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 …
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, …
My Winding Road to Lean Startup
Last fall, I was recovering from a startup that almost touched the sun, but like Icarus, took a nasty fall. I still had a burning desire to create a great company, but I knew that it was time that *I* chose what was right and wrong, rather than work for someone else. If I was going to chart my own …
Lean Failure and the Risk of No-Man’s Land
“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
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 …
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 …
The Cold Reality of First-Time Funding
Earlier today, I watched Fred Wilson and Ben Horowitz debate lean vs fat fundraising approaches (very different from “lean startup” concepts even if often confused). The reality is very very simple: unless you are a celebrity/proven founder, “lean” is your only option. I don’t buy for a second that Horowitz would write a “fat” check to an unproven entrepreneur no …
Lean Startup “Marketing Bullshit”
Venture Hacks‘ daily email delivered an enjoyable post by Sean Fioritto called “Steve Blank is my hero“, exhorting the Hacker News readership to pay attention to Blank’s philosophies. Sean’s explanation of resistance jumped off the screen at me: “if you can’t see through the halo of marketing bullshit to the nuggets of genius underneath…” “I sometimes worry that the Hacker …
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 …