The Philadelphia Startup Leaders Manifesto is a great example of why federated entrepreneurship is a good model for a startup ecosystem. I have reproduced it here with some observations on our startup stages model, the Bootstrapper Breakfasts®, and Silicon Valley.
Federated Entrepreneurship in PSL Manifesto Read More »
Managing sales people is a straightforward proposition: you get what you reward. Analyze the compensation package and ensure it isn’t encouraging what you don’t want or discouraging what you do. If you are unhappy with commitments the sales team is making you need to make it clear who needs to review and sign off on
Managing Sales People Read More »
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
Entrepreneurial Passion: Good Servant, Poor Master Read More »
I am rescuing a dialog on customer development and channel development I had with Ash Maurya from the comments to his “Lessons Learned in 2010” blog post. I am still at work on the “system of simultaneous equations” model and I think his new thinking on the “Customer Factory” is moving closer to iterating against
Customer Development and Channel Development Read More »
Cold calling, despite it’s popularity, is almost always the worst possible customer acquisition approach as a pure method. Find a way to warm up the call.
If “Cold Calling” is Your Answer Please Reconsider Read More »
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
Tristan Kromer on Testing Customer and Value Hypotheses Read More »
Core skills for customer development: triage, lead generation, complex negotiation that builds a business relationship, and project management.
What Are Core Skills For Customer Development? Read More »
I have not yet internalized the lessons from Daniel Cook‘s “Laws of Productivity: 8 Productivity Experiments You Don’t Need to Repeat” [PDF] so I find myself work–and now blogging–on a holiday. Here are my key take-aways from Cook’s roundup on knowledge work productivity and some additional thoughts on why they are so hard to put
Labor Day 2014: Knowledge Work Productivity Read More »
I got the following unsolicited E-mail this morning; I think the marketing term for this is “blogger outreach.” I have redacted the name of the sender (“YYY”) and the name of the firm/product (“XXX”) but “[press kit]” and “[review/checkout]” were included verbatim in the original. There was no footer with an unsubscribe option although phone
Five Blogger Outreach Mistakes To Avoid Read More »
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
Few Against Many Requires Focus and Perseverance Read More »
