Connecting Technical Know-How With Customer Needs
John Cook observes that connecting technical know-how with customer needs requires skills outside of mathematics.
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Customer Development
Edith Harbaugh: It’s Your Execution Not Your Idea
This is a guest post by Edith Harbaugh. She moderates the Lean Startup Circle mailing list but doesn’t have a blog of her own, so I have offered her mine because I was impressed by her insights and writing. It’s Your Execution Not Your Idea An initially dispiriting thing to hear from a customer is
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Prepare and Rehearse Your Answer to “How Do We Get Started?”
Always prepare an answer for when a prospect asks you “How do we get started?” Do this before you hear it the first time so you are ready.
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Our “Entrepreneur’s Guide To Sales” Added To Chicago MBA Coursepack
Mark Duncan and I collaborated on a four page article “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sales” that has been added to the Chicago MBA Coursepack
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Mapping the Path to Your First Dollar of Revenue – Handout
Here is the handout from this morning’s Bootstrapper Breakfast® in Walnut Creek where I gave a briefing on “Mapping the Path to Your First Dollar of Revenue.”
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Early Adopters Have Already Let Go of the Past
Early adopters have already let go of the past and are looking for near term results that can provide building blocks to better outcomes.
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Take Time to Walk Around The Problem
It’s rare for a new initiative to work the first time, at least when I try. I have to “walk around the problem” to look at it from different perspectives.
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Customer Development Requires a Willingness to Be Surprised
Customer Development requires an openness to new ideas from prospects and a willingness to revisit assumptions and to be surprised.
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Keeping the Ball Rolling With Prospects
Keeping the ball rolling with prospects requires a mix of empathy for their situation and a project management mindset.
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My Interview With Peggy Aycinena
My Interview With Peggy Aycinena I was interviewed by Peggy Aycinena about six months ago and she subsequently published it in July on the GabeOnEDA site as “Business 101: Art & Magic of EDA Marketing.” Peggy has always appreciated that the technology is nothing without the team and it’s the people you need to focus
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Spend Some Time On How To Disprove Your Hypotheses
It’s often more fruitful to consider what evidence would disprove your hypotheses and what are the simplest things you could do to collect it?
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Ash Maurya on “Running Lean”
Ash Maurya (@AshMaurya) has released the first two chapters of his new book “Running Lean” and here are my first impressions.
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Cold Calling Won’t Find Your First Business Customer
I meet teams trying to cold call for their first business customer and I just haven’t seen it work; the trust issues cripple them. Here is a relevant excerpt from Gabriel Weinberg’s interview with me for his traction book.
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We Cannot Sate Your Hunger For Certainty But We Can Increase Your Odds of Success
A hunger for certainty will not help an entrepreneur make timely decisions or manage the level of ambiguity and uncertainty they need to navigate through.
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3 Equations & 3 Unknowns: Target Customer is Key Initial Value
The first 3 unknowns for a startup are Customers, Features, and Message. Of these the target customer is the key variable to lock down first.
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Gabriel Weinberg Interviews Me For His Traction Book
Gabriel Weinberg is a serial entrepreneur (latest startup: DuckDuckGo), a Hacker Angel, insightful blogger, and frequent contributor to Hacker News. He is writing a book on how startups get traction and interviewing folks like Patrick McKenzie to collect lessons learned from a variety of perspectives. I was delighted when he approached me to take part
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Chalk Talk on Technology Adoption
A Chalk Talk on “Managing Risk In Technology Adoption” that covers some of key challenges technology providers have with getting companies to use their products.
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3 Equations & 3 Unknowns: Customers, Features, Message
We posted the interview I did with Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity about a month ago but in the last two days I have had two people comment to me directly and one tweet about my “three equations and three unknowns” answer: customers, features, message.
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Product-Market Fit is a Fraction Not a Bit
Product-Market fit is a measure of the relative fitness of a product solving a problem for a particular customer set at a point in time.
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If We Killed Our Product Would You Miss It?
Don’t ask prospects, “If we killed our product would you miss it?” It’s product management malpractice.
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