Posted by Brandon at 9:39 am
David Heineimeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals in Chicago, says that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. He argues that constraints–fiscal, temporal, or otherwise–drive innovation and effective problem-solving. The most important thing, Hansson believes, is to make a dent in the universe with your company.
Posted by Brandon at 1:34 pm
Many Startups fail simply because they don’t provide value to their customers with the products/services they offer. In order to provide value, Startups should focus on developing a product/services that addresses a need.
Here is an article I found, based on The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, which will hopefully help you develop Product-Market Fit. You can view it here.
Identify and document your assumptions
The sooner you understand and accept that you, as a entrepreneur at somewhere pre-Product Market Fit with your startup, are operating in near-chaos, where all your assumptions/hypotheses about how you gratify your users, who they are, how you will acquire and monetize them – are simply that, untested assumptions, the better off you are.
With your assumptions documented and in-hand you will:
“Get out of the Building” to validate (or invalidate) your assumptions
You must find, meet and speak with prospective customers about your product and ascertain the validity of your assumptions. This is the crux of Customer Development. Only by speaking to these people will you have any sort of understanding about “their reality” as Dan Martell likes to put it. What problems do they face? How do they solve them? What matters to them? What is a must-have for them?
As you speak to potential customers, you should:
Posted by Brandon at 8:17 am
My friend Jeff posted a great article about Real Estate Agents on Twitter and I figured I would give my .02 cents. Here’s my reply:
I 100% agree with you Jeff. In my opinion, many agents join twitter because they’ve heard it’s the holy grail, then start posting their listings, thinking they’re going to find more buyers/sellers. They’ll be quite surprised to find that very few people will browse their listings and end up complaining about how twitter doesn’t work.
Truth be told, twitter is a relationship-building tool. NOT a sales tool. These relationships take time and require continuous engagement, rather than popping in every time you have a listing. Prove to the rest of the community that you’re not a robot and people will start to follow you.
Any person with sales experience should know it’s all about the relationship, and I find it surprising that many agents forget this when joining twitter.
Please feel free to comment below!
Posted by Brandon at 9:21 am
Short answer:
Do insanely awesome work. That kind of work markets itself and you.
(via Rajesh Setty)
