, then they thought of selling it. Manufacturers either paid directly, via slotting allowances etc., or paid in materials and labour to make the shelves more attractive and better organised; then they paid both as demand for shelfspace exceeded supply. More recently, for fast turnover items, manufacturers such as Frito-Lay have used a direct delivery and merchandising service where their people will spend pretty much all day in store refilling shelves to their and the store’s mutual benefit.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Retail competitors face each other with similar offerings of similar stores selling similar products at similar prices. Since
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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In the 1980s, Woolworths in the United Kingdom had major cost and thus selling price disadvantages compared to the ‘selling’ retailers who were pushing the same products at lower prices. They responded by demanding exclusive presentations of products from the main manufacturers. The strategy worked for a while as Woolworths had the size to order economically efficient quantities of such ‘exclusives’ in specific product categories where Woolworths were strong, while their competitors did not. But this approach added extra costs to the manufacturers, who soon began to regret agreeing to the idea. It
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Selling-oriented retailers can be tough to deal with because they are determined to secure better terms than their quasi-identical competitors. Their biggest fear during negotiations is that they did not squeeze manufacturers hard enough and left some margin on the table that may be given up to a more determined competitor, who will use it to undercut them on price.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Cullen’s model of selling top brands at cost then morphed into their being sold as loss-leaders, owing to the inexorable need to attract shoppers into grocery stores. This is why private label brands eventually reappeared: to counter the power of national brands upon which retailers were actually making a loss. The
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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In simple terms, the trade start buying the product on discount to hold in stock for future sale at a higher margin rather than sell immediately. They make money by taking advantage of contradicting discounts and promotional schedules and then selling the product for a higher price at a later date. This is not uncommon. If a manufacturer offers promotional prices every other month, a retailer will forward buy five weeks’ supply at the end of each promotional month. It is not unknown for a retailer to buy a year’s supply ahead of a major price rise. At
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Selling strategies by retailers are not all bad news for manufacturers. Discounting big brands makes them exceptionally good value and, when advertised in flyers by retailers, reinforces the brand’s advertising presence, and thus share of mind (mindspace) together with the retailer usually devoting more space to the promoted lines, increasing their shelfspace. Meanwhile,
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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De Beers operated a selling cartel for diamonds by using their control of the central selling organisations to manage prices by manipulating supply and demand. In the past, when a single country, such as Zaire, tried to break away and sell their diamonds independently, De Beers would flood the market with similar diamonds to drive down prices for Zaire, forcing them to return to the cartel. But
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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They could see the economic attractiveness of being able to strip out the burgeoning brand-related costs from manufacturer brands and make a very good margin, even if the volumes were going to be low. There is a lot of profit available if you do not spend 5–10% of retail selling price (RSP) on marketing, 2% on product development, 10% on high management costs and 8% on a sales force.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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For example, a supermarket may sell a branded version of a commodity like milk at a 2–3% margin but, by buying competitively and minimising packaging and marketing costs, could offer lower prices for generic milk and make margins five times higher.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Two brands of toothpaste can sell alongside each other on a shelf, and consolidating them into one brand would make few savings and no sense. Whereas a store buying another store has an incentive to consolidate to create one chain with improved coverage because a retail chain benefits substantially from increasing its critical mass.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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This shows that price is imperative for all FMCG retailers. They must always do two things well: Be genuinely price competitive on the top 100 best-selling products where the shopper is most likely to make direct comparisons. Perpetually make efforts to manage their price image and must consider the impact of all marketing actions on that image. Wal-Mart still advertise their price Rollbacks even though everyone has known for decades they are good value.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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The retailer features them in advertising to generate store traffic, but once the shopper is in the store the retailer has every incentive via prominent merchandising to sell that person a competitive brand, one
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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If they’re not selling you something, then you’re the thing being sold to someone else. All
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Matthew Siege (One in the Gut (Headshot Online, #1))
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Shelfspace, number of facings, position, local promotion, advertising, information from scanning data and choice of new products are all key assets for retailers. Selling
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Category management is something of a misnomer; category understanding may be a better goal. Category understanding should be an effort to see the market from the retail point of view, and offer brands/SKUs that retailers want to stock. The idea is not to sell to retailers what you want to produce, but produce what they want to sell and their shoppers want to buy.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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Cernovich, Yiannopoulos, and Sommers all found a marketing opportunity in Gamergate: a constantly active audience willing to buy whatever it was they felt like selling that day. No matter what their stance had been previously, their support of Gamergate guaranteed that followers of Gamergate would hang on their every word.
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Bailey Poland (Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online)
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Salvage Cars USA
I Bid Safely provides you to all Salvage Cars in the USA with standard cost comparison other competitors. Our Company also sells with other vehicles like Motorcycles, Boats, Jet skis, Trucks, and Trailers.
Phone: +1 800-688-5169
Fax: +1 215 392 7844
225 Wilmington West Chester Pike,
#202 Chadds Ford, PA
19317
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I Bid Safely Inc.
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searching for and investing in non-price differences to promote products: invest in adding value (e.g. advertising) rather than selling pressure (e.g. promotions).
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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It follows that everything we do online will be either a complement to, or a replacement for, what we do in the real world.
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David R. Bell (Location is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One)
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Sell your business products, used Products online here, Art Baby Kids, Books, Clothing accessories, Electronics products, Jewelry, Watchesgift cards, Sports equipment, Crafts, Musical instrument, Real estate.
Visit us - inkeex.com
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inkeex
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The words looped in my head. Download it for free. Cheerful, triumphant. Download it for free! What a freaking bargain.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She found what?”
"That website. Meems, what was the name again? Bongo or something?”
Mimi looked up from her iPad. “What are you talking about?”
“That website where you found Sarah’s book.”
"Oh,” she said. “Bingo. Haven’t you heard of it? It’s like an online library. You can download almost anything for free. It’s amazing.”
My hands were shaking. I set down Jen’s phone, and then I set down the wineglass next to it. Without a coaster.
"You mean a pirate site,” I said.
“Oh God, no! I would never. It’s an online library.”
"That’s what they call it. But they’re just stealing. They’re fencing stolen goods. Easy to do with electronic copies.”
"No. That’s not true.” Mimi’s voice rose a little. Sharpened a little. “Libraries lend out e-books.”
“Real libraries do. They buy them from the publisher. Sites like Bingo just upload unauthorized copies to sell advertising or put cookies on your phone or whatever else. They’re pirates.”
There was a small, shrill silence. I lifted my wineglass and took a long drink, even though my fingers were trembling so badly, I knew everyone could see the vibration.
"Well,” said Mimi. “It’s not like it matters. I mean, the book’s been out for years and everything, it’s like public domain.”
I put down the wineglass and picked up my tote bag. “So I don’t have time to lecture you about copyright law or anything. Basically, if publishers don’t get paid, authors don’t get paid. That’s kind of how it works.”
"Oh, come on,” said Mimi. “You got paid for this book.”
"Not as much as you think. Definitely not as much as your husband gets paid to short derivatives or whatever he does that buys all this stuff.” I waved my hand at the walls. “And you know, fine, maybe it’s not the big sellers who suffer. It’s the midlist authors, the great names you never hear of, where every sale counts … What am I saying? You don’t care. None of you actually cares. Sitting here in your palaces in the sky. You never had to earn a penny of your own. Why the hell should you care about royalties?” I climbed out of my silver chair and hoisted my tote bag over my shoulder. “It’s about a dollar a book, by the way. Paid out every six months. So I walked all the way over here, gave up an evening of my life, and even if every single one of you had actually bought a legitimate copy, I would have earned about a dozen bucks for my trouble. Twelve dollars and a glass of cheap wine. I’ll see myself out.
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Lauren Willig
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David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.
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Jean Case (Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose)
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Yo can sell your power PC online today with Sell GPU. All the models and old power PC with great deals on Sell GPU. Online selling today.
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Sell GPU
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if you don’t make eye contact at least 72 percent of the time, people won’t trust you. There have been detailed studies on this stuff, and 72 percent is the number. You can look it up online. Anything more, and you risk getting into a stare-off with somebody.
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Jordan Belfort (Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success)
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When you sell a product to a client, you are not selling them a product that you just want to bring into the world: you sell a product that you believe will make their lives easier. You can’t sell a customer a product unless it improves their life – it’s impractical, yet many business owners put themselves into this situation.
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Chris Oberg (Likes Don't Pay Bills: How to Leverage Social Media to Get Leads and Customers (How Solo Entrepreneurs & Small Businesses Can Make Money Online Book 3))
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Minus The Agent is a leading property portal in Australia that aims to empower a property owner to make a deal without engaging an agent. It achieves this by enabling online selling or renting of property. The user on this site can easily list a property. There are a number of packages available for selling and renting purposes for a user to choose from. The user can select a package as per his requirements and pay for it. Minus The Agent believes that publicity and marketing are necessary for a successful sale. Therefore, it enhances the visibility of the property by listing it on leading property websites in Australia. Further, the property is advertised on social media sites. The site believes in providing complete autonomy to its users. This enables them in being in complete control of the deal. This is facilitated by allowing the users to upload details and photographs of their choice of property. They also have 24/7 access to the site to modify this data if required. There are no hidden charges. Once listed, the property remains on the site till the deal is done.
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Jodie Kelly
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And while seeking out the opinions and perspectives of people like ourselves may lead to a more personal and familiar buying experience, what’s even more amazing is the impact those trusted sources have on conversion rates. B2B sales cycle data from Salesforce demonstrates that, when it comes to lead conversion, the interest that originates from customer and employee referrals converts to deals at rates fifty times higher than email campaigns!9 Furthermore, data from marketing automation giant Marketo indicates that leads originating from referrals convert to opportunities at rates of four times the average, and similar to the next three highest-converting lead sources combined (those being partner, inbound, and marketing-generated).10 My personal experience over the years greatly corroborates these statistics. For example, when I started my own sales practice, Cerebral Selling, I needed to have a logo designed. Around the same time, my friend had recently had a nice logo designed for his business. I asked him who he used, he told me, and I just did the same. No further research or investigation required. A short time later, I wanted to head out of town with my wife for an overnight trip to the beautiful Niagara wine region of Ontario to celebrate our anniversary. I didn’t know where to stay or which restaurant to go to, so instead of sifting through pages of online content and reviews, I asked a friend who runs a vineyard in the region. When he gave me his recommendations, I simply booked the places he told me. No questions asked. Were there better places to stay and eat? Potentially. Were there other creative design shops that could have generated equally if not more spectacular logos? More than likely. Do I care? Absolutely not! I love my logo and had a great anniversary outing, and feel secure in my decisions around both because of the feeling I received by selecting recommendations from people I trust. Both experiences are perfect examples of the prescriptive-led sales cycle we spoke about in chapter 2. This means that when it comes to your selling motion, one of the most unobtrusive, empathetic, and authentic ways to convert prospective buyers is simply to surround them with like-minded customers who love you.
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David Priemer (Sell the Way You Buy: A Modern Approach To Sales That Actually Works (Even On You!))