Sam Smith

“Increasingly, companies use their power to influence and manipulate their users. Websites that profit from advertising spend a lot of effort making sure you spend as much time on those sites as possible, optimizing their content for maximum addictiveness.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“THE GLOBE | Unlocking the Wealth in Rural Markets Mamta Kapur, Sanjay Dawar, and Vineet R. Ahuja | 151 words In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors—researchers with Accenture—conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged—for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones. Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers. Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations. Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers’ welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.”
― Anonymous

“Let’s consider another similar story — the dating website Plenty of Fish. German programmer Markus Frind started the company in 2003 as a programming exercise. He had been wanting to learn a new coding language called ASP.NET, so he built the site in two weeks — and to his surprise, it took off. Frind never raised a dime of outside money, because the venture was profitable from the beginning. “I didn’t see the need to raise money because I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he said in a 2015 interview with Business Insider. “It was a profitable company, and there was no need to raise money.”3 Plenty of Fish grew slowly and organically for more than 10 years, eventually growing to about 75 employees and 90 million registered users. In 2015, Match Group (which also owns dating sites Match.com and OKCupid) bought Plenty of Fish for $575 million. “It wasn’t like I had a plan to create a dating site,” Frind said. “It was just a side project I created that got really big.” Not bad for what started as a hobby.”
― Brian de Haaff, Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It

“The truth was that the city was losing manufacturing jobs at a pace five times worse than the national average, and one of the reasons for its loss of 800,000 industrial jobs since 1962 was, expert after expert concluded, the decline of rail freight service. Several government studies had to concede, despite the bias toward the more glamorous and profit-intensive Trump-like development of these yards, that “a substantial market demand” existed for a real rail terminal at either 60th or 34th Streets. In fact, the ailing railroad industry was beginning to make a strong comeback outside of New York by the end of the seventies, aided by escalating fuel costs, which were putting truckers at a sudden disadvantage. A West Side terminal at either of the Trump yards would not only have positioned the city to take advantage of this economic shift, it would also have dramatically reduced truckload traffic through clogged Manhattan streets. Trump’s simultaneous hold on both of the potential terminal sites for almost half a decade may have been a fatal blow to a manufacturing revival in New York.”
― Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention