The Right Mindset for Successful Networking

The ability to connect with others, truly connect, is what makes people become successful.

Success in life equals to the people you meet plus what you create together, with those people.

In order to be effective and successful in networking, you have to have the right mindset and the right skill set.

The right mindset and skill set comes from building honest relationships; people that you trust and who trust you in the same manner – an honest mutual trust.

In order to have the right mindset you have to follow a certain philosophy and the following actions:

Work actively towards becoming a member, a member of a network:

• Always analyze, where are the places you go to meet the kind of people who could most impact your life?
• Meet people inclined to be mentored or who are eager to mentor you - people you guide, people who guide you.
• Be conscious and aware, that, real networking is about finding ways to make other people more successful; their success will become your success.

Don't Keep Score

• It’s not about "how can you help me?" but "how can I help you?"
• However, become as willing to ask for help as you are to give it
• Relationship are like muscles, the more you work them, the stronger they become
• Trust is the main cornerstone, relationships are solidified by trust
• Bottom line: it's better to give before you receive. And never keep score. If your interactions are ruled by generosity your rewards will follow suit.

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

How to Deal with Your First Product Release to Grow

When you launch your viable product ( MVP) Release 1.0, lots of things can and will go wrong.  Feature requests will also start pouring in. The common tendency is to build more, but that is hardly the answer.

• More features dilute your unique value proposition:  your MVP is better as small and focused as possible – simple products are simple to understand.
• Don’t give up on you MVP too early:  first, troubleshoot and resolve issues with existing features before chasing new features
• Features always have hidden costs:  more features mean more tests, more screenshots, more videos, more coordination, more complexity, more distractions.
• You still don’t know what the customers really want: always keep your future feature ideas in a backlog – later on, validate and prioritize them.
• Start with Minimal Market Features: a feature with the smallest portion of work which provides added value to customers
• When validating and prioritizing features based on customer requests define if the request is a single request or common request – is the feature requested by a single customer or by most customers.  Define and assess whether it is a nice to have or a must have if it’s worth solving and which macro it will affect.
• Review features throughout the feature life-cycle, ensure that they have a positive impact. Otherwise, rework or kill them.
• At the beginning focus on traction and not on scaling – once you demonstrate early traction then and only then you can shift toward achieving sustainable growth.

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca

Leverage Your Product Release and Make it a Hit!

While some learning happens during the requirements-gathering stage, most learning happens after you release your product.

The first step is to reduce the scope of your minimum viable product (MVP) to its essence so that you build the smallest thing possible. Reducing the scope of your MVP not only shortens your development but also removes unnecessary distractions that dilute your product's measuring. 

How to accomplish an MVP:

• Clear your slate:  include only features which can be justified
• Start with your number one problem: the job of your unique value proposition (UVP) is to make a compelling promise and the job of the MVP is to deliver on that promise.
• Eliminate nice-to-haves and don't-needs: eliminate don't-needs right away, nice-to-have should only be included if they are a prerequisite feature of a must-have feature - otherwise, add it to your features backlog queue.
• Repeat previous step for your number two and number three problem 
• Consider other customer feature requests:  such as integration for example
• Charge from day one, but collect on day 30
• Focus on learning, not optimization: don't waste efforts optimizing servers, code, database - most likely you will not have a scaling problem when you launch. 
• Get Started deploying contentiously:  a technique of shortening the cycle time from requirements to release in a way in which the product is built end-to-end versus a batch-and-queue approach.  Implemented correctly, Continues Deployment does not shortcut quality as long as stricter testing and monitoring is in place.

One of the core values we have as a company is to inspire and empower people in all aspects of their lives. Additionally, if you want to read about our Custom Software Solutions and Consulting Services, please visit www.isucorp.ca