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 …
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 …
Wufoo’s customer support insight
From one of LukeW’s Warm Gun summaries. It was too long to tweet but I wanted to record it as an interesting insight: “Wufoo asked people about their emotional state when filling in a customer support request. This resulted in less emotional language and clearer descriptions of issues in customer support tickets.” – original post
Firing yourself up, and firing yourself down
Joel Gascoigne has a thoughtful post called “The maker/manager transition phase“. He grapples with the shift from early-stage startup “maker” mode to scaling-startup management mode. It is a major mental shift to go from doing to delegating. Joel includes a great quote from Joe Kraus: “If you’re a founding CEO, I believe that you are doing your company a disservice …
Innovation teams need generalists
Startups need execution-oriented, “whatever it takes” generalists. After my talk at the AgileUX conference a few months ago, a soon-to-be entrepreneur came up to me explaining their intent to hire the best UX, best visual designer, best copywriter, best SEO person, best node.js person, etc etc and put it all together to make magic. Because it’s all about team right? …
Pair interviewing isn’t just for devs, it’s also great for UX and product
I just wound down a project where I spent 6 months working hand-in-hand with Pivotal Labs, the respected agile/XP dev shop. It was a fabulous experience that had a strong impact on how I think about product development (more on that later). It also has changed how I interview product and UX people. Pivotal helped our mutual client interview developer …
Tips for low-volume A/B testing
I tweeted about low-volume A/B testing the other day, and wanted to share a few thoughts. I spent a few minutes talking to Hiten Shah (CEO of KISSMetrics) on the phone, who probably knows as much about A/B testing as anyone out there. He passed on three tips that I wanted to share here: 1. only do one variation at a time …
Startups: it’s not all coding and design
I’m starting a band. I can’t really play any instrument or sing, so I’m looking for a few musical co-founders. — Tweet by @Greenberg A ton of people retweeted the above note. It’s a great zinger aimed at folks who can’t build digital products trying to start digital products companies. After the initial chuckle, I couldn’t help but examine it …
Highlights from Andreessen’s Stanford CS183 talk
I would imagine that by now most of you have discovered Blake Masters’ notes from his Stanford class with Peter Thiel. In class 10, Marc Andreessen was the guest speaker and there were a number of gems in Blake’s write-up that I particularly wanted to highlight and in a few cases comment upon. Mark Andreessen: It’s hard; entrepreneurs are congenitally …
You can’t skip over early adopters
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: 1. Face the fact that you are guessing …