Archive for April, 2010
April 30th, 2010
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“There was a long silence on the other end, a silence peculiar to conference calls when an entire group stops to think.”
Clay Shirky in “The Collapse of Complex Business Models“
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“Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.” Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
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“Whenever you see a spike in self-employment in this kind of economy, you know that is involuntary entrepreneurship,” Jared Bernstein “Defying Forecasts, Job Losses Mount for 22nd Month” (September, 2003)
Cited by Chris Anderson in “The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity” (May 2009)
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“Hasten slowly, and without losing heart,
Put your work twenty times upon the anvil.”
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
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“Companies aren’t generally structured to access, absorb or utilize customer insights since they are organized by product, not by customer.” Ranjay Gulati in “Seeing Customers as Partners in Innovation“
Full quote:
“Being customer-driven doesn’t mean asking customers what they want and then giving it to them. It’s about building a deep awareness of how the customer uses your product. Companies aren’t generally structured to access, absorb or utilize customer insights since they are organized by product, not by customer.” Hat tip to Mac Fowler
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“Look for an enterprise problem so bad that people will pay you to solve it and let you keep the software“.
Bill Paseman
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“There are really two killer apps for the next era of IT tech: collaboration and correlation”
James Watters in April 11 tweet
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“Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.”
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
Quoted in “Honesty in Negotiations”
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“We are like machines made up of redundant components, many of which are defective right from the start.”
Leonid Gavrilov & Natalia Gavrilova in “Why We Fall Apart” (IEEE Spectrum article)
Full quote:
“The quest to understand and control aging has led us, two biologists, to draw inspiration from what might seem an unlikely source: reliability engineering. The engineering approach to understanding aging is based on ideas, methods, and models borrowed from reliability theory. Developed in the late 1950s to describe the failure and aging of complex electrical and electronic equipment, reliability theory has been greatly improved over the past several decades. It allows researchers to predict how a system with a specified architecture and level of reliability of its constituent parts will fail over time.
The theory is so general in scope that it can be applied to understanding aging in living organisms as well. In the ways that we age and die, we are not so different from the machines we build. The difference, we have found, is minimized if we think of ourselves in this unflattering way: we are like machines made up of redundant components, many of which are defective right from the start.
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“Startups explore novel practices in chaotic environments, winnowing them into emergent practices for complex environments.”
Sean Murphy
I was inspired by Steve Blank’s “startups are the search to find order in chaos” and influenced by Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework
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“It is better to ask some of the questions than know all of the answers”
James Thurber from ‘The Scotty Who Knew Too Much” in “Fables for our Time“
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“The best money during the nascent years of a business is patient for growth but impatient for profit.”
Clayton Christensen in “The Innovator’s Solution”
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“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
Logan Pearsall Smith
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“That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.”
Chuang Tzu
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“Startups are new businesses–not development projects—that need to discover a sustainable business model.”
William Pietri in “Responsible Technical Debt: Not an Oxymoron“
Full quote:
Startups are about learning. For this to make sense, you have to understand two things:
- Startups—even software startups—are businesses, not software development projects.
- The point of a startup isn’t to create a software product; it’s to discover a sustainable business model.
In a startup, software development isn’t an art for its own sake; what makes sense from a pure engineering perspective may not make sense more broadly. That’s true for any business really, but it’s especially true for a startup. That’s because the main goal of a startup is to discover a valuable business. Discovery requires experimentation, and the amount you can learn is a function of the cost of your experiments.
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“Pricing is the moment of truth—all of marketing comes to focus in the pricing decision.”
Raymond Corey
April 25th, 2010
Overview
The Startup Lessons Learned Conference (#sllconf) was Friday April 23rd, 2010. This post is an effort to capture press coverage and blog commentary on the conference that will be of use to entrepreneurs. I will update it periodically through the end of May 2010 as I become aware of new blog posts. Please feel free to contact me and suggest a post you have found useful.
The conference was streamed live to more than 60 locations by Justin.tv, their video archive is at http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/all If you missed the conference and are planning to watch the videos I would encourage you to read this blog post first: “Tips for Getting the Most Out of the Startup Lessons Learned Conference (SLLConf)”
Welcome and Opening
by Eric Ries, Startup Lessons Learned Blog
Keynote: To Agility, and Beyond
by Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute
Continuous Deployment Case Study: WiredReach
by Ash Maurya, WiredReach
Agile Development Case Study: Grockit
by Farb Nivi, Grockit
Case Study: But Does It Scale?
by James Birchler, Brett G. Durrett, and Tim Fitz, IMVU
Panel “But What About Design?”
Conversation: “Getting to Plan B”
with Eric Ries and Randy Komisar, KPCB
Minimum Viable Product Case Study: Aardvark
by Damon Horowitz and Max Ventilla of Aardvark/Google
Pivot Case Study: Flowtown
by Ethan Bloch and Dan Martell of Flowtown
Pivot Case Study: KISSMetrics
by Hiten Shah, KISSMetrics
Customer Development 2.0: Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups
by Steve Blank
Is Customer Development Marketing? Food on the Table Case Study
by Manuel Rosso, Food on the Table
Customer Development Case Study: Dropbox
by Drew Houston, Dropbox
Customer Development Case Study: PBWorks
by David Weekly, PBworks
Customer Development Panel: But Who Should Actually Get Out of the Building?
Summaries & Overviews That Apply to More Than One Talk or Session
- Startup Lessons Learned Conference Notes – Fri, April 23, 2010 by Troy Angrignon, (@troyangrignon), Ali Sohani (@alisohani), Grishma Govani (@strangeloops), Sarah Allen (@ultrasaurus), Kevin Donaldson et. al.
- Kevin Donaldson “Summary of Startup Lessons Learned Conference“
- Mathew Mahoney “Twitter Recap of Startup Lessons Learned Conference“
- NYT: “The Rise of the Fleet Footed Startup“
- Nathan Artz “Tricks Learned from Startups Lessons Learned Conference“
- SLLConf on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/sllconf
- Adam Wiggins “Startup Lessons Learned“
- Steve Blank “Woodstock for Entrepreneurs: the Startup Lessons Learned Conference“
- Anand Rajaram “Drinking from the Fire-hose – Lessons I learned from the Startup Lessons Learned Conference : Part 1“
- Michael Denomy “Startup Lessons Learned Conference“
- Deyan Vitanov “What’s Bugging Me About the Lean Startup: Promoting a Mindset of Marginal Incrementalism“
- Kurt Carr “My Lessons Learned” Intro, Part 1, Part2
- Alan Cooper “To Pivot, Or Not To Pivot“
- Richard Jordan “Live Blogging Startup Lessons Learned Conference“
- Damien Detcherry “Review of the lean start up conference: ‘Start up lessons, San Francisco, April 23th, 2010′“
- Tristan Kromer “Top Takeaway From Startup Lessons Learned“
- Tristan Kromer “Customer Development with Network Effects“
Remote Sites Recap
I will update this list periodically through the end of May 2010 as I become aware of new blog posts. Please feel free to contact me and suggest a post you have found useful.
April 22nd, 2010
I cam across an interesting conference going on today that seems related to tomorrow’s Startup Lessons Learned Conference: the Lean Software & Systems Conference with a hashtag #lssc10. It looks like this is the second year and last year it was held in Miami in 2009. It’s managed by the Lean Software and Systems Consortium.
Don Reinertsen gave the keynote on “The Easy Road to FLOW Goes through a Town named LEAN.” He is co-author (with Preston Smith) of “Developing Products in Half the Time” and “Managing the Design Factory: The Product Developers Toolkit” and more recently “The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development.” I last blogged about him in 2008 “Don Reinertsen: Priorities Are The Last Refuge of the Inumerate.”
I will track blog posts for this conference through the end of May, it looks like it may be addressing many of the same lean software development principles that the SLLConf folks are trying to implement in their startups.
April 22nd, 2010
I blogged about the “Startup Lessons Learned Conference on April 23” about three weeks ago and now the conference is tomorrow (April 23rd) in San Francisco. Whether you are planning to attend in person or at a remote streaming session (more than 60 locations are available see http://www.sllconf.com/streaming ) I think the best way to take advantage of the conference material would be to read two chapters from Steve Blank’s “Four Steps to the Epiphany” (cheaper at http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch): Chapter 3 on “Customer Discovery” and Chapter 4 on “Customer Validation. Ash Mauyra has also written three blog posts from his entrepreneurial perspective that I have found to be the best description, “from the inside out” of what customer development feels like. I would encourage you to read the following in advance:
Now, write down your current key hypotheses and identify which of these you are going to test in the next two to thirteen weeks. Come up with a rough plan of attack before you come to the conference or watch the video. Here are some key hypotheses you may want to test;
- Who is your target customer? What are some simple tests or questions that can identify them?
- What problem or need of theirs do you address. What are symptoms–from your target customer’s perspective not yours–that they will admit to about the problem or need?
- What’s the minimum feature set you need to address the target customer’s need. What is the customer’s perspective on the benefits that it will offer?
- How do these benefits compare to your target customer’s status quo and currently available alternatives? How will you differentiate your offering?
- How will they value your offering? How much can you charge?
There are a number of good presentations planned for the day, see http://www.sllconf.com/program and review the description of the session against the hypotheses you want to test in the next three months. Schedule time now with your team and/or advisors to sit down for an hour or two sometime next week and revisit your hypotheses (maybe a talk has suggested a more important one you should address first) in light of what you hear at the conference. Update your plans accordingly.
If you are attending the conference in person I will be there all day and would be happy to spend some time to review your key hypotheses and near term set of experiments to measure and assess them. Please bear in mind my experience has been startups selling to businesses so there may be other mentors with more appropriate experience if you are launching a media or consumer oriented offering: I am certain any of the other mentors on site would be happy to review your plan of attack as well. If you are watching remotely please feel free to send me an e-mail outlining your key hypotheses and intended course of action for the next two to three months and we can schedule a short call to review them.
If you are organizing a Lean Startup Circle event in May or June these might be some useful topics to address:
- What I Learned at the SLLConf and Changed Plans Accordingly
- What We have Learned about key hypotheses from experiments in the last Month
You are also welcome to discuss these topics at a Bootstrappers Breakfast if one is available in your area.
I hope this will help entrepreneurs get the most out of the SLLConf experience and accelerate their businesses. Please feel free to approach me at the conference, I always enjoy comparing notes with entrepreneurs. We are rolling out a new service for folks trying to make sense of the electronic design automation industry in partnership with a semantic technology firm: I will be using the conference to walk through key assumptions we are making about the offering to ensure I haven’t overlooked something.
Update April 23: I am attending Steve Blank’s talk at the Startup Lessons Learned Conference and I was reminded I have a number of posts on customer development that may help to offer a perspective on Customer Development 1.0 to provide context for his 2.0 version.
Update April 25: I have posted a “Startup Lessons Learned Coverage Roundup” that I will update through the end of May with news coverage and blog posts about conference sessions.
April 19th, 2010
We are working with a semantic technology firm to develop a new portal that will track EDA related blog posts and other content announced via an RSS, Atom, or other feed protocol . Our goal is to provide a richer level of aggregation and analysis than an RSS reader with 200 feeds offers today (see for example my list of 238 in my July 11, 2009 post “EDA Bloggers 2009“).
This is not intended to compete with any advertising supported sites, it will be a subscription service that will allow you to keep track of new blogs (including micro-blogs like twitter) and new blog posts on an ongoing basis.
If you are interested in tracking blog posts and new announcements in the design automation arena, I would like to schedule a short call to get your perspective and feedback on our plans. You can use the contact form to reach me by phone or E-mail.
April 18th, 2010
In Poker a Jack is as good or better than about 3/4 (OK 76.92%) of the cards in the deck, losing only to Queen, King, and Ace. So a “Jack of all Trades” is good at many things. The full verse is
“Jack of all trades, master of none,
though ofttimes better than master of one.“
Scott Adams offered “Career Advice” in July of 2007:
But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
- Become the best at one specific thing.
- Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.
I think this second strategy is a better one if you want to be an entrepreneur. It enables you to identify and take advantage of brokerage and translation opportunities: you can link folks who might not otherwise connect because of your ability to understand that even though they are working in different fields there is a mutually beneficial relationship possible.
There is a risk that skills and know how that you use infrequently can go stale or diminish in relative value depending upon how rapidly a particular field is advancing. The half-life or perishability of a skill is normally a function of the rate of innovation and any demographic changes in domain: how quickly does new knowledge emerge and old masters retire. Soft skills like how to run a meeting or how to manage tend to decay more slowly because people don’t change as much as technology. Adams suggests this in his closing advice:
At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a third skill, perhaps business or public speaking, develop that too.
It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.
One more risk being a “Jack” is that the knowledge in any one field does not enable you to differentiate yourself. So you need to consider how the various cards you have are going to combine in a useful way that is also differentiating.
There may also be a “meta” domain that you are actually mastering by exploring a variety of its facets. E.g. if two fields are going to interact more strongly over time (think biology and computing) then knowledge of both fields is helpful. It’s also useful for fostering innovation in an arena you are new to if you can transplant working methods and technologies that are established in a field you another field into your new domain. This knowledge brokering can also be the basis for your next startup. For an interesting perspective on this see Andrew Hargadon’s “Firms as Knowledge Brokers.”
April 15th, 2010
I would be interested in talking with other consulting or professional service firms that are using Central Desktop or other wiki systems to collaborate with clients or deliver services. For example, when we give workshops we also put the text of the relevant workbook into a custom workspace for each attendee. Also, as a part of our ongoing support for their customer development efforts we give each client their own workspace to keep our e-mail inboxes from becoming a default document repository.
I am also interested in talking to anyone who is using Central Desktop or other wiki system to develop / refine content for a book or larger document. I am working on converting a series of blog posts into a book and using a Central Desktop workspace as a refinery to review existing content and add new and linking material.
I would be happy to set up a conference call to compare notes on lessons learned and best practices. This is not a prelude to a solicitation for services or competitive intelligence gathering, it’s a an honest attempt to compare notes with other firms or authors wrestling with the same issues that we are. You can reach me at 408-252-9676 or skmurphy@skmurphy.com if a few folks are interested I will set up a telcon, happy to compare notes just pairwise as well.
April 14th, 2010
Create and Deliver Surprisingly Compelling Software Demonstrations
“Do The Last Thing First” — the recipe for a Great Demo!
When: Wednesday, Sept 15, 2010 8 am – 5 pm
Where: Moorpark Hotel, 4241 Moorpark Ave, San Jose CA 95129
Cost: $590
Before Aug 28: $566
This is an interactive workshop with Peter Cohan geared especially for you who demonstrate B-to-B software to your customer and channels. Bring a copy of your demo and be prepared to present it — we’ll help you turn it into a surprisingly compelling demo!
This seminar outlines a framework for the creation and delivery of improved demos and presentations to enable increased success in the marketing, sale, and deployment of software and related products. Whether it’s face to face, in a webinar, as a screencast, or as a self-running demo the ability to present the key benefits of your software product is essential to generating prospect interest and ultimately revenue. Peter Cohan of The Second Derivative gives us the recipe for a Great Demo!
“I am confident that with the insights gained from your workshop we will land more customers in fewer iterations.”
Lav Pachuri, CEO, Xleron Inc.
“Peter Cohan’s Great Demo method really works. It helped us win DEMOgod, and it has allowed us to explain our offering much more clearly to prospects.”
Chaim Indig, CEO, Phreesia
(See “DEMOgod Winner Phreesia Praises Peter Cohan Training“)
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Peter Cohan, Principal at Second Derivative
Community Web Site: www.DemoGurus.com
Peter Cohan is the founder and a principal of The Second Derivative, a consultancy focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results. In July 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus®, a community web exchange dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams improve their software demonstrations. In 2003, he authored Great Demo!, a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. The 2nd edition of Great Demo! was published March 2005.
Before The Second Derivative, Peter founded the Discovery Tools® business unit at Symyx Technologies, Inc., where he grew the business from an empty spreadsheet into a $30 million operation. Prior to Symyx, Peter served in marketing, sales, and management positions at MDL Information Systems, a leading provider of scientific information management software. Peter currently serves on the Board of Directors for Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and the board of advisors for Excellin, Inc. He holds a degree in chemistry.
Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manage and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.
Agenda:
- 8:00 AM Breakfast & Registration
- 8:30 AM Workshop begins
- Noon Lunch
- 1 PM Workshop Continues
- 5 PM Wrap up
Seating is Limited These are intensive sessions and we ask that you arrive at least 15 minutes before 8:30AM start time to ensure you will have a seat and won’t disrupt the session once it is underway.
For more information: Theresa Shafer 408-252-9676 events@skmurphy.com
April 13th, 2010
A baker’s dozen of common mistakes that I have seen founders make in preparing, delivering, and evaluating a new product presentation/demo.
- Don’t keep giving the same presentation if it’s not working. I am surprised when I ask teams who have presented to two or three dozen prospects, “How has the presentation changed since the first time you gave it?” and I am met with blank looks.
- If prospects don’t understand your presentation it’s possible that you are talking to the wrong people but just as likely that there are serious problems with your presentation.
- Do not keep giving the same presentation if it’s not working. That’s not a typo, it bears repeating. Working means that you are not only getting expressions of interest but your sale is actually advancing. I know that when you talk to experienced sales folks that they will tell you that “sales is a numbers game” and you just have to keep pitching until someone decides to buy. There is one very important qualifier to the “numbers game” approach, and that is that you are using a presentation and sales approach that has actually been proven to work in a repeatable fashion.
- Give the demo to people you trust who can act as proxies for your target prospects. Ask them how to improve it. If someone introduces you to a prospect, be sure to reconnect and ask them how the prospect felt and what could be done to improve the presentation. The prospect may be much more willing to be candid with a third party that they trust; most folks don’t want to give bad news to you directly.
- A lukewarm response is the worst of all. You can’t get any feedback on what to improve–unless you were introduced by a third party you can ask for help– and the sale is not advancing.
- You can tell that the sale is advancing if you are learning more and more about the customer’s problem. The prospect gives you data to run a test. They ask for an evaluation license and can give you a timetable and a list of experiments that they want to run. If these things are not happening your presentation is not working.
- Before you give a demo, make sure that you can clearly state the prospect’s view of the problem they are hoping to solve with your software. Confirm this by stating it and asking you have understood their situation correctly. Don’t give a demo if you don’t understand the problem that they are trying to solve. A demo is not an opportunity to train someone on your software; it’s an opportunity to offer either a vision of a solution or proof that your software can solve their problem.
- If you have raised some money, perhaps in an angel round, do not take your investment presentation and use that to attempt to close business. I know it can be hard to believe that something that was so useful when talking to investors won’t have a similar powerful effect on prospects. But let me be clear: you need to throw your investment presentation away and start from scratch.
- Keep copies of each presentation that you give. Always have two people at a presentation. One to give it, the other to observe. They can trade off but one should always be watching the prospect(s) to determine what’s resonating and what isn’t. Take time after the presentation to de-brief and write your thoughts down. Save a copy of your notes with a copy the slide deck that you used.
- On the title page for your presentation you should include: key audience member(s), company name and date of presentation; these should also be burned into the footer of each page. Three benefits:
- It gives the impression of personalization and prior custom preparation. Doing this should force you to at least think through what’s needed for this particular audience.
- It’s the minimum information you will need to keep you various presentation distinct. This allows you to keep an archive of all of your presentation and watch how it evolves over time.
- If you are asked for a soft copy of the slide, provide a PDF version of the talk, instead of PPT, with this info burned into it then the audience is more careful about who they circulate it to.
- Include your company name, URL, and copyright on each slide. They may become detached from the deck.
- Probe for a date or impending event that may drive a decision. Be cautious of people who tell you that they need something “yesterday” since yesterday will never come.
- Always have an engagement checklist and implementation timetable (if only at a high level) ready. Rehearse presenting it but keep it in backup slides. Do not have the prospect ask you “what does it take to get started” and stammer out “I’m not sure, no one has ever asked that before.”
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