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Growth
04 Sep, 2024 • 5 min read
TL;DR
Subheading 1
Let's cut to the chase. Building a startup is one of the most challenging endeavors you can undertake. The difference between success and failure often comes down to execution, not just ideas.
Project management isn't about stifling creativity or bogging you down in bureaucracy. It's about:
Focus: Keeping your team aligned with your core mission and priorities.
Efficiency: Maximizing your limited resources - time, money, and talent.
Adaptability: Giving you a framework to pivot quickly when needed.
Learning: Creating cycles of feedback and improvement to refine your product.
Credibility: Demonstrating to investors, partners, and customers that you can deliver.
Remember Sam's story. Project management didn't just help organize tasks - it transformed a quirky idea into a viable business. It can do the same for you.
You don't need to become a certified project manager or adopt complex systems. Start small. Use simple tools. Create clear goals. Prioritize ruthlessly. Communicate consistently. Iterate quickly.
In the end, project management could be the difference between your startup becoming the next big success story or just another "what if" tale. It's not just about having a brilliant idea - it's about having the tools and framework to bring that idea to life, adapt it to market realities, and scale it into a thriving business.
Your move, future startup success story. What will you do to bring more structure to your startup journey?
Subheading 2
The reason AI cannot replace human creatives, designers and strategists in branding is simple: Artificial intelligence can’t make intuitive leaps. It processes ungodly amounts of data, sure, but in a linear fashion. AI is brilliant at hoovering up yottabytes of verbiage and then, when prompted, making linear predictions about what comes next based on what came before. It’s simple logic: 2 + 2 = 4.
That’s why AI is so good at writing serviceable copy, pulling together data, or making creepily prescient online buying recommendations. It teases patterns out of mountains of past actions and information, draws inferences about those patterns, and turns those inferences into ideas, suggestions, and conclusions. But when there’s no chain of connected data to draw on, there are no patterns to analyze.
The math looks like this:
2 + 2 = Fish
Or if you want something more dramatic, think about the infamous Apple “1984” TV spot. It’s legendary, in part because it only ran once, but also because of its totalitarian imagery and message of liberation from conformity. We can’t imagine a logical, conservative AI algorithm coming up with something as edgy and daring for a computer brand. Apple’s seminal ad worked because it leveraged something else that AI doesn’t get: Emotion.
Subheading 3
Artificial intelligence also isn’t very good at capitalizing on surprises because, by definition, they come out of nowhere. Again, AI is a prediction engine, and if there’s nothing to base a prediction, it’s stumped. Humans, OTOH, are great at making hay out of random chance.
Take, for example, the fallout from the monster 2003 hit “Hey Ya” by OutKast, the earworm that told us, repeatedly, to “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Well, Polaroid had declared bankruptcy in 2001, but the company’s branding team knew a great thing when they saw it.
Right away, they hired the ad agency Euro RSCG to sponsor parties for OutKast where they distributed Polaroid cameras, and paid the two artists in OutKast to hold Polaroid cameras during some of their performances. The gambit worked: Polaroid’s public image and sales were boosted by the song. Even though the bump was temporary (the company filed for BK again in 2008), this stands as another example of people acting in ways AI just can’t.
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