2014
57 notes published in 2014
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Beware of the HiPPOs, by Hugh Molotsi
Hugh Molotsi explains why Intuit avoids HiPPO decisions, taken on the highest paid person's opinion, like the hippo, the most dangerous animal of the …
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Apple’s original iPhone was a minimum viable product
Elia Freedman answers Redfin's CEO Glenn Kelman, who blamed the lean startup for killing big ideas: the first iPhone was itself a minimum viable product …
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Bootstrap your content marketing in 7 steps, by Omar Mohout
Omar Mohout (Sirris) sums up in a short deck how a startup can build a lean content marketing machine in seven steps, on a shoestring budget.
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The case for corporate disobedience
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, in Harvard Business Review (June 2014): you can't really innovate without bending the rules. Companies gain from leaving room …
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Writer as coder: the iterative way to write a book
Leo Babauta (Zen Habits) wrote his book Zen Habits: Mastering the Art of Change the way software is built: a « minimum viable book » written chapter by …
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Beyond the MVP: the minimum loveable product, by Laurence McCahill
Laurence McCahill (Spook Studio) proposes the minimum loveable product: rather than the version that brings the most learning for the least effort, aim …
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How to use surveys to learn from your customers
Too often I have seen entrepreneur trying to understand their customer need by sending them … a survey. “Please rank those feature in order of …
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How to avoid delusional thinking in startup growth strategy
Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder of HowAboutWe, a dating service acquired by IAC, in a guest post on Andrew Chen's blog: early founders' growth plans are …
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Lessons from game design, by Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke's talk « Mechanics of Magic: Seven Lessons from Game Design » (66 minutes): gamification, with badges and progress bars stuck on …
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You’re right, they’re wrong, but they won (Seth Godin)
Seth Godin: when the others win although they are wrong, it is often because they took the time to build a movement, showed up again and again, told a …
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The Waterfall Startup
How wise entrepreneurs embrace the predictable outcome of their vision to build innovations. A new groundbreaking methodology to create predictable outcome in chaotic situations. Pre-order …
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Problem Interview Guide for Lean Startup Experience
A hard part of customer development doing problem interview. It’s hard because interviewing strangers is not natural and its also actually hard to do the …
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Problem interview template
Nov-14 2014: Added entry to classify customer into early adopter or not using @Justin_Wilcox definition: someone who is actively trying to solve the problem Talking …
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It’s time to fail! (Strategyzer)
Strategyzer: let ideas face their ultimate judge, the customer, as soon as they take shape. Two traps keep companies from testing early: the vision trap …
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Put this Hammer Down – Why do Customer Discovery ?
“When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” -Bernard Baruch Here, the hammer is your solution and the nails are your customers. I …
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Delegate outcomes and goals rather than tasks (Giff Constable)
Moves the Needle's Lean Lunch with Giff Constable, CEO of the product innovation firm Neo: how he helps organisations let go of bad ideas and work on …
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The importance of understanding your best users, by Ben Yoskovitz
Ben Yoskovitz, co-author of Lean Analytics: every startup has a share of « good » users, defined by the engagement that matters for its product. Look for …
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The design sprint, from Google Ventures to Google[x]
Talk at Google I/O 2014 (46 minutes) by Daniel Burka, Jake Knapp and Nadya Direkova: the design sprint, a five-day process to prototype and test any …
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Facebook’s experiment on emotional contagion
In June 2014, researchers from Facebook and Cornell published in PNAS an experiment run on nearly 700,000 users, whose news feeds were altered to show …
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Nordstrom links design thinking, lean startup and agile
The Nordstrom Innovation Lab tells its journey as a team timeline: an agile team that iterated « to nowhere » on ideas nobody wanted, then added lean …
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Design thinking: a more human zebra crossing
The Ergo Crosswalk, designed by Jae Min Lim: pedestrians instinctively cut corners at crossings, so this zebra crossing is curved to follow the paths …
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Applying the Lean Startup principles to game development
A few months ago, I started exploring how the Lean Startup principles could be applied to computer game development. This journey led me to Alexandre …
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Why smart people struggle with strategy (Roger L. Martin)
Roger L. Martin, in Harvard Business Review (June 2014): smart people struggle with strategy because there is no right answer. Brilliant students trained …
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The Lean UX anti-pattern, by Tendayi Viki
Tendayi Viki, following Tristan Kromer's « lean waterfall »: many large companies practise agile and lean inside each silo, design, engineering or …
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Business Agility and Luxury Companies
Hannah Koller just presented her EDHEC Master Thesis on how Luxury companies need and apply business agility concepts. How do the concepts of agility: responsiveness, fluidity, speed, …
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Product lessons we can learn from Google+
Paul Adams, who worked on the original Google+ team and invented Circles, draws eight product lessons from it: build around people's problems, not the …
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Comparing management cultures (Harvard Business Review)
A Harvard Business Review infographic (April 2014) that places countries on the scales of Erin Meyer's culture map, such as how people lead, decide, trust …
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Growth vs marketing vs product (Brian Balfour)
Brian Balfour on the quarrel around « growth hacking »: rather than argue about the term, look at what changed in five years, easy access to data, access …
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10 things I’ve learnt about lean startup
A co-founder of Spook Studio, a startup design studio behind Lean Startup Brighton, shares ten lessons: waterfall suits projects without unknowns, agile …
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7 proven templates for writing value propositions
Tor Grønsund gathers seven proven templates for writing a value proposition, from Geoffrey Moore's positioning statement and Venture Hacks' high-concept …
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Loyalty: is it killing your business?
A summary on LinkedIn of McKinsey research: companies that spend more on loyalty programmes grow no faster than their peers and have margins about 10% …
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A $32,000 startup that was sold for millions
Starting a company has never been cheaper: cloud computing, cheap sensors and the falling cost of genome sequencing let entrepreneurs bootstrap instead of …
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Focus matters: finding early adopters means putting aside potential clients
Focus matters: Finding early adopters is mainly about putting aside potential clients.
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Designing social products with 3 habit-forming feedback loops (Andrew Chen)
Andrew Chen describes the three feedback loops behind successful social products: one that rewards those who post content, one that rewards passive …
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Transforming business schools to drive entrepreneurship
Rory O'Shea in Entrepreneur: business schools should lead entrepreneurship education across the whole university, with cross-disciplinary, action-learning …
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The secret of Apple’s design process: a checklist
Quartz, drawing on Leander Kahney's book on Jony Ive: the keystone of Apple's creativity and speed is, unexpectedly, a checklist, the Apple New Product …
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95 ways to find your first customers
Jason Evanish lists 95 ways to find your first customers for customer development interviews or a first sale, channel by channel, LinkedIn, Facebook …
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The secret science of creating lifetime customers
Laurence McCahill tells how Chris Zane turned his small bike shop into one of the largest bicycle retailers in the United States by treating each customer …
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68 ways to increase website traffic (Mike Fishbein)
Mike Fishbein's list of 68 ways to bring traffic to a startup's site, mostly through content marketing and communities. Every product is different: test …
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5 famous growth hacks
Jon Yongfook, a serial entrepreneur based in Asia, describes five famous growth hacks that startups used instead of big marketing budgets, likely to …
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speaking.io: tips for public speaking
speaking.io, by Zach Holman: practical advice for speaking in public, from planning the talk and designing the slides to preparing for the day, delivering …
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Mobile payments bring back the arcade
SuperData (2012): mobile payments bring the logic of the arcade back to video games. Like putting another coin in the machine, players pay small amounts …
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Why stories go viral: emotions are contagious
Study on why Internet stories go viral. The simple answer: Emotions; because emotions themselves are contagious.
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The taxonomy of innovation (Harvard Business Review)
The Luma Institute's taxonomy of innovation, published by Harvard Business Review in January 2014: 36 of the most effective tools for innovators …
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Toyota applies lean startup to its in-car system
At the Lean Startup Conference 2013, Toyota engineers Matt Kresse and Vinuth Rai explained how they used lean startup methods to prototype and iterate on …
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Need vs want: branding is about what customers want
Need vs Want. Branding is about what customer want. Making emotional connection that rises above functional features
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Customer development: 14 ways to find customers to interview
Mike Fishbein lists 14 places to find people for customer development interviews: LinkedIn groups, people you know, referrals, cold calls and emails …
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Employees who feel love perform better
Sigal Barsade and Olivia O'Neill in Harvard Business Review (January 2014): their research on « companionate love », warmth, care and affection between …
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What to read after reading the ‘Lean Startup’
I sometimes get asked for recommendations on what to read after the Lean Startup. Here are a few resources I found useful: The 4 Steps …
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The investment readiness level (Steve Blank)
Steve Blank proposes the investment readiness level, a way for investors to judge startups at demo days on evidence rather than on demos, slides and …
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Countless iterations: the fastest-growing quiz app
Fast Company recounts how QuizUp, then the fastest-growing iPhone game, came out of countless iterations: its maker Plain Vanilla first released separate …
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Stop building, start listening: 167 customer interviews before launch
A founder recounts how his team spent four months interviewing 167 potential customers before launching: validating the idea, identifying the right …
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An MVP is not a cheaper product, it’s about smart learning (Steve Blank)
Steve Blank: a minimum viable product is not always a smaller, cheaper version of the final product. With a startup planning to fly drones with …
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Five successful startups that started as blogs
Fast Company: a blog post can be the quickest MVP. Several startups validated their idea by writing first, such as Danielle Morrill, whose essays ranking …
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Is this really growth hacking? (Sebastian Fung)
Sebastian Fung tells how he won HubSpot's Signals Challenge with growth hacking: blog posts with a call to action, sharing on Twitter and Meetup, testing …
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8 subconscious mistakes our brains make every day
An article from the Buffer blog, republished by Fast Company, lists eight thinking errors we make without noticing: surrounding ourselves with information …
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How much water can you sell? (37signals)
Jason Fried (37signals): at Techstars Chicago, each startup had one day to sell bottled water on the street, choosing its own stock and price. The …
