Entrepreneur’s Block

Giff Constable startups

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

Giff Constable startups

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, …

Lean Failure and the Risk of No-Man’s Land

Giff Constable startups

“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 …

Think goals, not functions

Giff Constable startups

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

Giff Constable startups

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 …

Our Customer Development Journey, Part 4 (8 thoughts from our MVP beta)

Giff Constable Aprizi, startups

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 …