Jerry Kennelly’s Business Axioms

Photo by Dublin Web Summit.

Jerry Kennelly, founder of Tweak.com, was the third speaker at this week’s Dublin Web Summit. His concentrated presentation distilled some personal business axioms that he had developed over his career.



1: Are you making life better?
Does your company have a greater vision beyond anything wholly based around money. For Tweak.com, his vision is to democratise design: “To bring Madison Avenue to Main Street USA.”

2: Operate in a business with high margins
His first company Stockbyte had a margin of 94% on some images and was delivering two million in profit per month before he sold it to Getty Images.

3: Know your competition 
Understand where you fit in relative to them within your industry’s ecosystem. Specifically: what is your company’s reason to exist?

4: Disruptors can quickly become disruptees
He sold Stockbyte before the companies coming in underneath him overtook him and the market value stock images hit equilibrium at about $10 per image.

5: Are you moving fast but not fast enough?
The reality of business online is: Faster, Better, Cheaper. Do not wait for perfection when building your service; get in front of your customers and start making transactions fast.

6: Take the easy money
Build partnerships for channel sales. He has a white-label version of Tweak.com that he is partnering with print companies and stock libraries.

7: Use talent pools
Hire globally. Do not fool yourself that all of the great skills you need can be found in Ireland. The best people are all over the world. Related to this: fire them fast. If someone is not performing after two months they are unlikely to change.

(Update: it turns out that Jerry presented nine axioms, but I did not note them all down.)

I am going to blog some of my notes from a selection of the presentations and roundtables at the fifth Dublin Web Summit over the next week or so as I process them.