Trevor Owens, the young dynamo in the NY startup scene who organized NYC’s lean startup machine weekend, asked my help in discussing “Idea Validation and Opportunity Assessment” at an all-day NYU event. We have been emailing back and forth about an audience participation exercise and I would love your thoughts on what could make it better. New entrepreneurs hit three …
Lean Startup Machine Presentation
Lean Startup Machine As promised, here is my 20-min presentation to the Lean Startup Machine event on July 23, 2010. Regarding the event, I was pretty impressed with how much the teams accomplished over the weekend, and their willingness to get out of comfort zones. This deck is neither as pretty nor as good as David Cancel’s recent talk, but …
Entrepreneur’s Block
On Friday, a reader sent me an email. They were suffering from “entrepreneur’s block”, where they kill off every idea as quickly as it arises. It is the opposite disease to those who fall in love with an idea, are afraid to talk to anyone about it and thus build something no one wants. In this case, the person never …
12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews
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, …
Our Customer Development Journey, Part 4 (8 thoughts from our MVP beta)
Aprizi has been in open beta for six weeks now. These last six weeks have been an intense blur, a fire hose of information, and going open beta was the best possible thing we could have done. We are making some fairly big near-term changes because of this process. Here are 8 thoughts on the latest phase of our customer …
Our Customer Development Journey, part 3
Aprizi is about to enter that crucial phase of open beta, so I wanted to pause and write down the latest installment in our customer development journey (part 1 and 2). For anyone new to the blog, Aprizi is building a personalization engine for online shopping — a Pandora for e-commerce, if you will. My thesis is that the intersection …
Thoughts on Product-Market Fit
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 …
Customer Development Update (and why I’m sticking with 1-on-1 talks)
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 …
Validating your startup idea and initial customer development
A reader named Eric asked a question about customer validation / development on my “Bull doesn’t build” post, and I thought I would answer with a post. Eric’s question was: “You talk about your ‘focus right now is on building a solid foundation of product-market fit.’ At what point do you spend more time focusing on product-market fit then on …
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