Professional services innovation requires deepening your understanding of customer needs and emerging problem areas, deepening expertise, and incorporating technology and specialized tools into service delivery. […]
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. […]
David Brooks offers a metaphor for college graduation as a transition from traveling station to station to navigating a borderless sea. The same can be said for making the transition from employee to entrepreneur. […]
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 [...]
Key points from Mary Sorber’s presentation on “Qualitative Research: Problem Exploration for Lean Startups” at Lean Culture July-31-2018. […]
The October 2018 Great Demo! Workshop at Embassy Suites by Hilton in Milpitas that past attendees have stayed at and enjoyed. A list of other nearby hotels. […]
A Bootstrappers Breakfast is “counter-cultural” to the VC ecosystem focus at many events for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Here are seven ways that we take a very different approach to facilitating events for entrepreneurs compared to most others in Silicon Valley. […]
In the same way that we must share cherries with robins if we want them to nest in our neighborhood, we can only capture a part of the value that our software creates for our customers. […]
Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel, shared a candid assessment of mistakes he made in the first 18 months of the six startups he has founded in “The first 18 months of starting a company: it’s life or death.” Here are 7 key pieces of advice that highlight mistakes first founders [...]
Exploration and discovery constitute significant activities for entrepreneurs. There are various metaphors–for example entrepreneur as researcher, entrepreneur as scientist, entrepreneur as journalist–this post uses entrepreneur as detective as a metaphor. […]
Three tips for selling in an early market, with a particular focus on selling IoT devices in 2017: find early adopters, start with a pilot, and identify partners who understand how to foster change. […]
Whether you are interviewing potential employees or potential customers, don’t explore Thoughtland with a focus on predictions and beliefs. Instead, explore actual behavior and prior experience. […]
Pete Tormey’s ebook “Startup Guide to Intellectual Property: Early Stage Protection of IP” is a great resource for founders on startup intellectual property. This blog post includes excerpts from the “Protecting IP Early” chapter that focus on protecting startup secrets early in its existence. […]
When someone on your team says, “Google Thinks Our Name Is a Typo” you are at a disadvantage. Even worse if it suggests a competitor as the correct spelling it makes it look like you are typosquatting. Unless you have a strong reason for doing so it’s probably not a [...]
It’s not uncommon for a startup’s offering to evolve from service to system integration to product. Here is an explanation for the reasons and benefits. […]
The difference between scouting a new market and scouting a promising market is that the former may not exist–or come into existence–while the latter clearly exists because it’s already occupied. […]
Mark Hanzo, CTO of Hanzo Archives, was interviewed by SimpleWeb as part of a series on validating startup ideas. I found his remarks on very practical and insightful and have added some observations of my own. […]
Key product management lessons learned extracted from two blog posts by John P. Cutler: “50 Things I’ve Learned About Product Management” and “Feedback Loops and Done.” […]
Chip Conley shares how he was able to look at AirBNB’s operation with newcomer’s eye when he chose to reconceive bewilderment as curiosity. […]
Customer development–discovery driven sales–requires that you first understand the customer’s problem then present a vision of a solution. If that is acceptable you can proceed to a demonstration that provides technical proof of value. […]