Three very smart people talking about the same thing from three slightly different angles: A Quantum of Utility We advise startups to launch when they’ve added a quantum of utility: when there is at least some set of users who would be excited to hear about it, because they can now do something they couldn’t [...]
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Minimal Viable Products and Gall’s Law
Swapping out the word “system” for “product” in Gall’s Law gets us: A complex product that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple product that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex product designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start [...]
Bill Gates’ Minimal Viable Product
Inspired by the recent post on Atari as the original Lean Startup — I thought I would point out a great anecdote about Minimal Viable Products. So, in case you were wondering, Bill Gates knows exactly what a Minimal Viable Product is. He started Microsoft based on one. Via Tim Ferris and Rick Smith: In [...]
Hacking CustDev: The Open Source Playbook
I need your help. I am collecting and curating all of the best tactical CustDev hacks in one evolving and growing open-source ‘playbook’. I am not talking theory of Customer Development. I am talking boots-on-the-ground, stormin’-the-beach-with-bayonets-fixed CustDev warfightin’ hacks that get the job done. These hacks run the gamut from finding people to talk with [...]
Distribution and Pricing Hypotheses with LOIs
Update: Manu has updated his post with an excerpt from mine as well as some additional thoughts. I think we’re on the exact same page. – I just came across a post by Manu Kumar wherein he, riffing on Customer Development, writes about the importance of and need for what he calls: Revenue Development. He [...]
If you’re not Getting out of the Building, you’re not doing Customer Development and Lean Startups
If you are pre-Product/Market Fit and you aren’t actually “Getting out of the Building” (actually talking to your customers), you aren’t doing Customer Development, and your startup isn’t a Lean Startup. Let me repeat that: If you aren’t actually talking to your customers, you aren’t doing Customer Development. And by talking, I mean speaking. With [...]
Lean Startup Judo: Maximum Efficiency with Minimum Effort
Judo is a sport which translates roughly into the “supple/gentle/soft way” in Japanese. The central guiding principle of judo is “Maximum Efficiency with Minimum Effort”. This distilled means that to defeat your opponent in the context of a judo match you should first unbalance him so: when your opponent pulls you, you push him. when [...]
Getting to Product-Market Fit: Guest Post at Sean Ellis’ blog
Sean asked me to write a guest post to help startups achieve Product-Market Fit since he primarily advises startup after they’ve already reached it (during their transition to high growth businesses). Actually getting to Product-Market Fit is an important topic since the vast majority of startups never get there, making it virtually impossible to drive [...]
Recent Posts on The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development
Eric Ries had very kind things to say about The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development in a recent blog post: I wish I’d had a book like this one, to help me figure out how to get started with customer development step-by-step. … Brant and Patrick undertook a difficult challenge: to provide a generally accessible [...]
The Danger of Premature Media Attention
Fan Bi, the founder of Blank Label, has an interesting post up at his blog. The original tweet announcing the blog post was captioned as “a perspective on the dangers on going lean.” From the blog post: We were getting more and more customers, but most of them were what Geoffrey Moore would describe as [...]
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