Lean Startup / Customer Development

Five Skills for Feasibility

Five Skills for Feasibility

I taught the Feasibility Analysis class at USC for a few years. Afterward, a colleague asked me to speak to his graduate class on the topic of feasibility analysis. This gave me the opportunity to do something that I never did over the past semesters – to think about how to express the essentials of […]

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The Disposable Startup

I wrote this post a while ago, but am posting it here for the first time. The Disposable Startup.

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Judging the Judges

In the startup world, there are many occasions in which startups are judged and few (if any) occasions when the judges themselves are judged. I want to quote my friend and startup advisor Kevin Dewalt, who in a blog post wrote “We don’t need to be judges – the customers are the only judge that […]

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Rolling Up Hills or Climbing Up Steps

Sometimes startups think of progress as rolling up a hill. You start off with almost nothing: a first iteration with no users and of maybe questionable value. But you believe that you’re able to roll up that hill to grow. Sometimes, depending on what you are building, rolling up a hill cannot work. The hill, […]

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How Lean Startup Optimizes For Annoyance

I’ve taught lean startup tools at a bootcamp, spoken about lean case studies in workshops, judged on application of lean techniques at competitions, and guided people to think through it all while I ran an accelerator. It’s not a perfect methodology. There’s lots of confusion about it. It doesn’t explain everything. And that’s just fine. But […]

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What’s the best way for a startup to measure its progress?

Across public talks and internally in the accelerator I co-founded, I’ve taught and advised on metrics that matter for startups. I could add to the lengthy body of knowledge of startup metrics but there’s a qualitative metric that people don’t mention because it’s hard to measure and few see it in person. Startups in their […]

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You’re So Vain

While we talk about lean startup and vanity metrics we also often send conflicting signals. Here are some examples that startup ecosystems create or enable. From what I’ve seen, vanity is the major culprit. The Events Problem Speaker Events. You don’t get any closer to your goal by going to hear a speaker, famous or […]

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