Entrepreneurs Still Welcome: 700 Blog Posts In Four Years

October 12th, 2010 Sean Murphy

This is my 700th blog post since my first post “Welcome Entrepreneurs!” on October 1, 2006 which opened with:

This blog is dedicated to entrepreneurs at any stage of their journey.  As individuals, in teams, and collectively, we all hope to create a better world for our customers, our employees, our stakeholders, and our children.

Our focus is helping startups find early customers for emerging technologies. This is very different from the traditional sales and marketing at established firms. Correctly identifying early customers who can be references to others is key to introducing emerging technologies.

Although emerging technologies change the rules and often enable far reaching growth most early adopters are focused on near term risks and benefits, and it is to those concerns entrepreneurial teams need to speak to get a foothold. The decision to act as a “beta” software site or early user of new software tools often resembles a hiring decision (does the prospective customer want to “hire the team”) more closely than a technology adoption decision.

Emerging technology marketing is a distinct domain from classical product marketing, most of the traditional market assessment techniques are not effective: focus groups, surveys, etc… Emerging markets require a strong commitment by the founding team to

• appreciating the prospective customer and customer’s view,
• rapidly evolving the product specification in response to feedback and customer experience,
• ongoing refinement and delivery of customer focused solutions.

Not everything I have written since has held up as well as these paragraphs. I believe that they still offer a good high level overview of the new product introduction problem as it applies to new technologies.

Entry Filed under: Blogging, Early Customer Stage, Rules of Thumb