innovation Archives ~ Launch Tomorrow

Goal setting with creative boundaries

January 15, 2021 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Recently I appeared on the marketing mindset internet radio show. It’s hosted by Marie Mason and it airs at 6pm EST. There aren’t many shows that drill down into this really important connection. In fact, like my friend Rob Drummond likes to say with respect to small businesses: almost every business problem is often rooted in a personal one.

walkway — Photographer: Héctor J. Rivas | Source: Unsplash

We’ve had two weeks into the new year, so reality is starting to set in. I can’t say I am an expert in this topic, but on the show I do share what works for me. In particular, the focus was on boundary setting last year.

Setting good boundaries and holding yourself to them helps ensure you reach your goals, both personally and as an organization. I also think setting boundaries is intimately tied with a creative process and innovation, which we cover briefly.

chatting about boundaries

Have a listen and let me know what you think.

Also, my friend Rob Drummond (mentioned above) has a free kindle book offer until Sunday (Jan 17) night for his book Simple Story Selling. I love his work, as it results in bite size stories which we often already tell as founders or entrepreneurs. The approach really helps with writing emails. It also ties in really well to early-stage landing pages. In short, story is the best possible way to present new products to unaware audiences. Really, it’s a no brainer. Grab it, and read it when you have some time.

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What’s cookin’ for Launch Tomorrow

November 6, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

This week I have a few updates to share. I think the main one is that it looks like my immediate family and I are recovering from covid-19. We don't really now how we got it, despite largely working from home in the last month or so. But in our case it kind of passed like a nasty flu and it seems to be kind of running in the background, too, even still. The testing took a long time, due to major spike in cases domestically here, so by the time I was certain we had it, the symptoms were disappearing.

I'm writing this to primarily just reassure everyone that this is a real thing, real people do get it, and there are varying levels of complications…so avoid it if you can. At the same time, I find it easier to have a more sanguine and less fear-tinged view of the pandemic, knowing how it ran its course in my personal context. It's not fun, especially in the early days of confirming you have it, as you know it can develop in any direction. But if you live, you have antibodies for this strain of the virus. If anyone wants to talk about having covid or dealing with it from a practical perspective, just drop me a line.

Fittingly, this week I appeared on the Working from Home show with Nelson Jordan. Nelson and I chatted about my experience managing remote teams before the pandemic. This is primarily in the context of working on the book called Align Remotely and helping to get the word out. The book is looking better and better and I want to release it officially in about a month.

visual workshops with remote innovation teams

Other than that, I have various facilitation sessions to help remote innovation teams deliver better and faster. I am starting to see that in many cases there is just not enough detail, particularly at the early stages, to be able to execute on a high level vision effectively. And that stops any efforts in their tracks. Such is the nature of the dreaded unknown unknowns. At the same time, the fastest way to start making progress is to go and deliberately explore them. If you'd like to get help with your riskiest assumptions or just to help your team identify the best way to spend their time, then give me a shout.

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How to budget for innovation

October 16, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

This week I just wanted to draw your attention to an old article on Harvard Business Review about budgeting in established companies for innovation.

Here, on average, is what they estimated they were currently spending: 85% of their resources on day-to-day operations 5% on incremental improvements that produced faster, cheaper, better sameness 5% on small sustaining innovations 5% on big, disruptive innovations When we asked the managers what a better proportion might be, their answers were: 75% on day-to-day operations 5% on incremental improvements 10% on sustaining innovations 10% on big, disruptive innovations.

Personally, I find this intuitive, because of asset allocation is part of my background in finance. In situations of partial randomness, like in the financial markets, the amount you allocate defines your expose to particular risks and profit drivers.

relative and absolute allocation matters when deciding a budget

You can’t control in advance whether an investment will go up, down, or sideways in value. But you can choose how much you allocate, both in relative and in absolute terms:

Relative: Relative to the budget as a whole, what % is allocated to each innovation initiative? Also, what is the relative pool of money allocated to each type of innovation?
Absolute: How much money are you putting in? In other words, are you ok if you lose 100% of it?

The big challenge really, with budgeting for innovation in established companies, is that it’s typically done on an annual basis. Whereas new product development occurs on a much shorter cycle time. That way you are making big decisions about funding without the benefit of market feedback and other considerations which are critical tactically.

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21 Different Ways To Prove Your Case, Even Though You Don’t Have A Product or Customer Yet

September 28, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

As late heavy hitter Gary Bencivenga says:

Almost everyone in the world, in every field of human endeavor, is desperately searching for someone to believe in. Be that person and you can write your own ticket. Belief is today’s most overlooked yet most powerful key to boosting response to any ad, in any medium. Harness it and you unleash the core atomic power for exploding response.

Most prospects want to believe the claims you make in a landing page, yet the claims challenge their world-view and the status quo. You need proof, ideally proof that resonates emotionally, in order to get them to take action.

Proof that resonates emotionally like guitar string

A landing page, or a salesletter, is like a one-to-one conversation between you and the prospect. You put various things on the landing page, designed to instill a particular reaction in the reader’s mind.

A good landing page is written in a conversational tone. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. In fact, you can read it out loud to ensure that the text “flows” well.

like a phone call with a friend … empathize

Imagine it as a phone conversation with a friend. They call you. They bring up a problem they’re struggling with. You say something surprising. You empathize with their pain. You talk about an approach you’ve used in the past or a product you can recommend to address it, as you know it will help them out. At the end, you help them buy the product or implement a solution in their lives. Empathize with your reader in the same way you’d empathize with that friend on the other end of the line.

Direct response progenitor Eugene Schwartz puts it well:

It is the facts that the prospect believes in and accepts, and the way that he passes that acceptance along from one fact to another, that determines the ad’s development, the arrangement of your claims and your images and your proofs, so that there is a step-by-step strengthening, not only of your prospect’s desire but of his conviction that the satisfaction of that desire will come true through your product.

You are building up the emotional weight of your argument as much as you can. You want the solution to become increasingly real in the prospect’s mind.

When you are making claims about the benefits your product has, your prospect is likely to not believe a claim that you make. It’s that natural “yeah, right” knee-jerk response.

Proof counters that pushback. It’s your job, as a product creator or founder, to provide strong counter-arguments to this type of objection. In other words, your copy should explicitly address the prospect’s objections about how your solution can solve his problem. Or hers.

Well, the best type of proof is a poignant detail that knocks out a line of questioning or thinking. Direct response copy that sells is very clear.

If you want to know what types of proof you can use, I’ve got your back. Launch Tomorrow includes 38 different types of proof you can include on your landing page.

You can get a copy over here: http://book.launchtomorrow.com

To be crystal clear, 21 different types of proof don’t require you to even even have a customer, much less a success story.

Even on a landing page MVP, it all comes down to knowing how to present your product.

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How Many Experiments Do I Need To Run?

September 18, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

A teacher said to her student, “Billy, if both of your parents were born in 1967, how old are they now?”
After a few moments, Billy answered, “It depends.”
“It depends on what?” she asked.
“It depends on whether you ask my father or my mother.”

It’s also like that with the number of experiments you need to run, in order to build a new product.

It depends.

On how much of a breakthrough you want your product to be.

Photographer: Rafael Pol | Source: Unsplash

Soviet inventor Genrich Altschuller created the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”, or TIPS. In the original Russian, it’s called TRIZ. TRIZ’s a massive topic in its own right, providing a systematic methodology for solving problems creatively.

Apparently even creativity can be systematized.

Anyway.

While Altschuller reads quite heavily in the translated English version, he shares nuggets of wisdom–which are very relevant for product entrepreneurs.

For example, he pored over about 40,000 patent filings, mining for insight and inspiration. It turned out, that there were clear patterns in how inventors approached problem solving. Depending on the type of challenge being addressed, the number of experiments the inventors did made the technological breakthrough even greater.