What is Under Your Control in an MVP
What is Under Your Control in an MVP? Your target customer, the problem you solve for them, and what capabilities you offer to help them.
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Startup Stages
Q: How Do You Iterate An MVP So That It’s “Good Enough For Government Work”
Iterating an MVP until it’s good enough for government work only works if your customer is open to a co-development relationship.
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College vs. Startup
Some thoughts on college vs. startups, the panels are sliced up from “Students” by Randall Monroe. This is which is a dream that I still have. I find it a marker for being under pressure.
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If You Knew How Hard a Startup Would Be
A new startup is often driven by a desire for autonomy, self-expression, and lifelong learning. Or it’s a creative solution to a lack of alternatives. Albert Hirschman observed that “creativity always comes as a surprise to us” which led him to suggest “the only we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging
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Even For Demanding Markets, An MVP That’s a 70% Solution is Often Good Enough
Stripping the least useful third of the features requested allows you to deliver a 70 percent solution much more rapidly that’s often good enough.
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MVP: Are You Building a Death Star?
Empires build Death Stars, rebels build X-Wing fighters. If your startup’s minimum viable product is a Death Star you are doing it wrong.
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Podcast with Pete Tormey: Bootstrapper’s Delegation Checklist
Pete Tormey and I did a short podcast on a delegation checklist. We wanted to help bootstrapping entrepreneurs decide what tasks it made the most sense to delegate in an early stage startup.
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Tips for Choosing a Logo
Tips for Choosing a Logo We get a number of questions about logos, here are three tips for designing or choosing a logo when you are bootstrapping or just getting started: Text Treatments: text logos are simple, the company name is always right there. Most high tech logos are text treatments, they are clear and
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Dean Kamen on Good Design and Where to Begin
An excerpt from an interview with Dean Kamen in “Imagine Design Create” by Tom Wujec. Kamen suggests entrepreneurs look for outmoded perspectives preventing the use of technologies that are “available, affordable, reliable, functional.”
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Upcoming MVP Clinics in July and August for Startup Entrepreneurs
Sean Murphy, CEO of SKMurphy Inc will be moderating two upcoming MVP Clinics. These are interactive roundtable discussions were entrepreneurs can present where they are with their MVP and hypotheses about customer, problem, solution, and value. The roundtable will explore issues that founders are having in defining and evaluating their MVP. Bootstrappers Breakfast on July
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Validating Your MVP For B2B Startups at SF Lean Startup Circle Tue-Jun-4
We have been invited back the SF Lean Startup Circle to present our “Validating Your MVP and Value Proposition for B2B Startups” workshop on June 4, starting 5:30pm. This interactive workshop will address: How a B2B startup should think about message, MVP, and launch. Understand who buys your product and how they calculate its value and
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Founder Story: Ari Halberstadt of Catalee on Founder’s Dilemmas
Theresa Shafer met Ari Halberstadt at a Bootstrapper Breakfast in SF earlier this year and was very impressed with his approach to his new startup, Catalee. Ari volunteered to talk with me about Noam Wasserman‘s “The Founder’s Dilemmas” as well as Catalee.
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For New Products Prospect Objections Are Valuable Data
If your prospect keep raising the same stupid objections and asking the same dumb questions it’s likely that your presentation is lacking or you are frequently talking to the wrong people. For new products, prospect objections are valuable data. Explore the implications and adjust your presentation and demo accordingly.
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Learning the Right Lessons From Failure
John Finneran’s postmortem: “Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup” shows he did not learn the right lessons from failure.
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Podcast with Pete Tormey on Forming a Team, Dividing Equity, and Gaining Early Traction
A conversation with Pete Tormey on forming a team, dividing equity, and gaining early traction in a startup.
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How To Thrive After An Acquisition
One common exit for a bootstrapping team is to sell their startup, here are some rules of thumb for how to thrive after an acquisition.
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Vision Is Critical But Avoid The “Field of Dreams”
The Field of Dreams model–build it and they will come–is a variation on “build a better mousetrap,” a self-limiting belief that dooms many startups.
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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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How To Bootstrap Your Start-Up at ASL Mar-27-2013
How To Bootstrap Your Start-Up at ASL Mar-27-2013: I have been invited by the Emerging Business Group at Abbott, Stringham and Lynch to give a talk on “How to Bootstrap Your Start-Up.”
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Hypothesis Not Hype For A New Product
Resist the temptation to hype your new product, treat it as an hypothesis not just in your own mind but also in how you describe it to prospects. If strangers tell you what they like about your product or particular ways that they found it useful then you can use that in your messaging for
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