📢 Building a Killer Pitch Deck...

Hi there,

Did you see Gartner's insights into 2024’s tech trends? From AI TRiSM to machine customers – your business, customers, or stakeholders are bound to be affected by at least one of these in the coming months. That’s why we’re here to add value at every stage of your innovation journey:

1. Startup Phase

2. Growth Phase

3. Scale/Sale Phase

Crafting an Effective Pitch Deck

Who better to learn pitching than from a Venture Capitalist, right? Check out this video where Guy Kawasaki explains how to pitch with just 10 slides. The core of the approach is to avoid theatrics and stick to due diligence and communicating what matters – basically by working and reworking your messaging until it can fit into an extremely limited space.

Fastest Idea-Testing: 7-Day Prototype

There are a few good people to learn prototyping from and Google Design Sprint creator, Jake Knapp, is one of them. In this awesome video he shows how, within a week-long sprint, by Thursday the team puts together a make-shift prototype and gathers real-world feedback from just 5 people. And by Friday have enough data to inform a much more successful MVP launch. 

Iteration: When to Proceed, Pivot or Restart

In every founder’s journey, there are moments of doubt. Steve Blank believes the way forward is to assess your confidence in product-market fit. If you’ve 1) got fit but are not making money yet, maybe all you need is time and growth. 2) A misalignment in what you offer and what customers want needs a pivot and 3) if you have fit but the market scale isn’t there and you can’t see another route, don’t be afraid to start over – did you know X (Twitter) was a restart?

Are you in the start phase? Have questions? Hit reply and let us know and we can see how we can help.

High-Powered Marketing for Growth

The key to unlocking truly powerful marketing for your product, lies in developing the perfect story for your brand says Treeshake founder Dave Duarte in this podcast. Stories are fundamental to how humans are wired, so the responsibility for your marketing does not lie with another person or department, it’s up to the founder to develop the narrative of why this product is needed, how it works, who it is for, why it is better and how much it is worth. Nail the story, build everything out from that and marketing suddenly becomes easier and more natural.

Optimising Operations with Local Tech

A big misconception among growing companies is that you need to invest in expensive international tools and systems to play in the “big leagues”. The truth is that we’ve seen some extremely innovative locally-produced tech from inside SA, and you’re doing yourself a disservice by not at least considering local solutions. Our co-founder Jacques Jordaan recently shared some awesome insights with Engineering News into business growth with local tech.

Innovating Within Your Product Line

iPhone co-creator Tony Fadell shares a lot of insights on iterative innovation in his Ted Talk. Highlights include 1) Steve Jobs’ advice to “stay a beginner,” meaning fight your habituation and notice the small things, which Fadell expands to 2) have young people in your team (they see the world a bit differently). Another great nugget is to 3) look wider than the problem you’re solving for the larger underlying need and 4) focus on customer experience – if people don’t absolutely love it, there’s more work to do.

Need help growing faster? Maybe that's augmenting your team, or perhaps it's coffee with one of our growth experts. Either way, hit reply and let us know and let’s see how we can help.

Maintaining a Culture of Innovation and Agility

We recently challenged the notion that there’s a pinnacle of excellence a person can achieve in their role/career/industry. We say, no, change is constant, and that’s why we at Specno have a culture of continuous learning. And you can see for yourself how our people say this helps them remain innovative, adaptable, and excited in everything they do.

Lean Methodologies for Large-Scale Operations

As a startup being Lean is easy – everyone contributes to everything. But an extremely unique point of view on how to apply Lean to your growing company, according to Simon Sinek, is to forget the numbers and focus on the Kaizen strategy within the Toyota Way: Mix up your teams, bring people from different fields of expertise into unrelated fields and ask them to solve problems – an HR person looking at medical tech, for example, because they bring a completely fresh perspective (the heart of innovation according to Steve Jobs).

Developing Channels: The Amazon Way

With the retail space in SA expected to heat up in 2024 with the arrival of Amazon, it seems to apt to look into some of the ways they’ve changed the game in other parts of the world. A word buzzing around most retailers these days is omnichannel. So we did a nice deep-dive into the Amazon omnichannel strategy and found a few unique insights almost anyone can learn from.

Want to scale faster? We have people that are comfortable with the discomfort of the scale phase. Hit reply and chat with us about how we can augment your team and help you scale faster.

Have your say…

What’s happening at Specno

Our team is hard at work planning the next Founders Den to happen soon… (Here’s what happened last time…)

If you'd like to partner with us for that event, contact us here. And, if you’d like to attend, look out for the announcement on our LinkedIn in the next few weeks.

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