3 Early Customer Stage

Customer Development: Scouting A New Market

There are no undefended markets. Established markets are characterized by entrenched competitors who have strong brand identify and deep customer relationships. Although Bill Hewlett always strove to “attack the undefended hill,” the reality is that any market worth having is at least lightly defended by the status quo of current alternatives. When scouting a new …

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Newsletter: Retrospectives, Post Mortems, and After Action Reviews

SKMurphy December 2015  Newsletter This blog post summarizes our December newsletter, you can subscribe to the monthly SKMurphy newsletter using the form at the right Retrospectives, Post Mortems, and After Action Reviews The end of year is always a good time to look back and assess what you have accomplished and what you have learned doing …

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Newsletter: Customer Discovery Interviews

SKMurphy Newsletter for October 2015 This blog post summarizes our October newsletter, you can subscribe to the monthly SKMurphy newsletter using the form at the right Customer Interviews Customer Discovery interviews are key to discovering whether or not a market exists for your product or service and the skills and questions you hone in the early …

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Primary Research Tools: Q&A With Jen Berkley Jackson

I recently did an in depth interview with Jen Berkley Jackson of The Insight Advantage on primary research tools. Jen works with companies to help them make sure that they understand their customers better than any competitor or potential competitor. Her firm performs primary research for clients, using a variety of tools to gather information …

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Good and Bad Reasons to Pivot

Much has been written about a startup making a pivot in direction after Eric Ries first coined the term in a 2009 blog post “Pivot don’t Jump to a New Vision.” The word pivot has attracted almost as much wordplay as the word lean.  What follows is a short list of good and bad reasons to …

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Larry Smith: Fail Fast, Fail Often, and Die

Larry Smith is an Economics Professor of Economics at the University of Waterloo who writes and lectures on Entrepreneurship, innovation, and Technology markets. What follows is part of a conversation he had with Alan Quarry in the AQ’s Blog & Grill series of interviews with entrepreneurs. His key point, that he makes in a somewhat cranky fashion, is that technology …

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Moltz You Need To Be A Little Crazy

Webinar Replay: You Need to Be a Little Crazy

This is a webinar replay that was recorded on Wednesday, June 8, 2011 with Massimo Paolini, Miles Kehoe, Dorai Thodla, and Sean Murphy discussing Barry Moltz‘s “You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business.” They share how they personally found the courage to start their businesses and their …

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A Serious Conversation Can Change Your Life

Theodore Zeldin gave a series of six lectures on conversation that were collected in slim book called “Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives.” I found it offered a number of insights on what is needed for a serious conversation. And since serious conversation is one of the primary tools for early market exploration and …

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Your First Dozen Enterprise Customers

My interview with Gabriel Weinberg was originally published Sep-8-2010. He was doing research for what became his fantastic book Traction. We talked for the better part of an hour and a half and I can remember he kept returning in different ways to what was needed to close your first dozen enterprise customers. He recently …

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Jen Berkley Jackson on Win Loss Interviews

I have known Jennifer Berkley Jackson of The Insight Advantage for the better part of  a decade. I met her at a Breakfast for Management Consultants and have stayed in touch ever since. She wrote a great blog post last year on “Win/Loss Analysis, Your Secret Weapon for Success” and we recently sat down to …

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3D Printing: The Next Best Thing But Not Yet

3D printing is overhyped and its implications are not well understood. It will be twenty plus years before there is a 3D printer in most homes due to limitations of the cost of the machine, material, obtaining software and learning how to use the software. Other fundamentally problem that prevent 3D printers being adapted by the …

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