Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2010–2024years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "The new business road test" - John Mullins "Will it fly" - Pat Flynn
"Start marketing" - Rob Walling (https://robwalling.com/assets/ebook.pdf) I recommend the article on "Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books" ;)
(don't know where I got this...)
Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
To make a business, you need to multiply the two.Explanation: AWFUL IDEA -1 WEAK IDEA 1 SO-SO IDEA 5 GOOD IDEA 10 GREAT IDEA 15 BRILLIANT IDEA 20 NO EXECUTION $1 WEAK EXECUTION $1000 SO-SO EXECUTION $10,000 GOOD EXECUTION $100,000 GREAT EXECUTION $1,000,000 BRILLIANT EXECUTION $10,000,000The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.
The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.
That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas.
I’m not interested until I see their execution.
- Read the book "the new business road test". It oulines a checklist of things prior to considering a business. You can apply a lot of it to new software project (e.g conducting marketing research for similar projects).
When it comes to software development and adding features, adapt an investor mindset. Ask yourself what is the return on investment (ROI) of implementing that feature? What are the risks? How can you hedge your bets? etc.
I remember reading a book "software by the numbers" which I think covered that. https://books.google.ca/books?id=tW14FDkNYv4C&dq=software+by...
The last thing you should do though is "push blindly" and not "overthink". Analysis prior to acting is a good thing and the anxiety you feel is because you're uncertain about your the future. You cannot predict the future because you don't have any research.
It doesn't mean you should wait for certainty. Nothing is deterministic. But you should always operate on your best guess; after having done your homework to investigate all known unknowns and minimize risks.
- I do have a couple of ideas so you know I am not completely lame.
Dirt Jockey (www.dirtjockey.com) is a marketplace for used construction equipment, parts and attachments. The customer need is that construction contractors are not able to buy directly from one another right now, it is only dealerships or auctions. Let's change the game.
Naked Farms (www.nakedfarms.com) I have no idea yet but the name is pretty awesome for organic foods. Actually, I do have some ideas around a customer need but not enough to put into words.
Cyber Gym (domain TBD) I do P90X and I used to have a personal trainer. The trainer costs too much money and the P90X videos get boring. How about a virtual trainer that watches you via the webcam to make sure you are doing exercises correctly? Think obesity - those folks don't like going to the gym and want to workout at home.
More ideas to come... please share you idea and "Customer Need State"...
Also, read this book before writing your business plan. Great Advice: http://www.amazon.com/new-business-road-test-entrepreneurs/d...
- Disclaimer: I have an MBA.
Dalton's full of shit.
I could just as easily write a diatribe about developers who think of themselves as special snowflakes, future unicorn founder/CEOs, worthy of extremely high compensation and autonomy, yet have zero clue about business, can't deliver a finished product to save their life and have no appreciation for the importance of usability when it comes to creating a product aimed at users who don't have a CompSci degree.
During my stint as CTO of a dot-com back in 1999/2000, I realised that there was a lot I didn't know about running a business, strategy, marketing, business development, finance, cash flow planning, accounting, cap tables, negotiation and all the other little things that add up to a successful venture. So, I decided to go to business school. But guess what? A lobotomy wasn't on the curriculum. I can still knock together a shell script, tail -f a logfile and pipe it through grep, get some vague clue about why something crashed by casting my eye over a Java exception error, and make a lazy developer deeply uncomfortable when he realises that - would you believe it! - this particular MBA actually knows what exception handling is and wants to know why the fuck we're not doing it.
Going to business school and getting an MBA added many new arrows to my quiver but it didn't take any away. It didn't narrow my horizons - it broadened them. The idea that an MBA can never be of any value to anything other than a large corporation is as ridiculous as the idea that a coder who learnt Java and the Waterfall method at college will never be able to learn Objective C and cope with Agile. True, some won't be able to but that doesn't mean that all won't.
MBA curricula are often perceived as out of date because the content must be approved as part of the academic accreditation process. As a result, they often don't incorporate the latest business methodologies. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on whether the latest business thinking is merely a fad or something that will last as long as Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. But, either way, graduating from business school doesn't mark the end of the learning process. My copy of Eric Ries' "The Lean Startup" occupies the same shelf as "Strategic Management" by Saloner, Shepard and Padolny, "Let Me People Go Surfing" by Yvon Chouinard, "Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter L Bernstein and John W Mullins' "The New Business Road Test". My last two Kindle purchases were Brad Feld's "Startup Communities" and "Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank.
Dalton claims that, "to an MBA Strategy > Implementation" but it's truer to say that, to an MBA, Strategy comes before Implementation. To do the reverse, implementing blindly and pivoting wildly, is akin to blindly throwing darts at a dartboard - eventually one of them will end up in the bullseye but that isn't necessarily proof that the thrower is anything other than lucky.
Dalton's entitled to his prejudice. If he wants to take the shortcomings of a subset of MBAs and apply those as a stereotype across the entire population, that's his prerogative. However, to make broad, sweeping generalisations about someone based on a single fact - whether it's the fact that they have an MBA, what school they went to or the colour of their skin - is pretty foolish because the exceptions will bite you on the ass. For every lame MBA, there's a Sheryl Sandberg or Alexis Maybank. For every team of MBA founders with all the strategy and no product, there's a Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, who came up with the idea for CloudFlare at Harvard Business School[1], or a Neil Blumenthal, who attributes much of Warby Parker’s success to his and his co-founders’ experiences at business school, which Blumenthal described as "the most helpful and useful of any of my educational background."[2]
And, for every lame MBA, there are likely dozens of developers who scoff at the notion that building a successful company requires anything other than the ability to code, and certainly none of that crap they teach you in business school. Of course, if that were true, we'd have many more billion-dollar startups and far fewer founders making schoolboy errors that could have been easily avoided.
Maybe if Dalton had taken a few classes in strategy and marketing, Wired wouldn't be writing about "The Great App.net Mistake".[3]
[1]: http://www.cloudflare.com/our-story
[2]: http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/29/warby-parker-the-result-of-...
[3]: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/the-great-app-net-mis...
- http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-custome...
http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/
http://venturehacks.com/articles/customer-development
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976470705
http://www.amazon.com/New-Business-Road-Test-entrepreneurs/d...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5E38frHo1U
etc.
- John Mullins describes a lightweight technique called the "long interview" in The New Business Road Test. I've only used this seriously once. The results of my trial provided good insights but were not as definite as I'd hoped.
Another method I heard from a startup marketing guru is that if you have a large number of users running a free or pre-release version, you should ask them, "how disappointed would you be if this product were discontinued?" You have product-market fit when a significant portion answer that they would be "very disappointed."
I've also had the impression that feature requests are not a particularly useful metric by themselves. The fact that you have conflicting feature requests probably indicates that your market is highly subsegmented. It might be useful to try to map these subsegments demographically and need-wise.
