How to create an actionable client profile
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How to create an actionable client profile

He’s the first man to ever win three Oscars. Daniel Day Lewis, that is. For the entire filming of My Left Foot, he didn’t leave his wheelchair, sound coherent, or even feed himself. For Last of the Mohicans he became a survivalist. He lived off the land. For In the Name of the Father, he lived in a prison cell. He starved…

Empty pocket testing by Buffer
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Empty pocket testing by Buffer

The following are a number of Lean Startup validation case studies. Some will already be well known; some will be completely unknown. A lot of landing page testing has happened since The Lean Startup was being pieced together by Eric Reis. These are retrospective reconstructions of what happened using landing pages as vehicles for minimum…

Lean Startup 101
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Lean Startup 101

Lean Startup is based on the scientific process, albeit more business focused, focused on learning fast when you know little. It’s the fastest known way to validate a product idea. Consider this a Lean Startup 101 introduction to how to use it in your business. The first step of choosing a hypothesis to test is…

The 80/20 of Lean Startup
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The 80/20 of Lean Startup

Remember the 80/20 rule? You get 80% of the results from 20% of the inputs. Well, 80% of the results from using Lean Startup come from running experiments, in my opinion. Meticulously. First, focus around the product; prove your value hypotheses. Then, focus on growth; prove your growth hypotheses. If you aren’t running experiments, you’re not…

A Minimum Viable Product Helps You Release Earlier
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A Minimum Viable Product Helps You Release Earlier

When releasing a new product, the first step is to get a minimum viable product (MVP) released. The minimum viable product encompasses the essence of the Lean Startup ethos. An MVP helps go through one cycle of the Build-Measure-Learn loop. Eric Reis warns “Customers don’t care how long something takes to build. They only care…

“Beam me some money, Scotty!”
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“Beam me some money, Scotty!”

In a previous life, Elon Musk was one of the main creators of PayPal. He’s pretty open about how the initial idea didn’t actually catch on very well. When he was doing customer interviews, he’d get that glazed-over look. Yeah, that one. At the time, the team was approaching consumers. They were saying they aimed…

Are you making this common split testing snafu?
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Are you making this common split testing snafu?

In case you didn’t know, SNAFU is a military slang acronym meaning “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up.” More and more, I hear founders saying that they’re working on a product, who’re concerned whether or not there will be any demand when they launch. I’ve seen it come up in surveys, in youtube videos, even during…

Is premature optimization a warranted concern?
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Is premature optimization a warranted concern?

Here’s a wonderfully geeky question from a forum I’m on, related to lean startup: I have a product that I want to test. I’ve built the one-pager website and set up some Facebook advertising to figure out the messaging / features that makes people sign up to determine the direction I will eventually build towards….