Q: Customer Exit Interview Questions
Six basic customer exit interview questions to ask when a customer decides to stop using your product.
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4 Finding your Niche
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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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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Price Based On Your Value To The Customer’s Situation
It’s especially important to price based on your value to a particular customer’s situation when you bring unique expertise and insight to a problem. This post is based on a real engagement that started with the conversation in “Living In Anticipation With Schrodinger’s Leads.”
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Engineering Your Sales Process Workshop Feb-8 Early Bird Closes This Weekend
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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Five Tests For Your “We’ll Run Ads” Business Model
Here are five tests entrepreneurs should run before they settle on a “we’ll run ads” business model for their startup.
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Impatience For Success Works Against Learning
Most successful products start in a niche and expand via a sequence of larger adjacent niches. Impatience for success works against learning.
Impatience For Success Works Against Learning Read More »
Dr. Atul Gawande on Managing Complexity and Uncertainty
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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Startups Should Focus on Impact and Innovation Before Growth
Growth is an outcome of impact. Focus on impact and innovation before investing efforts in growth. Once you have identified an opportunity to make an impact you can plan for growth.
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Startup Founders Announced for Working For Equity Panel at SVCC 2012
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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Yanis Varoufakis: “Valve is an Enlightened Oligarchy”
An analysis of Yanis Varoufakis “Why Valve? What do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world?”
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You Tried: It’s OK To Make a Change
Nothing new ever works, but repeatedly trying the same thing without variation is insanity (or bureaucracy). Fix your mistakes; make a change in approach.
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Q: Is Building The Wrong Product A Waste Of Time?
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
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.
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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Worry About Scaling After You Find Your Niche
It’s very hard to forecast the rate of adoption of a genuinely new offering in an emerging market, one that is discontinuous with current practice. A focus on scaling is premature until you have proof of value and have found your niche.
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Startup Stages Overview Video
Here is our Startup Stages Overview video, it explains our startup stages model and the risk reducing milestones that separate each stage.
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Honor Customer Commitments To Avoid Poisoning the Well
It’s essential to honor customer commitments to build effective business relationships and a solid reputation in an industry.
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Bug Reports vs. Business Plans
“Unhappy users in the EDA industry don’t continue to file bug reports; they start writing business plans.”Michael “Mac” McNamara.
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Zoom In For Traction, Zoom Out For Impact
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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