Continued from Part 2 Marc: On viral, one in a hundred or one in a thousand. Safe assumption is: your product ain’t viral. The number of things that are actually viral is very small. I love the magic business models but it’s really hard to find an example of someone who goes to get the [...]
Continued from Part 1 3 gradations of this thing Founders who build the product for themselves have a huge advantage: founder market fit. HP theory (in the old days) - the “next bench theory” - each bench would make the product for the next: voltmeters -> oscilloscope -> down the line; adjacent markets. Hardest, and [...]
“We pivoted twice, which is like 8 fewer than we should have needed to.” 1. Interactive television. Time warner had rolled out 60 homes in Florida (40 thousand dollars), gave up on that idea. gave up on that. 2. Xboxlive or psnetwork for… n64! We were slightly premature. Luckily we punted on that one. And [...]
Scott Cook from Intuit: In this age of innovation, the role of a leader has to change. The leader has four roles: The leader has to set the grand challenge. The leader has to install the systems and culture to enable people, even junior people, to run fast experiments to achieve that grand challenge. The leader has [...]
Lean marketing: if you had $1 to spend, where should you put it? Early on, when starting a company, there are lots of shiny things you want to go after — but it could be easy to spend money on lots of channels without realizing what sort of impact you could have on your business. [...]
Living beyond your means, spending energy merely to look successful and exaggerating your accomplishments are often a derivative of vanity metrics. What numbers not to use: - Pageviews - New members - Total members - Unique visitors/visits - Conversion Rate - Percent Growth - Conversion rate - Twitter followers - Facebook friends/likes Instead measure: - [...]
In Testing MVPs with Crowdfunding, Justin backed the position that your startup isn’t a business, it’s a hobby. Both hobbies and businesses are easy to get obsessed over and can cost a lot of money. Justin’s approach: Come up with idea > Interview Customers: Does this solve a real problem? > Use paper prototypes > [...]
Jessica Scorpio (@jessicascorpio) one of founders of Getaround spoke about her experience “Prototyping to Validate a Big Idea”. The big idea of getaround: solving a problem called “over car population” cars that sit idle connect to people who need a car. 5 billion daily un-utilized cour hours. Cars are really expensive to own. it costs 19% of their household [...]
A Conversation with Beth Comstock (@bethcomstock), SVP at GE, about Bringing Lean Startup to Life at One of the World’s Biggest Companies. GE is #6 by revenue. As far as we know, this is the biggest company using lean startup practices. 300,000 customers. Started by Thomas Edison. Its been through a few iterations. Eric: What is [...]
Danny Kim (@LitMotors) founder of LitMotors. Actual prototype in audience! It looks cool. We take the romance and efficiency of a motorcycle and put that on a car. Building a car is hard. I’m the only founder with an actual track record of building vehicles (video!) If you want to start a car company, you [...]
