I had to respond to a post NY angel investor Mark Birch recently wrote called Entrepreneurship and the Passion Deficit. He claims that “the number one reason startups fail is because there is no passion!” Mark’s a smart guy, but in this case, I totally disagree. For 17 years, I’ve been buried in the startup scene, working in Austin, the …
Breaking out your core assumptions
On Saturday, I’ll be mentoring teams at Lean Startup Machine, so this morning I took advantage of the train ride into town to consider what I would love to see from each group. The below “fill in the blank” sentences (an embedded slideshare) are intended to force someone to concisely break out their core assumptions. It might even be an …
The hardest thing about user testing and 5 tips to help
There are two established New York tech companies who do a great job of getting close and staying close to their customers: Meetup and The Ladders. Andres Glusman (VP of Strategy, Meetup) and Jeff Gothelf (Dir of UX, The Ladders) established regular, lightweight usability sessions at their respective companies (that’s them above giving Lean Ignite talks — see bottom for …
UX, prod mgr, HCI, UI, IA, wha?
I have been interviewing for product jobs, and it is staggering how there is no common language for product people. To some, UX means wireframe deliverables and visual information architect, and maybe even graphic designer. To me, UX means figuring out what should be built and why, how those concepts manifest in an actual product experience (with an emphasis on …
The Transactional Halo
I was meeting with a smart VC yesterday doing a mini post-mortem on Aprizi, our “Pandora for shopping”. When asked what I would do differently a second time, the number one thing is I would have rolled out the e-commerce model right away. I think a special bond forms between a customer and a service when the customer parts with …
10 Tips on Startup Mentoring
This post originally appeared on the Lean Startup Machine blog, with a few small changes. I wrote it with LSM’s bootcamp in mind, where in the course of a weekend multiple teams try to validate/invalidate as much as they possibly can around their startup idea (it is really something to watch). However, I like to think that these mentoring tips …
My Subjot Obsession
I’m a talker online. In the old days, it was via manually-updated websites and forums. These days, I’ve got multiple long-form blogs, and dabble with all the short-form tools. I like to talk about many different topics, but that’s where I get frustrated. With Twitter, I end up restricting my content because most of my followers are there to hear …
Quantitative vs Qualitative
I got into a really interesting discussion yesterday where I found myself defending lightweight usability testing. My core point: Analytics are great for What’s. For example, “A is better than B”, or “this is a problem area” What analytics do less well is help you understand Why’s. If you don’t understand the root cause, you can end up spinning your wheels …
Customer development isn’t enough; think holistically
I often mentor at “startup bootcamp” weekends, and I see a lot of emphasis on “product-market fit” and “minimal viable product”, but in general I don’t see teams asking questions and analyzing risks across enough aspects of a startup concept. Customer development, while essential, is not a replacement for business development, or rather, “business model development”. If something is to …
Entertainment or Utility? (more on gamification)
Several years back, over beers one evening at GDC (Game Developers Conference), I debated design principles with Bernie Yee, my colleague at Electric Sheep who had previously worked at Sony (Everquest) and at Harmonix (Rock Band). He argued that any product had to choose between being an entertainment property or a utility. There are a lot of people challenging that …