UPDATE: Click here for a revised list of tips or read my book on custdev Talking to Humans Last night kicked off an interesting experiment in New York. The Lean Startup Machine is a weekend-long customer development bootcamp where participants pitch their ideas, and all 50 people break into teams around the most popular ideas. Instead of a hackathon, …
Competitive Advantages (riffing off of ASmartBear post)
I’m a big fan of Jason Cohen’s blog A Smart Bear, but I gave him a hard time after his last post “Real Unfair Advantages” (read that first). I did not think it was concrete enough for the young entrepreneur. Let’s face it, you either have “authority” or you do not. The entrepreneur with the $100M exit under his belt, …
My Winding Road to Lean Startup
Last fall, I was recovering from a startup that almost touched the sun, but like Icarus, took a nasty fall. I still had a burning desire to create a great company, but I knew that it was time that *I* chose what was right and wrong, rather than work for someone else. If I was going to chart my own …
9 Tips for Distributed Teams
The best way to build a startup is to have everyone in a single physical location, but that isn’t always possible. I’ve had to deal with virtual teams on multiple occasions, and my last employer, The Electric Sheep Company, took it to an extreme, with 75 people mostly scattered around the country. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned over …
Lean Failure and the Risk of No-Man’s Land
“Isn’t Lean startup” supposed to prevent failure?” That was the question posed by Andrew Warner to Sean Ellis in a recent Mixergy interview. There is only one answer, “of course not.” Sean responds that not everyone is built to be an entrepreneur: even the best tools in the wrong hands go awry. True, and there are many other reasons startups …
You Won’t Find Letter.ly Here
A surprising number of NYC “startup” bloggers have started to adopt Letter.ly, a subscription email newsletter service. The root might simply be friendship with the creator, Sam Lessin, but I really do not understand or particularly like the trend. I have no problem with publishers charging for content, but if you don’t make your living as a publisher, why would …
Think goals, not functions
I just piggybacked on a twitter conversation between Sean Ellis and April Dunford talking about product management versus product marketing (see April’s post). Sean tweeted this comment which I just wanted to highlight: “Functions” is part of the problem in early stage. IMO goals better: PM fit, then conv eff, then growth… [Ed note: PM fit = product-market fit; conv …
Confidence, Transparency and Authenticity
Bob Sutton wrote an interesting post the other day called “The Wise Boss: More Evidence For Expressing Confidence, But Harboring Private Doubts“. He touches upon a topic that a lot of business leaders grapple with: what is the right balance between confidence and transparency. The interplay between the two is particularly heightened in a young startup, where you are inevitably …
Into the Deep End: Notes from Julie, our HackNY intern
This is a guest post from Julie Dinerman, the Columbia University student interning with Aprizi as part of the HackNY program, which paired area students with startups. I think HackNY’s organizers Hilary, Chris and Evan are creating something very important to the NY startup ecosystem, and we are really pleased to be among a great list of startups to get …
5 Tips for the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs
I just got back from speaking to 100 NYC high school kids about startups. The good folks at Global Kids asked me to say a few words at the NY Public Library Emoti-con festival, and I was more than happy to oblige and talk about one of my favorite subjects. I decided to give the kids some advice should they …