Practice Trumps Theory: Lean Startup + Customer Development + Bootstrap

I want to take a moment to provide a quick update on the progress of my book since I had initially hoped to have it published by now. I knew going in that writing a book would be a beast. I just hadn’t anticipated how big an undertaking this could be. What is it about? [...]

“Startups that succeed are those that manage to iterate enough times before running out of resources” -Eric Ries Even though an iteration (in Lean Startup) is defined as a Build/Measure/Learn experiment, the iteration loop can be applied equally well to optimization experiments as well as pivot experiments which has often led to Lean Startups being [...]

I got an interesting question the other day on why the call to action after Customer Discovery is “Signup Now” versus “Buy Now”. If you’ve got a problem and solution that resonates with a prospect, why not charge them right away? First, there is a big difference between describing/demoing a solution and delivering on one. [...]

The first “Lean Startup” conference (Startup Lessons Learned) was a great success. Eric Ries and company put together a great lineup of presenters and executed the event very well. I got the most value from the case-studies. While core principles were mostly the same (Customer first, Get out of the building, etc.), there were some [...]

While not the same thing, Bootstrapping and Lean Startups are quite complementary. Both cover techniques for building low-burn startups by eliminating waste through the maximization of existing resources first before expending effort on the acquisition of new or external resources. While bootstrapping provides a strategic roadmap for achieving sustainability through customer funding (i.e. charging customers), [...]

Pricing is simultaneously one of the most complicated and most important things to get right. It is harder to iterate with price and advice on when/how to start charging is all over the map. I wrote a guest post on Venture Hacks where I discuss how I tested and implemented pricing for my MVP. Read [...]