Posts filed under 'skmurphy'
February 1st, 2012
It’s not uncommon for a beginning entrepreneur to define prospects as “anyone who can use my product.” This is what Jerry Sternin calls “true but useless information.”
I see a number of startups make similar mistake in circular logic in defining their mission. Here is one example:
“Our goal is to deliver innovative disruptive solutions that meet the product development and improvement challenges faced by our customers.”
If a startup doesn’t meet their prospect’s challenges they probably won’t become or long remain your customers. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
The deeper challenge is that the majority of startups claim to offer innovative solutions and disruptive products. This alone does not differentiate you in any meaningful way and is not a specific promise.
Consider how to embody your technology in a prototype that would allow you to make specific credible claims of differentiated or unique value.
For example we worked with a firm that had a nanotechnology fabrication capability. They used it to make very thin heat pipes. They produced a sample kit that had two six inch long one inch wide 2mm thick pieces of metal. One was solid aluminum; the other was their aluminum heat pipe, which had about half the mass.
In a customer development interview we would ask a thermal engineer or mechanical engineer to dip both into a cup of steaming hot water or coffee. The engineer would normally drop it in less than a second as it had become too hot to hold: it was as if they had dipped their hand directly in the hot water. The solid aluminum would take several seconds to heat up to an equivalent temperature. They used this as a compelling demonstration of the difference in heat transfer rates at equivalent thickness. This was a very attractive proposition not only for mobile devices where thickness is at a premium but also applications like hybrid or electric vehicles where the weight and volume of the thermal transfer network can exceed that of the battery packs they are designed to protect. Less weight and higher heat transfer means either more battery storage or lower weight or both: the net impact is longer range.
If your software demo is not compelling prospects to take action, consider attending our Great Demo workshop on Wed-Feb-29.
January 31st, 2012
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“What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background but motivation, perseverance, and desire — the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.”
Ellen Ochoa
I think entrepreneurship requires not only the motivation to discover your own strengths but also the perseverance to discover opportunities in the marketplace that these strengths enable you to capitalize on.
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“Don’t just follow your passion unless your passion produces something other people will pay for.”
Tim Berry in “Lessons Learned from 22 Years of Successful Bootstrapping“
It’s not enough to make something that people want, they have to need it and be willing to pay for it. See also “Solve Real Problems That People Will Pay For Where You Add Unique Value.”
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“A hamlet with a church becomes a village. A town with a cathedral becomes a city. And, a Google search with ADHD becomes a morning.”
Merlin Mann
It’s a matter of “I always Google too long” vs. “I always Google too late.”
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“If you board the wrong train, it’s no use running along the corridor in the other direction.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark, and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
Edna O’Brien
I think this also matches the character of many successful entrepreneurs who are not Irish as well.
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“If you see a line get in it, because you’re going to want what’s at the end.”
USSR aphorism
and too often the basis for a poor launch message. Too many “viral launch” strategies require a prospective user or customer to tweet or e-mail friends or post a badge on their blog before they have had a chance to experience any aspect of the service. This reminds me of a joke from the USSR era:
Two women walk by a long line of people on a Moscow street. They reach the end and one says, “Let’s get in it!” “Why”, asks the other, “I cannot tell where it ends.” So they ask the last person in line, “What are you in line for?” He answers, “I am not sure but with a line this long it must be something good!”
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“A new broom sweeps clean but an old broom knows the corners.”
Irish aphorism
See also:
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“All is flux, nothing stays still.”
Heraclitus
To which Kevin Donovan replied “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon…” which is actually the first line to Shelley’s Mutability
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!–yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest.–A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.–One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same!–For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
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“A man’s character is his fate.”
Heraclitus
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“Learning from customers is like learning from a teacher via a game of charades.”
Odera Ume-Ezeoke (@oderau)
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“There are ventures where no reassurance is possible.
There is important work for you to do where no proof is available.”
Seth Godin in “The Problem With Reassurance“
More context:
The lizard brain seeks constant reassurance. It will wheedle and argue and debate with the rest of your head, pushing for one tiny bit of evidence, some sort of proof that everything will be okay.
Don’t do it. [...]
Developing the reassurance habit is easy to do and hard to kick. The problem is this: there are some ventures where no reassurance is possible. There is important work for you to do where no proof is available.
If you’ve trained the lizard brain that reassurance is forthcoming, it will scream even louder when those projects that don’t come with proof are at hand.
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“Principles don’t change with circumstances. That’s what makes them principles.”
George Colombo in “Great Quotations 2/21/2005“
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“If despair will yield at all, it will yield to a good night’s sleep.”
Mignon McLaughlin
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“Long-term planning is understanding the future consequences of today’s decisions.”
Gary Ryan Blair
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“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia.”
Mary Schmich in “Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young“ (June 1, 1997)
More context:
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.
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“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.”
Walter Elliott in “The Spiritual Life”
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“There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!”
Duke Ellington
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January 4th, 2012
We have Fortune 500 clients who are launching new products and who want to take advantage of customer development methodologies (or have come to the conclusion that they need a framework to revisit assumptions that are not working).
There are broadly two types of situations where a large company is launching a new product:
- It’s a new product that they can sell to current customers through established channels and/or a direct sales force
- It’s a new product that they want to sell to new customers and are uncertain if established channels will work (or know that they won’t, don’t want to de-focus their message).
Each comes with different challenges.
In the first you can get a false positive. I spoke to a product manager at a networking company that had introduced a video phone booth. It was after a talk given by Steve Blank and she expressed the opinion that Blank’s model might be useful for startups but was less applicable to established firms with effective sales forces like hers. They had just launched the product and had already collected several hundred orders (for systems that would cost more than 100K each). They had provided special incentives to the field to close evaluation units. Given the size of the total quota or book of business a sales team might be carrying with a major customer I suggested a better test than initial orders would be how many re-orders. She called me a few months later looking for customer development assistance: the special incentive had expired and the field had moved on to selling existing products that customers were requesting and new products that now had special incentives. There had been almost no re-orders or system expansions. No one wanted to admit that they had made a 100K mistake so the systems were in token use, but no one could justify buying any more. When startups hire a “closer” sales person for their new product they run the risk of leveraging pre-existing relationships such that they close the sale but don’t uncover the real needs of their customers or the real problems with their offering.
In the second case you can get a false negative. A few years ago we helped a recently acquired division of a software company whose new parent that had a dominant market position in their primary market. The division was at best fifth in its market but the legal department was forcing them to take negotiating positions on contract terms that were both inappropriate to the product line and unwinnable due to their lack of bargaining power. Their prospects for this new product had many viable options where the parent company’s prospects had few if any viable alternative vendors they could buy from. Launching a new product into a new market requires everyone to revisit what the total product has to be, and this is especially painful when many of their current practices are what have made them profitable–if not loved by their customers–in their primary market. Failure to comprehend that a new type of customer may have different needs–even in ancillary areas–may cause a good product to fail to gain traction.
It’s probably easier to introduce customer development methods either as part of a risk assessment phase, where it’s acceptable to revisit a product team’s optimism, or in a turn around situation where it’s clear that the initial approach has not borne fruit but it’s too early to give up.
January 2nd, 2012
MyPermissions: Checks for third party application access to your Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Instagram, and Flickr accounts.
SocialMention: Allows you to do keyword and phrase search across more than one hundred social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc…
HackerFollow: follow comments and posts by your favorite Hacker News contributors
December 31st, 2011
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like Feedburner to deliver new blog posts to your inbox.
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“When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”
William Somerset Maugham
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“It’s not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.”
Edwin Land
This reminds of Peter Drucker’s “organized abandonment” model for firms. He suggests that every year a business re-evaluate products and markets by asking themselves “if we did not do this already, would we go into it now, knowing what we now know?” If the answer is no then it no longer represents an opportunity. Further investment should be considered very carefully and deferred where possible in favor of new and emerging growth opportunities. See also:
- Brad Pierce’s “Reversify Your Product Offerings: Do Less with More“
- Carmine Gallo’s Fast Company article on “Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs” in particular this excerpt:
Early in Apple’s history, lead investor Mike Markkula sent a memo to Apple’s employees that outlined his marketing strategy. In that memo he talked about the importance of focus. Markkula wrote, “To do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all the unimportant opportunities, select from the remainder only those that we have the resources to do well, and concentrate our efforts on them.
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“Bootstrapping is not seeking outside funding until you have a business that both requires and merits investment.”
Sean Murphy
This is similar to an entrepreneurial proverb that Marc Hedlund offered:
The pitch that goes, “We could accelerate our growth with more money” is much more compelling than, “I need your money or our doors will close.”
More context:
The best way to get investment is not to need it — if you have a running business with real customers and you’re paying all your bills, you are much more likely to get a funding round than if you need the round in order to survive or succeed. The pitch that goes, “We could accelerate our growth with more money” is much more compelling than, “I need your money or our doors will close.”
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“Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.
Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.”
Samuel Johnson
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“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”
Edwin Land
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“Zoom in for traction, zoom out for impact.”
Sean Murphy
I used this as the title for “Zoom In For Traction, Zoom Out For Impact”
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“Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.”
Edwin Land
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“Treat your customers as if they were newspapers reporters; this is the new mantra for savvy companies of all sizes.”
Matt Mickiewicz in “Why Customer Service is the New Marketing“
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“It’s the picture on the box that sells the LEGO set.”
Sean Murphy
I used this as the title for “It’s the Picture on the Box that Sells the LEGO Set.”
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“It’s a whole year between Christmases, but it’s a short Christmas between years.”
Ashleigh Brilliant
For Christmas I was given a CD that collects all of Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot Shots (epigrams). They are quite good: I will be weaving more of them into my quotes for entrepreneurs in 2012.
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“We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
I used this quote to open “Record to Remember, Pause to Reflect“
December 26th, 2011
And you ask me what I want this year
And I try to make this kind and clear
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days
Cause I don’t need boxes wrapped in strings
And designer love and empty things
Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days
John Rzeznik “Better Days“
Entrepreneurs are by definition optimists. They see possibilities that others may discount or overlook. If we are to reach better days we need as much entrepreneurial imagination applied to the hard challenges facing us.
“The only certainty is a reasonable probability.”
Edgar Watson Howe, “Country Town Sayings”
December 25th, 2011
“It’s a whole year between Christmases, but it’s a short Christmas between years.”
Ashleigh Brilliant
December 19th, 2011
We have four Silicon Valley Bootstrappers Breakfasts® scheduled in the last two weeks of December. In addition to our regular roundtable format of introductions followed by each attending suggesting issues they would like to discuss or questions they have for the group we are going to discuss “What did you learn in 2011 that will make you a better entrepreneur in 2012?”
Here are the four breakfasts we have scheduled in the last two weeks in December
- 7:30am Tue-Dec-20-2011 Coco’s Bakery, 1206 Oakmead Parkway, Sunnyvale, CA (back room)
- 9am Fri-Dec-23-2011 Red Rock Coffee, 201 Castro St, Mountain View, CA (upstairs)
- 7:30am Tue-Dec-27-2011 Heavenly Cafe 3116 Oak Rd, Walnut Creek, CA
- 9:00am Thu-Dec-29-2011 1206 Oakmead Parkway, Sunnyvale, CA (back room)
Cost is $5 in advance / $10 at the door plus the cost of your own breakfast (separate checks). Check us out over the holidays if you want an early morning conversation with other technology entrepreneurs.
December 14th, 2011
“If you’re doing something big, people will compliment you. Most will give you accolades or be quietly supportive. But it’s those who simultaneously support and challenge you who can help. The best teams know this. They embrace feedback and seek criticism. They find ways to change and improve. And they know that when someone criticizes them, it’s an indication of respect. Only the people who really care risk helping us improve. ”
Brendan Baker in “Seek Knowledgeable Criticism” h/t to Rafe Needleman
Your startup is a work in progress. When most entrepreneurs evaluate where they are it’s difficult not to include the promising future they foresee naturally ensuing from current efforts (or on bad days the certain doom no matter what they do).
The first self-assessment to make is “do we have traction?” By traction I mean the ability to set and hit goals that increase your knowledge of the market or reduce the risks associated with becoming viable. There are many milestones that are necessary to enable a real goal that in and of themselves don’t increase your knowledge of the market or reduce the risks associated with viability. Some examples:
- Getting incorporated, registering a domain, getting a bank account, getting a Federal Tax ID, etc.. These are all important steps to be able transact business that no one on your team may be familiar with, but they are not goals. They don’t reduce your risk or increase your knowledge of the market.
- Spending money on tools, equipment, services, etc… You may never have hired an attorney or an accountant before or setup an account on a cloud service , and it’s possible to pick the wrong person or provider, but it does not reduce your risk.
If you don’t have traction you need then zoom in and narrow your focus. Ask for specific advice on how to understand the market opportunity, verify that you have identified the key risks that you face in the near term, and how to reduce or minimize one or more risks that you face. Here the most helpful criticism can take the form of questions:
- How are we measuring … how far have we come since…
- Who are we benchmarking our progress against and why?
- What have we already tried to solve this problem and what has been the result? What have we learned?
- What is the real problem that we are trying to solve?
- What can we accomplish in the next two to three weeks with the folks already committed to the team.
These questions can provoke a conversation that can help you form a plan of action for the next few weeks that will improve your traction. Once you have that plan you can present it to friends and advisors for feedback and critique.
The second self-assessment to make, if you are satisfied that you have traction is to determine what are the next set of realistic goals that, once achieved, will significantly enhance your viability or impact for your customers. Now is the time to zoom out and consider a broader context for your next set of actions. Here the most helpful criticism can take the form of different questions:
- How close are we to your next goal? What should we start measuring once we achieve it? What metrics no longer matter or are now counterproductive?
- What relationships have we created that can now help you grow your business?
- What are the most significant constraints on our growth or ability to add value to customers?
- What problems have we promoted in solving the ones that we faced earlier?
- What core values do we need to hold on to as we grow?
- What specialists do we need to add to the team on a temporary, part time, or full time basis?
Once you have those answers reviewing them with customers, partners, and advisors can yield additional insight.
December 13th, 2011
“Every so often—every 60 years or so—a body of technology comes along and over several decades, quietly, almost unnoticeably, transforms the economy: it brings new social classes to the fore and creates a different world for business…something deep is going on with information technology, something that goes well beyond the use of computers, social media, and commerce on the Internet.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
Anne Rozinat is co-founder of Fluxicon, a provider of software tools and services for business process mining. She has project experience with a number of major European firms in customer service, healthcare, IT services, healthcare and government. Her training is in software engineering with a PhD in Process Mining and she is a founding member of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining.
She is joining us on Wed-Dec-14 at Noon PDT to discuss Brian Arthur’s “The Second Economy” article in the October 2011 McKinsey Quarterly.
“Business processes that once took place among human beings are now executed electronically. They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. This shift is quietly creating a second economy, a digital one.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
In addition to her published research and her private client work Anne is an active blogger and has several posts that bear on Brian Arthur’s “Second Economy” thesis:
“In any deep transformation, industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do so they create new ways to profit from its possibilities.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
In the same way that computer networks required much more sophisticated network management and systems administration tools and methodologies, the increased digitization of business processes–blending automation with human expertise in extremely complex workflows–will require us to invent new tools and methods for specifying and managing them.
“This second economy that is silently forming—vast, interconnected, and extraordinarily productive—is creating for us a new economic world. How we will fare in this world, how we will adapt to it, how we will profit from it and share its benefits, is very much up to us.”
Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy“
Our hope is that conversation will touch on impacts, risks, and some early examples:
- Understand Pervasive Impact of Process Digitization on Business
- Key Risk Is to Make Work Processes Invisible
- Complicates “Management By Walking Around”
- New Tools & Practices Needed to Leverage
- Early Example: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
- Blends Automation and Human Expertise
- Creating New Kinds of Business Models
Please Register and join the roundtable discussion Wed-Dec-14 at Noon PST.
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