Top 10 tips to enable change

I want to lose my weight
I want to drink more water
I want to improve my work life balance
I want to be better at managing my time
I want to eat healthy food
I want to be more social, an extrovert

Everybody has atleast one thing in the back of their mind that when changed would make their life better. But only a few create a proper goal, a timeline, have discipline to execute and successfully make a sustaining change in their behavior. SMART (Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Timebound) goal is a great tool in setting yourself towards an achievable goal. Everybody start with a great goal and motivation but most of them fail.

There are many reasons why change is difficult

1. We are incapable of visualizing the long term consequence of our status quo behavior and simulate the impact of long term consequence.

2. Lack of reinforcement of our change thought - Our motivation level drops exponentially

3. A change in one behavior might require a break in our regular routing increasing the friction to change

Below are some tips on how to enable change.

Top 10 tips to enable change

1. Work on only 1 change at a time

2. Recruit a change coach - It can be your friend, spouse or anybody who takes an interest in you.

3. Hire a professional change coach

4. Have a visual banner to reinforce your change thought in your room. Verbalize what you want to be and where you want to be.

5. Set a change reminder in your mobile phone

6. Implement small changes first. If you want to create a habit of exercise, start by exercising at home first and move to a gym after you create the habit of exercising

7. Decrease the change friction by reducing the deviation from your routine.
Eg. If you want to go to gym to exercise, select a gym that is on your way to home from work. Or select a gym close to your work place or home.

8. Conceal your new change by  embedding it into an activity that you really love to do or an activity that is already a habit.
Eg: If you read a book everyday at night keep your night pills on top of the book that you read

9. Use easy tools to track - a simple whiteboard is very effective. Automatic tracking is the best method but very few tools are available for this.

10. Gamify - Mobile apps help in encouraging change. Eg: HabitStreak, Lift

10 Tactics to improve blog readership by Rand Fishkin of Moz

Content Marketing Hustle - Seth Godin

I recently came across an post from Seth Godin in his blog that was getting lot of shares in the social media. I went through the article - a very small one, for the data inclined - word count was 182 with more than 10,000 shares in twitter. It was not a spectacular article and so I was wondering what is making this article to get this level of attention. First I thought, come on this article is from Seth Godin and given his stature, anything he says would get that level of attention. Then I thought I would subscribe to his blog, which I hadn't yet but I followed him through RSS feeds. When I tried to subscribe, that is when I learnt a small marketing lesson. This is what I found, not the traditional subscription that sends articles to your email but a set of options to automatically share on a select social media channel. Automate the sharing, decrease the # of decision points to share - instead of readers trying to decide after every reading every article, the reader has given a blank check to share! Now this might not work for all the content creators but for established startup mavens and authors like  Seth Godin with a good quality of authorship.

A good slide on marketing ROI by Hubspot CMO

Platform Thinking - Enablement - Part 2

I had written about platform thinking in a business setup. In part 2, I want to talk about personal platform. There are other related terms that you might have heard - Influencer, Maven, Connector, Personal Branding. So hat does personal platform mean?

The proverb - "Tell me your friends and i'll tell you who you are" holds true and the new version of it would be "You are as good as your network".   Dale Carnegie's famous book "How to make friend and influence people" has a great deal of information on networking. But following networking strategies with an inner agenda of influencing others can have only a limited success if at all any.

How can one become an an essential cog in the social or professional fabric? It comes back to the same core concept of "Enablement". It is only through enabling others in your network, you can enable yourself. Another quote here is warranted - JFK's  "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" - Instead make it a bit broader just "ask not what others can do for you, ask what you can do for others". The more the people in your network are successful, the more you will be successful. So become a platform for others' success. Give more and you will get more, in personal, professional and social life.

Platform Thinking - Enablement - Part 1

Platform thinking and strategy has been discussed more in the web/high tech sector for a few years now and Facebook made it more popular. Though platform thinking has been understood in different perspectives, I want to mention a core concept explaining why platform thinking is important and why it works.

The core concept is "Enablement" - It is the attitude that helps ordinary people to become influencers; It is the culture that when imbibed into the corporate setting creates sustainable success. When firms and individuals understand that only by enabling others for success, they can construct their own success, they can become winners. When this concept is well understood, the firms get out of the "User Myopia" problem and go on to create a launching pad or platform for their users to launch their own businesses using the platform. Building communities and eco-systems are some of the required competitive advantages that a company has to build to sustain their early success. When a company focuses on building a platform what does it convey - that the company cares for their user's success not just their needs. In case of Facebook and Apple, by fostering a developer community apart from user communities, they were able to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Another great example is Sales force where they have created the Force platform and make the technology available to the developers that Sale force themselves use to create their products.

When multiple communities thrive on a platform, it boosts the existing networking effects and the value of the platform. The different communities create a complex value structure that depend and build upon each other.

The platform strategy is not to be viewed in the plain terms of multiple revenue stream and business models. Enablement must be a core corporate cultural element where each employee enables each other internally and the users, customers and other eco-system members externally. Such a corporate culture in itself then becomes a competitive advantage. This creates a 360 degree win situation bringing our the maximum value creation for all the stakeholders, customers and of course the shareholders.

Few other resources:

In the below video from Tech Disrupt 2013, Mark Zukerberg explains a bit about their platform strategy.



One key takeaway from this video is the Three Pillars mentioned by Mark - Build,Grow and Monetize. Enable the eco-system members to build their product, grow their business and monetize.

Sangeet Choudary has a blog dedicated to platform thinking and strategy and below is a slide from him that was presented at Echelon 2013 conference.

Echelon 2013: Platform Thinking - Business Model Design by Sangeet Paul Choudary from e27

Making sense out of Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp

Growth Story in numbers:

• 1.8 Billion users – Social messaging market by 2014 (Ovum forecasts)

• 7.6 Trillion messages - Operator based mobile messaging traffic in 2014

• 450 Million – Whatsapp users currently

• 3.5 Billion users – Global sms active users

• 1 Billion users – Whatsapp users forecast by 2014 year end.Whatsapp already has the same volume of texts as that of global sms volume.

• 40.8% - Premium messaging market growth rate.

• 38.3% - Mobile Advertising market growth rate

• $24.5 Billion – 2016 forecast for Mobile Ad revenue

• $3 Billion – Smart phone users forecast by 2018

• $120 Billion – Global sms revenue in 2013

• 53% - Mobile advertising share of Facebook’s revue

• 27% - CAGR  for Mobile Ad revenue

Just based on the above numbers, we can infer the monetization potential for Whatsapp.

But is Whatsapp worth $16 Billion?

Currently Whatsapp gets $1 (0.99 cents) per user after the first year.

Say 50% of the users have been using the app for more than a year that makes 225 Million paid users. So, they should have a revenue of $225 Million for 2013

The number of users is supposed to double to 1 Billion and so it will be making $450 Million for 2014 (overly optimistic assumption)

Now facebook gets about $7 billion in revenue and its market cap is $177 Billion.  Price to revenue ratio is 27. Let us reverse calculate what should be the revenue to justify $16Billion price tag.

It should be 16B/27 = $592 Million

So Facebook thinks Whatsapp is leaving (592-450) $142 Million as unrealized potential revenue for 2014.

Until now, nobody has been paying for Whatsapp. Until it is free it is growing but when users are asked to pay, they might flee.  Assuming, they will change the business model to ad based revenue, Let us do a simple valuation

50% of facebook revenue is coming from mobile ads.

Facebook active users =1.3 Billion

Mobile Ad rev/user = $2.7

Given that whatsapp is new to this model and given that whatsapp is not as big an asset as Facebook if we assume it can muster a $1 of mobile ad rev per user

Revenue estimate is $1 Billion for 2014 and $450 Million for 2013

Now using the Price to revenue ratio, Price =$450 Million*27=$12 Billion

This might have been the logic behind the pricing. Now facebook paid $4 Billion premium considering $12 Billion as a fair price which is a 30% premium.