The first few years of my career were awful. Drowning in debt, losing nine out of ten pitches for new business, failing to earn clients. It felt like
Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage
A fascinating adventure through Competitive Advantages, Mental Models, and practical lessons for operators. Also lots of fun pictures here!
9 signs that your business idea will probably fail - Dan Norris
After 14 years running my own businesses, I’ve failed a lot. I haven’t kept count thankfully, but I’d say I’ve started at least 50 businesses / ideas and out of those, 3 have worked. And when I say worked I don’t mean staying in business, I mean resulting in either a decent income for me […]
Jessica Livingston – Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing
The most important thing an early-stage startup should know about marketing is rather counterintuitive: that you probably shouldn’t be doing anything you’d use the term “marketing
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done. Some jobs are little (pass the time); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for something else to solve the problem. Jobs are multifaceted. They’re never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics. Consider the experiences of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their homes. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives. Instead of adding more features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales took off. The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.
Work Smarter: The Cocktail of Simplicity, Manageable Adversity, and Muntzing
Sometimes deliberate roadblocks can be a good thing to get more efficient and effective products and workflow. Here's how.
“Pricing Profitable Projects,” an article by Dan Mall
Make it work for them and you—in that order.
How to Hire a Great Marketing Person - Noah Kagan
I got this question asked and figured others might be curious on how I do it. The challenge about marketing output is that it’s not always numbers based and the ROI isn’t immediate. With that being said I think it can be and here’s how I would solve how to find and how to know […]
Navigating Mid-Success | Y Combinator
When you start a startup, you get pushed off the side of a cliff with a bag of aerospace parts.1 You hope they are the parts for a spaceship, and they look like they might be, but it’s impossible to tell when they’re all in a bag. So you start figuring out how the parts fit together as you fall. Every once in a while, it turns out you do have the parts for a spaceship—the market is huge, you have a great product, there’s a natural monopoly, and you have a credible path to be the winner. In that
The Startup Marketing Checklist
I tried dozens of side projects before starting Draft.dev, and now I’ve worked with hundreds of early-stage startups and established enterprises to help with growth marketing. So, a lot of founders ask me how to get started in marketing when your marketing budget is small and your product is new. I created this list to […]
Project vs. Product, Startup vs. Business
A couple of weeks ago I dropped into a thread by Mosh Lee, about how ATproto has too many projects and too few businesses. Yes!
Why Founders Market Their Products Too Late
Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers. Here’s why many startups don’t get round to marketing their product…
Steve Blank How to Find a Market? Use Jobs-To-Be-Done as the Front End of Customer Discovery
Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21st century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business mo…
Bob Moesta - Jobs-to-be-Done Find Out the Why!
When to Fold: The Cost of Failing Slow in a Startup
Failing Slow: Why One Founder Regretted Keeping His Startup Alive
The Taxonomy of the Lean Startup Pivot
If your business model isn't working, change something from one of these categories.
