Blog

It was 2018 and I was in Nashville attending my first IASA event. I was somewhat sweaty from helping to break down our exhibitor booth and I was sitting in this spectacular atrium of the hotel and convention center that held the event. I was feeling that good kind of...

In Adam Grant’s 2021 book ‘Think Again’, the author suggests that we should think like scientists in both our work and our lives. We should approach our opinions and beliefs as theories that we test to see if they align with observable facts, and if they don’t, we...

It’s remarkable how little innovation there has been in the world of insurance statutory financial reporting. For well over the past decade, reporting teams have been resigned to using outdated and backwards technology with questionable performance and reliability to...

In startup methodology, the first thing teams do once they have their initial business concept is Discovery. This is a process of in-depth interviews with potential customers which serves a dual purpose. One, it guides the development of the business concept, and two,...

Dan Lyons’ book ‘Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble’, is the true story of a journalist that goes to work at Hubspot as a ‘marketing fellow’ after losing his job at Newsweek. He’s one of hundreds of Hubspot employees, he’s twice the average age of the...

Photo credit: Amplitude There really aren’t revolutionary ideas in product development, so much as riffs on timeless principles. There’s no “new” way of doing things that yields magical results. Best practices today are simply a repackaging of proven processes, often...

A bad economy doesn't impact all products equally. In economics, there are normal goods and inferior goods.  Normal goods are the ones where there is a positive correlation between demand and the economic environment. Think of steak: consumers who are flush with...

July marked Gain’s sixth anniversary.  It’s always a fun, introspective exercise to chart our progress over the years. By way of how-we-got-to-now, here are the themes from prior anniversary posts.  From the top: Year 1 seems like an eternity ago, but the theme was...

Gain’s team recently returned from our first in-person conference in quite some time. The first week in June marked the first non-remote IASA Annual Conference in three years.  The high-level recap was that it was, as always, phenomenal. Not only does the organization...