lean startup
A college level class in growth hacking?
In a few days I’m teaching the first class in Growth Hacking at USC. I created this class because no matter what you feel about the “Growth Hacker” term, I find the role to be sought after by graduating students and the skill set to be appreciated by businesses. As far as I know, this is the […]
Startup Weekend Toolkit
Here’s a Startup Weekend Toolkit I put together after mentoring and judging. It’s a lot of info, so it’s best to read this before you go since you will be busy enough (and sleep deprived) during the weekend, but these resources will save you lots of pain. Startup Weekend isn’t a hackathon or a business […]
Going Gonzo to Build a Better Bootcamp
Hunter S. Thompson practiced Gonzo journalism, a format where the reporter participates in the story. Here’s the start of the Gonzo startup advisory (what I used to run as a “bootcamp”). In my experience, if you’re an early-stage entrepreneur and working with someone like me to learn Customer Development techniques, you will have some common troubles. […]
Startup Weekend To Dos
This weekend there will be more than the usual number of #lean hashtags on Twitter. Startup Weekend is holding its 54-hour events around the world, including in Hong Kong. I recently gave a pre-Startup Weekend talk on “Lean Startup in 54 Minutes” and I thought I’d share the major parts of the talk here. This […]
Can You Do An MVP For Your Life?
I had to come to Hong Kong to go to my first Barcamp. The timing was perfect — I arrived less than a week before to run Startup Bootcamp so it was a perfect time to meet more people. And everyone in the bootcamp attended for at least part of the day. After attending a […]
Fear, Waiting and LaGuardia
If there was ever a situation in which ride sharing apps would be used, it was at LaGuardia Airport, 12:30am after the airport had been closed for a storm. When I arrived, delayed for several hours with many other flights, I found a taxi line that was like nothing I had ever seen. In fact, […]
Simplicity
I saw two useful and simple new services yesterday: Delight.io (by Thomas Pun, who I know) and PopTip.com (from a new TechStars grad). Delight.io allows developers to add a line of code to their iOS app in order to see how users interact with the apps. PopTip allows any Twitter user to run a poll […]
Too experienced to learn
Is it possible to be too experienced to learn? I think it is. A historian told me about an example from US new recruits in WWII and how marksmanship ability varied among them. Supposedly, recruits from the US countryside performed worse than those from the city. This seems counter-intuitive. After all, men who grew up […]
More MBAs More Problems
A lot has been said about MBA programs’ lack of preparation for entrepreneurial work. I’m even going as far as to say that these programs can unintentionally mislead students by rewarding the wrong things. (I’m allowed to make these comments because I have an MBA and ran a startup.) Here are a few examples from […]
How to observe your way to insight
When we were starting out in my last startup, even before we had heard of customer development, we had a method for learning from users. It wasn’t great but it was better than what a lot of startups were doing. This is what we did (after we had exhausted our friends as beta testers): – […]