Gauging Customer Commitment
There are many useful ways to measure customer commitment to your product. Here is a rubric to help you assess each of your customers.
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4 Finding your Niche
Successful Entrepreneurship Is Ongoing Self-Improvement
Three variations on the idea that “successful entrepreneurship is an ongoing self-improvement” project, program, or process.
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Refine and Curate Your Thoughts as FAQs, Articles, and Talks
Refine and curate your thoughts by reworking the first draft of your answers in an email or in response to a question from a customer or an audience member at a talk.
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Erecting Barriers to Competition That Are Difficult to Duplicate
Competition is inevitable, that is why it’s wise to prepare for it and immunize yourself with difficult to copy differentiation where possible. A pure focus on implementing new features as fast as possible in an effort to outrun the competition is unlikely by itself to be enough. Here are some barriers you can erect that
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Narrative Rationality: Be Mindful Of Your Self-Description
Pay attention to self-description: the story you tell yourself and about yourself. Cultivate productive habits that don’t require conscious decisions. “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise
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Why Your Startup Matters Has Little to Do With Funding
Successful entrepreneurs answer “Why your startup matters?” by pointing to problems solved for customers and jobs created. Profit is a means to creating future value and funding is a means to creating profit.
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B.V. Jagadeesh on “Startup Leadership Lessons Learned”
Summary of a very insightful talk on leadership lessons learned by Mr. B.V. Jagadeesh entitled “Lessons Learned Starting, Leading, and Succeeding at Multiple Startups.”
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George Grellas on Leadership
George Grellas left a great short essay on leadership in a comment on Hacker News. Writing in response to “Wash the Dishes When Nobody Else Will” This is reposted with his permission (re-formatted from a single block of text).
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Tristan Kromer on Businesses Models
Tristan Kromer suggests that there are many viable models for a business, all have advantages and drawbacks. Services are easy to start but hard to scale. Despite surface appearance, a software business still inventory of people, key assets in the form of ideas, and a manufacturing process in the form of software release.
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Stoking the Star Maker Machinery Behind The Popular App
To many of the current incubators seem focused on “on hit wonder” startups designed to be acquired quickly. Apps are the new pop songs and the incubators are the music labels, stoking the star maker machinery.
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Managing Email Conversations With Customers
A guest post by Edith Harbaugh that offers a number of practical tips and suggestions for managing email conversations with customers.
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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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Evaluating and Reacting to New Competitors
Intelligently reacting to new competitors requires you to give them the benefit of the doubt but if your prospects or customers are not asking about them then focus on what they are asking you.
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Federated Entrepreneurship 3: Play Your Own Game
Federated entrepreneurship groups in different cities should following their own paths that leverage unique local strengths and advantages.
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Traveling Hopefully
For my first post of 2011 I commit to traveling hopefully. I was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s observation “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.”
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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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Good Decision, Bad Outcome
You never have complete information, if you do it’s a choice not a decision. You have to evaluate a decision in the context of the information that was available at the time. “Good Decision, Bad Outcome” When I first heard someone use this phrase it took a few weeks to sink in. Too often we
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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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