How Early Can You Launch?
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How Early Can You Launch?

The main thing about launches that I’ve realized is that people put way too much emphasis on them. They end up focussing too much on a one-off event, rather than on building a successful business. Sometimes, they end up paying a price for suboptimal trade-offs they make. The goal of a traditional launch is to…

“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….

38 different ways to prove your case
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38 different ways to prove your case

While ideally you have some sort of proof direct in your headline and ad, your persuasiveness argument relies on how well you prove your point. You see, it’s ultimately about belief and feeling. As heavy hitter Gary Bencivenga says: Almost everyone in the world, in every field of human endeavor, is desperately searching for someone…