by CustDevGuy | May 17, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Pricing, Uncategorized
Diaspora is now a certifiable Black Swan. As of this post, they have raised $176,165 from 4,860 backers and still have 15 days to go. I maintain that aside from tapping into the current anti-Facebook zeitgeist among the tech elite, their success is partially fueled...
by CustDevGuy | May 14, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Pricing, Sales and Marketing Roadmap
Very recently, the Diaspora project (advertised as “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”) on Kickstarter has caught the attention of the Twitterati, and has blown past its goal of raising $10,000 by...
by CustDevGuy | Apr 29, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development
Brant and I have finally finished our book, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany, within which we have included interviews from successful entrepreneurs in order see if their startup experiences mesh...
by CustDevGuy | Mar 4, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Lean Startup, Startup Marketing
I attended the most recent Startup2Startup event and after the presentation, the discussion turned to how one might define Product-Market Fit and what might serve as a proxy for Product-Market Fit, given various types of business models. The Sean Ellis 40%...
by CustDevGuy | Jan 3, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Sales and Marketing Roadmap
Success and Cognitive Bias One thing that often strikes me about conversations regarding start-up success is the pervasiveness of the narrative fallacy and hindsight bias. We can go to Wikipedia’s entry on Taleb for a definition: Narrative fallacy: creating a...
by CustDevGuy | Dec 22, 2009 | Customer Development, Sales and Marketing Roadmap
Hi everyone! Thank you for your participation in the survey, especially if you were kind enough to tweet about it. (While the raffle is over, if you haven’t responded, the survey is still open.) The purpose of the survey was two-fold. First, we thought it would...
by CustDevGuy | Dec 15, 2009 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development
Note: One of the more difficult aspects of customer development is understanding when to listen to customers/prospects and when not to. When should you rely on intuition and when is the customer right, if not always? Steve Blank’s oft quoted clarion call to...