Q: What Are Critical Tasks In A Startup?
Critical tasks in a startup include conversations with prospects and customers, planning, retrospectives, recruiting, and focused execution.
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If “Cold Calling” is Your Answer Please Reconsider
Cold calling, despite it’s popularity, is almost always the worst possible customer acquisition approach as a pure method. Find a way to warm up the call.
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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.
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Guidelines For An Online Community of Entrepreneurs
Here are some suggestion guidelines that help set newcomers expectations for what constitute valuable content and comments in an online community.
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Entrepreneurship As A Calling
The practical and spiritual aspects of entrepreneurship as a calling are well documented in “The Call of the Entrepreneur.”
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Why You Need A Logo
Q: What are logos good for? An image is processed by a different part of the brain than a word or phrase, making it both memorable and evocative in ways that are distinct from the name of your company. Having a logo for your company or product makes it more memorable and allows you to
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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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Lee Harris’ Insights on What 9-11 Means
Some excerpts from “Civilization and Its Enemies” by Lee Harris, with commentary on the implications of 9-11 for Silicon Valley. We Have An Enemy “It is the enemy who defines us as his enemy, and in making this definition he changes us, and changes us whether we like it or not. We cannot be the same
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No Such Thing as a Random Sample of Five People
Q: I have 3D printed a couple prototypes of my product. I am going to get user feedback by letting security guards–my target market–test if for free for a few days. How many prospect should I have test it before I can determine if there is a market for the product. Since you are 3D
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What Are Core Skills For Customer Development?
Core skills for customer development: triage, lead generation, complex negotiation that builds a business relationship, and project management.
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Ten Tips For New Product Demos
Here are ten tips for managing new product demos to prospects. While it’s always a good idea to preview inside the team and perhaps call in some favors for “friendly fire” review, at some point you have to bite the bullet and start giving new product demos to prospects. Here are my top ten tips (or
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Counting Your Blessings
The next few weeks and perhaps the next few years are going to be awful. Keep counting your blessings anyway, remain kind, and continue to make a difference. Peggy Noonan wrote My Brothers and Sisters on March 8, 2002 in the Wall Street Journal. She subtitled it “A report from New York, six months on”
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Second Sight: A Meditation on Silicon Valley and 9-11
Michael S. Malone wrote “Second Sight” for the Dec-3-2001 issue of Forbes ASAP (a great quarterly magazine put out by Forbes and edited by Malone that no longer seems to be available on-line). It’s also collected in his book “The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook 1963-2001” as Chapter 3. It’s a meditation
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User Experience Research vs. Customer Discovery
We Help You With Customer Discovery Q: Why don’t you ever blog about User Experience Research (UX)? The short answer is that we do customer discovery not user experience research. Our Clients Want Leads and Deals My clients come to me for help generating leads and closing deals, so that narrows my focus. We don’t
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Founders Want Leads and Deals
Q: I have looked at your website and based on some of your blog posts you seem to provide a full range of tactical services–content, outbound messaging, SEO, videos, newsletters, demos, etc.. Why do you talk about “leads and deals” instead of focusing on the full range of services that you offer? Founders Want Leads
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Nine Tips For Expert Public Speaking
Conor Neill has a great post up today on “a 9 Step Cheatsheet for Becoming a Public Speaking Expert” courtesy of the London Speakers Bureau. I am not usually a fan of infographics but this is exceptionally well done. Expert public speaking requires deliberate practice the same as any other skill. Here are some key
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A Great Demo Is A Conversation Driven By Mutual Curiosity
The best demo–a Great Demo!–is a conversations driven by mutual curiosity. Your goal is to learn more about a prospect’s current situation and needs while they want to learn more about your product and services and how you can help them. Mutual Demos “Before I demo to you, why don’t you demo to me what
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Labor Day 2014: Knowledge Work Productivity
I have not yet internalized the lessons from Daniel Cook‘s “Laws of Productivity: 8 Productivity Experiments You Don’t Need to Repeat” [PDF] so I find myself working–and now blogging–on a holiday. Here are my key takeaways from Cook’s roundup on knowledge work productivity and some additional thoughts on why they are so hard to put
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–August 2014
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog posts sent to you.
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Five Mistakes To Avoid In a Nurturing E-Mail
I signed up for a free trial of a lean project management tool (I have changed the name of the tool to <LeanTool>). A few days later I got the following nurturing E-Mail. Subject: Are you afraid to manage your project in a lean way? We’ve noticed that you haven’t been signing into <LeanTool> for a
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