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40 Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews

This post on B2B customer development interviews builds on one of my most popular. If you would like help preparing for customer development interviews or reviewing results from recent interviews, contact us. Here are my lessons learned from taking part in interviews where the startup planned to offer a product or service to a business. …

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Increase Your Luck Surface Area To Get More Customers

Jason Roberts 2010 “Luck Surface Area” model explains the need for entrepreneurs to combine time spent doing and developing expertise with time spent communicating with others. It’s a very useful and actionable insight. Unfortunately, the diagram he chose to illustrate the model assumes that entrepreneurs have an unlimited amount of time to do both. I …

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Neuromancer

Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

Neuromancer, William Gibson’s  first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction: a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use. I recently re-read it and was struck by how things …

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Veterans Day 2016

A thank you on Veterans Day 2016 to all of the men and women in our armed forces who made the United States possible, in particular this  Silicon Valley oasis of invention and innovation I get to call home. Some quotes to meditate on follow.

Team Building: Rapid Ramp

Recently, we worked with a startup on team building as they wrangled with the rapid growth of their business. They needed bring on new team members and wanted them to be productive and effective as quickly as possible.  Working with the leadership team we reviewed Bruce Tuckman’s four stages of team development.

3D Printing Tradeoffs and Optimization

There are four areas where tradeoffs are commonly made in 3D printing: conventional and additive manufacturing processes additive manufacturing processes 3D printer selection different parameter settings in a 3D printer’s build process The most common design goals considered for 3D printing tradeoffs are strength, speed of printing, minimum feature resolution, and cost.  The same 3D model …

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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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Difference Between a Hypothesis and an Assumption

The difference between a hypothesis and an assumption is that the first is normally explicit and the second implicit. A hypothesis is what is being tested explicitly by an experiment. An assumption is tested implicitly. By making your assumptions as well as your hypotheses explicit you increase the clarity of your approach and the chance …

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Three Great Books on Generating Innovative Business Ideas

Three Great Books on Generating Innovative Business Ideas These three books contain a wealth of useful suggestions for generating innovative business ideas from observing, questioning, and networking with customers and others: Innovator’s DNA “The Innovator’s DNA” by Christensen, Dyer, and Gregerson outlines a set of five skills that innovator’s use to develop entrepreneurial ideas: Associating: …

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Pretotyping – Techniques for Building the Right Product

Alberto Savoia defines pretotyping as determining that you are “building the right product before you invest in building your product right.” His book “Pretotype It” (Second Edition available as a Free PDF or on Kindle for $0.99) lists a set of seven techniques for pretotyping on pages 39-40. This post analyzes and elaborates on the techniques …

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notebook to Organizing Your Experiment Log

Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews

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 …

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3 Equations & 3 Unkowns: Target Customer is Key Initial Value

I mentioned in “3 Equations 3 Unknowns:  Customers, Features, and Message” that we spend a lot of time on the early customer stage. It requires very different sales style than you’ll see later on. It’s a conversational sales style. It’s much more about understanding the problem. You’re trying to solve three equations, three unknowns: Are …

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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, Jimmy Wales, and Paul English to collect lessons learned from a variety of perspectives. I was delighted when he …

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