Category: Economics, Business, & Work

‘Red Oceans’: How to Find Profitable Startup Ideas- Capital & Growth, by CSSheppard

Source: ‘Red Oceans’: How to Find Profitable Startup Ideas – Capital & Growth

Some entrepreneurs start businesses based upon their hobbies or avocational interests. They turned their passion for a particular activity or subject into a business venture. … Often these businesses are not started to reap considerable profits, but instead to pursue a lifestyle that brings joy and personal satisfaction to the entrepreneur.
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But if the market for what you like, what interests you or where you live is too small or diffused to support your business idea, then creating that business is a fool’s errand (unless you have money to burn).

The External Approach (or the “Outside-In approach”) to discovering viable business ideas looks first to the external market (verses the skills, knowledge and tastes of the entrepreneur) and tries to methodically discover market gaps that already exist.
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  • Observing the Market
  • Focus Groups
  • Reverse Brainstorming
  • Market Growth
  • Matrix Charting for Insights
  • The “Slice of Life” Approach
  • The Market-Area Saturation Approach
  • The Competitive Matrix Approach

Something doesn’t ad up about America’s advertising market – Schumpeter | The Economist

Source: Something doesn’t ad up about America’s advertising market – Schumpeter | The Economist

The immense sums being bet on advertising raise a question: how much of it can America take? A back-of-the-envelope calculation by Schumpeter suggests that stock prices currently imply that American advertising revenues will rise from 1% of GDP today, to as much as 1.8% of GDP by 2027 … First, the irritation factor, or how much consumers can absorb without being put off. … The second limit on the size of the advertising market is how much cash all other firms, in aggregate, have at their disposal to spend on ads.

Stockmarket investors are wrong to expect an enormous surge in advertising revenues

Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from, by Tom Lianza

Source: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from, by Tom Lianza

If … you care about getting paid, I think the most important thing you should be thinking about is where does that money come from?

There are a lot of valid answers to that question, but I think most of the time the calculus reduces to: we get our money from our customers.
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if the money that pays your paycheck can be traced back to your customers… how do you justify getting paid more money? At that point it’s simple… find a ways to impact the value your company is delivering to customers. But, there are a few subtleties here:

  • Your customers are not paying you for your time (slightly different for consultants).
  • Your customers are not paying you for your education.
  • Your customers aren’t even paying you for your individual output.

That last one can be counter-intuitive, but your customers are paying your company for the value your company delivers to them.

This is why … career ladders start to layer in responsibilities for things that a single individual can’t accomplish themselves. This doesn’t mean you need to become a manager, but it does mean you need to look beyond yourself to maximize the value you’re able to bring to the people who are ultimately paying you.

Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

Source: Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America

Corporate goliaths are taking over the U.S. economy. Yet small breweries are thriving. Why?

make it easier for small firms to grow and to make it harder for large firms to relax.

A phalanx of small businesses doesn’t automatically constitute a perfect economy. There are benefits to size. Larger companies can support greater production, and as a result they often pay the highest wages and attract the best talent. But what the U.S. economy seems to suffer from now isn’t a fetish for smallness, but a complacency with enormity. The craft-beer movement is an exception to that rule.

How Orwell used wartime rationing to argue for global justice

Source: How Orwell used wartime rationing to argue for global justice | Aeon Ideas

At the level of the planet as a whole, Londoners and New Yorkers and Sydneysiders who proclaim ‘We are the 99 per cent’ are in fact much more likely to belong if not to the 1 per cent, then certainly to the top 10 per cent. … As the economist Branko Milanovic has been insisting for decades, inequality within nations, bad as it is, pales in comparison with inequality between nations. Yet even those of us who find global inequality troubling and ultimately indefensible hesitate to raise the subject. … George Orwell did … Orwell recognised that, at a global scale, underpaid and downtrodden English workers were exploiters.
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His job was to mobilise support for Britain’s anti-Nazi war effort, and to get that support from the victims of British colonialism. … he talked about rationing: in particular, about the popularity of rationing among the English. … it seems most likely that he did so because he knew it was something India needed to hear. There could be no anti-fascist solidarity unless the exploited Indians could believe that a more just distribution of the world’s resources was possible