Store Launch Quotes

That’s it? She just wants to be a computer program?” “No,” says Doc Impossible. “She wants to rule the world. This is a means to an end. As self-aware, self-editing malignant stream of code injected into the internet, she could take control of everything from online banking to nuclear launch codes. She could store a thousand copies of herself in darknet servers all over the world, and become impossible to kill.” “Oh,” I say. “I vote no,” Sarah says.

we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any horizon.

New Rule: Republicans must stop pitting the American people against the government. Last week, we heard a speech from Republican leader Bobby Jindal--and he began it with the story that every immigrant tells about going to an American grocery store for the first time and being overwhelmed with the "endless variety on the shelves." And this was just a 7-Eleven--wait till he sees a Safeway. The thing is, that "endless variety"exists only because Americans pay taxes to a government, which maintains roads, irrigates fields, oversees the electrical grid, and everything else that enables the modern American supermarket to carry forty-seven varieties of frozen breakfast pastry.Of course, it's easy to tear government down--Ronald Reagan used to say the nine most terrifying words in the Englishlanguage were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." But that was before "I'm Sarah Palin, now show me the launch codes."The stimulus package was attacked as typical "tax and spend"--like repairing bridges is left-wing stuff. "There the liberals go again, always wanting to get across the river." Folks, the people are the government--the first responders who put out fires--that's your government. The ranger who shoos pedophiles out of the park restroom, the postman who delivers your porn.How stupid is it when people say, "That's all we need: the federal government telling Detroit how to make cars or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the post office?"You mean the place that takes a note that's in my hand in L.A. on Monday and gives it to my sister in New Jersey on Wednesday, for 44 cents? Let me be the first to say, I would be thrilled if America's health-care system was anywhere near as functional as the post office.Truth is, recent years have made me much more wary of government stepping aside and letting unregulated private enterprise run things it plainly is too greedy to trust with. Like Wall Street. Like rebuilding Iraq.Like the way Republicans always frame the health-care debate by saying, "Health-care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not government bureaucrats," leaving out the fact that health-care decisions aren't made by doctors, patients, or bureaucrats; they're made by insurance companies. Which are a lot like hospital gowns--chances are your gas isn't covered.

It would seem that the intellectual titans of the Enlightenment had no inkling of what was getting under way. Yet, strangely, all around the earth, ordinary people seem to have sensed the stirring of something momentous. They seemed to have understood that a process had been launched that could lead ultimately to catastrophe: what they didn't allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out. It has fallen to us, centuries later, to bear witness to the last turn of the wheel. And what we are seeing already -' he paused to point a finger in the direction of the distant wildfires - 'should be enough to remind us that the climatic perturbations of the Little Ice Age were trivial compared to what is in store for us now. What our ancestors experienced is but a pale foreshadowing of what the future holds!

In the Man Mall there’s a shop that sells fireworks, another that sells guns, a liquor store, a tattoo parlor, and an adult-toy shop with a peep show in the back. With forty dollars in your pocket, you can hit the Man Mall on a Friday night, get shitfaced, get blown by a stripper, get her name tattooed on your arm, celebrate by launching a bottle rocket over the interstate, and pick up a .38 so you’ll have an easy way to kill yourself in the morning.

Jimmy Hoffa’s first notoriety in union work was as the leader of a successful strike by the “Strawberry Boys.” He became identified with it. In 1932 the nineteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa was working as a truck loader and unloader of fresh fruits and vegetables on the platform dock of the Kroger Food Company in Detroit for 32¢ an hour. Twenty cents of that pay was in credit redeemable for groceries at Kroger food stores. But the men only got that 32¢ when there was work to do. They had to report at 4:30 P.M. for a twelve-hour shift and weren’t permitted to leave the platform. When there were no trucks to load or unload, the workers sat around without pay. On one immortal hot spring afternoon, a load of fresh strawberries arrived from Florida, and the career of the most famous labor leader in American history was launched. Hoffa gave a signal, and the men who would come to be known as the Strawberry Boys refused to move the Florida strawberries into refrigerator cars until their union was recognized and their demands for better working conditions were met.

Elizabeth and Sunny had always been security conscious, but their level of paranoia had reached a new peak with the launch in Walgreens stores. They had convinced themselves that Quest and LabCorp viewed Theranos as a mortal threat to their cozy oligopoly and that they would try to quash their new competitor by any means available. There was also the matter of the promise John Fuisz had made in his deposition to “fuck with” Elizabeth until she died. She took that threat very seriously. Following his retirement from the military earlier that year, James Mattis had joined the Theranos board

Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore. When it launched in 1995, Amazon could claim to be “Earth’s largest bookstore” because, unlike a retail bookstore that might stock 100,000 books, Amazon didn’t need to physically store any inventory—it simply requested the title from its supplier whenever a customer made an order. This quantum improvement was so effective that a very unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker.

Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger. The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self. The word is “No.” The driver threatens to have her arrested. “You may do that,” says Rosa Parks. A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move. “Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply. “I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.” On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage. They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The rest wait patiently outside, listening through loudspeakers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November.” He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a citywide bus boycott that lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They carpool with strangers. They change the course of American history.

The foundation of your greatness is in your head. Your brain is the most sophisticated computer there is. Its ten billion parts can store the equivalent of one hundred trillion words. It would take dozens of buildings to house computers capable of containing that much information. You have the potential to become a gifted genius, because you were born with the equivalent of a Pentium 10000 processor with hundreds of “cores” and millions of gigabytes of memory. However, like any powerful computer, your brain requires to be turned on and programed properly! Any computer today has more capacity and processing power than all the computers used by NASA to send rockets to the moon. However, you cannot launch rockets from your iPhone (or your Galaxy!) because you don’t have the necessary software (and hopefully nor the rockets...) However, with the right apps, you COULD! It is the same with that amazing computer in your head: You have to turn it on, and then upload the right programs or apps that will allow you to develop your potential and achieve everything you set out to do in life.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

Launching “Buy It Now” was a large change that touched every transaction, but the eBay team also innovated across the experience for both sellers and buyers as well. With an initial success, we doubled down on innovation to drive growth. We introduced stores on eBay, which dramatically increased the amount of product offered for sale on the platform. We expanded the menu of optional features that sellers could purchase to better highlight their listings on the site. We improved the post-transaction experience on ebay.com by significantly improving the “checkout” flow, including the eventual seamless integration of PayPal on the eBay site. Each of these innovations supported the growth of the business and helped to keep that gravity at bay. Years later, Jeff became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he would kick off the firm’s success in startups with network effects, investing in Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest, and others. I’m lucky to work with him! He recounted in an essay on the a16z blog that his strategy was to grow eBay by adding layers and layers of new revenue—like “adding layers to the cake.” You can see it visually here: Figure 12: eBay’s growth layer cake As the core US business began to look more like a line than a hockey stick, international and payments were layered on top. Together, the aggregate business started to look like a hockey stick, but underneath it was actually many new lines of business.

Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).

I thought we were meeting by the field house,” I call out as I make my way over. He doesn’t even turn around. “Nah, I’m pretty sure I said the parking lot.” “You definitely said the field house,” I argue. Why can’t he ever just admit that he’s wrong? “Geez, field house, parking lot. What difference does it make?” Mason asks. “Give it a rest, why don’t you.” I shoot him a glare. “Oh, hey, Mason. Remember when your hair was long and everyone thought you were a girl?” Ryder chuckles as he releases a perfect spiral in Mason’s direction. “She’s got you there.” “Hey, whose side are you on, anyway?” Mason catches the ball and cradles it against his chest, then launches it toward Ben. I just stand there watching as they continue to toss it back and forth between the three of them. Haven’t they had enough football for one day? I pull out my cell to check the time. “We should probably get going.” “I guess,” Ryder says with an exaggerated sigh, like I’m putting him out or something. Which is particularly annoying since he’s the one who insisted on going with me. Ben jogs up beside me, the football tucked beneath his arm. “Where are you two off to? Whoa, you’re sweaty.” I fold my arms across my damp chest. “Hey, southern girls don’t sweat. We glow.” Ben snorts at that. “Says who?” “Says Ryder’s mom,” I say with a grin. It’s one of Laura Grace’s favorite sayings--one that always makes Ryder wince. “The hardware store,” Ryder answers, snatching the ball back from Ben. “Gotta pick up some things for the storm--sandbags and stuff like that. Y’all want to come?” “Nah, I think I’ll pass.” Mason wrinkles his nose. “Pretty sure I don’t want to be cooped up in the truck with Jemma glowing like she is right now.” “Everybody thought you and Morgan were identical twin girls,” I say with a smirk. “Remember, Mason? Isn’t that just so cute?” “I’ll go,” Ben chimes in. “If you’re getting sandbags, you’ll need some help carrying them out to the truck.” “Thanks, Ben. See, someone’s a gentleman.” “Don’t look now, Ryder, but your one-woman fan club is over there.” Mason tips his head toward the school building in the distance. “I think she’s scented you out. Quick. You better run.” I glance over my shoulder to find Rosie standing on the sidewalk by the building’s double doors, looking around hopefully. “Hey!” Mason calls out, waving both arms above his head. “He’s over here.” Ryder’s cheeks turn beet-red. He just stares at the ground, his jaw working furiously. “C’mon, man,” Ben says, throwing an elbow into Mason’s side. “Don’t be a dick.” He grabs the football and heads toward Ryder’s Durango. “We better get going. The hardware store probably closes at six.” Silently, Ryder and I hurry after him and hop inside the truck--Ben up front, me in the backseat. We don’t look back to see if Rosie’s following.

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.

Burns and Allen household names—Gracie’s search for her “lost brother.” Whose idea was it? In The Big Broadcast, Frank Buxton and Bill Owen credit Bob Taplinger, head of publicity at CBS. Carroll thought the idea originated with Burns. In one of his books, Burns said it came out of the agency, whose executives wanted to publicize the show’s new 9:30 timeslot. All that mattered was this: it was the most sensational thing of its time. It was launched Jan. 4, 1933. Gracie mentioned that her brother was missing, and this became the centerpiece of the broadcast. The following Sunday she appeared without notice on Eddie Cantor’s show. She was looking for her brother, she told Cantor and the nation. She popped up suddenly on Jack Benny’s program. She appeared on melodramas and soap operas. Even when she did not appear, the search for Gracie Allen’s brother was worked into dramatic skits. Burns remembered that a telephone rang on a tense drama set inside a submarine. From the surface, someone asked the captain, “Is Gracie Allen’s brother down there with you?” Department stores worked the gag into their newspaper ads, and people everywhere were telling Gracie’s-brother jokes.

Certain AWS resource types like Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS DB instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, etc., can be launched from a golden image: a snapshot of a particular state of that resource. When compared to the bootstrapping approach, a golden image results in faster start times and removes dependencies to configuration services or third-party repositories. This is important in auto-scaled environments where you want to be able to quickly and reliably launch additional resources as a response to demand changes.

How to Setup Roku TV with Roku com link Account Call Toll Free +1-234-200-8005 Create Your Roku com link Account | www roku com link | Roku com link After updating the latest software, you need to create a Roku com link account for streaming amazing media content or add paid or unpaid channel on your Roku streaming device. If you want to get information about, how to activate Roku com link, follow the steps given below: ‍ 1. Turn on your Roku TV or Roku streaming device. 2. Press the home button. 3. Launch the Roku TV screen and get a Roku activation code. 4. The Roku activation link code is appears on your TV screen 5. Go to the from your computer and enter the activation Roku code to activate Roku com link account. 6. After entering the Roku activation code, your Roku com link account will be activated. Requirements to Setup Roku TV and Roku Streaming Device: • Firstly, un-boxed your Roku TV box • Use high bandwidth Internet connection • You will require a streaming device Step to step Roku device Setup Instructions: • Put batteries into your Roku remote. The Roku remote comes with a pair of batteries with packed box. • Remove the back cover of remote and insert the batteries into it. • Attach back cover again of the Roku remote. Turn On Your Roku TV: • Give the power supply to the Roku TV and see the indicator light under the TV screen. • Press the power the button on your Roku remote, you will see the startup screen. • If you want to use an Audio-guide mode then press the star (*) button 4 times. Note: - The 'Audio-Guide' is only available in the English language. Select Language: • When you power on your Roku com link device, after powering on you need to select the language which you preferred. • Choose your comfortable language from the list of languages and press the 'OK' button. Select Your Country or Country Code: • Choose your country where you are living or using your Roku TV • Next step to click on the next button. Select ‘Home Use’: • If you are not setting up your Roku for the store use • And choose Home use mode and click on the next button. Connect Your Roku TV with the Internet Connection: • Connect your device to the internet connection either wireless or wired. • If you have more than one Wi-Fi then chooses wireless connection. • Enter your Wi-Fi password, if your Wi-Fi is password protected and click on the 'connect' option.

The first week after the official launch, they took $12,000 in orders and shipped $846 worth of books, according to Eric Dillon, one of Amazon’s original investors. The next week they took $14,000 in orders and shipped $7,000 worth of books. So they were behind from the get-go and scrambling to catch up.

Promotion stocks came to the retailer ahead of the rest of the market. Also, they usually got an extra lot even after the end of the promotion Newly launched products came to the retailer first. The customers got more choice, faster, leading to favourable word-of-mouth publicity Local display and consumer sampling budgets were always directed liberally at the retailer Vendors ensured that no slow moving inventory was stuck in the retailer’s stores; they wanted nothing to choke the pipeline The retailer also received the best in-class margin from the distributor If some items were in short supply, the vendor would ensure the retailer was the last one to go out of stock In effect, the consumers found more products, fresher stocks and more promotions in the retailer’s stores compared to the general market. This wasn’t something actively created by either the vendors or the retailer, but was a byproduct of good trading practices. Just one move based on a trading community insight— everyone has less money in the bank than needed — hurled the retailer into a virtuous growth cycle, with all the vendors pushing in one direction, with them. Most people in the business would not give a second look at changing these trading practices. If the payment norm is eight days why modify it? Surely the wholesalers, too, know what they’re letting themselves in for? And the vast volumes offered by organised retail should offset the stress of extending credit. Isn’t that how it works? One retailer managed to peep behind the curtain of wholesaler business practices and understood what a boon more money in the bank was to the trade. And look at the gains they reaped for this seemingly insignificant insight!

You don’t want to hurt Cameron’s car, now do you? She didn’t mean to hit you.” As she spoke to the huge animal, she noticed a crowd had formed on the sidewalk in front of the diner and across the street on the porch at the store. “Why don’t you head on home now? Okay?” Fred seemed to think it over for a minute before he let out a big moo that launched Cameron right off her feet into Will’s arms. Fred pawed the ground with a giant hoof and then started slowly down Elm Street on his way out of town. “Oh my God,” Cameron said. “You’re a moose whisperer!

Consumers can now scan the code on the product when they are running low, and it will be ordered and delivered within hours to their home, completely side-lining all the tools and techniques of competing manufacturers who would wish to get the consumer to brand switch. Tesco’s Homeplus in South Korea also launched a campaign that engages shoppers to buy products using QR codes. Homeplus created virtual billboards of their store aisles in subway stations, allowing passengers to shop while they waited by scanning the products’ QR codes – the groceries being delivered when they arrived home. The goal of the campaign was to help Homeplus compete with the number-one retailer, E-MART, without increasing their store numbers. Since the launch, their online sales have increased 130%, making them the top online retailer in South Korea, and a close second offline.

What they didn’t own was the mindspace and shelfspace Cadbury had painstakingly built up over 180 years, especially in emerging markets like India. Cadbury had operated in India since 1948, and have a formidable presence with a 70% share of the rapidly growing chocolate market and a sales coverage that reached over one million stores. The costs and time for Kraft to attempt to replicate this would be unsustainable. Kraft can now use the Cadbury set-up to launch their own brands, and with their superior financial resources are able to add more juice than Cadbury would have been able to. In April 2011, Cadbury India launched Oreo, the Kraft-owned world’s number-one cookie brand, using Cadbury contract manufacturing expertise to source the product locally, Cadbury mindspace to brand the product under the Cadbury name and Cadbury shelfspace capabilities to achieve widespread distribution and prominent display. Mindspace and shelfspace are the valuable currencies of FMCG industries.

New brands often gain sales through launch promotion, but find that repeat purchases dwindle, not through technical failure but through lack of mindspace and shelfspace. Mindspace and shelfspace are the bottlenecks, and their ownership is often the only critical resource of a brand. To

When ConAgra Foods launched the new pop-up bowl for their Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn line, they used QR to direct shoppers to a short video that gave them more detail on the pop-up, trying to influence their buying decision at the point-of-purchase.

Manufacturers have one advantage that can never be overcome if used with focus, vigour and investment, and that is innovation. Yogurt, seemingly an ideal category for private label to take the lion’s share, has seen private label share decline. The top-five leaders, Danone, Yoplait/Sodiaal, Yakult Honsha, Nestlé and Müller, represent half of all yogurt sales. Their innovation has been developing premium products, like pro-biotic yogurt and yogurt enhanced with fruit, and they launch continually; between 2006 and 2010 Danone introduced nine new products. Although retailers have developed brands, Aldi has Fit & Active non-fat yogurt and Kroger has Carb Master Yogurt, they haven’t won over consumers, owing to their lack of innovation. Both are seeing sales decline.

If competitors are determined to grow in a static market, they may start to break the orderly market rules. Producing copies of rivals’ products is tempting because in the short term it ‘steals’ share and makes money. Although competitors with strong technological and marketing skills are unlikely to launch exact copies of rival brands, it is estimated that 97% of new products are not genuine innovations.6 The failure rate of new products is extremely high, around 90% two years after launch, so even though differentiated brands on the whole perform better than me-toos, me-toos are common in markets where innovation is slowing down. Once they get a hold in an industry, there is an inevitable downward pressure on prices.

THE LONGEVITY OF product brands, even those having no apparent technological advantage, is a striking characteristic of FMCG markets, as can be shown by the launch dates of 25 of the top global brands, starting with Schweppes in 1783 (

Many companies use massive sampling at the launch of a product: sampling leads to use, which leads to mindspace. This tool is especially popular among companies that introduce an innovative product to the market. When

When Starbucks launched its instant coffee brand in Japan in April 2010, they invited customers to participate in a four-day taste challenge to see whether they could taste the different between Starbucks VIA Coffee Essence (known as VIA Ready Brew everywhere else) and their fresh-brewed coffee. Over one million samples were given away at their 870 retail stores, and five months later more than 10 million sticks had been sold, making it one of their most successful new product launches. Starbucks

In October 2011, Heinz UK launched a Facebook promotion where, when someone complained of being ill on their Facebook page, friends could have them sent a tin of either Cream of Chicken or Cream of Tomato soup with a personalised ‘get well’ message on the label. By such means are lifelong brand associations built.

Brand Category Year of launch Schweppes Soft drinks 1783 Cadbury Chocolate 1831 Budweiser Beer 1876 Coca-Cola Soft drinks 1886 Heineken Beer 1886 Kodak Photo 1888 Lipton Tea 1890 Wrigley Chewing gum 1892 Colgate Toothpaste 1896 Campbell’s Soup 1898 Marlboro Tobacco 1902 Pepsi Soft drinks 1903 Gillette Shaving products 1908 Camel Tobacco 1913 Danone Yogurt 1919 Kellogg’s Cereal 1922 Duracell Batteries 1930 Nescafé Coffee 1938 Fanta Soft drinks 1940 Tropicana Juices 1952 Friskies Pet food 1956 Pampers Nappies (diapers) 1961 Sprite Soft drinks 1961 Huggies Nappies (diapers) 1978 Red Bull Energy drink 1987

Hoping to create a little prestige, some retailers develop and advertise premium clothes sub-brands. In 2006, Myer, one of Australia’s largest retailers, launched a fashion line by top designer Wayne Cooper, known as ‘Wayne by Wayne Cooper Collection’. In 2010, Tesco launched a high-end fashion range, F&F, following Asda, who have created the most successful retail clothing sub-brand, George, by well-known British designer George Davies, which is worth $1.6 billion and is being rolled out in Wal-Marts across North America.

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.

craft your landing page effortlessly and not have to stare at a blank template for long, you need the following elements: • The title of your lead magnet • The main benefit or main promise of your lead magnet • What your lead magnet teaches or what your subscribers will learn from it? o What will they achieve or overcome by consuming your lead magnet? o What pain points or problems does your lead magnet solve? o What desires or motivations does your lead magnet fulfill? o What mini transformation does it give? • Testimonials for social proof • A screenshot, mock-up, or visual of your lead magnet Note: You want to convert these benefits into 3–7 bullet points. These bullet points should begin with an action verb, with “how to” or “why,” or with a number. They should also include specific details such as page numbers or time stamps in videos where key information is found. For example, • How a 20-minute video recording turned into my first digital product that brought in $36,429.56 in the first month • 13 limiting beliefs that keep 99% of people from ever launching their ecommerce store—and how to beat them (Hint: You’re probably suffering from at least 5 of these) – pg. 3 • The ONLY two blogging rules ever (seriously, if you ignore these it will take you YEARS to launch your blog and business!) – 1min 37sec Your landing page should be a reflection of the words and sentences your target audience uses to describe their pain points. When it does, your target audience recognizes and identifies with the problem. Your lead magnet also becomes immediately more attractive.

If you don’t know anything about the business, launch it through the Marketplace, bring retailers in, watch what they do and what they sell, understand it, and then get into it.

The easiest way to describe how to harness the galvanizing power of why is with a tool I call the belief statement. For example, most of Apple’s product launches in recent years feature slick videos with commentary from Apple designers, engineers, and executives. These videos, while camouflaged as beautiful product showcases, are actually packed with statements not about what the products do but about the design thinking behind them: in essence, the tightly held beliefs with which Apple’s design team operates. We believe our users should be at the center of everything we do. We believe that a piece of technology should be as beautiful as it is functional. We believe that making devices thinner and lighter but more powerful requires innovative problem solving. Belief statements like these are so compelling for two reasons. First, the right corporate or organizational beliefs have the ability to resonate with our personal belief systems and feelings, and move us to action. In fact, the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study revealed that nearly two out of three people are now belief-driven buyers.4 And as we saw in our discussion of buyers’ emotional motivators in chapter 3, this works even if the beliefs stated are aspirational. For example, if my vision for my future self is someone who weighs a few pounds less and is in better physical shape, a well-timed ad from a health club or fancy kitchen blender evangelizing the benefits of a healthy lifestyle may be enough to rapidly convert me. In the case of Apple, the same phenomenon results in mobs of smitten consumers arriving at stores in droves, braving long lines and paying premium prices, as if to say, “Yes! I do believe I should be at the center of everything you do! Technology should be beautiful! Thinner? Lighter? More powerful? Of course! We share the same vision! We’re both cool!” (Although these actual words are rarely spoken aloud.) The second reason belief statements are so compelling is because they help us manifest the conviction and emotion critical to delivering our message in an authentic way.

The New Anthem For thirty days, every morning and every night, find a mirror, stand up straight, and confidently say the following out loud: I, [your name], choose my thoughts. I know that doing my best starts with thinking my best. Like laying a path for an adventure, these thoughts will set the course for my actions. I’m confident that what I think matters. I’m excited to see what happens next. I’m disciplined and dedicated to stick with it. Here are ten things I know: Today is brand-new and tomorrow is too. I’ve got a gift worth giving. The only person standing in my way is me, and I quit doing that yesterday. I am the CEO of me, and I am the best boss. Winning is contagious. When I help others win, I win too. Feeling uncomfortable is just a sign that my old comfort zone is having a hard time keeping up with me. Momentum is messy. Everything is always working out for me. I am my biggest fan. The best response to obstacles is to do it anyway. In the morning I’ve pulled the slingshot back. I’m not leaving this room, I’m launching from it, ready for a day of untold opportunities. I’ve packed honesty, generosity, laughter, and bravery for the road ahead. Watch out, world! It’s time to step up, step out, and step in. In the evening What a day! The best part is I left myself a lot of fun things to work on tomorrow. When my head hits that pillow, I’m off the clock, storing up energy and excitement for a brand-new day.

Now Where Do You Find Customers? When novice entrepreneurs search for opportunities, they too often look beyond their Zone of Influence. They think the action is happening somewhere else, in some other location or industry. But seasoned entrepreneurs almost always find and create opportunities within the context of who they are, what they know, and especially who they know. In each of the examples above, the business validation process begins with potential customers in the entrepreneur’s orbit. Actual people with names. Tribes you belong to or are interested in, most of whom are already self-organized online. People you know how to reach, today. Though it’s rarely a part of their official origin stories, the biggest companies in the world—even the viral apps now worth billions—started through personal networks and real human connections. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a weekend by emailing friends to use it. Version 1 did well, validating it. And Microsoft started with Bill Gates building software for a guy in Albuquerque. He had a CUSTOMER FIRST. In the beginning, founders should reach out to their friends, their former colleagues, their communities. You may think your business is unique, but trust me, it’s not. Every successful business can start this way. For example, Anahita loves her dogs and wanted healthier snacks for them. She started taking her homemade organic dog treats to her local dog park. She would sell out every time. A year later she now has a store called the Barkery, a dog bakery. Before you even think about picking a business idea, make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help. An easy way to do this is to think about where you have easy access to a targeted group of people whom you really want to help—like, say, new moms in Austin, cyclists, freelance writers, and taco obsessives (like me!). CHALLENGE Top three groups. Let’s write out your top three groups to target. Who do you have easy access to that you’d be EXCITED to help? This can be your neighbors, colleagues, religious friends, golf buddies, cooking friends, etc. The better you understand your target group, the better you can speak to them. The more specifically you can speak to their problems, the better and easier you can sell (or test products). Note how this process prioritizes communication with people, through starting (taking the first iteration of your solution straight to customers) and asking (engaging them in a conversation to determine how your solution can best fix their problem). Business creation should always be a conversation! Nearly every impulse we have is to be tight with our ideas by doing more research, going off alone to build the perfect product—anything and everything to avoid the discomfort of asking for money. This is the validation shortcut. You have to learn to fight through this impulse. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it.

As my dad and I entered the tenth local shop that afternoon, I felt my muscles go tight with a full body cringe. He’d just asked to speak to the manager in an Israeli accent as thick as hummus. Sounding identical to Arnold Schwarzenegger. “I don’t get it.” His voice boomed enthusiastically after he was introduced to the store’s boss. “You live in greatest country in world, and you have greatest business in sector, but you still have a crappy copier. Why? I must help you. Here, I gave much better, let me show!” His pitch would be met with a rejection. And then another rejection. Countless rejections. Rinse and repeat. Every. Damn. Day. But then, invariably, inevitably, a hard-won success. This particular day was glorious, though. Absolutely glorious. He sold two copiers in one day! So Dad said let’s go celebrate and grab some burritos! “Why you look so sad, Noah?” he said as we sat down to eat. Although I should have been riding on the adrenaline of my dad’s glorious day, something felt wrong. Despite his ultimate success, the process of getting there felt demoralizing and pointless. I shook my head. “So many noes. No, no, no, no. All day. Doesn’t it make you want to quit?” I asked. My dad replied with something that would change my life: “Love rejections! Collect them like treasure! Set rejection goals. I shoot for a hundred rejections each week, because if you work that hard to get so many noes, my little Noah’le, in them you will find a few yeses, too.” Maybe that’s why he named me NO-ah, to remind me of this daily to keep going. Love rejections?! Set rejection goals?! My dad reframed rejection as something desirable—so you feel good when you get it. He was saying aim for rejection! It was suddenly clear to me why my dad was never afraid to ask anyone anything—and why he pushed for a hundred rejections a week: the upside of asking is unlimited and the downside is minimal. And he was right! “What’s the worst that can happen?” he’d say whenever I cringed at someone turning him down. “So they said no. Who cares! And the upside of making sales is unlimited.

Here are four examples of Lead Magnets I use: A checklist that can be used to properly perform something I explained in a video. A template for determining, say, a business’s profit margin. An advanced guide that goes further into the details of a subject of one of my videos. A unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free. For me, it is 11 Side Hustle Ideas to Make $500/Day from Your Phone. The appropriate opt-in incentive depends on your content. Here are other types of examples: A DIY carpenter could offer plans to make a corner table. A marketing YouTuber could offer scripts of what to say on sales phone calls. A landscaping expert might offer recommendations for which kinds of grass to use around the United States. YouTuber Nick True at Mapped Out Money, who makes video tutorials that teach the best practices for using the personal budgeting software YNAB, found that he gets the highest sign-up rates when he offers a checklist that relates to the video. His followers really like having a resource that they can use to put his advice into practice. Jess Dante of Love and London runs a YouTube channel helping viewers plan their trips to London by suggesting lesser-known restaurants and stores to visit. Her superstar opt-in incentive is a free London 101 Guide with everything a first-time visitor needs to know. It’s been downloaded more than 45,000 times. Where you make your call to action will also have an impact on your success building your email list. You can make your call to action in a variety of places or ways inside your videos. One of the best ways is to give a short, relevant tease of the bonus or resource you’re offering within the YouTube video and tell people where they can learn more. CHALLENGE Create a Lead Magnet. It’s time to create your first Lead Magnet using the process we’ve just outlined above. You can use your piece of content from the previous chapter as a base or start something new. Don’t spend more than two hours on the first iteration. If you want to turn it into a big thing later on, great. But start SMALL. Go to MillionDollarWeekend.com to get Lead Magnet templates! (See what I did there?)

Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.

The result is that most banks will eventually rationalise down to just one store for every 250,000 people—or one store for every large town, city and shopping centre—rather than the current structure which allocates about one store for every 20,000 people. The question then is this: What do you do with the 80 per cent of stores that are no longer needed? The ones in the suburbs and smaller high streets? The answer is that you replace them with satellite self-service hub stations, which allow people to self-serve with ATMs and deposit machines.

In other words, retailing has moved from selling products or services in stores to using the stores as a method of building a sense of community around the brand. A sense of belonging. A sense of ownership. A sense of loyalty.

The issue today is that branches were not designed for this purpose. They were designed to look after money and process monetary transactions. They were designed to handle physical forms of cash and cheques, as secure transaction centres. This is the core reason why everyone thinks that branches will disappear because they are not retail stores, engaging the brand community, but instead transaction centres run like some administration process.

This focus on humans rather than money is best illustrated by the Apple store concept, which was the first to include the Genius Bar, a children’s play area and other features that critics thought were a waste of time. When the first Apple store designs were announced, Bloomberg reported: “(Steve) Jobs thinks he can do a better job than experienced retailers. Problem is, the numbers don’t add up. I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.”15 However, after opening, it was obvious that the stores were engaging customers in an even more immersive, brand building experience. Eight years later, Apple’s New York store became the highest grossing retailer on Fifth Avenue.

There is no more potent reminder of the power of customer reaction than lines at the Apple store in the days leading up to a new product launch. And consider the reach of billions of email messages sent every year that are signed off with “Sent from my iPhone.

The British public first fell in love with Jamie Oliver’s authentic, down-to-earth personality in the late ‘90s when he was featured in a documentary on the River Café. Jamie became a household name because of his energetic and infectious way of inspiring people to believe that anyone can cook and eat well. In his TV shows and cookery books and on his website, he made the concept of cooking good food practical and accessible to anyone. When Jamie Oliver opened a new restaurant in Perth, it naturally caused a bit of a buzz. High-profile personalities and big brands create an air of expectation. Brands like Jamie Oliver are talked about not just because of their fame and instant recognition, but because they have meaning attached to them. And people associate Jamie with simplicity, inclusiveness, energy, and creativity. If you’re one of the first people to have the experience of eating at the new Jamie’s Italian, then you’ve instantly got a story that you can share with your friends. The stories we tell to others (and to ourselves) are the reason that people were prepared to queue halfway down the street when Jamie’s Italian opened the doors to its Perth restaurant in March of 2013. As with pre-iPhone launch lines at the Apple store, the reaction of customers frames the scarcity of the experience. When you know there’s a three-month wait for a dinner booking (there is, although 50% of the restaurant is reserved for walk-ins), it feels like a win to be one of the few to have a booking. The reaction of other people makes the story better in the eyes of prospective diners. The hype and the scarcity just heighten the anticipation of the experience. People don’t go just for the food; they go for the story they can tell. Jamie told the UK press that 30,000 napkins are stolen from branches of his restaurant every month. Customers were also stealing expensive toilet flush handles until Jamie had them welded on. The loss of the linen and toilet fittings might impact Jamie’s profits, but it also helps to create the myth of the brand. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How would you like customers to react to your brand?

1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks).

Cyclists thus found their hobby not as pleasant as it could be, to say the least, and the League of American Wheelmen committed to doing something about it. A year after Fisher opened his store, the league launched a magazine, Good Roads, that became an influential mouthpiece for road improvement. Its articles were widely reprinted, which attracted members who didn’t even own bikes; at the group’s peak, Fisher and more than 102,000 others were on the rolls, and the Good Roads Movement was too big for politicians to ignore. Yes, the demand for roads was pedal-powered, and a national cause even before the first practical American car rolled out of a Chicopee, Massachusetts, shop in 1893. A few months ahead of the Duryea Motor Wagon’s debut, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to “make inquiry regarding public roads” and to investigate how they might be improved.

For each input source, Spark Streaming launches receivers, which are tasks running within the application’s executors that collect data from the input source and save it as RDDs. These receive the input data and replicate it (by default) to another executor for fault tolerance. This data is stored in the memory of the executors in the same way as cached RDDs.1

been finished. A month after the launch, Alan Atlas recalled, it crashed for nine hours, and hardly anyone in the outside world

As we moved along in the seventies, we had very definitely become an effective retail entity, and we had set the stage for the even more phenomenal growth that was going to follow. It’s amazing that our competitors didn’t catch on to us quicker and try harder to stop us. Whenever we put a Wal-Mart store into a town, customers would just flock to us from the variety stores. It didn’t take those stores long to figure out that if they were going to stay in business against this thing Wal-Mart had created, they were going to have to go into it themselves. And most of them did eventually convert to discounting. Kuhn’s Big K became a discount chain. Sterling launched its Magic Mart discount chain. And Duckwall went into discounting. Now, most of these guys already had distribution centers and systems in place, while we had to build one from scratch. So on paper we really didn’t stand a chance. What happened was that they didn’t really commit to discounting. They held on to their old variety store concepts too long. They were so accustomed to getting their 45 percent markup, they never let go. It was hard for them to take a blouse they’d been selling for $8.00, and sell it for $5.00, and only make 30 percent. With our low costs, our low expense structures, and our low prices, we were ending an era in the heartland. We shut the door on variety store thinking.

I wonder what the future has in store for the two of them.” Lucetta’s mention of the future had Bram pausing for a moment, realizing that with all the insanity of the past week or so, they’d not had much time to talk about anything, let alone what either of them wanted for the future. “Even though I was disappointed with the explanation behind the supposed ghosts at Ravenwood, you have to admit that some of what Mrs. Macmillan told you would make good fodder for a new book,” Lucetta continued, pulling him from his thoughts. “Readers would especially like the part about a hidden treasure, although, in my humble opinion, the hero should get caught trying to find it and . . .” As Lucetta continued musing about different plot points, it suddenly hit him how absolutely wonderful life would be if he could spend it with the amazing lady standing right next to him. That she was beautiful, there could be no doubt, but her true beauty wasn’t physical in nature, it was soul-deep—seen in the way she treated her friends, animals, and even a mother who’d brushed her aside for a man who was less than worthy. She’d been through so much, and yet, here she was, contemplating his work and what could help him, and . . . he wanted to give her a spectacular gesture, something that would show her exactly how special he found her. She’d been on her own for far too long, and during that time, she’d decided she didn’t need anyone else, or rather, she wouldn’t need anyone because that could cause her pain—pain she’d experienced when her father had left her, and then when her mother had done the same thing by choosing Nigel. “. . . and I know that you seem to be keen on the whole pirate idea, but really, Bram, if you’d create a hero who is more on the intelligent side, less on the race to the rescue of the damsel in distress side, well, I mean, I’m no author, but . . .” As she stopped for just a second to gulp in a breath of air, and then immediately launched back into a conversation she didn’t seem to realize he wasn’t participating in, Bram got the most intriguing and romantic idea he’d ever imagined. Taking a single step closer to Lucetta, he leaned down and kissed her still-moving lips. When she finally stopped talking and let out the smallest of sighs, he deepened the kiss, reluctantly pulling away from her a moment later. “I know this is going to seem rather peculiar,” he began. “But I need to go to work right this very minute.” “Work?” she repeated faintly. “Indeed, and I do hope you won’t get too annoyed by this, but I need to get started straightaway, which means you might want to go back to the theater so that you don’t get bored.” “You want me gone from Ravenwood?” she asked in a voice that had gone from faint to irritated in less than a second. “I don’t know if I’d put it quite like that, but I might be able to work faster without you around.” He sent her a smile, kissed her again, but when he started getting too distracted with the softness of her lips, pulled back, kissed the tip of her nose, and then . . . after telling her he’d see her before too long, headed straight back into his dungeon.

In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.

The breakthrough came in 1944 when John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician living in the United States, advanced the concept of a stored program. The idea was familiar to others in the field, but von Neumann saw its significance most clearly. With a stored program, the instructions for the computer could be kept in the machine’s own memory and treated in the same way as data. This would make it far quicker to launch a program and easier to modify it or switch from one program to another. As

Now look,” he said. He felt the back collar of his shirt and jacket clutched in an iron grip and he whirled on the giant, hitting him square in the jaw with his fist. He suspected he’d broken his hand, but no way was he letting on. He did wince in pain, however, while the very large man merely turned his brick of a face to the side. “You shouldn’t’a done that, little man,” the guy said. It took him roughly one second to draw back his fist and plaster Sean in the face hard enough to send him reeling into the melons. Then to the floor. Sean saw a lot of stars and was aware of the melons as they began to bounce around the produce section. And there was blood—he wasn’t sure where from since his entire face felt as if it had been through a meat grinder. “Hey!” Franci shouted. “What’s the matter with you? I told you to leave it alone, he’s harmless!” “No good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” the big man said. “It looked like you needed help. Maybe you like being grabbed like that in the grocery store, huh, babe?” Sean muttered something about not being harmless and tried to get to his feet, without success. The big man said, “Just stay down where you are, buster.” But Sean was intent on getting up and he’d just about made it to his feet when the man took two giant steps in his direction. That was all it took for Franci to launch herself on the lumberjack with a cry of outrage. She had her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist and screamed bloody murder while pummeling him on the back. “I. Told. You. To. Leave. Him. Alone!” she shrieked. Paul Bunyan whirled around and around, trying to shake her loose, but she was on him like a tick on a hound. Then the scene got a lot more interesting. “No! No! No! No! No!” screamed a store manager, running up to them, followed closely by another man and a couple of young bag boys. A crowd gathered and the grocery employees peeled Franci off the lumberjack, but she was kicking her heart out the whole time. “The police are coming!” the store manager yelled. “Stop this at once! Stop!” And Sean absently thought, This really isn’t going how I planned. Right

Mind the App: Just days after the original Android Marketplace app store launched, thousands of people happily downloaded their bank's new Android apps. After entering their account numbers and passwords, the apps failed to work as promised leading angry customers to call their banks. When they reached customer service, the banks advised "we don’t have an Android app." Whoops! In turned out, criminals had created and uploaded fake banking apps—designed with the bank’s own logos in order to to extract sensitive financial information. Many apps stores, particularly third-party sites, are essentially the Wild West. In fact, by 2013, more than 42,000 apps—many of them targeted at children who think they’re simply downloading a free game—in Google's Play store had been found to contain spyware and information-stealing Trojan programs. Pay close attention to the apps you and your family download, particularly their permission settings. They are generally "free" for a reason and you're paying with your privacy—or worse. If a flashlight app tells you it needs access to your location and contacts, run the other way!

Home Foods Store is a leading grocery retailer that has recently launched its e-commerce platform, RudcaFood, to cater to the growing demand for online grocery shopping. The website offers a wide range of fresh produce, pantry staples, and specialty items, all sourced from trusted suppliers and farmers. With RudcaFood, customers can enjoy the convenience of shopping from home while still receiving high-quality, locally sourced food. The website features an intuitive interface, easy navigation, and secure payment options, making it simple for customers to find and purchase the products they need. Additionally, Home Foods Store is committed to sustainability and reducing its carbon footprint, so customers can feel good about their purchases and their impact on the environment. Overall, RudcaFood is a valuable resource for anyone looking to save time and support local farmers while still enjoying the convenience of online shopping.

Counterparty is a cryptocommodity that runs atop Bitcoin, and was launched in January 2014 with a similar intent as Ethereum. It has a fixed supply of 2.6 million units of its native asset, XCP, which were all created upon launch. As described on Counterparty’s website, “Counterparty enables anyone to write specific digital agreements, or programs known as Smart Contracts, and execute them on the Bitcoin blockchain.”7 Since Bitcoin allows for small amounts of data to be transmitted in transactions and stored on Bitcoin’s blockchain, it becomes the system of record for Counterparty’s more flexible functionality. Since Counterparty relies upon Bitcoin, it does not have its own mining ecosystem.

When clerks and truck drivers tried to join unions and Wal-Mart ruthlessly crushed them, firing anyone foolish enough to speak out, Mr. Sam would come around afterward and apologize to any associates who felt ill-treated, vowing to do better, and some of them said that if only Mr. Sam knew what was going on, things wouldn’t be so bad. When the departure of factory jobs for overseas turned into a flood, Mr. Sam launched a Buy American campaign, winning praise from politicians and newspapers around the country, and Wal-Mart stores put up MADE IN THE U.S.A. signs over racks of clothing imported from Bangladesh, and consumers didn’t stop to consider that Wal-Mart was driving American manufacturers overseas or out of business by demanding killingly low prices.

What happened in 1970 in Los Angeles was the worst economic episode I’ve ever had to fight through. Unlike the post–Cold War Recession, we did not have the waves of in-migration from Mexico, nor were drug sales as great. I believe the underground economy was a silent savior of Los Angeles during 1990–94. The Kent State Massacre and the Pentagon Papers scandal didn’t help the 1970 scene. Furthermore, things didn’t get better in the early 1970s. The sharp recession of 1970 was followed by a sudden inflation caused by Vietnam spending. Nixon “slammed the gold window shut.” From 1945 to 1971, the U.S., under the Bretton Woods Agreement, had agreed to back its currency to a limited extent with gold at $35 per ounce. Other nations’ central banks were withdrawing our gold so fast that Nixon had to renege on the promise. This was followed in 1973 by the end of fixed currency exchange rates. The dollar plummeted. Traveling to the wine country of France in the summer of 1973, I was unable to cash American Express dollar-denominated traveler’s checks. Inflation jumped with the 1973 Energy Crisis. Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Then Watergate, accompanied by the Dow Jones hitting bottom in 1974. Three Initiatives to Turn the Tide Against all this, Trader Joe’s mounted three initiatives. In chronological order: We launched the Fearless Flyer early in 1970. We broke the price of imported wines in late 1970 thanks to a loophole in the Fair Trade law. Most importantly, in 1971, we married the health food store to the Good Time Charley party store, which had been the 1967–70 version of Trader Joe’s. Together these three elements comprised the second version of Trader Joe’s, Whole Earth Harry.

When examined through the lens of Meerkat’s Law and the central framework of this book, it is obvious why the resulting networks generated by big launches are weak. You’d rather have a smaller set of atomic networks that are denser and more engaged than a large number of networks that aren’t there. When a networked product depends on having other people in order to be useful, it’s better to ignore the top-line aggregate numbers. Instead, the quality of the traction can only be seen when you zoom all the way into the perspective of an individual user within the network. Does a new person who joins the product see value based on how many other users are already on it? You might as well ignore the aggregate numbers, and in particular the spike of users that a new product might see in its first days. As Eric Ries describes in his book The Lean Startup, these are “vanity metrics.” The numbers might make you feel good, especially when they are going up, but it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred million users if they are churning out at a high rate, due to a lack of other users engaging. When networks are built bottom-up, they are more likely to be densely interconnected, and thus healthier and more engaged. There are multiple reasons for this: A new product is often incubated within a subcommunity, whether that’s a college campus, San Francisco techies, gamers, or freelancers—as recent tech successes have shown. It will grow within this group before spreading into other verticals, allowing time for its developers to tune features like inviting or sharing, while honing the core value proposition. Once a new networked product is spreading via word of mouth, then each user is likely to know at least one other user already on the network. By the time it reaches the broader consciousness, it will be seen as a phenomenon, and top-down efforts can always be added on to scale a network that’s already big and engaged. If Big Bang Launches work so poorly in general, why do they work for Apple? This type of launch works for Apple because their core offerings can stand alone as premium, high-utility products that generally don’t need to construct new networks to function. At most, they tap into existing networks like email and SMS. Famously, Apple has not succeeded with social offerings like the now-defunct Game Center and Ping. The closest new networked product they’ve launched is arguably the App Store, but even that was initially not in Steve Jobs’s vision for the phone.87 Most important, though, you aren’t Apple. So don’t try to copy them without having their kinds of products.

we reflect his image most clearly when we do things his way. His divine design reveals his desire for the kind of intimate parent-child relationship with his children that we long for in our human families, whether we're the parent or the child. Like a proud parent, he envisioned taking pleasure in seeing us launch out boldly on the grand adventure he had in store for us, delighting in our relentless curiosity as we explore the world he created and put to use the good giftst he planted inside us. He anticipated the satisfaction of giving a hearty 'Well done!' to each of his children at the end of our journeys.

A TikTok clone app script is a pre-built software solution that allows you to create a short-form video sharing app that is similar to TikTok in terms of features and functionality. TikTok clone scripts are typically much less expensive than developing a custom app from scratch, and they can be deployed quickly, allowing you to launch your video sharing app in a short amount of time. TikTok clone scripts are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the platform to your specific needs. For example, you can change the branding of the app, add or remove features, and integrate your own monetization strategies. Here are some of the key features that you should look for in a TikTok clone app script: • Video recording and editing: The script should allow users to record and edit short-form videos. Editing features should include trimming, cropping, adding music and effects, and more. • Social features: The script should include social features such as following other users, liking and commenting on videos, and creating and participating in challenges. • Content moderation: The script should have robust content moderation systems in place to prevent the spread of harmful or offensive content. • Monetization options: The script should support a variety of monetization options, such as in-app advertising, subscription fees, and virtual goods. Once you have chosen a TikTok clone app script, you will need to work with a development team to customize the script and deploy your app. The development team will also help you to set up your monetization strategies and launch your app on the App Store and Google Play.

Simon Doiban is a name that is synonymous with the beauty industry. As a serial entrepreneur, Doiban has made a name for himself by launching and scaling successful beauty businesses. From his early beginnings in the industry to his current role as a beauty industry advisor, Doiban has demonstrated an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that has enabled him to succeed in a highly competitive market. Doiban’s journey in Miami in the beauty industry began when he launched his first beauty startup, a Beauty Spa with updated technology. The startup was an instant hit and quickly gained a large following. However, Doiban was not content with just one successful business. He went on to launch several other beauty startups, each one building on the success of the previous one. Following the example of the first business, he launch a second location of the Beauty Spa in one of the most concurrent zones in Miami, Brickell City Center. This marked the beginning of Doiban’s career as a serial entrepreneur in the beauty industry in Miami Area. Over the years, Doiban has launched and scaled several other beauty startups, each one building on the success of the previous one. His latest venture is a beauty consulting academy. The company has been praised for its innovative approach to beauty and has already gained a large following. Doiban’s success in the beauty industry can be attributed to his entrepreneurial spirit and his willingness to take risks. He has a deep understanding of the beauty market and has been able to identify gaps in the market that he can fill with his innovative products and services. He has also been able to build a loyal following of customers who trust his brand and appreciate the high-quality products that he provides. In conclusion, Simon Doiban is a serial entrepreneur who has made a name for himself in the beauty industry. His innovative and entrepreneurial spirit has enabled him to launch and scale successful beauty businesses, and his latest venture is set to revolutionize the beauty industry even further. As the beauty industry continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see what Doiban has in store for us next.

Email marketing​ - Print media ads​ - Facebook shop section​ - Reddit advertising - Affiliate marketing - Instagram ​ - Pinterest - Facebook audiences - Blogging - YouTube - Gift guides - Pop-up shops

With this morning’s launch of the nation’s first internet DVD rental store, every DVD owner—no matter where he lives, no matter how far he lives from a video rental store—is now guaranteed access to every DVD title available—to buy or to rent.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, was watching everything in real-time. Information didn't spread from one place to another. It was put online, and then it was everywhere. One day, a rumor spread that grocery store up the street might close. The next evening, when Tom drove by, he found the building completely empty. Every ounce of food had been taken, and every window had been smashed. And he realized the feedback loop was complete. It no longer mattered what the truth was. It only mattered what people thought it was. The media fought disinformation the only way it knew how: with ideology. When the president launched a plan to suspend habeas corpus and began requisitioning private property, the media began its push to pass it. When that failed, academics and psychologists took to the airwaves to explain how, under duress, people become overcome by cognitive bias and bigotry. Studies emerged noting the correlation between obsession over keeping one's property and authoritarian political thought. When the government began confiscating weapons, other studies appeared showing the scientific link between private gun ownership and racist fear of minorities. Then a report came out that federal employees has been seizing food from packaging centers in New York and Pennsylvania. They were shipping it out of starving communities. Everyone realized something then. Despite its claims otherwise, their government wasn't saving them. It was competing with them.

Week 1: Build an Arsenal of Ideas Day 1: Predict the Future Day 2: Learn How Money Grows on Trees Day 3: Brainstorm, Borrow, or Steal Ideas Day 4: Weigh the Obstacles and Opportunities of Each Idea Day 5: Forecast Your Profit on the Back of a Napkin Week 2: Select Your Best Idea Day 6: Use the Side Hustle Selector to Compare Ideas Day 7: Become a Detective Day 8: Have Imaginary Coffee with Your Ideal Customer Day 9: Transform Your Idea into an Offer Day 10: Create Your Origins Story Week 3: Prepare for Liftoff Day 11: Assemble the Nuts and Bolts Day 12: Decide How to Price Your Offer Day 13: Create a Side Hustle Shopping List Day 14: Set Up a Way to Get Paid Day 15: Design Your First Workflow Day 16: Spend 10 Percent More Time on the Most Important Tasks Week 4: Launch Your Idea to the Right People Day 17: Publish Your Offer! Day 18: Sell Like a Girl Scout Day 19: Ask Ten People for Help Day 20: Test, Test, and Test Again Day 21: Burn Down the Furniture Store Day 22: Frame Your First Dollar Week 5: Regroup and Refine Day 23: Track Your Progress and Decide on Next Steps Day 24: Grow What Works, Let Go of What Doesn’t Day 25: Look for Money Lying Under a Rock Day 26: Get It Out of Your Head Day 27: Back to the Future

Moteefee, a platform founded in 2015 and that currently has 2,500 micro-retailers and entrepreneurs, recently raised 4.5 million euros that will be used for further business expansion. According to PaySpace Magazine, Moteefe has raised €4.5 million in a Series A round led by Gresham House and Force Over Mass Capital. The platform for on-demand production of merchandise aims to use the money for further expansion worldwide. What is more, it plans to launch new products for large retailers and scale its operations. Moteefe enables influencers and retailers to create custom and personalized merchandise and then sell them around the world. The Dutch company takes care of the printing, the store, the payment, the customer service, and the fulfillment, charging a commission for every sale. In 2019, Moteefe was the UK’s fastest-growing e-commerce company with revenue growth of over 9,000 percent between 2015 and 2018.

Infinity Packaging Solutions specializes in Laminate Boxes, Setup Boxes, Chipboard Boxes and much more. Packaging solutions for all of your retail, industrial, and point of purchase packaging needs.Take advantage of our award-winning designers to create an impactful and successful packaging design for an existing product or a new product launch. We are the next and final step to seeing your product displayed on the shelves at the club stores, grocery, and retail chains.

To fill two and a half times as many seats, an airline needs two and a half times as many passengers. Pan Am’s lock on international travel, however, had been weakening. Congress had launched an antitrust investigation of Pan Am’s monopoly on foreign routes in the 1950s. Populist voices complained that regulators were protecting industry giants rather than consumers. Some of the loudest complaints came from startups—Texas Air, Braniff, and, eventually, Southwest Airlines. The startups also brought new ideas to the industry. Hub and spoke. Flying to secondary airports. Reducing turnaround times to 20 minutes. Like Sam Walton’s supersized stores far outside cities, none of the ideas involved new technologies. They were all small changes in strategy that no one thought would amount to much. They were all S-type loonshots.

There are five ways technology can boost marketing practices: Make more informed decisions based on big data. The greatest side product of digitalization is big data. In the digital context, every customer touchpoint—transaction, call center inquiry, and email exchange—is recorded. Moreover, customers leave footprints every time they browse the Internet and post something on social media. Privacy concerns aside, those are mountains of insights to extract. With such a rich source of information, marketers can now profile the customers at a granular and individual level, allowing one-to-one marketing at scale. Predict outcomes of marketing strategies and tactics. No marketing investment is a sure bet. But the idea of calculating the return on every marketing action makes marketing more accountable. With artificial intelligence–powered analytics, it is now possible for marketers to predict the outcome before launching new products or releasing new campaigns. The predictive model aims to discover patterns from previous marketing endeavors and understand what works, and based on the learning, recommend the optimized design for future campaigns. It allows marketers to stay ahead of the curve without jeopardizing the brands from possible failures. Bring the contextual digital experience to the physical world. The tracking of Internet users enables digital marketers to provide highly contextual experiences, such as personalized landing pages, relevant ads, and custom-made content. It gives digital-native companies a significant advantage over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Today, the connected devices and sensors—the Internet of Things—empowers businesses to bring contextual touchpoints to the physical space, leveling the playing field while facilitating seamless omnichannel experience. Sensors enable marketers to identify who is coming to the stores and provide personalized treatment. Augment frontline marketers’ capacity to deliver value. Instead of being drawn into the machine-versus-human debate, marketers can focus on building an optimized symbiosis between themselves and digital technologies. AI, along with NLP, can improve the productivity of customer-facing operations by taking over lower-value tasks and empowering frontline personnel to tailor their approach. Chatbots can handle simple, high-volume conversations with an instant response. AR and VR help companies deliver engaging products with minimum human involvement. Thus, frontline marketers can concentrate on delivering highly coveted social interactions only when they need to. Speed up marketing execution. The preferences of always-on customers constantly change, putting pressure on businesses to profit from a shorter window of opportunity. To cope with such a challenge, companies can draw inspiration from the agile practices of lean startups. These startups rely heavily on technology to perform rapid market experiments and real-time validation.

Dubsmash hit the number-one spot in the German app store just seven days after launch.

When the iPhone was launched in 2007, Apple did not yet have its App Store,

Zara has a highly sophisticated feedback system, allowing store managers to instantly report back customer feedback on new products. Customers may say they like the dress, but the shade of red is too bright. Feedback on the length, zipper, and other factors are gathered and evaluated in real time back at headquarters, and adjustments are made in a matter of hours. The next week, after implementing design changes based on customer feedback, a new 4,200 red dresses ship to the network of stores. Only after a series of improvements are made and customer demand has been validated is the dress mass-produced. Where most clothing manufacturers produce only a few dozen new styles each year, Zara launched over 12,000 new items annually.

If you want something you’ve never had, you must do something you’ve never done. Most people’s dreams are bigger than their nine-to-five paychecks. Which means if you have big vision, strong calling, or a desire to make huge change, your job by itself likely won’t fund it. Something must change. For us, it meant self-employment. For you, it might simply require adding an income stream, launching an online store, or making an investment. Either way, big change demands two things: time and money. If you’re stuck under a financial ceiling and chained to an emotionless forty-hour work week, you might be clipping your own wings. Escaping the prison of the professional employee isn’t easy. Make a plan and attack it. And chip away at the concrete that holds you in. You only get one life. Don’t spend it inside the walls of a job that’s holding you back.

John Deco became the basis of our marketing campaign. We decided to throw John Deco a homecoming party as our launch event. We invited a lot of brokers for food and drinks, and gave out fancy gifts from Tiffany & Co. and Hermès, making sure everyone knew that both of those stores were located right in the area. See what a great neighborhood this is!? Now people were talking about the building. Suddenly, instead of calling the building 99 John, brokers started referring to it as “the John Deco building.” It was no longer just a bunch of units being converted into condos—now everyone knew about the building’s rich history because we had created a story to showcase it to potential buyers. We got our first three offers the next day.

Zara takes only two weeks to develop a new product and get it into stores—the industry average is six months—and launches over ten thousand new designs per year, a rate several times that of competitors like H&M and Gap. Zara holds just six days of inventory, while rival H&M holds nearly ten times as much.

Curran tensed, his whole body compressing like a tight spring, and leaped onto a six-foot-high concrete boulder. He landed light and straightened, his gaze fixed on the crumbling corpse of the big-box store. His broad shoulders and the line of his back curved slightly. The wind pulled on his sweats, revealing a glimpse of his hard body, muscles ready to launch him at some unseen threat in an instant. That potential power was like a magnet. If I didn’t know him and I was driving by, I would’ve stopped to get a second look, trying to figure out who that scary hot bastard was. I would go home with him tonight. Go me. Okay. There was something seriously wrong with me. First, I was staring at him like some sort of love-struck idiot. Second, I was doing it while sitting in the middle of the street with the motor running. If another vehicle came barreling down the road, I’d get to experience the fun and excitement of a head-on collision. I pulled the car to the curb. It was a consequence of the blood loss. Sure. That was it.

Sean Parker: Prior to the release of Napster, prior to that pivotal moment, the web was one-way. It was a client-server model, you accessed information that was stored on a server. It was very much this broadcast model where individuals passively consumed what had been published. It wasn’t a two-way street. But the moment Napster launched, you were fully utilizing the capabilities of the internet. Everybody was sharing content. Everybody was downloading content. Everything is interactive. That was the original potential of the internet. Napster was ahead of its time.

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The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

That summer, Harrison Miller and Bezos butted heads in front of the board of directors over the size of the bet on toys. Bezos wanted Miller to plow $120 million into stocking every possible toy, from Barbie dolls to rare German-made wooden trains to cheap plastic beach pails, so that kids and parents would never be disappointed when they searched for an item on Amazon. But a prescient Miller, sensing disaster ahead, pushed to lower his own buy. “No! No! A hundred and twenty million!” Bezos yelled. “I want it all. If I have to, I will drive it to the landfill myself!” “Jeff, you drive a Honda Accord,” Joy Covey pointed out. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.” Bezos prevailed. And the company would make a sizable contribution to Toys for Tots after the holidays that year. “That first holiday season was the best of times and the worst of times,” Miller says. “The store was great for customers and we made our revenue goals, which were big, but other than that everything that could go wrong did. In the aftermath we were sitting on fifty million dollars of toy inventory. I had guys going down the back stairs with ‘Vinnie’ in New York, selling Digimons off to Mexico at twenty cents on the dollar. You just had to get rid of them, fast.” The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics

That became a greater concern in January 1997, when Barnes & Noble entered into an agreement to become the exclusive bookseller on America Online, where it would have access to AOL’s more than 8 million subscribers. Like Amazon.com, B&N boasted a database of more than 1 million titles, speedy delivery of about half a million books and 30 percent discounts off the cover price of hardcover books—a steeper discount than it offered to customers who shopped in its stores. B&N also announced that it was going to launch its own website in early spring 1997 after hiring a staff of 50.

I scan the timeline, scribbled on the back of some old homework, detailing everything that happened from the moment I picked her up for school in the morning. Her classes, after-school practice with the team, the fight with her parents, me picking her up at her house at just after 10 p.m., the boat launch, the stop she made at the convenience store right before midnight, and finally the cops finding her phone by the side of the road the next morning.

I never thought I’d be telling this story, but as Sarah Johnson’s ex-lover, I’ve had a front-row seat to the challenges she faced. Sarah, a personal trainer based in London, had always been someone who took her fitness seriously. Not only was she dedicated to staying in top shape, but she was also passionate about helping others achieve their fitness goals. Her commitment to her own physical health and well-being was part of what made her so successful as a trainer. When Sarah decided to expand her business by launching an online fitness equipment store, I could see how excited she was about the opportunity to reach more people. It was a natural progression for her—she wanted to provide quality fitness gear to help others maintain their health and keep in shape just like she did. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse when she became a victim of an online scam. Sarah had ordered £8,000 worth of fitness equipment from a company that appeared legitimate. She had done her research and was confident in her purchase. However, weeks passed, and no equipment ever arrived. The company’s website went offline, their phone number was disconnected, and all email correspondence was ignored. It became clear that she had been scammed, and her £8,000 investment seemed lost forever. I could see how devastated Sarah was, not just financially, but emotionally as well. She’d been putting so much energy into growing her business, all while maintaining her own physical health. Losing that money felt like a setback in every sense. But Sarah, ever resilient, wasn’t ready to give up. That’s when she turned to RAPID DIGITAL RECOVERY. After hearing about their success stories, Sarah reached out, hoping they could help. RAPID DIGITAL RECOVERY quickly got to work, using advanced tools and methods to track down the scammers. Within weeks, Sarah received incredible news: RAPID DIGITAL RECOVERY had managed to recover £7,500 of her lost £8,000. Seeing Sarah’s relief and joy was something I’ll never forget. This wasn’t just about getting her money back—it was about restoring her confidence and giving her the strength to keep pushing forward. Sarah, always determined to maintain her good shape physically and mentally, was able to bounce back from this setback. Since then, Sarah has been sharing her experience with other coaches and fitness professionals in the industry, advising them to be cautious and encouraging them to use RAPID DIGITAL RECOVERY if they find themselves in a similar situation. She’s a strong example of resilience, and today, she continues to help others maintain their physical health, just as she has learned to do herself. CONTACT DETAILS BELOW Whatsapp: +1 4 14 80 71 4 85 Email: rapiddigitalrecovery (@) execs. com Telegram: @Rapiddigitalrecovery1

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