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How do you figure out what’s the right mix of skills for the co-founders of your startup? I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. . Trying to figure out what the right set of co-founders isn’t so clear.
I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. My contract developers building the app aren’t very responsive. It takes weeks to make even a simple change.”.
Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.
The email continued, &# The problem I’m working on is that many founders are either making uninformed decisions or inefficiently learning the new skills they need. The solution I’m exploring is a just in time learning methodology that accelerates founders’ learning curve by aggregating relevant content, peers and mentors.&#.
If you can just be friendly enough and get your users to party with you, the rest is really easy. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. Consultants Don’t Pivot, Founders Do - Steve Blank , May 13, 2010 Consultants can help startups leverage their limited resources. It is to out friend.
He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) The rest of the vertical marketing recruits had similar backgrounds (and similar careers.) (I never could find one from the petroleum industry so I wore that hat along with the VP of Marketing title.)
The founders coming out of the DEC ( Digital Equipment Corporation ) and Intel culture of the 1960’s and ‘70’s. As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner.
They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.
One of the things I found most valuable from participating in the Founder Institute was a lesson about the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek. People who constantly whine about the great ideas they had, years and years before the rest, but “just never pursued them because it was the wrong time”. Pursue your passions: Start with the why.
He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us. Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. I'm very sensitive to it though because I know it can be devastating to a startup, especially a single founder startup.
Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customerdevelopment in them. I first did it for the founder.
If you’re a technical startup founder, one of the painful lessons is that it’s not enough just to build a great product. You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). Clay Hebert , founder of Crowdfunding Hacks. Clay Hebert.
As a recent graduate of the Computer Science department at CU Boulder, I’m really lucky to have found what I want to do for the rest of my life, even if it was only recently. We learned how to do customerdevelopment, conduct empathy interviews, and build a real MVP (not just an alpha version). Sign up here!
There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.
Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customerdevelopment that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.
But rest assured, whatever you give will come back to you with interest. Cofounder) JoAnn and I have realized that there are many ways to say ‘thank you’ to clients, and not all of them are verbal. Understand that giving to get isn’t like a financial transaction where you give and get right there and then. It may take time.
Co-founder magazine just interviewed me about the current state of entrepreneurship – in startups and large companies – and how we got here. click here to read the rest of the article. I thought they did a good job of capturing my thoughts. Take a read here.
But startups can shoot themselves in the foot when founders use consultants at the wrong time or in the wrong way. They’re deep into CustomerDevelopment ,” he said. Hmm, I asked, “Can you go back to the beginning and tell me about your Customer Discovery process? The rest of his story was mostly a blur.
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Andy Cunningham , founder and CEO of Cunningham Collective. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were. Andy Cunningham. They don’t know what you do.
I just spent a month and a half at Imperial College London co-teaching a “Wicked” Entrepreneurship class. Co mpanies also face Wicked problems. The rest of the teams spread out across the UK – all of them furiously mapping stakeholders, assumptions, systems, etc., while proposing minimal viable solutions.
The Lean LaunchPad class teaches students how to build a Lean Startup using business model design, customerdevelopment and agile engineering. Teams have to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week.) But what NYU did with the rest of their grant dollars was simply brilliant. Make it Better. So Frank did.
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Peter Arvai , co-founder of Prezi , an interactive presentation platform. Peter and his co-founders were committed to making Prezi a global company.
He has startup experience having co-founded his previous company PureHolidayHomes. They’ve started with an MVP focused on the Lake District and will soon expand to the rest of the UK and then Europe. Secondly, Matt was a sole founder when he joined us. He has deep knowledge of his sector. This is a big opportunity.
A month ago, Jason, one of my founder friends, shut down his startup. 1 rule every founder hears over and over: Nobody wants your product until you prove it. How come so many founders still wake up to this horrible truth, after months or years of hard work? CustomerDevelopment for us meant a lot of hard-won learnings.
I realize that my 15 minutes up here is all that’s between you and the rest or your life, so if I can keep you awake, I’m going to share 4 short stories from my life. As time went on, I was a co-founder or member of the starting team for six high-tech startups…. My first story is about finding your passion.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customerdevelopment? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.
Values – who and what founders and customers hold dear – were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Lane Merrifield.
Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Is the company hosting/co-sponsoring some event? Customer Discovery Sitting inside of your company you’ve made a whole bunch of assumptions about who your customers are and why they will buy.
While finding product-market fit is important, getting the rest of the business model right is the difference between and a great demo and a great business. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more.
Biological Clocks After Convergent and now single again, I was a co-founder of my next two startups; MIPS and Ardent. Family Rules My wife and I agreed to a few rules upfront and made up the rest as went along. My ideas about CustomerDevelopment started evolving around these concepts. Never miss an event.
You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. Pre-launch customerdevelopment data is another way, sometimes in the form of user surveys for consumer companies or interviews with potential beta customers for B2B businesses. Now it’s time to set the stage with the early traction you have.
Values – who and what founders and customers hold dear – were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Lane Merrifield.
One of our favorites was a panel led by Intuit co-founder Scott Cook, who spoke about the change in leadership required at his company when he decided to implement Lean Startup methods after meeting Eric in 2009. And, professional development improves staff retention and satisfaction. Your team will come back energized.
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Joining me in SiriusXM’s studio in New York were: Drew Silverstein , co-founder and CEO of the music technology venture Amper Music. Drew Silverstein.
I believe it is the best introduction to CustomerDevelopment you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of CustomerDevelopment and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can easily take from it whatever makes sense for your business, and leave the rest. I think theyve succeeded.
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Andy Cunningham , founder and CEO of Cunningham Collective. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were. Andy Cunningham. They don’t know what you do.
Frank Rimalovski , executive director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute joined me in the studio to discuss how the Entrepreneurial Institute is transforming the culture at NYU; and Frank Sculli , co-founder of BioDigital Inc shares what he wishes he’d known before he started his company. Frank Sculli.
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. We could take title (ownership) too those inventions funded by that agency, but the rest of them we had to go and fight each time and say, we wanted to take title or not.
And the rest is history: Google Maps was a huge success. I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal. Its easier to believe in a glorious future when you have only zeroes, for everyone: founders, investors, and employees. Ship it.&# Data can undermine this field.
So if youre new, consider not paying any attention to the rest of this post, and just diving into the archives, if you havent already. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996).
2 Comments Tags: CustomerDevelopment , lean startup , pivot , Strategy. Having gone through 51 iterations of my mockups and gathered as much as feedback as I could with our primitive alpha, I feel confident about our basic customer problem hypothesis. I think every entrepreneur should be actively generating ideas constantly.
For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Not everything has to follow lean startup and customerdevelopment principles, and I write that as a devoted practitioner of both. And that's fine.
If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customerdevelopment is in order? Labels: customerdevelopment , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customerdevelopment?
You can read the rest of his posts on his blog : Introduction , Part 1 , Part 2.) I am grateful to everyone who helped make this event a success, especially my co-organizers Charles Hudson and David Sachs. When I first encountered customerdevelopment , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs.
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