Category : Uncategorized

I just got a chance to see the businesses-in-progress of a bunch of product design students. They’re using etsy to sell their prototypes and one-offs as a pre-channel test. Kickstarter is awesome for avoiding channel issues and overcoming fixed setup costs, but the successful projects are pretty far along by the time they become funded. [...]

We all know we’re supposed to “write it down,” but almost nobody actually does. Why? Because we aren’t clear on the value. It’s about what we get 6 or 12 months from now, not tomorrow.

Startup advice was mighty confusing before Steve Blank started carving out distinctions between scalable startups and other upstart businesses. The word entrepreneur covers a lot of ground. It means someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business. Entrepreneurship often describes a small business whose owner starts up a company i.e. a plumbing [...]

A 2 minute video on building a community to help validate your channel before going full-time.

By paying attention to the people & businesses in your vicinity, you’ll often find you can merge your startup goals with your day-to-day. You don’t need a meeting. In a pub recently, someone was bouncing ideas off me about a business providing cool techy services to… well, pubs. The waitress came by to ask if we [...]

If you are starting a business for local merchants, and you live in a city, and you haven’t talked to lots of them, then you are blowing my mind. It’s difficult to take anything else about the business seriously because there’s a clear first step that hasn’t yet been attempted. Walk down the high street [...]

Your startup ideas don’t want to die peacefully of old age. They want to go down pistols blazing, in a gunfight with the market. And you’ll find that more often than you imagine, they stand back up–looking a touch different thanks to the bullet holes–with a new lease on life and a few new tricks [...]

As you know, I’m obsessed with Osterwalder & co’s Business Model Canvas. It’s the only business tool I’ve found which I use every day. A while back, I made about a dozen quick video workshops to walk through how I use it. Here are two, clocking in at 4 and 8 minutes, respectively. The first is a breakdown [...]

A lovingly crafted product is the entrepreneur’s version of golden handcuffs. You have this thing, and you know it’s important, and you drive yourself crazy figuring out who to sell it to or how to re-frame it or what the Most Marketable Use-Case is. You can’t move forward because giving it up feels like a [...]

When you start learning to cook, you compulsively follow the recipe. You stress over timing and ingredient ratios and whether the carrots are truly and properly chopped or just somewhat sliced. Over time, you learn where the wiggle room is. A lot of recipes simplify into: Mix it all together and cook on hot-ish with [...]