UPDATE: people have made very valid points that I have oversimplified the issues here, and I have decided that I agree. I neither want to be wishy-washy nor stupidly dogmatic. While I will leave the original post as-is below, consider it my *case* for why you need a co-founder but know that I acknowledge the complexities of this topic. The …
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, …
Competitive Advantages (riffing off of ASmartBear post)
I’m a big fan of Jason Cohen’s blog A Smart Bear, but I gave him a hard time after his last post “Real Unfair Advantages” (read that first). I did not think it was concrete enough for the young entrepreneur. Let’s face it, you either have “authority” or you do not. The entrepreneur with the $100M exit under his belt, …
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 …
9 Tips for Distributed Teams
The best way to build a startup is to have everyone in a single physical location, but that isn’t always possible. I’ve had to deal with virtual teams on multiple occasions, and my last employer, The Electric Sheep Company, took it to an extreme, with 75 people mostly scattered around the country. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned over …
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 …
Confidence, Transparency and Authenticity
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 …