Lessons Learned Blogging: 1400 Posts in 8 years
This post is a retrospective look at my inaugural post in 2006 and lessons learned blogging 1400 posts over the 8 years since.
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Providing Phone Support When Bootstrapping
Q: I am bootstrapping a e-commerce web startup and working a day job to fund my business until revenue takes off. I am getting ready to launch but am worried how I can provide phone support for customer service issues and to close sales. Any suggestions?
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Bill Meade: Customer Development and Schmexperts
Bill Meade (@BillMeade) is the Director of Data Science at Neal Analytics, a position he describes as, “Catalyst to a herd of genius cats, riding a machine learning cloud, into a business world about to discover analytical dreams can come true … easily. ” Bill has long experience with innovation, IP management, and customer development.
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Serious Problems With Business Model Canvas For Startups
Q: I’m just about to get out of the building to validate hypotheses and start learning, but I have a problem with the business model canvas. I have been advised to develop detailed hypotheses before starting customer discovery. This is my startup and I have no idea how to fill in the business model canvas
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An MVP is Finished Only After You Have Early Adopters
In this guest blog, Javid Jamae advises that an MVP is finished only after you have found early adopters for your product.
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Diving In Over Your Head
One of the hallmarks of the entrepreneurial journey is diving in over your head. At some point you have to commit fully to a new venture and at a later point you realize that, despite all of your careful preparation, you are testing the depth of water with both feet–or perhaps even head first. This
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Customer Development and Channel Development
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
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Q: Is It Waste To Build A B2B MVP That Inspires Trust?
A minimum viable product (MVP) for business must inspire trust. If prospects understand your promise they don’t believe you, they won’t buy.
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Q: What Are Critical Tasks In A Startup?
Critical tasks in a startup include conversations with prospects and customers, planning, retrospectives, recruiting, and focused execution.
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If “Cold Calling” is Your Answer Please Reconsider
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.
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Entrepreneurial Mindset: Create Value For Others
Creating value for others is the core of the entrepreneurial mindset. It enables the exchange of value that fuels entrepreneur’s efforts to bring new ideas and products to market.
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Guidelines For An Online Community of Entrepreneurs
Here are some suggestion guidelines that help set newcomers expectations for what constitute valuable content and comments in an online community.
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Entrepreneurship As A Calling
The practical and spiritual aspects of entrepreneurship as a calling are well documented in “The Call of the Entrepreneur.”
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Why You Need A Logo
Q: What are logos good for? An image is processed by a different part of the brain than a word or phrase, making it both memorable and evocative in ways that are distinct from the name of your company. Having a logo for your company or product makes it more memorable and allows you to
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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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Lee Harris’ Insights on What 9-11 Means
Some excerpts from “Civilization and Its Enemies” by Lee Harris, with commentary on the implications of 9-11 for Silicon Valley. We Have An Enemy “It is the enemy who defines us as his enemy, and in making this definition he changes us, and changes us whether we like it or not. We cannot be the same
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No Such Thing as a Random Sample of Five People
Q: I have 3D printed a couple prototypes of my product. I am going to get user feedback by letting security guards–my target market–test if for free for a few days. How many prospect should I have test it before I can determine if there is a market for the product. Since you are 3D
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What Are Core Skills For Customer Development?
Core skills for customer development: triage, lead generation, complex negotiation that builds a business relationship, and project management.
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Ten Tips For New Product Demos
Here are ten tips for managing new product demos to prospects. While it’s always a good idea to preview inside the team and perhaps call in some favors for “friendly fire” review, at some point you have to bite the bullet and start giving new product demos to prospects. Here are my top ten tips (or
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Counting Your Blessings
The next few weeks and perhaps the next few years are going to be awful. Keep counting your blessings anyway, remain kind, and continue to make a difference. Peggy Noonan wrote My Brothers and Sisters on March 8, 2002 in the Wall Street Journal. She subtitled it “A report from New York, six months on”
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