Yesterday I was speaking with a gaggle of early stage tech entrepreneurs about Lean Startup at Google Campus in London. They were eager to learn more about about hypothesis testing. Newbies wanting to learn about the Lean Startup approach. Yet they were falling prey to what I call the “solutionizing bias”. They only wanted…
Lean Startup is so overrated and trendy. All these acronyms like MVP, ARRRR, P&L just get your head in the wrong place. Who wants to be pirate anyway? They all had scurvy. I think Lean Startup causes more problems than it solves. I’d rather run a fat (phat) startup. I’ve done it many times before,…
In the TV series Mad Men, the story of mass market advertising itself gets put on the limelight. Despite being the epicenter of trendsetting, the fictional advertising agency SCDP gets sideswiped by social changes. Like the civic rights movement, feminism, and the hippies. For any serious student of marketing and Madison Avenue, it’s a great…
When I started college, the whole web was about 360 servers in September 1994. By December, it was in the tens of thousands. I can say this with a straight face, only because I was lucky enough to have good timing to get a front row seat to this explosion of the web. Hint: it’s…
Let’s take the bull by the horns. Running landing pages as experiments requires some thought about conversion rates. This question comes up in many forms. Here’s a recent post on a forum I participate in. I wanted to address it directly: Hi! Is there any benchmark telling that a given conversion rate is good or…
With my own eyes, I saw the fall of a totalitarian communist regime. As a teenager, my parents sent me to Poland in 1989. I lived with my grandmother for five months. Like most communist countries, Poland was run as a centrally planned economy. The government determined a budget via politicking. Then they choked off…
First impressions matter, except when you’re looking for a problem worth solving. In that case, split testing your landing pages is a complete waste of money. Traditionally, you’d use split testing to optimize your landing page. Help it turn traffic into conversions. Your user gets your message. The user experience communicates your message in the…
A friend of mine from when I was growing up is a true blue professional hacker for the US military. He gets paid to hack security software. Specifically, he writes software which figures out how other security software works. He figures out what the requirements are. He prods the software, notes down its behaviors, and…
There’s a specific agile tool which I think every early-stage product team should use, regardless of whether they’re following the Lean Startup methodology. Lean Startup drew its roots from agile software development. Eric Reis added Steve Blank’s idea of customer development to agile. Assuming we aren’t talking about re-reading Eric Reis’ book for the 17th…
Crickets. Imagine that’s what you hear as you jump up and down on the biggest physical or virtual stage you can afford on Launch Day. It’s probably the worst possible outcome for a product launch. You and your team have slaved away for months. You put finishing touches on the product, the marketing, and even…