1 Idea Stage

Entrepreneurial Passion: Good Servant, Poor Master

Entrepreneurial passion has to be based on a desire to create value, to be of service to a set of target customers. There may be many things you are interested in learning and room enough in your life for several hobbies, but pursuing a passion without regard to your ability to provide value in a …

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Tristan Kromer on Testing Customer and Value Hypotheses

These are excerpts from  Episode 9 of Outlier on Air: Tristan Kromer, A Lean Approach to Business.  They are in the same sequence the took place in the interview but a number of stories and asides have been omitted to focus on what I felt were some extremely valuable insights from Tristan Kromer on clarifying and testing …

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Customer Interviews: Spend an Hour to Save a Minute

For customer interviews we have a rule of thumb that if an hour or research saves a minute early in the conversation it’s a good investment.  When you look at the list of questions you have prepared to learn about the prospect’s business and their needs, it’s easy to say to yourself, “I am really …

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Minimum Viable Product: Enthusiastically Proceed Skeptically

In a candid discussion about the challenges of managing your own expectations for a minimum viable product (MVP), Tristan Kromer observed, “It’s psychologically hard to enthusiastically proceed with skepticism.” And that is the challenge, we have to be enthusiastic about our product ideas to persevere to complete them and tell others about them, but we have to …

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Few Against Many Requires Focus and Perseverance

We Happy Few The fewer men, the greater share of honour. […] We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; Henry V in Act IV Scene iii 18–67. “St. Crispin’s Day speech” A college kid in a dorm room starts assembling and selling person computers.. Two college dropouts–or recent graduates–start building hardware in a …

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Don’t Get Distracted Raising Venture Capital

It’s not a mistake to accept venture capital if your business merits and requires it for growth. Don’t get distracted seeking it until then. “The seductive narrative of Silicon Valley stars a genius-hero who goes on a journey, overcomes myriad obstacles, has a flash of insight and is rewarded by wise and benevolent investors with …

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Tools for Buzzword Compliant Business Models

A collection of humorous tools that generate buzzword compliant business models. Web Economy Bullshit Generators First there was Dack Ragus‘ (@dack) “Web Economy Bullshit Generator.” He started with sketches (“Kinda like Da Vinci’s sketchbook, except for bullshit”): “I made this massive list of potential bullshit terms while sitting on Miami Beach in January, 2000. Add a …

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