Q: How Much Attention Should I Pay To Potential Competition?
Instead of looking left and right for potential competition, I would walk around the table and look at the situation from your prospect’s perspective.
Instead of looking left and right for potential competition, I would walk around the table and look at the situation from your prospect’s perspective.
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 …
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 …
Video from Lean Innovation 101 Talk at SF Bay ACM Nov-20-2013 Read More »
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% …
Q: Resources For A Lean Approach to Sales, In Particular New Product Introduction Read More »
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 …
Getting More Customers Workshop on March 25, 2014 Read More »
Getting Unstuck Revisited I had a conversation today with a good friend I had not seen in a while. Normally cheerful, he was feeling “stuck” in his startup I have started several businesses, tried to start quite a few more, changed direction more often than I ever planned and shut down more than a few–sometimes even …
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 …
Recap Semifore MVP Clinic: Selling To A Team of Diverse Experts Read More »
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 , 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 …
Q: We have a SaaS offering that has been on the market for three years now and we have several dozen paying customers. Our offering is useful for firms with more than a hundred employees up to several thousand and is licensed at a corporate level. We have only lost two customers, one was acquired …
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 …
Market Discovery and Exploration Requires Models from Physics, Biology, and Psychology Read More »
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 …
Challenges in Analysing Market Structure and Competitive Landscape Read More »
It’s especially important to price based on your value to a particular customer’s situation when you bring unique expertise and insight to a problem. This post is based on a real engagement that started with the conversation in “Living In Anticipation With Schrodinger’s Leads.”
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 …
Engineering Your Sales Process Workshop Feb-8 Early Bird Closes This Weekend Read More »
Most successful products start in a niche and expand via a sequence of larger adjacent niches. Impatience for success works against learning.
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 …
Dr. Atul Gawande on Managing Complexity and Uncertainty Read More »
Growth is an outcome of impact. Focus on impact and innovation before investing efforts in growth. Once you have identified an opportunity to make an impact you can plan for growth.
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 …
Startup Founders Announced for Working For Equity Panel at SVCC 2012 Read More »
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 …
Yanis Varoufakis: “Valve is an Enlightened Oligarchy” Read More »
“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 …