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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Startup Stages
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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Challenges in Analyzing 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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Startups Where “We Are All In This Together” Learn Faster
An exploration of some of the implications of Arie P. de Geus insight that “The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
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Price Based On Your Value To The Customer’s Situation
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.”
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Living in Anticipation With Schrodinger’s Leads
It can take a while to determine what to ask in an opening conversation and which leads constitute opportunities. You have to follow up.
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Six Tips For Writing An E-Mail To A Prospect or Potential Partner
Here are six tips or writing an E-Mail to a prospect or potential partner: the Hollywood approach, the schoolboy approach, add a middleman, quit typing, begin at the end, and sketch a picture.
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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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A Conversation With A Bootstrapping EdTech Startup On Customer Interviews
What follows is a sequence of E-mails with an entrepreneur bootstrapping an EdTech startup around the challenges of doing customer interviews that have been recast as a conversation, with the original content edited for length and clarity. Entrepreneur (E): I am working with a couple of friends–we all have day jobs–on an idea for helping
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Five Tests For Your “We’ll Run Ads” Business Model
Here are five tests entrepreneurs should run before they settle on a “we’ll run ads” business model for their startup.
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Eric Berne: A Little Boy Sees And Hears Birds With Delight
When a little boy sees or hears a bird he appreciates it without having to label or identify it. It’s useful for entrepreneurs to engage in direct observation and thoughtful reflection without having to classify or characterize.
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Impatience For Success Works Against Learning
Most successful products start in a niche and expand via a sequence of larger adjacent niches. Impatience for success works against learning.
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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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Changing Management’s View of an Innovation From “Probably Not a Good Idea” to “We’re Late”
The key to changing management’s view of an innovation from “probably not a good idea” is to assess the impact of metrics that they care about. At which point you are often told “We’re late.”
Startups Should Focus on Impact and Innovation Before Growth
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.
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