The other day, a startup founder told me their ‘marketing strategy’ is to get their product to go viral by hoping people would tell others about it. Oh, and they are ‘doing’ Twitter. I had to go home and have a lie down. Why? Because I’m tired of explaining the difference between marketing strategy vs tactics and why it matters. I’m […]
What Can Fintech Startups Learn From the Insanity of Bank Marketing?
Bank and credit union marketers “seem to be using strategies and tactics from the 1970s and 1980s” finds the 2016 Financial Marketing Trends study. A clear message from this study is that if insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results then bank marketing is truly insane. The study’s publisher, Jim Marous […]
What is Fintech? (Hint: It’s not about the technology)
He looked just like Captain James T Kirk, and I felt like I was programming the USS Enterprise to fly. He was my computer science lecturer – just like my school-boy hero – except he wore a white lab coat. One of my first projects when learning to code back in 1979 was to write a […]
10 Reasons Not To Grow Your Startup
There’s an unquestioned assumption in startup-land: Grow your startup, or die. It seems you don’t even qualify as a startup unless you aspire to grow as big and as fast as possible. If you’re not trying to be a unicorn then you’re merely a limp-wristed amateur. Here are 10 reasons not to grow your startup:
Goldman Sachs’ Bid to Become a 140-year-old Tech Startup
Marty Chavez was cleaning toilets at a Monastery when God told him to go and work at Goldman Sachs. Since then, Marty worked his way up to become CIO of the world’s most revered investment bank. What’s amazing to me is that a third of Goldman’s global headcount are software engineers. That’s 11,000 people. That’s […]