Mark Brinkerhoff: Starting With a Sketch Saves Money
A great short briefing by Mark Brinkerhoff, President of Fusion Design on how starting with a sketch saves money; he uses a simple HVAC design example but the technique is broadly applicable.
MVP
Start with Mindset with Ash Maurya
Ash Maurya makes the case that entrepreneurs must start with mindset to drive the skill development that will create traction and success.
Newsletter V2021 Issue 1: Building, Borrowing and Keeping Trust
This newsletter is devoted to practical advice for entrepreneurs on how to build, borrow, and keep trust.
Mary Sorber: Raw Pasta is Not Enough
It’s easy for the product team to to fixate on the core technology that enables a product and lose sight of what’s needed for the “whole product.” This article is the result of an ongoing collaboration with Mary Sorber that started with her metaphor that raw pasta is not enough to create a successful Italian …
Scott Berkun: How to Translate Observations and Creative Insight Into a Solution
In “The Dance of the Possible,” Scott Berkun outlines four tests for understanding the real work involved to translate observations and creative insight into a solution.
Design Your MVP In Two Weeks
Design your MVP in two weeks to avoid adding unnecessary features and complexity to your offering. A two-week time box forces you to focus on essentials.
Q: How Do I Plan for Pivots or Even Shutting Down My Startup?
It’s useful to explore several paths in parallel and have a default list of pivots ready of your first few efforts don’t bear fruit.
Derek Sivers: How to Start a Movement
In February 2010 Derek Sivers gave a great talk on “How to Start a Movement” that offered some important tips for leaders and but offered the surprising conclusion that concluded that the most important and underappreciated key to a successful movement was the follower’s courage to follow and ability to show others how to follow.
Q: How to Explore an MVP For Knowledge Worker Productivity
Applications that improve knowledge worker productivity have to satisfy “prepared users” not “casual users” and are especially challenge to do customer discovery and development for. With his permission, I have included William Pietri (LinkedIn williampietri) answer to a real question from an early stage entrepreneur because I found it incredibly insightful. I have known William …
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Developing a New Product? Key Questions to Ask
An infographic with some key questions to consider when developing a new product. Originally suggested in “Breakthrough Thinking From Inside the Box” by Coyne, Clifford, and Dye in HBR December 2007.
Frank Robinson’s Minimum Viable Product Definition
Frank Robinson’s Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept as first articulated in 2001. An MVP is the result of product development and customer development proceeding in parallel, which Frank Robinson called “synchronous development.”
Something Ventured: Make Money and Change the World for the Better
One documentary worth watching to get some context on the history of entrepreneurship and venture capital is “Something Ventured.” It’s a series of interviews with venture capitalists talking about their investments and their risk mitigation strategies in the 1950’s through 1970’s. It’s clear that they paid a lot of attention to “minimum viable products” and …
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Q: A Google Search Finds Dozens of Competitors, What Now?
A common mistake technical entrepreneurs can make is to focus on what’s easy to build, and enter a market with dozens of competitors without thought to differentiation. Or to hope that by making it “free” they can make money by selling ads.
An MVP is Finished Only After You Have Early Adopters
Javid Jamae (@JavidJamae) is a Principal Engineer at Tout, where he heads up the experimentation and growth efforts; he leads a team focused on growing the viewership for both local and nationally syndicated content. Javid authored this great guest post on finding early adopters through customer interviews before building a minimum viable product (MVP) and it is …
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Q: Is It Waste To Build A B2B MVP That Inspires Trust?
Build A B2B MVP That Inspires Trust Q: I am preparing to launch a website for my minimum viable product (MVP). It’s a few pages and has has some forms and a file upload capability. Potential customers will be able to explain a particular type of problem that they have and then upload some relevant …
Q: Is It Waste To Build A B2B MVP That Inspires Trust? Read More »
Minimum Viable Product: Enthusiastically Proceed Skeptically
In a candid discussion about the challenges of managing your own expectations for a minimum viable product (MVP), Tristan Kromer observed, “It’s psychologically hard to enthusiastically proceed with skepticism.” And that is the challenge, we have to be enthusiastic about our product ideas to persevere to complete them and tell others about them, but we have to …
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Even For Demanding Markets, An MVP That’s a 70% Solution is Often Good Enough
Stripping the least useful third of the features requested allows you to deliver a 70 percent solution much more rapidly that’s often good enough.