March 19, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Every month we get emails asking for help as members of our BoS community want to learn new things and find out how they can grow and strengthen their business; we know how limited your time is and we want to make your life easier; so every month we are going to be sending out a Deep Dive email which will provide you with books, articles, podcasts, BoS Talks, and more that will get you up to speed with a particular topic.
The aim is to provide you with a set of resources and tools you can use to supercharge your business and jump start your team.
Joining the mailing list is super easy; just fill out the form below:
Our second Deep Dive for 2021 was Product Management
Check it out
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March 17, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Coming up at BoS Conf Online.Spring: Bruce McCarthy teaches stakeholder negotiation
Bruce literally wrote the book on roadmapping: Product Roadmapping Relaunched. He’s also led great talks, masterclasses, workshops, and Q&A sessions with BoS over the years.
This year, at BoS Conf Online.Spring, Bruce is back as a Breakout Leader helping you with your product problems and helping you negotiate and communicate your roadmap for stakeholder buy-in.
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March 11, 2021 by Mark Littlewood
Hi Mark, What do you regard as the best BoS talk ever given and why? I would be very interested in your response.
Question from a newsletter subscriber.
Interesting question and we get asked it a lot. We’ve just been talking about this again recently and there aren’t easy answers. Here’s a few that stand out in different ways but this is by no means a ranked list…
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March 11, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
April is an expert marketing practitioner turned executive consultant and author who helps technology companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love. She is a globally recognized expert in Positioning and Market strategy.
As startups, we are often competing against larger more established players that can outspend, out-market and out-sell us. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In this brand new talk, April will show you how you can take your competitor’s biggest strengths and turn them into weaknesses.
In this talk you will learn how to:
- use strategic positioning to carve out a place in the market where you can win against any competitor of any size and share a set of detailed examples where she did exactly that.
- make sure your customers understand who your REAL competition is.
- take on a large competitor by literally naming them and then positioning them into a corner – using their own positioning against them.
- arm your sales people to teach customers how to think about the market – in a way that advantages you (at least for your real target customers).
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March 10, 2021 by Mark Littlewood
What is Wardley mapping? Why Should you care?
Wardley mapping is an open source tool to help you make sense of the world in which you operate and make informed and intelligent strategic decisions about what you can do to thrive in the future. It was developed by Simon Wardley.
A Wardley map is… a map.
If that’s all you need, you’re done here! For the 4 minute read overview, you might want a little more info about what Wardley mapping is and why you should care…
Why should you care?
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March 8, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Coming up at BoS Conf Online.Spring, Scott Berkun talks how easy is your product to use?
With a strong UX background and a host of amazing books behind him, Scott Berkun comes to BoS Conf Online.Spring with an interactive session aimed at helping you identify the design principles of your product your users may find difficult to navigate.
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March 8, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
What is your biggest product challenge right now?
Do you spend hours discussing your product problems with your team and go round in round in circles trying to find the answer? Come and join the BoS Community as we talk through each other’s product problems and Bruce McCarthy – our Product Guru – provides wisdom and food for thought as we crunch through your product questions.
Join us for an interactive online Q&A on 11th March 2021 with Bruce McCarthy (Founder of Product Culture and Author of Product Roadmaps Relaunched)
“In just 30min Bruce helped us make the optimal choice that had kept us in meetings and agony for 3 weeks. If you have a product-
related challenge, I strongly recommend that you talk to Bruce.”
—Misha Sobolev, Founder and CEO, ExecFile
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March 8, 2021 by Mark Littlewood
On April 15, 2019, a fire started at Notre-Dame cathedral.
Within an hour, its famous 750 ton spire collapsed.
The cause of the fire is still unknown.
However, we do know something about the design of its fire alarm system…
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March 5, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Every month we get emails asking for help as members of our BoS community want to learn new things and find out how they can grow and strengthen their business and we know how important your time is and we want to make your life easier; so every month we are going to be sending out a Deep Dive email which will provide you with books, articles, podcasts, BoS Talks, and more that will get you up to speed with a particular topic.
We want to provide you with a set of resources and tools you can use to supercharge your business and get to where you want to be.
Joining the mailing list is super easy; just fill out the form below:
Our first Deep Dive for 2021 was Jobs-To-Be-Done – a topic we have seen develop and grow and even had a couple of Masterclasses on the process too!
Check it out
Read more
Want more of these insightful talks?
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March 5, 2021 by Paddy Heaton
4 Lessons The BoS Community Taught Me
Hey 👋 I’m Paddy, and for the last 3½ years I’ve been heading up all things Marketing at Business of Software. As I write this, it’s my last week in the job. I’ve run my last BoS event, signed off on my last newsletter, and deleted myself from the ‘Meet the Team’ page. It’s strange to think that in a few short hours I’ll press ‘End Meeting For All’ for the final time, and that’ll be it.
One of the great joys of this job has been being a part of the BoS community. I’ve learned a huge amount from them over my time here, and as a parting thought I’d like to share 4 lessons that I’ll never forget which the people of the BoS community – you, the attendees and speakers – have taught me.
Lesson #1 – Make Your Users Awesome
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March 2, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Kieran O’Neill // Thread
Kieran is probably a serial entrepreneur – he founded his first business aged 15, (sold age 19 for $1.25m), his second and third were also acquired. He’s co-founder/CEO of his fourth startup, Thread. In this interactive discussion, Kieran shares some of his experiences and learnings having founded and grown four tech businesses before the age of 30. Kieran’s focus at Thread is to drive the growth of the business and keep developing – not maintaining – the company culture.
Prior to Thread, Kieran founded one of the first video sharing websites aged 15 and sold it for $1.25M aged 19. He was then CEO and co-founder of Playfire, the largest social network for gamers, which he grew to 1.5 million customers before being acquired in 2012. He’s a member of the Forbes, Drapers and Financial Times 30 Under 30 lists.
Video below
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February 24, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Born in Peru, and raised as a math and science nerd in New Jersey with a passion for movies and storytelling, Cesar worked in advertising before leaving it all behind to pursue his own personal creative endeavours; among them a personal project – 1SecondEveryday.
It took time and a co-founder, Schoneck Shoaf, to turn it into a business, but now the App has been downloaded over 2 million times.
In this talk from BoS USA 2019, Cesar will share the story of how he accidentally turned his idea for a tool that would encourage him to be more adventurous into 1SecondEveryday. This became a thriving, bootstrapped, remote only, business that became the number one paid app in Apple’s App Store in 2018. Cesar shares the decision-making process that ultimately led to a change in business model, a rewrite of the platform and to taking outside capital.
Find out how 1Second Everyday:
- make remote working work
- changed the business model as it grew up
- discovered the ever-growing number of alternative sources of funding available to software entrepreneurs.
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February 24, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Regular BoS Newsletter readers will be familiar with our “Curated Content” section. Every week we collate the most interesting stories from the SaaS world and send them to out in our Newsletter.
We know our community of SaaS founders are busy – they don’t have time to scour the internet for niche software news and articles all the time. That’s why we do it for them. If you want to join this community of very clever people you can sign up here.
Read more
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February 16, 2021 by Mark Littlewood
Growth, Funding, Pivotal Moments and the Evolution of Adzerk to Kevel
BoS regulars will know James Avery, founder of Adzerk, recently renamed to be known forevermore as Kevel. We caught up with him following the announcement of an $11 million funding round for the 13 year old SaaS business which he describes as, ‘Seedstrapped’. We talk growth, funding, pivotal moments and the evolution of Adzerk to Kevel
We cover:
- The origin and growth of Adzerk
- His attitude and approach to taking outside funding and finding the right money at the right stage for him
- Some of the BoS talks that had an impact on his company, including changing its name to Kevel
- Why he doesn’t worry too much about what might happen in the future
Food for thought for anyone on the Long, Slow SaaS Ramp of Death…
Video, transcript and links to talks James has found particularly impactful as he built Kevel below…
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January 29, 2021 by Paddy Heaton
Eric (the money guy) & Brian (the product guy) Dosal share their experience of starting, scaling and ultimately selling BrightGauge, their self-funded, 35 employee SaaS business back in 2019. They share an honest and open account of why they decided to sell while it was still very profitable and experiencing rapid (50% year-on-year) growth.
They share the lessons learned in starting a company in San Francisco and then moving it back to their hometown, Miami, FL and the reasons why they took the decision to sell the company. They were not VC funded and had no pressure to sell. Even with a great culture, great team, great everything, it still could be a great idea to sell. AFTER selling, there are still things to do but it’s OK to take a break and/or start a new project.
Hear their takeaways from the experience, and learn how and why to finish big and leave on top.
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January 25, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Regular BoS Newsletter readers will be familiar with our “Curated Content” section. Every week we collate the most interesting stories from the SaaS world and send them to out in our Newsletter.
We know our community of SaaS founders are busy – they don’t have time to scour the internet for niche software news and articles all the time. That’s why we do it for them. If you want to join this community of very clever people you can sign up here.
Read more
Want more of these insightful talks?
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January 19, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Nandini has been immersed in the world of brand safety & digital advertising since 2016, when she began running Sleeping Giants, the social media campaign that alerted advertisers that their ads were funding hate speech on Breitbart News. Her efforts led to her being recognized by Business Insider as one of the industry leaders “fixing” digital advertising. DigiDay named her a DigiDay Changemaker. In 2019, Sleeping Giants won a Gold Cannes Lion Award for Best Social Media Campaign and a People’s Voice for Public Service and Activism Webby Award.
In August 2020, HotJar publically dropped the Trump campaign and the GOP account (before it was cool to do so). It was not only an unprecedented move for a tech company, it’s an incredible case study in how to manage a social media crisis in this age of extremes. In this talk from BoS USA Online 2020, Nandini discusses the background to the story and the actions the company’s leadership took to address a challenge that most software company CEOs have never seriously considered: booting users who violate their Acceptable Use Policies. Nandini explores the role of Acceptable Use Policies & ToS as a tool for choosing your course of action.
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January 4, 2021 by Kirk Baillie
Get started on a new career for 2021
Looking for a new challenge? Do you enjoy making new connections and building relationships with a range of great people from across the globe?
Then Business of Software might have just the opportunity for you…
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December 15, 2020 by Kirk Baillie
John Snyder started Grapeshot in a small office overlooking King’s Parade, right at the heart of the Cambridge tech cluster. While Cambridge is well known for the quality of its technology, many companies have struggled to turn their technology advantage into global commercial success. John was determined to do both in the global adtech market, not one that is traditionally associated with deep Cambridge tech.
In this talk from BoS Europe 2019, John talks about how he set about educating himself by learning from others and why he decided that his business had to have a global vision from the outset. He describes entering new markets with a relatively limited supply of capital which meant every new move could have been very costly. Ultimately, much of the success of the business was down to maintaining a clear company culture whilst operating across several continents and territories amidst different social cultures.
The company was acquired by Oracle Corporation in May 2018.
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