Startup Stages

Validating Your MVP For B2B Startups at SF Lean Startup Circle Tue-Jun-4

3 Early Customer Stage, Customer Development, Events, Lean Startup, Workshop / By /

We have been invited back the SF Lean Startup Circle to present our “Validating Your MVP and Value Proposition for B2B Startups” workshop on June 4, starting 5:30pm. This interactive workshop will address: How a B2B startup should think about  message, MVP, and launch. Understand who buys your product and how they calculate its value and […]

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Founder Story: Ari Halberstadt of Catalee on Founder’s Dilemmas and Residential Energy Market

1 Idea Stage, Audio, Founder Story / By /

Theresa Shafer met Ari Halberstadt at a Bootstrapper Breakfast in SF earlier this year and was very impressed with his approach to his new startup, Catalee. Ari volunteered to talk with me about Noam Wasserman‘s “The Founder’s Dilemmas” as well as Catalee. Here is a 12 minute podcast and transcript of our phone call. Or download

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For New Products Prospect Objections Are Valuable Data

3 Early Customer Stage, Audio, Demos, skmurphy / By /

If your prospect keep raising the same stupid objections and asking the same dumb questions it’s likely that your presentation is lacking or you are frequently talking to the wrong people. For new products, prospect objections are valuable data. Explore the implications and adjust your presentation and demo accordingly.

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Market Discovery and Exploration Requires Models from Physics, Biology, and Psychology

1 Idea Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, Customer Development / By /

Q: Appreciate your thoughts on qualitative vs. quantitative approaches to  market exploration. Customer development is like qualitative research; it is good for exploring hypotheses (and associated issues) but cannot validate them (by its very nature it is small sample size). To validate startup hypotheses one needs to do quantitative research, e.g. surveys, measurements (A/B tests), and have

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How To Bootstrap Your Start-Up at ASL Mar-27-2013

1 Idea Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, Events, skmurphy / By /

Update Mar-27-2013: Slides and audio for this event are now available at “Slides and Audio from How To Bootstrap at ASLCPA Mar 27” I have been asked by the Emerging Business Group at Abbott, Stringham and Lynch to give a talk on “How to Bootstrap Your Start-Up.” If you are a technology entrepreneurs who doesn’t fit

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Challenges in Analyzing Market Structure and Competitive Landscape

1 Idea Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, Customer Development, skmurphy / By /

Before you introduce a new product into an existing market you need to analyze the market structure and competitive landscape. This is a laundry list–not a prioritized list—of the set of challenges we currently wrestle with in helping clients monitor their external environment and craft strategies for new market creation and new product introduction into

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Engineering Your Sales Process Workshop Feb-8 Early Bird Closes This Weekend

2 Open for Business Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, 4 Finding your Niche, 5 Scaling Up Stage, Events, Sales, skmurphy / By /

Just a heads up that the early bird rates for our next “Engineering Your Sales Process®” Workshop close Sun-Jan-28. This is the same workshop that Scott Sambucci and Sean Murphy offered at the Lean Startup Conference in December 2012 but we are limiting the attendance to 12 entrepreneurs to allow it to be even more

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A Conversation With A Bootstrapping EdTech Startup On Customer Interviews

1 Idea Stage, 2 Open for Business Stage, 3 Early Customer Stage, Customer Development, Design of Experiments, Lean Startup, skmurphy / By /

What follows is a sequence of E-mails with an entrepreneur bootstrapping an EdTech startup around the challenges of doing customer interviews that have been recast as a conversation, with the original content edited for length and clarity. Entrepreneur (E): I am working with a couple of friends–we all have day jobs–on an idea for helping

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Dr. Atul Gawande

Dr. Atul Gawande on Managing Complexity and Uncertainty

4 Finding your Niche, skmurphy / By /

Managing complexity and uncertainty was the focus of Dr Atul Gawande’s commencement address at Williams College on Sunday, June 3rd, 2012 (Reprinted in New Yorker as “Failure and Rescue“). The entire talk is worth reading and offers a medical case history as a compelling context for his points. “…the critical skills of the best surgeons

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