How I Interview Customers
Interviewing Customers is a Special Kind of Torture Talk to a stranger. Fun. That stranger is immensely busy…and hates being sold things. Getting better. That stranger will likely destroy your vision...
View ArticleThe Startup Method: A 6-step Process for New Feature Development
This is the last article in a three-part series on building products for critical mass. Part I discusses why every startup needs a story. Part II details how to translate a story into a product flow....
View ArticleWell They “Should” be Our Customers
When scientists and engineers who’ve been working in the lab for years try to commercialize their technology they often get trapped by their own beliefs - including who the customers are, what...
View ArticleDigital is dead
Just a few years ago the world looked great for digital agencies. We were predicting the end of the mass media era. We claimed that everything was going to be social. We felt that traditional...
View ArticleCustomer Lifecycle Marketing: How to build a Sales and Marketing Machine
This post is part of a series on customer lifecycle marketing, a vital strategy to maximise profitability for any ecommerce store. It is intended for ecommerce marketeers, Heads of Ecommerce or anyone...
View ArticleWhen Customers Make You Smarter
We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. Here’s what happened when an extraordinary Digital Health team gained several critical...
View ArticleThe Product Manager is the Chief Customer Development Officer
If pressed, what would you say is the secret to product success? Certainly there are a number of things that go into making and selling products. Prioritization, design, manufacturing frameworks,...
View ArticleFive Ways to Learn Nothing from Your Customers’ Feedback
I have studied a lot of customer feedback systems in the 25 years I’ve spent working with companies on customer strategy. Many of them leave me sad and befuddled. So many companies make the same...
View ArticleMoneyball and the Investment Readiness Level [video]
Eric Ries was kind enough to invite me to speak at his Lean Startup Conference. In the talk I reviewed the basic components of the Lean Startup and described how we teach it. I observed that now that...
View ArticleSteve Blank @ The Lean Startup Conference 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjvEanpktEo...
View ArticleThe curated guide to The Lean Startup Conference
Lean is a movement according to Eric Ries, which explains how its principles can be applied across many different industries and in companies from GE to one-person startups that are not much more than...
View ArticleWhy New Features Usually Flop
Launching a successful feature demands the same skills as launching a successful product. The difference is that you also have to navigate around all of your legacy decisions, and appease current...
View ArticleThe Ultimate Guide to Customer Growth [slideshare]
Sean Johnson discusses tactics and strategies for driving customer growth by optimizing each stage of the customer development funnel. Slides: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Growth - GrowthHackers. ...
View ArticleTo Succeed, Growth Hacking Has To Focus More On Product Development Than...
I can’t think of a buzzier phrase in the tech industry these days than “growth hacking,” and in some ways I also can’t think of a more dangerous trend to glom onto. Sure, growth is good. But only if...
View ArticleGet the Heck Out of the Building in Founder’s School: Part 2
With a ~$2 billion endowment the Kauffman Foundation is the largest non-profit focused on entrepreneurship in the world. Giving away $80 million to every year (~$25 million to entrepreneurial causes)...
View ArticleAsking why is not always the best strategy
Questioning assumptions is good, but in this guest post, Daniel Ritzenthaler, a product designer with HubSpot, explains how to draw the line at productive questioning. I’m not a yes-man by any stretch....
View ArticleDriving Corporate Innovation: Design Thinking vs. Customer Development
Startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but interestingly we see that companies are not larger versions of startups. I’ve been spending some time with large companies that are interested...
View ArticleHow to Engage Your Users to Build the Product They Actually Want
Massdrop launched in 2012 based on one idea: To use bulk buying to help people get lower prices on products they love. This idea became a platform, letting people band together across the internet to...
View ArticleRarely say yes to feature requests
Here’s a simple set of Yes/No questions that you can quickly answer before you add another item to your product roadmap. Saying yes to a feature request – whether it’s a to an existing customer, a...
View ArticleA Couple Of Good Books For Entrepreneurs
I feel like we are in this zone where everyone is doing a startup. Of course that is a great thing. Getting people out of dead end jobs and into their creative zone seems like a good thing no matter...
View ArticlePlanning to Do a SaaS Startup? Don’t Forget the 20 Interview Rule.
Recently I spent some time with two seemingly similar SaaS start-ups. Both are at about $100k in MRR (congratulations!). Both have happy, enthusiastic customers. Both have really great products and...
View Article5 mistakes we all make with product feedback
At the outset of a new project, or especially if you’ve recently taken over a product, it’s tempting to survey all your users to appraise where things are. It’s usually a mistake. In fact there are...
View ArticleStartups: Never Stop Validating
A startup is a learning experience and pivots are inevitable. So it should be no surprise that photo sharing app Instagram started out as a check-in app, or that Slack spun out of Tiny Speck, a gaming...
View ArticleMaking sense of customer feedback
Recently we told you there are some customer opinions you shouldn’t listen to. But after you’ve weeded out the aspirational, the hypothetical and the third party statements, what customer feedback...
View ArticleHow to Apply “Diagram Thinking” to User Feedback at Your Startup
Jokes aside, this is exactly what we do with “users” (I wish there was a better term for this.). We take them through funnels and user journeys, and if there’s a hitch on the road, we’re back to square...
View ArticleLean Startup in the Enterprise Anti-Pattern: The Lean Waterfall by @TriKro
More and more enterprise scale companies are drinking the lean Kool Aid and starting to implement Lean Startup methodology. In doing so, they are failing at the most basic level. Lean Startup in the...
View ArticleCustomer Interviews: So you’ve decided to take your startup seriously.
I used to hate dancing at weddings. I’m tall, goofy, and an awful dancer. Triple threat. Dancing made me self-conscious, so I’d just make some excuse and stay at the table while everyone else had a...
View ArticleWhy Our Startup Built An Audience Before Our Product
That’s a question you’ll hear a lot when pitching an idea for a startup, and it’s one that you better have an answer to. But with so many marketing channels available, where do you even begin? The...
View ArticleThis is the Product Death Cycle. Why it happens, and how to break out of it
The hardest part of any new product launch is the beginning, when it’s not quite working, and you’re iterating and molding the experience to fix it. It may be the hardest phase, but it’s also the most...
View Article7 things I’ve Learned About Lean Startup
I’m an early adopter of Lean Startup. Ever since Eric Ries starting writing about his thoughts on the Startup Lessons Learned Blog, I was hooked. I was hooked because he just made sense. Eric put a...
View Article8 Customer Discovery Questions to Validate Product Market Fit for Your Startup
When I was a PM at Google, we conducted customer research often to understand our customers’ opinions on AdSense. In 2005, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were vying to win dominant share of advertising...
View ArticleThe Tools Early-Stage Startups Actually Need to Understand Their Customers
After 18 months of struggling to get traction with two product ideas, Segment started its turnaround. What followed was a two-year stretch of growth from four to 60 people, thousands of new customers...
View Article
