Paul's posterous

Nail the Customer Development Manifesto to the Wall « Steve Blank

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here:

A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search
for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model

There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside

Pair Customer Development with Agile Development

Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model

If You’re Afraid to Fail You’re Destined to Do So

Iterations and Pivots are Driven by Insight

Validate Your Hypotheses with Experiments

Success Begins with Buy-In from Investors and Co-Founders

No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers

Not All Startups Are Alike

Startup Metrics are Different from Existing Companies

Agree on Market Type – It Changes Everything

Fast, Fearless Decision-Making, Cycle Time, Speed and Tempo

If it’s not About Passion, You’re Dead the Day You Opened your Doors

Startup Titles and Functions Are Very Different from a Company’s

Preserve Cash While Searching. After It’s Found, Spend

Communicate and Share Learning

Startups Demand Comfort with Chaos and Uncertainty

Quite a few people have asked for a way to remember these without having to dig through the book. So by popular demand, here’s a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto. You can order a copy here.

Nail it to your wall.

Nail the Manifesto to your Wall
Get your own Poster here: http://sblank.com/HpwmuN

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Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto

via steveblank.com

This is awesome and worthy of a repost. Print it out, put it on your wall, refer to it often. Thanks for this Steve.

Seth's Blog: People who know what they're talking about...

« It's never too late | Blog Home

People who know what they're talking about...

Almost always talk like they know what they're talking about. That's why it pays to invest more time than you might imagine on the vocabulary, history and concepts of your industry.

Insider language, terms of art, the ability to use technical concepts... it matters.

On the other hand, sounding like you're smart doesn't mean you are.

Necessary but not sufficient.

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Posted by Seth Godin on February 11, 2012 | Permalink

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« It's never too late | Blog Home

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Good reminder for me and everyone. I know it is table stakes but it is important to speak with knowledge and compelling authority. In a startup or very early adopter market people are usually looking to you to take them where they need to go. If they sense that you are not 100% aware of their problems and knowledgable in your or their space it will erode there confidence in you and your Company. Early adopters WANT to take that leap but they need the help of a well spoken, confident and knowledgable partner.....BE THAT!

Thanks Mom and Dad...

Children seldom understand the trials their parents face, the dreams deferred, or sacrifices made, until one day when they are grown with grown-up choices too, and realize the debt they can never repay.

Thanks Mom and Dad for all you have done and continue I do for me...

Three Magic Numbers

via onswipe.feld.com

A great post I wanted to share from Brad Feld (@bfeld)...

It is easy to get lost, confused and bogged down by the myriad of metrics that are available to us. DON'T!!!! Take the time and think through your business and figure out what the THREE important FORWARD LOOKING metrics are in your business. Whether you are a start-up or a long established business this is a critical exercise.

There are so many reasons this is critical to success but I am a big believer in 'That which is measured is improved' and if your focus is...well....unfocussed then your business will be too.

Measure three things, focus on three things and the rest of the Company will follow and all activities, projects and work will start to align to support these metrics.

What are your three? write a list of all the things you measure now, critique them, distell them, get them right! Do it now...

Understanding the Customer Buying Cycle and Triggers | For Entrepreneurs

via forentrepreneurs.com

Fantastic post by David Skok. If you, like me are in the Enterprise Sales business this framework is a really good roadmap for you to walk through and think about your sales cycle and your marketing programs and how they tie and can be more efficiently aligned with the Customer Buying Cycle.

Get some folks in a room with a big whiteboard and actually talk this through, draw pictures use real examples from your pipeline that have both closed and not closed. Learn some lessons and change some processes and activities.

Great exercise, good luck and let me know how it worked for you please.

Letter from Zuckerberg...The Hacker Way!

There is much debate about IPO value and buy vs overvalued and compensation and personal worth...blah blah blah....

What is undisputable is that in 8 years Zuck has built great services for what is now over 800 million active users across the world. This letter from Zuck descibes the culture and process that has made Facebook successful in a brief, understandable, eloquent way and I applaud and admire the focus and discipline required to accomplish this huge task and admire and applaud the success that has resulted. have a read and think about how YOU can change YOUR organization in some very small or very big way today.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

How to bring a product to market / A very rare interview with Sean Ellis - Venture Hacks

via venturehacks.com

I flaggeded this using Instapaper back in December when it first came out from Nivi at Venture Hacks and finally got around to reading it on the plane on my flight home from IBM Pulse last night. I highly recommend that regardless of what stage your tech company is in (or you think its in) that you listen/read/make notes on the attached interview.

If you are unclear on what product/market fit is, you need to....listen
If you are pre product/market fit....listen
If you are post product/market fit...listen

There are some great examples as well as great lessons in when to market and when not to market, how to save early $$ and how to make sure that you are on the right path.

Love to hear your thoughts and comments on this...do you agree? disagree? any examples? need help? Let me know.

BTW...if you are not following @seanellis and @venturehacks please do...very much worth your time.

Outlier Example

via youtube.com

OK so I am a big Neil Peart fan and a bit of a drum geek but having heard Neil speak and his story it is an excellent example of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hr rule in his Outlier book. (I have linked to my favorite solo of his on Youtube for my pleasure as much as yours)

In my opinion Neil is probably the greatest drummer in the world, if you disagree thats OK as long as you can acknowledge that he is one of the best at his craft. Neil started as a kid (pre-ten years old) laying magazines out on his bed, listening to music and beating the covers the magazines. At 10 he got a drum pad (not a set) and practiced on the pad. As an early teen every spare moment was spent on a second hand drum set. Playing along with songs he liked, making up new stuff, trying stuff he hadn't seen done before and being creative...innovating (even though he didn't see it that way at 14). Neil played in bands and played solo's eventually forming the band Rush continually driving himself to do more, get better, push the envelope.

The interesting thing that most people who are true outliers will understand is that he did this not just because he was driven to be the best (although that was 'a' factor). He did it because he LOVED IT! Whether it is Gladwell or Vaynerchuk or any of the other experts it is obvious to all that everyone should be looking to match what they LOVE doing with what they get paid to do.

The formula looks like this:

The more you love something the more you are prepared to do it, the better you get at it, the more people will find you and ask you/pay you to do it for them, the more fulfilled and happy you will feel and the better person you will be for all your loved ones.

Find your passion, follow it, work hard at it.

Are you? If not, make a change. Don't say you can't afford to...be practical about planning the swith but...can you afford not to?

Tags Gladwell Vaynerchuk happiness outlier passion work
January, 23, 2010
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Can't wait to Read!

via startuplessonslearned.com

I know I am late to the game but I FINALLY ordered my copy of "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank....can't wait to read it as it has been one of the single most frequently recommended read from folks. Not exactly an early adopter on this one but I'm hoping better late than never!

I'll post my thoughts as and after I get through it but for those who have I'd like to hear how it changed your perspective? What you did differently after reading? Do you recommend it to friends? Why or Why not?

Updated Customer Development Image | Market By Numbers | Marketing Help

via market-by-numbers.com

Really great illustrative piece of work by Brant Cooper that nicely outlines the customer evoluation...go to Brant's Market By Numbers blog and add to your reader if you are at all interested in customer development.