Early Markets Offer Fluid Opportunities
Startups see fluid opportunities in dynamic environments, but no certainties before opportunities pass or the “situation changes.”
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Startup Stages
Tristan Kromer on Businesses Models
Tristan Kromer suggests that there are many viable models for a business, all have advantages and drawbacks. Services are easy to start but hard to scale. Despite surface appearance, a software business still inventory of people, key assets in the form of ideas, and a manufacturing process in the form of software release.
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Users, Businesses, and Hobbies
I will often hear folks say “I think I can get a lot of users, I know that there is a market for this.” I worry because a market requires customers not just users: you can tell who your customer is because they pay for your product or service. When you say to yourself that
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We Use a Wiki to Organize Customer Interviews
Tips for using a wiki to organize customer interviews for customer discovery and to assess perspectives on their offering after purchase.
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Tom Van Vleck’s “3 Questions” Complement Root Cause Analysis
Tom Van Vleck has a great collection of software engineering stories on his site. One particularly good article is “Three Questions For Each Bug That You Find” which offers the following key observation: The key idea behind these questions is that every bug is a symptom of an underlying process. You have to treat the
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Time To Update Your Business Card
From time to time I run into a business card that makes me think. Here’s one that I will model as I update my own cards. Also check out some cool business cards from last year. Back:
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Stoking the Star Maker Machinery Behind The Popular App
To many of the current incubators seem focused on “on hit wonder” startups designed to be acquired quickly. Apps are the new pop songs and the incubators are the music labels, stoking the star maker machinery.
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Larry Lang on Managing Incentives
[Note this post was written in 2011]. The recent troubles at Cisco have prompted a lot of commentary on the Cisco alumni e-mail list. One of the more thoughtful analyses was posted by Larry Lang (@llang629), who spent more than a decade at Cisco in a variety of positions. His last was as VP and
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Failure to Thrive
Failure To Thrive: “We need another two weeks to add this one last feature.” This mindset of hesitation kills more products than any competitor.
Connecting Technical Know-How With Customer Needs
John Cook observes that connecting technical know-how with customer needs requires skills outside of mathematics.
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Video: Early Revenue For Enterprise Web Apps
This webinar is for SaaS firms faced with an “enterprise sales” challenge by virtue of their minimum price point or number of job boundaries, business processes, or contractual relationships that have to change to create value. The focus is on early revenue. Here is the video from my February 24 webinar with DreamSimplicity on “Early Sales
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Managing Email Conversations With Customers
A guest post by Edith Harbaugh that offers a number of practical tips and suggestions for managing email conversations with customers.
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Prepare and Rehearse Your Answer to “How Do We Get Started?”
Always prepare an answer for when a prospect asks you “How do we get started?” Do this before you hear it the first time so you are ready.
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Our “Entrepreneur’s Guide To Sales” Added To Chicago MBA Coursepack
Mark Duncan and I collaborated on a four page article “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sales” that has been added to the Chicago MBA Coursepack
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Evaluating and Reacting to New Competitors
Intelligently reacting to new competitors requires you to give them the benefit of the doubt but if your prospects or customers are not asking about them then focus on what they are asking you.
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Zero Sum vs. Quid Pro Quo
The essence of entrepreneurship is a free exchange of value–what the Romans called “quid pro quo”–that leaves all parties better off: no one loses.
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Federated Entrepreneurship 3: Play Your Own Game
Federated entrepreneurship groups in different cities should following their own paths that leverage unique local strengths and advantages.
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New Capabilities We Plan To Develop in 2011
To ensure that conversations and requests for help were productive, Anthony Scampavia kept a question at the top of his whiteboard in his various offices at Cisco for more than a dozen years: What is the problem you are trying to solve? Here are three problems we have identified and capabilities we plan to develop
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Traveling Hopefully
For my first post of 2011 I commit to traveling hopefully. I was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s observation “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.”
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Let Men Their Songs Employ
I have been thinking about different kinds of teams and team work. For example a choir has sheet music (“Let Men Their Songs Employ”) that predefines the content and timing of each person’s contribution. In a different way the script for a play outlines the content and sequence of each actor’s part.
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