This is the story of how Rocket Internet entered a developing market and succeeded because of its diversified portfolio of startups and investments — In 2015, Rocket Internet reached out to me with a clear mandate — they wanted to launch their Lamudi business in a developing market, but they also wanted to fail and pivot as quickly as possible to reduce the pain if there was no market fit to be found.

Every product needs an initial insight to get started with, and when that insight is found, it needs to go through a series of hypothesis-driven customer discovery experiments. This is the story of how we built a product that brought neighbors and local stakeholders together and helped them build social capital using technology. — Initial insights and market validation In September 2018, our payments startup had scaled from 15 full-time employees to 65, and with an office in one of the city’s most crowded and densely populated locations, very quickly, parking spaces close to the office and in a reasonably safe and legally viable location were short in supply.

Assessing three segments: 1) Pure digital wallets and the case of PayPal, 2) Digital payment ecosystems and the case of AliPay, and 3) Social payment platforms and the cases of Venmo and WeChat — Fintech, in its broad definition, is the technological innovation that improves how money and capital are transferred, raised, and invested. While the word ‘Fintech’ might be new, the relationship between technology and finance is not. The financial services sector has always been at the forefront of technological innovation and has…

The pandemic has accelerated the trends we had seen during the last decade and leading up to the retail apocalypse of 2017. …

Part 1: What is a disruption? How digital is disrupting? What is the role of the entrepreneur? How quickly is digital disruption happening? How is collaboration shaping in this era? — Every few years we hear that the launch of a new digital product is going to change the world and/or disrupt an industry. But disruption is way more than just a new product or the market frenzy over a new feature. Disruption can indeed be irritating at times, but we’ll…

Business development, fuels growth, whether at startups or corporate settings. ‘Biz-Dev’ requires correct hiring, goal and KPI setting, sufficient resource allocation, management involvement, and focused specialization to succeed. — A sales department is responsible for selling specific offerings to customers and marketing determines which specific customer segments to target with specific products and features. But when the opportunity isn’t clear but potential is huge, that’s when business development steps in. Business development aims to identify and flush out new…

Build the fundamentals including the team, processes, and analytics, identify the opportunities through self-declared, deductive, and inductive approaches, prioritize the efforts as there will be limited bandwidth in dealing with all the projects you may have in mind — Personalization is a popular topic in marketing and knowing the techniques for creating a professional personalization program will make a huge difference in marketing results, as sometimes it works and sometimes it just doesn’t. …

Defining, managing, and succeeding with Customer Success teams and building a culture that is committed to maximizing the lifetime value of the customer — A customer can become extremely unhappy when he/she is struggling to get value out of a product they’ve paid for and the organization that sold it doesn’t seem to care. In moments such as this, customer success can make a huge difference. Nearly every software organization, subscription businesses such as…