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 …
Lean Experiments 101 (given to IxD program at SVA)
In late January, Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo asked me to come talk about lean startup ideas to their “Entrepreneurial Design” class in SVA’s Interaction Design masters program. Christina just wrote up some thoughts from the day and they put up the audio file. I have embedded the slides and audio file below: MVP/Experiments talk at SVA IxD program View …
Excuses, Excuses, Excuses (on customer development)
For our last Lean Ignite here in New York, I decided to have a little fun and rant about all the excuses I hear from teams as to why they are *not* doing customer development. Below is the 5-minute video for those who are interested (link). And yes, now I finally understand why people tell me I sound like Jerry …
What if I’m not solving a problem?
A lot of customer development language revolves around ensuring that you are solving a real problem, and the right problem. But what if you aren’t solving a problem? Lean startup principles still apply to games and entertainment apps. You have the same things to validate: user experience and an understanding of your value, who your customers are (and when certain …
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 …
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 …
12 Tips for Customer Development Interviews (revised)
UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR A REVISED LIST OF 12 TIPS A year ago, I gave a talk at the very first Lean Startup Machine about giving customer development interviews. Tomorrow, I am doing the same with a new batch of LSM warriors and I have revised and updated my list (and accompanying text) as follows: 1. One person at …
$9.4M? And Aprizi’s First Pivot
When Liz and I first started Aprizi, it was very different in concept from where we eventually ended up. I had become fascinated with Mint and Gist, and people’s willingness to share rich data in exchange for the right value proposition. I started thinking about other places where valuable data existed, but was relatively hard to get to. This led …
Landmines on the Road to Product Market Fit
On Friday, I gave a 20-minute talk at a product design conference organized by Ty Ahmad-Taylor (CEO of FanFeedr) and Hard Candy Shell (the talk shared the same title as this post). I discussed mistakes and lessons from Aprizi’s journey. I don’t think it was videotaped, so I am going to take advantage of this flight to California to write …
How a blog can help you with customer development
There are many strategies for customer development, and here is another one: start a company blog focused on the problem you hope to solve and the people you hope to solve it for. In this context, your purpose with the blog is not to get vast amounts of traffic, but rather to help you connect with and learn from lots …
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