I received lots of great questions on the “How We Build Features” post that I decided to do a follow-on post-Q&A-style: Features versus Bugs and the 80/20 Rule Chris Cornutt: I’d love to see an expanded version of the “Features vs Bugs” section. I’m a

The Chinese word “weiji” for “crisis” is made up of two symbols — one signifying challenge (wei) and the other signifying opportunity (ji). Other than the fact that this particular translation, while popular, may be inaccurate, the “challenge/opportunity” duality is still very fitting to Customer Development. The Customer Development battle-cry:

After launching your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it’s quite likely that customer uptake won’t be immediate. It should be expected: Your MVP is the minimum feature set that lets you start learning about customers. When you first launch a product, many things can and do go wrong. But

The number one question I get during my workshops is: “Would an investor accept a Lean Canvas in place of a traditional business plan or investor deck?”. I usually then turn to the investors in the room and put them on the spot: Many prominent VCs and Angels have said

The key takeaway from my last post was that the “business model” is the real product of a startup. As entrepreneurs, we’ve got the solution covered but need help with the rest of the business model to avoid chasing after solutions no one cares about, which is a form

Running experiments is a key activity in Lean Startups, but my bias for experimentation preceded Lean Startups. While I can trace it back to several interests I’ve held, one that particularly helped me develop this skill was cooking. Cooking and startups have more in common than you’d think.

I’ve watched Eric Ries’ blog grow from 5 subscribers to 60K+ subscribers in two years, which is great for the Lean Startup movement. And as with any fast-growing movement, Lean Startup has picked up its share of evangelists, believers, fanatics, skeptics, atheists, and heretics. Unfortunately, these roles are primarily

Eric Ries succinctly captures the Lean Startup validated learning loop as Build/Measure/Learn. While a cycle around the validation learning loop (or experiment) helps you validate a specific business model hypothesis, I’ve been searching for a workflow that strings multiple experiments together (into an iteration) to take a

One of the lessons learned from my last post had to do with the Fallacy of Customer Development: Unless you are building a business (like Enterprise software) where the primary channel to customers is through direct sales, customer development is NOT a scalable way to reach customers. Instead, Customer Development