Pages 39-40 of “Pretotype It” (Second Edition) by Alberto Savoia lists seven techniques for determining that you are “building the right product before you invest in building your product right.” Bold text is from the book, my comments are mixed in below each one.
The Mechanical Turk – Replace complex and expensive computers or machines with human beings.
Also known as
starting with a service
wrapping a thick protective blanket of consulting around your product so that no one is hurt by it
selling the holes not the drill
Wizard of Oz (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).
Flintstoning (Fred Flinstone’s feet powered his “car”).
Manualating (a backward formation from automating)
the concierge method
The Pinocchio – Build a non-functional, “lifeless”, version of the product. Useful for form and fit validation. Jeff Hawkins famously carried around a block of wood to get an appreciation for what a PDA might feel like.
The Minimum Viable Product (or Stripped Tease) – Create a functional version of the product, but stripped down to its most basic functionality. A basic approach for any bootstrapper – make sure you have the simplest offering that customers are willing to buy before you worry about adding features (and delaying time to break even revenue). In reading this Savoia is using the Marty Cagan MVP model “smallest possible product that has three critical characteristics: people choose to use it or buy it; people can figure out how to use it; and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available – also known as valuable, usable and feasible.”
The Provincial – Before launching world-wide, run a test on a very small sample. Start in a niche. When in doubt zoom in or traction.
The Fake Door – Create a fake “entry” for a product that doesn’t yet exist in any form. I am not a fan of this except in very limited circumstances for B2B markets as it can be very corrosive to the trust required to built a long term business relationship. And at least with software products for business, a longer term relationship is normally intrinsic to the customer’s calculation of the value of your offering. If you start to erect “Potemkin village” products that have too many false fronts or facade items in your menus and options prospects may doubt the entire offering.
The Pretend-to-Own – Before investing in buying whatever you need for your product, rent or borrow it first. Find a way to use tooling or equipment before committing to a significant purchase.
The Re-label – Put a different label on an existing product that looks like the product you want to create. Often a more complex product can have menu items deleted or entire branches of a menu tree pruned to explore whether this is a market for a simpler offering. At Cisco we didn’t stuff two connectors on a four port router and changed the paint job to create a “lower cost” model until the box could be re-designed.
What’s missing
The holodeck – simulate the effect of a product on a workflow: understand where the next bottleneck is to determine how much benefit eliminating one or more steps (or reducing one or more category of error) will actually yield. This is the default method for “system on a chip” design approaches but I suspect we will see more service workflow simulations as a part of the development of new service offerings in the future.
Family Tree – verify that manual implementations exist for what you plan to automate, has someone written an Excel macro (or an EMACS macro) to solve the problem. Are people already following a checklist to prevent a category of errors? Replacing workarounds involves less behavior change (at least in terms of a customer’s view of the real problem) than getting them to try something without antecedents.
“What’s On Your Mind” – understand the customer’s view of the problem and the constraints your solution has to satisfy before proposing one. This normally requires an active curiosity about the customer’s perception of their needs. This is not the same as asking them for features and implementing them without considering the deeper implications.
Picnic in the Graveyard – do research on what’s been tried and failed. Many near misses have two out of three values in a feature set combination correct (some just have too many features and it’s less a matter of changing features than deleting a few). If you are going to introduce something that’s “been tried before” be clear in your own mind of what’s different about it and why it will make a difference to your customer.
A building code is a function of the municipality issuing building permits for what is essentially custom construction. Products (and product liability calculations) are driven by tort liability, which is managed by insurance and mechanisms like Underwriters Laboratory testing and certification. It’s also managed at a Federal and state level by legislation
Even though most software licenses have strong limits on any warranty or liability I suspect that we will see both insurance-driven and legislative “design codes” imposed on software as it becomes as woven into the fabric of our lives as wood and sheetrock. The “software content” of not only airplanes but automobiles, power tools, appliances, and many other products is increasing each year.
Traditions are solutions to problems that we forgot we had. Most of the building codes are “rules of thumb” to prevent injury or loss of life, hardwired into legal mechanisms to prevent folks from cutting corners to save money and imposing a downstream risk.
Rich Skrenta is probably right that it will be a while before application software becomes subject to “building codes” but embedded software, and not just for medical implants and airplanes, may transition in a matter of a decade or two.
I have never considered myself an artist or visual thinker because I am not able to sketch a likeness of a person or draw a landscape. I managed engineers and drafters who had to produce mechanical and dimensioned drawings when I was at Cisco and 3Com, but I never had an affinity for the three dimensional visualization skills that they had.
I associate art with an effort to represent physical reality or inspire an emotional reaction to reality. It’s odd how you can put things in buckets and ignore them, I had discounted the “design thinking” model because art seemed to me to be less about business and more about self-discovery. And yet I have worked on teams designing very complex systems, the silicon cathedrals of the late 20th century, for the better part of two decades.
I am not sure why I experienced the dichotomy between system design and user experience design, although one presentation that helped me to crystallize my discomfort was Giff Constable’s “The Missing Agile Principle.” Reading it I realized that I was focused more on prospect/customer value and than the creative expression of an idea. Obviously you need both.
But I had an epiphany reading through the curriculum for the Design Strategy MBA offered by the California College of the Arts that I am actually a visual thinker: I can sketch a likeness of a business concept or draw a business process and do so all of the time. And where cycle time, people time, investment dollars, or data are the units of measure I find it easy to dimension my drawings.
I think we need better processes (and perhaps a better visual language) for sketching hypothetical business models. I think that useful likenesses can be found in Dan Roam’s techniques and perhaps some of the directed graph models that Brant Cooper sketches in “The CustDev Whiteboard.”
Watching electrical engineers develop new circuit designs I would see them sketch a number of different but equally useful diagrams that represented different aspects of a hypothetical design’s behavior or structure: circuit diagrams, waveforms, state machine diagrams, logic schematics, block diagrams, etc.. The “Innovator’s DNA” stresses the value of sketching timelines, workflows, and input/output diagrams to better understand the current situation and how it came to be. I think we can learn a lot from other fields for how to sketch the likeness of our hypothetical businesses and emerging markets.
Note: As to why I am reading degree curriculum and syllabus documents, I am not considering going back to college. I was researching what design thinking is all about after Lisa Solomon reached out to me in response to “Associating, Pattern Matching, and Sensemaking“)
I originally made a note to blog about Octopart in October of 2007 and again in April of 2008 as I used them to research part information for various client projects. The interface has evolved over the years but the site offers a very clean and information rich way to search for parts and part information, aggregating content from a number of sites into a single coherent view. The company was founded by Sam Wurzel, Andres Morey, and Harish Agarwal in 2006. All three had a common background in physics and they have brought a level of rigor along with a hacker perspective to part selection that has created a useful and innovative part selection site.
When they announced in January that DigiKey was allowing them to include their catalog in the Octopart parametric search results I realized I needed to do an interview with them. I was able to talk to Sam Wurzel, what follows is an edited transcript of our conversation with hyperlinks added for context. I have included more on the founders’ backgrounds after the main interview to give readers who are interested a window into their diverse backgrounds and low key humor.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your background
All of us have a background in physics, and physics is what brought us together. Andres and I became friends while studying physics in college and Harish and Andres became friends while studying physics in grad school. Our areas of research were all different; I was working on plasma physics, Andres was working on experimental cosmology and Harish was working on biophysics.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about what led you to found your company, what was the problem that motivated you?
In 2005 I read Paul Graham’s essay “How to Start a Startup” and it really changed my perspective that I could start a technology company. I was in graduate school in Boulder but it was becoming clear that the academic path was not the right one for me and I had been looking for alternatives.
Soon after that I sent Andres the link, and we started throwing around ideas for startup companies. In the spring of 2006 I got a phone call from Andres. He was having trouble finding a low temperature capacitor for his experiment and suggested that we build a database of electronic parts and make it easily searchable on the web.
Q: Are there any entrepreneurs in your family or who you interacted with when you were growing up?
Both of my grandfathers were entrepreneurs in their own way: one owned a pharmacy and the other owned a car dealership.
Q: So both ran businesses that had complex inventory management issues?
It’s funny, I hadn’t really thought about it before, but now that you ask I remember working in the parts department of my grandfather’s car dealership. Maybe that gave me some insight into the problems that Octopart solves for engineers and electronics hobbyists.
Q: How did you get started?
In mid 2006, we started writing code and learning about web technologies in the little spare time we had. After working in the lab all day, we would come home and write code on a Linux server that I bought at a yard sale for $50. We would often work until 3 or 4 in the morning. By that fall we had a working prototype and applied to Y Combinator. We got some seed funding from them and incorporated the company at the end of 2006. We launched the site in March of 2007.
Q: Can you give me a brief overview of where the company is today?
Today we’ve grown to serve over 440,000 unique visitors per month who are searching for electronic parts. We list the inventories of over 50 distributors, including some of the largest distributors in the industry.
Q: Octopart is a powerful search tool: what’s the business model? Are you profitable?
Our business model is connecting part buyers with distributors, and the distributors pay for that traffic. We also do display advertising targeted to the electronics industry. We are profitable.
Q: What are the two or three things that you have been able to accomplish that you take the most pride in or satisfaction from?
From a technical standpoint, we’re very proud of the back-end system we’ve built to handle the incoming data feeds and the front end system to serve up fast responses to user queries. From a product standpoint, we’re proud that our users find Octopart useful. Getting emails from users who love the site is great.
Q: What has been the biggest surprise? What was one key assumption you made, perhaps even unconsciously, that has caused the most grief?
When we started Octopart, we were sure that within 6 months, we would have all the major distributors signed up and we would be overwhelmed with users. In fact everything takes longer than we expect it to. That includes building technology, building relationships and getting users. On the surface, it seems like the problems involved in part search are straigtforward: get the data, build a system to keep track of it, and build an intuitive frontend interface. But each of those problems have subproblems, and each subproblem needs to be iterated on quite a bit.
Q: What development, event, or new understanding since you started has had the most impact on your original plan? How has your plan changed in response?
Surprisingly, the business model and the design of the site today has not changed that much since we first conceived it. The biggest difference between the original vision and where we are today is the time it took us to get here. We still focus on two critical challenges: getting good data from many sources and correlating it into an integrated view of a part, and offering our users an intuitive and powerful interface for finding the parts that they are looking for. Both are hard problems and although we have made a lot of progress I wouldn’t consider either of them to be fully solved.
Q: You must be doing something right if almost half a million people visit every month looking for part information. Thanks for your time
I have included biographical information supplied by Octopart on the founders as I found it very interesting reading.
Sam Wurzel
Sam graduated from Brown University with a Bachelors degree in physics and engineering. He went to graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder where left the PhD program with a Masters degree to work on Octopart.
Sam likes to build things. While a student, he spent alternate summers working in experimental physics labs as research assistant and in bicycle shops as a mechanic. In grad school at CU Boulder Sam joined a newly formed lab testing the design of a fusion plasma confinement scheme which one day might be useful in a commercial fusion reactor. Although Sam liked the lab work, he realized academia was not a good fit for him. So, he started working on Octopart, and eventually left his PhD program to move to Berkeley to pursue Octopart full time.
At Octopart Sam manages relationships with distributors, writes code to handle their data feeds, and works on techniques to normalize the data arriving from many different sources.
When Sam is not working on Octopart, he enjoys running and reading while on public transportation.
Andres Morey
Andres received his Bachelors degree in physics from Brown University in Providence, RI and attended UC Berkeley for graduate school, leaving the PhD program with a Masters degree in physics to work on Octopart. As a grad student, Andres worked on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – an experiment that uses neutrino interactions in the ice at the South Pole to map cosmic neutrino sources.
While working on various hardware projects for his experiment, Andres spent a lot of time searching for electronic components. Frustrated with the online search options, he called up his friend and fellow grad student, Sam Wurzel, and suggested that they build an electronic parts search engine. After spending several months working on a prototype they decided to leave grad school to work on the project fulltime and in November 2006 they incorporated as Octopart, Inc.
Since leaving grad school, Andres has been working on Octopart fulltime. Andres is responsible for most of Octopart’s consumer-facing features including client-side code and all graphical and UI elements. In the course of working on Octopart Andres discovered that he loves working at a tech startup because it is a platform for solving a series of never ending problems from managing human relationships to squashing obscure Internet Explorer bugs. Andres discovered that he loves coding because of the feeling he gets when he finds an elegant solution to a coding puzzle.
Currently, Andres spends his free time thinking about Octopart.
Harish Agarwal
Harish received his undergrad degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Engineering Physics and a Masters degree from Cambridge University in Semiconductor Physics. Harish left his physics PhD program at U.C. Berkeley with a Masters degree to join Octopart.
Harish enjoys understanding systems and developing projects that work on top of them. As a graduate student in Jan Liphardt’s biophysics lab at U.C. Berkeley, Harish was tasked with studying nuclear transport in eukaryotic cells. Having come from a physics undergraduate education, this involved hitting the books and pestering kind colleagues for advice and gems of wisdom. This crash course preceded many long days at the bench developing biological protocols and a microscopy system to track nanometer scale cargo transit through the nuclear pore on millisecond timescales.
Harish left academia in the spring of 2007 to join two friends in developing Octopart, a search engine for electronic parts. Having come from a biophysics lab to work on an already launched website without knowing exactly what MySQL stood for, this involved a lot of intense on the job learning. In the past three years, Harish has had the opportunity to work on many nooks and crannies of Octopart, from developing front end user features, to hacking search capabilities into open source search engines.
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And then I found out I had cancer under my right eye.
Basal Cell Carcinoma. I was soon told it wasn’t terminal, but having any kind of cancer in your twenties comes as a shock. I wasn’t going to die from this cancer but was going to get a big ol scar smack on my face.
If you’re going to get a reminder that life is fragile and you should be living it to the fullest, in the middle of your face is actually a pretty good place to have it.
My life had a dramatic moment to help me make a change, but you don’t need to get cancer to change. Every day is a dramatic moment. Every day you have the opportunity to change you life for the better. Tomorrow looks open in your calendar…
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“Avoid hiring unlucky people. Take half the applicant’s resumes and throw them in the trash.”
Brandon Smietana (@RKHilbertSpace)
Two observations:
This same process when applied by unlucky managers prevents them from hiring lucky people.
Applying this approach recursively, that is repeatedly discarding the unlucky half of the pile of resumes will result in the selection of the luckiest candidate in the pile.
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“The first thing to decide before you walk into in any negotiation is what to do if the other chap says no.” Ernest Bevin
“Altruism is a hard master, but so is opportunism.”
Mignon McLaughlin
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“There is nothing worse than doing the wrong thing well.”
Peter Drucker
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“Be more than you seem to be.”
Frederick the Great
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“If you want to catch a fish, first learn to think like a fish.”
Maori proverb
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“Success: achieving one’s goals. Wealth is a measure of success only if wealth is the goal. Too often people judge the success of others by their own goals.”
Peter Siviglia in “Recipes from the Top of the Food Chain“
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“Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.”
Aza Raskin quoted in “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure”
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“Maybe the reason we become entrepreneurs is a secret to us until we come face-to-face with it. Maybe the reason we become entrepreneurs is to learn our limits.” Matthew Wensing
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“The initial implementation of a superior design is always inferior to the final implementation of an inferior design.”
Gerald Weinberg in “Rethinking Systems Analysis and Design“
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”Wherever we look upon this earth, the opportunities take shape within the problems.”
Nelson Rockefeller
Strategic foresight is something of a growth industry, with new degree-granting programmes popping up everywhere. Foresight–futurism, if you want to call it that–has traditionally been something of a black art, and also a subject of well-deserved suspicion when practiced by self-styled gurus who claim to be able to foretell the future. It’s good that it’s becoming more widely practiced, and also good that some standards of professional conduct and ability are starting to be recognized. The most basic is this: that we all recognize that no one can predict the future, and we don’t pretend to. You can’t predict the future, but you can work to minimize surprise. Knowing what’s going to happen is impossible, but being prepared for the unforeseen… is just barely possible. And that’s what foresight practitioners seek to do. The consequences of a little foresight can be billions of dollars saved, or many lives. And that makes it worth doing, difficult as it is.
On Wed-Feb-22 at Noon PST the Book Club For Business Impact will cover lessons learned applying a number of techniques for associating from chapter 2 of the “Innovator’s DNA” by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen. These techniques will include
The skill of associating is not succinctly defined in one place in the book but I would offer this definition: associating is connecting disparate facts, observations, and stories to enable compelling combinations that form new business ideas. In a footnote to Chapter 2 on associating the authors note
We prefer the term associational thinking to pattern recognition because the latter term seems to suggest that there is an identifiable pattern innovative entrepreneurs recognize. As innovators described how they discovered or recognized ideas for innovative new ventures, it seemed to us that while they connected disparate ideas together, they often did not recognize a pattern, or even recognize that it would be a viable business opportunity. They often discovered things that fit together through trial and error and adaption.
Sometimes it even takes a while before you “know it when you see it.” I think in large part associational thinking involves sensemaking. Here are two relevant citations. The first is from “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking” by Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld in Organization Science Vol. 16, No. 4, July–August 2005, pp. 409–421
Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action.
[...]
To deal with ambiguity, interdependent people search for meaning, settle for plausibility, and move on. These are moments of sensemaking…
Most startups settle for plausibility and plow forward because they will be out of time and budget by the time they achieve certainty.
The second and much longer citation is from “Making Sense of Sensemaking 2: A Macrocognitive Model” by Gary Klein, Brian Moon, and Robert R. Hoffman in IEEE Intelligent Systems Vol. 21, No. 5 September/October 2006
When people try to make sense of events, they begin with some perspective, viewpoint, or framework–however minimal. For now, let’s use a metaphor and call this a
frame. We can express frames in various meaningful forms, including stories, maps, organizational diagrams, or scripts, and can use them in subsequent and parallel processes. Even though frames define what count as data, they themselves actually shape the data (for example, a house fire will be perceived differently by the homeowner, the firefighters, and the arson investigators). Furthermore, frames change as we acquire data. In other words, this is a two way street: Frames shape and define the relevant data, and data mandate that frames change in nontrivial ways.
[..]
Sensemaking can involve elaborating the frame by adding details, and questioning the frame and doubting the explanations it provides. A frame functions as a hypothesis about the connections among data. One reaction to doubt is to explain away troublesome data and preserve the frame.
[...]
Questioning the frame leads us to reconsider—to reject the initial frame and seek to replace it with a better one. We might compare alternative frames to determine which seems most accurate. Or we might simply be mystified by the events.
Anyone who has stumbled through a sequence of pivots into a pirouette can appreciate that last observation.
Please join us Feb-22-2012 at Noon PST for an interactive panel discussion on techniques for generating and spotting compelling new product ideas. Register at http://skmdna120222.eventbrite.com
I have been really encouraged by comments I have received on some recent blog posts:
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It’s a shame that they ended up in my spam folder. Apparently folks who sell pharmaceuticals, toner ink, and mortgage refinancing, not to mention site owners who host a wide variety of video clips all really really appreciate this blog.
As for you, my fifteen readers, please let me know what I can do to improve your reading experience.
Update–later that same night–A real comment from Will Sargent that did make my day:
I read your blog and appreciate how to the point you are. You have a good healthy balance between practical discussion and idealistic views. Your blog is an example to others.
Sean Murphy: This is Sean Murphy for the Book Club for Business Impact, talking why are covering “The Innovators DNA” by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen, in a five-part webinar series.
I think this is the best book from 2011 on innovation and entrepreneurship. It is based on interviews of more than 100 innovators, a decade of research and compliments other auto-biographical books that have come out. It is packed with insights. It presents five key discovery skills, how to assess them, how to develop them and how to apply them. These skills are important to master for any team trying to innovate.
I think the following kinds of people will benefit from taking part in this series.
If you are a first time entrepreneur, this book and this webinar series will give you a model for exploring a new market.
If you are a serial entrepreneur I think it will give you a useful perspective on your earlier efforts and may enable you to refine your approach.
And if you are trying to get your firm to innovate it gives you a framework of key discovery skills and also allows you to understand the contrast of traditional execution skills that are more focused on detail and planning as opposed to discovery.
Steve Hogan: This is Steve Hogan. I am joining Sean on this series. I am a recovering serial entrepreneur. I got lucky earlier in life, started a couple of companies that had successful exits. I have been working with developmentally challenged early stage tech companies and helping them find the path to profitability and growth. But my true passion is mentoring first-time entrepreneurs so that they never, ever, need a savior.
Sean: I am the CEO of SKMurphy. I have been an entrepreneur for a while. I have a consulting firm that helps technology firms and introduce new products and services. Our focus is early customers and early revenue.
Steve, what is your take on the book?
Steve: I think it is a great book for first-time entrepreneurs. In fact I wish I had this when I was doing my first couple of companies. The key insight I took take away was that the leader’s innovative skills impact the entire team. Strong leaders with strong discovery skills can improve the entire team’s ability to innovate.
The DNA in the title refers to the DNA of the organization, not just the leaders. These are discovery skill sets not just the traits. More importantly, it is a personal self-help and skill building directory. The authors believe that everybody has these basic skill sets and offer a simple test to help you to identify your strengths.
They give you a step by step approach to cultivate those strengths and build your tool kit. It is a truly unique way of improving your own performance derived from interviews with over a hundred other entrepreneurs.
Sean: I think it is also a very good book for innovators in larger firms. It offers a model for why established firms find innovation difficult. It explains the different skills that are required at different stages in a firm’s life cycle, in particular, the discovery skills used for innovation and execution skills useful for skill and growth.
I want to stress that these webinars will be a learning experience, not a lecture experience. We have invited other innovators to share their lessons learned applying these five key discovery skills. We will offer this in an interactive format which will help you apply these skills to your situation.
Steve: Here are the skills we are going to be talking about in the five separate webinar sessions, and our take on what they involve:
Associating: connecting disparate facts, observations, and stories to enable combinations of seemingly unrelated ideas in a new and unique way.
Questioning: first understanding the world as it is, then exploring why, why not, and what if.
Observing: being mindful in familiar situations and appreciative in novel situations.
Networking is an absolute. By this they don’t mean hanging around with your buddies, it means taking serious conversation with people of diverse backgrounds, people with backgrounds different from your own, learning from their experience and learning from their expertise.
Experimenting: taking risks to gain new perspectives. This can either involve trying new experiences, or carefully analyzing products, processes, and ideas, or testing your ideas with prototypes. Experimenting is not done in a lab setting, it’s about submerging yourself in a truly different environment and appreciating a different perspective on life.
Sean: On page 27 they explain how these skills fit together.
There are two basic orientations an innovator brings to a new field. One is to challenge status quo and that drives questioning, observing and networking and a willingness to take risks and that drives experimenting. Tying those four skills together is associating, where you are linking at different facts to create new combinations that may either yield an innovative thought or business idea or trigger more questions and a need for more observations, more folks to talk to and more experiments to run.
Steve: These webinars are a true roundtable discussion format, not a pure lecture series. The panel is going to include first time entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs and other innovators from larger companies. We will take questions from a live audience and each session is going to focus on one particular skill and the lessons learned and applying that skill.
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Jul-20-2011 “Five Discovery Skills that Distinguish Great Innovators” Note that the definitions that Steve and I offer are based on our own reading of the book and differ somewhat from how the skills are defined in this article.
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.
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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.
“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!”
