Often times after a radio show or podcast has become popular there is a desire to release a book and How I Built This fits into the pattern. There is a podcast called How I Built This by Guy Raz which resulted in a book published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, NY, 2020. The podcast is Guy Raz interviewing entrepreneurs about their journey to become successful. In the book, Mr. Raz groups the answers into categories and as a journalist adds stories around the theme of the chapter.

If you are buying real estate, you know the expression – location, location and location. If you are investing in a small business, some locations are better than others for the operations of the business. In most industries, an infrastructure grows around the large businesses for example in software world, Silicon Valley has people engaged in all the levels of software companies. If you owned a software business, you would want people with a connection into the Valley ecosystem. Once in the valley’s ecosystem, it becomes easier to recruit and find talent for your company. It does not necessary mean you have to be there, but it means you have to connection into the ecosystem.

Every year 850,000 new businesses are established, only 80% will make it to the 1st anniversary. Most of those businesses will be one person based trying to make their dream come true.

In the app world, across the 5 biggest app stores, there are over 5 million apps available for download. In 2018 those apps produced nearly 200 billion individual downloads and $365 billion in revenue. In 2019, more than 1,000 apps were added every day to the iOS app store.

The above data shows great opportunity, however the top 5 apps account for 85% of all the in-app time spent by users on their mobile devices. The other apps vie for the remaining 15% of users’ in app time.

The difference between the top and bottom app is often the ability to get attention or ability to create buzz and to engineer word of the mouth. How to do get buzz is more art than science. It is always possible to generate buzz with money, but the product has to be very good and aimed at customers and potential customers.

Building buzz is about leveraging specific relationships (trend setters, media contacts) and resources (OPM, expertise) to your name out there in front as many people as possible. If the name is out there, people including your core customers will try and retry your products and services. The buzz is one source telling another – you need to try this. If they try and love the product, it is likely they will tell others. The company’s job is to ensure the product and service is done very well all the time. When the signal breaks from the normal noise of the marketplace, the company can reach farther than they could have been imagined.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, for large companies, they are what all the smaller competition desires, the ability to generate profits to pay dividends. In many industries, the competition is difficult to achieve that end which means the large company has to have consistency that consumers demand. As an investor, if you use the product you can determine does the product want you to use it again and again?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.