Startup Stages

Bug Reports vs. Business Plans

“Unhappy users in our industry don’t continue to file bug reports; they start writing business plans.” Michael “Mac”  McNamara talking about the EDA Industry I was reminded of this remark that Mac made at an SDForum event several years ago as I was reading the “Who Are User Entrepreneurs?” study which summarizes findings on innovation, …

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Pretotyping – Techniques for Building the Right Product

Alberto Savoia defines pretotyping as determining that you are “building the right product before you invest in building your product right.” His book “Pretotype It” (Second Edition available as a Free PDF or on Kindle for $0.99) lists a set of seven techniques for pretotyping on pages 39-40. This post analyzes and elaborates on the techniques …

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Sketching The Likeness Of An Imaginary Business

Startups originate in the mind of an entrepreneur, often as the result of observing something that seems odd, or is the result of juxtaposing two or three seeming unrelated or even incongruous ideas. The first challenge the entrepreneur faces turn his insight into something others can critique and improve upon: to show them sketches of …

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Customer Development Is Not Just For Startups

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 …

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Zoom In For Traction, Zoom Out For Impact

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). If you are not getting traction, if you don’t have the ability to reliably …

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Perfectionism vs. Mastery

Perfectionism vs. Mastery Mastery’s great accomplishments require time and a willingness to release a sequence of prototypes. Perfectionism means you don’t ship until it’s perfect. Which means you never ship or what you ship has not learned from problems or needs that only visible post deployment. Randall Munroe’s “The General Problem” embeds this observation: “I …

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Stay Tuned! We Are Being Purposefully Vague Right Now

I came across an interesting tool this week in the collaboration area. The web page invited me to apply for membership, prompting me to enter my e-mail, twitter handle, blog, and a brief bio. But they were “purposefully vague’ about who they were. It wasn’t exactly stealth mode, more like maintaining deniability if it failed …

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What Happens When The “Come As You Are Party” is Over

“Nobody makes a video game about the quartermaster division, but armies win and lose on logistics and supply, and politics and diplomacy, and the work people do on the homefront.” Mike O’Malley in “History-ness and Video Games“ The first stage of a bootstrapped startup is a “come as you are” party. The founders are living …

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notebook to Organizing Your Experiment Log

Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews

This post on customer development interviews is one of my most popular. If you would like help preparing for customer development interviews or reviewing results from recent interviews please sign up for a no cost no obligation office hours session and I will be happy to help you rehearse or de-brief. Here are my lessons learned from taking …

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Customer Development Conversations With Busy Prospects

Question from an entrepreneur in the midst of customer discovery for a new product. Q: We are preparing to launch our first product in a few months. Next week there is a conference sponsored by a professional society that represents one of our potential target markets.  We have already done about a dozen customer discovery …

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