Launch Tomorrow

Landing Pages for your Lean Startup

  • About
  • Members
  • Blog
  • Services

The one thing Steve Jobs did that turned around Apple

July 26, 2019 by LaunchTomorrow 2 Comments

After a nasty battle with Apple shareholders, Steve Jobs, then the original founding CEO, was ousted. He went on to create NeXt computers (later acquired by Disney). In the meantime, Apple drifted as a company. It proliferated product lines. Lost focus. And the share price entered a death spiral phase. A few years later in 1997, he was recruited back to save the company from very poor public share price performance.

“Saint Steve” at Macworld 1998

When we got to the company a year ago, there were a lot of products. There were 15 product platforms and a zillion variants of each one. I couldn’t even figure this out myself. After about three weeks. I said, “how are we gonna explain this to others, when we don’t even know which products to recommend to our friends?”

In this keynote at 1998 Macworld, he announced early successes, such as a 3rd consecutive profitable quarter. In my opinion, one of the most powerful parts of his talk was the following grid:

Filed Under: priorities, stories, velocity Tagged With: faster time to market

SEO, PageRank, and the Landing Page MVP

July 9, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Landing Page MVP launch tomorrow

Reverse Engineering The Sale

July 31, 2014 by LaunchTomorrow

download (1)

What Exactly Are Financial Options Then?

April 21, 2014 by LaunchTomorrow

In order to understand real options, you need to understand financial options. Financial options are the biggest tectonic shift in finance of the 20th century. The main concept behind financial options is simple. In non-financial terms, an option gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell something at a pre-specified price, only up until a pre-specified time.

Options give you many new opportunities to make money and customize exactly which risks you want to bear. You can:

  1. position for a large market move upwards, with a much lower level of exposure to risk.
  2. minimize your future losses if you expect the market will go south.
  3. prepare to buy something for a lower price, if you predict certain conditions will arise.
  4. lock in a cash flow stream, without being exposed to market risk.
  5. allow for a core exposure to market risk, while still dabbling in various options on the side.
  6. conserve capital via limiting risk, so that there is more cash available for future investment.

In short, options allow you to assemble the exact financial risks you want to bear while discard those you don’t. As a result, you customize your risk profile in a more powerful (and accurate) way than investors who don’t use options. This high granularity will clearly make you more profitable in a highly volatile environment.

Types of Options

When you initially buy an option, you aren’t sure what will happen. Instead, you have a hunch that it will. You are betting on a particular event happening in the future, without bearing the full risk of it happening. With financial options, this typically refers to how the price of the something in the market changes.

There are two main types of options: puts and calls. From the point of view of an option buyer, a put prevents a big loss, but costs a bit up front. It’s the option to sell something at a pre-agreed price.

A call is the opposite. It enables you to get a big gain, but it also costs a bit up front. It allows you to buy something in the future at a pre-agreed price.

In both cases, when you exercise the option, you already know what happened. You know why you want to use it-when you do.

Underlying

The asset an option gives you the right to buy or sell is called an underlying. It’s the “what” of an option. What are you betting about?

What can be an underlying?

The price of the option is actually different than that of the underlying itself. It’s independent. This is because of the unique characteristics of each option.

Time

Every option has a couple of characteristics which affect its price, not just the underlying, i.e. the pre-specified price & time at which you can buy the underlying.

For example, consider these two bets (options):
1. betting that Poland will win the world cup at the next world cup
2. betting that Poland will win the world cup at least once in the next 100 years

If Poland does win the next world cup, you would win both of these bets. They have the same underlying. Simultaneously, they have different pre-specified expiry dates. Because of this difference, each bet will have a different value, even though the underlying is the same.

If you look at a variety of options for the same underlying but expiring on different dates, you can see this pattern. As you go further out in time, typically the later option will be more expensive. It compensates or charges you for the value of time. a bank also compensates or charges you for holding your savings with them or taking out a loan for the same reason.

 Strike Price

Assuming you have the same underlying, as the strike price (the pre-specified price) is lower on a put, the cheaper it is. Everyone thinks it’s unlikely the option will ever need to be used. There is less demand for each option where the strike price is further away from the current market price of the underlying.

Conversely, as the strike price gets lower on a call, the more expensive it is. Remember that as it gives you the ability to buy the underlying at a lower price. If it’s compared to the underlying, and the strike price is much lower than the underlying price, then you can buy the option and exercise it.

How options are different than stocks

Unlike stocks, all of the money you invest into an option will disappear when the option expires; this is the worst case scenario. Stocks have no predetermined lifetime, as they represent a claim on a company that is expected to be around forever. Accountants call such a company a “going concern”. In contrast, options always have a date by which they expire. It’s a necessary part of the option. Having the option to do something by next month or by the end of next year, even if it’s the same thing, will not cost the same amount. By holding an option, you might lose everything you invest, or you stand to gain a very large amount relative to the amount invested if the foreseen scenario happens.

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: manage risks, priorities Tagged With: options, underlier

Not Sure About Priorities? Clear Your Big Bottleneck

April 9, 2014 by LaunchTomorrow

changed.priorities.hockadilly

April 9, 2014 by LaunchTomorrow

changed.priorities.hockadilly

There is a simple heuristic, which you can use to determine the top priority activity you can engage in-at any given moment. It comes out of the “lean manufacturing” camp. It can apply to a business as a whole, a specific product and its backlog. Your developers typically apply it, when improving software performance. Now you can use it in the context of your product development process.

Your biggest priority at any given moment is clearing your biggest bottleneck. This will give the largest non-linear jump forwards in system productivity, because of the Herbie problem . This includes business productivity (read profit). Cycle time goes down. You reduce “friction” around production.

Once you clear a bottleneck, you create another one (a relatively smaller one) elsewhere. This is the nature of this game. Then clearing that bottleneck will give you the highest possible non-linear improvement in the output of the business as a whole. In that context, if you aren’t releasing your software to production automagically with every check-in, you have bottlenecks to clear. 🙂

The end game of clearing bottlenecks is simple. You become a “pull-based” organization. You can respond immediately to customer requests, if you want to, if you need to, or if it tickles your fancy. That’s a pretty valuable place to be.

[image cred: hockadilly]

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: priorities, time management Tagged With: bottleneck, conway's law, managing priorities

By Role

  • Startup Founder
  • Software Manager
  • Remote Leader
  • Innovation Executive
  • You Like?

    Search

    Key Topics

  • Faster time to market
  • Early-stage Growth and Marketing
  • Product-Message-Market Fit
  • Experiments and Minimum viable products
  • Metrics
  • About Luke

    Luke Szyrmer is an innovation and remote work expert. He’s the bestselling author of #1 bestseller Launch Tomorrow. He mentors early stage tech founders and innovators in established companies. Read More…

    Topics

    • agile
    • alignment
    • assumptions
    • case study
    • communication
    • conversion rate
    • delay
    • Estimation
    • experiments
    • extreme product launch
    • find people
    • funding
    • Growth
    • inner game
    • innovation
    • landing page
    • landing page MVP
    • manage risks
    • marketing
    • metrics
    • minimum viable product
    • modelling
    • modularity
    • personal
    • Pitch
    • podcasts
    • priorities
    • proof
    • release planning
    • Risk
    • software
    • startup
    • stories
    • time management
    • tools for founders
    • uncategorized
    • unknown unknowns
    • velocity
    • vizualization

    Tags

    agile funding automated testing bottleneck case study conway's law covid customer development digital taylorism existential risk extreme product launch faster time to market growth headlines identifying needs landing page mvp launch lean lean startup managing priorities market risk minimum viable product modularity numbers options output paypal planning principles prioritization problem to solve process risk product market fit real options split testing startup story systemic test driven development testing time management tool underlier value hypothesis value proposition work time

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in · Privacy policy · Cookie policy · Terms & conditions