Thoughts on Product-Market Fit

Giff Constable startups

Here are a few thoughts on product-market fit that came up when I was chatting this evening with Brant Cooper of Market by Numbers. Revenue & Testing To me, “lean startup” and “product-market fit” boil down to rigorously and continuously testing your assumptions as early as possible, and holding off heavy investments in scalability and growth until you feel confident …

Two zinger quotes

Giff Constable Uncategorized

Ran across these two quotes today that brought a smile: “By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.” — Steve Blank, Speed and Tempo “the running joke [on raising VC] is that as …

When it comes to startups, products and services don’t mix

Giff Constable startups

[Note: 8 years later, I’ve written an update to this post] This post is about dancing with the devil (i.e. consulting) as you pursue your dreams and try to pay the bills.  I believe that it is near impossible to build a successful software product while maintaining a services business. (UPDATE: I should clarify that I am talking about the period …

Tale of Two Twitters: Information vs Social

Giff Constable social media

I was reading Dave Hornik’s latest post over at VentureBlog and stopped at this sentence: “To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information.” I’ve heard others call Twitter an “information network, not a social network” and gather that Twitter itself likes the former term. …

Customer Development Update (and why I’m sticking with 1-on-1 talks)

Giff Constable startups

Conversations with prospective customers is an unending process. Here is a quick update (first post) on some of those efforts with Aprizi: First, conversations have gotten a lot more concrete as we’ve honed our thoughts. We started out talking about people’s challenges and a wide array of features. The first wave of discussions helped us narrow down and prioritize what …

Great startup lawyers

Giff Constable startups

My reaction to the recent Venture Hacks post on lawyers was that we need to help entrepreneurs find good attorneys!  They are out there — I am certainly happy with my current attorney, Brian Hutchings at Gunderson, and when I was selling the first company I founded, my attorney at Fenwick was indispensable. So today I reached out to a …

The Beautiful Sound of No

Giff Constable management, startups

Hiten Shah tonight sent out an interesting tweet, “The more you know, the more you no.”  Interestingly enough, Matt Henrick riffed back, “the less you know, the more you will try.”  My brain went in a different direction: how experience teaches you what not to do.  I thought it would be fun to talk about some great no’s in a …

Don’t let another startup throw you off your game

Giff Constable startups

In the spirit of transparency, I thought I’d share an anecdote about competition and those little gravitational forces you have to resist as an entrepreneur. About a month after we started Aprizi, a “sorta / kinda” competitive company announced on TechCrunch and has since received a lot of attention among the techie set. It was hard not to be distracted. …