They Screwed Up: They Followed Our Specification
A story from my engineering days at Cisco about how a lack of trust led to a default assumption that “they screwed up.”
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How To Thrive After An Acquisition
One common exit for a bootstrapping team is to sell their startup, here are some rules of thumb for how to thrive after an acquisition.
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–April 2013
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected in a blog post like this one at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts in your inbox.
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Hiring A Startup’s First Sales Person
Gabriel Weinberg is a serial entrepreneur (latest startup: DuckDuckGo), an insightful blogger, and quality contributor to Hacker News. He is writing a book on how startups get traction due out this summer that includes interviews with folks like Patrick McKenzie, Jimmy Wales, and Paul English to collect lessons learned from a variety of perspectives. I was
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Vision Is Critical But Avoid The “Field of Dreams”
The Field of Dreams model–build it and they will come–is a variation on “build a better mousetrap,” a self-limiting belief that dooms many startups.
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16 Quotes on Customer Development From Asif Mandozai
Asif Mandozai (@asifmandozai) uses twitter to share customer development insights. Here is a set of 16 quotes I found to be practical and actionable.
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–March 2013
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
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Slides and Audio From “How To Bootstrap” ASLCPA Mar-27-2013
Here are the slides and audio from a “How To Bootstrap Your Startup” presentation at an Emerging Business Group Best Practices Seminar at Abbott, Stringham, and Lynch.
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May 21 at IEEE-CNSV: Successful Consulting Engagements With Startups
IEEE-CNSV Panel: Successful Consulting Engagements With Startups I will be moderating a panel on “Successful Consulting Engagements with Startups” at the May-21-2013 IEEE-CNSV meeting. The genesis was an e-mail thread on the CNSV list last June that started with this question: I have a new client which is a very-early-stage start-up, funded by one of
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Communicating Complex Concepts in Video: Luxr’s 5 Whys Video
Luxr has produced a clever encapsulation of the 5 Whys methodology, a technique for persistently probing the symptoms to find the root cause of a problem. Compared to several other “5 Whys” videos YouTube steered me to after I viewed this one I was struck by how practical and tactical Luxr’s explanation was. It communicated the
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Mark Stiving: Three Pricing Principles I Confirmed In Las Vegas
Mark Stiving is a serial entrepreneur and a pricing expert. In this video he tells the story of being mistaken for a lost lamb by a shepherdess in Las Vegas after being screwed by a cab driver. He uses her business model to illustrate three important pricing principles: Know Your Value Segment Your Market Offer
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Market Discovery and Exploration Requires Models from Physics, Biology, and Psychology
Q: Appreciate your thoughts on qualitative vs. quantitative approaches to market exploration. Customer development is like qualitative research; it is good for exploring hypotheses (and associated issues) but cannot validate them (by its very nature it is small sample size). To validate startup hypotheses one needs to do quantitative research, e.g. surveys, measurements (A/B tests), and have
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How To Start a Warm Conversation About a Customer Problem
The most effective ways to start a warm conversation with prospect are introductions, responding to questions in a forum, and face to face at an event.
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How To Bootstrap Your Start-Up at ASL Mar-27-2013
How To Bootstrap Your Start-Up at ASL Mar-27-2013: I have been invited by the Emerging Business Group at Abbott, Stringham and Lynch to give a talk on “How to Bootstrap Your Start-Up.”
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Hypothesis Not Hype For A New Product
Resist the temptation to hype your new product, treat it as an hypothesis not just in your own mind but also in how you describe it to prospects. If strangers tell you what they like about your product or particular ways that they found it useful then you can use that in your messaging for
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–February 2013
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts in your inbox.
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Three Sales Pitches That Never Really Work
Here are three sales pitches that never really work with some suggestions for how to improve them.
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Challenges in Analyzing Market Structure and Competitive Landscape
Before you introduce a new product into an existing market you need to analyze the market structure and competitive landscape. This is a laundry list–not a prioritized list—of the set of challenges we currently wrestle with in helping clients monitor their external environment and craft strategies for new market creation and new product introduction into
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Startups Where “We Are All In This Together” Learn Faster
An exploration of some of the implications of Arie P. de Geus insight that “The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
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Ilya Semin of Datanyze on Value of Great Demo Workshop
We reach out to past attendees of the Great Demo workshop and ask them how they have applied the principles and techniques covered and what the impact has been on their business. Ilya Semin, the founder of software startup Datanyze, attended a Great Demo workshop in 2012 and sent us this detailed response. It is reproduced
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