Filed under: Sales

Nice Summary 256 Must-Read Content For All Tech Entrepreneurs

 

Over the past few months, I (Stanley Tang) have been reading a lot of articles and gathering tons of information about tech startups as I set to launch my first one this fall. I’ve saved many of my favorites and, rather than keeping them to myself, I decided to share my bookmarks to the public.

The list I’ve compiled below have been filtered and I’ve only selected to publish the best of the best articles and videos. I urge all entrepreneurs who is serious about starting their own tech startup to read those articles as there are tons of golden nuggets to be taken away from them.

This list isn’t meant to be consumed all at once. Instead, you should use this bookmark as a resource list that you can always come back and reference. I’ll be constantly updating this list as I come across new well-worthy articles Enjoy: via Stanley Tang Blog 

* Highly recommended

Entrepreneurship

General Startup Advice

The Idea

Product Strategy

Running The Company

Startup Culture

Assembling Your Team

Sales & Marketing

Business Model & Monetization

Venture Capital, Funding & Equity

Legal

Source: http://www.stanleytang.com/blog/256-must-read-content-for-all-tech-entrepreneurs/

Fixed To Flexible - Great ebook on the basics of pricing

Todd Sattersten has published an eBook called Fixed to Flexible and it is about cost, price, margin, and the options we have for how to sell. It is a quick and good read. I especially recommend it for entreprepreneurs, product/marketing guys and sales people. It might change the way you look at pricing.

There are four basic messages:
- The story of cost is that it always trends down. You can count on it.
- The story of price is that it is more flexible than you think.
- The story of margin is that is is a stark choice between opposing strategies.
- The story of options is that you have many more than you realize.
The way they are stated here they seem simple and obvious. However, I recommend you read the book. Every topic has a concise an entertaining explanation.

What kind of store is not about sales? That’s like saying you’ve got a pen that isn’t about writing - I like it :-)

Nokia Confirms New York and Chicago Flagship Stores Are Closing in Early 2010

Same deal with the London store — big expensive stores that failed to generate sales. Chris Ziegler at Engadget writes:

The way we saw it, these stores were never about sales; they were about exposing Nokia to the public and vice versa in a cool, hip environment, and regardless of how you feel about the company’s handsets, they’d effectively accomplished that with the flagship strategy.

What kind of store is not about sales? That’s like saying you’ve got a pen that isn’t about writing.

Advice for Entrepreneurs: Charging For Your Product Helps You Focus On Customers Instead of Users

Charging for your product helps you find out who your customers are. Discovering who your customers are is crucial and it isn’t as easy as it would seem. When a product first launches it can be picked up by a wide variety of groups. But a product can’t effectively target all types of users so decisions have to be made pretty early on about what type of customer you are targeting. Not charging for your product can push you towards making the wrong decision.

Charging for the product helped us quickly figure out who our customers were going to be, what they wanted to accomplish and how we could help them. When you launch your next product ask yourself, “Am I looking for users or customers?” The answer should have a big impact on your decisions going forward.

Very true!