Category Archives: business tips

Success in Business Requires Failure and Humility

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker The world loves to celebrate visionaries. We think about their successes and feel confident that some super-beings can peer through the mists to chart the future. Yet most of these people got things wrong over and over again. Apple Lisa computer? Dud. Apple Newton? Ditto. Apple TV? The jury is out. Repeatedly [...]

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Pick a Small Market and Make Money in Business

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker New ideas are intoxicating. We think the world should be as enchanted by the concept as we are. If you ever feel this way, think about indoor plumbing. It took over 4,000 years from the invention of indoor plumbing until it caught on during the 19th century. Really, is your new idea [...]

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How to Make the First Sale in Your Business

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker Wonderful movies have been made about people singlehandedly taking on the world to prove a new idea. If this is your dream, snap out of it. Change results from alliances of people and companies. I ran one of the first companies using cell phones as marketing tools. As the dot-com boom turned [...]

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Safe Investments in 2012

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker On the TV game show Wheel of Fortune, contestants guess at consonants in a word puzzle to run up their pot of money. Sometimes, however, they spend $250 to buy vowels, reducing their uncertainty about what the puzzle says. Buying vowels is a great idea for new markets—spend a bit to learn. [...]

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How a Small Business Compete with Big Companies

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker While working with Celtel, I lived for a while in Zambia. One of our main competitors there was the state-owned telecom company, Zamtel. Life is pretty easy when your competition is Zamtel. I once had a service issue on a Zamtel line we used for Internet access, so I called the number [...]

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Keep Your Business Strategy Simple

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker Years ago, I created one of the first services to use your cell phone to find special offers in a neighborhood. The idea seemed so compelling, and eventually it was. Several companies, including Facebook and foursquare, are doing this now. But at the time it asked people to change engrained habits too [...]

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Your CEO doesn’t need to be Steve Jobs

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker Innovations that open up new markets often don’t stem from brilliantly creative solutions. Your CEO doesn’t need to be Steve Jobs for your company to generate business breakthroughs (a lot of CEOs think they’re Steve Jobs, but that’s a different issue). The keys to creating new markets are usually dead obvious if [...]

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How to Identify New Business Opportunity

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

By Stephen Wunker Latent needs are all around us. Is your life perfect? I didn’t think so. Sometimes people are over-served by what the market provides (I don’t understand 99% of the functions in Excel) and oftentimes they’re under-served or completely ignored. Life is full of unmet needs and moments of joy that are too [...]

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How to Find New Markets and Make Money

By Internet Business | Published: 2011

John D. Rockefeller became a billionaire in 1916, when that was real money. Mark Zuckerberg is worth nearly $10 billion today, which is still pretty good. John Bogle turned around Vanguard, a sleepy money management company, with a new idea called index funds and made the firm a global leader in its industry. What do [...]

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