Crafting Deals with Customers and Partners
Bootstrappers prosper by closing deals with customers and partners. Here are twelve tips if you are new to crafting deals.
Bootstrappers prosper by closing deals with customers and partners. Here are twelve tips if you are new to crafting deals.
Slides and Audio From “Forming Leading A Team of Experts” at Project Management Institute of Silicon Valley on Sep-17-2012. Audio includes a lively discussion.
Successful entrepreneurs have a passion to see their inventions adopted as innovations not admired as works of art. This is the science of startups.
Avoid “vendor speak” where you use words like innovative, seamless, robust, disruptive, or patented. These are not words a customer would use to describe your product.
Debugging your startup requires peace of mind because debugging any problem, including debugging yourself, requires peace of mind. It’s what enables you to stay in flow.
The fact that your new application was a weekend project is not a feature! I see announcements like We just coded this up last weekend take a look… I wrote this on a Saturday afternoon check it out… We built the tool (over the last few weekends)… I don’t know if it’s Startup Weekend’s original …
The Fact That Your App Was a Weekend Project Is Not a Feature Read More »
I am interested in talking with anyone who is using Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) or Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) methods and paradigms to inform their customer interviews. I have been reading “Working Minds: A Practitioner’s Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis” by Gary Klein et. al. and I had an epiphany that these techniques would be …
Are You Using Cognitive Task Analysis for New Market Exploration? Read More »
Conversations with prospects unfold in real time: you must listen for what’s said and not said, manage your emotions, and understand the implications.
Jim Manzi, founder of Lotus and Applied Predictive Technologies, advises entrepreneurs to “Focus on delivering value to customers at a foreseeable profit” in “How to Succeed in Business by Really, Really Trying.” How to Succeed in Business by Really, Really Trying. It’s a great article and also on the limits of advice to entrepreneurs, in particular autobiographies …
Jim Manzi: Focus on Delivering Value to Customers at a Foreseeable Profit. Read More »
Focus on delighting early customers over accumulating followers. You need proof of deep value in a niche over small value dispersed over a large market.
I remember once talking to my high-school physics teacher, who had been one of the leading teachers in our district for decades. “Don’t you get tired teaching physics?” I asked him one day. “I don’t teach physics,” he replied. “I teach students.” The same wisdom applies to securing financing for startups: investors don’t fund technologies, …
Beta customer conflates three categories of people who are using your product in a way that’s not healthy for your long term business prospects if you are selling to business users, in particular early adopter or pragmatic enterprise users.
This is Sean Murphy for SKMurphy, Inc. I want to talk to you about our startup stages model and understanding that risk reducing milestones that separate each stage. We break the startup journey into five stages. In each stage you will explore different options and converge on a key risk reducing milestone. Starting from idea …
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 …
The primary challenge when you are first targeting a set of prospects for your product is to resist the urge of seeing the product as broadly applicable, instead focus narrowly where you bring strong benefit to get traction.
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 …
You waste time and reputation using these methods for B2B customer discovery: surveys, landing pages, and asking for endorsement before product experience.
A few thoughts on customer interviews and why their capacity to surprise us makes them preferable to surveys and landing pages for early market exploration.
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 …
A bootstrapper needs four attributes to succeed: purpose, patience, politeness, and prudent risk taking. These are markers for strength not weakness.