{"id":931,"date":"2010-11-22T22:44:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-22T22:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=931"},"modified":"2010-11-22T22:44:18","modified_gmt":"2010-11-22T22:44:18","slug":"the-dash-for-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2010\/11\/22\/the-dash-for-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"The dash for customers"},"content":{"rendered":"

This sort of thing happens all the time, but it’s usually less obvious, and less ‘all-at-once’.<\/p>\n

People generallhy consider there to be two business growth strategies. I think it was Joel (of joelonsoftware fame) who called them Ben & Jerrys Vs Amazon. Amazon’s strategy was ‘Get Big Fast’. It depended on getting tons of customers, very quickly, and growing, growing, growing. Making a profit was irrelevant, that would come later. Ben & Jerrys was slow sustained growth (like positech!)<\/p>\n

It’s also a strategy for building a games portal. If I had the time, and knew the right people, I’d be doing it myself with showmethegames<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two portals are currently engaged in the mad rush to get customers. One is games for windows live, one is indiedb. Indiedb are doing it cunningly and cleverly with a competition, where you need an account to vote (please vote for GSB!)<\/p>\n

Games for windows live are doing it by offering an old game, that they own, for 99% off. People think this is incredible generosity, but it really isn’t. If they could find a way to pay YOU $10 to sign up for an account (assuming you are someone who ever buys games) they would.<\/p>\n

This isn’t a bad strategy, or an evil strategy, it’s very good business. It’s also very risky. If you win, in the long term, you become steam \/ amazon and make hundreds of millions. If you lose, you earn nothing, and you blew $10 million trying to make it work.<\/p>\n

I’m too much of a wimp to actually remortgage the house and try it with SMTG. I’ll probably regret that one day :( At least I’m still biz-savvy enough to only include one hyperlink in this post though :D<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This sort of thing happens all the time, but it’s usually less obvious, and less ‘all-at-once’. People generallhy consider there to be two business growth strategies. I think it was Joel (of joelonsoftware fame) who called them Ben & Jerrys Vs Amazon. Amazon’s strategy was ‘Get Big Fast’. It depended on getting tons of customers,<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… The dash for customers<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":932,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions\/932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}