by Clay Ostrom | Jun 17, 2019 | Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Psychology, Strategy
< Back to The Campfire It’s easy to compare the emotional turbulence of running a business with riding a roller coaster. The standard business lifecycle comes with tense uphill climbs, exciting turns, and sometimes heart-stopping descents. When you’re that invested...
by Clay Ostrom | Feb 19, 2019 | Entrepreneurship, Psychology, Startups
< Back to The Campfire You’re at your desk. You’re deep into a problem. You’ve stared at it for hours. You’ve hacked away most of the obvious nonsense. You’ve got it down to the core.And now you’re stuck. You need to figure out:That right combination of words for...
by Clay Ostrom | Jan 30, 2019 | Customers, Psychology, Sales
< Back to The Campfire In the world of programming, there are lots of rules to highlight how bad developers are at estimating the time it will take to finish a project. It’s so difficult to estimate time accurately, that the rules are even sarcastic about it. The...
by Clay Ostrom | Jan 9, 2019 | Branding, Content Strategy, Psychology
< Back to The Campfire One of the hardest parts of creating content for a business is developing a consistent style. Consistency in this case means two things: Ensuring the actual content is consistent from piece to piece, and channel to channel. Embodying a style...
by Clay Ostrom | Sep 11, 2018 | Customers, Marketing, Psychology, Startups, Strategy
< Back to The Campfire Whether you’re a startup or you’ve been around for years, talking to your customers is a critical practice. It provides a level of insight into your business that you can’t get through surveys and analytics alone. I recently worked on a...
by Clay Ostrom | Jul 18, 2018 | 10X Teardown, Elements of Value, Jobs To Be Done, Marketing, Psychology, Startups, Strategy
< Back to The Campfire The 10X Rule for innovation sets a bar that’s simple to understand but very difficult to achieve. The rule roughly states that in order for customers to switch from a current behavior, they need a new option that’s 10X better.The value of...
