Newsletter: Customer Discovery Interviews
Customer discovery interviews are key to discerning if a market exists for a product or service. Honing your discovery skills is essential for scaling.
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Startup Stages
8 Tips For Bootstrapping A Service Business
Michael J. Riordan is a certified public accountant who has been in business in San Jose for more than 35 years. He gave a crisp briefing on “Bootstrapping a Service Business” at the Thursday Oct 8 PATCA meeting. He gave a great set of tips, here are my notes:
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Roderick Huiskamp: Five Ways to Explore Pricing
Roderick Huiskamp (@RoderickH) is a Strategic Marketing Analyst with Fedex in Belgium. In this guest post he offers five ways to explore pricing, with three additional suggestions for the special case of professional services.
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Scaling Up To a High Reliability Organization
Randy Cadieux, founder of V-Speed LLC, started to post some interesting articles in the Lean Startup Circle Group on LinkedIn in June of this year, in particular his “Working on the Edge of Failure.” The high reliability organization as a lot to teach startups so I decided to reach out to him to compare notes. This led
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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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Organizing Your Experiment Log
In Chapter 9 of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig goes into an extended explanation of the Scientific Method using the metaphor of motorcycle repair. He stresses the value of an experiment log, explaining how to organize it so that you don’t become lost in exploring for solutions to a problem. I have
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Be Wary of Competition That Cares Deeply
It’s easy to mis-assess who your real competition is. We worry the most about competition that cares deeply. “You’re competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome.” Seth Godin in “Texting While Working“
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Q: How Can I Calculate The Exit Value Of My Idea?
It’s masturbation to calculate the exit value of idea that has not been reduced to practice and achieved some level of traction. The real question is how much time and effort to invest to achieve a level of traction that would allow place a value on the business that leverages the ideas. Often it’s not a
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Q: Can I Be My First Customer?
It’s OK to solve your own problem first, to be the first customer. This at a minimum gets the idea out of your head and reduced to practice where it can be tested. The trick is to use this basic product to spark further discussions about the problem you solved, no your solution.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. on Intellect and Character
Two extracts from “The Poet at the Breakfast Table” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. on intellect and character, with additional commentary for entrepreneurs.
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Planning and Reflection
Ash Maurya rebooted his blog as “The Space Between“–experimental format where he is exploring the space between ideas–and has offered a number of short reflective posts. Here are excerpts from three where he explores the value of planning and reflection, and the need to prioritize learning over the illusion of progress.
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Q: Should I Tap My 401K To Bootstrap?
Q: Should I tap my 401K to bootstrap my startup? A: No, and read Barry Moltz’s “You Have to Be a Little Crazy” on the risks of money from friends and family.
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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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Resources for Student Entrepreneur Organizations
With the 2016 school year getting ready to start in the next six to eight weeks at most colleges and universities I have had several conversations with student entrepreneur organizations about how I might be able to help them. I have developed content and given talks and webinars over the last five years that may provide
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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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Jonathan Bendor: Use Rubrics To Guide Innovation
An interesting interview from May 1, 2015 with Jonathan Bendor, a Stanford professor, who suggests that firms use rubrics to guide innovation so that criticism becomes less personal and more consistent and constructive. What follows is an edited transcript with some additional commentary.
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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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Nature, Technology and Magic
What seems natural, artificial, or supernatural is a function of familiarity. Nature is the background or context for innovation. The challenge is that we live in a world and culture formed by millennia of innovation so that some incredibly advanced technologies seem natural. The difference between technology and magic is not that one works more
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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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