founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
People approach creating products from many different perspectives. Some seek out customer pain and dedicate themselves to solving their problems. Others follow the technology and strive to deliver solutions that are just now possible. Some like to follow competitors and deliver better solutions in a fast-follower model. Others are simply trying to find a way to make some money so that they can ...
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I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
When I advise entrepreneurs to build their own MVP many ask me, "what language should I use." Since technology is rarely a business risk for startups, I advise entrepreneurs to make the decision based on community instead. Pick a popular technology based on the availability of people who can help you when you get stuck. ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
Most people expect us to give them sales pitches about our products. When we instead start asking Customer Development questions about their habits and problems, the conversation can seem really weird to them. I've found that framing the meeting by (1) asking for advice, (2) keeping the meeting short, (3) giving them unique industry insight, and (4) framing the background questions ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
The term "pivot" is probably one of the most overused and abused terms in today's product teams. If you're not familiar with the concept, see Your Business Plan Is Wrong. As I work with different teams I find the term used in so many different ways. Mostly the different uses of the term are pretty harmless. It is often used as a synonym for "change." ...
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I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
Although Customer Development can give us tremendous insight into market problems, it takes a lot of time - time that's wasted if we do it incorrectly. Worse yet, poorly worded questions can cause us to reach wrong conclusions about what people want. The best questions don't require customers to speculate about their behavior. ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
The Lean Startup method strongly advocates experiments - and for good reason. It's critically important for a startup to acquire validated learning as quickly as possible. How quickly can you get through a learning cycle? How efficiently can you get to the answers to crucial questions? ...
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Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
Entrepreneurs aren't quitters. To succeed you need to be resilient, thick skinned and borderline crazy. You need to have just the right amount of delusion to believe you can succeed, spurring you on despite the absurd odds. But sometimes, you have to quit. On the other hand, sometimes you need to pivot. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs use the pivot as an excuse to remain delusional ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
The great dilemma of lean. When do you pivot or quit, and when do you persevere? There is no firm answer. I doubt there will ever be one. This isn't color by numbers. Entrepreneurs need incredible fortitude, resilience, and persistence, because success does not comes easy. Even the seemingly "instant hits" are very hard to build. ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
I continue to be fascinated with the changing art of product management. This week, I taught a class at Intelligent.ly on the topic. After running through a series of slides reviewing modern product management techniques and the search for product-market fit (drawing from leading thinkers and a class I teach at Harvard B-School), I had the students break up into teams of 8 to create scrums to addr ...
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Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning. Lean Planning is a set of tools for discovering a business model that works, building an action plan to test your assumptions, creating financial models and a plan for a viable business, and tracking your performance ...
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Via: Up and Running
COO at Palo Alto Software: @bplans & @liveplan. Passionate a |
Language - be it Objective C, Chinese, Ruby, or Klingon - isn't something you learn through study, it's something you learn through use. The best way to learn how to build your startup MVP is to start building your startup MVP. ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
A lot of startups rightly aim to release a minimum viable product (MVP) as their first initiative. The goal of an MVP helps a team rally around a concrete product design that they can get out the door in a limited amount of time. And it's every startup's hope that once the MVP is released, early adopters will flock to it eagerly and tell their more mainstream friends by the millions. ...
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Via: Mark Hendrickson
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You're following the advice of Ash Maurya or Steve Blank and trying to talk to customers but are having trouble finding them. In this post I offer a way forward: (1) stop and regroup, (2) troubleshoot the source of the problem, (3) pivot based on what you've learned, (4) be patient. ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
A lot of companies still talk about being in stealth mode and aiming for a big hoorah type launch. It doesn't usually work. Worse still, startups that are in stealth mode rarely talk to customers, prospects, users, partners or anyone else before their big reveal, which means they have little to no validation for what they're doing. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
An entrepreneur named Nick Jones recently reached out to me after reading The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. Nick is the founder of Lavish Longboards. "Skateboards?", you might be asking yourself? Yes, I might answer you, "skateboards". You might then ask, "But don't Lean Startup and Customer Development only pertain to technology startups?" ...
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Via: Vlaskovits
CMO at @GetDrumbi. Wrote The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustD |
The standard nonprofit process of building a digital strategy -- or a standalone campaign -- can often be a shot in the dark. Organizations spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on a theory that users will click or donate or share or engage, and success is by no means guaranteed. To borrow a phrase, the accepted model is "build it and they'll come." We suggest that a better model, follo ...
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Digital strategist, founder of Social Contxt, social media e |
If you're running a lean startup, "launch and learn" is undoubtedly a familiar mantra. But launching a new feature can take weeks or even months, and for a scrappy startup that's a potentially make-or-break issue. We've collected a time-tested toolkit of methods for learning that are cheap, fast, and perfect for startups to find those crucial mistakes earlier. ...
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Via: Design Staff
User Experience Designer, Prototyper, Storyteller. Partner a |
At long last, Lean Startup has become a global movement. While more an more of us are talking about Lean Startup, far fewer are talking about how tedious, frustrating, and tough it is in practice. In this post I share what my personal experience has been like - and it hasn't followed the Lean Startup script. ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
The language we use for startup stages (discovery, validation, customer creation, company building) is abstract. The lines are blurry. And if jumping ahead of yourself is the #1 cause of startup death[1], that's a problem. So here's another way of thinking about the stages of a startup in visual terms using the business model canvas ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
Paul Gollash, the founder and CEO of Voxy, just came and spoke at our NYC Lean Startup meetup, and I wanted to share some of his stories. These notes are from my memory, but hopefully reasonably accurate. Voxy is a language learning startup that is around 2 years old ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
The story of why we started a fully focused content marketing strategy here at Buffer is actually one that isn't glamorous at all. It was born out of pure necessity that we couldn't get any press coverage for the launch of Buffer. For the first few weeks I was on board, I tried restlessly to [...] ...
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Via: Buffer Blog
Co-founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share Tweets, Fac |
Ash Maurya's 10 steps to product/market fit. ...
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Via: Spark59
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
Innovation Accounting effectively helps startups to define, measure, and communicate progress. That last part is key. The true job of entrepreneurs is systematically de-risking their startups over time through a series of conversations. Success lies at the intersection of these conversations and each has a specific function and protocol. ...
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Via: Ash Maurya
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
A lean startup teams use the Validation Canvas to explicitly list their core assumptions, the assumptions that if proved false would sink their business. Then they identify the assumption that is the most important and most risky and then test it. But what happened if the first insights failed your assumptions. ...
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Via: Lean Startup Machine
product manager/designer/foodie/musician/husband/father and |
Entrepreneurs put off what they are most afraid of - failing. For most, that's selling their idea. They will stick their head in the sand and build a product for 6 months, come up for air, only to realize no one wants it. ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Q: How does taking a scientific approach to your startup allow you to feel passion for the product you are building. It would seem to place you in the position of taking orders from the customer ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
In my last post I described a new business tool, the Value Proposition Designer. In this post I outline how you can use the tool to not only design Value Propositions, but also to test them. You'll learn how you can supercharge the already powerful Lean Startup and Customer Development principles to design, test, and build stuff that customers really want. ...
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Bestselling author, member of the Business Model Generation, |
The developer behind Appbot - a service for app developers who want their app store reviews and features in their email inbox - has posted the lessons he learned when building his minimum viable product. There is nothing revolutionary here, but it is a good list of things to do. This is my summary: ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
You may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad class taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, Caltech and for the National Science Foundation. Now you too can take this course. I've worked with the Udacity, the best online digital university on a mission to democratize education, to produce the course. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
I had an epiphany recently about the congruence between Peter Cohan's Great Demo! methodology and a lean approach to sales and presentation practices. The simplest definition of the Great Demo! is "Do the Last thing First" ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
During the search for product-market fit. It helps companies avoid building stuff that customers don't want. Yet, there is no underlying conceptual tool that accompanies this process. There is no practical tool that helps business people map, think through, discuss, test, and pivot their company's value proposition in relationship to their customers' needs. So I came up with the Value Proposition ...
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Bestselling author, member of the Business Model Generation, |
There are many channels that can produce your first early customers and contacts, but the one I see most often is cold email. This post outlines the method I use to approach cold emailing. It is a reflection of the tactics I use when cold calling, and I have seen my success rates improve dramatically when I invest in the process. ...
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Via: Ash Maurya
Entrepreneur and software developer. I like learning new thi |
When my mentor asked me for specific quotes from "potential customers" to demonstrate demand in an investor presentation the next day, I was up S* ...
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Co-founder at MovingWorlds. Social Entrepreneur Empowering S |
A founder's skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination. Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
We all know, "everyone" isn't a customer segment. But what do we do when we've got a bunch of potential customer segments? It's an issue we all face at one point or another, in fact, as we previously noted, Bounce has a pile of potential customers: For Real Estate agents, sales people, event planners, founders, If we target all of these customers, not only will it take forever to build this produ ...
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Entrepreneur-ish |
This has to be one of my favorite customer development tips: using Mechanical Turk to do customer interviews. Nick Soman, Founder of LikeBright, and I discuss how he used Mechanical Turk to interview 100 customers in 4 hours, and how that got him into TechStars Seattle. ...
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Entrepreneur-ish |
I gave a tech-talk at Pivotal Labs on the reasons why people fail to implement lean startup ideas, even when they like the theory. I've been meaning to post the notes to the slides, so here you go: When "lean startup" first came out, it was greeted by two erroneous responses: ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
"The problem is very rarely data," he said. "Or that we don't have access to data." According to Avinash, success in digital marketing -- and, more broadly, business in the modern world -- depends on understanding three things: ...
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Via: ion interactive blog
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I've invested in hundreds of companies that have started from scratch and I've been though some crazy number of product launches, especially if you include all of the TechStars companies I've been involved with. These alphas, or betas, or v1.0 or v0.1 launches are exciting moments as they signify the transition from an idea to a product. And, it's at that point that the real work begins. ...
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Via: Feld Thoughts
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
The Lean Startup model created by Eric Ries has been applied to a lot of different industries. Turns out, it's the most efficient way to approach community building as well. I've been taking a lean approach to building community after 4 years of learning from things that worked and, more importantly, things that didn't work. ...
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Via: Social Fresh
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Common sense tells us to wait to release our product until it works perfectly; however, in the startup world, nothing could be further from the truth. Too many startups fail because they launch too slowly. The ideal product launch is a product that is just good enough; the ideal product launch is a minimum viable product (MVP). ...
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Founder of @TourWoo, the easiest way to book a tour online. |
Simple doesn't mean no-frills or dumbed down that just meets basic needs. It is about creating a product that does the job - big or small - by appearing to be simple in how it works, looks and feels. People think it's simple even if it's complicated, which is a huge challenge that most companies fail to tackle. ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
Even if your product has broad appeal to many customers or solves a universal problem, the goal is to focus in on a well defined customer segment that represents your prototypical first customer (early adopter). This is because: "You can't effectively build, design, and position a product for everyone." ...
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Via: Spark59
Lean Practitioner & Designer at Spark59. Coloring book creat |
Until you start shipping regularly and thinking about everything in terms of how quickly you can get usage and test your assumptions, it's easy to imagine that things will often go to plan. The crazy part is, in my experience, the more likely case is that things won't go to plan. ...
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Via: joel.is
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The term "Lean", in the context of process-improvement, was coined in the 1990s first for Lean Manufacturing; it was then applied to Lean Six Sigma, and even Lean IT. The Lean philosophy was developed primarily by the Toyota Production System (TPS) as a concept to preserve value with less work. As a discipline matures, new methods are developed to improve the quality and reduce the costs of produc ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
So many marketers have this received wisdom about online surveys being a great alternative because they are fast and cheap. But there is an enormous benefit to doing online surveys the right way, making an investment in all segments of your customer base, and creating a virtuous circle between the desire to share information with your brand, and the desire to spread information about your brand wi ...
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Via: BrandSavant
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Customer development is hard. It takes work to get it right and you'll always be improving your technique. Here are a few tips I like to keep in my head while I'm getting out of the building. ...
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Via: Grasshopper Herder
#leanstartup, #custdev, #RoR, banjo, questions, tao, #bmgen, |
When Ries and Blank criticize the business plan. They say it gets in the way of the more agile and flexible lean startup. So, It would be better to advocate a type of business planning that could be called lean business planning. That would mean starting small with a business plan that summarizes the current strategy, metrics, milestones, tasks and basic responsibilities. ...
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Founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software; entrepreneur, bu |
At the heart of what we do is The Hypothesis. Getting the hypothesis right is the first key to validating (or invalidating) our assumptions underlying our entire startup. If you get out of the building with a bad hypothesis, you won't hear anything valuable from your customers. ...
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Via: Lean Startup Machine
product manager/designer/foodie/musician/husband/father and |
How to distinguish between a Big Idea that simply starts small -- consistent with Lean Startup methodology -- as compared to a Small Idea that will always remain a Small Idea. This question has been on my mind because recently, when I talk to entrepreneurs, I'm seeing too many Small Ideas. ...
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Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
When new entrepreneurs are introduced to Lean Startup I can often sense their confusion: What is Lean Startup? Structured approach? Set of principles? Cargo cult? It sure is a good marketing buzzword. And from reading the book its quite difficult to actually take action inside your startup. The actionable tools start appearing once you go into the different communities. ...
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Via: Spark59
My Mission: Bringing the Customer's Perspective into Enginee |
In my previous post I explained the three reasons why we need to be fast in launching an MVP. Now I want to explain how I did that with my own MVP experiment. ...
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Locaweb product development and product management. And open |
The first question you want to ask your customers is usually not the question you want answered. For some reason, our first instinct is to ask a question that is one or two or three steps removed from the actual information we want. I can't tell you why this is, but I can tell you I've seen it every time I work with someone to get user research done. ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
In my previous post, I said that teams need to stop shipping features and focus on creating value. I promised a tactical view of how an existing organization. 10 Characteristics of a Lean* product team: ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
Last time, I outlined the thought process behind the Lean Stack and provided a 3000-foot overview of the toolset. In this post, I'm going to dive a little deeper into the process flow and end with a concrete case-study. ...
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Via: Ash Maurya
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
What do I mean by Agile 1.0? Agile 1.0 is all about production, i.e. shipping features in an effective manner. In Agile 1.0, the stakeholder is called the "customer" (which is crazy when you think about it). In Agile 1.0, dev is too often an order-taker, not a strategic partner in the business. ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
The longer you take to put your product in front of real users, the longer it will take for you get some revenue and the longer you'll have to invest from your own money or investor's money. Below is a typical return on investment chart. While you don't launch your product and don't have revenue, all you'll have are costs, i.e., you'll be in the investment phase of the curve below. ...
Hoping to up my conversion rate, I wanted to figure out what style of messages OkCupid members respond to the most, so I did a little a/b testing with four types of messages: ...
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Entrepreneur-ish |
Question: For online/mobile consumer services, in what scenarios does high organic user growth not imply product-market fit? There's been a bunch of recent examples of products that grow quickly but have little to no retention/engagement. The reason is that in this context, you can think of products as having 2 main components, distribution tactics and Product experience. ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas is the tool of choice for a quick, one page dashboard of your business hypotheses. It very much appeals to the business guy in me, but it irks the User Experience (UX) part of my brain. But hey...the canvas is a tool. Use the right tool for the right job. ...
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Via: Grasshopper Herder
#leanstartup, #custdev, #RoR, banjo, questions, tao, #bmgen, |
Getting a 50-page business plan reviewed is hard. Getting a 1-page business model reviewed is easy and, is an important part of the process. It is imperative that you share your model with at least one other person - Ash Maurya, Running Lean ...
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Entrepreneur-ish |
The one common startup mistake that I see many people, not only habitually making but bragging about, involves over complicating your product. For most first time and seasoned tech entrepreneurs, the natural desires to make your product a Swiss Army knife of useless crap can be hard to resist. ...
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Via: VooDoo Anthology
Former special operations combat veteran turned writer and e |
Even though running experiments is a key activity in Lean Startups, correctly defining, running, and tracking them is hard. After a few iterations and a lot of testing, we have developed a process that works for us and half a dozen other startups - something we're calling a lean stack. ...
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Via: Spark59
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
Just liked vested employees are better employees, vested partners are better partners (yes, we call our customers partners because they are the most important thing to us). Spending time with potential customers is also a vital part of the customer validation and creation steps outlined in Steven Blank's customer development model. So how do we engage potential customers before we have product? ...
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Co-founder at MovingWorlds. Social Entrepreneur Empowering S |
Even though running experiments is a key activity in Lean Startups, correctly defining, running, and tracking them is hard. After a few iterations and a lot of testing, we have developed a process that works for us and half a dozen other startups - something we're calling a lean stack. ...
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Via: Ash Maurya
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
Since different businesses require different approaches to customer development, I want to make sure we have a wide range of startups on here sharing their stories. With that, I’m very excited to introduce Mark Horoszowski. Mark is CEO at MovingWorlds, a B2B social enterprise that’s in the midst of its validating it’s business model. He’ll [...] ...
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Co-founder at MovingWorlds. Social Entrepreneur Empowering S |
Lean Canvas is technically a morphing of Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas by Ash Mauyra, but what really matters is that it is a single sheet of paper that makes it obvious which of our assumptions are wrong. ...
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Entrepreneur-ish |
A comment thread with the extremely knowledgeable Tristan Komer, reminded me of several misleading responses I've heard from customers. At first glance it sounds like they're saying, "Yeah, I'd pay for that", but are really just being teases. Consider the following replies to, "Would you pay for it?": ...
We ended up talking mostly about culture. From the earliest days, Ali put in place a very straightforward goal: make 100% of Attivio's clients referenceable. He and his founding team proceeded to hire, execute, and reward in line with that goal. ...
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Via: Bostinnovation
Founder of Explorics. Lean startup coach. Market testing, cu |
Engineers and scientists tend to have more of an affinity for technology than people and can find the conversations with prospects and early customers particularly challenging. Face to face conversations and phone conversations unfold in real time and require that you manage a number of things in parallel ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
In the pursuit of a minimum viable product (MVP), we've seen that it's important to evaluate early the critical components that will differentiate an offer from competition and make a product truly viable. ...
Everything I know from 4 years of intensive customer development and sales, boiled down into an 18 minutes talk I gave at HackFwd in Berlin. HD video is here, normal is embedded below. I'm pretty happy with this one and think you won't have heard the content elsewhere. Watch it! ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
At one of the Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle meetups, someone asked questions along the following lines (paraphrased): Won't using lean startup techniques reduce my commitment to an idea? If I can just walk away from something because I have not invested much in it, how do I know that I won't give up too early? ...
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Via: 22 idea street
Interested in entrepreneurship, lean startups, customer deve |
Pivots aren't new. Admitting we do them is. I've been involved in loads of version 1 product concept/development/launch exercises I've yet to see one where the offering didn't significantly change after initial customer feedback. At what point in the product life-cycle these "pivots" occur however is shifting earlier and earlier as most self-respecting entrepreneurs... ...
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Via: Rocket Watcher
Co-founder of RocketScope http://rocketscope.com a marketing |
In the kelp beds off the coast of Southern California, one can find thousands of species of fish, but two of the most sought after by commercial fishermen are the California Halibut and the White Seabass. Both fish are classified as "demersal", meaning they live near or on the bottom of the ocean floor and catching fish of both species in the 20-30 lb pound range is not uncommon. ...
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Via: Startup Lessons
Trying to change how startups are built. |
First, let's take a look at what Eric is really talking about. He's really advocating learning. To learn as much about your products as possible, to learn whether or not there is, in fact, a customer at the other end willing to pay for it. After all, he learned the hard way the damage not figuring out who your users are can cause. His early startup crashed and burned because he didn't figure out w ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help comp |
The Lean Startup model has a concept known as the "minimum viable product" (MVP). This is a version of your product you create that serves only to test an assumption in the real world by giving your customers something they can actually use. It may not be pretty and certainly does not contain every feature you want it to have, ...
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Blogger and Internet business entrepreneur from Australia |
One of the top questions I get when helping entrepreneurs, especially those who have not achieved product/market fit, is "How much should I invest into the design of my... landing page, MVP, smoke-test, pitch deck,... etc." The commonly cited answer is that "it depends." But it depends on WHAT? ...
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Via: Spark59
Lean Practitioner & Designer at Spark59. Coloring book creat |
Me and my co-founder realized a few days ago by talking to users and doing some research that there are some serious issues with the idea we applied with to YC. The question to you is whether we should bother coming up with a new idea (which we are struggling to do) incorporating the new knowledge we have gained or simply go into the YC interview knowing that the idea they are expecting us to talk ...
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Via: MattMaroon.com
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Feedback is going to define your company at some point or another, whether you want it or not. Every single company story is one of customer feedback. Apple heard (feedback) that computers (theirs, but moreso Microsoft's) were perceived as complex and confusing. So they re-focused on devices that simply worked and /seemed/ simple. Candy-colored iMacs weren't what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak imagi ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
I recently ran across yet another situation where an entrepreneur was reluctant to launch early. He had two urges. He wanted to continue polishing the UX to make it more mainstream-ready. He also wanted to add more features and options to appeal to a broader range of customers. Here was my advice: ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
When Alex takes a straw poll in the room he discovers that many of the entrepreneurs in the audience are aware of the concept of lean startups but not many are sure if they are implementing the approach in their own organisations. In this talk he offers a historical overview of the lean approach, from its origins in Japanese manufacturing through its development in product design circles in the mi ...
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Via: HackFwd Blog
We're experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and |
The quickest way to create a billion dollar company is to take basic human social needs and figure out how to mediate them on-line. (Look at the first wave of the web/mobile/cloud startups that have done just that: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match.com, Pandora, Zynga, WordPress, LinkedIn.) It's your turn. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
Entrepreneurs blame the Lean Startup process. They point out that the need to validate everything before moving forward slows them down and confuses them too much. They’d rather just go ahead with something and define that as progress. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
When David Tran stepped onto the scene at Lean Startup Machine Toronto, he wasn’t interested in creating a minimum viable product. He wasn’t even interested in developing what would be his award-winning idea, one he’d been keeping in his back pocket for the past few months. He was interested in validating his beliefs about management [...] ...
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Via: Lean Startup Machine
Account Manager @Contently, Former Editorial Assistant @Tell |
You've got your vision of what you want to build. You've also got a ton of unknowns and uncertainty. You know you can't just go build it and hope they will come. You have to do it iteratively. Put a little bit out there, see how people react, figure out what to do next. But where do you start? How much is enough to start getting feedback? ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
As Cook points out in the video, you can worry too much about building a $100 million or a billion dollar business when making sure you are having an impact on a problem a customer cares about can secure you a $1M to 10M business that can lay the groundwork for a larger business. ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
The term "beta customer" conflates three categories of people who are using your product in a way that's not healthy for your long term business prospects if you are selling to business users, in particular early adopter or pragmatic enterprise users. ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
Early adopters desire the new functionality you claim to provide. They are willing to accept instability, poor usability, limited integrations and other faults just to gain this new technology.You're reading Running Closed Betas: Which Users, and How Long?, a post from the Intercom Blog. Intercom is a powerful CRM and mess ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here: A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
One of the hottest buzzword for startups these days is "pivot." The term, introduced by entrepreneur and venture advisor Eric Ries in an article on Lessons Learned a couple of years ago, is properly used to describe smart startups that change direction quickly, but stay grounded in what they've learned. ...
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Via: Hot Sauce!
Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
Don’t get me wrong. I like Lean UX. It's pioneered by people whose work and writings I've found to be very influential in my own career. It's about time we focus less on the beauty of our deliverables and more on how we create value for our organizations. The problem, for me, is this: The process continues to position UX as a tactical discipline with little strategic value. ...
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Via: Johnny Holland
Digital product strategist, UX designer, co-founder of Indus |
The concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can be elusive because it comprises a contradiction: it's both minimum and viable. However, the MVP has well known precedents. ...
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Via: Lean Startup Machine
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One of the most important elements of a marketing strategy is the development of an ideal target customer profile. Effectively understand who makes an ideal customer allows you to build your entire business, message, product, services, sales and support around attracting and serving this narrowly defined customer group. ...
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Via: Duct Tape Marketing
Small business marketing consultant, speaker and author of D |
Someone asked me this question recently, and it's a good one. Understanding your competition is important, but ultimately it should have very little impact on what you do. For starters, your biggest competitor is likely not another company, but in fact the most difficult alternative to overcome: doing nothing. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
Almost every good business pivots at some point. But if you pivot too early, you'll abandon an idea or strategy that might have worked if you'd had better execution or just more time. On the other hand, if you stay the course too long, you might drive a sinking ship to the bottom even faster, squandering resources. When to stay the course, and when to pivot ...
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Via: Under30CEO
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"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett, Westward Ho Hackers break things. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately but we always break things. The joy of breaking things doesn't come from destruction, it comes from learning how to put things back together more elegantly and stronger than before. ...
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Via: HackFwd Blog
We're experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and |
Team ParkPoint Capital This team spoke face-to-face with 326 customers. As often happens, this team came into class convinced that their market research proved that their business was providing credit to underbanked customers. 8 weeks later they ended up as a financial service provider for immigrants. Lots of learning and pivots on the way. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
I'm going to use this post to break down what I did right and what I did horribly wrong during the process of building Domain Polish. We'll cover everything from pricing to exit negotiations replete with lots of interesting (and sometimes stomach-churning) statistics. ...
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Via: Dan Shipper
UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan. |
I understand the Lean Startup thesis and the benefits it provides to startups looking to create and evolve products that resonate with users. But as I read through the book, there was something about the Ries' thesis that wasn't clicking. I wondered whether it was just me or whether there is a flaw or hole in The Lean Startup. ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
For most new high-tech products, the first customers are always "early adopters." The conventional wisdom is that early adopters are the ideal target for new products, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, [...] ...
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Via: Hot Sauce!
Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
I believe if you intend to charge for your product, you should start testing pricing even before you build your MVP. Remember from the last post, that pricing is part of the product. Not only does this approach delay validation because it's too easy to say yes, but a lack of strong customer "commitment" can also be detrimental to optimal learning. ...
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Via: Spark59
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
The Lean Startup process is a way of moving towards and achieving your vision (or at least trying!) That statement assumes you have a vision in the first place. Unfortunately, too many startups are founded without one. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
The class is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world. Students were going to get a hands-on experience in how to start a new company. The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
An optimal price is one that is accepted but not without some initial resistance. It is your job to both set that price and convince the customer... Pricing is considered more art than science but in the next series of posts I'd like to explore tactics for demystifying how to set and test pricing. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
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"Pretotype It" by Alberto Savoia lists seven techniques for determining that you are "building the right product before you invest in building your product right." Bold text is from the book, my comments are mixed in below each one. ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models? And when do business planning and execution come into play? Here's an attempt to put this all in context. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
Your startup finally has the financial resources to expand the team. That's both awesome, and dangerous. So here is one more filter for you to think about as you evaluate each candidate: Is your company "pre" product-market fit, or "post"? (I'm not talking about your pitch to VCs but your own honest assessment) ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
I had a big realization yesterday: I don't know anything. I'm talking about Airtime for Email. I know that people are interested in it. We've had almost 100 businesses sign up since launch. I know it's a validated idea - we have paying customers. Knowing that kind of thing just tells me that I should keep working on Airtime. But the problem is that I have no idea WHAT I should be doing. ...
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Via: Dan Shipper
UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan. |
What many startups are missing within the product development/sales process is in-depth details about their target audiences. In many respects, this explains why startups flounder even though they believe their product has a lot of potential. ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
I'm going to walk through my thought process and strategy around a new project I've been playing with to [hopefully] show what's happening under the hood. After failing at business blogging several times and then quasi-succeeding, I began to wonder whether many other people suffer from the same problems. ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
When doing a startup, it is perfectly okay to wonder whether you are on the right track. It is not a sign of weakness. In fact, being too attached to one's idea is a sure shot path to failure. Honest introspection into your startup should be done regularly to have a clearer perspective. After all, startup is a lot of effort and hard work. What good it is if you don't know whether that effort is in ...
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Via: Paras Chopra
Startups and Online Marketing enthusiast |
For startups, attracting someone’s attention, getting them to check out their product and, finally, having them sign up can be a long but satisfying journey. New users are celebrated because it illustrates a product has appeal, fills a need and, in some way, provides value. ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
My father used to complain that a friend of his would make his doctor practice veterinary medicine. The doctor would ask him what was wrong and his friend would reply in a non-committal way. Some entrepreneurs, especially in the early market, seem to prefer veterinary marketing: running tests and making changes in their application ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
While entrepreneurship is in the news fairly regularly, I seldom make news myself. Today, however there are two important updates for entrepreneurs everywhere. Let me be brief… The "Startup Owner's Manual" goes On Press Tuesday 2/14 Two years in the making and literally ten years in development. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
I've talked in the past about lots of ways to do user research faster. Now, let's talk about a way to make your design process faster. This is not a new idea, but it's worth reiterating for those of you who are trying to make decisions like this on a day to day basis. Today's chapter will cover the fastest and most useful sort of visual design for your lean startup. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
How do you measure how much your users like your product? This is one of the essential question that every founder needs to answer to make the right decisions - to move the product ahead. In some lean startup related discussion I stumbled accross the idea of asking your users if they were sad if the used product would vanish. As the lean startup is all about validating assumptions based on data ...
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Via: connex.io Blog
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Let's get this out of the way immediately. Sturgeon's Law can't be denied by any man, woman, child … or community, for that matter. Meta community, I love you to death, so let's be honest with each other: most of the feedback and feature requests you give us are just not, uh, er … actionable, for a zillion different reasons. ...
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Via: Coding Horror
Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of http://stackoverflow.com an |
Often, there are macro changes that drive a company to be successful. There are many examples of products that launched too early (pen computing), with a later version reaching massive product / market fit (palm pilots). The best entrepreneurs ask "Why now?" - what is the meta trend that creates a window of opportunity that I can take advantage of? ...
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Via: Eladgil
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I talk to a lot of very small companies that are trying to do Customer Development, and the conversations are often the same. The entrepreneur explains that the company is working on a fabulous product, and they want to figure out a) if anybody wants to buy the product and b) if they need to change anything about the product so that more people will buy it. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
Laura Klein has a thoughtful post up about validating problems and needs and behavior before product. I agree with her. It still doesn’t mean that you’ll get things right but you can prevent a lot of wasted effort. It again made me think about the liberating power of deciding to focus on learning goals, rather [...] ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
With the popularization of lean startups, minimum viable products (MVPs) have recently entered into business and software lexicon. Who can argue with building more than you actually need? Many people seem to interpret MVP as the first iteration of their product. Once they build that version, they can add more features, and whomever uses the product will be even more happy than before. Businessp ...
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Via: 22 idea street
Interested in entrepreneurship, lean startups, customer deve |
MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center asked me to give an Agile Product Management workshop for their Hacking IAP course. The course is a special seminar in management they’re doing for MIT student entrepreneurs. It takes place over the IAP (January) term and is open to all MIT students that have startups already underway. The first week of [...] ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
These days, most entrepreneurs I talk to understand the importance of speaking with customers before building a full-blown product. They’re getting out of the building. And that’s great. A few years ago it wasn’t like that at all. But unfortunately, I often speak with entrepreneurs that have only talked to one or two customers. That’s not nearly enough. The danger in speak ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
Customer development and lean startup techniques have been so loudly touted by, well, startups, that many people in non-startup or non-technology companies think these tools don’t apply to them. “The rules are different when you’re talking to large enterprise customers,” they say. Â ”This doesn’t work when you’re dealing with customers who are already us ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
I’ve been thinking about “plug-ins” that complement the Business Model Canvas for a while. One concept that I’ve been looking at more closely over the last few weeks is the invaluable “jobs-to-be-done” approach. I tried to turn it into a visual approach like the Business Model Canvas (BMC). The result is a prototype conceptual tool, [...] ...
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Bestselling author, member of the Business Model Generation, |
With “lean and mean” becoming a startup mantra, the idea of bootstrapping has become sexy because it talks to the ability to build something from scratch while maintaining your freedom and independence. The ability to bootstrap has become more possible as the costs to nurture develop and market a product have declined. What may have [...] ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
The popular view of a real entrepreneur is someone with a big vision, and a stubborn determination to charge straight ahead through any obstacle and make it happen. The vision part is fine, but successful entrepreneurs have found that the extreme uncertainty of a new product or service usually requires many course corrections, or “pivots†[...] ...
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Via: Hot Sauce!
Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
Lean Startup isn’t responsible for the deluge of crappy products being released by mediocre startups. Erick Schonfeld makes that suggestion in his recent post Details Matter. I’d argue that the mainstream usage of things like Twitter and Facebook (along with social media’s ability to create incredible influencers), lower costs and barriers to entry (development is easier/faster) ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
Many newbie entrepreneurs think they know exactly what the market wants. I know this, because I used to be exactly like that. But time and bitter experience has taught me – I don’t know what the market wants. And you reading this, neither do you. Let me explain. Your range of experience in this world [...] ...
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Via: Max Klein
I'm an average software developer who sells products on the |
For a long time, there were niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts: people who enjoyed photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies. Because Hipstamatic lacked sharing features, many users took pictures with Hipstamatic and then shared those pictures using othe ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Is Agile the same as Lean? When people say “agile†do they really mean Scrum? Or do people still use different types of agile – and if so, why? Been getting a lot of questions lately, so thought I’d take a stab at this… Lean Lean comes from Lean Manufacturing and is a set of [...] ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick/Evangelist for Startups at Microsoft ~ awesome |
Landing pages, conversion, bounce rate, blah, blah, blah, blah, yada yada yada. As important as all of those terms and concepts are, sometimes you need to step back a bit and look at things in a more playful manner. ...
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Via: Unbounce Blog
Co-founder of @Unbounce - opinionated writer on conversion o |
I recently gave a talk to LUXr New York about MVPs, or really about running experiments. Instead of using the term “MVP”, I find myself using the word experiment for a few different reasons: less jargon; a clearer connotation of lightweight, learning, and not necessarily tied to digital product, and a clearer signal that this [...] ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds SEAL Team saying Over the last 40 years Technology investors have learned that the success of startups are not just about the technology but “it’s about the team.†We spent a year screwing it up in our Lean LaunchPad classes until we figured out it was [...] ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
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