Topic

personal anecdotes.

27 posts tagged personal anecdotes, newest first.

All articles, page 2.

27 posts

How We Work With New Clients: Inside Our Client Discovery Process.

Even though we’re an outsourcing company, we also receive multiple solicitations a day from competitors asking if they can help us build software. They try every gimmick in the book to get us to respond– free lunch, free coffee, and lately, they’ve been offering some sort of free work upfront to capture our interest as a prospective client. This puts us in an odd position because we also rely on outbound marketing to bring in new business. So now, how is a prospective client supposed to know...

Articles

Need a B2B data source? Here's our experience with ZoomInfo.

Like many custom software development firms that provide services to other companies, CodeStringers utilizes, among other vehicles, email marketing to a "high accuracy" source of company and contact data. We have numerous email program genres, including monthly newsletters, prospecting (emails that directly seek new clients), and thought leadership (white papers and other "high value" content resources). Beyond the Obvious: What is "Data Quality"?Contact data quality can be evaluated by...

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How To Succeed With Your MVP Launch and Beyond.

Here at CodeStringers, we’ve seen founders make two mistakes vis-à-vis their MVP launch. 1. They launch too early before the MVP is actually “viable”. 2. Conversely, they may launch too late because they want the MVP to be perfect first. In other words, they launch after the MVP has reached its “minimum viable” state. 3. Oftentimes, founders insufficiently plan what to do after launch because they spent so much energy focusing on the launch itself. So let’s take a look at each of these...

Articles

Keeping Promises.

As an entrepreneur, it’s an amazing feeling when your customers tell you that your business is delivering something unique. I recently had this happen and wanted to share the anecdote. I was recently introduced to a potential new customer looking to build a software product for a new business. The contact who introduced us joined us on a call where I described how we typically engage with customers when defining and building a “minimum viable product (MVP)”. I stated that CodeStringers does a...

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Why You Should Start a Business During a Recession.

You can’t watch the news for more than five minutes these days without hearing predictions of a recession, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, tightening of credit markets, global supply crisis, et cetera. When consumers get wind of these adverse events, they begin a cycle of economic decline: 1. Consumers get nervous, so they spend less, 2. Businesses make less money than they did before, 3. Businesses slow hiring and/or lay off employees, 4. Which makes consumers nervous, so they spend...

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Empathetic Leadership: Are Leaders Born or Made?

Research on the relationship between leadership and organizational success has shown that a leader's capacity for empathy and compassion has the strongest influence on organizational profitability and productivity. How does empathy relate to your ability to lead? What can you do to improve your leadership skills? In this post, we will define empathy and empathetic leadership and provide advice on how to enhance this skill. What is empathy?The term empathy was first introduced in 1909 by...

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Know Your Lane: The Core Competencies Business Owners Should Own.

As an individualIf I could give one piece of advice to someone starting a business career, it would be to “know your lane.” I would tell them to do an honest soul-searching session and ask themselves a few questions: 1. What are you good at? But perhaps more importantly, what are you not good at? 2. What kind of work do you enjoy doing? (granted, “enjoy” is a relative term in business) 3. Do you want to be challenged every day, or do you prefer something a bit more rote and routine? 4. How do...

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8 Business Growth Strategies for Attracting the Help You Need.

As an adviser to new businesses, I’m a strong believer that no one succeeds alone in business. Yet I find that many entrepreneurs struggle and fail in the transition from personally developing an innovative idea to building the relationships necessary to transform it into a successful business. These relationships include investors, an operational team, and customers. I encountered this challenge, reaffirmed and magnified, in an inspiring book titled "No One Succeeds Alone: Learn Everything...

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The Warren Buffett Advice Most People Still Haven't Learned.

According to Buffett, your leadership could be in trouble with this missing element. Back in 2005, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates held a Q&A at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A student in the audience asked Buffett how he would know that his management team is making ethical decisions that would parallel his own. Buffett offered up advice in the form of a "test" that many managers today would probably fail. You may want to read Leadership vs. management: What’s the difference? The...

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6 Reasons for Miscommunication in the Workplace, and How to Avoid Them.

“Next year’s annual customer event will be held in Austin. Please start planning immediately. Be prepared to connect in a few months to present the details of your plan.” The marching orders from your boss are clear. An event in Austin. Next year. As the Head of Events at your organization, you waste no time … diving headfirst into the plans. Fast forward to “a few months later,” and you present your plan to the C-suite. Someone raises their hand when the first slide appears, “Why does that...

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Why Listening to Customers Beats Backing Your Own Hunch.

Hubris is a death sentence for many startups. I’ve heard many entrepreneurs, including myself, quote Henry Ford’s famous words: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘faster horses.'” Ford implied that entrepreneurs often have better insights than their customers. “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘faster horses’,” -Henry Ford The history of innovation reveals only a few visionaries who accurately predicted customer needs and...

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Software Outsourcing Trends: What the Pandemic Taught Us.

COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruptions to the global economy, but the outsourcing business has been particularly hard hit. As soon as clients felt economic instability and an uncertain future, R&D budgets were slashed, transactions were delayed, projects were cut, and prospective clients disappeared. Consequently, many outsourcers had to downsize or even go out of business. However, organizations adapted quickly and took advantage of the crisis. CodeStringers is one of them. We were...

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