The document discusses common business principles and strategies that are often not grounded in common sense. It advocates for creating new product categories to automatically become the number one player in that space. It also recommends focusing on category design rather than just product differentiation. Additionally, it provides strategies around project management tools for game developers, enterprise cloud version control, and pricing models based on customer value rather than just costs.

1. COMMON SENSE BUSINESS

2. Common sense is the least
common of the senses!

4. “It’s a winner takes all market”
“Once we finish building this feature”
“Our customers don’t actually want to talk to us”
“We can only acquire customers as low cost leaders”
“But I do talk to my customers”
“Increasing the price is impossible without
huge churn and Twitter meltdown”
“Distributed teams are a win-win”
“Our Engineers are the best of the best”
“There’s no point hiring salespeople”
“We need to spend aggressively to
hit our growth goals”
“That might work in other
companies, but we’re different”
“There is no way to cut costs
without destroying the business”

5. Principles
Price Strategy
Category Design
Installed Base Health
Centralized Teams
Success Based Investing
Customer Interviews
Go to Market Science > Product

6. Category Design

7. Product differentiation isn’t strategy. My best salesperson vs your best salesperson; you’ve
raised more VC dollars than me; I’m the cheapest; I’ve got the most features. HARD WORK!
Create a New Category - automatically be #1. You want to occupy a position in the
customer's mind, and only one company can be there.
It’s easier to sell a category than a product. Customers self-select.
The company is easier to run! At every level, decisions become more obvious fits or misfits.

8. Project Management and Code Repos “All-In-One-Place”
…. for Game Developers!
Goldilocks: More powerful than Trello, better UI than Jira.
#1 in SVN
Assembla

9. Enterprise Cloud Version Control

10. Price Strategy

11. Value Pricing: The mid-point between the value you deliver and the maximum the customer
could pay. Entrepreneurs typically don’t value price - they do cost or competitor.
Increase Prices: Most SaaS companies price too low. (And almost never increase prices!).
Don’t Grandfather Plans. It’s not a ‘standard practice’, it’s really over-charging new
customers to subsidize the existing base.
Evaluate all the Levers. As your business, customer, and product evolves - the dimensions
of value change too - regularly evaluate the levers pricing should be applied to.

12. Thank you!