It feels like every week Techcrunch hosts an article that says “lean startup doesn’t work my my category.” I would remain blissfully ignorant of these pieces if not for the fact that they end up polluting my morning coffee, when I scan my twitter stream. The latest is Roman Stanek’s piece on enterprise software. “There is much talk in the …
The Paradox of Patience
Lean is all about speeding up cycle times, reducing waste, compressing the hunt for product-market fit. So at face value it seems like it should be all about going fast fast fast. Ironically I find that lean often requires a great deal of patience, sometimes uncomfortably so. You need to give yourself time to gather data and let experiments run. …
Extrapolating from Kids
It can be amusing to watch adults try to peer into the world of youth and how they use technology. “What can we learn from these alien creatures?” While kids can indeed show future trends, you have to be really careful extrapolating behavior into the future. Examples of mistaken extrapolation: – “Kids love using Club Penguin, so when they grow …
Einstein
I’m kicking off 2013 with a few quotes from, or commonly attributed to, Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” “If you …
Ain’t nothing wrong with making your ugly site suck a little less
Via Josh Porter, I just read Aral Balkan’s rant about a recent article that made the rounds on hacker news called “How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour“. The thrust of Aral’s rant is “design is not veneer”. And yeah, I get it. My colleagues and readers here have heard me make that same grumble. Some …
It is easier for e-commerce to embrace content than vice versa
Erin Griffith’s article on content and commerce in PandoDaily got me thinking about the space, now that I’ve had a couple more years of observing players in the market. Some initial observations: Great e-commerce businesses are not affiliate businesses. Rather they have their own products to move (whether branded or third-party vendors). Commerce businesses want growth and engagement, but most …
A Great Example of Persistence
Yesterday I wrote about persistence. As fate would have it, I later caught up with an entrepreneur who was evidencing a great kind of persistence. His startup is an enterprise SaaS play, and he has an initial base of happy paying customers. So far the local VC community hasn’t fully realized his great potential, so he has been bootstrapping. I …
SSH keys and multiple heroku accounts
When you get stuck on tech ops problems, the web is your friend. So I figured the least that I could do is contribute for the next person banging their head on this issue… I have multiple heroku accounts for personal and work. Yesterday, I found that I could not push from git to heroku for a new work project. …
Lean’s Great Dilemma: Persist or Pivot
The Lean Startup Conference finished with a discussion between Marc Andreessen and Eric Ries. Two points rose to the fore: “lean is not an excuse to avoid sales and marketing” (side note: agree, but lean helps you decide when to scale up those efforts); and “persistence is still really important.” The last point is the great dilemma of lean. When …
12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews (Revision 3)
Update: check out my book on customer development Talking to Humans Note: also see my 11 Customer Development Anti-Patterns post. Each time I give a talk introducing people to qualitative “customer development” conversations, I try to revisit my points. A few months ago, I gave this talk to an entrepreneurship class at Columbia Business School, and once again the …