Mike Silverman passed away Sep-13-2014 after a 14 month battle with cancer. He was an entrepreneur with tremendous energy and integrity. I will miss him. He founded Ops A La Carte in 2002 and built it up to a training, testing, and consulting organization providing work for dozens of experienced reliability engineers.
Mike Silverman 1964-2014 Read More »
I am a big fan of Jill Konrath and her Selling to Big Companies book. She has good advice on closing the sale: it’s up tot the customer. If you are selling a product that requires consideration or a complex evaluation by one or more employees of your prospect’s organization the following advice is particularly
Closing the Sale: It’s Up To The Customer Read More »
This post is a retrospective look at my inaugural post in 2006 and lessons learned blogging 1400 posts over the 8 years since.
Lessons Learned Blogging: 1400 Posts in 8 years Read More »
Q: I am bootstrapping a e-commerce web startup and working a day job to fund my business until revenue takes off. I am getting ready to launch but am worried how I can provide phone support for customer service issues and to close sales. Any suggestions?
Providing Phone Support When Bootstrapping Read More »
The following announcement went out this morning: ARMONK, N.Y – 25 Sep 2014: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Verdafero, a San Francisco-based utility analytics startup, has selected IBM Cloud to power its utility analytics platform, allowing customers to reduce their energy, water or waste consumption by up to 30 percent. Verdafero chose IBM’s open
Verdafero Partners with IBM Read More »
Bill Meade (@BillMeade) is the Director of Data Science at Neal Analytics, a position he describes as, “Catalyst to a herd of genius cats, riding a machine learning cloud, into a business world about to discover analytical dreams can come true … easily. ” Bill has long experience with innovation, IP management, and customer development.
Bill Meade: Customer Development and Schmexperts Read More »
Q: I’m just about to get out of the building to validate hypotheses and start learning, but I have a problem with the business model canvas. I have been advised to develop detailed hypotheses before starting customer discovery. This is my startup and I have no idea how to fill in the business model canvas
Serious Problems With Business Model Canvas For Startups Read More »
Javid Jamae (@JavidJamae) is a Principal Engineer at Tout, where he heads up the experimentation and growth efforts; he leads a team focused on growing the viewership for both local and nationally syndicated content. Javid authored this great guest post on finding early adopters through customer interviews before building a minimum viable product (MVP) and it is
An MVP is Finished Only After You Have Early Adopters Read More »
One of the hallmarks of the entrepreneurial journey is diving in over your head. At some point you have to commit fully to a new venture and at a later point you realize that, despite all of your careful preparation, you are testing the depth of water with both feet–or perhaps even head first. This
Diving In Over Your Head Read More »
I am rescuing a dialog on customer development and channel development I had with Ash Maurya from the comments to his “Lessons Learned in 2010” blog post. I am still at work on the “system of simultaneous equations” model and I think his new thinking on the “Customer Factory” is moving closer to iterating against
Customer Development and Channel Development Read More »
Build A B2B MVP That Inspires Trust Q: I am preparing to launch a website for my minimum viable product (MVP). It’s a few pages and has has some forms and a file upload capability. Potential customers will be able to explain a particular type of problem that they have and then upload some relevant
Q: Is It Waste To Build A B2B MVP That Inspires Trust? Read More »
Q: What is the target allocation for each of these critical tasks in a successful startup? Here is my list of critical tasks in a startup and a percentage allocation: Planning 10% Execution 50% Ideation 20% Talking to Potential Customers 15% Recruiting 5% What Is The Real Decision? Can you clarify : At what stage of company? What time frame
Q: What Are Critical Tasks In A Startup? Read More »
Cold calling, despite it’s popularity, is almost always the worst possible customer acquisition approach as a pure method. Find a way to warm up the call.
If “Cold Calling” is Your Answer Please Reconsider Read More »
Creating value for others is the core of the entrepreneurial mindset. It enables the exchange of value that fuels entrepreneur’s efforts to bring new ideas and products to market. Dan Sullivan: Entrepreneurs Make Two Decisions In “The Great Crossover,” Dan Sullivan offers the following insight on entrepreneurial mindset: Successful entrepreneurs differ from other people–not in their
Entrepreneurial Mindset: Create Value For Others Read More »
Here are some suggestion guidelines that help set newcomers expectations for what constitute valuable content and comments in an online community.
Guidelines For An Online Community of Entrepreneurs Read More »
The practical and spiritual aspects of entrepreneurship as a calling are well documented in “The Call of the Entrepreneur.”
Entrepreneurship As A Calling Read More »
Q: What are logos good for? An image is processed by a different part of the brain than a word or phrase, making it both memorable and evocative in ways that are distinct from the name of your company. Having a logo for your company or product makes it more memorable and allows you to
Why You Need A Logo Read More »
These are excerpts from Episode 9 of Outlier on Air: Tristan Kromer, A Lean Approach to Business. They are in the same sequence the took place in the interview but a number of stories and asides have been omitted to focus on what I felt were some extremely valuable insights from Tristan Kromer on clarifying and testing
Tristan Kromer on Testing Customer and Value Hypotheses Read More »
Some excerpts from “Civilization and Its Enemies” by Lee Harris, with commentary on the implications of 9-11 for Silicon Valley. We Have An Enemy “It is the enemy who defines us as his enemy, and in making this definition he changes us, and changes us whether we like it or not. We cannot be the same
Lee Harris’ Insights on What 9-11 Means Read More »
Q: I have 3D printed a couple prototypes of my product. I am going to get user feedback by letting security guards–my target market–test if for free for a few days. How many prospect should I have test it before I can determine if there is a market for the product. Since you are 3D
No Such Thing as a Random Sample of Five People Read More »
