When you are working with your mind, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and ineffective—even without a full calendar.

Energy Management is at Least as Important as Time Management

Be aware of how each activity affects your energy levels. Strategically space out the activities you find invigorating with those that are draining.

Bringing some basic structure to your energy management can help you unleash energy you never knew you had.
– The Startup Daily

Ideas begin as abstract concepts. While concepts are flexible and fluid, they tend to be vague and hard to talk about. If you want your early-stage ideas to get fair consideration when they are shared with others, you need to make them more concrete.

Before Asking for Feedback on an Idea, Give it a Working Name

Naming something brings it to life. A name should be short, easy on the ears, and unique. But don’t spend too much time on it, the working name doesn’t need to be a final product name. You only need a temporary name that allows people to refer to it, share it, and remember it.
– The Startup Daily

In a startup environment everyone has more responsibilities than usual, which is why it is especially important that responsibility for each task is ultimately assigned to a single person.

Whenever Two or More Are Responsible for Something, Nobody Is

Shared responsibility only works when one or more parties assumes complete responsibility. If the task is important, it is the manager’s job to assign responsibility to a specific person, or to take responsibility for themselves.
– The Startup Daily

Even if you give your customers a great price and meet all their demands, they will not stay customers for long if they are not successful. The fate of your business is tied to the fate of your customers.

Measure Your Own Success by Measuring the Success of Your Customers

You can escape the cycle of selling based on price alone by developing a deeper understanding of your customer’s business, their goals, and how they measure success. Develop more relationships inside the customer’s organization. Find out what their biggest problems are, and figure out how you can help to solve them.

If you create value for your customers and help them meet their goals, it will be their best interest to make you successful as well.

                                                          – The Startup Daily

For years academics have been ranking the impact of a scientific paper by measuring the number of times that paper is cited by other papers. This system was even codified in 1960 and named the Scientific Citation Index.

While working on his Ph.D. at Stanford University, Larry Page recognized that ranking Internet search results was analogous to ranking scientific papers.

Whatever Your Problem, It Has Probably Been Solved Already in a Different Field

Using the number of incoming links a web page has to determine the relevance of that page became the basis of PageRank, the algorithm—and secret sauce—that allowed Google to disrupt and dominate the Internet search industry.
– The Startup Daily

You don’t need to be especially brilliant to be successful in accomplishing your goals.

Intelligence can even work against you at times—intelligent people often make simple things more complicated than they need to be.

Intelligence is Not a Prerequisite for Success, but Determination Is

Your journey will be filled with unseen difficulties. There will be many opportunities to give up along the way. Stubborn determination will be your greatest asset through these challenges.
– The Startup Daily

Product development organizations have a lot to learn from those in the service business. While products are usually treated as black boxes with predefined features and functions, services use each bit of information they learn about their customers to build customized solutions. Service providers have a holistic view of the customer’s experience, treating each touch point as a chapter in a larger story.

Companies That Treat Their Products More Like a Service Can Offer a Better Experience

Services offer another benefit for businesses that provide them. While it’s easy for a customer to swap out one product for another with similar specifications, services are stickier. A well designed service is able to provide more value with each use. As the relationship strengthens over time, its customers become increasingly loyal.
– The Startup Daily

New entrepreneurs often make the mistake of underpricing their product or service. Lack of confidence, fear, and desperation lead the new business owner to set prices that are lower than those of the established competition.

It’s better to err on the side of charging too much, and put more effort into communicating your value to your customers.

Charging Too Little Can Hurt Your Business

When you set your prices too low, you make a statement to the market that you are competing on price. But there will always be someone who can charge less. Your higher volume competitors are able to leverage the economies of scale, giving them a pricing advantage.

Once customers get used to your lower prices they will perceive you as being a discount solution, and it will be much harder for them to accept a price increase.

If you don’t value your own offering, why should anyone else?
– The Startup Daily

Customers don’t experience products in a vacuum. The product experience includes the name, packaging, purchasing experience, unboxing experience, social context, competitive landscape, and the emotions and memories triggered by past exposure to marketing messages.

To make matters more complicated, most of these considerations are processed subconsciously. Customers are often unaware of how important the supporting factors are in the influencing the choices they make.

Customers Don’t Just Choose the Best Product, They Choose the Best Experience

The Coca-Cola Company famously learned this lesson when they changed the formula for Coca-Cola in 1985. The new formula consistently beat the original formula in blind taste tests, so they assumed they had a better product. Yet when it was introduced to the market, customers hated it. People don’t buy blind taste tests. Customer’s opinions of the product changed when it was offered as a complete experience, and customers wanted the original Coca-Cola experience.
– The Startup Daily

Feeling overwhelmed is not usually an indicator of having too much work, but an indicator that it’s not clear what work to do next. You may have the talent, strategy, and resources you need, but you just can’t get started. The tasks ahead just seem too big.

The Best Solution to Being Overwhelmed Is to Introduce More Structure

Adding some processes and protocols can get things back on track. You don’t want to overdo it, but more structure in your organization makes the next steps automatic which helps to eliminate procrastination and paralysis.
– The Startup Daily