The Pricing Game: Charge More

For a product priced at $10 with a profit of $1, if you raise the price by 1% ($0.10) that's a 10% increase in profit. Raise the price by 10% ($1) and it's a 100% increase in profit!


References:

• http://www.pricingsolutions.com/index.php/en/more-about-joomla/the-newsletters/157-pricing-for-profit
• http://iterativepath.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/another-cpg-reporting-profit-rise-from-price-increase/
• http://iterativepath.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/the-1-price-increase-fallacy/
• http://iterativepath.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/3-components-of-effective-price-management/
• http://pricingforprofitbook.com/pricing
• http://www.amazon.com/1-Windfall-Successful-Companies-Profit/dp/0061684325/
• http://www.amazon.com/Price-Advantage-Wiley-Finance/dp/0470481773/

Should you build an ecommerce platform for small businesses in India?

Asking small businesses in India to get their own ecommerce store is like selling them retail space in the remotest part of town.

The first problem to solve for small businesses is to help them get more customers.

I learned this the hard way with AceSeller.

How can I help small businesses get more customer? is a better question to ask than Should I build an ecommerce platform for small businesses?

The former is a problem statement looking for a solution and going down that path will lead you to many interesting solutions. The latter is a solution looking for a problem, where you already think you know the solution and you're just looking for validation.

So what is wrong with you?

So what is wrong with you? Are you a freak? No. You are just human. And you suffer from the same malady that infects every human being. It is a monster in side all of us, and it has many arms: Chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness. Many, many arms. None of us is entirely free from it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head saying, "Not good enough yet. Got to have more. Got to make it better. Got to be better." It is a monster, a monster that manifests everywhere in subtle forms.

- Mindfulness in Plain English by Ven. Henepola Gunaratana

Who are you?

I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.

- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Intelligence is overrated

Intelligence is overrated as a metric, from the get-go. Being smart doesn't mean anything - accomplishing something, whether that be writing a book, founding a company, making a new scientific discovery, sculpting a masterpiece, etc., is a much better metric. Unfortunately everyone seems to be hung up on the "idea" of being smart, as if having a high IQ somehow constitutes an accomplishment.

- a comment on Hacker News 

Monkey See Monkey Do aka Agile WTF (Way To Fail)

Here's the talk Naresh and me did at Agile Bangaluru 2010.

This was the talk's abstract:

We don't have all the answers. We don't know the best way to build software in the right way. But we do know one thing: the right way doesn't involve mindlessly following practices just because some "expert" says you need to.
In this workshop we'll take a critical look at various "agile" practices and try to highlight the dogma and ceremony that has creeped in. We'll also question if the practices defined a decade ago are still applicable? If yes, have they evolved since? What are some of the original creators of these processes practicing today? And so on..

It's almost 2 hrs, and the first 25 mins of the presentation is a spoof of how agile projects are run. We eventually get around to discussing some agile practices and the tradeoffs they involve:

Here are the slides: