4 Finding your Niche

Building a Business Requires Building Trust

One of the hallmarks for success in a business-to-business market is the ability to form personal relationships as well as professional business relationships. Both require building trust. I am always dismayed when I read advice that advocates bait and switch or other forms of con games that erode trust and make it difficult for any …

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Video from Lean Innovation 101 Talk at SF Bay ACM Nov-20-2013

The video from my “What is Lean–Lean Innovation 101” talk is up: Here is the description for the talk “Lean” provides a scientific approach for creating a product and developing new businesses. Teams can iteratively building products or services to meet the needs of early customers by adopting a combination of customer development, business-hypothesis-driven experimentation …

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Q: Resources For A Lean Approach to Sales, In Particular New Product Introduction

Q: We have started selling and are looking for resources for a lean approach to sales, in particular for new product introduction. Lean Approach To Sales at Lean Startup Conference 2012 Scott Sambucci and I presented a workshop at Lean Startup 2012 on “Engineering Your Sales Process.” The deck is posted at http://www.slideshare.net/SalesQualia/engineering-your-sales-process About 70% …

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Getting More Customers Workshop on March 25, 2014

Let’s face it, finding customers can be quite a challenge. In this interactive workshop, we will cover a variety of proven marketing techniques for growing your business: attendees will select one or two that fit their style and develop a plan to implement them in their business in the next 90 days. Speaking – small …

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Recap Semifore MVP Clinic: Selling To A Team of Diverse Experts

Series profile Thinking about this using an OODA loop model – — Observe -> Orient -> Decide ->  Act Orient part is sensemaking — its own kind of fast learning Often takes a long time in a complex situation (e.g., all situations where learning is involved); subject to error because it’s “culture bound” What we …

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The Likely Consequences of Entrepreneurship Require Perseverance

Justin Kan (@JustinKan) wrote “Startups Don’t Die, They Commit Suicide” in 2011″ (mirrored on his blog here)  reflecting on what he had observed and learned as a serial entrepreneur. It was reposted on the Philly Startup Leaders list earlier this week which led me to write the following comments mixed with excerpts from Kan’s post.

Semifore Execs Share Bootstrapping Lessons and 2014 Scaling Up Plans at Jan-17-2014 MVP Clinic

Semifore , Inc. was founded in 2006 by Richard Weber based on his system design experience at several startups and some larger systems firms. All of them struggled with the need for  tools and methods to keep the hardware architecture in sync with software architecture and to ensure that the development and customer documentation was …

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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 Analysing 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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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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Dr. Atul Gawande

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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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”

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist-in-residence at Valve Software. In “Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world?” makes this interesting observation. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that …

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You Tried: It’s OK To Make a Change

“In restless dreams I walked alone, Narrow streets of cobblestone.” Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sounds of Silence” Nothing new ever works, but doing the same thing over and over again without variation or detecting and correcting mistakes is insanity (or at least bureaucracy). So many startup overnight success stories that stress the importance of passion …

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