4 Finding your Niche

Challenges in Analyzing Market Structure and Competitive Landscape

1 Idea Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, Customer Development, skmurphy / By /

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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Engineering Your Sales Process Workshop Feb-8 Early Bird Closes This Weekend

2 Open for Business Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, 5 Scaling Up Stage, Events, Sales, skmurphy / By /

Just a heads up that the early bird rates for our next “Engineering Your Sales Process®” Workshop close Sun-Jan-28. This is the same workshop that Scott Sambucci and Sean Murphy offered at the Lean Startup Conference in December 2012 but we are limiting the attendance to 12 entrepreneurs to allow it to be even more

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Dr. Atul Gawande

Dr. Atul Gawande on Managing Complexity and Uncertainty

4 Finding your Niche, skmurphy / By /

Managing complexity and uncertainty was the focus of Dr Atul Gawande’s commencement address at Williams College on Sunday, June 3rd, 2012 (Reprinted in New Yorker as “Failure and Rescue“). The entire talk is worth reading and offers a medical case history as a compelling context for his points. “…the critical skills of the best surgeons

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Startup Founders Announced for Working For Equity Panel at SVCC 2012

1 Idea Stage, 2 Open for Business Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, Events, Founder Story, skmurphy / By /

For the third year in a row I will moderate a panel of startup founders sharing lesson learned bootstrapping a technology startup at Silicon Valley Code Camp. This “Working for Equity” session will be on Sunday Oct 7 at 9:15am. Here is the announcement Many of us in Silicon Valley seek to found or be

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Q: Is Building The Wrong Product A Waste Of Time?

1 Idea Stage, 2 Open for Business Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, Customer Development, skmurphy, Startup Advice Column / By /

Building the “wrong product” is not a waste of time you learn about the market and technical feasibility. Right and wrong are both gray, not black or white. Customer development and technical development typically require a sequence of prototypes that are “less wrong” over time under they become good enough.

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Entrepreneurs Need a Community of Practice Not a Movement

1 Idea Stage, 2 Open for Business Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, Community of Practice, skmurphy / By /

Entrepreneurs need a community of practice to improve their skills, not a movement they can join as a fad. I don’t consider myself a disciple or part of a movement. I consider myself a practitioner. I am a huge fan of Saras Sarasvathy, Clayton Christensen, Peter Drucker, Gary Klein, and Gerald Weinberg.

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Jim Manzi: Focus on Delivering Value to Customers at a Foreseeable Profit.

3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche / By /

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

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Startup Stages Overview Video

1 Idea Stage, 2 Open for Business Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, 5 Scaling Up Stage, skmurphy, Startup Stages / By /

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

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Honor Customer Commitments To Avoid Poisoning the Well

4 Finding your Niche, skmurphy / By /

Honor Customer Commitments To Avoid Poisoning the Well “In a small way, every talent acquisition poisons the well for future, bootstrapped startups. It erodes the confidence of users and potential customers. People put their company blog on Posterous, they add their business to GoWalla, they gave AdGrok a few hours of their time, etcetera, etcetera.

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Zoom In For Traction, Zoom Out For Impact

2 Open for Business Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, 5 Scaling Up Stage, skmurphy / By /

Your startup is  a work in progress.  When most entrepreneurs evaluate where they are it’s difficult not to include the promising future they foresee naturally ensuing from current efforts (or on bad days the certain doom no matter what they do). If you are not getting traction, if you don’t have the ability to reliably

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notebook to Organizing Your Experiment Log

Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews

3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, Customer Development, Favorites / By /

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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