Startup Stages

OCT Offers Insights That Used To Require an Autopsy

Christoph Guetter suggests in “The eye is a window to the brain; but who’s looking?” that the micron scale resolution of optical coherence tomography (OCT) for in vivo cross-sectional imaging of the human retina may allow earlier and more accurate diagnoses of several common neurodegenerative disorders: Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic

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Webinar Replay: Innovator’s DNA Associating Skill

Panel sessions Feb 22, 2012 on Innovator’s DNA Skill #1 Associating. Terry Frazier of Cognovis, Steve Hogan of Tech-Rx, and Sean Murphy of SKMurphy. Part of the Book Club For Business Impact covered lessons learned applying a number of techniques for associating from chapter 2 of the “Innovator’s DNA” by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton

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Innovator's DNA

Webinar Replay: Innovator’s DNA Series Overview

Steve Hogan and Sean Murphy walk through a five part webinar series on “The Innovator’s DNA” by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen,and Clayton Christensen. Sean thinks it’s the best book on innovation and entrepreneurship for 2011 and useful for any team that is trying to innovate. Each webinar will be in a roundtable format and include

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Crafting a Value Proposition

Q: I struggle with the value proposition for our product. Either I am too abstract “we offer a positive return on time invested” or too vague “help increase your ability to manage critical challenges.” Do you have any suggestions for how to frame or formulate a value proposition? Here a few questions that a value

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Entrepreneurial Passion: Good Servant, Poor Master

Entrepreneurial passion has to be based on a desire to create value, to be of service to a set of target customers. There may be many things you are interested in learning and room enough in your life for several hobbies, but pursuing a passion without regard to your ability to provide value in a

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Entrepreneurial Mindset: Create Value For Others

Creating value for others is the core of the entrepreneurial mindset. It enables the exchange of value that fuels entrepreneur’s efforts to bring new ideas and products to market. Dan Sullivan: Entrepreneurs Make Two Decisions In “The Great Crossover,” Dan Sullivan offers the following insight on entrepreneurial mindset: Successful entrepreneurs differ from other people–not in their

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Tristan Kromer on Testing Customer and Value Hypotheses

These are excerpts from  Episode 9 of Outlier on Air: Tristan Kromer, A Lean Approach to Business.  They are in the same sequence the took place in the interview but a number of stories and asides have been omitted to focus on what I felt were some extremely valuable insights from Tristan Kromer on clarifying and testing

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Map Customer Buying Process Before Sending a Proposal

Map the customer buying process, needs, and situation before you invest time sending a detailed proposal. A quick request can mean you are column fodder. Q: We are still trying to close our first paying customer. We have a website up and have talked to a number of people. More or less out of the blue

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Customer Interviews: Spend an Hour to Save a Minute

For customer interviews we have a rule of thumb that if an hour or research saves a minute early in the conversation it’s a good investment.  When you look at the list of questions you have prepared to learn about the prospect’s business and their needs, it’s easy to say to yourself, “I am really

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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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Few Against Many Requires Focus and Perseverance

We Happy Few The fewer men, the greater share of honour. […] We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; Henry V in Act IV Scene iii 18–67. “St. Crispin’s Day speech” A college kid in a dorm room starts assembling and selling person computers.. Two college dropouts–or recent graduates–start building hardware in a

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