by Brant | Sep 3, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Marketing Help
Even since I began tweeting — as a non-early adopter in early 2009, btw — I’ve wanted to create a 10 steps blog post for something, because, well, because that’s what you’re supposed to when you blog, right? So when my Twitter dashboard became a (brief) topic of conversation at the San Diego Tech Coffee meetup last week , an opportunity arose: a 10 steps post on Twitter? Damn, that’s social media gold right there. And I’m after nothing, if not social media gold!
So I came up with 8 steps, which is 2 whole steps easier than 10!
But seriously, people. I love Twitter, use it daily, and there is simply no doubt that I have benefited from using it. Depending on your business, not only might you benefit, too, but it might be required practice for you to be successful.
by Brant | Jul 26, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Lean Startup
As technologists working on new products and new markets, we tend to forget where we are on the technology adoption lifecycle curve. That’s a mistake. Here’s why: 1. Nobody cares See all that white space under the middle of the curve? Those are people...
by Brant | Jun 8, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Startups
During the next week of reflection, a non-early adopter, but loyal user of the product called the founder to announce that he would not after all, pay for the product. Not at the proposed price, not at the price they had argued for, not at any price.
So he fired himself as Founder and CEO of his company. And then he fired me. (“I no longer need your services. But in the future…”)
We talked briefly about his future, including possible pivots and leaps, but essentially, the gig was up. I admire his self-awareness and the honesty with which he evaluated his situation.
by Brant | May 9, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Economy, San Diego, Startups
Whether there’s a tech bubble or not is an interesting discussion going on in the blogosphere. (Reading guide is below.)
I fall into the “boom before bubble” pack. Having lived through the 90s’ bubble, there’s no way we’re there yet. That doesn’t mean there won’t be one, but my feeling is we’re skating a razor’s edge off one side of which looms another wave of housing foreclosures and a doom & gloom Sequoia presentation. Investors herding like sheep around darling Silicon Valley startup memes is not in itself bubblicious, it’s SOP. Sheep investing affects supply and demand conditions that result in higher valuations. Good or bad, that doesn’t in itself represent a bubble.
The Internet bubble was about more that overvalued startups. Horowitz and Graham argue other dynamics way better than I can (see links below), but I think it’s important to point out that bubbles dramatically affect the entire economic climate. The bubble was “our” version of 70s inflation. The bubble caused a huge migration of people to the SF Bay Area. Salaries went through the roof (not just for engineering talent.) So did cost of living. In the 90s, the housing bubble was inseparable from the Internet bubble. The buying of lots of different goods became irrational.
by Brant | Apr 28, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup, Startups
Despite Dave McClure’s imploring to “kill a feature” and Eric Ries’ urging to “cut your product in half, then halve it again,” most startup founders I encounter are trying to work their way toward Product-Market fit by planning and building new features. The analytical mind of an entrepreneur, both engineer and business-side, naturally tends toward solving problems and ostensibly, features solve problems. But it’s the wrong approach for most startups.
by Brant | Mar 21, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup, San Diego, Startups
At long last, here’s the video from Steve Blank’s presentation last month. Steve Blank speaks to San Diego Tech Founders from Brant Cooper on Vimeo. Contents: 00:00 My Intro 03:17 Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups – Old constraints on startups...
by Brant | Mar 15, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup, Startups, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development
Steve Blank and Alex Osterwalder have combined their respective methodologies, Customer Development and Business Model Generation, into a powerful business model generation and testing framework. There are several good sources for how these two mesh, including this...
by Brant | Feb 23, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup
I haven’t weighed in on Customer Development thoughts for several hours, so it’s about time. Interesting series of tweets in the last several days got me thinking about the biases we bring to Lean Startup Customer Development practices. Unfortunately, but...
by Brant | Feb 14, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup, Metrics-Driven Marketing
Back in December 2009 when Patrick Vlaskovits and I first contemplated our Customer Development book, I was noodling around with a graphic to illustrate the integrate Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics with Customer Development activities. I posted the graphic in a...
by Brant | Jan 12, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup
Customer development is a method for discovering, testing and validating user acquisition and conversion methods. So that a marketplace suffers from the “Chicken and Egg” problem, i.e., there’s only a true market when they’re both there doesn’t affect Customer Discovery and some amount of Customer Validation. In other words, you can interview both sides of the market place, show them solution ideas, validate MVP features all without the other side of the marketplace being involved at all.
The pre-development signal you are trying to hone in on is “What will it take minimally for each side of the equation to come to the market?” In most marketplaces, what you will discover is that one side of the market is actually the product, and the other side is the consumer of the product.
