This is a follow-up to Give it away in response to the question: “How do you validate interest before the product is built?” I’m going to walk through my thought process and strategy around a new project I’ve been playing with to [hopefully] show what’s happening under the hood. After failing at business blogging several times [...]
Continue Reading15 Feb
The quickest way to validate your value proposition is to give it away. If they aren’t lining up to take it for free then they aren’t going to buy it. If you want to open a consultancy, try having open office hours. If nobody knows you exist, you’ve got a visibility issue. If people hear [...]
Continue Reading09 Feb
The ABC of selling is: Always Be Closing. It’s provably bad advice[1] as shown by gads of research described in the must-read SPIN Selling by Neil “I have an awesome name” Rackham. While that’s a good thing to know, I’m more interested in how this faulty advice came to dominate the sales world. As Rackham describes [...]
Continue Reading07 Feb
Startups are made out of people. When the people wear down, progress halts. Recently, I’ve been stressed. I was just shy of the breaking point, in that my output was still good but the internal process was a mess. I was burning increasing amounts of energy just to meet the next short-term deadline. Toyota has [...]
Continue Reading04 Feb
The point of following your passion when you start a company isn’t because it magically makes the work easy. It’s still hard and you’ll still hit the dip. The real benefit is this: By following an internal compass (what you care about) rather than an external one (market trends & “opportunities”), you’ll repeatedly return to [...]
Continue Reading21 Jan
I’m confident and capable in customer meetings, but not conferences. In bars, but not clubs. In cafes, but not markets. Expertise, and thus confidence, develops in silos. The most shy person you’ve ever met can explode into life and become the king of the room when the topic of conversation shifts toward his area of [...]
Continue Reading10 Jan
Ask anyone how to start a local marketplace business and Zaarly will have successfully done the opposite. Bo did a great interview about how they approached it all. Although there’s plenty to learn from the interview, I want to focus on a comment from an agitated viewer. This comment represents a common mindset which, left unchecked, [...]
Continue Reading31 Dec
Happy new year! This is a new post format. Does this sort of once-a-week curation deliver any value, or is it just blog spam? Please let me know in the comments, on twitter (@robfitz), or via email (rob@thestartuptoolkit.com). Thanks! All the very best. The idea that we need to be sane and organised to do [...]
Continue Reading30 Dec
I’ve done nothing for the past 5 years but drive companies out of business. Through doing so, I’ve learned how to make failure sustainable. Career entrepreneurship isn’t viable if you’re forced to return to a full-time job after every slip-up. Upside versus downside A few years ago, I would have claimed that the definition of [...]
Continue Reading29 Dec
I began doing something properly stupid the other day[1]. I decided I needed to do a survey. You know, to get to know you guys better. So I came up with all sorts of interesting questions. What a dummy! That’s like saying: Today I really want to use a belt sander. Now let’s go find something [...]
Continue Reading
16 Feb
8 Comments