Author Archives: Stuart G. Hall

About Stuart G. Hall

Making a positive difference one day at a time. #London #Leicester

Want a practical complexity heuristic?

Posted on by
Reply

Update: 7 May 2016

What I didn’t explain is the hard part is figuring out what the parts are, and how they fit together. But there’s a good example in my upselling solution blog post, on how I figured out what imho was blocking growth at Causeway, with the help of expert ‘sales hacker’ Richard Harris. I guess the exec team at Causeway have found their own way to a solution, with the business transition to SaaS.

There you go, click on the pic for the three tweet answer, thanks.

Beware: this is not ‘top level’ thinking. This is a heuristic.

PS: I came up with all this a day after staring in to the sky whilst waiting for the morning minibus to Sony in Weybridge – and after tweeting about a strange line in the sky – by chance stumbled on the origin of the phrase ‘Occam’s Razor’ which is relevant to the design of heuristics: “One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”

The answer to my question – ‘Ockham Stack’ (see Q & A below with @CoxeyLoxey) – is named after the village in Surrey where William of Ockham, the guy who coined the phrase Occam’s Razor, came from. So hope that didn’t increase beyond what’s necessary, the # entities required to explain it!

Will the Winklevoss twins’ new community succeed?

Posted on by
Reply

This caught my eye today, in an email from Richard Millington, who runs the community management training business The Pillar Summit in response to the news of investment by the Winklevoss brothers (oh, and Divya Narendra) in a new financial community.

Part of the reason it stood out is simply that I started off my professional life in community management setting up..drum roll..a new community for financial professionals! Well accountants, to be precise. And then worked on the FinReg21 community for a short while.

But enough from me, over to Richard to express his concerns to members of The Pillar Community:

Here is a quick challenge for you all.

Yesterday, the Winklevoss twins invested $1m in SumZero – a community for financial professionals.

I can imagine them debating the math: “Too bad we only made $65m from that Facebook idea, but this community for financial professionals sounds much smarter (and more original!). Financial professionals are rich, so let’s charge $1000+ per year for membership. If we can get just 5000 of the 5m in the USA to join, we’ll be making $5m per year!”

Do you know how many entrepreneurs have approached us with idea to build an exclusive, paid membership, community for financial professionals? 6.

That may not sound high, but these are just the tiny number of people that approached us. It’s a slither of the pie. I’d estimate there are 100 to 200 people in the USA working on this very idea right now.

Here is an open challenge to you all.

Based upon what we’ve covered on the Pillar Summit so far, tell me what’s wrong with SumZero?

Why is it unlikely to succeed? What do you think they are doing wrong?

Now without being on Richard’s course I can’t directly comment. But I get the drift, that the SumZero idea is unlikely to take off in terms of probability. But enough from me, over to Divya to explain the proposition: